Page 25 of The Billionaire's Demand

‘I first came here with my father,’ he said. ‘We went up on to the roof, saw the gargoyles. Great for a twelve-year-old.’

There was a fond, reminiscent note to his voice. He had been close to his father, Eliana knew. Although their fathers had been very different, it was something she and Leandros had had in common, and they’d talked about it sometimes. Unlike her, sadly, Leandros had no memories of his mother—she had died when he was a baby.

He glanced at her now. ‘I know your father didn’t like travelling, and his health was not great, but why didn’t you take off as a teenager, Eliana? Do Europe with your friends?’

She wondered why he was bothering to ask, but she answered all the same.

‘My father would have worried about me,’ she said. ‘And I didn’t want to leave him.’

‘You were very sheltered,’ he said slowly. ‘Cossetted.’

His eyes were resting on her, and what she saw in them hurt.

‘I didn’t think you were spoilt, simply...naive. Entitled, I suppose, but not really realising it. I didn’t think it mattered. As my wife, you’d have everything you could want, so what would it matter if you’d grown up taking that for granted, expecting to go on being looked after, cossetted, for the rest of your life?’ His voice changed, hardened. ‘How wrong I was.’

Eliana was silent. What could she say? Nothing in her defence—nothing at all. Instead, she started to walk away a little, as if studying some other aspect of the cathedral. But she was taking little of it in.

He thought me entitled, but after the desolation of losing my mother, my father feared me leaving home, leaving him. It made him shower me with gifts and protect me, which I let him do because I knew it gave him comfort to do so...made him feel...safe. Just as I knew that he was glad that, since I was so keen on marrying, at least it was to someone who would be based in Athens, not too far away.

It was painful to remember...painful to think that. And pointless too. Her father was dead, and she had never married Leandros...

Leandros came up to her.

‘The crypt is open, if you wanted to visit? Otherwise I was going to suggest Sainte-Chapelle—it’s a short walk from here, and we can go inside, unlike here.’

Eliana resisted the impulse to say Why not? again, lest it draw an edged comment from Leandros. So instead she said politely, ‘That sounds good.’

Did it sound good? Did anything they were doing sound good?

But then, how could it? How could anything about the tangled, knotted, twisted mess of emotions she was caught in, ever be ‘good’? It was a tangled mess—and Leandros was at the heart of it. Confusing and conflicting, jostling past and present. How overwhelming it was for her to be with Leandros again, however painful the reasons.

The reasons she was admitting.

The reasons she was not...

Her eyes went to him now, as they started to walk away from Notre Dame. How tall he was...how familiar. Once so dear to her so that her breath would catch with it, at seeing his strong profile. She felt a sudden impulse to reach for his hand, to take it and walk along beside him, hand in hand, as they had once always done...

She felt her hands clench at her sides in painful self-denial.

‘Just along here,’ Leandros announced, and she looked to where he was indicating, at Sainte-Chapelle, instead of where her eyes wanted to linger—on him at her side.

Leandros got entrance tickets and they went inside. Immediately, Eliana gasped in awe. Sunshine was pouring through the narrow windows that soared the height of the walls, one after another along the length of the nave, leading the eye towards the glory of the vast rose window above the altar. She gazed, amazed at the sheer incredible beauty of it.

‘It’s like being inside a jewel box!’ she exclaimed wonderingly, gazing around her.

‘The rose window depicts the Apocalypse,’ Leandros was saying. ‘The Four Horsemen are there somewhere, and all the other signs of the end of the world.’

She gave a little shudder. ‘I won’t look too closely,’ she said.

She turned her attention to the painted pillars, as brilliantly coloured as the stained glass, and then to the vaulted ceilings running alongside the main aisle, painted in French blue with the French royal fleur de Lys.

‘The chapel was commissioned by Louis IX, the saintly King of the early Middle Ages,’ Leandros remarked beside her.

‘He was the one whose first wife was Eleanor of Aquitaine, wasn’t he? Before she went off to marry Henry Plantagenet, King of England.’

‘No, she married an earlier Louis, then Henry Plantagenet of England. Two glittering marriages—a queen twice over. Of course, as an heiress in her own right she didn’t need to marry to enjoy a lavish lifestyle.’

Eliana made no answer—there was none to make. If it was yet another dig at her, then it was one he was, after all, entitled to make. She wandered away a little, moving to examine one of the many painted statuettes adorning this jewel box of a chapel, knowing that the sting of his words was both hurtful and to be expected. And there was nothing she could do about either. Yet they hung in her head for all that, heavy and hard.

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