Olivia Gates - One Night In…

His face twisted in horror. ‘Meghan, don’t.’

‘No— you don’t,’ Meghan snapped back. He looked startled, and she almost smiled. ‘I see who you really are. The world even sees it—sees what you’ve done with Di Agnio Enterprises. Alessandro, you must forgive yourself. If not for your own sake, then for mine.’ She paused, her voice turning into an ache as she repeated the words he’d once said to her, the words with which he’d healed her. ‘I know, and I accept you. I believe you.’ She paused, tears filling her eyes as her fingers skimmed his cheek. ‘I love you.’

Alessandro was silent; his eyes were closed. Meghan’s heart beat a steady, desperate staccato as she wondered what was going on in his tormented mind, what would happen now.

Then a single tear slipped down his cheek; it dampened her fingers. Alessandro’s grief for his brother. Meghan’s breath caught in her chest; her heart expanded and she could breathe again. She could believe again.

Alessandro opened his eyes. ‘I love you.’

Meghan felt weak with relief, giddy with joy.

He shook his head, took her tear-dampened fingers and lifted them to his lips. ‘I don’t know why I have been so blessed to have a woman who believes in me enough to see me through this. To make me go through this.’ He smiled, the sorrow sifting from his eyes, revealing a flicker of hope. ‘You saved me, Meghan. You saved me.’

‘And you saved me.’

‘I need to ask you to forgive me,’ he continued in a low voice, ‘for hurting you so very much. I did it to drive you away. I thought it would be easier for both of us. Or at least for me. I couldn’t bear seeing you walk away from me, gattina. Seeing you disgusted by who I was, by who I am.’

‘No,’ Meghan whispered, ‘never that. I know who you are, Alessandro, and you are the man I love.’

He nodded in acceptance, in wonder. ‘You knew even before I did. How can you know me so well when I was blind to myself?’

‘We were both blind,’ she said with a little laugh. ‘And we needed each other to be healed. Forgiven.’ Loved.

He pulled her towards him, kissed her with a gentle passion that had her swaying into him completely, surrendering everything. Her heart, her soul, her mind, her body. His. All his.

‘I am a blessed, blessed man,’ he said, and there was a ragged edge of incredulous gratitude in his voice.

‘No more blessed than I am.’

He nodded, kissing her again, and as sunlight slanted through the windows, sifting patterns on the floor, Meghan realised the shadows were gone. All of them.

All that was left was her and Alessandro, and joy. Only joy.

A self-confessed romance junkie, INDIA GREYwas just thirteen years old when she first sent off for the Mills & Boon Writers’ Guidelines. She can still recall the thrill of getting the large brown envelope with its distinctive logo through the letterbox, and subsequently whiled away many a dull school-day staring out of the window and dreaming of the perfect hero. She kept these guidelines with her for the next ten years, tucking them carefully inside the cover of each new diary in January, and beginning every list of New Year’s Resolutions with the words Start Novel. In the meantime she also gained a degree in English Literature and Language from Manchester University and, in a stroke of genius on the part of the Gods of Romance, met her gorgeous future husband on the very last night of their three years there. The last fifteen years have been spent blissfully buried in domesticity, and heaps of pink washing generated by three small daughters, but she has never really stopped daydreaming about romance. She’s just profoundly grateful to have finally got an excuse to do it legitimately!

To John.

Thank you for the Happy Ever After.

THE dress was ivory satin, heavy and smooth. Once a nineteen-fifties cocktail dress belonging to Grandmère, Anna’s mother had taken it in to fit Anna’s skinny ten-year-old frame and added a narrow grosgrain ribbon around the waist, just above where the skirt flared out with wonderful fullness. An old piece of net curtain trimmed with tiny crystal beads and fixed down with a pleasingly authentic-looking plastic tiara completed the picture.

‘It’s beautiful.’ Anna looked at herself in the mirror, her dark eyes shining with joy. ‘Just like what a real bride would wear. It’s the best birthday present ever. Thank you, Mama.’

Lisette smiled. ‘Happy Birthday, chérie. You’re beautiful. You look like a fairy princess.’

Anna frowned. She knew it wasn’t true. Fairy princesses would be soft and blonde and blue-eyed like her mother, not olive-skinned and dark like she was. But she loved the dress all the same.

She was lucky that her birthday always fell in the summer holidays, when she and her mother were staying with Grandmère at Château Belle-Eden, and that summer she did nothing but play weddings. Gathering armfuls of flowers from the château’s garden, she entwined garlands of jasmine and ivy around the banisters and tied heavy old-fashioned roses into spiky bouquets. In the hot, still afternoons the hallway was cool and the dim light filtering through the magnificent stained-glass dome above cast shimmering patterns on to the pale stone floor. While her mother played the piano in the salon Anna would drift down the stairs, shedding petals from her wilting rose bouquet, towards her imaginary waiting groom.

She pictured him standing at the bottom of the sweeping staircase, looking exactly like the prince in her book of fairy tales. Tall, blond, impossibly elegant in his morning coat, she imagined over and over again the moment when he would turn and look up at her.

The love that blazed in his blue eyes took her breath away every time.

‘C’EST tout, mademoiselle?’

Anna cast a last look at her childhood, jumbled into the back of the auctioneer’s van, and swallowed hard.

‘Yes. That’s all.’

The man slid up the tailgate and dusted off his big hands. ‘Bien, mademoiselle. There are just a few boxes left in the attic now; nothing that can go in a Paris saleroom, I’m afraid. Perhaps a local firm, a brocante?

Anna nodded, absent-mindedly scuffing the dusty gravel with the toe of her little green ballet pump, then stopping abruptly. She’d spent too long in tatty espadrilles hanging around with the GreenPlanet gang—she’d almost forgotten how to behave in proper clothes.

She straightened up and smiled apologetically at the removal man. His face softened. He’d worked for Paris’s top auction house for a good many years now, so by rights nothing should surprise him any more. Aristocrats were an eccentric lot, and English aristocrats were the oddest of all, but Lady Roseanna Delafield was like no one he had ever come across before. With her silky black hair shot through with pink streaks and her quick, graceful ballerina’s movements, she was like a pedigree kitten who had got lost and gone feral. Today her hair was caught back in a discreet knot at the nape of her neck, she was wearing a little black linen shift dress that made her skin glow like sun-kissed apricots and she looked for all the world like any other smart young lady of breeding, but nothing could quite disguise the vulnerability in those big dark eyes.

‘Bon chance, ma petite,’ he said kindly, climbing into the driver’s seat of his lorry. ‘Is sad to say goodbye to somewhere where we ‘ave been ‘appy, no?’

Anna shrugged sadly. ‘Yes. But maybe it’s not goodbye just yet. You never know …’