by Julia James
Her heart was hammering, each beat a blow hard enough to crush her to the ground.
It was unbearable to see him.
I thought I would never set eyes on him again.
Pain clutched at her at the thought—and at the reality of seeing him. Because there was no reason for him to have sought her! No point—no purpose.
No purpose in anything now except what she had to do now—what she was telling him, the words tearing from her.
‘It was obvious what I had to do. I had to set you free!’ She swallowed, and there was a razor blade in her throat, drawing blood. ‘Free to marry Ariadne.’ Her voice changed. ‘As you always wanted to.’
He was staring at her, his brows snapping together in an uncomprehending black frown. He lowered himself to the bed, leaning forward. In the low light his features seemed gaunt and strained, and tension racked his jacketless shoulders.
Helplessly, she let her eyes rest on the way his powerful chest moulded the fine material of his shirt... Then she dragged her pointless gaze away. He was gone from her—as distant as the stars in the sky. All she had to do now was tell him that she knew that, accepted it...
‘Your mother told me, Xandros!’ she said, her voice twisting painfully. ‘Told me what I had absolutely no idea of! That you and Ariadne were once engaged!’
‘My mother—’ His voice was bitter.
‘Xandros! Don’t blame her! I’m grateful to her—incredibly grateful! She was as kind as she could possibly have been about it! She was upset—I could see she was. Upset for me as well as upset because obviously the whole situation is a mess! An unholy, hideous mess!’ A cry broke from her. ‘If only you hadn’t given up on Ariadne! She’d have come back to you—as she has now—and then...then everything would have been all right.’
She took a gulping breath, leaning forward, willing him to hear her out. To know she was doing all she could to clear up that unholy, hideous mess. The mess that had Xandros married to one woman while another carried his child. The woman he had wanted to marry all along...
‘But it still will be all right,’ she said urgently now. ‘I’ll do everything I can to get our divorce through as fast as it can be done, I promise! And as for the pre-nup—of course I won’t be taking a penny from you!’ She swallowed. ‘Not now you don’t need me to get your merger with my father.’
Her face worked. She knew she had to say this, too. That it would make it easier for him in the long run.
‘There’s something I haven’t told you. I was... I was going to steel myself to do it, but I didn’t want to spoil that last weekend on Kallistris. My father cornered me in a café the day before and he told me...’ Her voice faltered, but she forced herself on. ‘He told me that he would not progress the merger until—’ Her voice cracked with the pain of it all and the bitter, bitter irony. ‘Until he knew that I was pregnant.’
She clenched her hands together, twisting her fingers tightly in her misery. She made herself meet those blank dark eyes that were resting on her with a weight she could not bear. Crushing the air in her lungs, making it impossible to speak. Yet speak she must. Her eyes were huge, imploring him to understand.
‘So, you see, Xandros...’ She faltered once more, and then went on—because what else was there to do now but play it out to the bitter end? Even though it was tearing her into ragged shreds. ‘When your mother told me about Ariadne... Well, it’s all worked out for the best, hasn’t it?’ Her voice flattened, and she forced herself on. ‘Everything has come together just the way you originally wanted! And for my father, too—so he won’t delay things any more. You’ll get your merger and you’ll get the wife you always planned to have—the one your mother wanted for you, who she said was ideally suited to you—and my father will get his Lakaris grandson. And you will also get the next Lakaris heir to continue your bloodline.’
She swallowed again, felt razors in her throat.
‘It’s a happy ending all round,’ she said.
Except for me.
She felt herself give a silent cry of anguish. But then it had never been going to be a happy ending for her, had it? And not just because of her father’s ultimatum.
Because even with the merger Xandros would have terminated our marriage after six months. I would have lost him anyway. So what’s the difference if that loss has happened sooner and I have to bear seeing my half-sister get the life that I would give everything to have...?
The pain was just the same.
She took another razored breath, feeling the torment of seeing Xandros again—parting from him again—knife through her.
Xandros was looking at her, his dark eyes holding hers. Yet suddenly they were veiled. Unreadable.
‘The next Lakaris heir...’
His deep voice echoed hers. Something shifted in his eyes, in those dark, lambent depths. Something she could not recognise. She saw him take a breath, heavy and incised, and then he spoke again, his shoulders flexing minutely.
‘Yes, well...’ he said, and there was a heaviness in his voice that made no sense. ‘That won’t exactly be the case.’
Rosalie swallowed. ‘I suppose Ariadne’s baby might be a girl,’ she heard herself reply—as if discussing its gender were just a passing topic of conversation, instead of a nail in the lid of the coffin of her stupid and pathetic hopes, a nail driven into her breaking heart.
‘It can be anything it likes!’ Xandros retorted.
Something shifted in his eyes again—something that seemed to ignite in them.
‘Because it isn’t mine.’
Rosalie could only stare, uncomprehending, feeling a flame deep within her that was like a searing point of light...a laser that shot with blinding brilliance.
* * *
She was staring at him, her face blank. It took all Xandros’s strength to hold her gaze to tell her what she needed to hear.
