you are nothing like your father,’ Andy said with certainty. ‘Because you simply aren’t capable of the violence that he so obviously was.’
Darius drew in a sharp breath, even as he looked down at her searchingly, and saw only sincerity in the clear green of her eyes as she gazed back at him unflinchingly. ‘Thank you for that,’ he breathed huskily.
‘It was never in question,’ she assured him firmly. ‘We inherit our genes from our parents, yes, but that isn’t all that we are. A lot of what we are we make of ourselves. Look at me; no one else in my family was ever interested in ballet, or becoming a dancer of any kind. My sister is an accountant, for goodness’ sake!’
‘Your sister who doesn’t approve of me,’ Darius drawled ruefully.
‘She doesn’t know you,’ Andy dismissed. ‘Do Xander and your mother know the truth now?’ she added softly.
‘About my father’s death twenty years ago? Yes, I’ve talked to both of them on the subject this week,’ he confirmed as she nodded.
‘And has it helped to heal the breach between you and your mother?’
He smiled at Miranda’s perception in realising that was the reason for those years of estrangement between them. ‘We’ll get there, eventually. Unfortunately my mother and I are too much alike—we tend to close ourselves in emotionally. My mother has spent the last twenty years deliberately not asking me for the truth, because she was afraid of hearing it, which in turn caused the emotional disconnection between the two of us.’
‘And Xander? Was his accident last weekend really an accident?’
Darius drew his breath in sharply. ‘He says it was.’
‘And do you believe him?’
‘Yes, up to a point I do believe him.’ He nodded. ‘The truth of the matter is that I’ve been worried about Xander for a while now, without knowing why. He’s been playing even harder than he works, recklessly so, and he works ten-hour days.’
‘Like you do.’
‘Yes, like I do.’ He smiled slightly. ‘You know, I thought Xander and I were close, but I had no idea of the torment going on inside his head all these years. This fear that he might one day turn into a monster like our father.’ He gave a pained grimace.
‘He needs someone to believe in him. Not just you and your mother; that’s a given, because you both already love him unconditionally.’ She smiled. ‘Xander needs someone outside your family, a woman maybe, to love and believe in him.’
Darius eyed her curiously. ‘How did you get to be so wise?’
Andy wasn’t wise at all; she was talking from personal experience!
Her sister Kim and brother-in-law Colin had been nothing but supportive of her over the past four years, but it was because of Darius, because of his expressed belief in her, that she had found the courage to dare to dance in public again. She would never be as good a dancer as she had once been, and it was going to take the next few weeks of serious training before the gala for her to achieve even an acceptable level for her to appear on a public stage again. But she would never have found the courage to do even that without Darius’s belief in her.
A small glimmer of hope had begun to burn inside Andy as Darius talked to her of his parents’ marriage, his father’s violence, his traumatic childhood, the reason for the emotional breach between himself and his mother all these years and his brother’s emotional turmoil now.
A glimmer of hope that Darius, a man she knew never shared his emotions with anyone, had to have told her those things, shared those things with her, for a reason...
‘YOU MUST BE wondering why the hell I’m bothering to burden you with all of this unpleasant family history,’ Darius said.
Andy was more than wondering—deep inside, where her hopes and dreams had long been buried, a rainbow of possibilities, which had begun to blossom with her decision to dance again, was now bursting into an array of colours!
‘Actually, I was a little concerned initially that you might be going to confess that those rumours about your exotic tastes for whips and paddles in the bedroom were true after all.’
‘What?’ Darius eyed her incredulously.
She eyed him innocently. ‘You mean they aren’t true?’
‘Of course they aren’t tr— You’re messing with me, right?’ he realised as she grinned at him. ‘You do know that it isn’t true, but just a load of rubbish printed by the gutter press?’
She nodded, relieved that some of the tension seemed to have left his expression. ‘What I was actually wondering—’ she held Darius’s gaze steadily with hers as she slowly stood up ‘—is if you’re now interested in going back downstairs and bringing your fantasy of making love to me in my dance studio to life.’
‘What?’ Darius’s second gasp was a cross between surprise and laughter.
Miranda’s eyes glowed warmly as she slowly crossed the room, hips swaying gently, until she stood just in front of him. ‘I did say that it sounds intriguing,’ she reminded throatily.
‘So you did.’ Darius found himself constantly amazed by this woman.
He had just told Miranda all of his awful family history, and instead of being horrified by it, or running as fast as she could in the opposite direction, as she very well might have done, she was instead reminding him of his fantasy with more than a glint of interest in those amazing green eyes.
He closed his own eyes briefly before opening them again. ‘Have I told you yet how wonderful I think you are?’
A delicate blush warmed her cheeks as she answered him huskily. ‘Not yet, no.’
Darius’s arms moved about the slenderness of her waist as he pulled her gently into him. ‘Possibly because wonderful doesn’t even begin to cover what I think or feel for you. It’s because of how I feel about you that I’ve been able to face the demons of the past. That I’m sure I’ll eventually be able to completely heal this breach with my mother. And that’s because I—’ He broke off, the words proving more difficult to say than he had even imagined they would be.
Except Miranda deserved to hear the words. As heartfelt and as often as she would allow him to say them.
He drew in a ragged breath. ‘I know we haven’t known each other for very long. That it’s far too soon for you. That I definitely need to stop being so emotionally closed off, before I can even begin to hope that you’ll ever feel the same way about me. That...’
‘Darius, will you stop waffling and get to the point?’ She groaned her frustration.
He nodded abruptly. ‘The point is that I’ve fallen in love with you. Deeply. Completely. For always,’ he added with certainty. ‘I may be new to this, but what I feel for you is all encompassing. To the point that you now own me. And you know what? I don’t
