Astraeus gestured for Amalie to open it.
Apprehensive, certain he was going to ask her to play for him, she obeyed. The gorgeous scent of wood and resin puffed out and she inhaled it greedily, as she had done since toddlerhood, when her father would open his violin case.
She made to lift the violin out but the King stopped her, placing his hand on the instrument and stroking it.
‘This belonged to Rhea,’ he said. ‘It was hand-crafted for her by Massimo Cinelli. It was my wedding present to her.’
Massimo Cinelli was one of the foremost twentieth-century luthiers, a man who made string instruments of such tonal quality it was argued that they rivalled Stradivarius. His had been a life cut tragically short, and when he’d died at the age of fifty-three he had been known to have made around three hundred string instruments, a quarter of which were violins. In recent months an auction for one of his violas had fetched a value of half a million pounds.
Amalie could only imagine what a violin made for a queen would fetch—especially a queen who’d left such a huge legacy to the classical music world. It made her joyful and sad all at the same time to know this would have been the violin Rhea had used at Carnegie Hall, when she’d played with Amalie’s father all those years ago.
‘I am bequeathing it to you,’ the King said.
‘What do you mean?’
Surely he had to be talking about her using it for the gala?
‘It is yours, child.’
‘Mine...?’
His smile was sad. ‘It’s sat in darkness for five years. It needs to be played. I know you will treasure it and I know you will honour Rhea’s memory. Take it, child—it’s yours.’
Amalie was truly lost for words. She knew this was no joke, but all the same... The King of Agon had just given her one of his wife’s most prized possessions—a gift beyond value.
‘Thank you,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders with helplessness at her inability to come up with anything more meaningful.
‘No. Thank you,’ he answered enigmatically, then beckoned his nurse over and spoke to her in Greek.
The nurse took hold of his wheelchair.
‘And now I bid you a good night,’ Astraeus said. ‘It has been a pleasure meeting you, despinis.’
‘It has been an honour, Your Majesty.’
Talos had risen to his feet, so she followed suit, only to have the King take her hand and tug her down so he could speak in her ear. ‘I’m glad my grandson has found you. Please look after him for me when I’m gone.’
In another breach of protocol she kissed his cold cheek and whispered, ‘I promise I’ll try.’
It was the best she could do. She doubted Talos would ever give her the chance.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A DRIVER RETURNED them to Talos’s estate. They’d been sitting in the back, the partition up, for a few minutes before he spoke.
‘What did my grandfather say to you?’
That was what he was concerned about? Not that she’d been given a family heirloom? The heirloom that now sat on her lap, where she held it tightly.
‘I think he whispered it to me because he didn’t want you to hear,’ she answered, striving for lightness.
‘Don’t be absurd. I’m his grandson. We have no secrets.’
She finally found the courage to look at him. ‘You hold on to your secrets extremely well. You must have inherited that from somewhere.’
‘Are you deliberately talking in riddles?’
‘Why didn’t you tell me he was ill?’
His jaw set in the clenched fashion it had been fixed in throughout the evening. Her heart ached to see it and she wished she could breach the wall he’d erected between them. Even before they’d become lovers she’d never felt as if she couldn’t touch him, but right then she was certain that if she reached out he would recoil from her.
‘My grandfather’s illness is not a subject for idle gossip.’
‘I appreciate that.’
She took a breath. It wasn’t so much his answer that had cut, but the dismissive tone in which he’d said it. As if she were no one.
‘But if you’d told me the truth about his health from the beginning...’
‘Then what?’ he asked bitingly. ‘You would have agreed to perform for him without having to be blackmailed into it?’
‘I don’t know.’ She tightened her grip on the violin case, soothing her fingers on the velvety material. It was the only part of her she could soothe. ‘I don’t know if things would have been different—my point is you never gave me the chance to find out if I would have reacted differently.’
‘You wouldn’t have,’ he said, with tight assurance.
‘We’ll never know.’ Now she clenched her own teeth, before loosening them. ‘What I don’t understand is why you haven’t told me since. We’ve shared a bed for over a fortnight.’
There had been plenty of opportunities for him to tell her. Times when she’d asked him if there was something wrong. The time she’d asked him outright if the gala held more importance to him than the reason he’d shared with her.
‘Do not presume that sharing a bed means I owe you anything.’
She had never known him to be this cold. She’d never known him to be cold at all. When something angered him Talos burned.
This coldness chilled her to the bone.
The car came to a stop. The driver opened her door.
Not another word was exchanged as she got out and entered the cottage. Not a word of goodnight. Not a kiss. Not a touch. Not a look.
She flinched to hear the engine spark back to life and the car driving off, taking Talos to his villa.
Feeling as if lead weights had been inserted into her limbs, she kicked off her shoes and placed Rhea Kalliakis’s violin on the piano. If she didn’t feel so numb she would already have it out of the case and be tuning it. This was a Cinelli. Any other violinist in the world would likely have passed out with shock to be given it. It was the classical violinist’s version of winning the lottery.
