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    The Kyriakis Baby
    The Kyriakis Baby
    The Kyriakis Baby
    Ebook221 pages3 hours

    The Kyriakis Baby

    By Sara Wood

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    About this ebook


    Emma and Greek tycoon Leon Kyriakis had once shared an intense and passionate love, but their relationship had ended abruptly. Heartbroken, Emma had married Leon's younger brother on the rebound. But she'd paid dearly: she'd been framed for fraud....

    Unable to prove her innocence, widow Emma had seen her baby daughter taken away – by Leon.

    Emma vowed to do anything to claim her daughter back – even if that meant she would have to share a bed with Leon once more....
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers Australia
    Release dateJul 1, 2012
    ISBN9781460838662
    The Kyriakis Baby
    Author

    Sara Wood

    Sara has wonderful memories of her childhood. Her parents were desperately poor but their devotion to family life gave her a feeling of great security. Sara's father was one of four fostered children and never knew his parents, hence his joy with his own family. Birthday parties were sensational - her father would perform brilliantly as a Chinese magician or a clown or invent hilarious games and treasure hunts. From him she learned that working hard brought many rewards, especially self-respect. Sara won a rare scholarship to a public school, but university would have stretched the budget too far, so she left school at 16 and took a secretarial course. Married at 21, she had a son by the age of 22 and another three years later. She ran an all-day playgroup and was a seaside landlady at the same time, catering for up to 11 people - bed, breakfast, and evening meal. Finally she realised that she and her husband were incompatible! Divorce lifted a weight from her shoulders. A new life opened up with an offer of a teacher training place. From being rendered nervous, uncertain, and cabbagelike by her dominating ex-husband, she soon became confident and outgoing again. During her degree course she met her present husband, a kind, thoughtful, attentive man who is her friend and soul mate. She loved teaching in Sussex but after 12 years she became frustrated and dissatisfied with new rules and regulations, which she felt turned her into a drudge. Her switch into writing came about in a peculiar way. Richie, her elder son, had always been nuts about natural history and had a huge collection of animal skulls. At the age of 15 he decided he'd write an information book about collecting. Heinemann and Pan, prestigious publishers, eagerly fell on the book and when it was published it won the famous Times Information Book Award. Interviews, television spots, and magazine articles followed. Encouraged by his success, she thought she could write, too, and had several information books for children published. Then she saw Charlotte Lamb being wined and dined by Mills & Boon on a television program and decided she could do Charlotte's job! But she'd rarely read fiction before, so she bought 20 books, analysed them carefully, then wrote one of her own. Amazingly, it was accepted and she began writing full time. Sara and her husband moved to a small country estate in Cornwall, which was a paradise. Her sons visited often - Richie brought his wife, Heidi, and their two daughters; Simon was always rushing in after some danger-filled action in Alaska or Hawaii, protecting the environment with Greenpeace. Sara qualified as a homeopath, and cared for the health of her family and friends. But paradise is always fleeting. Sara's husband became seriously ill and it was clear that they had to move somewhere less demanding on their time and effort. After a nightmare year of worrying about him, nursing, and watching him like a hawk, she was relieved when they'd sold the estate and moved back to Sussex. Their current house is large and thatched and sits in the pretty rolling downs with wonderful walks and views all around. They live closer to the boys (men!) and see them often. Richie and Heidi's family is growing. Simon has a son and a new, dangerous, passion - flinging himself off mountains (paragliding). The three hills nearby frequently entice him down. She adores seeing her family (her mother, and her mother-in-law, too) around the table at Christmas. Sara feels fortunate that although she's had tough times and has sometimes been desperately unhappy, she is now surrounded by love and feels she can weather any storm to come.

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      The Kyriakis Baby - Sara Wood

      PROLOGUE

      EMMA sat staring into space, her eyes huge with fear. Her solicitor would come, she told herself. He’d have the answer. He must.

      The question wouldn’t go away. It was driving her mad. Over and over again it hammered into her aching head.

      Where is my baby?

      She broke her numb silence with a whimpering moan of despair, a thin, poignant figure drawn in on herself, a woman lost in her own dark world.

      Only two weeks ago, she’d stood petrified with fear in the dock and had heard the foreman of the jury pronounce her guilty. It had all been a blur from then on. At Leyton Women’s Prison, a note had been handed to her from her brother-in-law, Leon. It had been brutal in its simplicity. ‘I have your child.’

      She’d heard nothing since. Her baby, Alexandra, had vanished off the face of the earth.

