Free Forgiven but Not Forgotten? by Abby Green

Arctic. She’d been a necessary wake-up call. A startling reminder of what was important. Not to get side-tracked.
    Andreas reassured himself that this time things were different. When the lift stopped and the doors opened a rush of anticipaton and pleasure seized him, washing aside all his doubts. Siena DePiero was here and that was all he needed to know. Having her anywhere but close to him was not an option.
    He’d been waiting for this moment for a long time—ever since that night, when he’d felt a kind of helpless anger and a sense of betrayal that he never wanted to feel again. Ever since that following morning, when she’d emerged from the hotel like a manifestation of his fantasies, her hair tumbled around her shoulders, backlit against the Paris dawn light. He’d wanted her then—fiercely. Even after what she’d done. It had taken all of his strength to get on his motorcycle and leave her behind.
    * * *
    ‘This is your room.’
    Andreas was standing back to let Siena go into a vast bedroom. She’d just been given a tour of the jaw-dropping apartment. Silently she went in, relieved to hear Andreas say: ‘your room’. It was stunning, decked out in sumptuous but understated dark blues and complementary greys. A king-sized bed dominated the room, and Siena could see a glimpse of a white-tiled en suite bathroom and an entrance to another room.
    Exploring, she found herself walking through a large dressing alcove to a separate lounge area, with a sofa, chairs, desk and a TV. Effectively she had her own suite.
    She turned around to see Andreas leaning with his shoulder against the entrance to the dressing room, his hands in his pockets giving him a rakish air.
    ‘This is...lovely,’ she said stiffly, knowing that lovely was woefully inadequate in the face of this opulence. She was stunned again at Andreas’s world now, and stunned anew to see him in his open-shirted tuxedo and realise that only hours before Andreas Xenakis had still been firmly in her shameful guilt-ridden past, not her tumultuous present.
    But he was going to find you sooner or later, an inner voice reminded her.
    ‘I’ll arrange for a stylist and a beautician to come tomorrow, to attend to whatever you need.’
    To make her beautiful for him.
    Siena felt light-headed all of a sudden and swayed ever so slightly.
    Immediately Andreas was standing straight, alert. ‘What is it? Are you hungry?’
    Siena beat back the waves of weakness, determined not to show Andreas any vulnerability. She shook her head. ‘No. It’s nothing. I’m just tired. I’d like to go to bed now.’
    Andreas just looked at her for a long moment and then as if deciding something, he stepped back and said, ‘By all means, Siena. You’re my guest now and you know where everything is. Help yourself to anything you want.’
    He backed away, and just before he got to her bedroom door he said softly, ‘You should sleep while you can, Siena. You’ll need it.’
    Siena fought back a fresh wave of light-headedness at hearing him say that and watched as he walked out of the room, closing the bedroom door behind him. Sudden weariness nearly felled her. Her head hurt after everything that had happened. She couldn’t take any more in.
    Finding her small suitcase, she extracted what she needed and dressed for bed. She couldn’t block out the way her weak body rejoiced to sink into expensive bedclothes, and gratefully slipped into what felt like a coma.
    * * *
    Andreas knew he was in the grip of a dream but he couldn’t seem to pull himself out of it. He was back in that glittering ballroom in Paris. He could feel the ambition rising up within him to own such a place one day. It would be a remarkable achievement for a boy from a small town outside Athens with only the most basic qualifications to his name.
    And then, like a camera zooming in for a close-up, all he could see was her face. Pure and beautiful. Haughty and cold. Perfect. The white-gold of her hair was in a