And I cannot let it happen. I dare not!
All her life she had kept intimacy at bay, kept herself safe from what she had seen destroy her father. The hurt he’d suffered that she dared not risk for herself! So now she must say what she must say. Do what she must do.
Nikos’s voice was cutting across her anguished thoughts.
‘Diana—speak to me. What is it?’
There was steel in Nikos’s voice now. He wanted answers, explanations. Something was going wrong, and he wanted to know what it was. Why it was. So that he could fix it. Whatever it was, he could fix it.
Her breath caught—then she forced herself into words. Words she had to say. Had to...
‘Nikos—what happened in the desert...it shouldn’t have happened!’
Disbelief flashed across his face. ‘How can you say that?’
His voice was hollow. As if the breath had been punched from his body by a blow that had landed out of nowhere. His mind was reeling, unable to comprehend what she had just thrown at him. It made no sense. No sense. How could she possibly be saying what she had just said?
‘And how can you not see that?’ she cried in response. ‘It’s not what our marriage is about! It never was—it was never anything more than...than convenience! A marriage that would suit us both, provide us both with something that was important to each of us—restoring Greymont for me, an entrée into my world for you! And then we’d go our separate ways! You said that, Nikos—you said it yourself to me. It was what you proposed!’
She took another ragged breath.
‘And that’s what I agreed to. All I agreed to.’
He was staring at her. Every line in his face frozen. Disbelieving.
‘Are you telling me,’ he said slowly, ‘that you actually believe our marriage should be celibate?’
Now it was Diana looking at him as if he were insane. Her eyes flared. ‘Of course!’ she said. ‘That’s what we signed up to. Right from the start.’
An oath sprang from him. ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this!’ he said.
His voice was still hollow, but there was an edge to it that made her blench.
He took a heaving breath. Lifted his hands. ‘Diana, how can you possibly have thought our marriage should be celibate? When did I ever give you cause to think so?’
Consternation filled her features. ‘Well, of course I thought you thought that! You gave me every reason to believe so. Nikos, you never laid a finger on me in all the time of our engagement. Nor when we first arrived here!’
He ran his hand agitatedly through his hair. He still could not believe what he was hearing. It was impossible—just impossible—that she should have thought what she said she’d thought. Impossible!
‘I was giving you time, Diana. Time to get to know me, to get used to me. Of course I wasn’t going to be crass enough to pounce on you the moment we’d signed the marriage register. I wanted the time to be right for us.’
He made no reference to ice maidens—what help would that have been? She probably hadn’t even been aware that she was one—that she’d radiated Look but don’t touch as if it had beamed from her in high frequency.
The very fact that she was talking now, in this insane way, of celibacy—dear God, when they were married, when they’d just returned from that burning consummation under the desert stars—was proof of how totally unaware she was of how unaroused, how frozen she had been. It was a state she’d thought was normal.
His mind worked rapidly. Was that why she was being like this now? Was this just panic—a kind of delayed ‘morning after the night before’ reaction as she surfaced back in the real world, away from the desert idyll that had so beguiled her—beguiled them both? That must be it—it was the only explanation.
His mood steadied and he forced himself to stay calm. Reasonable. He took a breath, lowering his voice, making it sound as it needed to now. Reassuring.
‘And we have come to know each other, haven’t we, Diana?’ he went on now, in that reassuring tone. ‘We’ve got used to one another now that we’ve finally had time to be with each other, now we’re married—and we’ve found each other agreeable, haven’t we? We get on well.’
His expression changed without him being aware of it. It was vital that she understood what he was saying now.
‘Maybe if we hadn’t had that invitation from the Sheikh to stay at his desert palace it might have taken longer for our relationship to deepen. To reach the conclusion that it has. A conclusion, Diana, that has always been inevitable.’
He took a step towards her, unconscious of his action, only of his need to close the distance between them. To make everything all right between them again. The way it had been in the desert.
His voice was husky. He had to tell her. He had to make things clear to her, cut through the confusion that must be in her, the panic, even, which was the only way he could account for what she was saying.