by Julia James
Restlessly he shifted his stance again, his eyes sliding past her.
‘I was farmed out when I was born. Handed over to foster parents. They were not unkind to me, merely...uninterested. I was sent to boarding school, and then university here in France. At twenty-one, after I’d graduated, I was summoned to a lawyer in Paris. He told me of my parentage.’
An edge came into his voice, like a blade.
‘He told me that my father would settle a substantial sum on me, providing I signed documents forbidding me from ever seeking him out or claiming his paternity.’ The blade in his voice swept like a knife through the air. ‘I tore up the cheque and stormed out, wanting nothing from such a man who would disown his own son. Then I drove out here to find my mother—’
He stopped abruptly. Once again his eyes swept the room, but this time Diana could sense in his gaze something that had not been there before. Something that made her feel again what she had felt so unwillingly when he had first started speaking. The shaft of pity.
His face was gaunt, his mouth twisted. ‘She sent me away. Saw me to the door. Told me never to come here again—never to contact her again. Then she went back inside. Shutting me out. Not wanting me. Not wanting the child she had cast aside.’ He paused. His voice dropped. ‘Rejecting me.’
That something moved again in his eyes, more powerfully now, and it hurt Diana to see it. It was that same look her father had had in his eyes when he’d remembered the wife who had not wanted him, who had rejected him.
‘I drove away,’ Nikos was saying now, piercing her own memories with his, ‘vowing never to contact her again, just as she wished, washing my hands of her just as I had my father, as both of them had washed their hands of me. I took a new name for myself—my own and no one else’s. Cursing both my parents. I was determined to show them I did not need them, that I could get everything they had on my own, without them.’
There was another emotion in his voice now.
‘I’ve proved myself my father’s son,’ he ground out, his eyes flaring with bitter anger. ‘Everything I touch turns to gold—just as it does for him! And, having made as much money as my father, I gained all the expensive baubles that he possesses, the lavish lifestyle that goes with such wealth—and, yes, the celebrity trophy mistress I had in Nadya! But it wasn’t enough. I wanted to get for myself what my mother had denied me in her rejection. My place in the world she came from—the world you come from, Diana.’
He paused, his eyes resting on her, dark and unreadable.
‘By marrying you I would take my place in that world—but I would also obtain something else. Something I wanted the very first moment I saw you.’
He shifted his position restlessly, and then his gaze lanced back to her. And in it now was an expression that was not unreadable at all. It blazed from him openly, nakedly. It made her reel with the force of it.
‘I could get you, Diana. The woman I’ve desired from my very first glimpse of you. The woman I thought I had finally made my own—the woman I transformed from frozen ice maiden to warm, passionate bride, melting in my arms, burning in her desire for me!’
His voice changed, expression wiped clean. There was harshness in his voice now—a harshness that had become all too familiar in these last hideous months while she had been chained to his side.
‘Only to discover that after all we had together in the desert it meant nothing to you. Nothing! That to you all I was good for was supplying the money that would save Greymont for you. That only your precious ancestral home was important to you, your privileged way of life. You did not want me disturbing that with my inconvenient desire for you.’
She stared at him. The bitterness in his voice was like gall.
He spoke again. ‘Just as my mother valued above all else her privileged way of life here at this elegant chateau, undisturbed by the inconvenient existence of an unwanted bastard son.’
Diana felt her face pale, wanted to cry out, but she couldn’t. He was speaking again, his words silencing her.
‘All these months, Diana, I have blamed you for being like her. For valuing only what she valued. For rejecting me.’ He paused. Drew breath. ‘It made me angry that you should turn out to be like her. Valuing only the privileged lifestyle you enjoy.’ His mouth twisted. ‘Nothing else. No one else.’
She could read bitterness in the stark lines of his face, savage and harsh, but there was something else beneath it. Something that seemed to twist her up inside.
He was speaking again, and now there was a tension in his voice, like wire strung too tight, and his strong features were incised with that same tension.
