Page 23 of A Diamond for My Forbidden Bride

Once his anger had gone, he hadn’t cared about being right. And that day we’d sat beside the fire I’d successfully lit and toasted marshmallows together.

‘You can build the fire,’ Valentin murmured. ‘You’re good at building fires, as I recall.’

The thing that had tugged in my chest tugged again. Painfully. Something that felt like yearning.

But I shoved it away. Hard.

I wasn’t going there. I wasn’t. I couldn’t. Not again.

I took a breath and met his gaze, feeling myself as consumed by it as I always had been. ‘I’m not lighting fires with you, Valentin. And thank you for the meal. I’m sure it’s lovely, and I appreciate the effort, but I’m not sitting out here and reminiscing with you about old times.’

I gripped the glass of champagne and raised it, swallowing the whole of it down, because it was delicious and I needed it; and because, even after all this time, I still found it difficult to walk away from him. ‘But I’m not the same person I was back then. That girl you knew... She’s gone. I’m not falling in love with you, and I’m certainly not marrying you, understand?’

I got to my feet, the champagne glittering in my bloodstream, and reached for a roll. ‘I’ll take this for my dinner. But that’s all. Thank you for the wine.’

Valentin didn’t move. ‘So you’re running away now?’

‘Hardly.’ I turned and stepped away from the table.

‘You ran from everyone else, but you never ran from me. Don’t you remember?’ His voice was quiet, yet I heard.

I stopped a few steps away from the table and, even though I hated myself for stopping, something inside wouldn’t let me take another step.

‘You didn’t want me at your beach, remember?’ he went on in the same quiet voice. ‘I could tell. You were sitting there, enjoying the silence, and then suddenly this rowdy boy appeared. You wanted to leave, and you hated me for disturbing your special place, but for some reason you stayed.’

I remembered. I had been ten and my parents had had a fight, filling the house with my father’s cold fury and my mother’s weepy apologies.

I’d hated it when they fought, when my father was so cruel and my mother just took it. It had made me angry with her, made me want to yell at her to fight back. But I knew that would only make it worse, so I’d run away to the beach I’d discovered a couple of days earlier. It had been next to our villa, small, quiet and hidden by trees and cliffs, and no one had known about it. No one but me.

Valentin was right, though. I’d been enjoying the silence until this black-eyed, older boy had appeared. I’d hated him instantly for disturbing me, for finding my special beach and ruining it with his presence. And I’d been on the point of getting up and leaving when something magical had happened.

Unlike me, the boy hadn’t been annoyed to find someone else there. No, his face had lit up, as if my being there had been the best thing that had ever happened to him. And his smile had been incandescent. He’d looked at me as if I were magic. As if I were incredible. As if I wasn’t the constant reminder of my mother’s failure to give her husband a son and treated accordingly by both my parents. My father had always been coldly impatient with me, my mother constantly anxious that I would do something to offend him.

‘Don’t go,’ he’d said, as if sensing I was about to leave. ‘Please stay.’

Even then I’d been able to see he was like a bonfire, intense and burning, holding me mesmerised. My father had been cold, my mother soft and floaty and ineffectual, but this boy had been...intense. And I had been drawn to his intensity like a moth to a flame.

No. I’d never run from him.

So why are you walking away now?

‘Are you afraid of me?’ Valentin’s voice was low and deep, winding around me like a velvet rope. ‘Did I scare you with all that talk of monsters and psychopaths?’

My heart was beating far too fast, and I didn’t want him to come near me. Something might happen if he did. Something I wasn’t sure I’d to be able to come back from.

So? Keep walking.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I gave him a mocking look. ‘Afraid? Of you? Seriously?’

He ignored my tone. ‘Well, you have no guarantee I’m not as mad as Domingo. And I can’t say for certain I’m not. But, no, perhaps it’s not me you’re afraid of. Perhaps it’s yourself.’

I shouldn’t have turned round then. I should have kept right on walking. Yet once again I stayed where I was.

The breeze lifted the silken skirts of my dress, the silk brushing against my skin making me very aware that all I wore beneath it was that tiny bikini.

‘I think not,’ I said icily, desperately trying to keep my cool.

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