by Julia James
‘I’m willing to take anything,’ Sophie said, her voice low.
Anxiety pressed at her. Although the cheque from Nikos was buying her blessed time, she had to start earning again as soon as she possibly could.
But she should not have thought of that cheque.
Nor of Nikos.
Like a guillotine, her mind slammed shut. A steel door rammed down across her memory. It took every ounce of her strength to hold it in place.
Focus—that’s all you have to do! Focus on the only thing that matters now: getting another job. Any job.
The woman at the Job Centre was scrolling down her computer screen. ‘There really is very little,’ she said, disapproval still emanating from her. ‘If you could type it might be different, but as it is you have no marketable skills.’
Sophie knew. Had known it for four bitter years. No marketable skills, and no time to acquire any. No time to do anything other than work all the hours she could, for whatever wages she could.
The woman sat back, defeated. ‘You’ll have to come in tomorrow. There may be more then. All that’s on the database is casual bar work, and you said you didn’t want that.’
No, Sophie didn’t want that. She’d tried it once and found the inevitable sexual harassment repellent. Since then she’d stuck to shop work, which could run on into the evenings. But now she knew she had no leg to stand on in being picky about bar work. Not after she’d been prepared to work as an escort…
Even if she had denied the true nature of the work Nikos had been right.
But she couldn’t think of Nikos. Absolutely, totally must not think of him. She looked across at the woman. Her expression was bleak.
‘What’s going in bar work?’
Ten minutes later she walked out on to the street. The dust and fumes of London hit her, worse than ever now, after the respite she’d had in the countryside. But that was the least of her problems. The biggest one was what it always had been—money. Even if she got the job she’d been sent to start that evening the money would be lousy. The basic hourly rate was grim. She ran sums in her head and felt fear bite.
Bleakly she trudged along the pavement. Her muscles still ached from the miles she’d walked yesterday. Down the long drive of the house at five in the morning, then a good two miles along the main road until she’d finally come to a village, found someone up and about at that early hour, and asked where the nearest train station was. It had turned out to be a taxi-ride away—a fare she could scarcely afford, let alone the price of a train ticket back to London. And she’d left her pitiful luggage behind her too. She had bolted with nothing more than her handbag, wearing the same clothes she had the night before because they’d been the only ones she could silently scrabble for as she edged from the bedroom, terrified Nikos would wake. Terrified her nerve would crack and she would be unable to do what she had to do…
But I did it, and that’s all that matters! Nothing else—nothing else…
Despair crowded into her mind. She tried to fight it off, but it settled like a grey, chill miasma over her.
I have to keep going. That’s all I must think about. Keep going.
And above all I must not think about what happened with Nikos! Because if I do…if I do…
Dear God, if she let herself think, remember, feel anything about what had happened, she would collapse, sit down on the kerb and weep, until her body was wrung out and she was simply dust on the street to be blown away into oblivion.
It was an aberration, a dream—that’s all. That’s how I have to think of it. As if I’d dreamt it. Because that’s all it was. A dream. As unreal as if I had imagined it. As impossible as if I had imagined it.
But, try as she did to tell herself that, it seemed her body knew better. Her body was crying out to her that that extraordinary, miraculous night, that gift that had been given to her out of nowhere, had been real.
She could remember with every cell just how exquisite his every caress had been, every touch of his lips, every beautiful, incredible sensation he had aroused in her as he had made love to her slowly, sensuously, tenderly, passionately…
She stumbled on, forcing herself to do so. Finding words in her head that she did not want there—could not allow there. But they came all the same, just as the echoes of his caresses trembled in her limbs, set an aching in her breasts, her heart. Her stricken, broken heart.
How can a heart break twice?
Hadn’t it been agony enough to go through it the first time around, without having to endure it again now? Yet she knew that there was no escape—could be no escape. Nikos had come back into her life, and her heart had broken all over again.
It was that simple, that brutal.
If only he’d never seen me again!
And yet…
How could she wish never to have seen Nikos again? Never to have experienced that miraculous, magical night she had spent with him? It had been a blessing she could never regret! Emotion poured through her. Whatever the reason Nikos had taken her she must be glad—glad with all her heart—that he had! Because this time her abiding memory would not be burning humiliation and coruscating shame, tearing her to pieces, but instead something she could treasure all her life—a precious gift to hoard and protect, not reject with loathing and repulsion and anger.
That’s what I must hold on to! To give me the strength to go on.
For go on she must—there was no alternative. There never had been.
Head bowed, she went on walking the hard pavement.
‘Sir, we’ve got a sighting.’
Instantly Nikos tensed, fingers gripping his mobile. ‘Where?’ he barked.
His security operative gave him the location. Nikos scrawled it on a pad, then cleared the line, before punching through to his chauffeur to order his car to the forecourt and relaying the location for him to key into the car’s satnav. Then, striding from the office, pausing only to instruct his PA to cancel all appointments, he swung out into the corridor of the executive suite of Kazandros Corp’s London headquarters and headed for the lift. His expression was grim.
His mood grimmer.
