by Julia James
From demons she refused to give a name to.
'I wasn't suggesting we go hot-clubbing till dawn,' he assured her. 'Since it isn't your scene anyway, I recall, I was thinking of something a little more... .sophisticated. I think you will enjoy it. I know I will...'
She compressed her mouth. 'I said I don't dance. I mean it.'
He smiled lazily down at her, his mockery at her refusal glittering in his eyes like gold glinting in a sheet of slate, 'I can see I shall have to persuade you otherwise.'
He let the tips of his fingers brush lightly along her arm, amused at the way she jerked away again. He knew just how to handle her now, baiting her with her own responsiveness to him. She didn't like being that responsive, she was fighting against it, but it would be a losing battle, he knew.
And the victory would be his.
A sweet victory—reduced to abject pleading for his love-making this woman who made it totally, shamelessly clear that the only reason she was marrying him was to gain control of he capital her grandfather held for her. That would be a victory he would savour to the full.
As for Andrea, all she could do was put her mask in place and try and get through the evening.
Despite her protestations Nikos took her out later that night, and though it was not some packed and heaving strobe-lit club, there was no way she was going to let him lead her out onto the small, intimate floor in the rooftop restaurant he took her to.
'I said I don't dance and I meant it!' she repeated.
'Try,' he said. There was a glint in his eye, and it was not entirely predatory. There was determination in it as well.
Andrea gave in.
He led her out—she as stiff as a board—onto the dance floor. A love song was playing, and though with one part of her mind she was grateful, with the rest of it she felt her terror only increased, for reasons which had nothing to do with her habitual refusal to dance.
Nikos slid his arms around her, resting on the curve of her hips at either side. They burned through the thin fabric of her long peacock-blue dress with a warmth that made the pulse in her neck beat faster. She stood immobile. Her legs began to ache with the tension.
'Put your arms around my neck, pethi mou.'
The warmth of his breath on her ear made her shiver. He was too close. Much, much too close. The long, lean line of his body pressed against her, hip to hip, thigh to thigh.
Don't think! Don't feel! she adjured herself desperately.
Gingerly, very gingerly, she lifted her arms and placed one palm on either shoulder.
He was hi evening dress, and the dark fabric felt smooth and rich to the touch. Beneath the jacket she could feel the hardness :: his shoulders. She tensed even more.
‘Relax,' he murmured, and with the slightest of pressures on ~=r hip started to move her around with him.
For a brief moment she went with him, her right foot moving jerkily in the direction he was urging her. Her legs were like wood, unbending.
'Relax,' he said again.
She moved her left leg, catching up with him, and they repeated the movement—him smoothly, she with a jerkiness that she could not control. Her spine was beginning to hurt with the effort.
She lasted another ten seconds, her face rigid, willing herself to keep going. Then, with a little cry, she stumbled away from him.
'I can't! I can't do this!'
She broke across the little dance floor, desperate to sit down, and collapsed back on her chair. Nikos was there in an instant beside her.
'What the hell was that about?' he demanded.
She could hear the annoyance in his voice. Only the annoyance.
'I told you, I don't dance!' she bit at him.
'Don't? Or won't?' he asked thinly, and sat down himself. He seized at the neck of the champagne bottle nestling in its ice bucket and refilled his glass. Hers was almost untouched.
'When we are married,' he said, setting down his glass with a snap, 'I shall give you lessons.'
'You do that,' she replied, and took a gulp of her champagne.
Nikos Vassilis would never teach her to dance.
Or anything else.
Surreptitiously, under the table, she slowly rubbed at her thighs. The ache went right through to her bones. And beyond.
Andrea clenched the phone to her ear.
'You're sure? You're absolutely sure?'
'Yes, Miss Fraser, completely sure. The sum of five hundred thousand pounds has been credited to your account.'
'And it can't be removed without my permission?' Her question was sharp.
'Certainly not!' The voice of the bank official, a thousand miles away in London, sounded deeply shocked as he replied.
It was the morning of Andrea's wedding.
The happiest day of my life! The day I finally, finally wave a wand over Mum and start our new lives!
As she terminated the call, with repeated assurances from her bank that the money deposited in her account first thing that day was totally and irrevocably hers to dispose of as she would, deep, deep relief flooded through her. She had done it! She had got what she had come for—the promise of freedom from poverty, from ill-health, from the grind and drab penury her mother had put up with for twenty-five years.
Now all she had to do was endure the next twenty-four hours and she would be on her way home.
I can do it! I've done it so far and I can do this last thing!
'Kyria, may I start to dress you, please?' Zoe's voice sounded anxiously from the doorway. 'Kyrios Coustakis would like you to go downstairs as soon as possible.'
