Page 62 of Reclaimed By His Billion-Dollar Ring

Tiredness washed over him again. He had staked everything on this moment, on trying to justify what he’d done. And now—

Abruptly, she pushed back her chair. It scraped on the stone floor. ‘I need... I need...’

She didn’t finish. Only walked rapidly from the room. He heard the front door open, and then silence.

He picked up the box file, replaced it in the painted armoire that had been there all his life, as solid and sound as the house he’d grown up in, as the grandmother who’d raised him.

He followed Calanthe out into the garden. She was standing with her back to him, arms folded defensively, her shoulders hunched. He came up behind her, but not too close.

Keeping his distance.

That was essential.

‘I don’t know whether I did right or wrong in taking your father’s money as I did,’ he said slowly. ‘But this I do know. I never regretted it. I regret a lot—but not that.’

She turned, her arms still tightly folded as if to protect herself, keep him at bay. ‘Do you regret things, Nikos? What do you regret?’

Her voice was low. Sunlight was playing on her hair. Gilding the honey of her skin. How beautiful she was—how breathtakingly, wondrously beautiful...

As she had always been.

From the very first to the very last.

As this, surely, was the last.

‘I regret having to leave you that golden summertime,’ he said. ‘I’ve told myself I would have left you anyway, even had I never known whose daughter you were, because you were just a summer romance. You were so young, and I had to make my way in the world. I had nothing to offer you then. Yet for all that I would still have left you with regret. Wishing I did not have to. Wishing...’ He took a breath, ready to say now, all these years later, what he had told himself was not so. ‘Wishing I could ask you to wait for me.’

It was said—what he had barely given head space for.

He had told himself that what they had was only a summer romance, that it could not last, could never be more than that.

And when I discovered who she was I had to cling to that fiction.

Her eyes were on him, her folded arms still keeping him at bay. Still protecting herself, as if stanching a wound. Then she spoke, her voice low and anguished.

‘I would have waited, Nikos. Because I was in love with you.’

Her eyes were pained, and no longer because of what he’d told her at his grandmother’s dining table. He could see there were other reasons now. Reasons beyond that.

‘I was in love with you, and it broke my heart when you left me. And I would have gone on yearning for you...hoping and hopeless...wanting you back. So my father told me what you’d done.’ Her voice hollowed. ‘So that I could stop loving you—and hate you instead.’

She looked away for a moment, then back at him.

‘But I have no cause to hate you, Nik. Not now.’

She looked around her and he saw her expression—so drawn and stark and stricken—soften a fraction.

‘I shall think of you here, Nikos. That will be good, I think. Because this is a good house, and your grandmother was a good woman, and she raised you, as I now know, to be a good man. I’ve wasted years hating you. Now at least I can let that go. What a waste it all was,’ she said sadly.

He saw her dip her head, saw the sun burnishing her hair, setting a halo around it. Saw, too, slow tears oozing down her cheeks.

He felt himself step forward. Reach out his hand. Touch her lowered cheek with his outstretched finger.

‘Don’t weep,’ he said. His voice was low. ‘Don’t weep for the waste of it. I was never worth it. But you...you, Calanthe, have always been worth it—always! In that golden summer and now. Above all now.’

He let his hand fall away, felt his fingertip wet with her slow tears.

‘Eight years ago it did not matter what I felt for you. You were Georgios Petranakos’s daughter and you were beyond me. And my duty...’ he drew a heavy breath ‘...my duty was to my grandmother, to ensure she was no longer cheated of what was her due. Then, when I saw you again in Athens, at your father’s side, even more beautiful than you had ever been, I knew that all I had wanted that summer long ago was what I wanted again. You in my arms again. In my bed. And when your father needed me...then it all seemed so perfect for me. Until—’

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