Secrets of Cinderella’s Awakening by Sharon Kendrick

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ITWASACTUALLYquite easy to ‘disappear’.

Marnie realised she’d spent most of her working life influenced by the faint fear of not knowing what the future held. She’d been saving for that mythical rainy day for a very long time, which meant she’d accumulated quite a lot of cash which she could now use.

Because that rainy day had arrived.

Accompanied by her sister, she had left London—sneaking away as dawn was breaking over the city, with Pansy driving a borrowed and rather fancy car, although refusing to say whose car it was—‘I’ll tell you later...’

Hair Heaven had told her to take as much time as she needed and, at very short notice, Marnie had found a tiny cottage to rent on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors—chosen mostly because it reminded her of one of her favourite books from childhood and seemed to fit with the bleak mood she was trying to hide from her sister.

‘It’s good to be able to help you for a change,’ Pansy said, once they’d managed to push open the rather stiff front door and she’d placed a steaming mug of tea in front of Marnie, as though she were recovering from some kind of sickness.

Which in a way, Marnie guessed, she was. There was obviously a reason why the expression lovesick had come about—and she was certainly portraying all the symptoms of it. She couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t stop thinking about the man who had stolen her heart and left her wondering how she was ever going to get it back.

Pansy waved a packet of chocolate biscuits in front of her but Marnie shook her head. ‘I won’t, thanks.’

‘You should. You’re looking peaky,’ said Pansy disapprovingly.

‘Unlike you,’ said Marnie, eyeing her sister.

It was true. Pansy was positively glowing and had toned down the sequins and too-tight tops. She’d also had her hair cut so that it swung in a sleek blonde bob around her shoulders, instead of falling to just above her bottom in that retro hippie style. ‘Why didn’t you ask me to cut your hair for you?’ she added suspiciously.

‘You were too busy jetting off in private planes, weren’t you?’

A lump rose in Marnie’s throat and, quickly, she changed the subject. ‘Whatever you’re doing, just keep doing it. You look fantastic,’ she said huskily.

The biscuit she’d been just about to munch into forgotten, Pansy smiled—a soft, sweet smile edged with contentment. Marnie had never seen her sister look like that before and suddenly the penny dropped, and she wondered what had taken her so long to work it out. ‘You’re in love?’ she asked.

Pansy nodded. ‘I am. I’ve been seeing Walker. Quite a lot, actually.’

‘The barrister who defended you?’

‘That’s right.’

A flare of anxiety washed through her. ‘Pansy, is that even legal?’

Her twin shot her a reproving look. ‘Of course it is. It happens all the time, lawyers falling in love with their clients—although apparently it’s always best to wait until the case is over.’ She grinned. ‘And Walker is way too ambitious to ever risk breaking the law.’

‘And he doesn’t mind—’

‘That my mum was on the game and that I spent time in prison myself?’ Pansy sighed and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, obviously it’s not the perfect CV for a barrister’s wife but he says those experiences are what made me the woman I am today, and he loves that woman. Anyway, isn’t the whole point of life supposed to be about learning from our mistakes and other people’s? About redemption?’

‘I’m sure it is,’ said Marnie gruffly, knowing she had to get her twin out of here because any minute now she was going to break down and cry. ‘Anyway, you’d better get back to him.’

‘Marnie—’

‘No. Honestly. I really don’t want to hear it.’

‘But you don’t know what I was going to say.’

‘Yes, I do. We’re twins, Pan, and sometimes I know what you’re thinking, though that’s going to happen less and less, the closer you get to Walker. And that’s the way it should be. I’m so happy for you. Really, I am. I think it’s a wonderful love story, but I don’t want to talk about Leon. Not now and not ever. I just don’t. It...it hurts too much.’ She drew in a deep breath, aware of just how much vulnerability she was revealing to her younger sister. And that was a first. ‘Do you understand?’

Pressing her lips together as if she too was trying not to cry, Pansy nodded. ‘I understand perfectly,’ she whispered, and suddenly the two sisters were embracing, more tightly than they’d done in years. ‘Just keep in touch, won’t you?’

