To love so swiftly—to hurt so badly...
She saw him flinch, as if her words had made a wound, but he answered her.
‘The moment I knew—that hellish moment when I knew everything I’d feared about you, all I’d accused you of was false...nothing but false... I knew that I had destroyed everything between us. You threw me out and I could do nothing but go. Accept that you wanted nothing to do with me. Let you get on with your preparations for tonight without my plaguing you.’
His voice changed. ‘But tonight I could keep silent no longer. I determined to find you—face you.’ A rueful look entered his dark eyes. ‘I bottled it. I was too...too scared to face you.’ His gaze changed again, becoming searching. ‘What you’ve achieved tonight—what it will bring you now—will there be room for me? Can there be?’
She gave a little cry. ‘Oh, Bastiaan, don’t you see? It’s because of what I feel—because now I know what love is—that I can achieve what I have tonight...what will be in me from now for ever.’
She drew back a little.
‘That aria I sang, where the War Bride mourns her husband’s death...’ She swallowed, gazing up at him with all her heart in her eyes. ‘She sings of love that is lost, love that burns so briefly and then was gone. I couldn’t sing it. I didn’t understand it until—’
He pulled her into his arms, wrapping them tight around her. ‘Oh, my beloved, you will never feel that way again. Whatever lessons in love you learn from me will be happy ones from now. Only happy ones.’
She felt tears come then, prickling in her eyes, dusting her lashes with diamonds in the starlight. Bastiaan—hers. Her Bastiaan! After such torment, such bliss! After such fears, such trust. After such anger, such love...
She lifted her head to his, sought his mouth and found it, and into her kiss she poured all that was in her heart, all that she was, all that she would be.
An eternal duet of love that they would sing together all their li
ves.
EPILOGUE
SARAH LAY ON the little sandy beach, gazing up at the stars which shone like a glittering celestial tiara overhead. There was no sound but the lapping of water, the night song of the cicadas from the vegetation in the gardens behind. But her heart was singing—singing with a joy, a happiness so true, so profound, that she could still scarcely credit it.
‘Do you remember,’ the low, deep voice beside her asked, ‘how we gazed up at the stars by the pool in my villa at Cap Pierre?’
She squeezed the hand that was holding hers as she and Bastiaan lay side by side, their eyes fixed on eternity, ablaze overnight in the Greek sky.
‘Was it then?’ she breathed. ‘Then that I started to fall in love with you?’
‘And I with you?’
Her fingers tightened on his. Love had come so swiftly she had not imagined it possible. And hurt had followed.
But the pain I felt was proof of love—it showed me my own heart.
Now all that pain was gone—vanished and banished, never to return! Now, here with Bastiaan, as they lay side by side on the first night of their married life together, they were sealing their love for ever. He had asked her where she wanted to spend her honeymoon but she had seen in his eyes that he already knew where he wanted them to be.
‘I always said,’ he told her, ‘that I would bring my bride to my island—that she alone would be the one woman I would ever want here with me.’
She lifted his hand to her mouth, grazing his knuckles with a kiss.
‘I also always said—’ and his voice was different now, rueful and wry ‘—that I would know who that woman would be the moment I set eyes on her.’
She laughed. She could do that now—now that all the pain from the way he had mistrusted and misused her was gone.
‘How blind I was! Blind to everything that you truly were! Except...’ And now he hefted himself on to one elbow, rolled on to his hip to gaze down at her—his beloved Sarah, his beloved bride, his beloved wife for all the years to come. ‘Except to my desire for you.’
His eyes blazed with ardour and she felt her blood quicken in its veins as it always did when he looked at her like that, felt her bones melting into the sand beneath her.
‘That alone was true and real! I desired you then and I desire you now—it will never end, my beautiful, beloved Sarah!’
For an instant longer his gaze poured into hers, and then his mouth was tasting hers and she was drawing him down to her. Passion flared and burned.
Then, abruptly, Sarah held him off. ‘Bastiaan Karavalas—if you think I am going to spend my wedding night and consummate my marriage on a beach, with pebbles digging into me and sand getting into places I don’t even want to think about, then you are—’