But the weight of the gift lay heavily on her. And Talos’s parting words lay even heavier.
‘Do not presume that sharing a bed means I owe you anything.’
He’d really said that. He’d hardly said a word all night but he’d said that. And as the full weight of those words filtered through her brain the numbness disappeared, pain lanced through her, and something even more powerful filled her.
Anger. Unadulterated rage.
How dared he talk to her as if she were nothing more than a notch on his bedpost?
Consumed with a fury she only partly understood, she flung open the front door and ran out into the night. Cutting through the trees, she saw the lights of the villa in the distance, along with the lights of the car just approaching it.
The lead in her limbs had gone. Her legs were now seemingly made of air as she flew over the fields, running faster than she’d ever known she could, the wind rippling against her face, the skirt of her blue summer dress billowing out behind her.
It seemed as if no time had passed before she set the security lights ablaze. In the time it had taken her to race there the car had dropped Talos off and begun its return journey to the palace.
As she banged on the front door with her fist, then punched the doorbell, she was assailed with memories of that morning a month before, when Talos had knocked on her own front door and turned her world on its axis.
The door was wrenched open.
Talos stood there, staring at her as if she’d just appeared from the moon.
‘Sharing your bed doesn’t mean I presume you owe me anything—let alone know what’s going on in your head,’ she spat from her place on the doorstep, before he could utter a word. ‘But we’ve shared more than just a bed.
Or at least I have.’
He looked murderous. He looked as if he wanted nothing more than to wrap his hands around her throat.
‘Have you run all the way here from the cottage in the dark? Are you insane? It’s the middle of the night—there could be anyone out there!’
‘You didn’t worry about that the other night when I walked here in the dark.’
Suddenly the exertion of her run hit her and she bent over, grabbing her knees as she fought desperately to breathe. God, but her lungs burned.
‘Amalie?’
She lifted her head to look at him, puffing in air until she felt able to straighten again.
He stared at her with eyes now curiously vacant. His detachment ratcheted her fury up another notch.
She straightened. ‘Do not treat me as if I’m some nothing you had sex with just because it was available. It was more than that and you know it—and you owe me more than to treat me like that.’
‘I do not owe you anything. If you think your being a virgin before we became lovers means I have to treat you—’
‘It’s nothing to do with me being a virgin!’ she yelled, punching him in the shoulder.
He didn’t so much as jolt.
‘This is to do with me sharing everything with you. I spilled my guts about my childhood and my life to you. I gave you everything! I didn’t expect a marriage proposal, or declarations of love, but I did expect some respect.’
‘It was never my intention to be disrespectful.’
‘Then what was your intention? Tell me, damn you. Why have you closed yourself off? I thought you were frustrated because I’m still struggling to play with the orchestra, but now I’m wondering if you’re just bored with me. Is that it? Are you too gutless to tell me that you don’t want me any more and rather than come out and say it you’re taking the coward’s way of withdrawing, hoping I’ll get the hint?’
Her voice had risen to a shout. No doubt half the live-in staff had been woken.
Suddenly he jerked forward and grabbed her forearm. ‘Come with me,’ he said through gritted teeth, marching her through the reception room, down a wide corridor and through a door that revealed what at first glance appeared to be an office, filled with plush masculine furniture.
He slammed the door shut and loomed over her, his arms folded over his chest. His eyes had darkened to a point of blackness.
‘First of all, do not presume to tell me what I think.’
‘I have to make assumptions because you don’t tell me anything!’
‘What do you want me to say? Do you want me to apologise because my grandfather is dying?’
‘No!’ She clamped her teeth together and blinked back the sudden stinging tears welling in the backs of her eyes. ‘Of course not. I didn’t mean—’
Before she knew what was happening Talos’s control shattered before her eyes.
He punched the wall, blackness seeping out of him. ‘I know what you meant. You think because you have shared confidences with me that I must do the same in return.’
‘No!’ She shook her head over and over, terrified not for herself but for him. She’d never seen such pain before, etched on every line of his face and in every movement of his powerful body.
He seemed not to hear her, kicking the solid wood desk with such force he put a dent in it. ‘Do you want me to pour my heart out about my childhood? To understand where my nightmares come from and why I went so off the rails in my adolescence? Is that what you want?’
‘I—’
‘Do you want to hear about the day I watched my father punch my mother not once but a dozen times in the stomach? Do you want to hear how I jumped on his back to protect her and how he threw me off with such force my head split open on their bedframe? That my lasting memory of my mother is her holding me and her tears falling on my bleeding head? Is that what you want? To know that I couldn’t protect her then and that my vow to always protect her in the future came to nothing, because two hours later both my parents were dead? And now my grandfather is dying too. And I have to accept that as a fact of life and accept there is nothing I can do about it. You want me to share how I feel? Well, it feels as if my stomach and heart have been shredded into nothing. Is that enough for you? Is that what you wanted to hear?’
