Page 25 of Greek's Temporary Cinderella

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.

Leandros let her be and she continued her exploration, wanting diversion. As she returned from her circuit he said, pleasantly, ‘Seen enough?’

She nodded, and they made their way out again.

He glanced at his watch. ‘We should be getting back. You’ll need time to get yourself ready—we’re going to the opera. Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. It should suit you.’

That was definitely a dig—it was an opera about a poor girl who rejected her equally poor lover in favour of a wealthy suitor. She wanted to protest, riposte, find some way of answering back. But how could she? Like Manon, she had chosen wealth over love.

Not that that had stopped her first love from wanting her to want him still.

As she got into the car that Leandros had summoned to their side his words from the night before were in her head—how he did not want her to make a sacrifice of herself. Taunting her that she would be eager for him.

He wants me to want him.

Her eyes shadowed as she pulled her seat belt across. The man she wanted was the man she had once known, so long ago. The man she had once loved—and rejected. This man now—this Leandros—was not that man. And she was not the woman he had once loved either.

So what is there left? Nothing that I want.

That was the truth of it, she thought bleakly. Leandros here, now, only wanted a sexual affair with her—she had forfeited anything more. But for herself...?

Her eyes went to him now, in profile, as they crossed over the river to the Left Bank. Emotions flowed within her as turbid as the waters of the Seine—and as unknowable.

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