‘And that is what I need to know! Was I right to be so angry with you? Right to accuse you of being no better than my mother, who only valued all of this?’
His hand swept around the room, condemning in a single gesture all that it represented. His gaze was skewering her, nailing her where she sat. She saw his mouth twist again.
‘Are you the same, Diana? Is Greymont all that you are capable of wanting, valuing? Is Greymont and all that goes with it all you care about?’
His eyes were dark—as dark as pits. Pits into which she was falling.
Her voice was shaking as she answered him. Inside her chest her heart had started to pound, like a hammer raining blows upon her. ‘You...you knew I married you to protect Greymont, Nikos. You knew that—’
A hand slashed through the air. ‘But is that all you are, Diana? A woman cut from the same cloth as my mother? Caring only for wealth and worldly status and possessions?’
She reeled. Suddenly, like a spectre, she saw her father, shaking his head sorrowfully, looking at her with such desolation in his face she could not bear to see it. Nor to hear his words.
‘I wasn’t rich enough for her...your mother—’
She felt her insides hollowing as the echo of her father’s words rang in her ears.
She stared at Nikos, eyes distended. There was a spike in her lungs, draining the air from her, and his bitter accusation was stinging her to the quick, the echo of her father’s words like thorns in her soul.
Words burst from her as she surged to her feet. His words had been blows, buffeting her. In agitation and self-defence she cried out at him.
‘Nikos, I’m sorry—so sorry!—that your mother hurt you so much! Because I know how that feels. I know it for myself.’
She took a hectic breath, feeling her heart pounding inside her, urgently wanting to defend herself—justify herself. Protect herself from what he’d thrown at her.
‘When I was ten my mother walked out on my father. And on me!’ Her expression changed, memory thrusting her back into that long-ago time that was searing in her heart as if it had only just happened. ‘Like your mother, Nikos, she didn’t want me. She only wanted the huge riches of the Australian media mogul she took off with. A man twice her age and with a hundred times my father’s wealth!’
She could hear the agitation in her own voice, knew why it was there. She saw that Nikos had stilled.
Her gaze shifted, tearing away from him, shifting around the elegant salon in this beautiful chateau. Shadowing. Taking another breath, she made herself go on. It was too late to stop now.
‘She cut all contact. I ceased to exist for her. Was not important to her. So I made her not important to me.’
Her eyes came back to Nikos. He was standing stock-still, his eyes veiled suddenly.
Shock was detonating through him. He had summoned her here to find the truth. The truth he had to discover. The truth on which so much rested. So much more than he had ever dreamt.
Well, now he had the truth he’d sought.
I thought she rejected me because she was like my mother—as I thought my mother to be.
But it was himself. All along it was himself. That was who she was like. Like him she had been abandoned, rejected, as he had felt himself to be, by the one woman who should have cherished her.
A chill swept through him.
‘My father became my world—he was all I had left. And Greymont—’
A low ache was starting up in her, old and familiar, from long, long ago. Without realisation, her arms slid around herself. As if staunching a wound.
With a dry mouth she forced herself on.
‘It was the same for my father. We—Greymont, and myself—became his reason for going on after my mother left him. And it was because...’ Her voice changed. ‘Because he saw how desperately I loved Greymont—how I clung to it, to him—he vowed to make sure I would never lose it.’
She shut her eyes a moment, her jaw clenching. Then her lids flew open and she looked straight at Nikos. He was stock-still, his face unreadable, his eyes unreadable. It didn’t matter. She had to say this now. Had to.
‘And to ensure that I did he gave up all hope of ever finding anyone else to make him happy. Gave up all thoughts of marrying again. For my sake. Because...’ She gave a sigh—a long, weary sigh. ‘Because he would not risk having a son who would take precedence over me—inherit Greymont, dispossess me of the home I loved so desperately.’
There was a heaviness inside her now, like a crushing weight, as she lifted her eyes to his, made herself hold them, as impossible as it was for her to do so.
