Page 63 of Greek's Temporary Cinderella

She felt her hand taken, lifted. Heard Leandros speak again, his voice low. And what was in it was an intensity that broke her apart.

‘Six years ago you walked away from me, turned me down. This time—’ his fingers around hers spasmed ‘—don’t. Just...don’t. Don’t turn me down again.’ He paused, then spoke again, his voice husky, as if each word were painful. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’

Her face worked. Emotion was storming up in her, storming through the drumming of her blood. Leandros was speaking again, his words breaking through the deafening drumming of her blood, reaching for her. Finding her. Emotion was filling his words...so much emotion...

‘We found each other again in Paris. Don’t—Eliana don’t let us lose each other again! When you walked out on me that second time, it was like...it was like a knife in my throat. And I knew...knew...that what we’d first had, all those years ago, was there again.’ His voice dropped. ‘Maybe it had never gone away. Just been suffocated by my bitterness...’

She turned her fingers in his. Then she spoke, her voice low and halting—and painful.

‘I hurt you. I hurt you and I know I did. And I have never, for a single day, forgiven myself. I told you in Paris that, given a second chance, I’d make the same choice again—marry Damian. Because nothing would have been different if that second chance had come. If I hadn’t married Damian my father would still have been facing a financial ruin I could not have borne to impose on him, and—’

She stopped.

His expression had changed. Arrested.

‘And what?’ There was an edge in his voice, but the blade was not aimed at her.

She shut her eyes. That drumming was still in her ears, her heart, her pulse.

‘And your father would still have been threatening to disinherit you if you married me,’ she said.

Her eyes flew open. Suddenly it was her hand clenching his, crushing it with her intensity.

‘Leandros, did you never think how I felt when he told me that? Told me you’d be penniless if you married me? Dear God, Leandros, I loved you! How could I possibly have gone on with marrying you knowing it would estrange you from your father? Strip you of your inheritance? How could I have done that to you?’

He was staring at her. She wanted to cry out—cry out the dismay she’d felt when his father had made it so crystal-clear to her what marrying his son would do to Leandros.

‘So I didn’t, Leandros. I didn’t do it to you. I told you I didn’t want to marry you any longer and I let you say...let you say...’

‘Let me call you what I did. Venal and luxury-loving—another Manon.’ His voice was hollow. Shaken.

‘It was better that you did that. Better that you hated and despised me than felt I was only marrying Damian to protect my father. If you hated and despised me you could move on—set me aside.’

He let go her hand and it felt cold suddenly. But not as cold as the chill that filled her as he spoke again. Slowly, heavily. As if a weight were on his chest.

He drew a breath—a razored one. ‘My father only said that to test you. He’d warned me ever since I was a teenager that there would be women out there whose interest would not be in me, but my family’s wealth. He’d told me he would test any woman I wanted to marry. Test her to see what her reaction was. And I—I agreed with it.’

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.

---