Page 57 of A Diamond for My Forbidden Bride

I’d become my father at long last.

Night came swiftly, as it did in the tropics, and that was when I saw it—the flames of a driftwood fire on the beach.

It was her; of course it was her.

I ignored her for as long as possible and then, when I couldn’t any more, I found myself striding down the jetty towards that fire. I’d tell her to put it out, that was what I’d do, and then I’d walk away. Because, if she wasn’t going to, I would. I’d take the first plane out and go back to Europe. Find my brother. Take his company.

I should certainly have felt something about that, some kind of triumph at least, but my heart felt dead inside me. As if a light had gone out.

I was a frozen wasteland.

I found her sitting on a blanket she’d spread over the sand wearing only a silky loose white top through which I could see the delicate little bikini she wore underneath. Her hair was down over her shoulders and she smiled when she saw me, her face lighting up.

The way mine had lit up when I’d seen her for the first time all those years ago.

My chest ached, the ice inside me shifting.

‘Come and sit down.’ She patted the blanket beside her then picked up a bag of something on the other side of her and waved it at me. ‘I’ve got marshmallows.’

The shifting feeling in my chest deepened into pain.

She must have found those marshmallows in the kitchen, because I’d got them for exactly this reason. To toast them over the driftwood fire the way we’d done all those years ago.

‘You need to put the fire out,’ I ordered.

‘Do I?’ She frowned. ‘I don’t see why. Nothing’s going to catch alight.’ She picked up a sharpened stick. ‘Come on, sit with me. You know I can’t do toasted marshmallows as well as you.’

It was true, she never could. I was the best.

The pain began to radiate outwards from inside me and I didn’t want it. I wanted the deadness back.

Of course you do. But that’s the easy way out, isn’t it? If your heart is dead, you can’t feel pain.

That was true. Just as if you didn’t care, you couldn’t be angry.

‘If you didn’t care then, yes, I might be worried, but that’s not the case. You do care. You care deeply and you’re furious about it.’

That was what she’d said to me this morning, her gaze direct. As if she’d seen something in me, something that I knew wasn’t there.

The pain intensified, because I wanted it to be there.

I wanted to sit next to her. I wanted to toast the best marshmallow and then I wanted to feed it to her. I wanted to have her warm, bare thigh next to mine, and I wanted to talk about foolish things that made us both laugh.

I wanted to give her an engagement ring and see her in a wedding dress.

I wanted to marry her.

I wanted to spend my life with her.

But how could I do that? How could I ask her to marry a man like me? A man who’d been lying to himself all this time about who he was. A man who couldn’t even trust himself.

A man who didn’t know, who didn’t understand, what the word love meant.

I couldn’t ask that of her. I couldn’t. It would be repeating what her own parents’ marriage had been like and I couldn’t do that.

She was a star that burned and I...I was nothing but ash.

I turned to go, to head back to the villa, but then I heard her voice.

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