would have himself, Anatole, to raise him, and he would have Tia—recreated now as Christine. Once, marriage had seemed impossible to him—fatherhood out of the question. But now, as emotion swept up in him, he knew that everything had changed for ever.
The future was crystal-clear to him and it was centred on this woman—this woman who was back in his life. It made clear, obvious sense all round. His desire for her was stronger than it had ever been. Her mature beauty drew him now even more than her ingénue loveliness had moved him—on that count there could be no doubt.
He spoke again to her, his final words for this evening, his tone a low, sensual husk, his eyes a caress.
‘You’ll melt, Christine,’ he said, with promise in his voice, ‘on our wedding night.’
* * *
Christine lay in bed, sleepless, her eyes staring up at the ceiling. Thoughts, emotions, confusion—all whirled chaotically around in her head. She could make sense of nothing. Nothing at all. Every now and then she would try and snatch at the whirling maelstrom, to try and capture it, but it always eluded her. Fragments skimmed past her again, just out of range.
He wants to marry me.
He despises me.
He kissed me.
None of it made sense—none of it—yet round and round the fragments whirled.
She tossed and turned, and found no rest at all.
But in the morning, when finally she awoke from the heavy, mentally exhausted slumber into which she’d fallen in the small hours, only one fragment was vivid in her head.
Temptation.
Oh, she could tell herself as much as she liked that it was insane that a man who had thrown the accusations at her that he had, a man who had told her to her face that he never wanted to marry her, should now be offering to do just that. Of his own free will.
It was insane that she should pay even the slightest attention to what he’d said. What he’d done. And yet tendrils of something writhed through her brain, finding soft, vulnerable places to cling to, to penetrate. She could feel it spreading in her mind...something so dangerous it terrified her.
Temptation.
Deadly, fatal temptation.
She had felt it once before—just as strong, just as dangerous. Once before she had been about to do something that with every instinct in her body she had known to be wrong. And the conflict had almost destroyed her. Would have destroyed her had it not been for Vasilis.
She had poured it all out to him that desperate day in Athens, when Anatole had made it so ruthlessly clear how little she meant to him—had set out the only terms under which he was prepared to continue with her, and what the consequences would be if she rejected those terms, broke them.
And Vasilis had listened. Had let her weep and sob and pour out all her misery and desperation. And then kindly, calmly and oh-so-generously, he had put forward another possibility for her.
He saved me. He saved me from the danger I was in of yielding to that overpowering temptation, that nightmare torment, that desperate desolation of realising that Anatole was a million miles away from what I yearned for.
Restlessly now, all these years later, she crossed to the window of her bedroom to look down over the gardens. She loved this house—this quiet, tranquil house that was so redolent of her marriage to Vasilis. He had brought her peace when her life had been in pieces.
Her eyes moved to the door set in the wall that led into a little dressing room, and from there into Vasilis’s bedroom. A room that was now empty of him.
I miss him. I miss his kindness, his company, his wisdom.
Yet already, in the long months since she’d stood at his bleak graveside, he was beginning to fade in her head. Or perhaps it was not that he was fading, but that another was forcing himself into her consciousness. Into the space that had once been her husband’s.
Just as her husband had once taken the space that had belonged to the man now replacing him.
I worked so hard to free myself of Anatole. Yet now he is back in my head, dominating everything.
And he was offering her now, with supreme, bitter irony, what he had never wanted to offer her before.
‘Do I tempt you?’
Anatole had taunted her with those words and she had felt the force of them...the temptation to let herself be tempted. And then she had felt the touch of his mouth on hers...
With a smothered cry of anguish she whirled about, forcing herself to get on with the day—to put aside the insanity that Anatole was proposing, force it out of her head.
But when, mid-morning, she went up to Nicky’s nursery to spend some time with him and let Nanny Ruth have a break, the first thing Nicky did was ask where Anatole was. She gave some answer—she knew not what—and was dismayed to see his little face fall. Even more dismayed to discover that he remembered what he’d said so sleepily the night before. What Anatole had said.
His little face quivered. ‘He said my pappou sent him to look after me. But where is he?’
She did her best to divert him, practising his reading and writing with him, until suddenly his eyes brightened and Christine, too, heard a car arriving—crunching along the front drive.
A bare few minutes later, rapid, masculine footsteps sounded outside, the nursery door opened, and there was Anatole.
With a whoop of glee Nicky rushed to him, to be swung up into Anatole’s arms. Christine could only gaze at them, emotion scything inside her powerfully at the sight of her son’s blazing delight at Anatole’s arrival—and Anatole, his face softening, showed in every line of his body his gladness to see Nicky.
He turned to Christine, with Nicky held effortlessly in the crook of his arm, one little hand snaked around his neck, and the pair of them smiled broadly at her.
So like each other...
There was a humming in her ears, blood rushing, and she could only blink helplessly. Then Anatole was speaking...
‘Who wants to go on an adventure today?’ he asked.
Nicky’s eyes lit up. ‘Me! Me!’ came the excited reply.
Anatole laughed and swung him down on his feet again, his eyes going to Christine.
‘It’s a glorious day out there—how about an outing? All three of us?’
She opened her mouth to give any number of objections, but in the face of Nicky’s joyous response could not voice them. ‘Why not?’ she said weakly. ‘I’ll let Nanny know.’
She made her escape, finding Nanny Ruth in her sitting room, watching a programme about antiques on the TV and finishing off a cup of tea.
‘What a good idea!’ she said, beaming when Christine told her of Anatole’s plans. She looked at her employer. ‘It will distract Nicky. And, if I might say...’ Christine got the
