With a fascination which seemed beyond his control, he had found himself watching her when she wasn’t looking. When she was curled up in an armchair reading a book and making his life seem almost...normal. He’d never had normal before. And hadn’t he been filled with an unbearable sense of longing for the family life which had been nothing but a dark void during his own childhood? Hadn’t he started wondering again whether he could give this child what he’d never had himself? And one thing was for sure: he could not break the heart of his child’s mother...
The car stopped outside the restaurant and as she draped the scarlet shawl around her shoulders he found he couldn’t look away. He wanted to pull her into his arms and kiss all that shiny lipstick away from her beautiful lips, but why start the evening on a false promise?
‘You look...great,’ he said neutrally as the driver opened the limousine door for her.
‘Thanks.’
Ellie’s fingers tightened around the gilt chain of her handbag. First he’d shot her down in flames and then he’d told her she looked great? Was that the best he could do? Why, she’d had more praise from her science teacher at school—and she was hopeless at science. Cautiously, she stepped onto the pavement, balancing carefully on her high heels, thinking how unlike the Ellie of old she must look with enough diamonds glittering on her finger to have bought her an apartment outright.
She was grateful for the armour of her expensive new clothes in a room where every other woman looked amazing—but it wasn’t that which made her feel suddenly wistful. All the wives and girlfriends looked so happy. Did she? Did she look how a new bride was supposed to look—all dewy-eyed and serene? She wondered if anyone guessed that inside she felt as if she were clinging onto this strange new reality by the tips of her fingers.
But sometimes you built things up in your head and they weren’t nearly as bad as you’d feared. The woman who’d designed Alek’s apartment—Alannah—turned out to be a lot less scary than Ellie had imagined. Maybe because she was married to Niccolò da Conti, a stunningly handsome man who seemed to command almost as much attention as Alek and who clearly adored his wife.
Some of the guests were more memorable than others. Ellie stood for ages talking to Luis and Carly and discovered they were all friends going back years. When the sultan arrived—last—Ellie was overcome with nerves because she’d never met a royal before and might not have bought such high heels if she’d thought about having to curtsey in them. But Murat was charming and quickly put her at her ease, and his Welsh wife was lovely.
Ellie watched the exalted group of men joshing and laughing with one another and as she listened to their wives eagerly discussing their social calendars she tried not to feel like the outsider in their midst.
‘Let me see your ring, Ellie,’ said Alannah, catching hold of Ellie’s hand and peering down at the glittering band. ‘Gosh, it’s beautiful. Those diamonds look almost blue—they’re so bright.’ She raised her eyes and smiled. ‘So tell us about Alek’s proposal—was it romantic?’
Ellie wished she’d anticipated this perfectly understandable question so that she could have prepped an answer. She didn’t know how honest to be. She didn’t know how much he’d already told them. She knew that apart from the faint swell of her breasts, there was no outward sign of her pregnancy. Maybe some of the women had already guessed the reason why the world’s most reluctant groom had put a ring on her finger, but for some reason she didn’t want to tell them. Not right now. Couldn’t tonight be her fantasy? Couldn’t she play the part of the shiny-eyed new bride and pretend, just this once?
So she curved a smile—and found it was stupidly easy to let her voice tremble with excitement as she allowed herself to be caught up in the memory. ‘He kissed me in Bond Street and almost stopped the traffic.’
‘Really?’ Alannah smiled. ‘Not another “get a room” moment from the famously private Alek Sarantos? Didn’t I read something about him kissing you while you were working as a waitress?’
A sudden lump in her throat was making words difficult and Ellie just nodded. She wondered if Alek ever thought about that moment of passion beneath the starry sky. That split second of thoughtlessness, setting off the domino effect which had brought them to this moment. Did he regret it?
Yet as she glanced over to see him deep in conversation with Murat, she found that she couldn’t regret what had happened, because sometimes your feelings defied logic. Something incredible had happened when she’d lain with him and she couldn’t seem to scrub that memory away. He could be arrogant and cold, but there was something about him which drew her to him like a magnet, no matter how hard she tried to resist. It might be senseless to care about him, but did that mean it was wrong? Could you stop yourself from falling in love with someone, even if you knew it was a mistake?