by Lynne Graham
She remembered being sponged down repeatedly and being so weak that even speaking was beyond her. And she remembered Nik, silhouetted against the lamplit darkness of an unfamiliar room, Nik, hunched in a seat, oddly grey-looking in the dawn light. There had been other people too but it felt like too much effort to remember them.
Her eyes opened. A maid was drawing curtains back on a spectacular wall of glass through which Leah could see a slice of cloudless, densely blue sky. Then the sunlight blinded her and she turned her head away, gratefully recognising that her throat didn’t hurt, her head didn’t ache and her muscles no longer protested against every movement. The door closed. A sudden pressing need for the bathroom assailed her.
She attempted to sit up. Her body was disobedient. With a moan of impatience she rolled her legs off the edge of the divan and slid down in an ungraceful heap on to the mercifully thick, deep pile of the carpet. It was a vast room. Lamplight had confusingly shrunk its contours.
Using the bed as a brace, she pushed herself upright and swayed like a drunk, registering that she was not quite as recovered as she had fondly imagined. But obstinacy got her to the en suite.
An accidental meeting with her own reflection in a mirror horrified her. Who was that white scarecrow with the lank hank of hair? Fighting her own weakness, she knelt beside the bath to turn on the taps. At least if she was clean she would feel better.
‘Cristo! What the hell do you think you are doing?’
Leah flinched and clutched the side of the bath. Nik towered over her, intimidatingly tall and dark. He looked tremendously elegant in a fabulously well-cut cream suit which merely accentuated his exotic colouring.
‘Are you crazy?’ he thundered, not content with having frightened her half out of her wits. ‘You should be in bed!’
‘I want a bath.’ Leah rested her cheek dully down on the cold ceramic edge, weak as a kitten. And then it came to her... Like a slow-motion replay from some distant dream, she saw him with Eleni Kiriakos again. Her heart seemed to stop beating. A chill like an icy winter wind enclosed her shrinking flesh.
‘A bath when you can’t even stand up?’ Nik derided as he bent down to lift her.
Leah burst into floods of tears, disconcerting him as much as herself. But she had had no warning, no chance to stem those tears. They simply gushed forth as though someone had thrown an overload switch and forced their release. And the effect on Nik was little short of staggering.
With a stifled imprecation in Greek, he scooped her up and cradled her while he apologised profusely for upsetting her and assured her that of course she could have a bath if she wanted one that badly. It was just that she had been so ill, he stressed, and he was naturally afraid that she would over-exert herself and suffer a relapse. It was Nik metaphorically on his knees, Nik as she had never known him.
Ten minutes later, Leah slid into her bath, and had not the image of the beautiful doctor still been lingering she might almost have been touched by the amount of concern Nik was displaying. As it was, she simply didn’t understand and was still too weak to devote her low energy resources to the vexing question of why Nik should have gone to such lengths to force her to come to Greece to put a front on a marriage that had never been anything other than a charade for both of them.
Washing her hair exhausted her. When she emerged from the bathroom, she made no objection to being carried back to bed by Nik, although she was amazed that he had waited with such patience for her.
‘I can hear the sea,’ she murmured, finally identifying that rushing sound as waves surging up on to a shore.
‘Do you remember anything of the trip here?’ Unreadable dark eyes rested on her.
‘Nothing,’ she sighed.
‘We’re not in Athens. When you were ill, there was little point in taking you to my mother’s home. So I brought you here instead.’
‘And where is here?’
‘Thrathos, a small island which my father purchased shortly before his death. The perfect place for you to recuperate,’ Nik said smoothly.
‘An island?’ Leah raised an uncertain hand to her damp brow, her physical weakness slowing up her ability to think, but the one thought that did cross her dazed mind was that she knew precious little about her husband of five years.
A smiling, dark-eyed maid provided an interruption by arriving with a breakfast tray. Leah’s empty stomach gave a tiny leap as she registered just how hungry she was. ‘How long have I been here?’ she asked.
‘Two days—’
‘Two?’