Finally his quarry had been run to earth. Emotion scythed through him, but he cut it short. For twenty-four hours emotion had rampaged through him, all but stopping him from functioning. Consuming him to the exclusion of everything else. From the moment he had finally realised that Sophie had gone—disappeared—not just from his bed, but from Belledon itself.
It had taken him over an hour of increasingly frantic searching through the near-derelict main house to establish that she was not lying with a broken neck at the foot of collapsing stairs, or fallen through the rotten floorboards. Even longer to realise that, despite having left all her belongings behind, unpacked, she had nevertheless gone—left him.
Why? The question still burned at the base of his mind, though he had stopped trying to find an answer. There was none that he could think of. It was inexplicable—unforgivable.
What the hell was she playing at?
Anger bit in his throat and he thrust it away. As he climbed into the car, throwing himself back in his seat and ordering his chauffeur, ‘Just drive!’, his face took on a closed, brooding expression. He’d been a fool. A total fool.
Just like last time.
Sophie Granton had torn him to shreds all over again. The burning in the pit of his stomach intensified, and so did the grim expression on his drawn features. He would find Sophie—find her, shake her like a rag, and get answers!
Damn her—damn her for doing this to me all over again! Taking me to heaven—then tossing me into hell. Damn her!
The drive to the location he’d been given took longer than he’d expected. From the plush Kazandros offices in the City the car wended its way north-west—but not to any of the prosperous areas of London that he would once have associated with Sophie Granton. But then these days Sophie Granton was no longer a Holland Park princess. As the car headed into more downmarket streets, Nikos
glanced out through the smoked-glass windows, frowning. This area was not just downmarket, it was derelict!
His mobile sounded again, and he snapped it open.
‘Yes?’ His voice was curt.
‘The subject is now walking along the street designated as her home address,’ came the voice at the other end of the connection.
‘Just keep her under surveillance,’ said Nikos, before relaying the information to his driver.
His frown darkened as he looked about him. Then he saw her. She was some way ahead of the car, trudging along the pavement. There was something about the way she was walking that stung in his memory. He’d seen her walking like that once before, her head bowed, only just managing to put one foot in front of another. It had been the night he’d set eyes on her trudging through the rain in her tawdry finery, escaping from Cosmo Dimistris.
Defeated. Exhausted. Broken.
For a split second emotion knifed in him like a blade in his heart, twisting it painfully. Then a more predominant emotion surged again.
‘Stop the car!’
The chauffeur did not need telling twice. He slowed to a halt and Nikos leapt from the car, striding along the pavement, past pedestrians, with a heavy, rapid tread. She was right ahead of him.
He clamped his hand on her shoulder and spun her round. She gave half a cry, her face suddenly shot with terror. Then she saw who it was.
She went white.
‘Nikos.’ Her voice was a breath, her skin taut over her cheekbones.
‘Yes, Nikos!’ he snarled. ‘And now you can tell me what the hell you think you’re playing at!’
Her expression blanked—completely blanked. For a second Nikos felt fury shoot through him, and then he realised that she was not deliberately blanking him, not deigning to shut him out. She was blank because she couldn’t answer him. It was the same beaten, broken look she had had when he’d scooped her up, soaking wet, off the street.
The pressure of his hand on her shoulder slackened. He had to talk to her, get answers. But not here—not on the street.
‘Where do you live, Sophie?’ His eyes glanced around—surely she didn’t live here? It might not be officially a slum, but the whole place was seedy and malodorous, with litter in the street, and graffiti, and clearly vandalised buildings.
She pointed vaguely to a building a few metres away. The lower storey was a boarded-up shop, and at the side was a door, inset with chipped and peeling paint.
‘You live there?’ The shock in Nikos’s voice was open. What the hell is going on? Why is she reduced to this total dump?
Well, he would get answers to that, too. He would get all the answers he needed.
The car had drawn up alongside him now. It was drawing attention—it was not the kind of car that frequented an area like this. He crossed briefly to the driver and spoke to him, telling him to cruise around the block until he was called back. The car glided off, and Nikos turned his attention to Sophie. His hand was still on her shoulder.
He thought he could feel her trembling.
He walked her to the door she’d indicated, and waited while she fumblingly got out the keys and opened it. Inside, a smell of dirt, decay and stale urine hit him. There was no hallway, just a flight of stairs going straight up. At the top were several doors.
‘This one,’ said Sophie in a low voice, and opened it.
There was a single room beyond, and as he stepped inside Nikos realised that whatever had happened to Sophie Granton since he had severed all contact four years ago it had not been good. The room was some kind of bedsit, with half the space occupied by a narrow bed, and opposite, in an alcove flanked by a built-in cupboard, a sink, with a small fridge to one side, topped by a miniature cooker sporting a pair of cooking rings on which were stacked two saucepans. A small kettle was on the draining board, plugged into a loose socket on the wall. The floor covering was cracked vinyl, with a tiny rug beside the bed, and the curtains were faded around the window, which looked down into a cramped yard at the back of the house. The sole virtue of the room was that it was clean, tidy, and smelled of disinfectant.
‘You live here—’
It was neither a question nor a statement. It was a voicing of disbelief.
