Читать книгу Irresistible Greeks Collection - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 29

HAD the world stopped moving? It must have, thought Athan with what was still working in his brain, because everything else seemed to have stopped. Including his breathing. Then, explosively, it restarted.

‘His sister?’ Shock reverberated in his voice.

Marisa’s gaze was levelled at him, still expressionless. Like a basilisk’s gaze.

She might have laughed to see the shock on his face—but she wasn’t in the mood for laughing. She was in the mood for killing.

Anger—dark, murderous anger—was leashing itself tighter and tighter around her. She had to hold it down—hold it tight down. Because it if escaped …

‘Ian’s sister?’ The voice this time was Eva’s, and all it held in it was complete bewilderment. ‘But Ian hasn’t got a sister.’

Marisa’s eyes went to Ian, knowing that this was the moment they had dreaded but now had to face. She saw him draw breath, then open his mouth to speak.

‘I didn’t know—I didn’t know about Marisa. Not until very recently.’ He took another breath. ‘Look, maybe we should all sit down. It’s … it’s complicated, and it’s going to be … difficult,’ he said.

He gestured towards the table and after a moment’s hesitation Eva went and took her place.

Marisa did likewise. Her body felt very stiff. Immobile. She watched Athan stalk to the other side and sit himself down opposite her, while Ian took his place opposite his wife. Just like two couples settling down to a dinner party. As though a bombshell hadn’t just exploded in the middle of them.

‘I don’t know about you, but I could do with a glass of wine,’ Ian said in a shaky voice, trying, Marisa knew, to keep it light.

He reached for the bottle of white wine cooling in its chiller, and for the next few moments there was a hiatus while he poured four glasses and handed them round. Instinctively Marisa found herself taking a gulp.

She needed it.

As she set the glass back on the pristine white tablecloth she realised her hand was trembling slightly. Involuntarily, her eyes glanced across at the dark figure sitting opposite her. His face was like marble—showing absolutely nothing.

Emotion spiked in her, but she crushed it down. She mustn’t let anything out—nothing at all. She was here to support Ian, that was all. And he, poor lamb, looked drawn. She watched him take a generous mouthful of wine, then he straightened his shoulders, looked straight across at his wife, and started.

‘Marisa is my half-sister,’ he said. ‘We share the same father. But Marisa’s mother—’ He stopped.

Across the table, Marisa could see Athan tense. Her eyes went to his. For one brief moment they met, and in them she could see that he knew exactly what was going to be said next.

And it would have to be by her. It wasn’t fair to get Ian to say it.

‘My mother …’ She swallowed, turning her gaze to include Eva. ‘My mother was Ian’s father’s mistress.’

She dropped her gaze, unable to continue for a moment. Emotion welled in her like a huge, stifling balloon.

Eva said something. It was in Greek. Even to Marisa’s untrained ears it sounded shocked.

But she dimly realised it didn’t sound surprised …

Ian was talking again, and she could hear in his voice what she had heard before so often when they had talked about themselves and their backgrounds: a weary resignation.

‘You both know what he was like—Eva, you of all people know because of your mother’s long friendship with mine—how she supported my mother through so many unhappy years. Even when my father threatened your parents’ marriage with his troublemaking.’ He took another mouthful of wine, as though he still needed it. ‘Marisa’s mother wasn’t the first of his mistresses and she certainly wasn’t the last. But she was …’ He paused, and now he reached his hand out and slipped it comfortingly around Marisa’s wrist. ‘She was the only one who made the terrible mistake of falling in love with him.’

Marisa spoke. Her voice was low, and she couldn’t look at Eva—let alone Athan. Above all not Athan.

‘I don’t exonerate her. She knew he was married. But she told me that he always said it was a marriage wherein both partners understood—’ her voice twisted ‘—understood that it was primarily about business and property, preserving wealth and inheritance and so on, and that he had never married for love.’ Marisa took another breath, lifting her eyes this time and they were filled with a bleak, sad pity for her foolish, trusting, self-blinded mother. ‘She chose to believe him. He pursued her relentlessly because she’d said no to him.’ Her voice twisted again. ‘He wasn’t a man who liked women to say no to him, so he told her whatever he considered effective in getting her into bed. He told her his wife had met someone else and asked for a divorce.’ Her voice became tight. ‘When she had yielded to him, and subsequently found herself pregnant, he suddenly didn’t want to know any more. And she realised far too late how stupid she had been.’