      From that moment on, life had been suspended for Emma. Perhaps she had eaten at some time—she wouldn’t know. And sleep had come only when her exhausted body could take no more of the waking hell. Even then she’d been plagued by nightmares from which she’d woken sobbing, and drenched in a cold sweat.

      That morning, preparing for visiting time, she’d noticed with sudden shock that the months of stress had etched a network of fine lines around her mouth. Furrows scoured her high forehead and a deep notch had been excavated between her brows.

      Leon had done this to her.

      In the cheap mirror she’d seen that her blonde hair was now lank instead of thick and lustrous. Emma had grimaced, had scraped the lifeless hanks back into a severe pony-tail and had fastened them carelessly with a rubber band, unconcerned that spikes of hair stuck out at all angles.

      She looked awful. So what? Who was there to see? She just didn’t care. Nothing mattered any more. How could it? Alexandra was her baby and she’d been spirited away. And she was just six months old.

      Her baby. The focus of her entire existence. Something miraculous, salvaged from a terrible marriage to Taki. Sweet, dimpled little Lexi, whose chuckles and sunny nature could make her smile despite her worries and who’d roused in her such a fierce and tender passion that she’d been shaken by its profundity.

      And now Lexi had disappeared. Sitting disconsolately at her appointed place, she took a dog-eared photo from her pocket and stared at it with empty eyes.

      Her thoughts tortured her. What happened, she wondered miserably, when a baby was abruptly parted from its mother? Would she eat? Would her child be bewildered and upset—or would anyone’s arms, anyone’s smile be acceptable? She thought of Lexi, sick from crying, and groaned.

      ‘Oh, my baby!’

      She lifted a frail hand to stifle a sob. The action made her vaguely aware that people were stirring around her, their voices rising above the normal subdued mutter that was normally adopted in the large visitors’ hall.

      Dragged from her inner torment, she lifted her head and gloomily followed the source of interest. And instantly she froze, transfixed by the man who stood in the distant doorway.

      Not her solicitor. Someone tall, dark and broad and undeniably Greek, his sharply tailored city suit and impeccable grooming quite incongruous amid the plethora of T-shirts, jogging pants and designer trainers.

      Leon. The unfeeling brute who’d abducted her baby.

      The pain in her chest intensified as a harsh protest scraped its way from her throat. He’d come to gloat! To read her the riot act, to talk about her lack of morals and his right to take Alexandra.

      Right! she seethed. What about her right to justice? Her rights of motherhood? Why had she automatically lost her rights as a human being?

      Battle-ready, Emma drew her weary body upright, her eyes glittering with anger. She’d have him arrested! He was a fool to have come…

      The thudding of her heart seemed to trip and falter as logic poured cold water on her impetuous thoughts. Leon was no fool. If he was here, it was to say something important. What could that be?

      Her fevered imagination quickly provided answers. Her baby was dead. A cot death. An accident. An unidentified sickness…

      She gasped, and somehow she was on her feet, catapulted by an unknown force that had flung her chair violently to the ground. Leon’s eyes swerved to meet hers and he recoiled in shock, as if her appearance appalled him. But Emma was way beyond personal pride.

      ‘Is she dead?’ she yelled hysterically across the vast hall.

      Aghast, he shook his head and mouthed one word. ‘No!’

      She swayed, her whole body sagging in relief. A warder roughly ordered her to sit but her knees were already giving way beneath her and if a fellow prisoner hadn’t righted her chair Emma would have collapsed in a crumpled heap onto the floor.

      Her baby was alive. Alive! ‘Thank you, God. Thank you,’ she whispered emotionally.

      She trembled all over, her knees juddering against the low metal table. Hands as shaky as a drug addict’s covered her eyes. She knew she couldn’t take much more.

      I must stay calm, she thought in panic. To be more controlled and rational. OK, maybe restraint had seldom featured in her impulsive and passionate nature and her life had been splattered with spectacular foot-in-mouth mistakes—but she had to find some semblance of control. Leon must be persuaded to surrender Lexi.

      All her instincts were urging her to hurl abuse and accusations at Leon, to repeat the terrible things she’d privately called him over the past nightmare days. After that, she thought grimly, it would be a nice twist to get him thrown in jail.

      But a rare caution warned her against this. He held the welfare of her baby in his hands. Perhaps only he knew where Lexi was. If she annoyed him, she might never see her daughter again.

      Her bitter scowl of disappointment would have unnerved him if he hadn’t been engrossed in talking to a warder. She glared. Surrounded by grey and depressed people, he looked indecently fit and vigorous as he finished his conversation and threaded his way carefully between the seated prisoners and their visitors.

      It seemed to Emma that his whole manner suggested he was concerned that any contact with them might contaminate him irrevocably with some vile disease.