‘It would be a biological impossibility for it to be so,’ he went on, his eyes never leaving her gaunt, strained face.
He saw her face work.
‘But the timing—your mother told me. Ariadne’s into her second trimester, so her pregnancy must have begun while she was still...still engaged to you...’
His jaw steeled. ‘Rosalie, why do you think Ariadne refused to marry me? I thought it was simply because she balked at doing her father’s bidding. But there was another reason.’ He took an incising breath, his mouth pressed tight. ‘A reason I had already started to suspect, and which she has now confirmed to me. She met someone else. Someone who fathered her baby. There can be no doubt about it! Her baby cannot be mine, because the most I ever shared with your half-sister was a goodnight kiss!’
He looked at her. Her grey-green eyes were distended. Those eyes that had captivated him from the first—that still did. That always would...
‘So now it’s you who must see, Rosalie.’
But what did she see? What did this woman who had fled from him really see?
Too much and not enough.
He felt emotion crush his lungs. Emotion he needed to hold back.
‘My mother got it wrong,’ he said. ‘Ariadne arrived out of the blue at the house, her pregnancy showing, and my mother jumped to what to her was the obvious conclusion. The wrong conclusion! When Ariadne realised what my mother had assumed she phoned me straight away. But it was too late.’ His voice changed. ‘You’d gone. Disappeared to London. Filed for divorce.’
He got up suddenly, striding restlessly to the window and back again, wheeling around to look down on her where she was sitting limply, immobile, white as a sheet.
‘A completely unnecessary divorce,’ he said quietly.
He saw the expression in her eyes change, saw something moving in them. And for the first time since Ariadne had phoned him at the airport in Thessaloniki he felt hope.
But then it was gone. And her voice,
when she spoke, was as strained as it had been before, stumbling over her words.
‘But it is still going to be necessary,’ she said heavily. ‘Our divorce. Because of what my father threw at me. His impossible demand that unless... Until...until I’m pregnant the merger you married me to get will never happen.’
He plunged his hands into his pockets. Steeled his jaw. Took a breath before saying what he had to say now.
‘There won’t be a merger,’ he said. ‘I’m pulling out of it.’
* * *
Xandros was looking at her. He was silhouetted against the drawn window drapes, hands plunged into his trouser pockets, his stance stiff, face expressionless. And yet in his eyes...
Rosalie felt a pulse start to thump in her throat. Hammering in her veins.
‘You’re pulling out?’ she echoed, her voice as blank as her face. ‘But why?’
‘Why? Because I never...never...want you to doubt the reason I say this to you now.’
Something flashed across his face and the pulse at her throat thumped more strongly yet. The set of his broad shoulders seemed different, somehow, but still tense.
‘Why,’ he asked slowly, his eyes never leaving her, ‘do you call your father’s demand “impossible”?’
She swallowed. There were still razor blades in her throat, drawing blood...
‘Because...because...we were only meant to be married for half a year! My getting pregnant would have been a disaster!’
His eyes were resting on her...so dark. So unreadable.
‘Would it?’
She stared. ‘I don’t understand...’
His expression changed. In place of that unreadable mask something moved in his eyes. Something it was impossible for her to read. Then the faintest smile hovered fleetingly at his mouth. The mouth that had once kissed her into senseless bliss but would never do so again.
Pain like an arrow across her cheek scathed her heart.
‘Perhaps,’ he was saying now, still speaking slowly, with the same strange expression in his face, ‘I would have welcomed it.’
There was still the same tension across the broad sweep of his shoulders, in the motionless poise of his stance.
She felt her face pucker. ‘Don’t say that, Xandros—’
Her voice was broken. She was broken. Broken into tiny fragments that she could not hold together.
He stood looking down at her, that expression she could not read—dared not read—still in his eyes.
He was speaking to her again.
‘Don’t say it because the thought of bearing my child appals you? Don’t say it because a child would bind us, one to the other, for all our days...all our lives? Don’t say it because that would be a fate that would horrify you?’
She felt her throat twist, those razor blades embedded in it agonising. She could not stop them. Could not stop anything at all. Could not stop his voice—could not stop him starting towards her, hunkering down, taking her trembling hands in his. He was looking into her eyes, from which tears were starting to spill. Tears she could not bear to shed but could not stop.
‘Does it appal you?’
His voice had changed, and she could not bear that either. Could not bear what it held...what it was asking of her.
‘Don’t tell me that it does! Don’t tell me that!’
His eyes were holding hers now, and she could not stop that either—they were pouring into her.
‘Because I won’t believe you. Call me arrogant, conceited and presumptuous, but I won’t believe you! I won’t believe you, Rosalie, because my head is full of memories that give the lie to that! Memories that burn and scorch within me. Memories of the nights we have spent in each other’s arms! Memories that glow with all the warmth and radiance of the summer sun. Memories of the days we have spent in each other’s company. Good days...precious to me—so precious.’ And now his voice was ragged with the emotion he was no longer trying to hold in check. ‘Days I never want to end. Nights I never want to lose.’
His hands closed around hers, so warm, so strong, so comforting and protective. So possessive.
