by Lynne Graham
Sarah shuddered as she breathed in deep. Desperate for a man...embittered by her lack of one. Clearly that was how Alex Terzakis saw her. With rigorous determination she suppressed a squirming sense of utter humiliation. He was Greek to the backbone. What Callie called ‘unreconstructed man’, what Sarah called a Neanderthal primitive. He belonged in a cave, not a civilised society. Or in a museum alongside the dinosaur display.
Even in the depths of the mortification she was struggling to conceal from him she was conscious of a helpless current of grotesque fascination. On the surface, he was so sophisticated...but underneath as earthy and as simplistic in his beliefs about the needs of a woman as any uneducated peasant. He was telling her politely that what she really needed was a man in her bed... Dear lord, even the dinosaur display would be too advanced for him! It would never occur to him that celibacy was a perfectly natural choice for many people.
Then how could it occur to him? Alex Terzakis had not one but two mistresses. One in Athens, one in Paris. Sarah swallowed back her distaste, repelled by such rampant and unashamed promiscuity. Evidently his sexual appetite was voracious and uncontrolled. In today’s society, Alex Terzakis was a prehistoric savage, more to be pitied than anything else, she told herself, raising her chin. That she should have allowed such a barbarian to hurt and embarrass her was ridiculous!
‘Nicky is not for sale,’ Sarah said very drily, but her cheeks warmed as she dimly questioned her surprisingly intimate thoughts over the past few minutes.
‘I did not suggest that he was but I hardly think that you would wish to tie yourself down with a young and demanding child when you could make a new life for yourself.’
‘But I don’t want a new life. I am perfectly happy with the one that I have.’
His striking bone-structure tightened, hooded dark eyes resting on her without any perceptible emotion at all. ‘Then you force me to be blunt—’
‘Oh, I don’t think you need forcing,’ Sarah opined, sweetly sarcastic as she raked him with unhidden derision. ‘I would say that being blunt comes very naturally to you. The challenge would be sensitivity.’
‘You are a woman of discernment.’ Instead of reacting with the anger she had expected, Alex cast her a glittering threat of a smile. ‘Although I strive hard to pity you for your lack of femininity, your shrewish tongue and your unashamed malice, I do indeed find it a quite extraordinary challenge.’
Sarah turned crimson and then white in speedy succession. Her loathing for him was magnified into a murderous heat. Her teeth sank into the soft underside of her lower lip and she tasted the sweet tang of her own blood when what she most wanted was his.
‘Let us waste no further time. You are telling me that you wish to deprive Nikos of his natural heritage and his father out of spite,’ he asserted, icily contemptuous. ‘In opposition, what do you offer? A hovel for him to live in! The tag of illegitimacy to carry throughout his life! And the guardianship of a woman who is not of good character. Had you had any decency, you would not have encouraged your teenage sister to continue her relationship with my brother—’
Sarah was trembling with fury. ‘What control did you have over your wretched brother?’
‘I was not aware of their affair until it was too late. You knew from the beginning,’ Alex condemned. ‘You played your own part in your sister’s premature death—’
‘God forgive you!’ Sarah was stricken to the heart by the charge.
‘And, not content with that tragedy, you now seek to destroy my nephew’s future. I will not allow you to do it. He belongs with my family. We can give him everything,’ he stressed with harsh emphasis. ‘An extended family of supportive relatives, quite apart from a loving mother and father of his own...’
Sarah tensed, her fine brows drawing together.
‘The finest schools, a beautiful home, the ability to hold his head high wherever he is and in whatever company. He is a Terzakis.’ And to be a Terzakis was evidently the very zenith of anyone’s worldly ambition, she translated. She was facing a male fired by a powerful pride in his own blue-blooded, monied heritage. He could probably quote his family tree accurately back at least several generations. Little wonder, she thought, bitterly resentful, that Callie Hartwell, daughter of a factory supervisor and a nurse, had been less than nothing to him. No fancy pedigree there, just good working-class breeding.
Her reflections turned back to something that had puzzled her seconds earlier. She must have misheard him. He could not have said ‘a loving mother’. He could not have said that.
