From Dirt to Diamonds

by Julia James

  She felt the sickness roil in her stomach again, the ache between her legs marking her shame—the stamp of his triumph over her, encompassing her destruction …

  For a moment so brief she knew it was not real another memory cut across her torment.

  Her body clinging to his. That wonder and amazement—that ecstasy that she had never dreamt of! It had made a living flame of her body, transporting her to a world, a universe she had never known existed. His arms around her, embracing her, wrapping her to him, folding her to him, holding her, while she cried out in wonder and bliss.

  No! She wiped the memory from her mind. That was an illusion—nothing more than that! An illusion he’d wanted her to believe, for how else would he have got his triumph? Proving beyond doubt, beyond all her defiant denial, that she was exactly what he had accused her of being five long bitter years ago! And now all she could do was flee. Flee as fast, as far as she could.

  She had survived him before. She would survive him now. She must.

  The final knife turned in her, its blade reaching deepest of all. She was going to pay a price she had never known existed. That could never be expunged.

  Never.

  Bleakly, blindly, she blundered on, desperation in every stumbling step.

  She had nearly crested the slope that bulged from the main descent of the mountainside to the road still far below. The pathway was petering out, and she could only tread in what she hoped and prayed was the right direction. She scanned the way ahead, urgency pressing at her. The light was stronger now, sunshine blazing on the upper slopes above the chalet. She dared not look back to see how far she was, knowing how exposed she must be. She had to go on, as fast as possible …

  And then, freezing the blood in her veins, she heard a shout behind her.

  Like a hunted deer she halted, turned, and terror froze her. It was Angelos, coming down the path towards her. He was still a hundred metres or so above her, but his long stride swallowed up the path, zigzagging down to where she was. Panic seized her. She plunged on, slipping as she did so, grabbing at the grass to steady herself. She heard him shout again, but she only scrambled onwards, heart pounding sickly.

  Then, as she looked ahead further at the path, she gave a smothered cry of dismay. Till now the convex slope had concealed what lay ahead. Now, as she finally cleared the curving angle, she saw that the path stopped abruptly, terminating where a sheet of rock and scree dropped sharply away. A landslip had sliced through the rest of the slope, taking the path with it. For a moment she just stood there, swaying. Then, over her head, she heard Angelos’s voice.

  ‘Kat—stay where you are! Don’t move!’

  Her head whipped round. He was only fifty metres above her now, cutting down vertically over the grass. Closing fast. She scrambled onwards, to where the path ended and the sheer rock face started. She heard him call again. Felt panic knife again.

  She couldn’t stop! She couldn’t!

  Urgency, desperation, drove her onwards. With a ragged breath she dropped to her knees and started to inch out across the bare, steep rock, using her hands and her feet together over the sheer surface. It was wet with condensation from the night air, slippery beneath her fingers and icy cold. Close up, its smoothness was deceptive, with jagged flakes and shallow shelves of scree increasing in the direction she was trying to traverse, across and down. It was madness to attempt it—there was scarcely a foothold or a handhold that she could use properly, and grabbing at one such only resulted in the heel of her hand being cut.

  She whimpered in pain. Simultaneously her foot slipped, and her crouching position slid out into an open sprawl across the treacherous surface. She froze, spread-eagled, her toes in agony trying to keep her from sliding further down. She could see blood from her hand seeping on to the rock. The pain made her hand slip, and with the loss of hold she felt her body judder down the rockface further, her feet only encountering scrabbling scree that would not hold her. Desperately she clung on, shoulder sockets in agony, trying to force herself to make her next move. But fear paralysed her. And weakness. She had no strength left—none.

  ‘Kat!’

  The voice was right above her now, and she strained her face upwards. Angelos was on the grass ridge above the rock face, lying face-down, half hanging over. His hand was extended down towards her.

  ‘Get my hand!’ He strained it further forward—the maximum he could reach without falling himself.

  He was nearly touching her. She gazed, blind with panic and dread.

  ‘Lunge for my hand—I’ll catch you. It’s OK, I can pull you back up. Just do it, Kat—do it!’

  He sounded so angry. Furious. His face was dark.

  She saw him. Saw him clear, vivid.

  Angelos Petrakos. The man who had destroyed her once, five long years ago. Who had taken Giles from her, destroyed all her hopes of that future. And who had now completed her destruction. Her utter destruction.

  A destruction from which there could be no return …

  ‘Kat—take my hand!’

  She gazed up at him. Holding out his hand to her.

  As if—dear God—Angelos Petrakos were trying to save her …

  She wanted to laugh. Laugh with savage self-mockery at the idea that he might be trying to save her. But her lungs were frozen—her body could not laugh.

  It could only convulse.

  Loosening her frail, exhausted grip.

  ‘Kat!’

