by Lynne Graham
Her olive branch broken and discarded unceremoniously at her feet, Ella did not respond. She knew the older man well enough to appreciate that he would relish any opportunity to embarrass her in front of an audience. Although it took considerable courage, she kept on smiling and moved on, beckoning a waiter to ensure a clutch of late arrivals were served at the buffet. Kasma brought Callie back down, and the little girl, her stuffed rabbit now tucked securely under her arm, sped back to Ella’s side to clutch at her skirt in a possessive hold.
It took real effort for Ella to continue to play hostess and chat and smile as though nothing was wrong. Every so often she bent down to touch her hand gently on Callie’s head and remind herself of what she had gained, and why she had forged her devil’s bargain. Her thoughts were tumultuous. Aristandros had only told the truth to his grandfather: she was happy with him. Did that mean that at heart she was a slut? Sharing Ari’s bed and being with him was more of a pleasure than a punishment. It shook her to admit that to herself. He had held her to ransom over an innocent child’s head, and yet whenever he wanted her she was still his for the asking. What did that say about her? Shame and confusion engulfed her in a hot, creeping tide of remorse.
Lily had texted her only that day: are you his Dr Dazzler by accident or design?
Ella still didn’t know how to answer that question. While the original design had been Ari’s, it now sometimes seemed to her as though she had simply surrendered, and had used Callie as her excuse for doing so. When Aristandros touched her, she went up in flames. What had started out purporting to be a sacrifice had become a delight. If she was a victim, of revenge she was a willing victim and that reality made her cringe.
Lean, breathtakingly handsome face cool as ice-water, his carriage as always superb, Aristandros strode towards her. Nothing in his expression revealed any sign of annoyance over his recent dispute with his grandfather. Her heart lurched behind her breastbone, her mouth running dry as he rested a hand at the base of her spine and whispered, ‘Why aren’t you with your family?’
CHAPTER EIGHT
ELLA shot him a darkling glance of disbelief. ‘Why on earth did you invite my family when you knew there was a rift between us all?’ she flung at him, half under her breath, furious that he had set her up for such a confrontation even after she had told him that her family was at odds with her and had been for years.
‘I thought the invitation would help…I even thought you might be pleased to see them!’ Aristandros responded, his strong face taut
‘It was a serious mistake. You shouldn’t have interfered. My family don’t want to be around me when I’m with you,’ Ella revealed in a bitter surge of confidence. ‘In fact, Theo says they can’t have anything to do with Callie while I’m here.’
Aristandros rested his stunned gaze on her, and swore below his breath. ‘That’s outrageous, khriso mou. He cannot insult you below my roof. Anyone who does so is an unwelcome guest.’
‘There’s not much you can do about it. He’s a very stubborn man. Just ignore it, as I am, and hopefully in time he’ll get over his pique. You shouldn’t have asked them here.’ Ella’s teeth worried anxiously at her full lower lip as she absorbed the stormy flare of gold immediately lightening Ari’s spectacular eyes. Assurances that he should not have done something went down like a brick with a guy who had based his entire life on doing what he wanted to do on every occasion. Callie vented a cross little sob and tugged at Ella’s dress, while resting heavily up against her legs as tiredness took her over.
‘Sardelos has upset you,’ Aristandros growled. ‘I will not tolerate that.’
‘Stay out of this, it’s not your business,’ Ella hissed in a frantic undertone as she bent to comfort Callie, and lifted the child up into her arms. ‘If you interfere any more it’ll just cause endless trouble and resentment. I’m going to put Callie down for a nap. Promise me that you’ll mind your own business.’
Aristandros dealt her a sardonic look of disbelief. ‘You are my business. If they insult you, they insult me, for it is my wish that you be here and I will not tolerate any show of disrespect.’
Anchoring the little girl on her hip, and keeping her there with one straining arm—for Callie was no lightweight—Ella rested what she hoped was a soothing hand on his chest. ‘Nobody is being disrespectful of you,’ she hastened to assert in an effort to pour oil on troubled waters. ‘Please don’t get involved…please. Don’t play with fire.’
