by Lynne Graham
Olympia sat there like a statue, not moving a muscle, knowing she couldn't afford to move in case she broke down. And if she broke down she might cry or scream or shout, and he would then know that he had really hurt her. Self- preservation kept her still, her face a very pale but smooth oval as she gazed back at him in frozen silence, unable to trust her voice enough to attempt speech.
Nik's penetrating dark scrutiny was one of ferocious intensity. She suspected that he was not getting the reaction he wanted from her and that gave her a bitter comfort. After all, she had sacrificed her pride only to be rewarded with a humiliation that smarted and stung even as her body ached from his intimate possession.
'You look just like you looked the morning after you were caught with Lukas. Cold as bloody charity,' Nik condemned with steadily fracturing cool, a flash of gold now illuminating his stunning eyes. 'You have no loyalty and even fewer principles...that lack in you turns me off most.'
It took every ounce of what little courage she had left, but Olympia lifted her chin and murmured glacially, 'I hope I conceive this month. I find this kind of scene a complete bore, but interesting for all that. Here you are, twenty-nine years old, and you're still stuck in the past which I left behind years ago, along with other childish things.'
A dark line of blood ran up over Nik's spectacular cheekbones. He sent her a look of chilling dark fury and she jerked as if she had been struck. 'Be careful how you fight back, pethi mou. Too many people have already suffered at your hands. I don't intend to give you a second bite at the same cherry.'
He strode out. She leapt out of bed, raced about gathering up every item of clothing he had left behind and then, yanking open the door, she threw it all out in a heap in the corridor. Then she stood in the centre of the room, naked and shaking like a leaf. Pulling the sheet from the tumbled bed, she hauled it round herself. Next she poured herself a glass of champagne, hoping it would steady her ragged nerves.
But, try as she might, she could not prevent her memories from taking her back to the night which lay at the very heart of Nik's hatred for her. Hatred. She shivered and sank back on the bed to recall what had happened earlier that same day ten years earlier...
Katerina had asked Olympia to go shopping with her that morning.
'I just can't believe the way you let Nik boss you around,' Katerina had remarked over coffee in a cafe’. 'Take his plans for his own entertainment tonight. If I was engaged to a guy as good-looking and volatile as Nik Cozakis, I wouldn't let him go out to a nightclub without me!'
'I don't want Nik to feel that being engaged means he has to take me everywhere with him—'
'Everywhere?' Katerina rolled her eyes in cynical disbelief. 'You already get left behind when he goes sailing. You also got left behind when he flew over to Paris to take care of some business for his father. Why don't we spring a surprise on the guys tonight? We could go to the same club and see what they get up to without us.'
Olympia didn't fall for that idea at first. When Nik called in that afternoon, she just asked him up front to let her accompany him that evening. He told her no, she was too young. So she threatened to go out clubbing with Katerina instead.
'No way,' Nik countered. 'Her family wouldn't like it either. We go out in a crowd to clubs. That way we all look after each other.'
'But you've just said that I can't come with you tonight—'
'It's a boys' night...OK?'
And they argued and parted for the first time still angry at each other. Olympia immediately phoned Katerina to take her up on her suggestion that they gatecrash the evening. Katerina made it sound like a really fun thing to do, but by the time the taxi dropped them off at the club Olympia's strongest need was to smooth over the row she had had with Nik.
They found Lukas sitting alone at a table with Nik's car keys lying in front of him. When Olympia asked him in surprise where the other boys were, he muttered something about them having gone on to a party somewhere else.
Olympia had barely sat down when Katerina suddenly gasped, 'Oh, no!'
Olympia looked in the same direction and saw Nik. Lounging back against a pillar, her fianc6 was in the act of hauling a beautiful giggling blonde into his arms. Crushing her to his lean, powerful frame, he then fell on her like a sex-starved animal, demonstrating an enthusiasm which he had never let loose in Olympia's radius. It was a process which the luscious blonde openly revelled in.
'Who...wh-what?' Olympia stammered in sick disbelief.
