own?
‘Actually, yes, he was comforting me,’ she said. She looked him straight in the face. ‘Because I had just found out about Malantha, you see.’
He stilled then, became so still that an outside observer might have wondered if he breathed at all. Only the ebony glitter from the narrowed eyes showed that he did.
‘What about Malantha?’ he questioned softly.
‘That she was the girl you were promised to! I discovered that I had been nothing but a light, summer diversion, one in just a long line of willing lovers! I saw you both together, you see, Dimitri. I discovered that night what everyone else on the island knew—that Malantha was always the girl you were intended to marry—and, yes, I was upset. Very upset,’ she finished, though the word sounded tame when she said it now.
Upset? At the time it had felt as though her heart had been torn from her body and ripped apart, with the edges left raw and jagged and gaping. First love and first heartbreak—and didn’t they say that the cut of first love was the deepest cut of all?
Everyone had told her that the pain would fade and eventually heal, and heal it had. It had just left a faint but indelible scar along the way.
She lifted her head and stared at him, her eyes bright and searching. ‘What happened to Malantha, by the way?’ she asked.
There was a pause, a pause that seemed to go on for ever and ever.
‘I married her.’
The world shifted out of focus, and when it shifted back in again it looked different. It was what she had half known and half expected and yet not what she wanted to hear. For hadn’t there been a foolish part of her that longed for him to tell her that she had been mistaken? That he had not been promised to Malantha at all. Or that he had, but had changed his mind along the way.
In a way it made things worse, and yet in a funny kind of way it made things better. So she had not been wrong. Those nights when she had lain awake wondering if she had ruined everything by jumping to a stupid conclusion had been wasted nights. Her instincts had been right all along.
She sucked in a dry, painful breath. ‘Then hadn’t you better be getting back to her?’ she questioned coldly. ‘In the circumstances, I doubt whether she would approve of you sitting in my kitchen, drinking my coffee—do you, Dimitri?’
‘My wife is dead,’ he said baldly.
There was a moment of terrible, stunned silence and Molly was rocked by emotions so basic and conflicting that for several long seconds she could not speak.
Dead? She looked at him blankly, seeking and finding the sombre affirmation in his eyes. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘W…when?’ she asked ineffectually.
‘When Zoe was a baby.’
‘Oh, God, Dimitri—that’s awful.’
He shook his head. He didn’t want her sympathy. It was mistimed and irrelevant now. He wanted her, he realised. He always had and he still did. To lose himself in the soft white folds of her body. To feel that tumble of blonde hair swaying like silk against his chest. Desire could strike at any time, and this could not be a more inappropriate one, but that didn’t stop him feeling its slow, stealthy course through his veins, like some unstoppable drug.
‘It was a long time ago. It is past.’
For a moment, all that could be heard was the ticking of the clock.
‘How old is Zoe now?’ she asked suddenly.
The black eyes narrowed. ‘Fifteen.’
This time the sums were easier. ‘So you married Malantha soon after I had left?’ But she didn’t need an answer to that. ‘Of course you did.’ She looked him straight in the eye. ‘Just tell me one thing, Dimitri—were you sleeping with her at the same time you were sleeping with me?’
His eyes iced over and his mouth curved with distaste. If anything could demonstrate their fundamental differences, then that one question had managed it with blinding simplicity. ‘Of course not. Malantha was brought up to be a virgin on her wedding night.’
It was meant to wound, and it did—but it was the truth, and who was she to argue with that?
She wanted to tell him to drink his coffee and go, and yet wasn’t there some irrational side of her that wanted the very opposite? To take him into her arms as if the intervening years simply hadn’t happened—and, in the process, to exorcise him and his sensual influence once and for all.
‘So now what?’ she questioned, amazed at how steady her voice sounded. ‘You haven’t even told me why you’re here, or how long you’re staying. Or even how you ended up living so close?’
Her eyes were questioning and he gave a soft laugh. ‘You think I tracked you down? Found where you were living and moved into the house next door?’
As he said it she realised how preposterous the idea was. ‘So it’s just a terrible coincidence?’
Terrible? Right at that moment, it didn’t seem so terrible. The woman who had always been able to take him straight to heaven and back was living in the house next door. Thoughtfully, Dimitri stroked the pad of his thumb against the warm circumference of the coffee-cup. If fate had provided such a breathtaking opportunity for a taste of former pleasures, then who was he to refuse such an opportunity?
He stared at her, wondering if there really was such a thing as coincidence? Now that he came to think about it, hadn’t she once described Hampstead to him, telling him how beautiful it was and painting a picture of the heath and all its glories? Had that description planted a seed in his subconscious mind, so that, when he had been choosing where to stay in London, he had instinctively plumped for the leafy green area which seemed so far from the centre of a city it was so close to? Had he subconsciously willed fate to step in—and had it not done just that?
‘I am here for a few weeks,’ he said slowly. ‘Zoe is going to an English summer school and I wanted to accompany her.’
Her mind ticked over; she was getting quite good at mental arithmetic. A few weeks. It wasn’t a lifetime. Surely it wouldn’t take too much planning for both of them to be able to keep out of the other’s way for that long. As long as they were agreed.
‘So what are we going to do?’
‘Do? What do you suggest?’ More as a diversionary tactic, he picked up his coffee and sipped it, black eyes challenging her through the thin cloud of steam which rose up like clouds. He wondered what she would say if he told her exactly what he would like to do at that precise moment, and how she would react. Would she open her mouth to his if he pulled her into his arms and began to kiss her? He saw the inky dilation of her pupils and once again he felt the powerful pull of desire. Because nothing was more seductive than mutual desire, particularly if one of the parties was doing their utmost to suppress it. ‘We are neighbours, Molly,’ he said softly. ‘And we must behave as neighbours do.’
‘You mean…’ she swallowed ‘…avoid each other wherever possible?’
‘Is that how English neighbours behave?’ he mocked. He shook his head and smiled. ‘On the contrary,’ he said, and the gravel-deep voice sounded