With that final, urgent plea for forebearance, Ella headed off with Callie. Kasma offered to carry the little girl upstairs, but Ella demurred; in the mood she was in, the feel of Callie’s clinging arms was comforting. The very last thing she needed was for Aristandros to wade in to an already delicate situation. She was all too painfully aware that her mother invariably suffered when Theo lost his temper
When she glanced down from the landing, she saw the male guests were gathering in the hall, and then moving on into Ari’s office-suite, where a conference room would house the investors’ meeting he had mentioned. The sight of what had to be an excellent diversion for unreliable masculine tempers and egos filled her with a giant sense of relief. When business was at stake, Aristandros would surely not waste his energy thinking about anything else.
‘Shoos,’ Callie sounded importantly as Ella removed her sandals. ‘Socks.’
‘Very good,’ Ella applauded, turning up Callie’s earnest little face to drop a kiss on it.
‘My goodness, she’s talking now…’
Ella almost jumped out of her skin, and twisted her head round to focus on the older woman in the doorway. ‘Mum?’
‘Theo’s gone into the meeting, and I asked a maid to bring me up,’ Jane Sardelos explained in a harried undertone. ‘He would be furious if he knew I was here with you.’
‘He gets furious far too easily. Why won’t you leave him?’ Ella asked in a pained, heartfelt undertone that betrayed her incomprehension on that score.
‘He’s my husband and he loves me. He’s been a good father and provider. You don’t understand,’ the older woman proclaimed, just as she had throughout Ella’s teenaged years. ‘Let me see my grandchild…She’s the very image of you, Ella.’
Ella noticed that the little girl showed no sign of recognising her grandmother. ‘You haven’t seen much of her, have you?’
‘Susie was very difficult after the birth,’ Jane murmured sadly as she stared down with softening eyes at the sleepy little girl and sat down beside the cot. ‘She didn’t want my advice, or anyone else’s, and it was obvious that her marriage was breaking down and she didn’t care. I saw Calliope a few times when she was very young, but Susie really didn’t want to be bothered with visitors, and she was quite unpleasant on several occasions.’
‘I think that Susie very probably had post-natal depression,’ Ella contended gently.
‘She wouldn’t see a doctor, though.’ Jane Sardelos shook her head heavily. ‘I did what I could, but your sister was always very wilful and I’m afraid she paid the price for it. But I don’t want you to pay a price as well.’
‘Let’s not talk about me,’ Ella cut in hurriedly.
‘Half the world is talking about you since you moved in with Ari Xenakis. He might want you today, Ella, but there are no guarantees for the next day, or the one after that. I shouldn’t have called you what I did, but I was very upset when I found out that you were living with him.’
‘I can’t discuss Aristandros with you. I’m an adult and I’ve made my choice. I don’t expect you to agree with it, but there’s no point arguing about it, because it won’t change anything. Mum, it’s seven years since I even saw you,’ Ella reminded the older woman painfully. ‘Let’s not waste this moment.’
‘A moment is really all we have,’ the older woman acknowledged tautly, scrambling up to wrap her arms round her taller daughter in a sudden jerky movement that betrayed the precarious state of her nerves. ‘I’ve missed you so much, particularly after Susie passed away.
But Theo is outraged by this situation. He says that because of your very public affair he’s lost face.’
Ella hugged her mother back with warm affection. ‘For goodness’ sake, he always exaggerates—he is only my stepfather.’
‘You’ve embarrassed the whole family,’ another voice delivered in condemnation from the doorway.
Ella focused on her half-brother, Dmitri, as her mother backed away from her. ‘Stop making excuses for your father,’ Ella urged. ‘He found fault with everything I ever did because I stood up to him. He doesn’t like me and he never will.’
‘Mum…in a few minutes Dad will be looking for you. You need to come back downstairs.’ Having issued that warning, Dmitri turned away from Ella, who was livid with him for behaving like a pompous prat.
‘Do you still live at home?’ she asked her brother. Watching her mother turn pale with fear as she’d registered the risk of her husband discovering that she had defied his dictates took Ella back to all the years that she did not want to recall. Years blighted by sudden violence and discord, and Jane’s increasingly pathetic attempts to make their warped family life seem normal.