A flying knock sounded on the door and a teenager in cerise cycle shorts and a cropped top, her long hair a mass of glossy black ringlets, erupted into the room with a wide grin. ‘Great, you’re feeling better...’
‘Leah, this is my niece, Apollonia—’
‘Everyone calls me Ponia,’ the tiny brunette broke in cheerfully. ‘I came to meet you at the airport but you won’t remember me. You were practically unconscious.’
‘I remember your voice.’ Leah smiled. Ponia’s friendliness was infectious. Yet once again she suffered that feeling of almost embarrassing ignorance. Nik’s niece. He could have a dozen for all she knew.
‘Leah has to rest, not be talked into a relapse,’ Nik warned.
Ponia reddened, obviously sensitive to any reference to her chatterbox tendencies.
‘But I’d love to have some company.’ Leah shot Nik’s hard profile a speaking glance of reproach.
‘Terrif!’ Ponia plonked herself down casually on the foot of the bed. ‘You know, I thought you’d be older—but then maybe you’re older than you look! What age are you?’
‘Ponia...’ Nik breathed.
‘Twenty-two—’
‘You got married at seventeen?’ Ponia swivelled her eyes, whose expression was a combination of shock and fascination, across to her uncle. ‘And you agreed with my parents that you think that is far too young for me to be seriously dating?’ she demanded.
Registering the gathering storm in Nik’s discomfited features and holding back her own sudden desire to laugh, Leah found herself surging to the ebullient teenager’s rescue. ‘You speak marvellous English, Ponia.’
‘I go to school in England. I wish I’d known what age you were,’ she complained afresh. ‘I would have visited and got to know you years ago...in spite of what everybody else said!’
Nik released his breath in a sudden hiss and addressed his niece in Greek. Ponia stiffened, a mutinous expression tightening her pretty face as she bent her head. What had the Andreakis family said about Nik’s wife whom they had never met? Leah could not help being curious.
‘Don’t let her tire you out,’ Nik sighed, heading for the door.
‘Men are really thick sometimes,’ Ponia muttered and then threw a comically dismayed look at Leah.
‘Aren’t they just!’ Leah laughed, belatedly realising how very depressed she had been feeling before Ponia’s arrival. It was the flu which had done that to her, she told herself.
‘I had to twist his arm to get to come here with you,’ Ponia confided. ‘Nik always feels sorry for me because I have such a drag of a time when I’m home between terms.’
‘I suppose all your friends are in England,’ Leah said.
‘Oh, it’s not that, it’s the family being so old.’ Ponia grimaced. ‘They’re all living in the last century!’
‘Your parents?’ Leah was trying not to smile.
‘Well, they’re the youngest, I guess,’ the teenager conceded grudgingly. ‘Only early fifties—’
‘The youngest? Nik’s only thirty...your mother, his sister, is that much older?’
‘And her two sisters are older again. My grandmother is well into her seventies.’
Nik must have been a very late baby. Leah found herself having to rearrange her assumptions. For some reason she had assumed that Nik was the eldest child, not the youngest. It was rather unusual to have a gap of over twenty years between children, she thought absently.
‘Is that why you came to meet us at the airport?’ Leah smiled again.
‘No, that was because I wanted you to know how welcome you were. I think the way my family have treated you is horrible,’ Ponia said very earnestly.
Leah sipped at her coffee. ‘I—’
‘And you were the exact same age as I am now,’ the teenager continued heatedly as she sprang off the bed and wandered over to the window. ‘I know how I would feel if my husband’s family refused to have anything to do with me...I’d be very hurt and then I’d get furious!’
Illumination sank in on Leah. The Andreakis family had evidently rejected her sight unseen. Nik had not deliberately excluded her from his family circle. But Leah felt neither hurt nor furious. Theirs had not been a normal marriage. She had had more to worry about than the uninterest of Nik’s distant family...although she was suddenly distinctly grateful not to be a guest in her mother-in-law’s house.
‘I’m not furious,’ she said wryly.
‘But it was so unfair. It wasn’t your fault that Nik fell madly in love with you and backed out of his betrothal with Eleni Kiriakos!’ Ponia grimaced impressively in the pin-dropping silence. ‘I mean, that was just one of those things and it would have been a lot worse if he’d fallen for you after he’d married her...don’t you think?’
