Suddenly wide awake, Grace straightened and looked at Nico with urgency, although underneath the urgency there was still a thread of caution, guarding against believing something that sounded too good to be true.
‘I don’t understand,’ she breathed.
‘You do, Grace. I’m in love with you. I never thought it could happen to me. I’ve always told myself that I would never allow my emotions to wreak havoc with a cool head. My uncle—well, never mind that in the end I didn’t know him, only knew of the reputation that lay in tatters after his exile—shaped my way of thinking. He represented everything that could go wrong when you lacked discipline. I looked at my own father and saw the opposite. An ordered life with ordered choices. He was the cool, calm and collected half of the coin where Sander was the other, and then I made my own youthful mistake.
‘I fell for a girl who turned out to be just the sort of demanding woman I had spent a lifetime being warned against. In no uncertain terms I was warned that the woman who ended up at my side for the long haul would have to be someone who understood that I wasn’t like anyone else. My father had his own empire and was responsible enough to put his employees first and I had my own and would have to do the same. There would be no time to pander to a woman who wanted all of me. I was too young to see that travelling down one road did not preclude the other. To be in charge didn’t automatically mean making sure you never gave your emotions away. Falling in love didn’t necessarily entail throwing yourself under the bus and giving in to a life of chaos. I look back on my parents and I can see now that while it may have been an arranged marriage of sorts, it was also a true love match.’
‘You had such a varied, colourful love life, Nico...’
‘Because I was happy to divide myself into two halves. The first would be the man who played the field and had fun and the second would be the man who gave that up and married a woman who didn’t make demands, who left me to put work at the forefront of my life. Hot and cold, black and white, nothing in between. But, my darling, even while I was busy making those choices you were there, and little did I ever suspect that every minute of every day spent with you undermined all my grand plans for my future. Making love to you...it was different from anything I’d ever done before, fulfilling in ways I never dreamed imaginable and, of course, now I know why. I wasn’t having sex, I was touching...tasting...beingwith a woman I had fallen hopelessly in love with.’
‘So does that mean you forgive me for not telling you about Tommy?’
‘On one condition...’
‘What’s that?’
‘No more secrets between us. We talk about everything and anything all the time. Doubts, fears, hopes and dreams...we share everything.’
‘I think I can agree to that...’
‘And one other thing.’
‘That’s two conditions!’ But she laughed, her eyes gently teasing him, filled with the love she had been so careful never to reveal.
‘You marry me. As soon as possible. I want to start our lives together without waiting because I can’t live without you.’
‘I can definitely...’ Grace flung herself at him, the man she’d loved for so long ‘...agree to that.’
EPILOGUE
GRACELOOKEDATherself in the full-length mirror of the bedroom and smiled.
She twisted to one side, then to the other. Outside, winter was gathering in cold and darkness even though it was only a little after six in the evening.
Nico was due back any minute, and just thinking about that lock in the front door, and the decisive tread of his footsteps as he entered the lovely old cottage in Richmond they had chosen together a little over a year ago, made her heart thump.
The old, familiar feeling, a love that was so deep and so true that just thinking about him and knowing that she was the only person in the world to really see what lay inside him, made her shiver with pleasure.
Sometimes, she stopped and was amazed all over again at how much had happened in such a short space of time.
He hadn’t been joking when he’d told her that he wanted their lives together to start right away.
‘But a wedding takes ages to sort out,’ Grace had told him a little dubiously, but, as neither of them had wanted anything at all extravagant, it had been remarkably straightforward to arrange.
They had gone back to the island for it and had been welcomed warmly by the new owners of Sander’s hotel and by the staff who remembered them from when they had last been there.
Old memories and new ones being shaped. Grace had looked around her to the turquoise sea gently lapping on sand as powdery as icing sugar, with the sun a setting orange ball sinking behind the indigo horizon. The assembled guests had been as struck as she had been by the beauty of the place as she and Nico had exchanged wedding vows.
Her floaty cream dress had reminded her of how she had felt that first time on the island, when she had dumped the starchy work clothes and slipped into the light, soft summer dresses she had bought, and she had blushed when her husband-to-be had looked at her with such love and tenderness that it had brought a lump to her throat. Had he read what she’d been thinking?
His parents had been there and that had been moving as they had touched base with the people Sander had grown to love.
They’d both kept in touch with him, as it turned out, and, much as they had pleaded for him to return to the fold, he had flatly refused, preferring the peace of the island.
Her mother had come as well, along with her stepfather, and Tommy with his fiancée.
It had been a small affair. Relatives, friends...they had stayed at one of the five-star hotels in Nassau and she and Nico had remained back at Sander’s hotel, as they privately called it.