“It is my fault,” he said. “But it is your fault too.”
She sucked in a breath, his accusation hurting her. “How?”
“You’re shutting me out, and pushing me away, instead of letting me fight for this. For you. You told me you regret your first marriage. What about this? Do you not think you’ll regret the way you’ve shut me out of your life?”
Indignation swirled through her. “What choice did I have?”
“Plenty,” he promised. “You could have listened to me, you could have let me explain. You could have stayed, long enough for me to show you that what I feel for you is love – the strongest, most meaningful love in the world. You could have stayed long enough to calm down. To breathe and think.”
“I’ve been breathing,” she whispered. “And thinking.”
“And?” He prompted, the word gruff.
“I don’t know,” she said, so softly, so faintly, it was almost impossible to decipher. “I’m so angry with you.”
“Yes,” he agreed, as though it hardly mattered. “Have you spoken to your mother?”
Heat flushed her cheeks. She shook her head, before remembering he couldn’t see her. “No.” A husky admission.
“Then you do not know she’s gone into therapy?”
“Therapy?” This had Bella standing up straight, a frown on her face. “No.”
“She wants to make her marriage work. And God knows, I don’t love her.”
“But you did?”
“No.” He said the word with absolute vehemence. “I was captivated by her, and flattered by the attention. But think about it, Bella. It’s been many years since your father died, many years of both your mother and me being available. If I loved her, would I have let anything stop me from being with her?”
She was quiet, letting his words filter through her mind. “It was too complicated,” she said, wearily. “I guess it stopped you…”
“It was complicated, but no. Nothing would have stopped me acting on what I wanted, if it was what I wanted. Our situation, yours and mine, was also complex and yet I begged you to marry me, because even then, I couldn’t imagine my life without you in it.”
“Because of the baby,” she said, putting her hand over her stomach, thinking of their daughter, growing inside of her.
“Yes, at first. But looking back, it was more than that. You were the most fascinating woman I’ve ever known, and I was terrified of that. Initially, I wanted to walk right away from you, I wanted to avoid this because you’re Andrew’s daughter and God, as if I hadn’t already done enough to him.”
She felt his guilt and self-recriminations and fought an urgent wave to reassure him. “I have hated myself for … I don’t even know. Your mother and I have never been together, Bella. I would never betray my friend like that. But I knew, I knew a line had been crossed. Ten years ago, as a twenty five year old, I let a married woman tell me she loved me, and I was flattered when I should have been outraged.”
She swept her eyes shut, hurting for the young man he’d been, knowing it was a million miles from who he was now.
“And when your father died, I wanted to be there for Kat, as a friend. I wanted to support her, and, yes, I liked how her adoration made me feel. I told myself I was sleeping with other woman to stop me from going to her, but the truth is, I didn’t want her. I didn’t. Never.”
She sucked in a shaking breath, but couldn’t speak.
“I told her that, the night Lorenzo came to you in Athens. I told Kat, bluntly, that nothing would have ever happened between us. I told her I loved you, that you’re the first woman I have ever loved – that our meeting and being together feels like the strangest kind of fate. I’d lived thirty five years before that night, Bella, but now I cannot imagine my life without you in it.”
Tears squeezed out of her eyes.
“I fell in lust with you, first, but I think it was only a day or two after you being on the island when I knew my heart was taking over. And now, you have it all, for always and ever, Mrs Katrakis.”
Her chest felt heavy and light, she was at the end of a cliff, darkness and an abyss beyond her. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
“I was terrified of losing you,” he said, honestly. “I knew I should have. I felt like I was suffocating, every time I thought of you discovering all of this and believing the worst. I couldn’t bear the thought of hurting you, I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you, so I did just about the stupidest thing I could do and buried my head in the sand.”
Her heart trembled. “Not quite,” she said, after a moment. “You spoke to mom without knowing Lorenzo had come to me. Were you going to tell me, next?”
She waited, and then, he said, quietly. “No, agape. I would never have told you this, if I’d had the choice. Your mother did not wish you to know – and I would always have wished to spare you the pain. Besides, having realized what love is, having felt it with you, I know that I have never loved another woman – there was, in some ways, nothing for you to know.”
“She left daddy for you,” Bella pointed out.
“She left Andrew because he spent almost half his time in Washington and she was lonely. Theirs was not a perfect marriage, Bella. I was the excuse she needed, the temptation she’d been looking for. Or maybe she just wanted to use me to hurt your father, like Lorenzo said. Maybe if I’d given in to her, it would have been over in a couple of days, out of her system. But she didn’t love me, she didn’t leave your father for me. There was, and never has been, anything substantial between us.”
Bella’s breath was shaky. “I want to believe you.”
“It’s Christmas eve,” he said, quietly. “A time for faith and miracles.”
A knock sounded on her door and she dashed away her tears. Her heart turned over in her chest. He was so far away, and now, more than anything, she just wanted to see him, to look into his eyes, to tell him…
“Do you want this marriage to work, Bella?”
