A terrible yearning swept through her. A yearning for what had never been, for what never would be. What never could be.
With aching pain, she moved past him.
‘Sophie—’
She paused minutely. She could not say goodnight, could not speak anodyne words. It was all beyond her.
‘Sophie, I—’
She tilted her head—the barest acknowledgement. ‘Goodbye, Nikos.’
Her voice was low, faint. She had meant to say goodnight, but a truer word had come. She started forwards again, into the interior.
‘Sophie—’
Her name came from him again, but it was different now, and his hand was on her shoulder. Halting her. She turned.
He was so close to her. Standing there in the doorway, his hand on her shoulder, pressing through the material of her blouse. He said something in Greek. She did not know what. Knew only that in the darkness of the night his face was stark.
His eyes were burning suddenly, with a fire that came from deep within.
Weakness went through her, making her breath catch, her heart seize. The warmth of his hand on her shoulder made her weaker yet. Her eyes clung to his. Clung in desperation, beseeching. Yearning.
Oh, dear God—Nikos!
Emotion filled her that she should be so close to him, and then anguish that this was, could only be, her final moment with him. That nothing remained—only this final parting.
And then…
Slowly, infinitely slowly, as if a weight were dragging at him, his hands slid from her shoulders to fasten around her arms. She felt his muscles tense, felt him draw her towards him. Her heartbeat had slowed. Her breath stopped. Time stopped. The unbearable past that had taken him from her once, the unbearable future that would take him from her for ever, all vanished, and there was only this moment—now. This moment with him. The soft dark of the night, the dim points of the stars, the faint soughing of the wind in the distant trees, the haunting cry of the hunting owl—that was all there was.
And Nikos. So close to her. So close.
Holding her.
Words came from him again, in his own language, low and rasped. She did not understand. But she did not need words to know what was in his eyes, his face.
His lips.
In a slow, slow descent, his mouth covered hers.
Like silken velvet his mouth moved on hers, drawing from her a nectar sweeter than honey. The nectar he had tasted before, as sweet as this. The nectar that had been in her very first kiss—and in her last.
And now in this.
She opened to him. She could not do otherwise. Giving herself, all of herself, to this moment of bliss. Nikos kissing her. Nikos’s mouth moving on hers softly, slowly.
As he had kissed her the very first time.
Past and present fused in her head, her heart. The past she had submerged beneath layer after layer of desperately imposed barriers was now as real and singing in her consciousness as the bliss of the present.
Holland Park, after the open-air opera, walking along, hand in hand, his fingers laced with hers. Nikos pausing in the shadowed pathway to turn her slowly towards him, to murmur her name, and then, as her eyes fluttered shut, to do what she had been longing, aching for him to do—kiss her…
It was as if that moment had come again—as if this was the first time all over again. As if her heart were singing, soaring as it had then, her body and soul filling with the sweetest bliss.
Then, in that distant, long-ago past, he had drawn back regretfully, reluctantly, and she had gone on standing there, dazed and dizzy with delight, gazing up at him, lips parted, her heart soaring heavenward on wings of wonder.
‘I must take you home,’ he’d murmured then, and had walked with her, slowly, his arm around her shoulders, their bodies touching. They had meandered homewards, slowly, back towards her father’s house. His car had been parked there, and though she had invited him in for coffee—daringly, hopefully—he had ruefully shaken his head.
‘I can’t,’ he’d said. ‘Or I will want to stay…’
All he’d done was tilt up her chin and drop the lightest, slightest kiss upon her lips. Then he’d let her go and turned away, walked back to the car, pausing only to lift his hand in a final goodnight and call softly, ‘Go in, Sophie.’
And she had, though it had been like tearing herself away, and when she had shut the front door she had leant back against it until she’d heard his car drive away, and then she had drifted upstairs, floating on air to her bedroom, aching with all her being for him.
As she ached now. Now that she was in his arms again—now that the bliss of his kiss was soaring in her veins—now that the low, hectic beat of her heart, the pulse of her blood, were binding her to him—now that the warm, sensuous pressure of his mouth was drowning her senses.