Andrea nodded, and the lengthy process of dressing Yiorgos Coustakis's illegitimate granddaughter for her wedding to the man who would run his company and give him the heir he craved got underway.
Andrea felt the relief drain out of her, replaced by a tightness that started to wind around her lungs like biting cord. As she sat in front of the looking glass, Zoe skilfully pinning up her hair, she stared at her reflection. Her eyes seemed too big, her skin too pale. She clenched her hands together in her lap. The reality of what she was about to do hit her, over and over again, like repeated blows.
For all that it was a small, private wedding, it seemed to go on for ever, Andrea thought bleakly. She stood beside her bridegroom, unsmiling, her throat so tight she could hardly say the words that bound her to the tall, straight figure at her side. Sickness churned in her stomach.
She was marrying him! She was actually marrying Nikos Vassilis. Here. Now. Right now. Faintness drummed at her. Her legs and spine ached with the tension wiring her whole body taut.
There was a ring on her finger. She could see it glinting in the sunlight.
It doesn't mean anything! This time tomorrow he'll have packed me off back to London and wished me good riddance. He'll have what he wanted—my grandfather's company. He'll be glad to see the back of me. He never wanted me in the first place.
And he doesn't even intend to be faithful...
Her lips compressed. Three nights ago her grandfather had summoned her again. Nikos had returned her from yet another night out, this time a concert, where the combination of Dvorak and Rachmaninov, plus the thrill of hearing one of the world's greatest soloists give the Dvorak cello concerto, had conspired to weaken her facade. As they left the concert hall she had turned impulsively to Nikos.
'That was wonderful! Thank you!'
Her eyes were shining, her face radiant.
Nikos paused and looked down at her. ‘I’m glad to have given you pleasure.'
For once there was no double meaning in his words, no sensual glint in his eyes. For a moment they just looked at each other. Andrea's ears rang with the echo of the tumultuous finale of the Rachmaninov symphony. Her heart was almost as tumultuous.
Her eyes entwined with his and something flowed between them. She could not tell what it was, but it was something that made her want the moment to last for ever.
She was almost regretful that in fact she neve
r was going to be his wife in anything but briefest name.
It was a regret that had been destroyed in the two-minute conversation with her grandfather on her return to his villa.
'There are things to make clear to you,' he began in his harsh, condemning voice, as she stood unspeaking in front of him to receive her lecture. 'From the moment you become Nikos Vassilis's wife you will behave as a Greek wife should. He will teach you the obedience you so sorely lack!' His soulless eyes rested on her like a basilisk, 'You will understand that you will gain no privileges from your connection with me. Nor should you imagine that you will gain any privileges from the fact that you are handsome enough for your husband to find you, for the moment, sexually desirable.'
He saw the expression on her face and gave a short laugh. 'I said "for the moment" and that is what I meant! Understand this, girl—' his eyes bored into hers '—in Greece a man who is a husband is still a man. And his wife must know her place. Which is to be silent! Nikos Vassilis has two mistresses currently—an American model, a tramp who sleeps with any man who passes, and a woman of Athens who is a professional whore. He will discard neither for your sake.' His voice dropped menacingly. 'If I hear any whining from you, any screeching tantrums because of this, you will regret it! Do you understand?'
She understood all right and she felt revulsion shimmer through her.
Be grateful you're not marrying him for real!
But marrying him she was—if she wanted money for Kim then she must go through this farce of a wedding ceremony.
Not one mistress but two! Her mouth twisted. My, my, what a busy lad Nikos Vassilis was! And still intended to be, so it seemed! Well, that might be the way Greek males saw the world, but she would be having none of it!
The pop of a champagne bottle made her jump, exacerbating her jittery nerves. One of the servants was pouring out foaming liquid into tall glasses. Andrea sipped at hers and looked around her.
All this money, all this wealth, all this opulence and luxury, she thought. I've been drowning in it for two weeks, nearly three.
I want to go home!
The thought caught at her, making her want to cry out with it. She wanted to go home, back to Kim, back to the poky, damp flat that Nikos Vassilis would be appalled to know she had grown up in! He thought he was marrying the Coustakis heiress. What a joke! What a ludicrous, ridiculous joke!
Well, the joke would be on him before the night was out.
But she didn't feel like laughing.
Andrea sat in the Louis Quinze armchair, her eyes shut. The champagne had been drunk, she had endured the painfully polite congratulations of the household staff, and now she was waiting for her brand-new husband to emerge out of the library, where her grandfather was finally allowing him to sign the merger contracts. A bevy of men in suits had arrived on the doorstep an hour ago, all with aides and briefcases, and disappeared into the inner sanctum of Yiorgos Coustakis to conduct the real business of the day.
