PROLOGUE
‘WHAT EXACTLY AM I looking at?’ Dimitrios’s scorn for journalists was evident in the tone of his voice. Always somewhat intimidating, he reserved a particularly gruff response for the man on the other end of the phone.
‘My email?’ The reporter’s smugness was unbearable.
Its subject was: Call me to discuss.
The only text in the email read:
Article running in the weekend papers.
Attached was a photograph of a young boy.
It was a bizarre enough email to prompt Dimitrios’s response. There was something in the child’s face—his eyes—that was familiar to Dimitrios, and a spark of worry ignited.
His twin brother, Zach, was renowned for his startlingly brief affairs. Was it possible he had, somewhere over the years, fathered a child?
It was just the kind of scandal the papers would love, dragging their family name—and that of the media empire Zach and Dimitrios had worked their backsides off to protect since inheriting the multi-billion-dollar corporation from their father—through the mud.
‘Is there another reason I would have called you?’
Ashton worked for a rival newspaper based out of Sydney. Dimitrios could have—and would have—pulled strings to have the story killed in his own papers but he knew nothing he said would deter Ashton.
‘So? Do you have a quote?’
Dimitrios sighed. ‘How can I? I have no idea what response your cryptic photograph is supposed to elicit from me. Recognition? Fear? Sorry to disappoint, but I feel neither.’
He would need to speak to his brother, find out if he knew anything about this. Surely Zach would have mentioned having had a child? Unless he didn’t know? Although, wasn’t it far more likely this journalist was grasping at straws?
‘What about if I give you the name Annie Hargreaves?’
Dimitrios’s whole body responded. Staring out of the window of his top-level office at the morning sun that coated Singapore in a golden glow, past the iconic towers of Marina Bay Sands towards the strait, he felt as though a rock had been dropped on his gut.
‘What did you say?’
The question was asked through bared teeth. He didn’t need Ashton to repeat the question. Everything about Annabelle Damned Hargreaves was burned into his memory. Her body. Her kiss. Her innocence. The way she’d looked at him the night they’d made love, as though it had meant something important, something special. As though he could have given her anything—as though he were that kind of man! Instead of understanding what it actually had been—an outpouring of mutual grief after the death of his best friend, her brother.
He thought of the things he’d said to her after they’d slept together, after he’d taken her virginity. Words that even at the time had been calculatedly cutting. He’d followed the old adage of being cruel to be kind, understanding that she wanted more from him than he would ever be able to give. Knowing he needed to destroy any childish fantasies and hopes she might have had that he, Dimitrios Papandreo, could be the kind of man to give her some kind of mythical happ
ily-ever-after. He’d never been that way inclined but, after Lewis’s death, the reality of life’s cruelty had been made abundantly clear to him.
None the less, having her name come out of nowhere sent a pulse of raw feeling through his body, scattering any ability to think rationally. Every one of his senses went on high alert in a response that was pure survival instinct.
‘Miss Annie Hargreaves, twenty-five years old, of Bankstown, Sydney. Six-year-old boy. Single mother to a little boy named Max. Now do you care to comment?’
Dimitrios gripped the phone more tightly, his whole body coursing with a type of acid. His gut rolled, every muscle on his lean, athletic frame tensed as though he were preparing for a fist fight.
Six.
Max.
The facts exploded through him like sticks of dynamite.
He swore inwardly, standing abruptly and stalking towards the windows, bracing one arm against the glass, pressing his forehead to it, staring directly beneath him. The sense of vertigo only compounded the spinning feeling he was already combatting.
Lewis had died seven years earlier. The anniversary of his death had just passed—a day Dimitrios and Zach marked each year. The three of them had been inseparable, more than best friends. Lewis had been like a third brother. His death had destroyed Dimitrios and Zach. His loss had been shocking—how someone so healthy and strong could simply cease to exist, all of his life force and energy just...gone. Dimitrios had known pain in his life, but never that kind of grief, and it had torn him in two.
His eyes swept shut as he thought of Lewis’s little sister.
Annabelle...