She had put her bag down on the bed. ‘Yes,’ she said.
She seemed very calm, but her face and eyes were still blank. He looked at her a moment. She was not meeting his eyes; she didn’t seem to be able to. He paused a moment, then spoke.
‘What in God’s name is going on?’ He took a breath, sharp and scissored. ‘How can you live in this hole?’
She blinked, as if the question were a strange one. ‘It’s all I can afford.’
He said something in Greek, sibilant and angry.
‘Why? Sophie, your father was a millionaire several times over! Even losing his business can’t have reduced him to this! He will have put money aside, ring-fenced it. Even if it wasn’t a fortune, like he had before, he would hardly end up a pauper! So why the hell are you living like this?’
His eyes narrowed suddenly. ‘Have you fallen out with him?’ Speculation laced his expression. ‘Does he disapprove of your lifestyle? Is that it? Was that really the first time you’d worked as an escort, or were you feeding me a line?’ A new thought struck him, cold, and horrible. ‘Are you doing drugs, Sophie?’
He studied her. It had never crossed his mind that she might be, but now, looking at her, he wondered. When he’d held her in his arms he’d thought her wand-slim—was her slenderness the shedding of flesh that drugs could cause? Just as they could cause penury and desperation—enough to make her risk working as an escort?
Did she tell me she was paying off credit-card debts, or was that just my assumption? Was she really paying for drugs?
The shake of her head was infinitesimal, but it was there all the same, and Nikos found relief snaking through him. Then incomprehension took over again. So why was she living like this?
‘Does your father know this is where you live?’
The question seemed to send a jolt through her, and emotion jagged in her eyes for a second. There was another imperceptible shake of her head. She wrapped her arms around herself, as if she were bandaging her body. As if she were wounded.
Something was wrong, Nikos knew, with foreboding. Very wrong.
‘Why haven’t you told your father, Sophie?’ His voice was low. ‘He couldn’t possibly want you to live here! He would help you get on your feet—you know he would! Maybe you feel you should be independent at your age, not rely on him financially, but—’
A sound broke from her. It might have been a laugh, but Nikos knew it was not. She looked at him. Straight at him.
‘He hasn’t got any money,’ she said. Her arms seemed to tighten around her, and the wildness in her eyes intensified. She was under huge emotional stress, Nikos could see, and he knew he had to tread very, very carefully or she would break into pieces.
He looked at her. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said carefully.
This time she did laugh. But it was hollow and wild. ‘Don’t you? Tell me, Nikos, you who operate up in the financial stratosphere, does your fiscal expertise go downmarket at all? Do you, running a company the size of Kazandros, ever come across any slang jargon in the financial field? Does the term “boiler room” mean anything to you?’ Her voice was cruel, and vicious. But again it was not him she was aiming at.
He stilled. ‘Yes,’ he said.
Boiler room—slang for financial operations so fraudulent the financial authorities were forever struggling to combat them. Like fetid mushrooms, as soon as one was closed down another sprang up to take its place. Shady in the extreme, and highly, obscenely profitable for those who ran them. Always hungry for more and yet more investors, persuading them by slick, sophisticated marketing to invest in worthless bogus shares and then, when the promised returns did not materialise, persuading them to invest more and yet more to recoup their original investment, to get to the magic pot
of gold at the end of the shoddy rainbow.
Until they had no more money left to invest. Until they had been bled dry. And then the scam merchants moved on to the next victim.
Nikos’s brows drew together in puzzlement. Surely Edward Granton, a long-term, big-league corporate player, would have recognised a boiler-room scam? Known not to go near it? So how the hell had he got trapped in its fraudulent coils?
He pushed the question aside. Right now it wasn’t important. Right now only one thing was important. His gaze swept condemningly around the dingy bedsit. Revulsion rose in him. He took her elbow.
‘We’re getting out of here,’ he said.
Her eyes flared suddenly, and then, like a shadow falling, they went blank again.
‘You go, Nikos,’ she said, in that low, dead voice.
He gave a brief, rasping laugh. ‘There is no way on earth, Sophie, that I am leaving you in this dump. Get your things—we’re going.’ He glanced around again at the bare room. ‘There can’t be much here, and anyway—’ his voice tightened ‘—I have the things you left at Belledon.’
‘I…I’ll come and collect them,’ she said falteringly.
‘They’re only fit for the trash,’ he riposted.
‘They’re all I’ve got. Please.’ Her voice sounded anxious. ‘Please let me collect them—don’t throw them away. I need them. And,’ she went on, forcing herself, ‘I’m fine here—honestly. I’m used to it.’
She took another razoring breath. She needed him to go. Just go. She was starting to break, and she mustn’t break in front of him—she just mustn’t. The stark shock of his approach on the street was wearing off, leaving in its place only an urgency to get rid of him. She had to get rid of him. She had to. It had taken all the strength she possessed to leave him that fateful morning, to force herself to walk away, down the long, long road back to the bleak, hopeless life to which she was condemned and from which there could be no escape.
And now to see him again, to have him here, so close, in this vile dump she lived in, was agony—just agony!