But mercifully Leah was saved from the necessity of a reply as a maid entered and addressed Ponia.
‘Rats! Mother on the phone,’ the teenager groaned, and then grinned. ‘She won’t ask any questions, I bet, but she has to be just gasping to know all about you! She’s terribly fond of Nik...’ She frowned, noticing Leah’s waxen pallor for the first time. ‘You should get some sleep. You look really drained. I’ll see you later.’
‘Lovely,’ Leah said shakily, flying on automatic pilot after a revelation which had literally depth-charged her out of her weak languor. She tasted blood in her mouth, registered that she had bitten down painfully on her tongue to prevent a shocked exclamation escaping her. Well, well, well, she thought, struggling manfully to recover from the shock.
CHAPTER SIX
ELENI AND NIK. Nik and Eleni. Leah was shattered. Five years ago they had been engaged to be married. Evidently Nik might not have been averse to a little Parisian flirtation but he had already had his future wife lined up. At least he had, Leah adjusted, until her father had intervened to demand a change of bride. Leah felt really sick as the full meaning of what she had learnt sank in.
Nik and Eleni Kiriakos were lovers. So why had Nik insisted that Leah remain his wife? Why had he refused to snatch at his freedom? Didn’t he want to marry Eleni? Or was he quite content to retain the good doctor as his mistress, his patently devoted mistress, who couldn’t even keep her paws off him in the presence of his wife?
Leah shuddered; she presumed that there was nothing in the Hippocratic oath that forbade such behaviour. No wonder Nik had been so bitter about their marriage! But Nik had not chosen to tell her the whole truth of what their marriage had cost him.
On the other hand, Nik was certainly beginning to settle the score for what he had suffered. Could that possibly be mere coincidence? Dear God, Nik had to hate her! It was a nonsense surely for him to say that he did not?
More wretched, more isolated than she had ever felt in her life before, Leah buried her aching head in the pillows. Just as Max Harrington had manipulated Nik and forcibly rearranged his life five years ago, Nik was now bringing to bear a similar pressure on Max’s daughter.
Nik had first revealed what might have been called a ‘sudden’ attraction towards his hitherto invisible wife the day Leah had told him she was in love with another man. Previous to that, he had believed that she still loved him and no doubt over the years he had reaped a vicarious satisfaction from punishing her for her father’s sins by demonstrating his complete indifference towards her.
He didn’t yet know that Paul was out of her life. But he had been ruthlessly determined to achieve that end. Why? An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? Nik had been deprived of Eleni five years ago. Was he intent on putting Leah through the same torment of losing a loved one? Was he capable of being that sadistic? Her father was out of reach, had been out of reach of any form of retribution even while alive by virtue of his blackmail, but Leah was very much within reach and always had been.
Yes, Nik could be sadistic. She remembered his cruel assurance that even Max couldn’t force him to perform like a stud in her bed. Her pounding head was whirling. She thought back shrinkingly to Nik’s passionate possession of her, only now recalled his unashamed admission that that had been a deliberate ploy. At the time she had believed that he meant he had slept with her both to reinforce his contention that they could have a real marriage and to tear a gaping hole in her confident assertion that she loved Paul... even to punish her for daring to defy him.
Only now did she see another, even more humiliating explanation for that night. A turn of the screw, a heightening of the victim’s torment...Nik, with all his considerable sexual savoir-faire, setting out with cool calculation to seduce his wife and thus throw her into absolute turmoil. Suddenly she felt painfully degraded by her own weakness in his arms, the unsuspected vulnerability which had made her a pushover for all that smouldering, sizzling Greek machismo. And Nik had just loved that discovery. The awareness was like a knife twisting in an open wound.
Exhaustion sent her into an uneasy sleep from which she awoke to find that it was after midnight. She had slept solid for more than twelve hours. But evidently it had done her good. Physically she was feeling much stronger...even if she did feel as though she was on the brink of starvation.