‘Try stopping me,’ answered Marnie fiercely, but once her twin had driven away in Walker’s strangely silent electric car, she didn’t have to pretend any more. For a while, she sat on an overstuffed armchair, buried her face in her hands and wept. She wept as tears trickled out from between her fingers and dripped onto her jeans. Until she felt exhausted, but in a way washed clean. And lighter, somehow—although the terrible ache in her heart hadn’t gone away.

But as the next few days passed, Marnie tried to come to terms with what had happened, convincing herself that it was nothing more than she had ever expected. Like Pansy said, it was always going to end in tears. She couldn’t allow what had happened with Leon to define her life in a negative way, she just couldn’t. She needed to extract all the lovely elements they’d shared and remind herself that she was capable of a lot more things than she’d previously imagined. Of love, for a start—and how could any experience which had given her that ever be described as bad? It wasn’t as if she’d ever seriously considered a future with him, was it? She’d get over it eventually, because people did. Every day thousands of people were getting their hearts broken and picking themselves up and carrying on.

Well, so would she.

Leon had managed to do it. Obviously. He hadn’t tried to reach out and connect with her since she’d stormed from his Kensington apartment, had he? And she told herself she was glad about that. It would have been torture to speak to him, or see him and pretend that her heart wasn’t shattering into a million pieces. She might have announced that her love for him was in the past tense but that wasn’t true, was it? Love didn’t disappear overnight, more was the pity.

Each day she would pull on some wellington boots, a waterproof coat and wide-brimmed hat and set off across the green-grey landscape of the brooding moorland, her stride lengthening as she got further away from the cottage. She’d bought herself an ordnance survey map and had started to explore the area in detail. It was so beautiful out here—in a very stark and elemental way. There were rocks and waterfalls and circling birds of prey. She was completely alone and yet somehow that felt okay.

One afternoon she had a slight wobble on her way back to the cottage, when she thought she spotted a man on the horizon, surveying the landscape through a pair of binoculars which glinted in the winter sun. The tall and brooding figure so reminded her of Leon that her heart constricted very painfully and tears sprang to her eyes. But thankfully the sound of a bird distracted her and when she turned back again, the man had gone. And that was normal too. You’re not going mad at all, she reassured herself. It was probably a common phenomenon to imagine you’d seen someone when you’d been thinking about them as obsessively as she had about Leon Kanonidou.

She was tired when she let herself back into the cottage, but it was a very satisfying sort of tiredness. It wasn’t like working out at the gym but a much more gratifying form of exercise, she decided. Peering into the tiny mirror over the bathroom sink, she appeared to have lost some of the haunted look which had made her face look so sallow recently and she wondered if it was time to leave London for good. Perhaps she should make the break from Hair Heaven permanent. She could move to somewhere like Yorkshire and see if she could get the backing to set up a little salon of her own. It was good to make plans. It made the future seem less bleak.

It was growing dark and she was deciding which book she would start reading this evening, having told the cottage owner that she didn’t mind not having any broadband—how stupid was that?—when she saw the flare of headlights on the approaching track and heard the purr of a car drawing up outside the cottage.

Her heart raced and she knew then that she hadn’t imagined a man who looked like Leon on the Yorkshire Moors. Because no other man looked like Leon and no other man ever could. He was here. Somehow he had managed to track down where she was staying. On the other side of that door was the man she loved with all her heart.

And she didn’t know if she could face him.

Wouldn’t it set her recovery back and prolong the torture if she allowed her eyes to feast on him once more?

The loud knock reinforced his identity as much as the powerful car he was driving. She’d heard a knock like that once before when she’d been in Greece, feeling miserable and foolish after losing her virginity to him and realising he wasn’t the man she thought he was. But she was a different Marnie now. She might be badly hurt, but she had always been strong. The question was whether she was strong enough to cope with seeing him again.

