She mouthed groggily. ‘Stavros Cous... Cous...?’ She tried to say the foreign-sounding name, but couldn’t make her throat muscles work properly.
The man was frowning down at her, and with a part of her brain that should not have been working she registered how
the frown angled the sculpted planes of his face, darkening those incredible dark eyes of his to make him even more ludicrously good-looking than ever, doing things to her that were utterly irrelevant right now, at this moment when he had told her what she had never expected to hear in all her life...
‘Stavros Coustakis.’
She heard him repeat the name in the accented voice which went, she realised, with the foreign-sounding name he’d said—just as it went with the air of foreignness about him.
She blinked again, staring at him. ‘I’ve got a father?’
The question sounded stupid, because he’d just told her she had, but she could see it had an effect on the man, because his frown deepened even more, drawing together his arched brows and furrowing his broad brow, deepening the lines scored around his mouth.
‘You didn’t know? You didn’t know Stavros Coustakis was your father?’
There was incredulity in the man’s voice, and Rosalie looked at him blankly. ‘No,’ she said.
The man seemed to be staring down at her as if not believing anything about her. Not believing she was who she’d told him she was. And not believing she didn’t know this Stavros Cous-something-or-other was her father.
Her father...
The word rang in her head. A word she never used—for what would have been the point? It was a word that was utterly nothing to do with her, because he didn’t exist—hadn’t existed except for those pathetically few short weeks in her poor mother’s life, when he had seemed to bring romance before departing for ever.
But suddenly now, at this very moment, he did exist.
She felt shock ricochet through her at the realisation, and it made her voice thready as she asked the question burning fiercely in her head. ‘How did he find me?’
It came out in a rush, a blurting question, and she gazed hungrily at this man who had come here and dropped this amazing, incredible, unbelievable bombshell into her life—a life that had suddenly, out of nowhere, changed for ever.
My father knows about me! He’s sent someone to find me!
Emotion leapt within her, distracting her from the fact that the dark eyes looking down at her had suddenly veiled.
‘That is something you must ask him yourself,’ was his clipped reply, but she leapt onwards to the next question.
‘Where is he?’ Her voice was avid, hungry, the words tumbling from her.
‘He lives in Athens.’
‘Athens?’ Rosalie’s eyes widened. Her father was Greek?
In her head her mother’s voice echoed...
‘He was foreign—so romantic!—working in London...’
‘Yes.’
The man’s voice was curt. She saw his face tighten, as if he were shutting her out of something.
‘As for any other questions you may have, they can wait.’ He glanced around himself. She could see his expression tighten even more. ‘Get your things and we’ll leave.’
Rosalie stared. ‘What do you mean?’
That tight-lipped, angry look was back in his dark eyes.
‘I’m taking you to Athens,’ he said. ‘To your father.’
* * *