‘I haven’t said all I need to,’ he said as he walked towards her, his eyes penetrating hers.
She swallowed hard as he towered over her, determined she wasn’t going to move away again. It was time to face up to him—and to the fact that he didn’t love her.
‘You made it clear as I left the villa that you had nothing more to say to me. Now you turn up here and accuse me of selling your story. One I know nothing about.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said and her gaze flew to his at this uncharacteristic admission.
‘Have you ever had any contact with your mother since?’
Suddenly she had to know the whole story. She had to know his story—not the one in the paper that Christos had told. She thought of the words his grandmother had said about her having the key. Had the old lady meant that their baby would be the key to healing his past? Surely she hadn’t known his mother’s story would hit the headlines.
‘She tried to contact me when my father died, and several times since, but...’ He paused and looked at her, the expression in his eyes far away, wrapped in past hurt.
‘But what, Nikos?’ she asked, gently touching his face with her hand, feeling the sharpness of stubble that was also out of character.
It tore her apart to see him like this. She’d do anything she could to make it right for him, but agreeing to marry him wouldn’t work. Whatever was haunting him needed to be brought out into the open, and it was something she needed to do before she moved on to being a mother.
‘I couldn’t let her back into my life. She walked out on me when I was a child—a young boy.’
She heard the pain in his words, felt it transferred to her through the fingers that touched his face. A touch he seemed oblivious to.
‘She didn’t come to your father’s funeral?’
The movement was hardly visible, but he shook his head.
‘They should never have got married. They didn’t belong together. I remember soon after she’d gone my father caught a butterfly, held it tight in his cupped hands, and told me my mother was like a butterfly.’
Serena frowned, not knowing what he was saying, but an image of the brightly coloured creature contained in large manly hands sprang to her mind. ‘What did he mean?’ she whispered, unsure of the relevance this had.
‘He said we had to let it go or it would die.’ The stark and matter-of-fact words sounded numb, devoid of any emotion.
Inside her she wept tears for the boy who had been forced to grow up without his mother, but she wondered if that had been what his mother had really wanted. Could a mother really walk away from her child so coldly?
Before she could say anything else Nikos continued as if he had never expected her to respond.
‘That’s the last time I remember my father being a man I looked up to. He began to drink heavily, became someone to avoid at all costs. That’s when I went to live with my grandparents. I was eight years old.’
Suddenly he looked down at her, his eyes searching hers, and then his gaze dropped further, to the small white baby vest she held. Tension filled the air and she held her breath as he took it from her, his hands so big and tanned against the little garment. He pressed it against the palm of one hand and she bit hard into her lip and looked at his bent head, at the thick, dark, almost tamed curls she’d plunged her fingers into in the throes of passion. He was making everything so much harder.
‘Nikos.’ He looked up at her and as his eyes met hers again she took the vest from him. ‘Don’t do this.’
‘Do what?’ he said hoarsely.
‘Make it harder.’ She heard the catch in her voice and moved away from him, dropping the vest onto the pile, unable to deal with the flood of love and despair that ravaged her heart.
‘I will not walk away from my son, Serena.’ His eyes glittered with determination and his voice reverberated with outrage. ‘I can’t.’
‘You don’t know it will be a boy.’ She frowned at his insistence that the baby was a boy.
‘No,’ he said curtly, the firmness she’d come to expect in his voice back, and then he looked at her.
His defensive wall was in place once more. If only it had stayed down long enough for her to cross—long enough for her to slip through and show him what love could be like.
But that was impossible. He didn’t let anyone close. She knew that now.
* * *
Nikos fought hard to push down the rampage of emotions holding that tiny scrap of material had unleashed. It weakened him—weakened his resolve.