Her pulse was thick in her veins. “I…”
She walked slowly from the kitchen, each step requiring effort as her brain tried to make sense of what she wanted and needed. It would be so much easier if she could see him, and look into his eyes and see the truth of what he was saying!
“Do you want to go to bed with me, to wake up with me, to stand beside me, shoulder to shoulder, looking out at whatever life throws our way? Do you want to raise this child with me, our daughter, and any more we are blessed with? Do you want to be my wife, and have me as your husband, knowing that no matter what you say now, I will love you forever more?”
Every fibre of her body screamed at her: yes! But she was besieged by doubts, by uncertainties. “There’s someone at the door,” she said in a rush. “I have to go.”
“Wait,” his voice was urgent, and she heard something from the other side of the door. “Just think about this. Imagine your life without me in it. Imagine living here, or Edinburgh, or Athens, wherever you wish, and knowing me to be an ocean away. Is that what you want?”
Every cell rejected that.
“Hang on a second,” she whispered, her heart hammering. She pulled the door inwards, and certainty flashed into her heart and soul like lightning cracking over a dam.
For there, on the doorstep, covered in snow, was the man her heart had been craving, the only man she’d ever loved, the father of her baby, and he was looking at her as though he couldn’t believe it was really her.
“Do you want me,” he said, stepping through the doorframe and bringing his body close to hers, “to make this better, agape? To take away all this pain and replace it each and every day with happiness and pleasure?”
She was shaking from head to toe, adrenaline and emotions rioting inside her. “Can you do that?” She whispered, already knowing he could, knowing that just seeing him again was filling her up with a rush of warmth she’d thought banished forever.
“Yes.” So emphatic! So confident! “If you’ll let me…”
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She tilted her chin towards him, defiance in her eyes. “Promise?”
“Cross my heart,” he said, moving closer still, pressing her back against the wall. Her eyes flew wide, her lips parted, and his gaze dropped to her mouth hungrily.
“I’ve missed you so much,” she said, honestly, lifting her hands to his shirtfront and grabbing it in her fists.
“I am very glad,” he said, the words roughened by emotion.
Her stomach kicked, and she grabbed his hands, dragging them down to the baby. She saw the wonder that crossed his face as he felt the proof of their child moving inside her.
“That is kind of weird,” he said, laughing, dipping his forehead to hers.
“Very,” she agreed, pressing up on tiptoes, so her lips were only a hair’s breadth from his.
He surrendered to the kiss first, brushing their mouths together, holding his there, before deepening the kiss. “I love you,” he said. “Se agapó.”
“Se agapó right back,” she repeated, into his mouth, breathing the words through his body, and he sucked them in, allowing himself to relax – slightly – for the first time since she’d walked away from him, insisting it was over.
“How did you know where I was?” She asked, later, when they lay in bed, limbs intertwined, looking at the snow that continued to fall beyond the window.
“Addan,” he said, stroking her hair, breathing her in, every moment relaxing him more and more.
“Seriously? How did you…?”
“Our fathers were also friends,” he said, thanking God for that. “He was worried Sophia would be angry, but I think he was even more worried I was on the brink of a nervous breakdown,” Vitalo confessed, only half-joking.
“I’m glad he told you,” she whispered. “And I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Christmas is a time for family,” he said, repeating her words back to her.
“So it is,” she smiled.
“And I’m not going anywhere again,” he promised, kissing her hair.
Her eyes swept shut and sleep closed in around her; she welcomed it, she accepted it, but she didn’t bother hoping she would dream of Vitalo – not when he was right there with her. She hoped only that when she woke up, she would discover this was her reality.
And she did, because it was.
Forever more.
“She looks nothing like me,” Vitalo teased, smiling down at their baby with her pale skin and pink lips. “Thank God.”
Bella grinned, tired but happier than she’d ever been. “She has your chin,” she contradicted, pressing a finger into their baby’s dimple.
“And your smile,” Vitalo said, looking towards his wife.
“She’s only a week old,” Bella laughed. “We haven’t seen her smile.”
“You do not think this is a smile?”
“The nurses said it was gas.”
“Grumpy old women,” he demurred, and she pulled a face – mock stern, but silently she agreed with him. The two midwives who’d attended her delivery had been less besotted with Alexandria than Bella would have liked.
“Your mother and Lorenzo will be arriving later today,” he said, reaching into the cot and lifting their sleeping baby.
Bella reached out and playfully slapped his arm. “Don’t they say never to wake a sleeping baby?”
“I am not waking her,” he said, breathing in their baby’s sweet fragrance. “I am holding her. There is a difference.” He walked to his wife and put an arm around her, bringing the two people he loved most on earth together.
“It’s a shame Sophia can’t come,” Bella said, sadness briefly creasing the corners of her eyes. “But she can’t travel while in mourning, and we can’t go there until Alex has had her shots…”
“We will go as soon as we can,” he promised, a matching grief briefly marring his own handsome face.
“And Cleo?” She prompted, wondering at the half-sister she was yet to meet. “Any word?”
He shook his head, his expression tight. “Nothing. It is as though she disappeared completely off the face of the earth. One day she will be found,” he said, but Bella could tell his confidence was assumed.