‘Not for years. Stavros and I have an apartment.’
‘So, I can’t ask you to look after Mum tonight,’ Ella remarked stiffly.
Immediately grasping her meaning, Dmitri reddened, said nothing and concentrated on hurrying the older woman out of the room. He was as desperate to avoid conflict with his father as Ella had once been. She would never forget the tension of living in the Sardelos household, where everyone had worked hard in speech and action to avoid doing anything that might annoy Theo. While the initial conflict in the marriage had arisen over her stepfather’s infidelity, he had soon found plenty of other issues to set his temper off.
‘I’ll try to phone you.’ Jane flung the promise over a thin shoulder.
‘Any time, and for any reason. I’ll always be here for you.’ Ella returned that assurance with a slight wobble in her strained voice. Until she had seen her mother again, she had not allowed herself to acknowledge how much she had missed the older woman’s presence in her life.
Ella settled Callie for her nap, and left the nursery to return to the female guests milling round the terrace and the spacious drawing-room. She discovered that she was very much the centre of attention, and was reminded of how curious people always were about Aristandros—his lifestyle, his possessions, his women, his family and background, all of which had supplied years of gossip fodder for newspaper and magazine articles. Tactfully sidestepping the more intrusive questions, she moved from one knot of women to the next.
The men filtered back in little groups to their partners, and the guests began to go home. Drakon Xenakis made a point of bidding Ella goodbye before his departure. She was filled with consternation, however, when she saw her stepfather halt on the threshold of the room and simply jerk his head in her mother’s direction in a peremptory signal that he wanted to leave. Even at a glance she could tell that the older man was incensed with anger, the colour high on his fleshy face, his mouth compressed into an aggressive whitened line. As she watched her stepfather, her brothers and her mother trooped out without a further word to anyone.
Ella tracked Aristandros down to the office that connected with the conference room.
‘What the heck did you say to my stepfather?’ she demanded curtly.
His personal assistants froze in incredulity, and she flushed, wishing she had exercised greater self-control, and waited until she could speak to him alone.
Face impassive, Aristandros lounged back against the edge of the desk behind him and viewed her with hard, dark eyes. ‘Don’t address me in that tone,’ he told her with a chilling bite.
Ella was mortified when only then did he dismiss his staff with a meaningful shift of one authoritative hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered. ‘I should have waited a moment.’
‘All that I ask is that you remember your manners,’ Aristandros responded grimly.
‘I was concerned—I saw Theo stomping out in a complete rage. What happened?’ she pressed, anxiously pacing the carpet in front of him.
‘I informed Sardelos and your brothers that they are not welcome here if they cannot treat you with respect.’
Ella shot him an appalled look. ‘I don’t need you to fight my battles for me!’
‘I invited them, and this is my house. Their behaviour was unacceptable. What I say goes, khriso mou.’ Aristandros spelt out that reminder without a second of hesitation
‘I’ve never seen my stepfather so angry, and no wonder! You humiliated him in front of his sons, and he’ll blame me for that as well!’ Ella lamented. ‘I could kill you for interfering in something that has nothing to do with you.’
‘I defended you and you’re behaving as if I did something wrong?’ Aristandros growled, his eyes smouldering dark gold with angry disbelief. ‘You’ve let your stepfather bully you for so long that you can’t see the wood for the trees. He needs to be shown his boundaries by someone he can’t influence or control.’
Ella spun away from Aristandros, her thoughts heavily preoccupied with the likely fallout from the comeuppance which Theo had been given. Her stepfather set great store on his association with the Xenakis family; the sudden loss of that favourable social standing would not only humble him but also harm his business prospects. She wanted to yell and shout at Aristandros for acting with a heavy hand, but knew he had no comprehension of the likelihood that her mother would ultimately pay for her husband’s sins.
‘You interfered by inviting them here when you knew there was a serious rift between us,’ she accused tautly.
‘For goodness’ sake, my mother phoned me in Paris to tell me that they thought I was acting like a whore with you!’
