by Lynne Graham
But he wanted her...oh, yes, Alex wanted her...for the moment—for probably about as long as it took for him to register the fact that she was no longer a challenge. If she clung, her novelty value would shrivel up and die. Being married to Alex, she decided, was more like having an affair.
She was emerging from the nursery when Claudine and Alex’s butler, Henri with the expressionless face, appeared.
‘A special delivery, madame.’ Henri extended a package to her, unusually breathless, as if he had hurried instead of strolled at his usual stately pace.
‘For me?’ Frowning in surprise, Sarah tore off the fancy gold paper and found a jewel case. She flipped open the lid, her eyes widening as she read the message on the card, penned in Alex’s almost indecipherable scrawl. ‘For the most erotic and exciting five hours of my life... I can be romantic too. Alex.’
Beneath the card was a breathtaking diamond necklace on a velvet bed. Her eyes smarted and burned. ‘I can be romantic too’... Like hell he could be, she thought bitterly, painfully. What was so romantic about being rewarded for giving him a good time in bed? Neanderthal man had bombed out at supersonic speed. He hadn’t a clue how to be romantic because he had never been forced to stir himself into making that amount of effort.
Conscious of politely straining heads and still hovering company, she dug the card into her pocket and extended the box for appraisal.
‘Oooh!’ Claudine gasped ecstatically.
‘Magnifique,’ Henri breathed, impressed to death.
‘Want to try it on?’ Sarah offered Claudine carelessly.
‘Non, madame,’ Claudine said in shock. ‘But allow me to assist you...’
A minute later Sarah had the diamonds round her throat, for the sake of appearances. She was duly admired and then mercifully freed from her audience. She hung over Nicky’s cot. ‘He’s not only unromantic, he’s insensitive. It’s as if he’s paying me...you know?’ A sob caught in her working throat. ‘It should have been flowers or just a note or a fluffy toy or something.’
She had only just finished eradicating the streaks of mascara half an hour later when she was interrupted by Henri. A visitor. A Madame du Pré.
The woman who advanced towards her across the depth of the salon quite took Sarah’s breath away. Very tall and slender, her smooth black hair caught back ballerina-style in a snood, her clothing just screaming designer style, she was not only beautiful, she was enviably elegant. A grave smile curved her perfect bone-structure as she extended a slim white hand. ‘I am Elise. I hope I may call you Sarah.’
‘Elise,’ Sarah gulped. ‘Please sit down.’
‘I can see you are not feeling quite up to dealing with a visitor,’ Elise assured her sympathetically. ‘I am very sorry to intrude at such a time.’
‘I had lunch ages ago,’ Sarah murmured, wondering why she wasn’t supposed to be up to coping with her first, indeed her one and only visitor.
Elise uttered a rueful laugh. ‘I think we both know that I was not referring to the hour of the day.’ Gracefully she sank down into an armchair. ‘I have known Alex for so many years that I count myself a close friend of the family. If it were not for that fact, I would not have dreamt of coming here to offer you my assistance.’
Sarah settled down rather jerkily opposite, unnerved by the perfection of the woman Alex had planned to marry, her concentration lapsing. ‘Sorry... your assistance?’ she queried uncertainly.
‘I would hate you to consider this visit of mine an intrusion.’
‘Of course not. You are very welcome,’ she assured the older woman manfully.
‘Thank you,’ Elise conceded graciously in turn and then sighed. ‘If only we could have met in less fraught circumstances. Forgive me if I am blunt but I am well aware of the treatment Alex has been subjecting you to... You must be feeling so alone, so isolated, so humiliated...’
Sarah stared at her. ‘Must I be?’
‘Sarah...’ Elise chided softly. ‘When all of Paris is agog to read the latest outrageous exploit in the gossip columns, there is no need for you to feel that you have to save face with me. I am here truly in a spirit of friendship and concern. The newspapers are behaving atrociously, but then Alex has courted publicity with such brazen disregard for the honour of the family name, what can one expect?’
Sarah hadn’t a clue what Elise was talking about. Newspapers. It dawned on her that she hadn’t set eyes on a single newspaper since the morning after the wedding. Since she only read newspapers occasionally, preferring the television news or a good book, she hadn’t until now missed that astonishing absence of the printed daily word. Alex courting publicity...latest outrageous exploit? Her imagination went into overdrive. She struggled to conceal her ignorance from Elise.