  It was the last sound she heard before her head hit against the rockface as she slid joltingly, vertically down and she lost consciousness. In her last moment of awareness something struck her as odd. Angelos hadn’t sounded angry any more …

  For a timeless moment Angelos was paralysed, watching Kat’s helpless body jolting downwards, as if she were nothing more than a rag doll. Then, eventually, it reached a ledge and stopped.

  There were voices. Thea could hear them. Dimly, as if from a long, long way away. Gradually they got louder. Penetrated the fog in her brain. Roused her to wakefulness at last. She blinked her eyes open.

  An elderly man in a white coat, with a kindly face, was looking down at her. She realised she was lying in a bed, in a clinical-looking room. A nurse was standing behind the doctor.

  ‘My dear fraulein, how are you feeling?’

  The accent was strongly Swiss, but there was a concern in it that somehow made her throat tighten.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked weakly. ‘I … I fell …’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the kindly doctor. ‘But most fortunately, although you have some injuries, none are major. However, you are not well enough to leave hospital just yet.’

  ‘How did I get here?’ Her voice was hazy.

  ‘Mountain Rescue brought you in, summoned by Herr Petrakos. You were unconscious after falling. Now, my dear fraulein, you must promise me something. Our mountains are beautiful, but they can be very dangerous. You must promise me you will never try anything so reckless again.’ He looked at her over the top of his glasses. ‘You have been very fortunate. You have only abrasions—and your ribs are bruised, not broken. But you could have died, fraulein—truly, you could have died.’ His voice changed, became less sombre. ‘Now, we will need you to stay the night here, because we must watch for concussion. But I believe you may see Herr Petrakos—he is most anxious to see you.’

  Her face closed. ‘I don’t want to see him.’

  The doctor’s eyebrows rose. ‘No? But he is most concerned, fraulein, most concerned. Indeed, I would say he is—what is the word in English?—ah, yes—quite frantic about you.’

  She could only stare. Angelos? Frantic?

  ‘I don’t want to see him,’ she said again. Her voice was without expression.

  The doctor looked at her questioningly a moment, then simply nodded. ‘As you wish. I will let him know.’

  Outside in the waiting area Angelos was pacing up and down, his face taut. When the doctor emerged, he pounced.

  ‘She will make a ful
l recovery,’ the doctor told him immediately, and at once words in Greek broke from Angelos, relief knifing through his face. But his expression darkened at the doctor’s next words.

  He picked his words carefully. ‘She does not wish for any visitors just now. Perhaps this afternoon,’ he said, temporising, seeing Angelos’s eyes flash with emotion at the refusal. ‘However, Herr Petrakos …’ He was picking his words even more carefully now, and Angelos stiffened. ‘I think you must take pains to impress upon the fraulein that it is … unwise … to attempt any form of mountain-walking if there is any alcohol in the system. Even from the night before.’

  Angelos’s brows snapped together. ‘Alcohol?’ His voice was disbelieving. ‘She doesn’t drink alcohol!

  The doctor’s eyebrows rose. ‘Indeed? And yet her blood shows its presence …’

  ‘Impossible,’ said Angelos curtly. Then, abruptly, memory stabbed. He’d taken the cognac glass out of her hand …

  But she couldn’t possibly have drunk cognac? Why? Why would she do such a thing?

  Emotion knifed in him again. There was so much he’d thought impossible about her …

  His hands clenched, fighting for calm. For sense. For comprehension.

  ‘I have to see her—it’s imperative, absolutely imperative!’

  But the doctor remained adamant, and seething with frustration—so much more than frustration!—Angelos could only return to the chalet. His thoughts were dark and turbid, and after he had interviewed Franz and Johann were like snakes writhing inside him.

  Apfelwein—that was what she had drunk last night. Not apfelsaft, innocuous, harmless, apple juice, but an alcoholic drink. Surely to God she would have noticed the difference?

  But would she—could she? If she never drank wine, or even cider, could she have known at all that it was alcoholic? Cold ran through him. Cold—and more than cold.

  He walked out on to the terrace, hands gripping the wooden balcony in a death-grip.

  She was intoxicated, and I didn’t notice.

  Memory jarred again. She’d been sipping at the cognac with half a litre of apfelwein inside her, never having touched alcohol in her life! Heightening her intoxication. She wouldn’t even have known …

  Only felt its effects …

  His hands clenched again over the wooden balustrade, whitening his fingers.

  I have to speak to her.

  His face was stark. Grim.

  Grimmer still when, the moment his untouched lunch had been cleared away, he phoned the clinic to say he was on his way down again, and that this time he would not be balked of seeing her—only to be informed, politely and regretfully by the clinic receptionist, that against all medical advice the English fraulein had discharged herself and gone.

  The taxi drew up outside the block of flats and Thea climbed out. Despite the humid heat, she felt cold. Cold in her bones. Her very being. The rail journey from Switzerland seemed to have taken for ever, but it had not been long enough for her to shed the bleakness that engulfed her.