Her legs ached. Carefully she rubbed them through the material of her trousers. Zoe had helped her change out of the long ivory satin gown she had worn for the ceremony, and now she was back in the clothes she had arrived in. Although the staff had emptied just about the whole of the closet into half a dozen suitcases to see her through her honeymoon. Andrea had insisted on her own small case—the one she had brought with her—being handed to her personally. She had packed it the night before, with all her own clothes and the make-up bag containing the key to the airport locker holding her money and passport, right after phoning Tony and telling him that she was coming home in forty-eight hours, and asking him, as always, to give her love to Kim. She hadn't spoken to her mother since arriving here. Hadn't been able to bring herself to. She knew Kim would understand, would make do with having her love passed on every day by Tony.
The ormolu clock on the gilded mantelpiece ticked quietly. The room was silent. The only sound in it was Andrea's heavy heartbeat.
Let me just get through tonight, and then 1 can be gone!
There was the click of a door opening across the marbled hall, and the sound of voices. She opened her eyes. She could hear the besuited visitors taking their leave, their business done.
Time for Nikos to move on to the next item on his agenda— taking his bride on honeymoon, thought Andrea viciously. Being angry seemed like a good idea right now.
Safer.
She heard Nikos's voice in the hallway, and her grandfather answering shortly. Then footsteps as her grandfather trod heavily back to his own affairs. It must have been a good day's work for him, Andrea thought, selling his company and his bastard granddaughter at the same time.
Something flickered in the corner of her eye, and she twisted her head. It was just a drape, fluttering in the breeze from the open window. The day was warm, the sun inviting. Something caught at her heart, an echo from very long ago, from long before she was born.
Out of nowhere a memory came. A memory of something that had never happened but that she had so often, as a child, wished so ardently were real, and not a mere hopeless longing. The memory of her father, kind and smiling, calling her his princess, her mother his queen, crowning them both with happiness ...
But it had never happened. Never. Instead he had died before she was born.
It shouldn't have been like this!
The silent cry came from deep inside her.
But it is like this, and there's nothing more I can do about it than I have already done.
'Are you ready?'
Nikos's voice was harsh, cutting through her sombre thoughts. He sounded tense.
She got to her feet.
'Yes,' she answered, and walked towards him where he stood in the doorway.
They took their places in the back of her grandfather's vast limousine, Andrea sinking back so far into the seat that she felt she would disappear. Nikos threw himself into the other corner. The car moved forward smoothly.
They did not talk, and Andrea was glad. She had nothing to say to this man now. After tomorrow morning she would never see him again. He was a passing stranger, nothing more.
'Would you like a drink?'
She blinked. Nikos was pulling out a concealed drinks compartment, revealing an array of crystal decanters. She shook her head. He lifted one of the decanters and poured a measure of its contents into a glass. Andrea could smell whisky. He knocked it back in one shot, then replaced the glass and slid shut the cabinet.
'How are you feeling?'
The abrupt question took her by surprise. She shrugged.
'OK,' she said indifferently.
He made a sound in his throat that sounded to her ears like an impatient sigh, and then, with a swift movement, he loosened the tie at his throat and undid his collar. Andrea couldn't help looking across at him.
Immediately she wished he hadn't. She didn't know what it was about loosened ties and opened shirt collars, but the kick to her guts was immediate. Nikos ran a hand roughly through his hair, ruffling its satin smoothness. Another kick went straight through her guts.
To her relief, he wasn't paying her any attention, simply staring moodily out through the smoked glass window. Then, abruptly, he spoke.
'Theos, but I'm glad that's over!'
The kick in Andrea's guts vanished instantly. He was glad it was over. Fine. So was she. Very glad. Very glad indeed. Couldn't have been gladder. Her lips pressed together.
She looked away, staring out of her own window, and heard Nikos shift in his seat
'Don't sulk, Andrea,' he told her tersely. 'You enjoyed that ordeal as little as I did! But it's over now. Thank God!' Then, on an even terser note, he said, 'Did you get your money?'
There was condemnation in his voice. Andrea thought of the merger contracts, signed not half an hour ago. Making Nikos Vassilis one of the richest men in Europe.
'Of course,' she answered.
'You won't need it,' said the man she had married. 'I will give you everything you want
.' She didn't reply. He gave another, heavier sigh.
'Andrea, this is a time for plain speaking. We are married. And there is absolutely no reason to suppose things will not work out between us! Your grandfather is out of the picture now. He does not concern us. It is up to us to make this marriage work, and I believe it can—very successfully. If we both just make an effort to make it work! I am prepared to do so— and I ask that you are too. As soon as our honeymoon is over we shall fly to England to meet your mother, and mend bridges there. However much she disapproved of your grandfather, I hope she will think more kindly of me.'
She'll never lay eyes on you, thought Andrea, never even know you exist. Nikos was talking still.