‘Yes, what can one expect?’ Sarah said with studied casualness.
‘Discretion,’ Elise murmured in a suitable undertone. ‘And to offer you my advice may seem encroaching...’
‘No, I’d be very grateful for your advice,’ Sarah assured her shakily.
‘Tell Alex that you will not stand for such behaviour. He may not have chosen to publicise his sudden marriage but naturally society is aware that he is a newly married man. For him to flaunt a variety of different women night after night in the most public of places is naturally conducive to the kind of media furore one can only deplore,’ Elise completed with a shake of her beautiful head.
‘Different women...night after night...media furore.’ The key phrases lit up in illuminated brilliance inside Sarah’s whirling head. And she knew then that if spontaneous combustion existed Elise would have burned alive in front of her. Kill the messenger, she thought hysterically. The enemy had come to crow.
‘I am astonished that Alex should sink to such a level.’
‘I’m not,’ Sarah admitted through compressed lips, a shudder running through her.
Elise surveyed her with apparently troubled dark eyes. ‘I am prepared to speak to Alex on your behalf and reason with him.’
‘That’s very kind of you but I don’t require that type of assistance.’ Sarah stood up, smiling so widely, her jaw ached. ‘I am so very pleased to have met you, Elise. Vivien told me how deeply impressed I would be and I am.’
Faint colour mottled the perfect complexion. Elise got up. ‘But I—’
‘Henri!’ Sarah bawled, certain he was lurking not too far away.
‘I am afraid I have offended you,’ Elise said, looking impressively dismayed by the concept.
‘There you are, Henri!’ Sarah hailed the butler with relief. ‘Please show Madam du Pré out.’
‘Alex will be furious when he hears of this—’
‘I don’t think so.’
Trembling violently, Sarah watched Elise stalk out, the picture of wounded dignity. She listened to Henri’s steps returning across the vast hall, walked to the door of the salon and lifted her head high. ‘I want to see the last two weeks’ newspapers.’
Henri perceptibly paled. ‘All of them, madame?’
‘I think you know the relevant ones, Henri,’ she conceded tightly and then turned away.
Everybody knew...everybody had known but her. That was what Vivien had been shouting at Alex about! And Alex had actually believed she knew as well. ‘The more you ignored what I was doing, the more I seethed,’ he had said. Claudine brought the newspapers in a fat, well-thumbed bunch. The entire staff had been poring over them and feeling so incredibly sorry for the new bride, linked in misery to a groom behaving like a rutting stag within twenty-four hours of the wedding.
Nothing could have prepared Sarah for the agony of seeing the first photo. It dug cruel fingers into her heart. Alex, dining with a blonde; the next one was of Alex dancing with a brunette. She stopped there, looked no further. She was choked with outrage, savaged by pain. Alex had forced her to share his bed on their wedding night and had then gone out to make an outsize fool of her in public. He had told her she would need buckets of humility to stay married to him an
d he hadn’t been exaggerating one little bit.
In turmoil, she sat there, ripped apart by a sense of betrayal so powerful, it blocked out all else. This was the man she had spent five hours in bed with. She was so shattered she couldn’t even cry. ‘You will lie down for me whenever I want,’ he had said. And she had.
Henri was hovering when she glanced up numbly. He passed her the phone. It was Vivien, chattering gaily about how lonely she was in her apartment and how much she would love Sarah to go out to dinner with her. ‘Love to,’ Sarah said numbly.
An hour later, Henri appeared again. This time he passed the phone as if it were an offensive weapon. ‘Monsieur Terzakis,’ he told her.
Sarah snatched at the phone like a madwoman, suddenly galvanised into life again by the power of sheer shuddering rage and hatred.
‘How do you feel?’ Alex purred in a tone of deeply intimate recollection.
‘Gobsmacked!’
‘I don’t think I know that expression...’
‘I saw my first newspaper in thirteen days this afternoon,’ she said sweetly. ‘And then I went on to my second old issue. Gobsmacked,’ she said again in the simmering silence echoing from the other end of the line.