      Yes, she thought, near to choking with indignation, this place is a terrible dump! The atmosphere is rank, the bare walls are grimmer than Alcatraz and the clank of keys and clang of gates are two of the most chilling sounds on earth! And she, sweet heaven, she would have to suffer it every wretched day of her life for the next five years!

      The injustice made her head spin. She was innocent. Innocent!

      Aching with anger she tortured herself with the milestones she could miss in five years of little Lexi’s life. Her baby’s first words, her first steps, the momentous day when she’d start school. And daily cuddles. Smiles, gurgles, small loving arms…

      She gave a shuddering sob. Those joys were her right as a mother! This was her baby, her very flesh and blood, and the person she cared for above all others. How dared he play hide-and-seek with her child!

      Resolutions scattered. Uncontainable fury brought her to her feet again when he had come to a mere yard or two’s distance of her trembling figure.

      ‘Where is my baby? What have you done with her?’ she demanded fiercely.

      ‘Sit down.’ Leon snapped.

      His outstretched hand gave an imperious wave and, to her amazement, it halted the two frowning warders bearing down on her. Authority, she thought with glowering resentment. He has it in spades. Well, not with me!

      ‘Answer my question, damn you!’ she insisted grimly, remaining on her feet out of sheer cussedness.

      Tense, and smouldering with a volcanic ferocity, Leon slid into the seat at her table. And yet even there he still managed to dominate the room, perhaps because when seated his height and breadth seemed more than that of the average man. Emma scowled. Nothing about the handsome Leon could ever be remotely termed average.

      The blue-black of his hair was more intense, the density of his dark and expressive eyes more mesmerising than any she’d ever seen. The people who met him were always disturbed, intimidated or attracted, depending on their sex and their connection with him. But no one ever forgot the charismatic Leon Kyriakis.

      And nor had she. Not one moment of their lovemaking. Despite everything, she felt his inexorable sexual pull now and wilted at the sheer strength of his strong-boned and finely chiselled face, and the curl of his electrifyingly sensual mouth that once she’d kissed and tasted so avidly, so lovingly. Until his utterly callous betrayal.

      The furnace in her loins fuelled her loathing as his burning eyes captured her gaze. For a second or two a crackling hostility shot between them, heating up the atmosphere till she felt her skin too must be on fire. And then his ink-black eyes silvered with lethal contempt.

      ‘Sit down, Emma,’ he repeated harshly, ‘or you’ll be back in your cell with your knitting and your mug of cocoa and I’ll be halfway to the airport.’

      Alarmed, she promptly obeyed, her head lowered in anger while she curbed a wealth of tart answers. She could have kicked herself. She’d known she had to handle him carefully. And yet she’d stupidly waded in with all guns blazing. Not much of a kid-gloves approach, was it?

      Calm. Restraint. Operate brain before mouth. But how, when violent emotions constantly erupted within her? She missed her baby desperately and her greatest fear was that Lexi might be pining too. No one else knew her little ways. Nobody could understand her baby as she could.

      Tears suddenly blurred her vision. Knuckling them away miserably, she looked up with dead, hopeless eyes, all the agony in her heart showing plainly on her ashen face.

      ‘I can’t bear this any longer! If you have a shred of pity, you must tell me! Where is my baby?’ she implored.

      Leon immediately edged his chair back, frowning down at the table. ‘Safe.’

      He cleared his throat and fiddled with his cuff, apparently annoyed that it was showing a centimetre less than its twin.

      ‘Thank God,’ she whispered.

      She swallowed ineffectively. There was a solid lump blocking her throat and she gagged on it, desperate to clear it so she could speak. Seeing this, he pushed a glass of water towards her and she stared, oddly surprised at the contrast between their two hands.

      His was tanned, broad and virtually pulsing with life. Hers looked a ghastly white, just skin and bone, as if, she thought deliriously, she was in a living death.

      She clasped the glass as if grabbing a lifeline but her hand shook too much when she raised it and she abruptly put it back on the table. No histrionics. Reasoned argument. For her baby’s sake…

      The hard lump eased a little and she could swallow. ‘How…how is she?’

      Her voice quavered and his mouth immediately contracted into a hard line. What had she said to annoy him? Emma felt awash with terror in case he lost his not inconsiderable temper and refused to listen to her.

      ‘Don’t do this to me. I must know,’ she begged wretchedly.

      ‘Alexandra is well and happy.’

      He spoke in a stiff undertone and she leaned far across the table, frantic to hear every word he uttered. Leon seemed to shrink back as if she was invading his space. He loathed her, she thought dully. How was she to win him round?

