‘Your wife-to-be,’ echoed the nurse dutifully, ‘has come up here from A&E.’ She looked again at the pair of them. ‘It’s visiting hours at six, so come back then. In the meantime...’ her mouth twitched, and her expression was sympathetic now ‘...you’ve got five more minutes.’ She whisked out.
Nikos turned to Mel. His heart was soaring. Soaring like a bird in flight.
‘Will five minutes do it?’ he asked her, his brow lifting questioningly.
Mel shook her head. She was floating somewhere above the surface of the hospital bed—she didn’t know where. Didn’t care.
Had it been so simple? Had a holiday romance been the real thing all along?
I wanted freedom, but my freedom is here—here with Nikos. Here with our child, waiting to be born.
She felt her heart constrict. Whatever names Nikos might want, one she knew. If their baby was a boy it would be named for her grandfather. The grandfather she had loved so much. Not the stricken husk he had become, but the loving, protective grandfather she remembered so clearly.
Oh, Gramps—you wanted me to find a good man—and now I have. I have!
‘OK,’ said Nikos. ‘Well, if five minutes won’t do it...’ his eyes softened as he gazed down at her, the woman he had claimed the freedom to love ‘...how about fifty years?’
Her face lit. ‘Sounds good to me,’ she said. ‘Sounds very good!’
He bent to kiss her. ‘To our Golden Wedding Anniversary, then, and all the golden years between.’
‘To our golden years together,’ echoed Mel, and kissed him back.
EPILOGUE
THE CHRISTENING PARTY at Nikos and Mel’s newly acquired family-sized villa on the coast outside Athens was crowded with guests. Mel sat in almost regal splendour on the sofa, and young Nikos Stephanos Albert—already known as Nicky—lay on her lap, resplendent in his christening gown, fast asleep, oblivious to all the admiring comments that came his way.
The vast majority of those came from his doting parents, and Nikos, standing beside the sofa, was gazing down at his newborn son with an expression little short of besotted, accepting all the homage as nothing more than perfectly right and reasonable. Their son was the most amazing baby ever, and no other could possibly be even a fraction as wonderful.
They were not alone in this view, for Nikos’s parents shared it with them.
‘Hah!’ exclaimed Stephanos Parakis proudly, gazing benignly down at his grandson.
‘He looks like you,’ said his wife fondly. His new wife.
Nikos’s eyes tore themselves away from his infant son and settled with approval on Adela Parakis. Even if she hadn’t turned out to be a very calm and level-headed divorcee of forty-plus, rather than the sultry mistress he’d assumed, Nikos would have approved of her. For she had been the catalyst that had finally triggered his parents’ decision to call time on their tormented marriage.
One of the catalysts, Nikos acknowledged.
The other was the elegant silver-haired man at the side of Nikos’s mother—the new Principessa Falesi. The widowed Principe had met her at a party in Milan, and such had been his admiration for her that his mother had received with equanimity the news that her husband wished to remarry.
Now, as Principessa, she was enjoying a new lease of life—and of beauty. For as her son’s eyes perused her they could see that his mother had clearly undergone a facelift, chosen a dramatically more flattering hairstyle and, if he were not mistaken, had a few additional discreet nips and tucks, as well.
He was glad for her—glad for both his parents. Glad for their late happiness with other partners, and glad that their respective remarriages had enabled them—finally—to be civil to each other...especially when they now had a common fascination with their grandson.
‘He has my eyes,’ observed the Principessa with complacent satisfaction, approaching with her new husband.
‘He does,’ Mel smiled. Nikos’s mother was being very gracious towards her, and Mel wanted to keep her that way. So she didn’t point out that all newborns had blue eyes.
Nikos refrained from telling his mother that, actually, his son had his wife’s eyes—which just happened to be the most beautiful eyes in the world...
Memory struck through him—how Mel had flashed her sapphire eyes at him in that very first encounter, and how they had pierced him like Cupid’s proverbial arrow.
Happiness drenched through him. And disbelief.
A holiday romance? How could he ever have been idiotic enough to think Mel—wonderful, fabulous, adorable, beloved Mel—could be nothing more than a holiday romance? She was the most precious person in the world to him.