He kicked viciously at the sand as the name burned in his mind, making him clench his teeth hard against the feeling.
Roy Stanton.
Almost a year before he had hoped that he had heard the last of that name. That the man who had ruined his life, and taken away the one thing of value he truly loved, was out of his life for ever.
Roy Stanton and Becca between them had destroyed his happiness, and when he had thrown her out of the villa on the evening of their travesty of a wedding day he had hoped—prayed—that he would never, ever see or hear of either of them again.
And then she had turned up, needing money.
Money for a sick child.
Money for Roy Stanton’s sick child.
Standing staring at the sea was doing nothing to ease the restless rage of his thoughts and Andreas set off along the edge of the shore, striding fast, splashing through the water, heedless of the way that the waves broke against his legs, soaking the fine linen of his trousers. He needed the movement to express his feelings, to ease the fury in his mind so that he could think.
There was one thing that stood out clearly. The baby was innocent in all this. How could he not help a sick child? That was not in question. But Roy Stanton…!
Obviously the selfish bastard had moved on from Becca to another woman—Theos, he’d moved to her sister and had a child by her! And Becca had wept at the thought of it.
Oh, she’d fought with everything that was in her not to show those tears, but he’d seen them sheening her pale eyes, swimming under her lids as she fought to blink them back. Stanton had taken her from him, he’d made her break her wedding vows before she had even spoken the words out loud in the ceremony, and then he had broken her heart by moving on to someone else and fathering a child on her.
And Becca had still come here to plead for help for that baby. Her sister’s baby. Her sister’s child with her own former lover. His stomach heaved at the thought.
Inevitably, his mind went back to the time just before the wedding. The last time that he had been truly happy. When his future had been like a glorious sun rising out there on the horizon. He was going to be married to the woman he adored. She was his life and she loved him back—or so he had believed. Another few days, less than a week, and they would be together forever.
And then the phone calls had started.
Foul, sneaking phone calls that spoke of secrets and lies. The voice at the other end of the line had told him that Becca—his fiancée—wasn’t the woman he believed her to be. That she didn’t love him at all but was only using him; marrying him to get as much money from him as she could. Money that she was then going to share with her real lover…
And for a fee—a substantial fee—he would reveal the name of that lover. For now he would just give the initials. And those initials were RS.
Coming to a halt in his furious march over the sand, Andreas stared out at the horizon with unseeing eyes, shoulders hunched, hands pushed deep into his pockets.
He’d laughed. He’d actually laughed. The story was impossible to believe. He had trusted Becca. There was no way she was deceiving him. He’d slammed the phone down on the call; put it out of his mind.
Until the letter had arrived with a photocopy of a cheque. A cheque for the full amount of the money he had recently given Becca to help her pay for everything she needed for the wedding—right down to the last penny. And the cheque in the copy had been written in his fiancée’s handwriting—and made out to one Roy Stanton.
That was when he’d called in an investigator. He’d wanted to get to the bottom of this, find out the truth.
There had been nothing to find, the man he’d hired had assured him. He’d turned up no evidence to link Rebecca Ainsworth to Roy Stanton. The phone calls had been traced to the same Roy Stanton, who was obviously at the back of all this.
Whatever Becca had paid him the money for, he’d obviously wanted more. But Andreas didn’t give a damn about the money. He had plenty of that. It was only if the claims that Stanton was Becca’s lover were true that he would have acted.
And so he’d put the matter out of his mind and gone through with the wedding. He wouldn’t have been human if a doubt, a worry, hadn’t flashed across his mind just once—but he pushed them away. One look at his bride’s face had been enough to convince him that she was honest, innocent and as much in love with him as he was with her.
It was there in the way that she’d smiled at him, the way she’d looked deep into his eyes when she said her vows. And it had been there in the way that, in reply to the usual question ‘Do you take this man…?’ she had been unable to hold back in her reply, answering not just with the simple ‘I do’, but saying: