by Lucy Gordon
He reached out a hand to touch her face with tentative fingers.
‘Never leave me,’ he said. ‘You are my life. I can have no other and I want no other.’
‘I’m yours for as long as you need me,’ she vowed.
It was a few days before they were both well enough to leave the hospital. They paid a final visit to the villa and wandered through the grounds.
‘I’m having it demolished,’ he said. ‘I could never come here again. We’ll make our home somewhere else.’
‘What about Brigitta, and your child? We can’t leave them here. Let’s take them back to Athens and let them rest in the grounds there.’
‘You wouldn’t mind that?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘She’s part of your life, and but for her we might never have met.’
‘And if we hadn’t met my life would have gone on in the old dead, hopeless way. I have so much to be grateful for. I feared love as a weakness, but I was wrong. Love is strength, and the true weakling is the man who can’t love, or the one who fears to let himself love.
‘For years I’ve held myself behind doors that were bolted and barred, refusing to allow anyone through. I thought I was safe from invasion, but in truth I was destroying myself from within. Now I know that there’s no true strength except what you give me in your arms, and in your heart.’
She took his face between her hands.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s not a weakness to need people. It’s only a weakness if you don’t know that you need them, so you don’t reach out to them, and you’re left floundering alone. But if you reach out, and they reach back, then your strength can defeat worlds.’
‘And you did reach back, didn’t you?’ he asked. ‘It wasn’t just chance that we met again after so many years.’
‘True. I think the ancient gods gave their orders from Mount Olympus.’
‘And that’s why it’s been inevitable between us from the start-if you really feel you can put up with me.’
‘How could I disobey the orders of the gods?’ she asked him tenderly.
And what the gods ordered, they would protect. Their life together had been ordained, and so it must be. It would be a life of passion and pain, quarrels, reconciliations, heartbreak and joy. But never for one moment would they doubt that they were treading the path that had been preordained for them.
One day the River Styx would be waiting to carry them on, to Eternity.
But that day was not yet.
Lucy Gordon
LUCY GORDON cut her writing teeth on magazine journalism, interviewing many of the world’s most interesting men, including Warren Beatty, Richard Chamberlain, Roger Moore, Sir Alec Guinness and Sir John Gielgud. She has also camped out with lions in Africa, and had many other unusual experiences, which have often provided the background for her books. She is married to a Venetian, whom she met while on holiday in Venice. They got engaged within two days.
Two of her books have won a Romance Writers of America RITA ® Award- Song of the Lorelei in 1990 and His Brother’s Child in 1998, in the Best Traditional Romance category. You can visit her Web site at www.lucy-gordon.com.
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