Pulling on a light robe, she went off in search of food. Her mind was awash with all the frightening thoughts she had endured earlier and, preoccupied as she was, she got the shock of her life when Nik appeared silently in a doorway just as she was passing.
A hiss of unformed sound erupted from her lips and she backed away in haste, her shoulder-blades colliding with the cold stone wall on the other side of the passageway.
‘Looking for a phone, pethi mou?’
In the dim light, his striking features might have been a bronze sculpture, eyes a mere sliver of black below the dark crescents of his lashes.
Leah pressed a helpless hand to the crazed thump of her heartbeat. ‘A ph—phone...?’ she stammered blankly.
‘Judging by the length of your calls to Woods, you were heavily into the substitute of telephone sex,’ Nik murmured with silken insolence. ‘And you’ve had forty-eight hours at least without your daily fix... Well, if that is what it takes, never let it be said that I shrank from the challenge. Go back to your room and I’ll use the internal line because I promise you anything he can do I can do better...’
Leah sucked in air in a whoosh, infuriatingly shattered by the smooth suggestion. ‘You pervert!’
Nik groaned. ‘It goes against the grain, but I’m actually beginning to pity your blond Adonis. He had—what? Two and a half months? What did you do with him? Hold hands, sigh and share deeply meaningful conversations?’
Red as a beetroot now and seething, Leah’s teeth gritted. ‘None of your business!’
‘But you see me here...’ Nik spread expressive brown hands in a movement that blatantly betrayed his savage amusement ‘...enslaved by my need to know every gory detail.’
Quivering with rage, Leah turned on her heel. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said in a frigid voice.
‘Not for him, you weren’t. Maybe you were hungry for a little attention and romance. I can understand that,’ Nik drawled in the tone of one attempting to hold a deeply meaningful conversation and struggling.
‘You’re so bloody basic, you ought to be in a cage!’ Leah suddenly slung at him, losing control at the arrogance with which he talked down to her.
‘At least I’m trying to understan
d what attracted you to a third-rate wimp like Woods!’ he slammed back at her in a devastatingly sudden explosion of raw anger.
‘I’ve got very bad taste, Nik. Don’t you know that? After all, once I chose you.’
Adrenalin was racing through Leah’s veins. She saw something in Nik which she had not seen before, and marvelled that she had been so blind. Nik was not jealous of Paul—no, that would have been far too exaggerated a description of what he was feeling right now. But it undoubtedly offended Nik’s macho pride to believe that his wife preferred another man to him. Right at that moment it would have killed Leah to admit that Paul was yesterday’s news and as third-rate as Nik had claimed.
His brilliant eyes glittered over her and she could feel the raw force of his powerful personality beating down on her. It was oddly exhilarating, not demeaning, as that little scene with the towel had been that day in Paris when Nik had fondly imagined that all he had to do was crook an arrogant finger and she would do what he wanted...willingly, eagerly, gratefully... the way all the other women had in Nik Andreakis’s roving existence.
‘You need—’ Nik began.
‘Well, I don’t need half my clothes ripped off me like the last time,’ Leah cut in, lifting her chin high and shooting him a look of sublime scorn.
The silence lay there, thick and impenetrable, disturbed only by the thump of her own heartbeat in her ears.
For a split-second Nik stared at her with black eyes as dense as the night and then his sensual mouth gave a sudden appreciative twist and he threw back his dark head and burst out laughing. Sharply disconcerted, Leah stared back at him, colour flooding her cheeks. Without warning, she felt achingly vulnerable.
As she made a hurried movement to walk away, he caught her back with a powerful hand and guided her into the room he had recently vacated. ‘You said you were hungry. I’ll order some food,’ he said, abruptly prosaic.
But not a prosaic man, she reflected as she was thrust down unceremoniously on a comfortable sofa across from the cluttered desk he had clearly been working at. She linked her not quite steady hands, ruefully conscious of the internal upheaval that resulted from being in Nik’s radius. You never knew what was likely to happen next. Once that had fascinated her. He was so different from her. They were night and day, chalk and cheese. And yet when he had laughed she had been made shatteringly aware of the electrifying charisma that was so innate a part of him.