Page 42 of The Billionaire's Demand

She didn’t know and couldn’t tell. Knew only, with a clutch of emotion that she kept tight within her, what it was that she wanted.

In this sea of past bitterness and present doubt, of that she was sure.

I don’t want to leave him—whatever he might want of me here, and however briefly. While he wants anything of me at all, I don’t want to leave him.

Because this time, she knew, was all she would have—all she could ever have—of the man she had once loved and knew she still did.

CHAPTER TEN

LEANDROS STOOD BY the open windows giving out on to their Juliet balcony. The early-evening twilight was gathering. Gently, he eased the cork of the champagne bottle and it gave with a soft pop. As it did so, he heard the door of Eliana’s bedroom open, and she emerged.

After tea and coffee she’d gone off to take another soothing bath, and he’d been glad, repairing to take a shower himself, and change into more relaxed clothes—a lightweight fine cashmere sweater over an open-necked shirt with turned-back cuffs. He’d touched base with his office while he had the opportunity. He’d left matters in good order, and they still were. He was glad of it. He didn’t want distractions. Not now. Right now he had only one focus.

And she was standing right there.

She was hesitant, he could see, and he wanted that dispelled.

He made his smile warm, his voice warmer. ‘Ah, there you are—how are you feeling?’ There was genuine concern in his voice.

She didn’t answer him directly. ‘I soaked for ages—it was a real indulgence,’ she said lightly. ‘My apartment only has a shower, and the water is very seldom hot anyway.’

‘Then have a bath every day!’ he said, keeping his tone as light as hers. He picked up an empty flute. ‘Champagne? Or something different? Another G and T?’

Even as he asked her, his eyes were drinking her in. She’d put on one of her new dresses, softly draped in sage-green, halfway between dressy and casual—just right for dining in. She’d drawn her hair back into a low, loose chignon at the nape of her neck. He fancied she’d put on a little mascara, and maybe some lip sheen—just a very light touch of make-up to enhance her features. Whatever she’d done, with the dress and the hair and her own beauty she looked effortlessly lovely...

Something moved inside him as he looked at her—part of this strange new feeling he had about her that he knew was changing everything, even if he still did not understand how...

She stepped forward. ‘Thank you—champagne would be very nice.’

She was still a little hesitant, and Leandros found himself wanting her to relax more. He wanted that sense of simply taking the day as it came to continue—without the complications, the confusion, the complexities that lay between them.

He filled her flute, and then his own, holding hers out to her.

She took it, murmuring her thanks.

‘Santé,’ he said in the same light tone. And as he did, he recalled the toast he’d so acerbically given the previous evening at the opera—‘My very own Manon.’

It had been designed to taunt.

To mock.

To wound.

Regret, or something like it, smote him. Reappraisal—maybe that was the right word? There was a reappraisal he should apply—one that she deserved.

Maybe I was being unfair—oh, not in saying that she only wanted to marry for money, but knowing that, having done so, she paid a price for it. A heavy price. To be unjustly accused by her domineering father-in-law of failing to give him the grandson he demanded when that was entirely because her marriage was celibate because her husband was gay! And then her father-in-law punished her by reducing her to poverty in her widowhood.

His thoughts were sober.

Maybe she did not deserve any more retribution from me for what she did.

Maybe retribution—if that was even the right word now—had already been exacted from her...

Maybe she had already paid her price for her faithlessness.

And maybe, therefore—the words from that morning came again into his head—we should start over.

They’d made a start—today had been a good day, a much easier, more peaceable day, without their previous guarded, superficial civility. He had the grace to acknowledge that the bitterness he harboured was as deep within him as it had ever been, while she’d kept to an air of passive detachment. But today had not been like that. It had been—

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