Or even not by chance...
What then...?
The implications hovered in his head, spreading out through his consciousness, filling his mind.
We’d stay together, obviously—keep our marriage going...
Okay, that wasn’t what they’d originally planned—not what he’d intended or wanted—but that had been then...not now.
His expression changed. Now things were different. His time with Rosalie had changed him.
Had it changed his plans, his intentions as well?
Changed what he felt about marriage?
About Rosalie?
Into his head came what he’d said to her when she’d praised the lifestyle Panos and Maria enjoyed.
‘Sometimes when you have too much of something you enjoy it palls...’
He frowned. Was that true of his time with Rosalie? Would the time come when he had had too much of her, so that being with her palled?
It seemed an absurd question!
Do I really want our marriage to end when the merger is done?
His eyes flickered.
A baby would keep us together...
A child with Rosalie...
He turned over the thought in his mind.
Enticing. Appealing...
Perhaps, he mused, gazing up at the ceiling, lost in this strangely beguiling thought, when she joined him here he would draw her out on the subject... On the subject of not rushing to end their marriage. At all.
I need to know! To know what she feels—what she wants.
Surely he was not hoping in vain?
Memory was full within him—of the passion and desire in their lovemaking, the way her beautiful body clung to his, the heights they reached together every time! And it was more than when they were in bed—in and out of bed it was the same. Her smiles, her laughter, her kisses and her conversation... Surely it all pointed to the same thoughts, the same feelings, that were filling him more and more with every passing day...every passionate night...?
I want her with me all the time! Every day and every night! And I want her to want the same!
It was as though a light had gone on in his head, showing him things he’d never seen before...things that were now illuminated in a brilliant golden light. He reached for his phone to call her, to hear her voice, ask her to fly up here.
Before he could pick it up, it started to ring. He grinned. Was Rosalie telepathic as well as all her other manifold charms?
But as he answered, and heard the voice of his caller, his smile was wiped from his face.
‘Ariadne?’
He jackknifed upright.
Her voice came clear over the ether. Sounding fraught.
‘Xandros! I’ve got something to tell you. And it can’t wait. It just can’t!’
Everything in him froze.
Rosalie squirted cleaning fluid into the bathtub, and started to scrub the inside, her movements as automatic as they were familiar. Anguish filled her—and not just because she was right back where she’d started: in London, broke and cleaning for a living. Just the way Xandros had first found her.
That was her anguish—that single word, his name.
Xandros—the man she loved.
That was the truth of it—bitter now as gall. With every golden day she had spent with Xandros—every passion-fuelled night—the truth had been coming to her. Deny it as she had—suppress it as she’d had to.
We married to make the merger happen. But for me it became more—so much more.
How could it not? Pain shot through her. How could she not have done what she had, day after day, night after night? How could she not have fallen in love with Xandros? Weaving dreams that their brief marriage might last instead of ending?
That we might make our whole lives together—have children, a future... It was a dream I longed for so much that the temptation to make it happen was almost impossible to resist!
Cold shivered through her. Her punishment for so very nearly yielding to the unforgivable temptation to let herself get pregnant...have Xandros’s baby, bind him to her for ever...was unbearable.
It would be her half-sister who would have his baby now.
The half-sister who, far from refusing outright even to countenance marrying Xandros, had in fact been willing—as willing as Xandros had been to take Ariadne to his bed as his fiancée...
A corrosive sickness filled Rosalie, as if she had swallowed the bleach she was cleaning the bathtub with, and into her aching head came his mother’s oft-repeated words: ‘They were ideally suited to each other...’ And now they could be again. I must hope with all my heart that whatever made Ariadne run away, reject Xandros, she can now find happiness with him! The happiness they must have felt when they agreed to marry. Why should they not be happy? They will have everything—each other, their baby, even the merger...
Because her father would have got what he wanted: a Lakaris son-in-law and a Lakaris grandchild—with the daughter he’d originally wanted to have them.
Pain smote her yet again.
Ariadne would have everything.
And I will have nothing.
Only her memories. Her broken dreams. Her broken heart.
Useless tears smarted in her eyes and she rubbed them away with the back of her rubber-gloved hand. Went on with her cleaning.
After all, there was nothing else for her to do now...
The phone was ringing on his desk, and Xandros snatched it up on its first ring. It was his lawyer. The last person to have seen Rosalie the day she’d disappeared—saying she was filing for divorce.
The word still bit like a shark and he could not shake it off. Its jaws were clamped around him, drawing blood...
‘Any news?’ he demanded.
His adrenaline levels were sky-high—had been ever since Ariadne had phoned him in Thessaloniki, two weeks ago now. Ever since he’d received Rosalie’s text shortly thereafter.
Xandros, your mother has told me about Ariadne, so I’m going back to London today.
Emotion convulsed in him. It was like some bitterly ironic replay. Ariadne had texted to say she was fleeing from him. Now Rosalie had done the same.
Except that it isn’t the same at all! Not by a million miles—not by all the distance between the galaxies!
When Ariadne had fled all he had felt was relief.
With Rosalie it was...
Desperation.
As brutal as that.
Clutching him, crushing him.
He took a ragged breath now, the phone clamped to his ear.