Page 64 of The Billionaire's Demand

His voice grew heavier yet.

‘I told myself that your rejection of me justified that test, justified his suspicions—proved that they were not groundless. He told me that your father was in financial difficulties, that your marrying me would be a good way out of them. And when you walked out on me I thought he was right. And then, when your engagement to Damian Makris was announced, I knew it for certain. Money, and only money, was your reason for marrying—marrying anyone at all.’

He reached for his beer, his fingers indenting around the glass such that the tips whitened. He knocked back the rest of it. Placed the empty glass back on the table. Eyes spearing hers.

‘I have never,’ he said, ‘been more wrong in my life.’

He passed a hand over his brow, as if in a weariness very profound.

‘I screwed it up. I screwed it up so totally, so completely. And if I hadn’t—if I’d trusted you...trusted the love I knew you felt for me—I would have refused to believe your reasons for leaving me. Challenged them—demolished them somehow. I would have—should have—realised why you were saying those things to me.’

She shook her head. ‘But I still wouldn’t have married you if it had meant your disinheritance, your estrangement from your father.’

He thudded his hand down on the table. ‘But it wouldn’t have! I told you—he was just testing you, that’s all! If you’d stuck by me, told me you didn’t care if I were rich or poor, then he—and I—would have known that it was me you loved, not the Kastellanos money! Oh, God, Eliana, we’d have bailed out your father—rescued him—and then you and I...’ his voice was raw ‘...we would have spent these last six years together—as man and wife. The way we should have done if I hadn’t screwed it up. The way...’

His voice changed, and he reached for her hand again, seizing it as if it were a treasure that was about to slip away, out of his grasp.

‘The way we still can.’

That razored breath came again.

‘Marry me, Eliana—marry me this time around. With all the past cleared out of the way! Paris proved it to us both!’

His voice dropped, filled now with an intensity that reached into her very being.

‘It proved to me that I have never, never stopped loving you. I tried to—tried to kill it, poison it, defile it. But in Paris it broke free of all that. Even if I still hadn’t realised it, every night with you proved it—every day! And if—oh, dear God—if, my most beloved Eliana, in that heart of yours which has made you make such sacrifices, you can find a grain, a seed, a crumb of what you once felt for me, then... Oh, then I will spend all my life—all my life!—growing it in you.’

Her vision was clouding. There was an upwelling within her that was unstoppable.

‘You don’t have to do that, Leandros,’ she said. Her voice was almost a whisper, broken in its intensity. ‘Because it’s there—it’s always been there. Always! I thought it had gone—told myself that the only reason I’d agreed to go to Paris with you was because I owed it to you after all I’d done to you. But it was a lie! Oh, it was a lie. And when...when we came together, in each other’s arms, then I knew what the truth was. I was with you, in your arms, for one reason only—because I still loved you. I love you and I always will, Leandros... Always and always and always...’

Her vision had gone completely. Tears were running down her cheeks. Her heart was turning over and over within her.

She clutched at his hand and he lifted it—lifted it to his lips, crushing it with his kiss. She gazed at him with her obliterated vision, tears still streaming. Her heart overflowing even more than her eyes.

A discreet cough sounded beside her. She looked dimly in its direction. Their waiter was silently offering her a stack of paper serviettes. She gave a laugh—a broken, emotional sound—and grabbed them, using one, then two and three, because her tears would not stop. They would not stop for there were six long years of tears to shed...

She heard Leandros speak—but not to her. He was addressing the waiter.

‘I think,’ he was saying, ‘that she’s giving me a positive answer to my marriage proposal...’

The waiter was nodding. ‘Oh, quite definitely. My wife cried all day when I asked her to marry me! It’s their way of showing happiness, you know,’ he said kindly.

He disappeared, and Eliana went on crying. She could not stop. Leandros was crushing her hand, and she was clinging to it. Clinging to it as if were life itself. Which to her it was.

Then the waiter was there again, a bottle in his hand.

‘Compliments of the house, the chef says. He’s the owner, so what he says goes.’

He put the bottle on the table. It was sparkling wine, a popular Greek domestic variety, and he was removing the cage, then easing the cork. He poured them two glasses—wine glasses, meant for the wine in the carafe. But that was fine by her, because everything was fine by her—everything...

‘Congratulations!’ said the waiter, and disappeared again.

Leandros was picking up his glass, tapping it against hers. So she picked hers up as well.

‘To us,’ he said. ‘And to you, Eliana, the heart of my heart, whom I let go and have grieved for ever since. And now I claim you again—with all my heart.’

He clinked his glass against hers again and shakily, tearfully, she raised hers to her lips.

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