She took a heavy breath.

‘He gave her a lump sum—enough to buy the cottage I was brought up in—and a small income to go with it. He got her to sign a document waiving all claims to official child support from him. She was too devastated to refuse, and she went along with being bundled out of his life and kept quiet. She moved to Devon and disappeared. I grew up having no idea who he was—only that he was “the great love of her life,” as she used to say. After she died I came to London to try and find him. But I had no name and nothing to go on but a photograph my mother had kept—’

‘Which is how she found me,’ Ian interjected. ‘It was total, absolute chance. Marisa took a job at a cleaning company and my office was one of their contracts. One evening I was working late. She saw me, stared at me—and that’s how we found each other.’

‘Of course,’ Eva said slowly, comprehension dawning. ‘Ian looks the image of his father … and presumably the photo was of a man around his age?’

Marisa nodded. She could say no more.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ Eva breathed. ‘To have absolutely no idea that you had a sibling.’ She turned to her brother. ‘Athan, imagine not knowing you even existed—it would be dreadful.’

He didn’t respond. Then, abruptly, he got to his feet.

‘Excuse me. I must—’

He stopped. There was nothing he ‘must’ do except get out of there.

‘Athan?’

Eva’s voice was bewildered, but he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t help anything right now. He just had to walk out.

Without another word he left the room, ignoring Eva’s astonished rush of Greek at him, asking what on earth he was doing. Like an automaton he strode to the bank of lifts, jabbing at the button, willing the doors to open and let him escape. Leave. Get away. Away from her.

Away from what he’d done to her …

Inside the private dining room Eva was still staring, nonplussed, at her brother’s empty place.

‘What on earth—?’ she began.

Her bewildered gaze came back to her husband, then moved on to Marisa. She started to speak, but Marisa spoke instead.

‘I’m sorry—I have to—’ Her voice was staccato and she couldn’t finish. All she could do was get to her feet, roughly pushing back her chair, seize up her clutch bag and leave the room.

She could hear her half-brother call her name anxiously, but she ignored it.

Outside, the hotel corridor was deserted.

All except for the tall, dark figure standing by the elevator.

Sudden slicing memory knifed through her. Herself emerging from the elevator on her way back to the apartment Ian had leased for her, seeing the tall, dark figure striding towards her, asking her to keep the doors open for her.

A set up. That was all it had been. A calculating, carefully timed set-up with one purpose only.

To snare her. Captivate her.

Seduce her.

Seduce her away from the man he’d assumed she was having an affair with. A married man. His own brother-in-law.

Emotion buckled through her—hot and nauseating. Icy and punishing.

‘Wait!’

Her voice carried the length of the deserted corridor, made him turn instantly. His expression froze. She strode up to him. The anger she’d kept leashed so tightly inside her while she’d sat at the table and told of her relationship with Ian, leapt in her throat. She stopped dead in front of him. Of its own volition her hand lifted, and she brought it across his face in a ringing slap.

‘That’s for what you thought I was!’

Then, in a whirl of skirts, she pushed past him into the lift that was opening its doors behind him, jabbed the ‘close’ button urgently.

But he made no attempt to follow her—made no movement at all. Only turned very slowly and watched her as the doors closed and the elevator swept her up to the bedroom floors. Her heart was pounding. In her vision seared the image of his face. Like a dead man’s, with a weal forming across his cheekbone. Livid and ugly.

Marisa was walking. She did a lot of walking these days. Miles and miles. All over the moor. But however far she walked she never got away from what was eating her. Consuming her.

Destroying her.

Round and round the destructive thoughts went in her head. Over and over again she tumbled them.

How could she not have realised what it was that Athan thought about her? How could it not have penetrated through her thick, stupid skull that he had jumped to the conclusion about her that he had?

With hindsight—that most pointless and excruciating of all things—it was glaringly, blazingly obvious that that was what he had assumed all along

She’d replayed every line of that conversation—their ugly, utterly misbegotten conversation—where she had completely failed to understand just what he’d meant about her relationship with Ian.

I assumed he meant he’d discovered I was his sister. I never dreamt he thought anything so sleazy about me—anything so vile.

But that was exactly what he had done.

Right from the start.