‘His sacrifice of any chance of happiness for himself made it imperative for me to honour what he’d done. He ensured I’d inherit Greymont—so I had to save it, Nikos, I had to! I had to make it the most important thing in the world to me. Saving Greymont. Or I would have betrayed his trust in me. His trust that I would keep Greymont, pass it on to my descendants, preserve it for our family.’
She looked about her again, at the elegant salon with its antiques, its oil paintings on the walls, the vista of the grounds beyond, the sense of place and history all about her—so absolutely familiar to her from Greymont.
Her lips pressed together. She had to make him see, understand...
CHAPTER TWELVE
HER GAZE WENT back to him, with a pleading look on her face.
‘It’s something those not born to places like this can never really comprehend—but ask your brother, Nikos, whether he would ever want to part with his heritage, to be the Comte du Plassis who loses it, who lives to see strangers living here, knowing it’s not his any longer, that’s he’s had it taken from him?’ She shook her head again. ‘But places like this demand a price. A price that can be hard to pay.’
She did not see the expression on Nikos’s face change, the sudden bleakness in his eyes. He knew just what price had been paid for his brother to inherit. And who had paid it.
There was a hollowing inside him. Yes, he had paid the price, had been farmed out to foster parents. But his mother had paid too. Had stayed locked in an unhappy marriage in order to preserve her son’s inheritance. Her husband had been pitiless, refusing to release her, punishing her for not wanting him whilst chaining her to him.
As he, Nikos, had kept Diana chained to his side, punishing her for not wanting him.
Again a chill swept through him.
No! I am not like him!
Denial seared in him. And memory—memory that flamed in his vision.
Diana in my arms, with the desert stars above, her face alight with passion and ecstasy. Diana laughing with me, her face alight with a smile of happiness. Diana asleep in my embrace, my arms folding her to me, her head resting on me, her hair spread like a flag across me.
Each and every memory was telling him what he knew with every fibre of his being, every cell in his body.
She wanted me just as I wanted her. That desire that flamed between us was as real to her as it was to me. So how could she deny it—how?
A ‘mistake’, she’d called their time in the desert. The word mocked him, whipped him with scorpions.
But she was speaking again, her voice heavy.
‘And so I married you, Nikos, to keep Greymont safe. That’s why I married you—for that and only that.’
His gaze on her was bleak. ‘A man whose touch you could not tolerate? Would not endure? Despite all we were to each other in the desert?’
A cry broke from her—high and unearthly. ‘Because of it! Nikos, are you so blind? Can you not see?’
Her arms spasmed around the column of her body, as if she must contain the emotion ravening through it. But it was impossible to contain such emotion, to stop it pouring from her, carrying with it words that burst from her now.
‘Nikos—when you came to Greymont and put down in front of me your offer of marriage I wanted to snatch it with both hands! But I hesitated—I hesitated because—’
Her eyes sheared away. She was unable to look at him directly, to tell him to his face. But emotion was tumbling through her, churning her up, and she had to speak—she had to! Her arms tightened about herself more fiercely.
‘I’d seen the way you looked at me at that dinner. Seen the way you looked at me at Don Carlo, and in the taxi back to my hotel. I saw in your eyes what I’d seen in men’s eyes all my adult life. And I knew I could not...’ Her voice choked again. ‘I could not have that in our marriage!’
She did not see his expression change. His face whiten. She plunged on, unable to stop herself.
‘But I was desperate to accept your offer and so I persuaded myself that it wasn’t there. I believed what I wanted to believe—confirmed, as I thought, by the way you were during our engagement.’ She gave a high, hollow laugh, quickly cut short. ‘And all the while you were just biding your time. Waiting for the honeymoon to arrive.’
She shut her eyes, not able to bear seeing the world any longer. Not able to bear seeing him.
‘And arrive it did,’ she said, her voice hollow.
