‘And arrive it did,’ she said, her voice hollow.
Into her head, marching like an invading army that she had so long sought to keep at bay, came memories. Images. Each and every one as fatal to her as a gunshot.
Her eyes sprang open, as if to banish those memories that were so indelible within her. But instead of memory there was Nikos, there in front of her. So real. So close.
So infinitely far away.
As he must always be.
Nikos—the man who had caused her more pain than she had ever known existed!
‘Oh, God, Nikos!’ The words rang from her. ‘You think me an ice maiden. But I’ve had to be—I’ve had to be!’
Slowly, very slowly, she made the crippling clenching of her arms around her body slacken, let her hands fall to her sides, limp. She was weary with a lifetime of exhaustion, of holding at bay emotions she must not let herself feel or they would destroy her.
‘Being an ice maiden kept me safe. Having a celibate marriage to you kept me safe.’
There was silence. Only the low ticking of the ormolu clock on the mantel.
‘Safe,’ she said again, as if saying it could make it so.
But the word only mocked her pitilessly. Safe? It had been the most dangerous thing in the world, marrying Nikos—the one, the only man who had set alight that flare of sexual awareness inside her with a single glance. That single, fateful glance that had brought her here, now, to this final parting with him.
Pain seared inside her—the pain she had feared, so much all her life. A wild, anguished look pierced her eyes as she cried out.
‘I needed to be an ice maiden! I didn’t want to feel anything for any man. I had to protect myself! Protect myself from what I saw my father go through! Because what if what happened to my father, happened to me? He broke his heart over my mother! Because she never loved him back—’
She broke off, turning away. She had to go—flee! However long Nikos made her wait for her divorce. The divorce that would free her from the chains he held her by.
But he holds me by chains that I can never break! Never!
The anguish came again, that searing pain. A sob tore at her throat and her arms were spasming again, as if she would fall without that iron grip to hold her upright.
And then suddenly there was another clasp u
pon her. Hands folding over hers. Nikos’s strong, tall body right behind her. Slowly, deliberately, he was turning her around to face him.
His hands fell away from her, and she suddenly felt so very cold. She stood, trembling, unable to lift her head to look at him. He spoke. His voice was low, with a resonance in it that had never been there before.
‘Diana...’ He spoke carefully, as if finding his step along a high, perilous path, ‘Your fears have haunted you, possessed you—you must let them go.’
She lifted her head then. Stared at him with a wide, stricken gaze.
‘That isn’t possible, Nikos,’ she answered, her voice faint. ‘You, of all people, should know that.’ Her expression contorted. ‘Those nights we had in the desert... You could not understand why I so regretted them—why I told you it should never have happened. But now you know why I said that to you. Just as I, Nikos...’ her voice was etched with sadness ‘...know why my rejection of you made you so angry. Because it made you think me no better than your mother—the mother who rejected you so cruelly.’
His expression was strange.
‘Except that she did not.’ He saw the bewilderment in Diana’s eyes. ‘Antoine came to me—the half-brother I never even knew I had took me to her,’ he said. ‘He told me the truth about why she had to do what she did.’
Sadly, he told her the bleak, unhappy tale—and then the miracle of his reconciliation with her.
‘It was realising how wrong I had been about her, how I had misjudged her, that made me fear I had misjudged you, too!’ His expression was shadowed. ‘And fear even more that I had not.’
His expression changed, his voice becoming sombre now.
‘We’ve both been chained by our past. Trapped. I was trapped in hating the mother who had rejected me, only to find that she had been trapped by her need to protect my brother. And you, Diana, were trapped by the wounds your mother’s desertion inflicted on you—trapped by your gratitude to your father, your guilt over his sacrifice for you, your pity for him—the fear you learnt from him. The fear I want so much to free you from.’
‘But that fear is real, Nikos!’ she cried out. ‘It’s real. It was real from the first moment I set eyes on you, when I knew, for the first time in my life, that here was a man to make me feel the power of that fear. And it was terrifyingly real after our time together in the desert!’