“And we’ll be here for her,” Bella soothed. “Her family.”
“Yes,” he agreed, throatily. “Our family.” He leaned down and kissed her forehead. Alex stretched in his arms and both parents looked down at their infant, both with the same thought at the same time: there’d never been a more perfect, more beautiful baby in all the world.
“Family,” he said, and now his smile was genuine. “I never thought I would have this.”
“You do,” she said simply, and when their eyes met, it was with a surge of destiny and fate, of rightness and perfection. Because they had found one another, two people born separately but designed to live as a pair, two strong, intelligent individuals who were a formidable force when side by side.
Two people who belonged together, for all time, and always.
Epilogue
Sophia
HE’D DIED WHILE SHE was somewhere over the Atlantic, probably catching up on old episodes of Friends. He’d died while she was high in the sky, and she’d wondered if his spirit had passed through the aircraft, on its way to heaven.
She hadn’t known, until she’d landed in Abu Faya. Nothing had seemed amiss, at first, but once the plane had touched down and the aircraft doors had opened, the country’s chief security minister had met her, his expression somber.
“Sharafaha,” he addressed her with the deference due her position, as someone who was about to become betrothed to the King of the country. “We must leave, quickly.”
She was impatient to be back in the palace now. She’d been in America for two weeks, with Bella, but her life was here, in Abu Faya. Her future, too. Her blonde hair, long and loose, caught in the sultry desert air, lifting off her face, and she caught it in one hand, the diamond ring on her finger glinting in the afternoon sunlight.
“Why? Has something happened?”
He met her eyes and then looked away once more. “Now, Sharafaha.”
Displeasure at having not been answered sat inside of her, but she ignored it, suppressing her irritation as she had learned to do over the years. Sheikhas did not roll their eyes, nor sigh audibly. Sheikhas did not express what they might be feeling, even when they were feeling it in every bone of their body.
Settled in the back of the limousine, she lifted her phone from her bag and tried calling Addan. It rung out. She texted him instead, “Just landed. What’s going on?”
She put the phone away, her eyes chasing the sights of this country she loved so much as the limousine ate up the miles. The airport was nestled in desert, just a few low-lying buildings surrounded it, but beyond the desert was the enormous, modern city of Khatra, a place of wealth, privilege and dreams. It had been forged from the ideas of mankind, and it stood now as a sentinel to their strength and formidable spirit, when only their attention was focused. It was a city for dreamers, a city for doers, and beyond its magnificent modernity was the ancient, sand-swept landscape the country was famed for. Deserts, dunes and the Bedouin tribes that moved around, seeking one another out, following the historic customs of this place.
It was a twenty minute drive from the airport to the palace. She watched the undulations of the land and finally, the palace rose as if by magic from the sands that had created it. She would never get tired of that sight. As they approached, she remembered the first time she’d seen it – then as a six year old who believed in fairytales and magic, who thought princes were the creation of Hans Christian Andersen and desert principalities the providence of the Arabian nights stories she’d grown up listening to. All white walls and curling turrets, windows carved like teardrops into the sides, and palm trees lining the entrance and forming a perimeter. There were roses too, and persimmons, quinces and pomegranates forming an edible but impenetrable hedge. She and Addan had built houses from the thickets, and when she’d prick
ed her finger on the thorn of a pomegranate bush, he’d wiped the blood away with his white shirt and kissed her fingertip better. She’d been eight and he’d been twelve – but they’d become best friends that day. Brothers and sisters before they’d had any thought of marriage.
The car pulled to a stop at the entrance to the palace; she didn’t notice anything except the fragrance of the night-flowering jasmine that was beginning to sweeten the air, taking away the day’s salty and sultry heat, replacing it with romance and beauty.
“Where is Addan, Minister Hereth?” She asked, moving towards the large doors that led to the palace.
“This way,” he kept his head bowed low, leading her into the marble corridor. Ancient tapestries ran along its length, each telling a story of the country’s heritage. She’d spent days learning about them, trying to draw them, when she’d been a child. Once, she’d reached out to touch one, to feel the nobbled stitches in the time-worn fabric, but Addan had grabbed her fingers and held them, shaking his head.
“It’s back luck,” he’d said, in that way he had, that made it impossible to know if he was joking or not.
“I don’t believe in bad luck,” she had responded defiantly.
Six months later, her father had died, and she’d learned that there was such a thing as loss and luck and curses and fate.
Minister Hereth led Sophia through the corridors of the palace, corridors she knew as well as she’d ever known at any home in her life. At the door to Addan’s office, the minister came to a stop, knocking, his face unusually pale. “Minister, is something the matter?”
He didn’t answer at first and then, as the door opened inwards, “Yes, Sharafaha. There is.”
She blinked at him. “What? What’s happened?”
He didn’t speak. Her nerves stretched taut. Warily, she stepped inside.
“Addan?” She shook her hair loose from the pale headscarf she wore, draping it over the back of a chair. “Whatever is going on?”
This Christmas and Forever: A heartwarming anthology of billionaire holiday romances... Page 42