He was probably expecting her to play push-pull. To act all coy while not quite managing to hide her excitement at the realisation that he’d driven all this way to see her. Telling him to go away while expecting him to kiss her into changing her mind. He probably thought she would allow him to seduce her in front of that stupid damp fire, which she had been trying unsuccessfully to light. Well, he could go to hell!

She walked over to the door and pulled it open, trying not to react to his dark and windswept beauty as, coolly, she met his gaze.

‘Who do you think you are? Heathcliff?’

‘I hope not.’ His voice was wry. ‘Because I haven’t come here to see a ghost.’

‘I can’t believe you’ve read Wuthering Heights.’

‘Why? Because I’m Greek, or because I’m a man?’

Suddenly her knees sagged. She mustn’t allow herself to get distracted. She mustn’t. She must not put herself in emotional danger. Because suddenly the idea that she possessed some kind of inner strength was in grave doubt. ‘Why are you here, Leon?’

‘You must know why I’m here.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t. I think I may have mentioned before that I’m a hairdresser, not a mind-reader.’

‘I’d like to come in.’

She made a play of hesitating but she knew it was a lost cause. Because no way was she going to send him away without hearing what he had to say—he knew that and she knew that. But that didn’t mean she had to take his coat, or offer him a drink, did it? Why was he here? she wondered caustically. Had he been warned that a journalist had contacted her last week, offering her an eye-watering amount of money if she agreed to cooperate on a profile piece about the enigmatic billionaire—and was he seriously worried that she might go ahead and do it?

She stared at him. ‘So?’ she questioned, as coldly as she could.

Leon nodded in response to her terse greeting but he didn’t speak straight away, knowing he had to choose his words carefully because surely these were the most important words he would ever say. He could see she was still angry and hurt—and he couldn’t blame her for that. Not for the first time, he recognised that the forgiveness he sought from Marnie Porter was by no means guaranteed and she might not want to forgive him. What if it was already too late—if she had decided that she was well rid of his privileged but strangely antiseptic life? He felt the thud of pain. Of dread. Of fear. And he wondered how he could have been so emotionally brutal with her.

‘I thought a lot about what you said, Marnie.’

‘Good. I hope you can learn from it. I hope we both can.’

‘Marnie...’ He shook his head in frustration, realising that he had wanted her to make it easy for him by guessing what was on his mind. That she would be able to detect his pain and begin the healing process by forgiving him. But she was right. She wasn’t a mind-reader, nor should he expect her to be. And he couldn’t escape from his feelings or from learning to express them, not if he wanted her.

‘What you said—’

‘I said a lot of things, Leon.’

‘I know you did—but one of them stuck in my mind more than any of the others.’

She stared at him. ‘About my mum?’

‘No. Not at all. Nobody should be blamed for their parentage, because that’s something over which we have no choice or control.’ He raked his fingers back through his windswept hair. ‘I’m talking about when you told me you weren’t good enough.’

She shifted awkwardly and stared down at the flagstone floor. ‘Oh, that.’

‘Yes, that. Because that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. You protected your sister through the most difficult of circumstances, all through your childhood. You forged a career for yourself and you’ve stuck at it. You made your own way in the world and took less from me than anyone else I’ve ever met. You have suffered knock-backs and the sort of prejudice which would have felled most other people, but not you. And somehow, along the way, you made me realise I was capable of feeling stuff. Stuff I’d always run away from before. You’re more than good enough by anyone’s reckoning, but especially by mine.’

‘Thanks,’ she said woodenly, her head still bent.

‘And I realised something else,’ he said slowly. ‘That maybe I deliberately failed to give you the opening to tell me about your mother before. There were plenty of times I could have asked you more, but I liked your reluctance to talk about the past. It seemed to offer a protection against the true intimacy I had spent my life trying to avoid. Do you understand what I’m trying to say to you, Marnie? That in a way, I condoned your secrecy.’

She shrugged. ‘Sure.’

‘I’ve missed you so much.’ He swallowed. ‘And the question I need to ask you now is whether you could forgive me?’ he questioned unsteadily. ‘Because I love you, Marnie Porter. I love you in a way I never believed I could love anyone and I can’t imagine spending my life without you.’