‘You didn’t...know?’ Alex asked sounding astoundingly hesitant.
‘And I was the only person who didn’t, wasn’t I?’ she said fiercely, tears suddenly springing to her eyes.
‘I can explain—’
Sarah wasn’t listening. ‘What Vivien may have done to your father is nothing to what I am capable of.’
‘I’m coming home—’
‘I won’t be here...I’m going out on the town tonight!’ Sarah blazed down the receiver, her fingers crushing it. ‘You want war, you got it. If you can dance till dawn, so can I! If you can sleep around, so can I! In fact there is nothing you can do to me, you sneaky, hateful toad, that I can’t do back more nastily, more publicly and more painfully! The name of Terzakis will be a byword for scarlet woman! You’ll be down on your knees for a divorce by the time I’m finished with you!’
‘If you go out tonight...if you dare,’ Alex was growling incredulously.
Sarah cut the connection. Dinner with his stepmother—whoopee, wouldn’t that make him sweat when he found out? And then she astounded herself by bursting into floods of tears, the false edge of anger suddenly swamped by the most suffocating misery she had ever experienced. Dear God, why had she said all those utterly stupid, childish things? Why had she stooped to his level? Because she had wanted to hurt back...because she loved the swine. And how could she love someone like that? How could any sane woman love a monster?
CHAPTER NINE
‘YOU had the rat for twenty years...how come you didn’t poison him?’ Sarah muttered feverishly, downing another mansized slug of pink champagne. ‘How come you didn’t instil some basic moral principles with the aid of a whip and a chair?’
Vivien looked eaten by guilt. ‘I never thought Alex would behave like this,’ she said for the twentieth time. ‘He’s gone off the rails. Damon was always the one with the roving eye.’
‘Alex sought safety in numbers...and Olive Oil.’ Sarah referred to Elise with venom.
Vivien chuckled. ‘Imagine you having the nerve to throw her out!’
‘She had her five minutes of fame first and boy, did she enjoy it,’ Sarah recalled, reaching for her glass again, ignoring the food untouched on her plate. She wondered how much champagne it would take to wipe out the horrible images inside her head. Teetotal all her life, driven to drink by Alex.
‘Nicky isn’t your child,’ the little blonde woman said abruptly. ‘He isn’t Alex’s either, is he?’
Sarah stared across the table in a state of frozen animation.
‘Andy gave it away—didn’t even know she’d done it,’ Vivien sighed. ‘He’s Damon’s little accident...am I right?’
‘I just can’t talk about this to you, Vivien,’ Sarah whispered in horror.
‘Look, I know,’ Vivien stressed. ‘I wanted so badly to believe that my suspicions were wrong, but Alex... It just didn’t make sense. But if you aren’t that baby’s mother, who is?’
‘My sister. She’s dead.’ And Sarah couldn’t stop it—the whole story just came tumbling out, short, unsweet, shorn of all but the most basic details.
‘Their marriage was in deep trouble last year,’ Vivien told her, and reached for her hand to squeeze it gratefully. ‘Thank you for not treating me like an idiot. Sooner or later Andy will tell me and I’ll be prepared. I won’t badmouth Damon and put my feet in it and I won’t tell anyone that I already knew. Now, let’s talk about something else.’
‘How do I go about getting a divorce and keeping Nicky?’ Sarah enquired, happy to oblige.
Vivien’s eyebrows almost vanished below her feathery fringe. ‘You’re not thinking of divorce, are you?’ she exclaimed in consternation.
‘What else would I think about?’ Sarah’s voice slurred slightly.
‘Strategy,’ her mother-in-law supplied with enthusiasm.
‘I have no desire to fight for Alex,’ Sarah responded as gently as she could. ‘This is a marriage of convenience that went badly wrong from the word go, not a romance that went tragically off course.’
‘Let’s go on to a nightclub, relax,’ Vivien suggested rather abruptly, having glanced at her watch.
‘Dance till dawn, stay out all night,’ Sarah added facetiously.
‘If you like,’ Vivien beamed, encouraged by such remarks.
