‘I’m sorry,’ she whimpered. ‘I know it’s cowardly to sneak away.’
‘Then why are you?’
‘I shouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t have...’ Her voice tailed away and she looked down at the floor.
‘Made love?’ he supplied.
She gave a tiny nod. ‘It was wrong. All wrong.’
‘It felt damn right to me.’
‘I know.’ She gave a sudden bark of harsh laughter and her eyes flashed. ‘It’s what I keep thinking. How can something so wrong feel so right?’
‘If it feels so right then how can it be wrong?’ he countered.
‘It just is. You’re getting married.’
That little fact was something that constantly played on his mind. Only being in Amy’s arms had driven it and the accompanying nausea away.
Tightness coiled in his stomach. Throwing off the covers, he climbed out of bed and strode over to her, slamming his hand on the door to prevent her from escaping.
He spoke slowly, trying to think the words through before he vocalised them, knowing that one wrong word would make her flee whether or not he barricaded the door. ‘Amy, I might be getting married, but it’s you I want.’
‘We’ve been through this before. It doesn’t matter what you want or what I want. It doesn’t change the reality of the situation. Tonight was a mistake that can’t be repeated.’
‘Running away won’t change anything either. Admit it, matakia mou. You and I belong together.’
Her jaw clenched in response.
‘So what are you going to do?’ he asked scathingly, leaning closer to her ashen face. ‘Run away and start a relationship with Leander? Is that how you intend to prove we’re over?’
‘How do you know about Leander?’ She shook her head and took a deep inhalation. ‘Don’t answer that. I can guess.’
He felt no guilt for seeking information about her date. Helios looked out for those he cared for. ‘He’s too young for you. I know you, Amy. You don’t need a boy. You need—’
‘He’s my brother,’ she snapped suddenly, angry colour flushing her cheeks.
Her declaration momentarily stunned him into silence. Stepping back to look at her properly, he dragged a hand through his hair. ‘But Leander is from Agon. Your brothers are English, like you...’
‘I’m only half-English.’
‘Your parents are English.’ Weren’t they? Wasn’t this something they had talked about...?
‘My father’s English. Elaine—my mum—didn’t give birth to me. My birth mother’s from Agon.’
How had he not known this?
Amy must have sensed the direction his mind was travelling in. ‘Do you remember once asking me how I’d developed such an obsession and a love for your country?’
‘You said it was... You never gave a proper answer...’ Realisation dawned on him as he thought back to that conversation, months ago, when they had first started sleeping together. She’d brushed his question aside.
‘And you never pursued it.’ She shook her head in a mixture of sadness and anger.
‘I didn’t know there was anything to pursue. I’m not a mind reader.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She gave a helpless shrug. ‘A huge part of me wanted to tell you, and ask for your help in finding her, but I knew that confiding in you would change the nature of our relationship.’
‘What would have changed?’ he asked, completely perplexed.
From the first the chemistry between them had been off the charts. Making love to Amy had always felt different from the way it had felt with his other lovers. He’d never felt the urge to ask her to leave at night—he liked sharing his space with her, this incredibly sexy woman with a brain the size of a watermelon. He loved it that she could teach him things he didn’t know about his own country.
To learn now that she had roots in his country...
‘I didn’t keep any secrets from you,’ he added, his head reeling.
‘Apart from throwing a party to find a wife?’
He inhaled deeply. Yes, the real purpose of the ball was something he’d kept from her for as long as he could. But this information was on a different scale. He’d known Amy had kept a part of herself sheltered from him, but he’d had no idea it was something so fundamental.
Her eyes held his. ‘I was scared.’
Another stabbing pain lanced him. ‘Of me?’
‘Of what you would think of me. At least I was in the beginning.’ Her voice lowered to a whisper. ‘And I was scared because you and I came with time constraints. We had a fixed marker for when we would end, we both knew that. We both held things back.’
‘I never held anything back.’
‘Didn’t you?’ There was no challenge in her eyes, just a simple question. ‘Helios, I couldn’t take the risk of what we had developing into something more—of us becoming closer. We can’t be together for ever. I was trying to protect myself.’
For an age he stared at her, wishing he could see into her mind, wishing he could shake her...wishing that everything could be different.
‘Do not go anywhere,’ he said, turning his back to her and striding to his dressing room. ‘You and I are going to talk, and this is not a conversation to have naked. We’re long past the point of keeping secrets from each other.’
While Helios slipped on a pair of boxers Amy used the few moments alone to catch her thoughts before he reappeared.
It wasn’t long enough.
She pressed her back tightly against the door, her vocal cords too constricted for speech.
‘I mean it, Amy,’ he said with a hard look in his eye. ‘You’re not going anywhere until we’ve talked this through.’
‘What’s the point?’ she asked, her voice hoarse.
‘If your history is what’s stopping us from being together then I damn well deserve to know the truth.’ He strolled back to the bed and sat in the middle of it, his back resting against the headboard. ‘Now, come here.’
What an unholy mess. It had never been supposed to end like this. Her memories of her time with him were supposed to be filled with wonder, not sorrow and despair. Losing him wasn’t supposed to hurt.
She perched on the end of the bed and twisted to face him. Blowing out a puff of air, she gazed at the ceiling.
‘My father had an affair with the au pair. She dumped me on him when I was two weeks old and has wanted nothing to do with me since. Her husband and her parents don’t know I exist.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
OTHER THAN A slight shake of his head and a tightening of his lips, Helios gave no response.
‘My birth mother had me when she was nineteen. I know very little about her—she didn’t work for them for long.’
‘When you say for them...?’
‘My parents. My mum—as in the woman who raised me—was pregnant and had a three-year-old son when they employed Neysa, my birth mother, as an au pair. She quit after a couple of months but then turned up at my dad’s workplace seven months later and left me with the receptionist.’
Amy studied Helios’s reaction carefully. She no longer really feared, as she had at the beginning of their relationship, that he would think any less of her, but nagging doubts remained. Cruel words spoken in the playground still haunted her, clouding her judgement.
‘You must have been one ugly baby for your own mum to dump you.’
‘Do you have 666 marked on the back of your head?’
‘Your real mum’s a slut.’
She’d had to force herself to rise above it and pretend the taunts didn’t affect her when in reality they had burned. For years she had tortured herself, wondering if the taunts held the ring of truth. For years she’d tried to live a life as pure as the driven snow to prove she wasn’t intrinsically bad.
For years she’d wondered how Elaine—to her mind, her mum—could even bring herself to look at her.
Helios stared at her as if she’d just told him that all the scientists and even physics itself were wrong and the world was actually flat.
‘Did she leave a note?’ he asked quietly. ‘Give a reason?’
‘Her note to my father said only that I was his and that she couldn’t keep me.’
‘So your father had an affair with the au pair when your mum was pregnant? And they’re still together?’
She nodded. ‘God knows how Mum found it in her to forgive him but she did, and she raised me as her own.’
Helios shook his head, amazement in his eyes. ‘She raised you with her own children?’
‘Yes. Danny was born five months before me. We were in the same school year.’
He closed his eyes with a wince. ‘That must have been difficult.’
‘At times it was horrendous—especially at secondary school. But we coped.’
Amy’s existence could have caused major friction between her and her siblings, but both Danny and their older brother, Neil, had always been fiercely protective of her, particularly during their teenage years.
‘Did you always know?’
‘Not when I was a young child. My family was my family. Danny being five months older than me...it was just a fact of our lives. Neil always knew I was only his half-sister but, again, it was just a fact of our lives and something he assumed was normal. My parents never mentioned it so he didn’t either. Then we got older and other kids started asking questions... Mum told me the truth when I was ten.’