‘Androula would love him as her own. There is neither bitterness nor room for malice in her generous heart. She has had many months to adjust to the knowledge that another woman was carrying her husband’s child...’
Sarah was paralysed. Androula...her husband’s child? Dear God, Damon had got married to another woman while her poor sister had been pathetically pinning her hopes to an eventual reconciliation! He had actually got married! She was sick to the stomach, barely able to move on a stage to the even more staggering assertion that Callie’s no doubt triumphant rival was now most generously prepared to play mother to Damon’s illegitimate child...
‘Let me g-get this straight.’ Sarah formed the plea with an intonation wiped clean of emotion by extreme shock. ‘You are asking me to hand over Nicky to Damon and...and this And...’
‘Androula,’ he filled in obligingly.
‘Damon’s wife,’ she repeated, just to be sure that she could not have misunderstood.
‘She is a gentle, loving young woman,’ Alex emphasised with unconcealed pride in his freedom to make such a claim.
Not a little scrubber like Callie, Sarah interpreted in a passion of pain. She had not misunderstood. She was so appalled by what he was daring to suggest that only the fiercest discipline kept her nausea under control. That this savage did not even appreciate that he was contravening Sarah’s every moral principle underscored how very sick the Terzakis clan was in terms of basic decency.
Dear heaven, had Callie lived, would they have approached her to demand her child from her? Would Alex Terzakis have accused Callie of spitefully denying her son the wealth and material advantages which Damon alone could supply? Very probably. This was a male who had treated Callie like dirt from the outset, who had never for a single second even considered the possibility that she might be fit to marry his kid brother...no matter that she was already pregnant with his child. Self-evidently, Alex Terzakis did not even allow for the fact that such a low-class, common person as Sarah Hartwell could even have finer feelings!
Callie would have died sooner than hand over her son to Damon’s wife. The acrid taste of bile in her dry mouth, Sarah walked over to the phone. ‘If you don’t get out of this house right now, I intend to call the police,’ she told him unsteadily. ‘After all, you did force your way in.’
‘Is this all you have to say to me?’ Alex raked at her incredulously. ‘Are you completely without shame? I tell you of Androula’s generosity—’
‘Generosity—th-that’s a good one!’ Sarah lifted the receiver, fully prepared to carry out her threat. ‘What you have just dared to suggest is so frankly obscene it does not require any further discussion, Mr Terzakis. It is the sickest, most vile proposition I have ever heard.’
‘Obscene?’ He made it sound like a strange word.
Reluctantly, Sarah forced herself to look at him. Perceptibly she shuddered as she clashed with black ice eyes of enquiry. ‘Get out!’ she told him ferociously.
‘I have no intention of departing before we reach agreement.’ Rock-like resolution emanated from him in teeth-clenchingly arrogant waves.
‘If you don’t get out,’ Sarah swore between clenched teeth, abandoning the phone to employ a far more realistic form of intimidation, ‘I’ll approach the dirtiest tabloid available and tell all...’
Absolute outrage paralysed him. Violence shimmered rawly in his brilliant golden stare. ‘You would do that to Androula?’ he
prompted very, very quietly.
A shiver ran down her taut backbone but she stood tall in spite of it. ‘I don’t give that—’ she snapped her fingers with a sharp crack ‘—for your precious, saintly Androula!’
‘Were you of my sex, I would break every bone in your vindictive body...slowly,’ he told her wrathfully.
‘You’d get your fingers burnt,’ she derided. ‘You can’t touch me and you know you can’t—that’s what’s making you so angry. If either you or your brother approaches me again, I go to the Press. Damon could have had his child, Mr Terzakis. He had his chance and he blew it. My sister gave her life to bring Nicky into the world. That’s how precious he was to her and that’s how precious he is to me!’
‘You have no right to keep Nikos!’
‘Watch me...or fight me in court...where all will be revealed,’ she reminded him with satisfaction, now that she had established his Achilles’ heel. He was too proud to face the washing of the Terzakis dirty linen in public. ‘Damon and his wife will never ever take possession of Callie’s child. Accept that and stay out of our lives.’
