"I know you like seeing Kara, but—" There she broke off, too late to mind her words. "W-would you like a peach?" she stumbled. "I'll peel you one."
"Domini," he said quietly, "there is something I would like."
"What is it, Paul?" She stepped eagerly to his bedside. "Please tell me."
He turned his head and seemed to be looking right at her through the bandages. "I would like you to buy a plane ticket and go home to England," he said.
"What?" She stared down at him, unbelievingly.
"You heard me." He folded his hands behind his head, proud and dark against his white pillows. There were Venetian blinds at the windows and they cast tiger-stripes across his bed, one a bar of gold right across his brown throat where the jacket of his pyjamas lay open. Domini stared at his throat, and she saw it move as he swallowed.
"If you imagine I'm going to buy that ticket, then you're very much mistaken," she burst out. "I'm staying right here."
"They will turn you out in fifty minutes' time," he said dryly.
"Paul," she leant over him, supporting herself with one hand on the bed rail, her eardrops swinging against her cheeks, "I had to sign that form."
"You mean—they made you?"
"No—I did it for your sake. Darling—"
"What did you call me?" Again those lifted, bandaged eyes seemed to dwell on her face, and his mouth looked uncertain, relaxed from the sternness of a minute ago.
"I called you an arrogant Greek," Domini stormed. "Telling me to go to England! Do you think I'd go, with you like this? I've as much right to know whether that left eye is undamaged as you have!"
"Since when?" he demanded.
"Since you marched into my life and made me your wife!"
"Domini," his hand was searching and she put hers into it. His fingers closed tightly about hers, punishing and wonderful. "Are you sorry for me?" he asked.
"Sorry for you?" she scoffed. "I'm sorry for myself because I've got to put up with you for the next fifty years. Arrogant, bossy, master in your Greek house on the crag. What a life it will be!"
"I am not asking you to stay." His fingers unclosed about hers a fraction.
"You didn't ask me to love you," she said deliberately. "You told me to keep it. I'll keep it to myself if that's what you still want, Paul. I won't even stay for always, if you don't want me to, but for a while you're going to need me, and I'm available."
Then she gave a gasp as his fingers crushed hers again and he drew her hand to his lips. "How feminine to threaten and weep at the same time," he said against her fingers.
"I-I'm not—" »
"Not feminine?" he mocked.
"Not w-weeping, you brute." She fell to the bed, buried her face in his shoulder and gave way at last to the stored-up tears. "My Samson, you really brought down the pillars this time," she said at last, wiping her cheeks on his pyjama jacket.
He gathered her close to him. "Sun, moon and stars are dark right now, Domini, as in Samson's song," he murmured. "What if they stay dark for me?"
"Two people can see across mountains and oceans, Paul, if they're together and in need of each other." She kissed him in the hollow under his cheekbone. "You feel a bit smoother now, darling. You looked awful just after the operation, ah blue-jawed and piratical."
"Did I frighten you?" He stroked her hair.
"Has there ever been a time when you haven't?" she laughed.
His arms grew fierce, his lips were buried in her hair. "Beyond everything I had to have you, Domini," he said thickly. "There was no room in what I felt for compassion, for you or for myself. Do you understand?"
"I'm beginning to, at long last." Her teeth nipped his earlobe in loving punishment. "Making me your Sabine!"
"Now my Delilah, it looks like."
"It may never come to that, my darling," she said gently, and as he laid his face against her heart, her hand dwelt with compassion at the back of his head. "Dr. Suiza is very hopeful — we all are. Aren't you, yourself?"
"Do I deserve to be?" His head moved restlessly against her. "I took you away from all that was dear to you, tricked you that first night, gave you the heartache of a lost child—"
"Don't, Paul!" She pressed her mouth against his, warmly, persuasively, forgiving everything with a kiss as women have always done. "I love you," she said softly. "You made me love you a long time ago, but pride was always my sin and I wouldn't admit that love to myself, let alone to you. Oh, Paul, when they told me you were dying I wanted to die with you. Then when Dr. Suiza said there was a chance—a blind and terrible chance— I had to let you have it.
"Darling—Tiger—" She Caressed the nape of his neck, the hard shoulders, her bones gone to honey as his arms reduced her to helplessness in the old way, her lips crushed, silenced, possessed under the mouth that whispered warmly—after a long while:
"I have had enough of this hospital. Soon they must take off these bandages, Domini, for I want to go home with you."
And not many days later they went home, where on the piazza of their sea-crag home, Paul wrapped an arm about Domini's waist and saw again the deep blue of the Ionian reflected in the eyes raised in love to his face.
It didn't show, she thought compassionately, that Paul was totally blind in the right eye. But each day the left one grew stronger, brighter.
Tiger-eyes, tawny and exciting as the dark line of his profile and the arm that bound her so close to him.
I love him so much, she thought wonderingly. Paul . . . dear, dominant Paul, who had faced the rage of guns and grenades at sixteen; whose sons would be equally bold and daring.
"We will make a good life together, eh, Domini?" he said. "Now it will be again as it was that day we were together in Cornwall. Do you remember the little unicorn?"
She nodded happily. "That little unicorn was in my handbag each day I came to visit you in hospital. He brought us luck, and happiness, Paul."
“And you brought me love," he added, taking her close and kissing her deeply, endlessly, until Yannis came out smilingly to tell them that tea awaited them in the salotto.
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