Page 28 of Greek's Temporary Cinderella

Yet it wasn’t des Grieux that she was thinking of.

I’m thinking of myself—falling for Leandros the very first time I set eyes on him.

The memory was in her head...instant—indelible.

‘Donna non vidi mai...’

Never did I see such a woman... sang the tenor, and the joy and wonder and passionate yearning in his voice soared above the orchestra, out over the audience, reaching up towards her.

Echoing within her.

For, just like des Grieux, never before had she seen someone who made it impossible to turn her head away. At that party in Glyfada, where they’d met, she’d fallen so totally in love in that very moment.

She felt her head turn now, powerless to stop it. Felt her gaze go to Leandros’s profile, carved as if from stone. Felt, as Puccini’s music soared around her in passionate voice and swelling orchestra, filling her head, her heart, something call from her out of nowhere, it seemed to her. And she was unprepared, unwarned...with emotion rising up in her—an emotion she had thought long extinguished, smothered and lifeless, for six long, bitter, painful, endless years.

But it had not been banished, not extinguished. It was still there, hidden deep inside her—and it was summoned now, against all reason, by the passion of the music. It powered up inside her, all the emotion that had once filled her and which she had thought could be no more, thought impossible. And she could not stop it—could not force it back, force it down, force it back into the oblivion where it needed to be—where it must be. For how else could she go on living?

For a moment she was blind as it swept over her, possessing her entirely. Repossessing her.

And then suddenly, unstoppably, it was sweeping from her, sweeping away all the tangled, tormenting, confusing and conflicting emotions that had plagued her since the moment she had set eyes on Leandros again, made the fateful decision to come here to Paris with him. And they had plagued her every hour since. Now they were simply gone—as if they had never been. Swept away to leave uncovered, unhidden, one emotion—only one—that had been there all along. That always would be...

She tore her gaze away, forced it back to the stage below as the aria ended. And yet she was shaken to the core, to the very core of her being, as she realised, saw and knew the truth that had been there all along, concealed in the heart of that tangled confusion of emotions.

Six years might have passed—she might have walked away from Leandros and she might have been wed and widowed since, might have buried the man she had married, with tears for his sad, sad fate—but nothing could now conceal from her what she knew, what blazed within her.

What she still felt—would always feel, could never not feel for Leandros, whatever happened, whatever life did to her...

I am here with him now, here with him again after so, so long. And though all he wants of me is what he has declared, that cannot, will not, and does not change what I now know—the truth I now know. About myself.

Unconsciously, she started to sip at her refilled glass again, letting her eyes rest on the stage below, watching the events unfolding that would eventually lead the lovers to their doom. Unconsciously, she let the music take over, flowing over her even as what was happening to her inside was flowing through her.

She knew they were the same—that they shared the same name, the same truth.

That however flawed, however doomed, however one-sided, love always survives somehow—impossible though it must seem.

And now she knew, with a certainty that filled her, that it was still true.

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.

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