‘But Fotini suffered from severe depression. And she didn’t want our daughter.’
Costas turned his head to meet her gaze as her gasp of indrawn breath stretched between them. ‘Her condition was so serious she was hospitalised. And when she came home, despite the medication, her moods were unpredictable, her behaviour extreme. The highest of highs and the darkest of lows.’ He paused, nostrils flared and jaw set.
‘The only constant was that she steadfastly refused to have anything to do with Eleni unless forced to.’
Sophie’s heart clenched. For a little motherless child. For Costas, coping with a baby and a wildly unstable wife. And for her cousin, Fotini. What must they all have suffered?
‘It turned out that Fotini’s condition was exacerbated by the alcohol and the drugs her friends had been secretly supplying.’
‘You’re joking!’ No one could be that foolish, surely.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t think they realised how serious her condition was. Fotini could be the life and soul of the party when the mood took her. But the night she died they found a mix of alcohol and illegal drugs in her bloodstream. That was why she ran off the road. We were just lucky no one else was with her at the time.’
‘Oh, Costas.’ Sophie curved her palm around the clenched tension in his jaw, wishing she could ease the pain that throbbed in his voice. The regret.
‘It’s over now,’ he said, looking into her eyes. ‘But you need to know I wasn’t attracted to you because of any resemblance to Fotini. I want you for yourself, glikia mou. Everything about you is unique. You fill my heart in a way I never believed possible before.’
She met his eyes and saw the blaze of raw emotion there.
His hands cupped her face. She felt them shake. Those big, capable, powerful hands, trembling against her skin.
‘I love you, Sophie. That’s why I can’t let you leave me. I want you with me always. I need you. You’re part of me, part of my soul.’
Sophie closed her eyes for an instant against the hot, bright welling emotions that seared her. She was almost too scared to believe this was real.
‘ Agapi mou. I hurt you, I know. It was unforgivable. The act of a beast.’ His ragged voice broke through the last of her barriers. ‘What I feel for you—it scared me. Can you believe that? So like a coward I tried to run away, to pretend it was only lust between us.’
His thumb brushed her cheek in a soothing caress at odds with the searing fire in his eyes.
‘I didn’t believe in such a love between a man and a woman.’ He shrugged. ‘Perhaps it was the experience of an unhappy marriage. Or maybe it was fear of losing control, of total dependence on a single woman for my happiness. I don’t know, Sophie. All I know is that I refused to believe what I felt. I lied to you and to myself, pretending it was something I could contain. But it was too late. And when you rejected me—’ his voice deepened in pain and his hold on her tightened ‘—I lashed out at you. Unforgivably.’
Her eyes were brimful of tears. He was a dark blur filling her vision. She shook her head, too choked to speak. But her hands spanned his jaw, slid lovingly over his cheeks, his lips, his brow, needing the sensation of his hot flesh to anchor her in this spinning world of sudden, blazing happiness.
She leaned close. ‘I love you too, Costas. So much. I tried to hide it from you—it was tearing me apart to leave you.’
‘Sophie!’ His voice, like black velvet, caressed her. ‘We’ll never be apart again, I promise.’
And then she couldn’t speak, but this time because his lips were on hers, tenderly urgent. She opened for him and the world spun away.
It was an age later that she surfaced, panting as she dragged in oxygen. She felt so different. As if the shadows of the past had been banished by the magic of what she and Costas shared.
She smiled up into his face and he responded with a blazing grin that lit his features in a way that sucked the newly acquired oxygen straight from her lungs. He really was gorgeous when he looked at her like that.
‘You’ve sealed your fate, Sophie. You’re mine now.’ There was no doubting the possessive gleam in his eyes. And Sophie didn’t mind one bit.
She stroked the hard angle of his jaw, revelling in the sensation of his warm skin against hers.
‘And you’re mine.’ She smiled and watched him swallow as she feathered her fingertips over his mouth.
‘Sophie? There’s something else you need to know.’
She experienced a moment’s dread as she read uncertainty in his dark eyes. Then she squared her shoulders. Whatever it was, she could cope, now that she knew he loved her.
‘What is it?’
‘Eleni. She—’
‘You said she was making a good recovery!’