She could read bitterness in the stark lines of his face, savage and harsh, but there was something else beneath it. Something that seemed to twist her up inside.
He was speaking again, and now there was a tension in his voice, like wire strung too tight, and his strong features were incised with that same tension.
‘And that is what I need to know! Was I right to be so angry with you? Right to accuse you of being no better than my mother, who only valued all of this?’
His hand swept around the room, condemning in a single gesture all that it represented. His gaze was skewering her, nailing her where she sat. She saw his mouth twist again.
‘Are you the same, Diana? Is Greymont all that you are capable of wanting, valuing? Is Greymont and all that goes with it all you care about?’
His eyes were dark—as dark as pits. Pits into which she was falling.
Her voice was shaking as she answered him. Inside her chest her heart had started to pound, like a hammer raining blows upon her. ‘You...you knew I married you to protect Greymont, Nikos. You knew that—’
A hand slashed through the air. ‘But is that all you are, Diana? A woman cut from the same cloth as my mother? Caring only for wealth and worldly status and possessions?’
She reeled. Suddenly, like a spectre, she saw her father, shaking his head sorrowfully, looking at her with such desolation in his face she could not bear to see it. Nor to hear his words.
‘I wasn’t rich enough for her...your mother—’
She felt her insides hollowing as the echo of her father’s words rang in her ears.
She stared at Nikos, eyes distended. There was a spike in her lungs, draining the air from her, and his bitter accusation was stinging her to the quick, the echo of her father’s words like thorns in her soul.
Words burst from her as she surged to her feet. His words had been blows, buffeting her. In agitation and self-defence she cried out at him.
‘Nikos, I’m sorry—so sorry!—that your mother hurt you so much! Because I know how that feels. I know it for myself.’
She took a hectic breath, feeling her heart pounding inside her, urgently wanting to defend herself—justify herself. Protect herself from what he’d thrown at her.
‘When I was ten my mother walked out on my father. And on me!’ Her expression changed, memory thrusting her back into that long-ago time that was searing in her heart as if it had only just happened. ‘Like your mother, Nikos, she didn’t want me. She only wanted the huge riches of the Australian media mogul she took off with. A man twice her age and with a hundred times my father’s wealth!’
She could hear the agitation in her own voice, knew why it was there. She saw that Nikos had stilled.
Her gaze shifted, tearing away from him, shifting around the elegant salon in this beautiful chateau. Shadowing. Taking another breath, she made herself go on. It was too late to stop now.
‘She cut all contact. I ceased to exist for her. Was not important to her. So I made her not important to me.’
Her eyes came back to Nikos. He was standing stock-still, his eyes veiled suddenly.
Shock was detonating through him. He had summoned her here to find the truth. The truth he had to discover. The truth on which so much rested. So much more than he had ever dreamt.
Well, now he had the truth he’d sought.
I thought she rejected me because she was like my mother—as I thought my mother to be.
But it was himself. All along it was himself. That was who she was like. Like him she had been abandoned, rejected, as he had felt himself to be, by the one woman who should have cherished her.
A chill swept through him.
/> She was speaking again.
‘My father became my world—he was all I had left. And Greymont—’
A low ache was starting up in her, old and familiar, from long, long ago. Without realisation, her arms slid around herself. As if staunching a wound.
With a dry mouth she forced herself on.
‘It was the same for my father. We—Greymont, and myself—became his reason for going on after my mother left him. And it was because...’ Her voice changed. ‘Because he saw how desperately I loved Greymont—how I clung to it, to him—he vowed to make sure I would never lose it.’