Sarah followed her into the chauffeur-driven limousine awaiting them outside. She leaned back, smiling fixedly, while Vivien rabbited on about how to hold on to her marriage. What marriage? she almost said before she learnt to block her ears and switch off. In the grip of grief and bitterness, she had demanded that Alex marry her. She had been blind to the threat that Alex might have a hidden agenda. In retrospect that seemed incredibly dim of her, nor was it at all surprising that disaster had resulted. Now it was time to stop drifting with the tide, pick herself up out of the debris and sort her life out. But what about Nicky? a little voice screamed, throwing her back into chaos.
Her jangling emotions felt savaged. And she blamed herself entirely for her state of maudlin misery. She had fallen in love with Alex. In one blow, she had deprived herself of the ability to fight back. Love had addled her wits, decimated her pride and torn her in two. If she hadn’t loved Alex, if she hadn’t succumbed to the lure of all that dark Greek machismo, she would have been untouchable.
‘Freshen up your lipstick, look bright and happy,’ Vivien instructed chirpily.
The nightclub was noisy, full of a crush of people and heaving bodies on the dance-floor. As she slid behind a table, she noticed a little man staring at her over the back of his seat. As fast as she noticed his interest, he hurriedly turned away again.
‘Have another drink!’ Vivien told her loudly.
Another bucket of pink champagne had magically appeared. Vivien stuffed a roll of notes into the waiter’s hand, pressed the glass across to Sarah helpfully. Sarah obliged out of politeness and surveyed her surroundings, admitting that she was on the way to getting very drunk while knowing that a lady did not do that—ever.
‘Sarah!’ Vivien exclaimed, clutching her arm. ‘This is Stefan.’
‘Ste—what?’ Sarah noticed the lights from the floor had been blocked by a very large presence. Wide-eyed, she took in the enormous young man smiling widely at her from the other side of the table. He looked like a Chippendale, all blonde hair and muscles and white teeth.
‘He’s an escort...I’ve hired him for the night.’
Sarah giggled. She just couldn’t help it. Stefan settled into the place Vivien had vacated.
‘V-Vivien?’ Sarah gasped.
Vivien disappeared at supersonic speed into the crush.
Stefan smiled pleasantly. Sarah felt it was only fair to smile back before she told him that there had been a misunderstanding and that it really wasn’t his fau
lt that her mother-in-law was a maniac. Then it happened. An alarming flash of light blinded her. The photographer lowered his camera. The little man with the weasel face she had seen earlier retreated fast.
‘You like to dance?’ Stefan asked in a guttural mid-European accent.
Her legs wouldn’t hold her up. Vivien swam back to their table, brimming with triumph. ‘Where would you like to go next?’
Sarah stood up. ‘Home...alone.’
‘Sarah! If you go home early that will give the game away.’
Sarah had meant home as in London. ‘Vivien, you shouldn’t have done this.’
‘I had to do something!’ Vivien told her vehemently.
‘I need some fresh air. Goodnight,’ she told Stefan.
‘Didn’t you like him?’ Vivien whispered fiercely as Sarah forced her passage through the crowds.
‘Did you set up the photo session?’ Sarah asked once they were out on the pavement, reeling slightly as the air hit her.
‘Of course. If nobody knows what Alex’s wife looks like, how can they catch her in flagrante delicto?’
Oh, dear God... Overpowered, Sarah sank back into the limousine.
‘I seem to have upset you. I was only trying to help,’ Vivien persisted in a pained tone.
Sarah just groaned out loud. She dropped the other woman off at her apartment and then settled back again, acknowledging that she was not feeling up to facing Alex just yet, assuming he had come home as he had said he would...and she was so darned sleepy.
‘Could we drive around for a while?’ she asked the chauffeur.
She fell asleep, slowly sinking down along the back seat into a supine position.
Cold air woke her up from a semi-stupor. With immense effort, she dug her elbows back and slightly lifted her swimming head to squint at the male looming over her.
‘Why the hell didn’t you phone me?’ Alex blazed at the chauffeur.
‘Not his fault,’ Sarah slurred, struggling without much success to sit.
‘Where have you been?’ Alex bit out, every word aimed like a bullet. ‘It’s three in the morning, almost dawn! You have been absent for eight hours.’