Redeemed By Her Innocence / Sheikh's Royal Baby Revelation. Annie West

      ‘It happens,’ she said, taking a sip of wine, feeling it slide warmly into her stomach.

      ‘If it’s any consolation, you wouldn’t begin to imagine what’s been said to me. The question is, do we let what other people think affect our decisions?’

      ‘Is this about to turn into my second piece of business advice?’ she asked, smiling as she took another little sip of the very delicious wine.

      ‘Life advice,’ he countered.

      ‘So why exactly does Mister Seventy-Sixth-on-the-Forbes-List feel so maligned?’

      ‘I don’t. But what I’m trying to get across is that people paint pictures in business. And in life. The perfect world you think you see here…’

      He jerked his fork around the space. Lamps were now glowing softly right along the lines of the terrace, highlighting clumps of sleeping flowers nestled in their bushy beds. Further on, the blue glimmer of the pool and the solid lines of pale loungers stretched out expectantly under the watchful hillside, and the bright-faced moon above.

      ‘This paradise and every other paradise like it will be hiding all sorts of cracks and holes and heartache.’

      As she stared up at him lazily spearing watermelon and letting it slide down his throat, she recalled another article she had read, about his early childhood and humble beginnings.

      ‘You had it tough at one point in time, didn’t you?’

      He raised an eyebrow, continued to munch melon and she watched in a hazy trance now as his muscled forearms flexed with each movement of his fork, and the thick column of his throat constricted with each swallow. It was poetry in motion, dark and male and utterly magnetic.

      ‘No tougher than any other kid growing up in an abusive, dysfunctional family. All things considered, I had it pretty easy.’

      ‘I’m sure you could take care of yourself,’ she said, a trifle dismissively. He might have had humble beginnings but he had it all laid out at his feet now. He had no idea how she’d had to struggle.

      ‘Well, you see, that’s where you’re wrong, Jacquelyn. I couldn’t. So that’s how I ended up here.’

      He sounded so different, so quiet. He glanced down at the plate where a few glistening pink cubes of melon remained, but then he put his fork down, stared at it for a moment.

      ‘I ran away. I met my wife at the side of the road when she was still someone else’s wife. I knew what she was doing was wrong but I was eighteen. I was in so much trouble, with the police, with the gangs, with my father. I knew if I stayed in Sydney I’d be dead within a year. And then along comes Maria. And she wanted to be my wife and so I married her, I “reinvented myself” and now here I am. And here you are.’

      As he spoke she felt the ghosts of his past swirl around. She saw him look at her, really look at her. He wasn’t looking at her like a boss, he was looking at her like a man.

      ‘Here we are indeed,’ she said, and she glanced around with a nervousness that she wasn’t sure was real.

      ‘So, you see, I’ve bought the T-shirt with the whole marriage crap. It doesn’t really do it for me now that I’ve grown up. No offence,’ he said.

      ‘None taken. For the record, I may work at one end of the marriage production line, but I’m well aware of how it can end up.’

      ‘Things didn’t work out for you either, did they?’

      She flushed. She hated bringing all that up again. Not here, not now.

      ‘Things worked out,’ she said, but she couldn’t meet his eye.

      ‘Still hurts, huh? You’re not alone. Men can tend to have the upper hand in relationships. Things seem a bit less complicated for us.’

      ‘That’s just an excuse for dishonourable people to act in a dishonourable way,’ she said, and there was the bitterness in her voice, still there because she really didn’t buy the argument that men were different from women. There were people who were good and there were people who weren’t. There were good men in the world, like her father. The trouble was, they all appeared to be taken…

      ‘OK. I hear you. But relationships come in many forms. I’m not saying it’s OK to lie, but if everyone is clear about the boundaries, who are you to judge?’

      ‘Not everyone is as clear about the boundaries as you think they are,’ she said.

      Nikos looked at her with understanding painted in his eyes.

      ‘That Tim guy,’ he said, quietly. ‘What did he do to you?’

      She’d told no one apart from her mother the facts of that night, but somehow the whole story had made it around town before she’d even taken her ring off and flushed it down the toilet.

      ‘It’s no secret. We were going out for four years, engaged for two and he left me five weeks before we were due to get married.’

      He nodded. He reached over and squeezed her hand, but she drew it back again quickly. ‘I’m sorry, but people split up, all the time. It happens. Better that it happened before you got married than after.’

      ‘I know that. And believe me, I thank my lucky stars every day now. But it was how he did it. We were out for dinner. He ordered fillet steak, medium rare—he even said that—and then he just excused himself to go to the bathroom and never came back.’

      She’d sipped her gin and tonic, watching the light dance off the self-same engagement ring, and feeling so proud and pleased that she would soon have a golden band there beside it. And she’d sipped some more as she’d waited on Tim, and then some more until she’d finished her drink. And then she’d realised, he was away too long. Far too long.

      The shame, the humiliation. How long she had sat there, calling for help. ‘My fiancé is stuck in the toilet…something must have happened to him. Please call the police…he’s been abducted…’

      All the silly nonsense she’d convinced herself was true until, gently but firmly, the police officer had told her he had driven away in his own car—and had shown it to her there on the CCTV.

      ‘That’s pretty tough. You mean you didn’t actually split up—he just split? Was there someone else?’

      Nikos poured a little more wine, the gentle slosh of liquid in the glass a mesmeric accompaniment to his words.

      ‘I think so. I heard he went abroad, met someone else, a woman with children of her own. He’s only been back in the country a few months.’

      She wasn’t going to tell him about the email he’d finally sent a month later. Saying it was all her fault, that she wouldn’t listen. She’d driven him away.

      ‘Rubbish,’ her mother had said.

      ‘I’ll kill him if I get my hands on him,’ her father had said.

      ‘And yet you’re “pure as the driven snow”. Wasn’t that what he called you?’

      So he’d heard that. She wondered what else he’d heard. She swallowed and looked away.

      ‘I might not have had the same experiences as some other people.’

      ‘Experiences?’ he asked. ‘What kind of experiences are we talking about?’

      How could he lace a simple word with such meaning? The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, a shiver ran through her and she forced herself to stare at her wine glass. She was hardly going to tell him about her sexual experiences, or lack of.

      ‘I don’t really care for the things other people care for.’

      He watched her as he poured her another glass of wine. His eyes sparkled wickedly in the candlelight. He was as intoxicating as the wine. One more lingering stare and she’d