'Ramona. She's an ex-girlfriend, an Italian model...let's get out of here before they see us,' Katerina urged, snatching up Nik's car keys and thrusting them into Olympia's nerveless hands. 'We can talk outside about what to do. You can't make a scene in here!'
Hustled away at speed, Olympia was too distraught to protest. But a few feet from the exit Katerina stopped dead. 'Tell me, did you enjoy seeing Nik having a good time for a change?'
Olympia met her friend's glinting dark eyes and blinked, convinced she must have misheard her. 'Sorry?'
'Do you want to know what Nik really thinks of you?' Katerina enquired sweetly. 'I can tell you because he told me. He thinks you're fat and stupid and sexless, but worth your weight in gold!'
Olympia's stomach twisted. In deep shock, she stared back at the Greek girl.
'Your grandfather and Nik's father arranged your marriage before you even arrived in Athens. Everybody knows that.' Katerina gave her a contemptuous smile. 'Without your future inheritance you're nothing! If Nik needs to console himself with more attractive women, who can blame him?'
Stricken by such malice from the friend she trusted, Olympia whirled away and fled out to the car park. Taking refuge in Nik's Ferrari, as she had been primed to do, she burst into tears. Katerina's words stabbed her to the heart while her memory replayed the agonising image of Nik in an explicit clinch with a female ten times more beautiful than she herself could ever hope to be.
Katerina's spiteful assurances might have been discarded had they not fitted like a horrible blueprint to the flaws Olympia had been afraid to confront in her relationship with Nik. His seemingly instant attraction to her, the speed of their engagement, his sexual restraint which could easily be explained by her own lack of sex appeal. Nik had not only never loved her but had also discussed her and laughed about her with his cousin, Katerina. She felt as if she was dying inside herself, destroyed by her own blind, trusting stupidity. She must have been sitting there a good twenty minutes before the driver's door opened without warning. She froze, assuming it was Nik, but it was Lukas who climbed in beside her. 'Didn't want to do this, but here I am anyway,' he groaned, every word slurred by the amount of alcohol he had evidently consumed. 'You're standing on everybody's toes, Olympia. Why did you ever come to Greece?'
'Mind your own business—'
Lukas vented a humourless laugh. 'But it is...don't you see? My father says our company will be put out of business if your grandfather and Nik's father merge their empires. We won't be able to compete any more. Together, they'll be too powerful.'
'It's not likely to happen now!’ Olympia whispered tremulously.
In silence, Lukas let his head loll back against the seat.
And then Katerina reappeared, and approached the car with a triumphant smile on her lips. 'All present and correct, I see. Guess what I plan to tell Nik now...'
'Go away...both of you!' Olympia urged brokenly.
'I'm not finished yet. But you and Nik are...I can promise you that. Just in case you were thinking of forgiving him for snogging the face off the blonde, I'm about to go I back inside and tell him that I've just caught you and Lukas having a high old time of it here in his car!'
'Sorry,' Lukas framed thickly. 'Filthy set-up, but you didn't leave us much choice.'
'Why would you tell a mad story like that?' Olympia stared at the other girl in total disbelief and got out of the Ferrari to look her straight in the face.
'You're so dumb, Olympia.
' Katerina dropped her voice to a level that Lukas could not hear. 'Nik and I were getting really close until you muscled in and pushed me out. Who do you think he'll turn to when you're gone?'
It was the last straw for Olympia. No longer in the mood to confront Nik, feeling as gutted as she did, she was desperate just to get away from all of them—Nik and Lukas and Katerina—each of whom had betrayed her. Leaving Katerina and Lukas in possession of Nik's Ferrari, she took off across the car park. Unable to face returning to her grandfather's villa, she ended up walking into a park and spending what remained of the night on a bench.
And when she finally arrived home, at seven the next morning, Nik and her grandfather were waiting for her together. All emotion drained from her by then, she clung to the defensive shell supplied by her battered pride and her seething bitterness. Indeed, that day she genuinely didn't care about Katerina's lies or what she herself stood condemned for doing with Lukas if it enraged Nik and outraged Spyros and got her back home to her mother and London more quickly.
