Page 55 of Reclaimed By His Billion-Dollar Ring

Nikos, too, had finished his beer and started on the wine.

He tilted his head slightly. ‘The wine hasn’t changed in eight years,’ he said. ‘Rough, but good for all that.’

She didn’t answer, only took another mouthful of the wine. Feeling its impact on her. Giving her courage. She set down her glass, looked straight across at him.

‘You dragged me here, Nikos, to this place, because you said you had “things to say” to me. So, what are they?’ she challenged.

Yet even as she challenged him she felt a weariness of spirit assail her. What was the point of any of this? She felt a familiar pain squeeze her heart. Eight long years ago Nik had broken it. Now it would be broken all over again. This time because of her own stupidity.

This time around I knew what he was—but I still let it happen...

Her throat tightened with a familiar choking. And what good did that do her? None. Just as the ocean of tears she’d wept for him so long ago had never done her any good.

Nikos was answering her. His voice tight. ‘This is not the time. Tomorrow.’

She looked across at him. Felt that weariness encompass her, that heaviness dull her senses.

‘Whatever,’ she said, and gave an indifferent shrug.

Then went back to eating her pizza. Went back to listening to the happy chatter of families on holiday...happy couples, with happy children.

She reached for her wine glass again, drained it, picked up the carafe, refilled her glass, poured the rest of the carafe’s contents into Nikos’s glass, then set the empty carafe back on the wooden table.

‘You used to do that,’ Nikos said slowly, watching her. ‘Tell me to finish it off...that you’d had enough. Then you’d gaze across at me and I’d see in your eyes what any man would give a fortune to see.’

‘But you didn’t give a fortune, did you, Nik?’ she heard herself answer. ‘That besotted gaze of mine gained you a fortune. Or, if not a fortune, then at least a hefty pay-out.’ She paused. ‘My father told me exactly how much you cost him. Told me you doubled what you’d first been offered to leave me.’

She emptied her voice of emotion, because the emotion that would have been in it otherwise would have been unendurable to feel again.

‘He told me that though you drove a hard bargain, and took him for more than he’d intended to pay, it had been worth every cent. He paid you willingly whatever it took to keep me safe from you.’

His face had closed. As if a steel shutter had come down over it. She saw him reach for his refilled wine glass, drain it to the dregs. As if he needed it. His cheekbones were stark, his mouth like a whipped line, his eyes completely masked. As if he could not bear to let her see what was in them.

And for a second—just the barest, briefest second—she wanted to see. Because there had been a flash—just a flash—of something. An emotion revealed, then instantly gone.

It might have been guilt.

Or even shame.

If he’d been capable of either.

But it had been neither.

For that brief second she had seen what surely should not be there—surely could not be there. What made no sense being there.

Pain.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

NIKOS’S HANDS WERE grimly steering the hire car along the winding coast road—not towards the new marina, with its heliport for the yacht owners, but to the island’s main town, where the ferry port was.

The little harbour town along the coast from the resort and the former excavation site was not large enough for anything other than fishing craft and the vessels that had once plied their mercantile trade three thousand years ago across the eastern Mediterranean, leaving behind, millennia later, only the bare outline of their dwellings and warehouses, their bronze and ceramic household goods, their great amphorae that had once carried olive oil and wine, the cargo of the times.

His thoughts went to the resort hotel he’d taken Calanthe to—the one that he’d helped build with his bare hands. One day, in millennia to come, would the archaeologists of the future be excavating the site? Unearthing remnants of the people who had once been there? Not traders any longer, but holidaymakers. Every life a tale to tell...

A tale long lost.

How hard it was to tell a tale that was lost.

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