Aristandros went rigid. ‘A whore?’
‘Nobody suffers from the illusion that I’m the one paying for the designer dresses and the jewellery!’ Ella slashed back bitterly. ‘How do you expect people to view me?’
His brilliant gaze semi-screened by his lush, black lashes, Aristandros stared broodingly back at her, his eloquent mouth clenching hard. ‘It’s not a question I paused to consider—’
Ella raised a dubious brow. ‘You didn’t? Well, my goodness, you considered everything else that related to image. Why else was I repackaged as a dress-up doll?’
But Aristandros wasn’t listening. He was frowning darkly. ‘So that’s why you walked out on me in Paris…’
Ella tossed her head, her pale hair fanning back across a flushed cheekbone and brushed away by an impatient hand. ‘That phone call may have made me a little touchier than I should have been.’
He treated her to an austere appraisal. ‘But once again it underlines how little you listen to what I tell you, khriso mou.’
The intimidating tension in the atmosphere was ringing alarm-bells in Ella’s head. Aware of his renewed anger, but at a loss as to its cause, she blinked in bemusement. ‘I’m not sure I know what you’re getting at.’
‘That you should have told me about that phone call that distressed you,’ Aristandros grated impatiently.
‘And don’t you dare tell me that it was none of my business, because your behaviour that night spoke for you! I don’t like the way you keep secrets from me. It’s dishonest.’
Ella sucked in a startled breath at that hard-hitting denunciation. She could not credit what he was saying to her. ‘You have some nerve to say that to me!’ she slung back. ‘Maybe there’s a lot about you I don’t like: a guy who uses lawyers to blackmail me into an indefensible agreement to let him do whatever he likes, while I do only as he likes. Is that what you call having a relationship? No wonder none of them last longer than five minutes! On what basis do you think I would give you my trust?’
‘Stop there before this gets blown out of all proportion,’ Aristandros advised harshly.
But Ella was trembling with pent-up emotion, and she could no more have held back what she was feeling insid
e than she could have contained a tornado. Her blue eyes were as bright a blue as the heart of a flame. ‘Do you think I could trust a man who once told me he loved me and wanted to marry me, but who dumped me less than an hour later? And why—because I couldn’t match the perfect blueprint of a wife that you had in your head? Because I had the audacity to want something more than love and your money to focus on? Would you have given up business and the art of making money to marry me?’
Aristandros had lost colour below his bronzed skin, and it lent a curious ashen quality to his usual healthy glow. He stared steadily back at her, however, predictably not yielding an inch of ground. ‘We’re not having this conversation,’ he told her.
‘I’m not asking for permission, and I’m not having a conversation. You may not have noticed yet but I’m shouting at you!’ Ella yelled at him at full tilt, inflamed by his stony resistance to her verbal attack and his refusal to respond.
‘Stamates…that is enough,’ Aristandros bit out icily.
‘I hate you…even your grandfather thinks you’re treating me badly…Yes—not content with having lousy manners, I listen outside doors as well!’ Ella threw wildly at him, tears burning her eyes, and rage swelling like a giant balloon inside her to restrict her breathing. ‘I’m definitely not the perfect woman you think is your due. You’d better pray that I’m not fertile!’
And with that final parting shot, which was as low as she could think to sink, Ella fled out past the clutch of his staff in the hall who were trying to act like everything was normal and avoid looking at her. She took the stairs two at a time, with a huge sob locked halfway up her throat, and raced into the master bedroom—her fourth since she had moved in with him.
Ella very rarely cried. A sad film or a book could make the moisture well up, but it took a great deal to make her cry. Now she flung herself across the bed and sobbed her heart out. She was worried about her mother having to go home alone with an enraged and violent man who liked to use her as a punch bag. But, most of all, she was distraught over the row she had just had with Aristandros. It had started out a small argument and just grown and grown until it had torn apart the fragile fabric of the peace they had established, and destroyed the bonds they had somehow contrived to build. Now there could be no hiding from ugly but revealing truths, such as his fear that she might conceive a child he didn’t want.