She wanted to scream and yell and denounce him to the world. But there was no one she could tell. All she could do was swallow it down herself and keep it down. Keep totally out of everyone’s way. Bury herself down her in Devon again—for ever this time.

The way she should have done first time around.

I should never have let Ian persuade me to go up to London to tell Eva about me. Because of what Athan did—because I can’t tell Ian what he did—I can’t have anything to do with him and Eva anyway. I can’t ever look at Athan again—I can’t bear to!

Emotion seared in her, hot and scalding.

How can I ever have anything more to do with a man like that? A man I hate with every fibre of my being.

Because of course she hated him. What else was it possible to feel about Athan Teodarkis now? Nothing. Only hatred. Black and venomous.

All consuming.

All destroying.

She trudged on. The rising slope had peaked, and now she was on the low crest looking down onto the half-buried remains of the Bronze Age village below the tor. Someone was standing in the middle of the site, which wasn’t fenced off—there was very little damage walkers could do to such meagre remains.

At first when saw the solitary figure from the distance she was at she took no notice. On a warm day like this, in full Dartmoor spring, fellow walkers and ramblers on the moor were commonplace. But as she headed along the path that would take her past the site she stilled. There was something very familiar about the motionless figure.

He was looking towards her. Hands in his jacket pockets, legs slightly apart. The wind was ruffling his hair. His eyes were slightly narrowed against the sun behind her.

In a kind of daze—a mental suspension that kept one foot moving after another—she carried on down the slope towards the ancient village where once a whole community had thrived—living, loving, dying …

Now not even their ghosts remained to haunt the sunlit, windswept air.

He moved towards her, intersecting her path. Waiting for her.

She came up to him. Said nothing. Did nothing. Only stood there, her hands plunged into her anorak pockets, her face a mask.

Like his.

‘Ian told me you were back here.’ His voice was terse. Low.

Strained.

‘I gave you time,’ he said. ‘I gave us both time. But now we have to talk.’

She looked at him. Just looked at him. ‘There is absolutely nothing to say,’ she stated.

She was calm. Very calm. Amazingly calm, considering the seething tumult that had been inside her only moments ago, racking through her with all the unbearable impossibilities of the situation, the destructive morass of it all.

‘You know that’s not true,’ he contradicted her.

Something flared in her eyes, then died again. Quenched.

‘Well, what is there to say, then?’ she threw at him, hands digging deeper into her pockets.

This was unreal—unreal to be standing here, beside a place where people had once lived and loved and died, nothing more than shards of bone in the earth now, who could feel no pain or loss any more, no emotions—nothing. Unreal to be standing in such a place and confronting the man who had driven her back here.

‘What is there to say?’ she demanded again. She stared at him, unblinking. Unflinching. ‘You thought I was Ian’s mistress, so you seduced me to take my mind off him while he went back to his wife—your sister. Now you’ve discovered that actually I wasn’t his mistress after all. I’m his sister. And because I can’t stomach having any more contact with you, it means I can’t have anything to do with Ian or Eva, so telling Eva about me actually turns out to be have been a totally pointless exercise all round! There.’ She took a sharp, incising breath, glaring at him. ‘Does that just about sum up why there isn’t the slightest thing more to be said on the subject?’

Expressions worked in his face and his jaw tightened. ‘No, it doesn’t.’ He gave a heavy sigh. ‘You know it doesn’t. It doesn’t even begin to get to the reason why we have to talk.’

He took her arm. She tried to shake it off, but he simply led her to a nearby lichen-covered drystone wall and sat her down on it, lowering himself beside her. She edged away and she knew he could see she’d done it, and she was coldly, savagely pleased. She was still calm—still amazingly, icily calm. It was like being inside an iceberg, and it suited her fine—just fine. She waited for him to drop his grip on her, but he didn’t. She wouldn’t flatter him by shaking herself free. She would just endure that tight, hard clasp. It would remind her of how much she hated him.

He turned to look at her. She closed her face. She wanted to close her eyes, but again that would have shown him that she was affected by him. And she wasn’t affected—not at all.

She never would be. Never again.

He spoke abruptly. ‘This is what I don’t understand. That you didn’t realise I’d thought Ian had set you up as his mistress. Surely to God you must have done?’ His face worked. ‘Why the hell else would I have done what I did—said what I said? Why else would I have done or said those things to you? Just because you were Ian’s sister? Why the hell did you and Ian hide your relationship from everyone?’

