CHAPTER ONE

      IT HAD SEEMED like such a good idea back home in England. Now she wasn’t so certain any more. What if something went wrong, something she hadn’t foreseen? She could end up creating even more problems if she weren’t careful.

      Amy Prentice could feel her anxiety mounting as she and her eight-year-old son, Jacob, joined the queue for the ferry that would transport them to the small Greek island of Constantis. It had all appeared so straightforward when they had set off that morning. She would take Jacob to Constantis for a holiday and whilst they were there, she would tell him about his father being Greek. At the moment Jacob knew very little about the man who had fathered him apart from the fact that he was a doctor and that he worked in America, which was why they never saw him. Jacob had accepted it without question, or he had done before the other children in his class had started teasing him. Although a lot of them came from single-parent families too, at least they had some contact with their absent parent. Jacob, however, had never met his father and that was all down to her.

      Nicolaus Leonides had made his feelings abundantly clear nine years ago. He hadn’t been interested in the child Amy had been carrying and there was no reason to imagine that he had changed his mind. Not after everything she had read about him. Nico had achieved everything he had set out to do, establishing himself as one of the world’s foremost cosmetic surgeons. The name Nicolaus Leonides had become a byword for perfection and the fact that only those with a great deal of money