Olympia emerged from her recollection of that ghastly evening of revelation to find that she had had two glasses of champagne and that all of a sudden she wasn't feeling very well. Idiot to drink on an empty stomach! she castigated herself. Why was it that when Nik came into her life she went haywire and made a total hash of everything?
Normally she was quiet, sensible and reasonably mature. She didn't fight with people. She didn't make waves. In the grip of emotional turmoil, Olympia's mind flailed about in a half a dozen different directions. Things from the past didn't fit together as neatly any more, she acknowledged, while wondering why the bed appeared to be lurching beneath her. Was it the effect of the champagne? Standing up, she watched the carpet ripple with incredulous eyes and plotted a swerving path into the marble bathroom.
As she ran a bath for herself and got in, she struggled to concentrate on the shattering confession which Nik had made. His staggering claim that she, the plain Jane that she was, had given him sleepless nights of sexual frustration ten years back. That did not make sense—not when she looked back on their excruciatingly proper engagement, during which Nik had behaved as if she'd had a repelling force field surrounding her.
Indeed, she might well have called him a liar this evening had Nik not been demonstrating a most impressive amount of current desire for her! Was that why she had lost control and ended up in bed with him? Learning that she could actually be attractive to Nik had demolished her defences. Somewhere inside her still lurked the hurt and humiliated teenager who had been forced to see herself as fat and sexless.
Only now, when sanity returned in the aftermath, did she despise herself for surrendering to her own most basic urges, not to mention his. At what price too? 'Consummating their deal'? She shuddered, mortified, tears welling up and running down her cheeks.
Why didn't she know more about men? She had spent ten years sitting home with her mother, ten years distrusting the motives of every man who asked her out, and oh, yes, even with her restricted social outlets there had been invitations. She had succumbed to a handful of first dates but had invariably seen so many faults in the man she'd then said no to a second date. Yet now she had the horrible suspicion that the only flaw one or two of the nicer men had suffered from had been an inability to be Nik Cozakis! And if that was true, that meant she was a bigger fool than even he thought she was!
As she clambered out of the bath a wave of dizziness engulfed Olympia. In the act of wrapping herself in a fleecy towel, she overbalanced and fell. A cry of fright broke from her lips as she hit the floor. She was winded and she was hurt. She lay there sobbing with pain and self-loathing.
‘Theos mou!' The first she knew of Nik's arrival was the outburst of Greek, swiftly followed by the domineering command to lie still while a pair of infuriatingly invasive hands roamed over her legs and her arms.
'Haven't you had enough of that yet?' Olympia muttered, reddened eyes squeezed tight shut while she lay there like a corpse.
You might have broken something...I heard you scream!'
‘Go away!'
'I'm going to make you comfortable here on the floor. I have a doctor flown in,' Nik announced, sounding strangely breathless.
‘That would be stupid.' Olympia planted both hands on floor and slowly raised herself. She felt bruised and tired but knew she had done no lasting damage. Her head was still swimming. She opened her eyes to get her bearings and registered that the bathroom walls were heaving around her. That optical illusion made her feel horribly nauseous.
'Oh...' Nik sighed, suddenly recognising what was really wrong and propelling her in the right direction so that he could offer support while she was ingloriously ill.
He was a true prince when she would have given anything for a male who was squeamish and had simply cut and run to leave her to it. He mopped her brow with a cool cloth, murmured what sounded like concerned things in Greek, and stood by while she freshened up again.
'I'm drunk,' Olympia breathed, rebelling against a sympathy which stung her pride. Glancing up, she collided with liquid dark golden eyes framed by the most astonishingly long dark lashes, and even in the weakened state she was her heart skipped a beat.
'No, you're seasick,' Nik contradicted without hesitation. 'I should have thought of this, and I'm about to hit the first-aid supplies and make you feel much better.'
He carried her back to the bed, rolled her out of the towel and flipped the duvet over her. The entire manoeuvre was carried out with such dexterity that it was done before she knew what he was about.
