Page 29 of The Billionaire's Demand

Leandros gave his polite social smile.

‘Permit me to introduce Madame Makris. A fellow Hellene, like myself.’

It was the interval, and they were mingling in the spectacular Grand Foyer. Eliana was at his side, drawing admiring glances all around. But how should that not be? Her beauty was radiant—breathtaking. Turning every head. Turning his...

He was glad of the obligation to make small talk with the couple to whom he was now introducing Eliana. The man was a business associate, the woman his wife—ultra-chic as only a Parisienne could be. Did the couple wonder why he was with a woman he had introduced as married? He gave a mental shrug. The French took such things in stride.

The couple smiled at Eliana, and Eliana murmured something in halting French, then stayed silent. Conversation focussed on the performance, and Eliana was asked what she thought of it. She made a polite comment about the soprano and the tenor, and then made an equally polite comment in careful French about the magnificence of their surroundings.

It felt strange to be in company with her. The last time had been six years ago—another lifetime. He pulled his memory away. There was no reason for it...no purpose. The woman at his side now was not the woman he had once thought her.

She never had been.

She had stripped his illusions from him—and the process had been painful. Perhaps it was retaliation, therefore, that made him say to her, as they headed back to their loge at the end of the interval, ‘The ice-blue of the gown suits you.’ His eyes rested on her now, half lidded. He gave a smile. One without humour. ‘As icy as your heart?’

She made no answer, but a look passed across her eyes that he did not recognise. Then, with a shock, he did. It was a look he had not expected to see from her.

Sadness.

‘You have reason to think so,’ she said quietly.

‘At least you have the grace to admit that.’ His voice was terse.

She looked at him. There was still that same expression in her eyes.

‘I admit everything, Leandros,’ she said, in that same quiet voice. ‘Everything I did to you.’

They reached their loge and took their seats again. Her words echoed in his head. And the sadness that had been in her voice. Then his mouth tightened. She might admit what she had done to him—but she had not said she regretted it.

And if she did regret it? Would it make a difference? Would I think less ill of her?

Restlessly, he crossed his legs as the curtain rose. He could catch the faint scent of Eliana’s perfume, hear the slight rustle of her gown as she slanted her legs away from his. The sense of her presence at his side in the dim light of the auditorium pressed against him. He focussed, instead, deliberately, on Puccini’s passionate music and the events unfolding on the stage, darkening to their desolate conclusion.

The faithless woman was dragging the hapless lover to his death, and hers. He should feel no pity for her—none. And yet as, in the final scene, Manon’s besotted lover staggered to seek water in the desert in which they were marooned, and Manon lifted her lovely head to cry out, despairing and agonised, against her fate—‘sola, perduta, abbandonata’—lost, abandoned, alone—he could not help but feel her anguish.

He felt his eyes go to the woman at his side, sitting as motionless as he.

Abandoned and alone. Her husband dead, cast out by his ruthless father, all but destitute, scraping a living, bereft of all hope of anything better...

He felt emotion stab. It could not be pity. How could it be? She deserved none, had earned none. Not from him.

His expression hardened even as the final anguished notes from the dying lovers on stage brought down the curtain on the final act. There would be no second act for Eliana—not if she had hopes of one from him. He had brought her here only to rid himself of her—to exorcise her former power over him and to free himself.

That, and only that, was his purpose.

A purpose he must abide by. Or risk far too much...

‘What might tempt you?’

Leandros’s query made Eliana look up from the menu. After the performance they had removed, as it was popular to do, to the opera’s restaurant. Unlike the ornate Second Empire style of the rest of the building, the restaurant had been created as a startling contrast, with modernist style and lines—and a celebrity chef to entice those in the expensive seats to equally expensive post-performance dining.

‘I’m not quite sure,’ she answered now.

The gourmet menu was full of tempting possibilities, and she would be happy with any of them. Happy just to sit here and have Leandros across the table from her. She seemed, she thought, to be inhabiting a new world—it looked just like the one she had been in before, and yet it had changed. Profoundly, permanently. For there could be no going back now, she knew. She had faced the truth about herself. All that confusion and conflict within herself had gone.

Would it make her happy? No, that was impossible. Leandros’s justified bitterness was indelible—she knew that too, accepted it. Just as she accepted the truth of what Puccini’s heart-rending music had revealed to her. The truth about herself.

She let her gaze rest on Leandros, feeling again that upwelling of emotion that had come over her, accepting that truth—welcoming it. She was happy just to be here with him, discussing their dining options in the busy restaurant, with chatter and conversation all around them, other diners enjoying the gourmet offerings just as she and Leandros were about to do.

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