‘You told me that you wanted to set me free,’ he was saying now. ‘But I don’t want to be free of you! I don’t ever want to be free of you!’
Her face was working, and inside her heart was working, too. ‘You...you said... We agreed...when we married...six months...to get the merger done...’
He crushed her hands with his. Strong and warm and enclosing.
‘I’ve told you—to hell with the merger! I don’t want it any more!’ His voice was vehement, then urgent. ‘Because there is only one thing I do want.’
He lifted her hands to his mouth and kissed them, one after another, his gaze pouring into her like velvet.
‘I wanted to tell you before you fled back to London. To tell you that our time together has changed me—changed me completely!’ He made a face, half-rueful, half-wry. ‘Rosalie, I freely confess that one of the main attractions of keeping our marriage temporary—of keeping you temporary—was the fact that it had been the way I’d always lived my life. It suited me.’
The rueful expression deepened.
‘It suited me very well. So well it made me reluctant to agree to marry Ariadne, even though—as my mother and your father were so keen to point out—it would have been so “suitable.” The relief I felt when she jilted me only confirmed that I was not ready to settle down. But what I was too blind to realise—’ and now there was more than ruefulness in his voice...there was a twist of pain and remorse that caught at her as he spoke ‘—was how everything would change...with you! With you in my life! Day after day. Night after night. Just being with you.’ His expression changed again, and now there was a blaze in his eyes. ‘Just you...making everything wonderful!’ he said.
He kissed her hands again, keeping them fast in his as if he would never let them go again. His face was blurring in her vision now, and she could not breathe...dared not...could only gaze at him, listen to him speak...her heart so full she thought it must overflow with hope, with longing to hear what he was telling her...confessing...
He was speaking again now, and she clung to his words...to the hands holding hers so close, so fast...
‘I was starting to feel it more and more. I was even welcoming the delays your father was putting in my way because they would give me more time with you! But I still never realised why I was feeling it—or what it was that I was feeling! It took that last weekend on Kallistris, seeing Maria and Panos’s grandchildren, to open my eyes to what I truly wanted. Not the promise of my old freedom! What use would that be to me when my old life had gone for ever? I didn’t want it back! What I wanted...’ his voice softened ‘...was what I already had—with you. Only with you. You in my life, just as we were—for always. And more.’ He took a breath. ‘Children. A family...’ He paused. ‘A wife to love and be loved by...’ He paused again. ‘You, Rosalie. Only you.’
Her tears were falling openly now, sliding down her paper-white cheeks. He brushed them away with his mouth softly, like velvet, and then his lips found hers, soft and quivering, and he kissed them, too.
‘Only you,’ he said again.
He drew back, his eyes full with all that he had said.
‘I wanted you to come and join me in Thessaloniki—wanted you to start to discover your feelings just as I was discovering mine. I was starting to think about not wanting our marriage to end—wanting to make it permanent in the most binding way of all. Then Ariadne phoned, telling me that of all bitter ironies you believed she carried my baby—her, the very last person I would want to be the mother of my child now that I’d realised there was only one woman I could ever think to have a child with, to spend my life with! And everything exploded in my face!’
He gave a shudder, his face convulsing.
‘Being without you these two
endless weeks has been agony!’ He shook his head, his eyes filled with remembered pain. ‘Proving to me just how much you’ve come to mean to me! I’ve been desperate for you, Rosalie! Desperate to find you—desperate to tell you the truth. Not only the truth that my mother had got it so wrong about Ariadne, but the most important truth to me of all! That I love you and want you, beyond all things, to come back to me. To make our marriage real—and for ever.’
His gaze was pouring into hers again, his dark eyes turning to liquid gold. Turning her to liquid gold as well.
‘Can you...? Will you...?’ His voice was husky. ‘Do you want that, too? Can you love me as I have come to love you? I won’t give up hope, Rosalie! Ask of me anything but that!’
He gazed at her, drinking her in. His expression had changed again. Intensity and ardour softened it now, making it tender. Cherishing. Loving...
‘The fact that you are sitting here with tears pouring down your face from those eyes that have beguiled me since I first beheld them, and that you have let me kiss you as I have, and that your hands, Rosalie, are clutching mine as if you would never let them go... All that, my dearest heart, gives me cause to hope...’
She gave a choke—a cry from her throat. ‘I didn’t mean to fall in love with you, Xandros! Because I knew that wasn’t what you wanted! It was no part of why we married. We were always destined to part! So...’ She took a ragged breath, so much emotion inside her. ‘Do you really mean what you have just said?’
His hands tightened on hers and he gave her an old-fashioned look before getting to his feet, retaining her hands, which he lifted with his.
‘There may be only one way to prove myself,’ he said, and the glint in his eyes was pure gold.
He drew her to her feet, her limbs unresisting. Her tears were drying on her cheeks and her vision was clearing. She was focussing on the one man alone she would ever want. The man who was now lowering his mouth to hers...
His kiss was everything she remembered—everything she would remember all her days for the searing joy that filled her as his mouth claimed hers. As his heart claimed hers. As he claimed her.