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The stone was cold, but Siena wouldn’t have swapped it for the world. ‘No, it’s fine… Andreas, why are we here?’
For the first time Siena noticed that Andreas was avoiding her eye and then she looked more cl
osely. Her heart lurched. She might almost say that he looked nervous… He seemed to take a deep breath, and then he turned to look at her. The tortured expression on his face nearly took her breath away. Then he took her hands in his and she didn’t say anything.
He looked down for a moment, and then back up. Siena had never seen him hesitant like this, and her heart beat fast.
‘That morning…the morning after…when you came out of the hotel and I got on my bike and left…this is where I came. I came to this exact spot and sat on these steps and I looked out over this view and I cursed you.’ Andreas gripped her hands tight, as if to reassure her, and then he continued.
‘But mostly I cursed myself for being so stupid… You see, I thought I was the fool, to have been seduced by you. I thought you were like those other debutantes. Worldly-wise and experienced. Spoilt and bored.’
Siena tried to speak, familiar pain gripping her. ‘Andreas—’
He shook his head. ‘No. Let me speak, okay?’
Siena’s heart lurched and she nodded. Andreas looked impossibly young at that moment.
‘From the moment I saw you in that room I wanted you. When the opportunity came to be alone with you I jumped at it. And you were nothing like I’d expected. You were sweet and funny, so sexy and innocent.’
His mouth twisted. ‘And yet those were all the very things I thought you’d fabricated when you stood at your father’s side and denounced me. When his men took me outside I felt I deserved a beating for having been so duped… When I was called into my boss’s office I lashed out at you—you received the full brunt of my pain. You see, I was arrogant enough to believe that no woman could enthral me. I wasn’t going to have my head turned so easily. I’d vowed to get out of my small town and make something of myself. I wasn’t going to get caught up in suffocating domesticity like my father had and waste my life…and I wasn’t going to fall in love with some girl only to find out she didn’t love me, as my friend Spiro did to his tragic cost. Yet within minutes of setting eyes on you you’d turned me inside out and I didn’t even know it.’
Siena wasn’t sure if she was breathing. His eyes burned like two dark sapphires.
‘After what happened I put you down as a rich, cold-hearted bitch. But I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I wanted out of my world and into your world so badly. I wanted to be able to stand in front of you some day and show you that I wasn’t nothing. Prove that you had wanted me. You heard that conversation with my boss, didn’t you?’
Siena’s eyes were locked on Andreas. Slowly she nodded, and whispered, ‘I went looking for you. I wanted to apologise, to explain.’
Andreas’s mouth thinned. ‘I probably wouldn’t have believed you—just like I never gave you the chance to speak the next morning.’
Siena’s hands tightened in his. Her voice was pained. ‘You had to leave Europe. I did that to you.’
Andreas extricated one hand and lifted it to tuck some wayward hair behind Siena’s ear. He smiled. ‘Yes, and it was probably the best thing that could have happened to me. I got to America fired up with ambition and anger and energy. I caught Ruben’s eye…and the rest is history. If that night hadn’t happened and I’d stayed here I might be lucky enough to be managing that hotel now. I certainly wouldn’t own it… I don’t think I even knew my own potential until I went abroad.’
Siena said fiercely, ‘You would have succeeded, no matter what.’
Andreas’s hand cupped her jaw and he said seriously, ‘Would it even mattter to you if I was just the manager of some middle-of-the-road hotel?’
Siena’s heart stopped for a second and then galloped on. She shook her head and said honestly, ‘No, not in the slightest.’
Andreas’s fingers dropped from her chin and he took her hand again. He looked pained. ‘There’s something I should have said to you long before now…when you asked me if I wanted children…’
Siena remembered what he’d said that night and started to speak, not wanting to be reminded, but Andreas squeezed her hand.
‘No. It was unforgivable and cruel, what I said. You touched a nerve and I lashed out. And I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve it. You are not a cold-hearted tease. Any child would be lucky to have you as its mother, Siena.’
Siena felt tears prickle and blinked rapidly. His apology was profound, and she couldn’t speak, so she just nodded in acknowledgement. Andreas drew in a shaky breath and reached into the pocket of his jeans to take something out. And then he got down on one knee before her, with the whole of Paris bathed in dawn light behind him.
Her eyes grew huge as she saw that he held a small black velvet box. His hands were shaking.
He looked at her and admitted, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this… I always associated this with the death of ambition and success. I had a horror of somehow ending up back in my home town, having nothing. I thought my father had sacrificed too much by not taking up a college scholarship, by getting my mother pregnant and then marrying her having baby after baby. Staying stuck.’
‘But your parents…’ Siena said softly, still moved by his apology, trying not to let her heart jump out of her chest as she thought about that box. ‘They created something wonderful. And if you hadn’t had that secure foundation you might never have believed you could escape.’
Andreas smiled wryly. ‘I know…now.’ His smile faded slightly. ‘When you admitted to me how you felt about meeting my family…my mother…I knew I had to stop fighting it. That I had to stop trying to box you into a place that made it easier for me to deal with you… I tried to make you admit you hated it, but that was only to bolster my own pathetic determination to avoid looking at how it made me feel. The fact is, going home with you…it made all those demons run away. I saw only love and affection. The security. And I felt for the first time as if I could be part of it and not be consumed by it.’
Siena looked from the box to Andreas. He was still on his knees. ‘Andreas…?’
He opened the box and Siena looked down to see a beautiful vintage ring nestled in silk folds. It had one large round diamond at its centre, in an Art Deco setting, and was surrounded by small sapphires on either side. It was ornate, but simple, and Siena guessed very old.
