She swallowed again, felt razors in her throat.
‘It’s a happy ending all round,’ she said.
Except for me.
She felt herself give a silent cry of anguish. But then it had never been going to be a happy ending for her, had it? And not just because of her father’s ultimatum.
Because even with the merger Xandros would have terminated our marriage after six months. I would have lost him anyway. So what’s the difference if that loss has happened sooner and I have to bear seeing my half-sister get the life that I would give everything to have...?
The pain was just the same.
She took another razored breath, feeling the torment of seeing Xandros again—parting from him again—knife through her.
Xandros was looking at her, his dark eyes holding hers. Yet suddenly they were veiled. Unreadable.
‘The next Lakaris heir...’
His deep voice echoed hers. Something shifted in his eyes, in those dark, lambent depths. Something she could not recognise. She saw him take a breath, heavy and incised, and then he spoke again, his shoulders flexing minutely.
‘Yes, well...’ he said, and there was a heaviness in his voice that made no sense. ‘That won’t exactly be the case.’
Rosalie swallowed. ‘I suppose Ariadne’s baby might be a girl,’ she heard herself reply—as if discussing its gender were just a passing topic of conversation, instead of a nail in the lid of the coffin of her stupid and pathetic hopes, a nail driven into her breaking heart.
‘It can be anything it likes!’ Xandros retorted.
Something shifted in his eyes again—something that seemed to ignite in them.
‘Because it isn’t mine.’
Rosalie could only stare, uncomprehending, feeling a flame deep within her that was like a searing point of light...a laser that shot with blinding brilliance.
* * *
She was staring at him, her face blank. It took all Xandros’s strength to hold her gaze to tell her what she needed to hear.
‘It would be a biological impossibility for it to be so,’ he went on, his eyes never leaving her gaunt, strained face.
He saw her face work.
‘But the timing—your mother told me. Ariadne’s into her second trimester, so her pregnancy must have begun while she was still...still engaged to you...’
His jaw steeled. ‘Rosalie, why do you think Ariadne refused to marry me? I thought it was simply because she balked at doing her father’s bidding. But there was another reason.’ He took an incising breath, his mouth pressed tight. ‘A reason I had already started to suspect, and which she has now confirmed to me. She met someone else. Someone who fathered her baby. There can be no doubt about it! Her baby cannot be mine, because the most I ever shared with your half-sister was a goodnight kiss!’
He looked at her. Her grey-green eyes were distended. Those eyes that had captivated him from the first—that still did. That always would...
‘So now it’s you who must see, Rosalie.’
But what did she see? What did this woman who had fled from him really see?
Too much and not enough.
He felt emotion crush his lungs. Emotion he needed to hold back.
‘My mother got it wrong,’ he said. ‘Ariadne arrived out of the blue at the house, her pregnancy showing, and my mother jumped to what to her was the obvious conclusion. The wrong conclusion! When Ariadne realised what my mother had assumed she phoned me straight away. But it was too late.’ His voice changed. ‘You’d gone. Disappeared to London. Filed for divorce.’
He got up suddenly, striding restlessly to the window and back again, wheeling around to look down on her where she was sitting limply, immobile, white as a sheet.
‘A completely unnecessary divorce,’ he said quietly.