Page 42 of Greek's Temporary Cinderella

‘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—

Companionable.

There was that word again—the one that kept coming to him.

Almost like we used to be.

The thought flickered in his head like a light that might or might not dispel the shadows.

‘Santé,’ she echoed, dipping her head to take a taste of the gently beading champagne.

‘I’ve taken the liberty of ordering dinner for us,’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

He told her the choices he’d made, saying there was still time to change them, but she shook her head.

‘It all sounds delicious,’ she said. ‘Thank you. And thank you, too, for taking me to Giverny today.’

He glanced at her. ‘You don’t have to thank me,’ he said. ‘It’s all part of...’

He stopped. Part of what? Part of what he was offering her because of what he was getting in return? Like the clothes he’d bought her? This stay in a luxury hotel?

Put like that, he didn’t like the implication. Which didn’t make sense. It hadn’t troubled him when he’d put it to her in Thessaloniki over dinner. Outlining what he was offering her—what she would get out of it in return.

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