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He lowered his face to hers. His kiss was slow, and deep and sensual. It melted down her spine. But she mustn’t melt. She must not. It was essential she did not melt. Ever again.
She pulled away. ‘This was never the truth. It was just a lie to protect Armand from me.’
‘Don’t you understand?’ he demanded explosively. ‘That was the lie. Telling you that I’d had an affair with you in order to separate you from my brother. That was the lie. Because it was the only way to hit back at you for what you’d done to me—betrayed, as I believed, everything I’d believed we had between us. It was never true, Lissa, never. Yes, I sought you out at the casino deliberately. But once I’d seen you for yourself, I wanted you. It was torment to think of you as being my brother’s intended bride—and when you contacted me to tell me, so I thought, that your relationship with Armand was finished, I snatched you to me. I shut everything out of my mind, until … until that morning, when my world imploded around me. Hearing that call, thinking you were returning to marry Armand after all, nearly destroyed me. Forgive me, I beg of you, for what I said to you then. For all that I thought of you so wrongly.’
She swallowed. Her throat hurt. Her body hurt. Everywhere in her whole being hurt.
‘On the evidence you had, it was reasonable to think what you did,’ she said. What else could she say?
‘Reasonable?’ he echoed. His voice sounded hollow. ‘Yes, you are right—it was very reasonable of me to think what I did.’
There was a strange look in his face.
‘Reason. Logic. Evidence. Truth. Good words. All of them. Every one of them.’ His voice had changed—it seemed to come from very far away. ‘They were the words I used about you, Lissa. Right from the start—when I first heard of your existence and looked at that damning photo of you—and right to the end. When I heard your conversation with Armand and damned you with it. I applied reason to every judgement I made of you—every decision I took about you. It’s the way I’ve lived my life—with my head. Always my head. Always logical—always rational. Nothing else ever made sense to me.’
He took a breath—deep and rasping.
‘But you see …’ he said, in that same strange, remote voice, that came from somewhere so very far away. And she stood there, unable to move, unable to think or breathe. ‘You see, there was something I omitted to take into account in my dealings with you, Lissa. Something I must tell you—something I have discovered.’
He paused, and when he spoke again his eyes were very clear, his voice very clear.
‘I’ve always trusted reason,’ he said, ‘but it does not answer everything. You see …’ his clear, clear eyes held hers ‘… le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point.’
For a long, timeless moment she held still, letting the words enter her mind.
‘Do you need me to translate?’ His voice was quiet, his eyes, so clear, still holding hers.
She shook her head. His face was blurring. She could not speak. Only whisper. ‘The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.’
She felt the tears well up in her eyes, well and spill like diamonds. Her face constricted.
He was there in an instant. She reached gropingly for his hands.
The warmth of his fingers enclosed hers. Safe, cherishing.
She felt her heart turn slowly over.
‘Xavier—’ It was a breath. A hope. A hope she dared not have.
He folded her hands against the strong wall of his chest. She could feel the heavy beat of his heart. He was so close to her, so close.
He gazed down at her. His eyes were dark, and they stayed the breath in her lungs.
‘My heart, Lissa—my heart is yours. And it is what I should have trusted all along. Not what I knew, but what I felt.’
The tears ran down her cheeks. Washing away so much—so much pain and hurt. He kissed them away, his lips tender. And then his mouth sought hers again, and into his kiss he poured his heart.
‘Ah, mignonne, how much I love you.’
She clung to him. She was weeping now, and he held her, cradled her and murmured to her, cherishing her and keeping her safe. As he would for ever.
Emotion swelled in him like a wave. Gently he drew her down to sit on the stone balustrade. For a long while they sat, while Lissa quietened, and then they sat longer still, content to wind their arms around each other and gaze out over the azure sea beyond.
Presently, she spoke.
‘I tried to hate you, Xavier—or what you said to me, for what you did to me—but it only covered up what I truly felt. It hurt so much, knowing that everything I’d thought was between us was just a lie—that you had planned and manoeuvred and plotted the whole thing. That everything was false. Everything you had done or said—except during that last hideous exchange—was false.’ She took a ragged, shuddering breath. ‘Because to me— to me it had been the most precious time of my life, those weeks with you. I didn’t think it could last—I never dreamt that you could love me. I only knew that I had taken that time with you, while Lila was in America, and that if the operation had not worked, if Armand hadn’t felt for her what I’d so hoped, so prayed he did, then I would need to go to her, to be there for her. I could not abandon her to chase my own happiness. I did not dare love you …’
She lifted his hand, still holding hers, to her mouth.