      She bit her soft lower lip intently, anxious to hear about her beloved baby. ‘Is she very upset? Does she…cry much?’ she said jerkily.

      ‘No.’

      Her eyes widened. ‘Don’t lie to me!’ She flung the words at him. ‘She must!’

      ‘If I say she doesn’t, then it’s true,’ he answered irritably. ‘She’ll cry for a while when she’s tired or hungry or needing comfort but she soon stops. Otherwise she’s content. I am not a liar. I come from an honest people,’ he pointed out, forcing the words fiercely through his tightly clenched teeth.

      ‘I’m honest too. I don’t deserve to be in prison, accused of fraud,’ she hurled.

      ‘Such injustice.’ He tutted, his expression cynical and disbelieving.

      Emma realised that it was no use trying to persuade him that she was whiter than snow. He had her down as a criminal and that was that.

      ‘Lexi’s OK, then?’ she persisted in a plaintive tone. ‘She’s eating properly?’

      ‘How many times do I have to tell you?’ he said irritably. ‘She’s absolutely fine. Use your common sense. Why would I allow any harm to come to her?’

      Emma paused to consider this. In her experience Greeks loved children and had a way with them. Lexi was probably being spoiled rotten.

      A twinge, as sharp as a knife, twisted in her breast with such force that her hand lifted to ease it. For her daughter’s sake she felt relieved that all was well, but she felt more bereft than ever.

      Maybe she wasn’t necessary to Lexi’s well-being at all. Her child could exist without her. But could she exist without her child? Her heart went cold and she shuddered, sliding her thin arms around her shivering body, consoling herself with the fact that only she knew all the tiny things that made Lexi truly content.

      ‘She does have her teddy bear, doesn’t she?’ she began shakily. ‘And I don’t suppose you realise that she needs her yellow blanket—’

      ‘It’s with her as we speak. I removed everything from your house which looked remotely as if it belonged to Lexi,’ he retorted.

      Emma gaped, astounded at his thoroughness. ‘You planned this!’ she accused hotly. ‘You knew exactly what you would do if the jury pronounced me guilty—’

      ‘Of course I did. I couldn’t allow my late brother’s child to remain in the care of a stranger,’ he snapped.

      ‘She’s my neighbour. Lexi knows her. It was only temporary, anyway,’ she argued. ‘I fully expected to be free—’

      ‘And what did you organise if not?’ he asked sardonically.

      ‘If there was a problem, my neighbour was to bring her to the mother-and-baby unit here.’

      He still hadn’t answered the question. Where was her daughter? Suddenly she had a flash of fear, picturing her baby abandoned outside in a car, or in her buggy by the prison entrance where anyone could abduct her… She drew in a choking breath.

      ‘And what about your babysitting arrangements? If you’re here,’ she said jerkily, her voice rising in panic, ‘who’s looking after Lexi now?’

      His eyes flickered. ‘Marina. My—’

      But she’d got there before him. ‘Your wife!’ she said breathily.

      Emma sat stunned. Of course. Who else? she thought dully. And then she noticed something strange. There was a sliver of pain knifing across the dark depths of his eyes and bitterness had drawn his mouth into a hard line.

      He wasn’t happy, she realised with a shock. Pangs of half-remembered love touched her shuttered heart. She’d adored him once. They’d been students together and he’d been everything to her. But one day, totally out of the blue, she’d seen him emerging from a local restaurant with a drop-dead gorgeous blonde on his arm. Her world had disintegrated rapidly.

      ‘An engagement party,’ the obliging Greek waiter had said, his apron stuffed with tips from the affluent, laughing crowd.

      The lintel above the entrance where they were posing for photographs had born a banner with the elaborately printed legend, Leon and Marina. It had been emblazoned with hearts and love knots. The waiter picked up a discarded menu with the same design and the appalled Emma had known that this must have been planned for some time.

      Tears of rage and misery had rendered her speechless. He’d been organising his wedding while vowing he loved her…even while he was sleeping with her!

      ‘Leon!’ she’d cried rawly.

      He’d looked directly at her and turned a deathly white. ‘Emma!’

      All eyes had been upon her then. Clearly appalled that she’d found him out, he’d spoken to a younger man at his side who’d come over and introduced himself as Leon’s brother, Taki.

      ‘He’s the Kyriakis heir, she’s the Christofides heiress,’ Taki had explained gently as he’d driven her home. ‘Our families have been linked for generations. Don’t take this personally,’ he’d said soothingly, when she’d continued to sob. ‘It’s how we do things. We need sex so we find a woman who is amenable. Then we marry a

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