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He saw St Mary’s Church with its glinting spire and the graveyard running up behind it with the tumble of stone markers, large and small. He saw the mass of forest where he and Sybella had first walked together and he’d fallen so completely under her spell it was astonishing he’d been able to walk without stumbling over his feet.
Then he saw her, out on the hill just as Catherine had told him when he’d rung Sybella’s phone. Two small figures, but even at this distance he knew which one was Sybella.
‘Take it over to the west,’ he told his pilot, Max, and as the chopper came in closer the woman next to her began to jump up and down, waving her arms.
Nik was unstrapped and climbing out, the blades still rotating when he saw her coming towards him.
He didn’t know where her friend had gone; he didn’t care.
As he strode towards her he could see all the anxiety on her face and it tore strips from his chest.
‘You didn’t do it,’ she said.
He came as close as he dared without touching her.
She was wearing a pretty floral dress and her hair was plaited but there were flowers threaded through it, probably for May Day, and she looked like a pagan goddess of spring in her wellington boots.
‘I didn’t do it.’ He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket because it was hard to be this close to her and not touch her.
‘Why not?’ she asked softly, those hazel eyes as anxious as the first time he’d seen her, when he’d mistaken her for an intruder and been trying to scare her.
‘I worked it all out. I kept thinking about what you said, about it twisting me, about how I use money and privilege as a weapon…’
She lowered her head but she didn’t argue with him.
‘You were right, I’ve known it for a long time, and I kept justifying it because I was angry.’
‘She did a terrible thing, Nik.’
‘She did, but that’s old anger. Frankly, Sybella, I think I stopped expending all that energy on her when I bought back the archive. I did that for my father, by the way. It was my duty by him and then it was done.’
She shook her head. ‘Then who were you angry with?’
‘Deda, for taking me in when he didn’t have to, and Sasha for holding it against me. But it was all me—neither of them felt that way.’ His grey eyes searched her face for understanding. ‘And that’s when I knew I’d decided to be angry with you.’
‘With me?’
‘I didn’t think you loved me.’
The words sounded like paupers, emptying their sacks to show the rich people how little they had. Nik, who had seemed to have everything—money, power, all the confidence in the world—was opening up his heart to her.
She realised right then and there he saw her as the rich one. The one with the love to give and bestow. Just as she had once seen Simon. But she didn’t want to be that person with Nik. Because it was absolutely clear to her now that he loved her, had been trying to tell her for a long time how much he loved her, and she had been deaf.
‘Do you remember what you said about being angry with Simon, for the accident, something that couldn’t possibly be his fault?’ He spoke slowly, as if he might stumble over the difficult words.
‘Yes.’
‘I know you loved him, Sybella, from the bottom of your heart, because that’s who you are. What I worked out since I drove away from your house was why you were angry with me.’
‘Because I love you, you silly billy,’ she said, as if this were obvious.
He smiled then. That slow breaking dawn of a smile, and that he used it so rarely made her think it was only for her. And she knew now that it was.
‘Where have you been?’
‘I went to Helsinki and met my biological father.’
Of all the things he’d say she hadn’t expected that.
‘He’s a geologist,’ Nik added.
‘Of course he is.’ Sybella was smiling so broadly her face hurt as she stepped right up to him.
Nik fisted his hands because the urge to touch her was almost impossibly strong but he needed to tell her the whole story first. ‘He shook my hand, Sybella, and he didn’t ask his billionaire son for a kopeck. That’s the kind of man he is.’
