The question she so badly wanted to answer shaped itself in her mind yet again.
Could I really do what he so wants me to do? Is it possible? Is it really possible?
Doubt and torment filled her mind. Until Rafael Sanguardo had walked into her life her resolve had been absolute. Romance could never be part of her life! Never! But he had overset her resolve, made her question all her bleak assumptions about what was no longer possible for her.
And now, as she gazed across at him, she felt that resolve weaken, that bleak determination erode. Longing swept through her—longing to accept, to take what he was offering to her! To take it with all her being! To give herself to him as she longed so much to do!
Could I give myself to this time, this place, this moment? To this man? Could I truly give myself to him?
That was the question that hung like a dazzling star in the heavens, waiting for the answer that only she could give...
* * *
Celeste could not sleep. She lay tossing and turning in the wide bed in which she’d slept soundly and uninterruptedly all the previous nights. She knew what had made the difference.
Rafael.
The man she desired as no other... With a desire that had leapt in her veins the moment her eyes had lit upon his tall, lean figure suddenly beside her on the beach that afternoon!
A desire that was tempting her to do what she had never done. To defy the past, and claim a present that was everything Rafael Sanguardo held out to her!
She gazed, sleepless, at the slowly turning fan over her head. She had never thought this day would come. Had thought that she would continue alone—must continue alone...always alone! Dragging the past behind her. The past that clung to her like a foul miasma, its tainted tendrils netting her. The past that she could never leave behind her. Never cut herself free from—
But never before had she so longed to be able to do so! To take with open heart and hands what Rafael was offering! To give herself to him fully and freely—
She pushed the bedclothes back, strode to the glass doors that opened to her balcony and slid them open, the mosquito mesh with them. She stepped out into the night, glanced upwards. Stars blazed overhead, burning through the golden floor of heaven. So far away—so far away...
Memory coiled in her head. How she had first gazed up all those years ago, when she was as young—as helpless!—as Louise...gazing up at the blaze of stars in a sky where clouds were unknown. Gazing up across the vast distance between where she’d stood and where the stars dwelt in the lofty, remote reaches of farthest space, freed from the mire of the world so far below them.
She had longed, then, to be drawn upwards into their distant reaches—to be taken up off the earth, far, far away from everything that had been happening to her, everything that had surrounded her there below, dragging her into the sordid mire of the world that she’d been so helplessly, hopelessly trapped in.
Yet now, as she tilted her head upwards and gazed at the jewelled sky, it was not the scintillation of the distant stars that was dominant in her senses but the warm, balmy air, the fragrant scent of the blooms upon the trees wafting towards her, the sound of the sea, the wash of the warm, breaking waves, their airy foam dispersed into the tropical night.
The profusion seemed to play upon her skin, lulling her, slowing her breathing. She felt her gaze slip from the distant stars, rest instead on the outline of palm trees, the pale shimmer of flowers in the gardens beyond her room. The warmth of the night enveloped her, the soft breeze whispering over her skin. And in her head the soft whispering of words was taking shape.
You don’t need to gaze up at the stars to find beauty and wonder, or to seek refuge in the heavens. You no longer need to long to escape the earth. This earth—here, now—this scented garden, this dark foliage, these velvet flowers it bears, all lapped by the moon-silvered sea—is good. It has blessings of its own.