Marisa’s eyes widened. ‘How can you even ask that? You know how close Eva is to Ian’s mother—her godmother. How she’s become like a second mother to her, taking her own mother’s place. That’s why we were so reluctant to tell Eva. Because it would have torn her loyalties in two. How could she have anything to do with her husband’s sister when that sister was living proof of just how much Sheila Randall was hurt and betrayed by her husband?’

She swallowed. ‘After I fled London, telling Ian it was because I couldn’t go on hiding in the shadows, and he got a new job without your patronage, he became determined not to go on concealing such an important part of his life from his wife. It was a new start for him, and however difficult it was going to be he didn’t want any secrets from Eva any more. Even the secret of my existence,’ she finished bitterly.

Athan was silent a moment. Then he spoke. His voice was heavy—as heavy as the lead that seemed to be weighing him down, crushing him.

‘I thought Ian was like his father. Incapable of fidelity. I’ve always thought it—feared it. I never approved of his marriage to Eva. Thought him lightweight. Superficial. Unworthy of my sister. And I thought that she was doomed to follow the same path as her mother-in-law, whose life was made a misery by her faithless husband.’

He paused, glancing briefly at Marisa and then away again, because it hurt too much to do otherwise. ‘When my suspicions became aroused I took out surveillance on him. I found out about your existence—that you were living in an apartment he was paying for. There was no doubt about it. There were photos of you and him in a restaurant. Intimate photos that showed you and he billing and cooing over each other.’ He paused again. ‘And one of the photographs showed Ian giving you a diamond necklace.’ Another pause, briefer this time, then words broke from him—harsh and hard. ‘What the hell was I supposed to think? My brother-in-law was giving another woman a diamond necklace!’

Marisa stiffened.

‘It was Ian’s grandmother’s. Our father’s mother’s necklace.

He wanted me to have it. He wanted me to have all the things that our father had denied me—wanted to lift me out of the poverty that my father had condemned my mother to.’ She looked away—far away—back into the past to her childhood. ‘She knew she should never have given in to my father. Knew she was at fault. Knew she was a fool to love him. Knew she deserved what she got from him—rejection and short shrift. It was a lesson, she taught me well,’ she said heavily. Her eyes came back to Athan. ‘Which is why it was so unbearable to realise you thought I’d stoop to carrying on with a married man. Why I was so angry that evening Ian told Eva about me.’

Athan’s face was drawn. ‘You had every right to be.’ His voice was sombre. ‘I misjudged you totally. Thought the very worst of you.’

She could hear the self-laceration in his voice, and something twisted inside her.

‘I hated you for it!’ she burst out. ‘I thought I hated you for what you did to me—deliberately seducing me. But when I realised … realised that what you thought of me was a million times worse than simply trying to latch on to my wealthy brother and mess up his family … oh, then I hated you a million times more than I did before.’ She felt her hands fist in her pockets. ‘When I threw in your face what I truly was to Ian—what our relationship actually is—oh, it felt so damn good. Wiping that condemning contempt off your face. And slapping you felt even better!’

She jerked to her feet, yanking her arm free of him. Standing there, buckling with emotion, she swayed in the wind, her face convulsed.

Why had he come here? To torment her again? What for?

It was over now—all over. Nothing more to be done, or said. It was all a mess—a hideous, insoluble mess. But she knew she had to accept that in the end, it wasn’t his fault. Heavily, she turned around to face him again. He hadn’t moved. Was just sitting there immobile, looking at her.

His expression was …

Was what? she thought, finding thoughts skittering across her mind inchoately, incoherently.

Wary—that was what it was. But there was more than wariness in it. His eyes—his dark, gold-flecked eyes, whose glance had once turned her to jelly—were now regarding her with …

Such bleakness.

That was what was in his face. His eyes.

She took a scissoring breath. ‘There isn’t any point to this—there really isn’t. It’s just a mess—a total mess all round. I can see … understand … why you jumped to the conclusion you did. I can see why you wanted to protect your sister. You did what you thought best at the time. But now … now that it’s all out in the open—the actual truth, not your assumption—it just makes it impossible for me to have anything more to do with you, or Eva—or even Ian, really. I can’t ever see you again—you must see that. What you did to me will always be there, poisoning everything.’ She looked at him. Looked into those dark, wary, bleak eyes. ‘I can’t get over what you did—I will never be able to get over what you did.’

