‘Please be there.’
‘If I’m not?’
‘Then I’ll know,’ Zander said, and he took off her glasses and looked deep into her eyes. ‘Do we say goodbye here?’
He was choosing to kiss her, Charlotte realised.
He chose to pull her into him to serve as a constant reminder. He kissed her better than the first time and maybe for the last time; he kissed her with his mouth and she felt it with her heart. ‘Please …’ He dropped contact for he had to think, but once he had done that, everything would change.
Change can be good, Zander thought as he looked into the blue that could perhaps forever entrance him.
The same can be good too, Zander mused as he thought of her head on the pillow beside him from this night for ever. ‘Meet me tonight.’
HE WENT to his suite and waited for sense to return.
He downed a drink as if were medicine, felt the burn in his gut and waited for normal services to resume, for him to remember how much she annoyed him. Except he could recall not an instant, not a laugh that had irritated him, or questions that had irked. For the first time he had wanted to tell all to another. Still, he racked his brains to find fault somehow, to prove himself right, to tell himself that this could not work, that he was mad to consider a future with her.
But consider it he did.
So too did she.
Had there been love in those coal-black eyes—was there more that he might be prepared to give?
It wasn’t the yacht or the trappings that lured her, it was the voice that had filled her grey bedroom those mornings that she wanted to hear for ever; it was the man who had made her smile and melt. She wanted so much more of him.
She blasted her body and face with the shower, told herself not to get her hopes up, that this was a man who had hurt her deeply, a man who had shamed her badly. Logic told her that this was a man she should not trust.
The phone rang and it was Nico. She had to remember where, for now at least, her duties lay. She would enjoy giving him the good news about the land. But instead of Nico it was Constantine with sad news.
‘He passed away,’ Constantine said. ‘Nico’s father passed away a couple of hours ago. In the end it was peaceful and they made their peace, which is good.’
Charlotte offered her condolences and then told Constantine to pass on that she had Zander’s signature, but they both knew it was not really the land that Nico wanted but the brother and the mother and the history that came with it.
‘Charlotte, you know we have tried all the homes and hostels on Xanos and Lathira but the nurses here were talking and there is one we have missed. It’s in the nunnery in the northern hills of Xanos, they take in a few fallen women and care for them. I have rung and spoken to them and I think I might have found her. Please, Charlotte, can you go and find out? I don’t want to tell Nico until I am certain. Can you go now?’
‘Of course.’ Charlotte looked at the clock. She could surely do it. If she was a bit late for dinner, Zander would have to understand.
It wasn’t just for Nico that she said yes, neither was it for duty. She wanted to face Zander tonight with the truth on the table. As she walked through the foyer, past the various boutiques, she glanced at the jeweller’s, at an empty space where the necklace had been, and she actually held hope.
She was sure, completely sure, that she was doing the right thing by him, that it was the truth that was needed here.
And she was almost sure that Zander wasn’t about to break her heart again.
The driver was delighted by the blonde passenger who spoke a little Greek, but Charlotte barely replied to his questions as the car threaded its way along the hillside and came to rest at the nunnery.
There was no reception on her mobile phone, so she asked the driver to wait and stalled his protests with cash. Then she rang the bell and, when it was answered, she was welcomed into the old building. She spoke for a while with two kindly nuns, one of whom spoke a little English, which helped when Charlotte’s Greek was not up to the job.
‘She speaks of the twins all the time,’ the nun explained. ‘She has two plastic dolls that she holds and will not let go of. It is sad …’
‘Can I see her?’ Even now she dared not get her hopes up, for she had thought she was close to finding her so many times before.
‘Of course. If she can see her sons, or even know that they are okay, maybe she can go to God in peace.’
‘She’s only young, though,’ Charlotte said, for the woman they were speaking about was only around fifty, she had been told.
‘She has lived a hard life.’
It was impossible to remember she was supposed to be working as she walked into the sparsely furnished room for as she walked over to Roula, it was Zander who was in her heart.
It was Roula. She could now, without hearing a word from the woman, ring Nico and tell him his mother had been found, for the eyes that stared into the distance had been passed on to her sons, the pain in them too. Charlotte wanted to embrace her, but instead she approached slowly.
‘This is Charlotte,’ the nun explained to a vacant-looking face of Roula. ‘She works for Nico …’ The old lady’s eyes jerked to hers.
‘He has been looking for you,’ Charlotte said in Greek.
‘Alexandros?’ Roula begged, and Charlotte could not lie to her. Neither could she stand to tell her the truth, that the son she longed for hated her.
‘I know Zander too,’ she settled for and then, with Charlotte’s sparse Greek and the nun’s sparse English, they sat, slowly piecing together her story. Though she was supposed to be meeting Zander, Charlotte knew this was more important. She listened to the woman as her agony was slowly revealed. There was no question of rushing her, no impulse to ring Nico, no thought to the fading light outside or the taxi driver waiting, no thought even of Zander sitting waiting for her at a dinner table. Time did not matter for the moment, for these were words that Zander needed to hear.
‘TONIGHT they have their own rooms,’ Alexandros said. ‘Separate rooms.’
‘What harm …?’ Roula started and then stopped. She had learnt not to question Alexandros’s decisions, but on this one she had to stand up to him. It would be cruel to separate the babies, so she tried another route. ‘They will wake you with their tears.’
‘Let them cry—that is the way they will learn that at night you are with me.’ He ran a hand between her thighs, told her that tonight there would be no excuses—not that he listened when she made them.
Her only relief was the slam of the door when he left to spend the day sitting outside the taverna, playing cards and drinking, but Roula’s relief lasted just a moment before the countdown started, dreading his return.
Seventeen and the mother of twins, they were her only shining light. More beautiful than any other babies, she could watch them sleep for hours, the little snubs of their noses pushed up by their fingers as they sucked on their thumbs, eyelashes so long that they met the curve of their cheeks. Sometimes one would open his eyes to the other. Huge black eyes would gaze at his brother, soothed by what he saw, and then