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Cleo sealed her lips on the urge to tell him that he was too rigid in his viewpoint. Had his father planned to have a second family? Or had that been something that just happened?
‘And of course, eventually, I would like children of my own with you,’ Ari informed her levelly. ‘I’m suggesting a perfectly normal marriage—possibly one built on a more practical foundation than most, but that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be a good and successful marriage.’
Silence fell while her thoughts raced like trapped animals running in circles inside her head. She wanted to say that she would think about it for a while, but she knew she would only be saying that for the sake of her pride. She had always assumed that some day she would marry and have a family. She had also assumed that the man she married would love her, but nobody got everything they wanted, she thought ruefully. With Ari, she was boxing above her weight. He was rich and gorgeous and very honest about his expectations. He wanted what she wanted and she very much wanted himandLucy. She had fallen headlong in love with that little girl and needed to be involved in bringing her up. Ari could make them both happy, was already making Cleo happy, if she was honest with herself, only that happiness had felt very, very risky and short-term in nature because she had naturally assumed that what they had together would not last for long. Now Ari was offering her something permanent and secure and she was discovering right there in that moment that she wanted that chance with every breath in her body. She wanted him and she wanted Lucy and it really was that simple.
‘Okay,’ Cleo said shakily. ‘I’ll marry you.’
His exotic caramel eyes glittered gold below his lush black lashes and her heart skipped an entire beat. ‘Right, let’s go and get a ring—’
‘Aren’t you being a bit hasty? It’s after closing time too!’ Cleo reminded him.
Ari pulled out his phone, and a moment later, he was talking to a jeweller. Within minutes he was herding her out of the house again, pausing to speak to his housekeeper to tell her that they would return for dinner. ‘Or do you want to eat out to celebrate?’ he asked Cleo suddenly.
‘No, no, I’ll be perfectly happy to eat here,’ she assured him, feeling more than a little light-headed at the speed with which events were moving.
Two hours later, seated in a private room in the opulent jeweller’s in Hatton Garden, she sipped champagne and contemplated the magnificent pear-shaped palest blue diamond on her engagement finger in fascination. Blue diamonds were rare and she loved it, simply because Ari had expressed interest in it and admired it on her finger. As he walked her back out to the limo in the fading light, he murmured, ‘We’ll get married in Greece and fly your family out to join us. What do you think?’
‘I’m thinking about how much there is to organise beforehand,’ Cleo muttered weakly, dazed by how quickly he made plans. ‘Like a dress and invitations and—’
‘Mel will organise all that for us,’ Ari incised with satisfaction as he referred to his senior personal assistant. ‘She was a wedding planner before she came to work for me and she’s amazingly efficient.’
‘I’d better phone Mum,’ Cleo said, surprised that her head wasn’t spinning with the stream of changes that was suddenly threatening to turn her world upside down.
‘We’ll go and see Lucy before we leave and we won’t stay away long,’ Ari stipulated, single-minded as always, and Cleo’s romantic haze cleared a little at that point because, however unintentionally, Ari was reminding herwhyhe was marrying her.
‘Ari didn’t really notice me until we were at the retreat, and then, after he’d hauled me out of the water, he took me back to the house he was staying at and...er, well, that’s when we got to know each other,’ Cleo revealed in an embarrassed rush to her mother.
‘I can see why Liam didn’t make the cut,’ remarked Lisa Brown, a small blonde woman with her daughter’s blue eyes and generous mouth. ‘Ari’s very, very good-looking.’
‘I had a bit of a crush on him from the day I first saw him,’ Cleo admitted with a sigh. ‘It went from there...’
‘I just want him to make you happy. At the end of the day the fancy frills don’t matter,’ her mother opined. ‘It’s only feelings that count. But my word, this place is out of this world.’
Lisa’s blissful sigh of appreciation as they sat outside the luxury suite made Cleo grin. The opulent cabins of the Stefanos beach resort enjoyed the most beautiful view and they fronted a world-renowned hotel. Best of all, the twinkling turquoise sea and the smooth sandy beach lay only yards away, and both women were barefoot after a refreshing walk through the surf. With the sun beating down on them below a bright blue sky, Cleo’s mother, an inveterate sun lover, was in seventh heaven.