'If I had ever got to take you sailing I'd have been better prepared for this,' Nik commented with wry amusement.
'Who stopped you?' she muttered, tongue-in-cheek.
'Spyros,' Nik responded, startling her with that answer 'Your grandmother and your uncle drowned in the sea. Your grandfather didn't trust a teenager to look after you on the water, and with losses like that in the family how could I argue with him?'
As Nik left the state room, Olympia stared into space with shaken eyes. Such a simple explanation for his failure to take her sailing all those years ago, and yet it had never once occurred to her.
Five minutes later Nik reappeared with a glass of water and a tablet. She took them and lay back against the pillows.
Sheathed in tight black jeans and a beige T-shirt, Nik looked younger, more approachable, even more gorgeous than he usually looked. She turned her head away, her pinched profile taut, knowing that she had to look her plainest at that moment
'I'll be fine now. You can leave me.'
'No. I'll stay until you go to sleep.'
Her lip curled. Nik had been brought up to have wonderful manners. Confronted with apparent female fragility, he went into automatic protective male mode. It mean, nothing. It meant no more than the consummation of their marriage deal, she conceded grimly. So Nik enjoyed sex. So Nik wanted a son and heir. All she had really learnt was that she didn't need to be beautiful, like his ex-mistress Gisele Bonner, to get Nik in the mood, but since men had the reputation of being less choosy than women were about their sexual partners she was in no danger of seeing herself as irresistible.
'If you wanted me so much ten years ago, why did you never do anything about it?' she whispered suddenly, since he seemed to be in a more approachable mood.
'Get real, Olympia,' Nik urged lazily. 'If your grandfather had found out that we were sleeping together, he'd have sent you home in disgrace. I didn't want to be responsible for causing another family rift, nor did I want you thousands of miles away in London.'
'Yes,' she acknowledged, shutting her eyes.
'Do you want any more good reasons? Like the fact that a pregnancy would have been a disaster for both of us at that age? Or the simple truth that I honestly did want to try to wait until we were married?'
Olympia was so disconcerted by the ease with which he offered those explanations that she said nothing. On yet another count Katerina had
lied. Nik had never found her unattractive. Indeed, Nik had merely been a remarkably sensible teenager.
She drifted off to sleep without being aware of it and wakened in the early hours to the dim glow of a lamp somewhere close by. When she opened her eyes, she tensed in dismay to find Nik barely a foot away. Still clothed, he was lying on top of the duvet in an indolent sprawl, hooded dark eyes coolly intent on her face.
'What are you thinking about?' she heard herself whisper.
His beautiful mouth twisted. 'Lukas...'
'Magic!' Olympia snapped, and flipped over to present him with a defensively turned back.
'We grew up together. He was a clown but I was fond of him,' Nik breathed in a driven undertone. 'When he died, I felt like I'd let him down.'
'Died?' Olympia flipped back over to focus on him with shocked eyes. 'When did he die?'
'In a drunken car smash a few weeks after you left Greece.' Nik grimaced as he sat up. 'Apparently he was rarely seen sober after that night. I don't think he could cope with what he had done.'
Her face drained of all colour. 'So you're blaming me for that as well.'
'No, I'm not.'
But she didn't believe him. She felt hollow inside. Lukas Theotokas had been Katerina's dupe. Had Lukas even appreciated what he was getting involved in that night ten years ago? He had had to get very drunk to play his part in the brunette's plans. It was sad, terribly sad. And if she told Nik now that his one-time friend had deliberately set out to break them up by the nastiest means available, Nik would no doubt go through the roof. She sensed that Nik now saw Lukas as more sinned against than sinning.
'So much grief followed from that night,' Nik stated curtly. 'Katerina failed her exams, and for a while her family were very concerned about her. She was upset about Lukas—'
'I bet she was.'
Nik dealt her a chilling appraisal. 'You think that Katerina should have lied to protect you because you were friends, but for a Greek family loyalty always takes precedence.'