Nikos—only Nikos…only ever Nikos in all the world for me…
Her heart was full with emotion, the jewel in her palm rich and rare and so, so precious…
‘Sophie?’
Her name sounded in the air, sibilant and questioning. Nikos was looking at her enquiringly, his chair half pushed back. The dining room was almost deserted, the candle burnt low. The couple in the glass had vanished.
Or had they?
She got to her feet, as Nikos did the same, and then he was there, ushering her out as they were bowed away by the waiter—the last diners to leave, she saw. And Nikos was at her side, falling in beside her, as they stepped through the open French windows into the garden beyond the conservatory restaurant. She felt his presence, his closeness. Felt the rightness of his place at her side.
This is where he should be—where I should be…
Like the couple in the glass. Together.
‘Are you cold?’ Nikos’s enquiry was solicitous as he walked beside her on the dimly lit path.
Sophie shook her head. She wasn’t cold. The wine in her veins and the soft summer night warmed her. So did the heat in her blood. Was her pulse heavier than it normally was? Or was she just more conscious of the beating of her heart?
More conscious of the tall figure at her side?
What am I doing here? she thought. Surely she could not be here, with Nikos, having dined with him, talked to him, listened to him. Reality was prickling at her mind, penetrating the hazy miasma that had been cocooning her. Yet its entrance was unsure, uncertain.
She glanced about her. What was real? The night air? The scent of honeysuckle teasing her senses? The fall of their footsteps on the path? The massed dimness at the edge of the garden?
Nikos at her side?
Could he be real?
Oh, yes—oh, yes…He was real!
Nikos—Nikos, Nikos…
She tried to silence the voice in her head, for it had no right to cry out like that—nor reason, either. But reasons seemed a thousand miles away, and all that was left was a burning consciousness of his presence—a consciousness that became even more vivid as he paused at the top of a short flight of steps, looking upwards into the sky.
‘Look at the stars,’ he said.
She followed his uplifted gaze. Overhead the heavens shone, pricked with gold, the faintest wisps of cloud scudding over them.
‘There’s Jupiter,’ he said.
She gazed blindly. He raised his hand, to point, and as he did so his other hand closed on her shoulder, to alter her position slightly. Suddenly his breath was warm on her neck, and the stars blurred in her eyes. The warmth of his palm on her shoulder seemed like a brand. Imprinting her with his presence.
For a moment, timeless and motionless, she stilled completely, every cell in her body piercingly aware of Nikos’s closeness, his touch, his breath, his scent, his very being. Emotion lifted her.
Then, abruptly, the hand at her shoulder fell away.
‘The car park is just through here,’ he said. His voice was terse suddenly, and his pace as they walked towards the gate that led from the garden quickened. She felt the emotion that had lifted her hang, quiveringly, inside her.
As he gained the car, opening the passenger door for her, Nikos set his jaw tensely. What was happening to him?
What had been happening all evening?
As he gunned the engine and manoeuvred the car out of the car park, he tried to get his head around it. The evening had had a clear, unambiguous purpose: to put the past behind him. To make him see, finally, that the past was over and done with. That Sophie had no power to arouse emotions in him. That he could gain immunity from her, from what she could do to him…
Liar…
The word shaped itself in his head and he brushed it aside, but it reformed again. From the corner of his eye he could see her sitting there beside him, feel her presence, her reality.