‘I don’t understand...’ Her voice was faint.
It was Nikos who answered. ‘Antoine is my half-brother,’ he said. ‘The Comte du Plassis.’
A faint frown formed between Diana’s brows as she tried to make sense of what she did not understand—that Nikos had a half-brother she had not known existed. It was the Count who spoke next, his voice with a similar timbre to Nikos’s, but his accent decidedly French, lighter than Nikos’s clipped baritone.
‘I will leave you to your discussion.’
Antoine gave a little bow of his head and strode from the room. As he closed the double doors behind him the large room suddenly felt very small. A great weariness washed over Diana and she folded herself down in an armchair, overwhelmed by tension, by all the emotions washing through her, swirling up with her being here.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said again.
The three words encompassed more than just the discovery that he had a half-brother. Why had she been summoned here? To what purpose?
She gazed at Nikos. It hurt to see him.
It will always hurt to see him.
That was the truth she could not escape. She could escape their marriage—however long it took her to do so—but it would always hurt to see him. Always hurt to think about him. Always hurt to remember him.
For a moment he was silent, but beneath the mask that was his face a powerful emotion moved. He stood by the fireplace, one hand resting on the mantel, and his gaze targeted Diana.
‘I have to talk to you,’ he said. He took a ragged breath. ‘About things I have never talked about. Because I need you to understand why I have been as I have been towards you these last difficult months. Why I have been so harsh towards you.’
She stared at him, her insides churning. She was here to beg him to end their marriage, beg him to release her from the misery of it all. She did not need to hear anything from him other than agreement to that.
‘You don’t need to explain, Nikos,’ she bit out bleakly. ‘It was because I didn’t want sex with you. And since you’d assumed right from the off that, contrary to what I’d been assuming, sex was going to be on the menu, my refusal didn’t go down well.’
There was a brusqueness in her voice, but she didn’t care.
Dark fire flashed in his eyes—anger flaring. Her jaw tightened. So he didn’t like her spelling it out that bluntly? Well, tough—because it was true, however much it might offend him.
But his hand was slashing through the empty air, repudiating her crude analysis. ‘That is not why. Or not as you state it like that! Hear me out.’ His expression changed suddenly, all the anger gone. Instead, a bleakness that echoed her own filled his face. ‘Hear me out, Diana—please.’
His voice was low and his eyes dropped from hers. His shoulders seemed to hunch, and it struck her that she had never seen him like that before. Nikos had always been so sure of himself, so obviously in command of every situation, never at a loss. Self-confident and self-assured. And in the last unbearable months of their marriage he’d steeled into his stony, unrelenting determination to keep her at bay, yet chained inescapably to his side.
Was the change in him now because she had finally broken free of him?
No, far more had shaken him than the repayment of her debt to him, her demand for a divorce. And as she let her gaze rest on him she felt emotion go through her—one that she had never in all her time with him associated with him.
She tried to think when she had ever felt such an emotion before, and what it might be. Then, with a shiver, she realised—and remembered.
It was for my father—when my mother left him.
Pity.
Shock jagged through her as she looked across at Nikos, at the visible strain in his face. Was she feeling sorry for him? After all his harshness to her?
She couldn’t bear to feel pity! Couldn’t bear to see such painful emotion in his eyes. Why was it there? There was no need for it—
no cause.
He was speaking again and she made herself listen, fighting down the emotion she did not want to feel for him. She was here to end her misery of a marriage, that was all. Nothing he could say or do would alter that.
‘It was because, Diana, your reaction after we came back from the desert showed me that I had never realised just what kind of a person you truly are.’
He paused and she felt his gaze pressing on her, like a weight she could not bear.
‘A woman like my mother.’