Excerpt from An Heir Claimed by Christmas by Clare Connelly
PROLOGUE
‘W HAT 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 happily-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...
It wasn’t possible.
‘Rumour has it you two hooked up one night, about nine months before this little boy was born.’
Rumour? No. A source. There was no rumour about a child of his or he would have heard it much sooner. Somehow, this man had been given the information from someone who knew way too much.
Annabelle?
He rejected the idea immediately. If she’d wanted anyone to know, she would have come directly to him. Wouldn’t she?
‘Don’t you get it, Annabelle? I was drunk. I came here because I was thinking about Lewis, and I was missing him, and I wanted to talk to someone who would understand. That—’ he’d pointed to the bed ‘—was never meant to happen. I would never choose to go to bed with you. Surely you can see that?’
‘So?’ Ashton pushed. ‘Any confirmation? Have you met your son, Dimitrios?’
His son. It was as if the dynamite kept sparking and exploding, reigniting and exploding all over again. His arm took most of his body weight. His symmetrical face looked as though it had been sculpted with a blade. Tension radiated from his pulse points.
‘Look after her for me, Dim. Annie’s going to be devastated. She won’t cope with this. Please check in on her. Make sure she’s okay.’
Guilt nauseated him, as always. The sense that he’d failed his friend, and broken the death-bed promise Lewis had extracted from him, all because grief had driven his body to seek consolation in the one way he knew how. He’d failed Lewis and he’d never forgiven himself for that misstep.
And what about Annabelle? his brain demanded, reminding him that she had been grieving too. And he’d taken advantage of that, seeking solace in her arms, in her body, irrespective of the damage he might have been doing to her already tender heart.
‘Annie Hargreaves is a long-time friend of the family,’ he muttered, knowing it was the worst thing to say. It was feeding the flame with oxygen.
Ashton’s laugh made Dimitrios want to snap something in half. ‘A bit more than that, by the looks of it.’
Instincts took over, a ruthless streak turning his voice to stone. ‘You do realise you’re about to ruin a child’s life for the sake of circulation?’
‘And you claim to have a problem with that?’
Dimitrios couldn’t respond. Zach and he had seen their world-wide viewership and readership treble in the last decade.
He couldn’t—wouldn’t—trivialise the work journalists did.
He’d long since given up any hope that his life could be played out privately.
Despite his personal wishes, he was considered to be someone of interest, a public figure, and his life—to some extent—was a free-for-all.
He ground his teeth together, the whole situation one that filled him with a sense of dark impatience.
‘Let me get back to you.’
He hung up the phone and jammed it into his pocket, pushing away from the window without taking a step back from the glass.
‘You must know how I feel about you, Dimitrios...’
‘How you feel? Christ, Annabelle, you’re little more than a child. I haven’t thought about you or your feelings except for the fact you’re Lewis’s little sister.’
The little sister he’d promised Lewis he’d look after.
She’d winced.
‘Then let me tell you now. I like you. I think I...no... I’m sure that I love you.’
It had been like having a gun pushed to his temple.
Sheer panic flooded his nervous system. He’d made a mistake and it was going from bad to worse.
He’d had to disabuse her of any idea that he could do this.
He’d had to make a clean break, remove any hope she might have had that he could offer her more.
‘You’re deluding yourself. Nothing about this was “love”. It was sex, plain and simple. And you know what the worst of it is? I was so drunk I barely even remember what we did.’
Her face had scrunched in pain and he’d been glad. He was pushing her away to punish himself—she should hate him. He deserved that.
‘I have a life. A girlfriend.’
All the colour had drained from her face.
‘And you are a mistake I’ll always regret.’
Hell. Even now the words had the power to reach through time and make him feel a powerful sense of self-disgust. He’d done the right thing in pushing her away so forcefully, but seeing her heartbreak so clear on her face had made him feel like the worst kind of person.
It was a feeling that had never really let up.
He crossed back to his desk, moving the mouse to stir his computer screen to life. The photograph was there, as large as it had been a moment ago, but it took on a whole new importance now.
He’d thought the boy looked familiar, but not in a million years had he considered that he might be the father.
And Annabelle the mother.
Shock began to morph into something else.
Anger. Disappointment. Disbelief.
Why had she kept this from him?
‘You’ll always regret what we did? Well, I’ll never forgive you for that. Just get out. Get out! Leave me alone. Don’t ever contact me again.’
Had she been so angry she’d decided to keep their son from him?
He’d wanted to push her away for good, but maybe he’d gone too far.
Was this some sick form of payback? He couldn’t believe it, yet the facts were there, staring right back at him.
Annabelle had borne a child, and Dimitrios would bet his fortune on the fact he was the father.
Dimitrios ground his teeth together, his jaw set in a forbidding line as he reached for his desk phone and buzzed through to his hard-working assistant.
‘Have the jet fuelled. I need to get to Sydney. Immediately.’