Darius’s own parents had both left him, in different ways, two days after he was born. His unemployed father had discovered his newborn son crying in a basket by his door, left out in the rain by his former lover, a wealthy, spoiled heiress who’d abandoned the child she’d never wanted.
Fired from his job, Eugenios Kyrillos found himself unable to get another. No other rich Greek fathers, it seemed, wanted to risk their daughters’ virtue to a chauffeur who didn’t know his place. Desperate to find work, he’d departed for America, leaving his baby son to be raised by his grandmother in the desolate house by the sea.
The first time Darius had spoken to his father in person had been at his grandmother’s funeral, when he was eleven. Then his father had taken him from Greece, away from everything and everyone he’d ever known, and brought him to America.
Fairholme had seemed like an exotic palace, where everyone spoke a language he couldn’t understand. His father had seemed just as strange, the emotionally distant chauffeur of this grand American king—Howard Spencer.
And look what the Spencers had come to now.
Darius had long ago torn down his grandmother’s shack in Heraklios and built a palatial villa. He had a penthouse in Manhattan, a ski chalet in Switzerland, his private race track outside London. His personal fortune was greater than anything Howard Spencer ever dreamed of.
And the Spencers were now living in this tiny, threadbare apartment.
But instead of feeling a sense of triumph, Darius felt strangely unsettled as he walked through her dreary kitchen and poured a glass of water from the tap. Returning to the equally depressing living room, he handed Letty the glass, then looked at the folded blankets and pillow on the floor.
“Who sleeps on the sofa?”
Letty’s cheeks turned pink as she looked down at the sagging cushions. “I do.”
“You pay all the rent, and your father gets the bedroom?”
“He hasn’t been sleeping well. I just want him to be comfortable.”
Darius looked at her incredulously. “And you’re pregnant.”
“What do you care?” she said bitterly. “You’re just here to take my baby away.”
Well. True. His eyes fell on the empty suitcases. “Where were you planning to go?”
“Anywhere you couldn’t find us.”
Darius stared down at her grimly. After his conversation with Howard Spencer, he’d had his investigator check up on Letty and found she’d only recently left her job as a waitress. She was still broke. None of the other employees remembered seeing any men around her, except one waitress, Belle, who had described Darius himself.
It seemed that, contrary to all previous assumptions, Letty wasn’t a gold digger. Not with other men.
Not even with Darius.
In that, he’d misjudged her. After the way Letty had crushed him so devastatingly ten years ago, informing him that she was leaving him for a richer man, he’d believed Letty was a fortune hunter to the core.
It made sense. His own mother had abandoned him as a two-day-old newborn for the exact same reason. To Calla, Darius had been the embarrassing result of a one-night liaison with her wealthy family’s chauffeur. She’d been determined to marry as befitted her station. She’d cared only about money and the social position that went with it.
But Letty wasn’t the same. At least not anymore.
Darius abruptly sat down on the sofa beside her. “Why didn’t you come to me when you found out you were pregnant? You had to know I would give you everything you needed and more.”
“Give? I knew you’d only take!” she said incredulously. “You threatened me!”
He ground his teeth. “We could have come to some arrangement.”
“You threatened to buy my baby, and if I tried to refuse, you would take the baby from me and—what were your words?—drive me into the sea?”
Darius didn’t like to be reminded of what he’d said six months ago. He’d rationalized his cruelty on the grounds of justice. But now...strictly speaking, he might have sounded a little less than civil, if no
t outright crazy. Irritated, he glared at her. “Drink your water.”
“Why? What did you put into it?” She sniffed the glass. “Some drug to make me pass out so you can kidnap me to a Park Avenue dungeon?”
He snorted a laugh in spite of himself. “The water came from your tap. Drink it or not. I just thought you looked pale.”