‘This is the holiday of a lifetime and I get to see you married as well,’ Lisa murmured, squeezing her daughter’s hand affectionately. ‘And you’ll be nearby for most of it, which is even more wonderful—’
‘But she’ll be on herhoneymoon,’ Cleo’s stepfather, Davis, reminded his wife gently as he emerged from the cabin to join the two women, a greying, still trim older man in swim shorts. ‘We’ll go to the wedding and then work on our suntans. If Cleo gets a spare minute, I’m sure she’ll try and drop in to see us before we fly home again.’
‘Of course I will,’ Cleo said warmly.
Ari’s father had built an exclusive beach resort at the far end of the private island of Spinos and it had been Mel’s idea for most of the guests to stay there. Ari had flown her family out in his private jet. With her mother and stepfather, her stepbrothers and their partners all attending, Cleo had felt much more grounded and comfortable with the arrangements. She was also relieved that Liam had opted to stay home and look after the pub to allow his father and stepmother to come to the wedding and enjoy their first proper holiday in years.
‘Just one thing I wanted to ask you before we join the others,’ her mother murmured in an undertone. ‘How much does it bother you that your father isn’t here for your big day?’
Cleo sent the older woman a look of astonishment. ‘But he’s never been part of my life,’ she pointed out.
Lisa grimaced. ‘Yes, but in recent years I’ve come to believe that I may have given you a false impression of him when you were a child. I was still very bitter, you know, when he ended the affair and returned to being faithful to the woman he had been living with all along,’ she confided awkwardly. ‘To be honest, he told me then that it would break his heart to walk away from his child and that he was deeply ashamed but that my pregnancy had made him appreciate how much he loved the family he was already with. The only reason he didn’t visit you was that he couldn’t face telling the woman he loved about his infidelity and he didn’t want any more lies between them.’
Cleo studied her mother in shock because what she was hearing was a very different version of what she had previously been told. Her mother had not told her any lies, but Lisa had given her a much more negative image of her absent father.
‘I’m sorry that I let my bitterness over his rejection colour my judgement. It’s not fair for you to have to judge your father badly for a relationship that I freely entered. Iknewhe was with her. Iknewhe had kids. But I made the mistake of believing that because he hadn’t married her, he was not committed to them.’ Lisa breathed out audibly. ‘There—I’ve got that confession off my chest and I can relax now and we need never discuss it again.’
Cleo nodded twice, taken aback by the information she had received and knowing that she needed to mull it over in private. She felt sad at what she had learned, but she also better understood her father’s choices. He had chosen to be true to the children he had presumably planned to have rather than the unexpected pregnancy that her mother had presented him with. Could she really blame him for that? That he had admitted that he was ashamed to walk away from her gave her a much more positive image of the man.
Two crazy weeks of high-octane wedding preparations during which Mel had consulted her about every possible bridal preference had already left Cleo dizzy and very much aware that her bridegroom enjoyed an extremely privileged lifestyle. Time and time again she had had to swallow her misgivings and embrace the art of compromise. Just as often, she had taken Mel’s advice and chosen to go with more upmarket options. Neither she nor her family had been allowed to pay for anything. Of course, they couldn’t have afforded to pay for anything that would have passed muster in Ari’s elite world. In a battle between her pride and her common sense, practicality had won. But Cleo had, however, picked her own wedding gown and her mother had paid for it.
And tomorrow was her big day, Cleo acknowledged in wonderment. The one downbeat note in her life was that she missed Ari. She missed him much more than she had expected to miss him. When Lisa had asked her to spend some time with her family, she had wanted that precious time with her mother but, unfortunately for her, she wanted Ari too. And with him having been in Brussels on business and their separate travelling arrangements, she had only seen him when they visited Lucy together shortly before her departure. They were hoping that on their return to the UK they would be allowed to foster Lucy until such time as it was possible to adopt her.