For one long, unbearable moment they just gazed at each other across everything that divided them. An impossible divide.

A huge, crushing weariness pressed down on her. Her head bowed. She knew she should head for home, back to the sanctuary of her cottage. But her legs were suddenly like lead.

Then behind her she heard a movement. Hands lightly—so lightly—touched her hunched shoulders, then dropped away.

‘And nor will I.’

Athan’s voice was low. Conflict filled it. Filled his head. Was she right? Should he never have come here? Never have followed the crushing imperative to find her—talk to her? Because he had to talk to her. He couldn’t just leave it the way it had been—with her denouncing, punishing slap ringing across his mind. His soul.

Punishing him for what he had thought about her. Punishing him for what he’d done to her. Punishing him for getting her totally, utterly wrong …

‘It will be like a brand on me all my life,’ he told her. ‘What I did to you.’

She gave a little shrug. It was all she could manage. ‘It doesn’t matter. I understand why you did it. It was a … misunderstanding, that’s all.’ Her voice gave a little choke as she said the word that was so hideous an understatement. ‘A mess up. But it doesn’t matter. In the end it doesn’t leave any of us worse off, does it? If anything, Ian and Eva’s marriage is stronger than ever, so that’s surely some good out of it. He finally has a job where he feels he can not only make a real contribution to the world, in a way he never could before, but he can stand on his own two feet—out from under your shadow. Plus, of course—’ her voice twisted ‘—he has finally won your trust—convinced you he’s not cut from the same corrupt cloth as our father. So that’s all to the good, isn’t it?’

She spoke negligently, carelessly. As if nothing mattered any more—just as she was saying.

‘As for you and me—’ She swallowed. There was a stone in her throat. Making it hard to speak. Impossible almost. But she had to force the words all the same.

She stared out ahead of her, towards the granite tor beyond. Rocks that had thrust up out of the burning earth so deep below, then cooled and congealed in the air. Hardened and set. Unchangeable now. Only the wind and the rain would weather them, wear them down over aeons of time. Aeons that mocked the brief, agonised flurry of human lives. Just as the vanished ghosts of the dead village they stood in haunted those who came after them.

‘As for you and me,’ she said again, ‘what does it matter? What happened was … a mistake. An error. Regrettable, but understandable. It can’t be mended, but—’ The stone was harder now in her throat, but she had to get the words past it all the same. ‘It can be ignored.’

She heard his intake of breath behind her. Then, carefully, he spoke.

‘No—it can’t. It can’t be ignored. It has to be faced. I have to face it.’

The hands came again—lightly, briefly, on her shoulders. She could barely feel them, yet it was like electricity shivering within her as he turned her around to face him. Face what he was going to say.

His expression was sombre. The bleakness in his eyes was absolute.

‘I wronged you. I wronged you and I will regret that all my life—however unintentioned it was, the wrong remains. But if you ask me to regret what happened, then … I won’t. I can’t. I came here to you afterwards wanting only one thing. Thinking that because you were now no longer a danger to my sister I could indulge myself—take from you what I wanted so, so badly. Have you back for myself again.’

He gazed down at her, and behind the bleakness in his eyes something else flared. Something that was dangerous to her. That threatened her. That sought to set aside the aeons of time that formed the moors, the millennia that separated them from the people who had once dwelt here in the shadow of the tors. That sought to mock the effect of time on human lives.

Something that was stronger than time. That would outlast all things.

‘To have you back,’ he said. ‘To have you as you were in that brief, precious time we had—a time that enraptured me. And tormented me. Tormented me because I knew it was only a fleeting bubble—a bubble I would have to burst, cruelly and callously, when I denounced you.’

Emotion came to his eyes again, but it was stormy now. ‘I hated what I had to do—hated what I thought you were. It made me even harsher to you than I had to be. And when I followed you down here, saw how you lived, I could see how Ian must have turned your head, beguiled you … led you astray.’ He paused again, then said what needed to be said. ‘Just as his father led your mother astray.’

Her eyes fell. She could not answer him. He answered for her.

‘We’re human, all of us, Marisa. We make mistakes. Your mother made hers. I made mine—misjudging you. Misjudging Ian.’

