The Married Mistress (17 page)

‘I should never have kept our marriage secret.’ Damon shook his head in despair at the mistakes of the past. ‘If I’d come right out and said it…’

‘I understand.’

Sarah’s voice had a new strength, the strength that came from hope and joy and love.

‘I understand that you were only trying to protect me. Keep me safe.’

‘But instead I left you wide open to my father’s scheming—to his lies.’

‘But not any more—together we’ll be more than a match for him. Damon…’

But her words were interrupted by the sudden stilling of the car, the sound of the brakes. Looking round, she realised that while they had been talking their journey had been completed. They were at the airport, and she didn’t know why or where they were going.

‘Damon?’

He had turned to her, pushing his hand into his pocket and pulling out…

‘My passport! What are you doing with that? Damon, what—?’

‘Sarah,
agape mou,
I have to ask you something. I need you to come with me. Not to ask questions, just to trust me and come with me now. I have something I need to show you. Something I want you to see. Will you come with me?’

Would she? Sarah didn’t have to wait even to ask the question of herself. The answer was there in her mind, fully formed and totally confident. After all, hadn’t she made it when she had left the hotel and come with him? When she had put her trust in him then?

‘I’ll go with you to the ends of the earth if that’s what you ask of me!’

‘Oh, Sarah!’

Her name was a choking sound of delight. Of total happiness. And his face lit up as if the sun had just risen behind his eyes, making their darkness warm and glow.

‘Do you know that I adore you? That you are my life?’

‘I know,’ Sarah whispered. ‘Because I feel the same.’

The flight he took her on passed in a haze of delight. Damon’s private jet was fitted out with every luxury imaginable—including a huge and marvellously comfortable double bed. And as soon as the plane had left the runway, and had levelled out at the altitude for flight, Damon took
her hand and led her to that bed, where he made love to her so thoroughly and so wonderfully that she felt as if she had no need of the jet, that she was capable of flying high up in the clouds all by herself, lifted and carried on the wings of pure joy and the ecstasy of love.

‘But where
are
we going?’ she demanded when, some hours later, they had landed and, all the formalities behind them, Damon had hurried her to a waiting helicopter. Taking the controls himself, he piloted them up into the air once more and out over a sea so bright and so brilliant a blue that she knew it could only be the ocean around the island of Mykonos. Damon’s home.

‘Be patient,’ he shouted over the noise of the whirring blades. ‘Wait and see!’

And with that she had to be content until at last he turned the helicopter in a wide circle, bringing it down onto a large expanse of land—a stretch of the island that ran down to the edge of the sea, with a perfect strip of gleaming sandy beach between the earth and the water.

‘Recognise it?’ he asked when, with the engine turned off, they climbed out of the helicopter and stared around. Damon caught hold of her hand and gripped tightly. ‘Do you know where you are?’

‘Recognise…’

Sarah couldn’t make her voice work properly—or her thoughts. She did know where she was, or she thought she did. But the last time she had been here, the only time she had been here, it hadn’t looked like this.

‘Damon—is—is some of this my grandfather’s land?’

‘Yes—but it’s not your grandfather’s land any more. It’s yours.’

‘Mine—no, it can’t be! My land was never this big—this is huge! It’s…’

Something dawned on her, making her head spin in shock.

‘Damon—where are the hotels?
Your
hotels? What happened?’

‘I had them pulled down,’ he told her. ‘Knocked to the ground—and every last bit of them taken away.’

‘But why?’ She was stunned with the craziness, the extravagance of the gesture. ‘What made you do that?’

‘You did—or, rather, my need to prove to you that this land didn’t matter—that if I couldn’t have you I didn’t want any of it. My father always wanted this land to link the two hotels—from the moment I met you I didn’t give a damn about that. So I bought the land off him, knocked down the hotels and—here…’

His hand went to his inner jacket pocket, pulling out a sheaf of papers.

‘These are for you.’

Through the welling tears Sarah struggled to read the documents, incapable of taking in what they said in spite of the fact that they were written in English.

‘What? Damon—I don’t understand!’

His smile was wide and brilliant as the hot Greek sun blazing in the cloudless sky.

‘Don’t you see, my darling? This land is yours. All of it. Every last centimetre of it. Those are the deeds to it—all signed and sealed and totally legal. That’s why I came to you in London—I wanted to bring you here and give it to you. I wanted you to know that it was yours—all yours—whether you were my wife or not. And then I was going to beg you to come back to me. I wanted you to be sure that I love you for you and not for anything you own…’

‘But I know that now!’

Sarah cut off his words, flinging herself into his arms and kissing him with all the love that was bursting out of her heart, all the joy that made her soul sing.

‘Oh, Damon, my love. You don’t have to do this—you don’t need to—I love you and I believe you and I’d trust
you with my life. All that unhappiness, it’s all behind us. It’s in the past. The future’s ours and it’s wonderful and clear and bright.’

Her words were kissed away in their turn, and she was gathered into Damon’s arms and crushed against him, the strength of his hold and the passion in the way he took her mouth making promises for that future that no words could ever express.

And after she had dragged in a much-needed breath, when at last she could speak, Sarah lifted her head and looked around her at the beautiful spot in which they stood, the land that had once been a cause of such dissension but now was like a symbol of the two of them together. The end of the feud. The two families united and at peace.

‘Is this really mine?’ she said thoughtfully. ‘To do with exactly as I please?’

There was no hesitation in Damon’s response. It came swift and clear, and filled with total conviction.

‘It’s really yours,
ghineka mou
. Totally yours.’

‘Good. Then in that case…’

She smiled up into his glowing eyes, the perfect happiness in her heart showing clearly in her face.

‘What I’d really like is to build a house here. A wonderful, big, happy family house. The sort of place where we can settle down and raise our family and live together for the rest of our lives. So what—
andhras mou
—what do you think of that as a plan?’

‘It sounds wonderful,’ Damon assured her deeply. ‘Perfect. In fact it was just what I was hoping for too. Especially that “for the rest of our lives”. Because I can’t think of anything that I would rather do with the rest of my days than spend them with you, having you by my side, making love to you each day and making you as happy as I possibly can.’

And, gathering her up into his arms, he took her lips once more in a kiss that sealed the promise forever.