His eyes suddenly found hers, and he threw his hands in the air and stalked towards her.
‘So now you know all my dirty little secrets and I know yours, is there anything else you want from me or feel I should tell you, seeing as we’re having such a wonderful time trading confidences?’
If it hadn’t been for the wildness radiating from his eyes she would have hated him for his contempt. But she couldn’t. All she felt was horror.
‘No?’ He leaned down so his face was right against hers. ‘In that case, seeing as you’ve got what you wanted from me, you can leave.’
Abruptly he turned away and lifted the phone on the sprawling desk, rasping words in Greek to whoever was on the receiving end.
‘Talos...’ she said hesitantly when he’d replaced the receiver.
She didn’t know what she wanted to say. Couldn’t think of anything to say. What she did want was to take him in her arms and hold him close, but she knew without having to be told he didn’t want that. He didn’t want her or the solace she yearned to give him.
‘We have nothing more to say to each other.’ He seemed to have regained his composure, but his focus on her was stark. ‘We’ve enjoyed each other’s company but this is as far as we go.’
A knock on the door made her start.
Talos pulled it open and indicated for her to leave. ‘Kostas will take you back to the cottage. I hope for everyone’s sake the hypnotist your conductor has arranged for you works, because there is nothing more I can do to help you.’
With as much dignity as she could summon Amalie walked past him to Kostas, who had already set off to the front door.
* * *
Talos kicked the covers off and got out of bed. A large glass of single malt should help him sleep.
He glanced out of the window. Three o’clock in the morning and all was in darkness, but in the downward sloping distance he could see the dim lights of the cottage.
Amalie was awake.
He closed his eyes. He would bet every last cent he owned that at that very minute she was playing his grandmother’s violin, taking the only comfort she could. In his mind’s eye he watched her fingers flying over the strings, imagined the purity of the sound she produced. Knew that to hear it would tear his soul in half. That was if any part of his soul remained. After the way he’d spoken to her the other night whatever had been left of it had been ripped out.
He’d treated her abominably. He still didn’t know where all that rage had come from, knew only that she’d been getting too close. He’d been trying to protect himself. Squashing anything that resembled an emotion down into a tight little ball that could be hidden away and forgotten about.
Somehow Amalie had unpicked the edges of that ball and it had exploded back into life, making him feel more than a man could bear.
Theos, had he ever felt more wretched?
He’d been heartsick before—of course he had; the loss of his parents had devastated him. His father had been a brute, but Talos had still loved him...with the blind faith with which all small children loved their parents.
This felt different, as if the weight of a thousand bass drums had compressed inside him, beating their solemn sound through his aching bones.
He was wasted, physically and emotionally.
He closed his eyes, imagined Amalie padding into his room and settling on the corner of his bed to play for him, her music soothing him enough to drive all the demons from his head.
He hadn’t known his grandfather intended to give her the violin, b
ut he couldn’t think of a better person to have it. What good would it do sitting in a glass cabinet in the Kalliakis palace museum, nothing but a tourist attraction? At least Amalie would love and care for it. When she played it she would play with her heart.
He’d spent the day deliberately avoiding anyone connected with the orchestra. But palace whispers ran more quickly than the tide, and his avoidance hadn’t stopped rumours about the solo violinist having to play behind a screen for the third day in a row reaching his ears.
He imagined her standing there, shaking, her face white and pinched, terror in those beautiful green eyes, her breath coming in increasingly shallow jerks.
What was he doing to her?
It would be kinder to strip her naked and stand her on display. The humiliation would be less.
She’d come so far—been so incredibly brave. To force her to go ahead with the gala now would surely ensure his damnation to hell. Forget any potential ruination of the gala—forcing Amalie to go ahead would completely destroy her.
He couldn’t do it to her.
He would rather rip his own heart out than let her suffer any more.
* * *
Amalie rubbed her sleep-deprived eyes, then picked up her knife and chopped the melon into small chunks, the action making her think of Talos and the knife he carried everywhere with him.
Do not think of him, she ordered herself. Not today.
There would be plenty of time to mourn what had happened between them when she returned to Paris, but for now she had to get through today. That was all she should focus on.
The scent of the melon was as fragrant as all the fruit she’d had since her arrival on the island, but her stomach stubbornly refused to react to it other than to gurgle with nausea.
Please, stomach, she begged, accept some form of nourishment.
At the rate she was going, even if she managed to get on to the outdoor stage that evening, she would likely fall into a faint when the heat of the spotlight fell upon her and her starved belly reacted to it.
Hearing movement, she cut through to the entrance hall and found a letter had been pushed through the door.
Talos Claims His Virgin Page 16