He paused and her gaze flickered back up to him. The bleakness was back in his eyes.

‘We make mistakes and then we pay for them. Your mother paid for hers. I shall pay for mine.’ He paused. ‘Mine … my payment … will be doing without you.’ He took a razored breath. ‘I won’t impose upon you by giving a name to why that will exact a price from me, but be assured it will be a heavier price than I ever imagined possible.’ His mouth twisted. ‘A price I didn’t know existed until I started paying it.’

He lifted a hand as if to bid her farewell, as if to bid farewell to many things.

‘I’ll go now,’ he said. ‘I wish you well—it’s all I can do, isn’t it? All that you could possibly want me to do. I wish you well and leave you be.’ He looked around him, across the wide, sunlit moorland, ablaze now with gorse and new growth, at the blue sky above arcing from east to west. A wild bird was singing somewhere as it rose on currents of air. Then his eyes came back to her.

Looked their last on her.

He felt the knife slide into his heart as he tore his gaze away again, and set it instead on the lofty tor beyond, piercing the sky with its dark, impenetrable mass. He started to walk towards it, following the path that led there, leaving her behind.

She watched him go. Watched his figure start to recede. Watched him walk out of her life.

There was a haze over the sun. Which was strange, because there were no clouds in the cerulean sky. Yet the haze was there, like a mist in her vision. She blinked, but it did not clear.

Only the wind stung her eyes, beading her lashes with a misty haze.

Thoughts crowded into her head. She could make no sense of them. They jumbled and jostled and each one cried for space. Then one—only one—stilled the others. Formed itself into words inside her head. She heard them, made herself hear them, even as she stood there, watching him walk away from her …

The words came again in her head. Athan’s words.

‘We make mistakes. Your mother made hers. I made mine … ‘

They came again, circling like a plane. Bringing more words in their wake.

What if I’m making my mistake now?

Her mother had ruined her life, giving her love to a man—a man who had proved utterly unworthy, totally deceitful and uncaring—instead of telling him to leave her alone, get out of her life before he could destroy it.

But what if my mistake is the opposite one?

The thought hung blazing in her mind.

What if my mistake is to let go of a man I should never let go? A man I should clutch to me and hold tight in my arms?

A man it would be—will be—an agony to lose?

Her eyes held to the figure striding away from her, getting further and further away. The air in her lungs seemed to turn to granite. Impossible to breathe. Impossible.

‘Wait!’ The word tore from her, freeing her breath. ‘Athan! Wait!’

He stopped. Stopped dead. Froze. Then, as she stood, heart hammering in her chest, he turned.

She didn’t speak, didn’t cry out again. She had no thoughts, or words, or breath. She started forward, stumbling at first over the uneven ground, then found her balance, running now, faster and yet faster. The wind whipped the haze to her eyes, blinding her, but it didn’t matter. She knew where she was going. Knew it with every fibre of her being. Knew the only place she would ever want to be.

He caught her as she reached him. Caught her in an embrace that swept her off the ground, swept her round and round as his arms wrapped her to him. She was crying, sobbing, but it didn’t matter—nothing mattered. Nothing at all would ever matter—only this … this.

Being in his arms.

Loving him.

Loving him so, so much!

He was saying her name. Over and over again. Kissing her hair, clutching her to him. She was crying, and then she was laughing, and he was lowering her down so she could feel the ground beneath her feet again, but her arms were still wrapped around him so tightly, so close she would never let him go—never let him go … ?.

‘Oh, my darling—my darling one!’

Was that her speaking or him? It didn’t matter—nothing mattered but this. The joy surging through her, the love …

Then he was loosening his arms around her, cupping her upturned face with his hands, his eyes blazing down into hers.

All bleakness was gone.

Only love—blazing.

And slowly, beneath the towering tor, which had no power to mock what stood so far beyond the power of time, circled by the ghosts of those who had lived and loved here so long ago, he lowered his mouth to hers and kissed her.