Into her head, marching like an invading army that she had so long sought to keep at bay, came memories. Images. Each and every one as fatal to her as a gunshot.
Her eyes sprang open, as if to banish those memories that were so indelible within her. But instead of memory there was Nikos, there in front of her. So real. So close.
So infinitely far away.
As he must always be.
Nikos—the man who had caused her more pain than she had ever known existed!
‘Oh, God, Nikos!’ The words rang from her. ‘You think me an ice maiden. But I’ve had to be—I’ve had to be!’
Slowly, very slowly, she made the crippling clenching of her arms around her body slacken, let her hands fall to her sides, limp. She was weary with a lifetime of exhaustion, of holding at bay emotions she must not let herself feel or they would destroy her.
‘Being an ice maiden kept me safe. Having a celibate marriage to you kept me safe.’
There was silence. Only the low ticking of the ormolu clock on the mantel.
‘Safe,’ she said again, as if saying it could make it so.
But the word only mocked her pitilessly. Safe? It had been the most dangerous thing in the world, marrying Nikos—the one, the only man who had set alight that flare of sexual awareness inside her with a single glance. That single, fateful glance that had brought her here, now, to this final parting with him.
Pain seared inside her—the pain she had feared, so much all her life. A wild, anguished look pierced her eyes as she cried out.
‘I needed to be an ice maiden! I didn’t want to feel anything for any man. I had to protect myself! Protect myself from what I saw my father go through! Because what if what happened to my father, happened to me? He broke his heart over my mother! Because she never loved him back—’
She broke off, turning away. She had to go—flee! However long Nikos made her wait for her divorce. The divorce that would free her from the chains he held her by.
But he holds me by chains that I can never break! Never!
The anguish came again, that searing pain. A sob tore at her throat and her arms were spasming again, as if she would fall without that iron grip to hold her upright.
And then suddenly there was another clasp u
pon her. Hands folding over hers. Nikos’s strong, tall body right behind her. Slowly, deliberately, he was turning her around to face him.
His hands fell away from her, and she suddenly felt so very cold. She stood, trembling, unable to lift her head to look at him. He spoke. His voice was low, with a resonance in it that had never been there before.
‘Diana...’ He spoke carefully, as if finding his step along a high, perilous path, ‘Your fears have haunted you, possessed you—you must let them go.’
She lifted her head then. Stared at him with a wide, stricken gaze.
‘That isn’t possible, Nikos,’ she answered, her voice faint. ‘You, of all people, should know that.’ Her expression contorted. ‘Those nights we had in the desert... You could not understand why I so regretted them—why I told you it should never have happened. But now you know why I said that to you. Just as I, Nikos...’ her voice was etched with sadness ‘...know why my rejection of you made you so angry. Because it made you think me no better than your mother—the mother who rejected you so cruelly.’
His expression was strange.
‘Except that she did not.’ He saw the bewilderment in Diana’s eyes. ‘Antoine came to me—the half-brother I never even knew I had took me to her,’ he said. ‘He told me the truth about why she had to do what she did.’
Sadly, he told her the bleak, unhappy tale—and then the miracle of his reconciliation with her.
‘It was realising how wrong I had been about her, how I had misjudged her, that made me fear I had misjudged you, too!’ His expression was shadowed. ‘And fear even more that I had not.’
His expression changed, his voice becoming sombre now.
‘We’ve both been chained by our past. Trapped. I was trapped in hating the mother who had rejected me, only to find that she had been trapped by her need to protect my brother. And you, Diana, were trapped by the wounds your mother’s desertion inflicted on you—trapped by your gratitude to your father, your guilt over his sacrifice for you, your pity for him—the fear you learnt from him. The fear I want so much to free you from.’
‘But that fear is real, Nikos!’ she cried out. ‘It’s real. It was real from the first moment I set eyes on you, when I knew, for the first time in my life, that here was a man to make me feel the power of that fear. And it was terrifyingly real after our time together in the desert!’