In his enthusiasm it took him a moment to realise that the house was shrouded in darkness. Had there been a power outage? But as he headed further down the hallway he saw a light on in the corner of the living room.
He leaned against the door frame, his arm above his head, just looking at her. Curled up on a large cream armchair, her head turned to look out of the window, she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. In a large oversized thick wool cardigan and soft silvery-grey lounge suit it shouldn’t have worked with her golden Titian hair, but it did. She seemed regal almost, like a figure from a Renaissance painting—a silver angel with a crown of gold.
And then she turned to look at him and the sadness in her eyes cut him like a thousand knives.
‘What happened? What’s wrong?’
She ignored his question and asked, ‘Is Maria okay?’
‘Yes,’ he assured her.
‘Good,’ she said, turning back to look out into the darkness beyond the window.
‘She wants to meet you.’
Sia shook her head. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea.’
Something slithered in his stomach, making him nauseous.
‘Why?’
‘I have to go back to London,’ she said, gently tapping her mobile phone against her knee.
‘When did that happen?’
Instead of answering him, she nudged at the newspaper folded up on the table beside the lamp. While he scanned the headline, his gut clenching tighter and panic shooting through him like lightning, her gaze returned to the window.
‘Did you know that the Sabbatino brothers have a yacht? And that Ndiaye once studied fine art at the Sorbonne? And that both had parents who were negatively impacted by undisclosed business deals in the same year that you were exiled?’
There were so many ways he could have responded to her question, but he finally settled on the truth. ‘I did know those things, yes,’ he admitted.
‘What? You didn’t want to know if that was my ‘question’ before answering it? Because it wasn’t,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘That’s coming, but not yet.’
Anger began to mix with the fear, creating a toxic concoction spreading through his veins. ‘I thought we were done with that game.’
‘It wasn’t a game, Sebastian,’ she said disdainfully. ‘It was my job. My reputation. My career.’
He blanched. ‘I can get you another job.’
‘And the fact that this is your response goes to show how little you understand what I’ve lost.’
‘Don’t talk to me about loss,’ he growled. ‘My family lost everything—home, money, reputation.’
‘The exact price that I am paying for your revenge,’ she said, her voice so horrifyingly calm. ‘Do you care?’
‘Of course I care! How can you ask that?’
She shrugged indifferently. ‘Because at every turn you give me two very different sides of the coin. The billionaire hotelier who throws a VIP party for his staff. The thief who will do anything to protect his co-conspirators. The brother who was more father to his sister than anything and the playboy who almost made me love him,’ she choked as a tear began to roll down her cheek.
Sebastian experienced a tearing sensation as half of him soared with joy at even the possibility of her love, but the other—the half that registered the past tense, who caught the word ‘almost’ and who realised the depth of her sadness—felt the greatest loss he’d ever experienced.
‘How could you have done that to me?’ she demanded, unfolding from the chair and closing the distance between them. Her anger, her hurt, the thread of injustice vibrating in the air between them calling to him. ‘How can you proclaim to care and yet wave every aspect of your thievery and falsehood in my face?’
The pain her words caused made him desperate. Unable to shake the feeling that the most precious thing he could ever know, ever touch or be near wasn’t the millions and millions of pounds’ worth of paintings in his basement but the woman who sat in front of him.
‘You weren’t supposed to be there. You weren’t,’ he insisted. ‘It was supposed to be Sean Johnson, who came down with food poisoning the night before flying to see the Sheikh. It wasn’t supposed to be you.’
‘But it was,’ she said simply. ‘So my question, the one you promised to answer truthfully...’ she said, piercing him with a look, warning him, begging him, and he felt it call to his very soul. ‘Was it worth it?’