The Greek's Penniless Cinderella - Julia James Page 0,4
spear through him. But now there was a different cause for it. A completely different one he could scarcely bring himself to credit.
His laser gaze rested on the female standing frozen in front of him. He was still unable to believe she was who she said she was. Because it was impossible—just impossible!
Whoever Stavros’s hitherto totally unknown other daughter was, she just could not be the woman standing here!
However brief the liaison Stavros might have had with the girl’s mother, his child would have been amply provided for. Stavros Coustakis was one of the richest men in Greece! So his daughter would obviously be the London equivalent of Ariadne, living somewhere appropriate for having so wealthy a father! Somewhere like Chelsea or Notting Hill or Hampstead—
But the contact address that had been supplied to him by Stavros at his hotel a short while ago had made him frown. What would Stavros Coustakis’s daughter be doing in this tatty, rundown part of London? Was she into property redevelopment, perhaps? Seeing financial opportunities in clearing semi-derelict sites and here merely to scope out potential projects?
The actual truth, forcing itself upon him now as he stared incredulously at the figure in front of him, was...unbelievable.
He felt shock resonate through him again now, and his gaze skewered her, taking in every dire detail of her appearance—the stained tee, the baggy cotton trousers covered in damp patches, the hands in yellow rubber gloves, clutching a floor mop and a bucket reeking of disinfectant. Her hair was screwed up on top of her head in a kind of topknot from which messy tufts protruded. And as for her face—
His expression changed. He’d been so negatively impacted by the grim first impression she’d made that it had been all that had registered. But now...
His eyes narrowed in automatic male assessment. Okay, so her complexion was pallid and blotchy, lined with fatigue, and there was a streak of dirt across her cheek, but other than that...
Fine-boned features, a tender mouth, and beautiful eyes that, despite the dark hollows beneath them, are—
Grey-green.
Shock ripped through him again. For all his protest that this appallingly attired, rubber-gloved female with her mop and bucket just could not be Stavros Coustakis’s daughter, those eyes—so incredibly distinctive—proved his denial and disbelief wrong.
Thee mou—she really is his daughter.
Shock stabbed him again—and he saw the same emotion intensify in her frozen face as well.
‘My father?’ she gasped.
The mop clattered from Rosalie’s suddenly nerveless grip. Her vision seemed to be blurring, the world turning fuzzy...
She had heard the man who had just spoken say what surely to God he could not have said...
Because I don’t have a father. I’ve never had a father...never...
He was saying something in a foreign language. She didn’t know what—didn’t know anything except that the world was still turning fuzzy and she seemed to be falling...
Then, like iron, his grip seized upon her arm and she was bodily steered into the kitchen, forcibly propelled down on to the chair by the rickety table. At last the falling sensation stopped, and the world became less fuzzy, and she found herself blinking blankly.
The man was now standing in front of her, towering over her, and she was staring at him with that weird, blurry gaze. He was speaking again, and she forced herself to hear him.
‘Your father—Stavros Coustakis,’ he was saying.
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