He was white beneath his sun-bronzed skin, white with savage anger that he was visibly fighting to rein back. ‘This, then, is your revenge—’
‘It is not one atom of what I would like to do to you and your family,’ Sarah admitted, powered by a surge of helpless aggression. ‘Damon was a wimp but you are the one who destroyed my sister’s life. Why? Because she wasn’t good enough...she didn’t meet your snobbish standards and she was poor—’
‘I am innocent of such prejudice!’ he slashed back at her. ‘And to use an infant as a weapon of revenge is the true obscenity!’
‘Do you know what real revenge would be?’ Harshly she laughed, acknowledging that he was unhappily out of her reach. ‘It would be making you suffer for what you did to Callie. It’s your fault that Nicky is illegitimate, nobody else’s,’ she spelt out. ‘Your filthy family pride came before honour and decency. When you said I was not of good character, I should have laughed in your face!’
‘Cristos...’ With the charged and splintering aura of a wild animal at bay, Alex Terzakis shot a guttural stream of Greek at her, spreading both hands wide in a raking arc of dark, smouldering rage.
‘You daring to say that to me,’ Sarah continued, pressing on with the fearlessness of outrage. ‘You with your women you have to pay to have sex with you! You with your ignorant, chauvinist double standards and sickening hypocrisy! Lay one finger on me, Mr Terzakis, and I will see you in prison with pleasure!’
‘Some day...some incredibly lucky man will beat you stupid and teach you respect!’ Alex Terzakis swore with two clenched fists.
Sarah was on a high of quite extraordinary energy. The sight of him standing there, seethingly frustrated by a desire to kill her just to shut her up, boosted her adrenalin with amazing efficiency. ‘Do you want to know what you really deserve?’ she asked with saccharine sweetness, venom dripping from every syllable. ‘A wife who would make your life a living hell—a real bitch!’
‘Like you?’ He vented a cruelly amused laugh, raking her with merciless derision.
‘I wouldn’t touch you with a barge-pole!’ Sarah’s face was hectically flushed. ‘You are the most utterly repellent man I have ever met,’ she said with impressive conviction. ‘I may not rejoice in much in the way of physical beauty—’ she flung her head high as she made the admission in a small, tight voice ‘—but my standards are very high, unlike yours.’
He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Still as the Greek statue Gina had fancifully compared him to, Alex Terzakis was studying her with almost compulsive intensity. ‘No woman has ever found me...repellent.’ He could hardly get the word past his compressed lips, he was so outraged by the label.
‘Money obviously talks.’ Sarah cast wide the lounge door in an open invitation for his departure. For a split-second, she really thought he was going to take a fighting chance at landing himself in a prison cell. He was possessed by the force of his own fury. He smouldered, he vibrated, he emanated violent rage into an atmosphere that positively sizzled, ready to burst into open flames. And all in silence. She discovered that she couldn’t take her eyes off him either. Involuntarily she was mesmerised by the sheer passion of so volatile a temperament.
Unexpectedly, he strode past her. And then she realised why. Gina was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, eyes out on stalks, too shaken by what she had heard even to pretend not to have been eavesdropping.
‘You will hear from our lawyers.’ The announcement was hissed over one broad, set shoulder halfway out of the front door.
‘One visit, one attempt at intimidation, one even mildly threatening letter and I’ll sing like a canary for the Press,’ Sarah slung before she slammed the door in his wake.
Gina was gaping at her with a dropped jaw. The silence seemed to go on forever.
‘I doubt if he will bother us again,’ Sarah finally muttered stiffly, wondering just how much the older woman had contrived to overhear.
Slowly Gina shook her head, still staring. ‘I just can’t believe what I’ve been listening to...that that was you baiting him, taunting him...’
‘I handed him a few home truths. That’s all. And Mr Ice-cool he’s not,’ Sarah could not resist savouring. ‘I bet every woman he meets fawns on him, feeds his ego...’
‘Is that why you felt you had to tell him that he was repellent,’ Gina enquired not quite steadily, ‘and that he had to pay for sex?’