‘This is love,’ he said. ‘This is my love for you. For all that I did to you, this is why I cannot regret it. Because it gave you to me.’ He took a painful breath, his eyes full. ‘I didn’t realise what it was … what was happening to me … until I lost you. Lost you, my dearest one, over and over again. So many times. I lost you when I said those cruel, denouncing words to you. Lost you when, eaten by jealousy of Ian, I chased you down here. I wanted to grab you back like a spoilt child deprived of what he wanted. I lost you when you threw the truth about yourself in my face at that nightmare dinner. Lost you when you walked up to me and vented all your anger for what I’d thought about you. Lost you over and over and over again.’ His hands cupping her face pressed more urgently. ‘And with each loss it hammered home to me more what was happening. That I was falling in love with you.’

He shuddered, and she felt his pain and clung to him more closely.

‘Falling in love with you … even as I was losing you … over and over again … ‘

She gave a little cry, kissed him again to obliterate the pain she saw in him.

‘I feared loving you,’ she said ‘Feared it so much. When I saw you sometimes on St Cecile, looking at me when you thought I couldn’t see you, you looked so … so remote. I thought it was because you knew I was falling for you when you only wanted something passing that would end when we returned. That’s what I thought when you said you needed to speak to me. I was steeled for it—ready for you to tell me it was over. I had the strength to bear that.’

Her expression changed. ‘But when you threw at me what you did—oh, God, I didn’t have the strength for that. How could I have? What you hurled at me—what I thought you were accusing me of—I could not defend myself against that. Because I knew … knew that what I’d wanted so much was to be taken into my father’s family, not to be rejected by them any more. But you made me see it was impossible—that I was just a sordid little secret from Ian’s father’s past … ‘

Athan groaned and held her away from him, only the better to talk to her. His hands slipped to her shoulders.

‘I would never have objected to you for that reason alone. Yes, Ian’s mother suffered—but that was not your fault. How could it be? Nothing has been your fault. Only mine.’ His voice was heavy. ‘Only mine.’

She heard the self-accusation in his voice and hated it.

‘No.’ Her negation was fierce. ‘I will not let you say that. I will not let you … or me … look backwards now. I let anger blind me—blind me into rejecting you.’ She clutched him suddenly, clinging to him urgently. ‘Oh, I so nearly let you walk away from me. Don’t ever, ever let me be so blind again!’

‘Every time you look at me,’ he promised her, his voice warm and rich and full of all he felt for her, ‘you’ll see my love for you. It will be your mirror for all time. A true mirror. That I promise you.’

Her gaze was troubled suddenly. ‘It hurt,’ she said. ‘It hurt so much to realise that all the time you knew me in London, all the time we had on holiday, it was just … fake. The whole thing. When I thought it was real … ‘

Now the negation was his—and fiercer.

‘It was—it was real! That was the whole torment of it all! Knowing that if it weren’t for Eva, for what I thought I was doing to save her marriage, I would be spending that time with you without that hanging over my head. That’s why I so arrogantly thought I could get you back again—get that time back again. Oh, God, Marisa, to hold you in my arms again—to have you for myself this time, only myself. With no other reason to get in the way of us.’ He gazed down at her, emotion pouring from him. ‘And now … finally … after all this time … there truly is nothing to part us … to confuse and confound and blind us. Now—oh, my most beloved girl—there really is only this … ‘

He kissed her. Tenderly. Carefully. Lovingly.

‘Only this,’ he murmured.

He eased her away from him, changing his hold on her to put an arm around her shoulder, holding her hand in his across his body as he started to walk her along the path again. Side by side.

Peace filled her. Peace she had not felt for so long. A peace that she knew now would last for ever.

‘What fools we’ve been,’ she said dreamily, leaning her head against his shoulder.

He gave a low laugh. ‘Me more than you.’

She shook her head. ‘No, me more than you.’

He glanced down at her. ‘You’ll have to grant me the privilege of being right this time around.’ He dropped a kiss on her hair.

‘Uh-uh.’

He lanced the quirking smile at her that made her heart turn over—her tumbled, jangled heart that had finally found its resting place.

‘An argumentative woman, are you?’ he teased. ‘Well, there is only one way to settle it. You shall be right, my darling, all the time henceforth. Will that keep you happy?’

She shook her head. ‘Only one thing will keep me happy.’

‘Oh?’ he queried, his smile tugging deeper. ‘And what will that be?’

‘You,’ she said. ‘Only you. For all time.’ Love blazed from her eyes. A fire that could never be quenched.

‘Done,’ he answered. ‘And shall I seal the deal like this?’

Their kiss was long and deep and stronger than time.

Which stood still all around them and always would.