She looked up then and, though her eyes were very bright, she was shaking her head, a blonde halo of hair shimmering in the lamplight. ‘I’m afraid that’s not enough, Leon,’ she said. ‘The trust between us has been broken.’

‘Then let’s repair it.’

‘I don’t want to repair it.’

His heart was pounding—its loud thunder edged with fear. ‘Why not?’

‘Because...’

Her mouth was working and he could see her trying to keep a rein on her own emotions.

‘Because I don’t want to get hurt again,’ she burst out. ‘I’ve had a lot of trouble adjusting to life without you, but I’m managing and every day it’s getting easier. If we start seeing one another again, then we run the risk of breaking up all over again and I couldn’t bear it.’ She sucked in a deep breath and looked him straight in the eye. ‘I’m strong,’ she added. ‘But I really don’t think I’m that strong.’

He wanted so much to hold her—to comfort and kiss her—but the flash of her eyes was very definitely telling him not to touch. ‘What if I told you that I want to spend the rest of my life with you? That I want to marry you?’ he said huskily. ‘What if I told you that I’ve sold off two large divisions of my company, which means we can live wherever you want to live. Maybe Thessaloniki? If you’d like that,’ he amended hastily.

‘You’ve sold part of your company?’

‘Sure.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve been simplifying my life so that I could devote the next section of it to you—that’s what’s been keeping me busy. You haven’t seen the news? It’s been all over the internet.’

‘I haven’t got any internet here. And even if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have been reading anything about you.’

Leon’s heart was beating very fast as he realised that this woman needed a declaration of love so powerful that never again would she be in any doubt of his feelings for her. She’d said she didn’t know if she had the strength to risk having a relationship with him again, but he knew she did. He just had to convince her of that.

‘I love and admire you more than anyone I have ever met, Marnie,’ he said slowly, and very deliberately. ‘I love your pride and feistiness and your ability to make me laugh. I love waking up in the morning and finding you there beside me, so that I can kiss you. I like your company more than anyone else’s and I like you lying next to me when I wake in the darkness of the night. And I find myself imagining...’ For some reason, his voice had started to crack. ‘Imagining you,’ he breathed unevenly. ‘With a baby at your breast. Our child. A child we would love and protect with all our hearts. A child we would be honest with. There will be no more secrets between us from now on, my love. Agape mou. Just a shared life together. Will you share that vision with me, Marnie—will you journey down that road with me?’

As she heard the emotion underpinning his words, Marnie could feel the tears welling up in her eyes as she looked up into his beloved face. At the bronzed beauty of his sculpted features and the mouth she had thought so hard and unforgiving the first time she’d ever seen him. But Leon had crafted himself a mask to present to the world, the same as she had, she realised. A mask intended to conceal the pain they’d both suffered—a pain which had made them keep people at arm’s length.

Yet somehow the two of them had come together—and how. They had got it wrong the first time around but he was right, they could start again. Because that was what life was all about.

About hope. And redemption. And renewal.

And love. Most of all it was about love. A love she had never imagined could be hers.

‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Yes, I will journey down that road with you. Because I love you too, with all my heart. I think I’ve loved you from the moment I first set eyes on you, Leon Kanonidou.’

‘So you’ll marry me?’ he verified fiercely. ‘As soon as possible?’

She smiled. ‘Yes, I’ll marry you. But will you please hold me now? Because more than anything, I badly need you to kiss me.’

As his arms went round her, she sank lovingly into his embrace, feeling his warmth and protection as the sheer joy of being reunited with him flooded through her body. With tender fingers he dried the tracks of her tears and brushed the awry hair away from her cheeks and he lowered his lips to hers in what felt like slow motion.

But it was worth the wait.

Oh, yes. Definitely worth the wait.

Because that one kiss healed their past and sealed their future and made them realise how glorious their shared present was.

In fact, it was safe to say that it was the best kiss of their lives.