‘I wanted to hit him where it hurt.’ But Sarah couldn’t meet Gina’s gaze. In retrospect, she was ashamed that she had revealed her knowledge of his sex-life but she was not remotely ashamed that she had accidentally stumbled on the brand of attack he found hardest to tolerate.
‘I don’t believe he has to pay for sex...he’s breathtakingly handsome...and you’re saying that he consorts with hookers?’ Gina probed with rampant curiosity.
‘He keeps two mistresses. If he keeps them, he’s paying for his pleasure—’
‘That’s not the same thing at all!’
‘Why are you defending him?’
Gina groaned. ‘Sarah, he is not responsible for Callie’s death. Nobody is responsible for that. You’re becoming obsessed. You’re hurting, yes,’ she conceded, ‘but you are taking this all too personally—’
‘Losing Callie w-was very personal.’ A shuddering sob suddenly trembled through Sarah’s slight frame.
Gina put her arms round her in an awkward hug. ‘But you have to think of Nicky, love...’
‘Are you telling me that you think I should hand him over to Damon and his wife?’ Sarah asked sickly.
‘If his wife is willing and it’s not just a front to keep Damon sweet...but then, how could you ever know whether it is or not? Don’t look so betrayed,’ Gina pleaded, her round face uncertain and engraved with lines of strain. ‘I’m all mixed up too. I really don’t know what to think any more. But the one thing I do feel is that Nicky’s welfare ought to come first, and with the best will in the world...how can you match a tenth of what they can give him?’
‘Money’s not everything,’ Sarah protested, distressed by Gina’s candour and pierced on her weakest flank by the grudging acknowledgement that Nicky did have the right to a share of the Terzakis wealth...but surely not at the expense of grossly offending against Callie’s memory? However, Gina was right... Ultimately, Nicky’s needs and future happiness had to be considered first and her own bitter feelings, painful as they were, must not be allowed to colour her response to an offer of a loving, caring home from the other side of Nicky’s family.
But, dear lord, Alex Terzakis had accused her of using Nicky as a weapon of revenge when nothing could be further from the truth! If Damon and his wife genuinely wished to bring Nicky up as their child, let them come and make that offer personally, let them demonstrate their sincerity and their whole-hearted desire to take him into their family... It was not Alex’s job to do their talking fo
r them! And then Sarah might well be forced to think again of what was best for Nicky. In the meantime, Nicky was not some kind of parcel to be posted off into the unknown. Dear God, she loved him!
‘He’s a tiny little baby and I reckon you’re going to find him a far heavier burden than you ever found Callie,’ Gina sighed. ‘You’ll have to live here with me. There is no other way.’
* * *
The following week was a period of turmoil for Sarah. Nicky was adorable but he didn’t sleep very much. He didn’t want to eat every four hours either; he wanted to eat constantly. Gina had never had anything to do with babies. She tried to help, but Sarah relied heavily and slavishly on every word of advice advanced by the health visitor. At the same time, she was still struggling to adjust to the reality that Callie really was gone.
The phone rang and she expected it to be Callie. She saw someone with long blonde hair in the street and was jolted. She visited her sister’s grave three times in an anguished attempt to teach herself acceptance, but what made her alternately sob and rage most was the anger. And the anger was what she was least equipped to deal with.
Only with Alex Terzakis had she been able to let the anger out. She found that she couldn’t open up with Gina. Presumably her hatred for Damon’s brother allowed her to vent her true emotions freely, and that was good, not peculiar, good, she told herself repeatedly. And he had been a most satisfying target.
One week later to the day, Alex turned up again without warning. Gina was out. It was about eight in the evening. Sarah had just got out of her bath and she was on the way to bed, having decided that the only sensible way to manage was to sleep when Nicky condescended to sleep. When the bell went, she groaned, reckoning it was yet another of Gina’s friends, who frequently came round to gossip at night over a long gin and tonic.
But it was Alex Terzakis. Sarah was appalled. One slim hand grabbed at the loose neckline of her faded floral robe, the other frantically attempting to tighten the sash. She was immediately conscious that she was naked beneath the thin fabric, and that both embarrassed and infuriated her. ‘What do you want now?’ she muttered shakily.