  She had thought Angelos could do no worse to her—but she had been wrong. He had had one final, ultimate destruction for her …

  She felt her shoulders sag, weariness of spirit crush her down. She closed her eyes a moment, then took a breath, forcing her shoulders back. How many times had she done that in her life? Ever since, as Kat, she’d faced the destiny she’d been slipping towards and made the transforming decision not to go that way. Not to become the person her mother had been, her mother’s mother. To break that crushing chain of self-destruction dragging her down. To make something of herself, whatever it cost her.

  And now she must pay another price.

  Pain ripped at her, and its bitterly familiar twin—shame. Shame that she had been so unforgivably stupid as to forget so rashly, so blindly, just what he was to her. Her nemesis—now as he had always been. Angelos Petrakos.

  As she opened the entrance door of the block memory jumped in her mind. That evening when his bodyguard had stepped up, manoeuvring her inside, admitting his employer at well. She gave another shiver. A shudder.

  Nemesis, indeed.

  But she knew that then she had been fuelled by fury, rushing through her like a tide of adrenaline—determined, driven to defeat Angelos Petrakos, to show him that he could not destroy her, that she would defy his destruction!

  This time bleakness lapped about her. This time it was different. She could hate Angelos all she wanted, but he was not the cause of her downfall—she herself was. She and she alone had let him do it—had been his accomplice, his conspirator. It was herself she hated now, with a drear, bleak loathing that dragged at her like weights around her body—her treacherous, betraying body.

  Wearily, she stepped into the lift, feeling the heat increase in the airless compartment. Again memory stabbed at her. That crowded lift in Angelos’s hotel in London, being jostled back against him, so that her body had tensed like steel. And as she’d gained his suite she’d turned on him.

  ‘Don’t touch me—don’t ever touch me!’

  Her face contorted. Fool! That was what had set in motion this whole nightmare. Giving him orders. She, Kat Jones, had presumed to dare to give the mighty Angelos Petrakos orders! To forbid him something—demand respect for herself!

  She had doomed herself from that moment onwards. Because from that moment onwards, Angelos Petrakos had had only one malign aim, one fell purpose—to bring her down, to humble her, prove she could not defy him and get away with it. So, from that moment onwards, he had sought to demonstrate the futility of her presumption in denying what he, with calculated design, day by day lulling her, after all he’d done to her, from enmity to susceptibility, had determined on achieving—a seduction so skilful she had been pitifully, pathetically, incapable of realising was happening.

  Until it had been too late, and Angelos Petrakos, his destruction of her complete, had forced her to see the truth about herself.

  That she had yielded, of her own free will, to his most malign one….

  As she let herself into her flat, that she had last left what seemed like a lifetime ago now, she felt the familiar ripping pain tear through her. She made herself ignore it, as she had made herself ignore it all the way on her desolate journey, made herself go through the necessary routine of turning on the air-conditioning to cool the stifling flat, set the water to heat for a shower to refresh her weary body, if not her even wearier spirit, then carry the shopping she had bought on her way home from the station, into the kitchen. She would unpack them, make herself some tea, have a shower, eat something—anything, she didn’t care, had no appetite—then afterwards, for the rest of the endless, empty evening stretching ahead of her, perhaps there was something on TV she could watch, to blot up her thoughts. Perhaps she could watch TV for the next month. The next year. The rest of her life …

  The ripping pain came again, and again she stood, eyes shut, until she had fought it off. Then, bleak depression pressing down like weights upon her, she went to draw the curtains against the growing dusk. Outside, the London street below was busy—people coming and going, living their lives, so remote from hers. A car slipped silently along the roadway, sleek and dark and black, heading for the Opera House. For a moment memory plucked at her and she recalled how she’d thought the same of a similar car just before Angelos’s bodyguard had hustled her inside this block.

  A lifetime ago …

  She let out her breath, dragging the curtains across, then headed for her bedroom, forcing herself to stay upright instead of sinking down on the bed and seeking the pointless oblivion of sleep. Long-held discipline kicked in. Doing what she didn’t want to do because she had to do it. Within twenty minutes she’d unpacked, put away the groceries, made herself a cup of tea, and was standing under the shower, hot and stinging, its needles drumming on her shoulders. When she got out, she wrapped herself swiftly in her towelling dressing gown. She did not like to see her naked body.

  It bore the invisible mark of
shame upon it, blazoned on every curve, every centimetre of bare flesh.

  She tugged the belt tighter, then unclipped her hair, reaching for a brush to pull through it and release any knots and tangles. She shook her head, feeling the fall of hair tumbling down her back. It felt long and loose and lush, like a silky cloud about her head. The pain came again, jagging at her nerves, making her head bow under the blow.

  With a ragged inhalation she walked out of the bathroom, out of the bedroom, into her living room.

  And stopped dead.

  Angelos Petrakos was sitting on her sofa.

  CHAPTER TEN

  HE DIDN’T move.

  Nor did she. Shock had paralysed her. Shock and something more—something even more paralysing that froze the breath in her lungs even as it made the beat of her heart jolt as if a lightning bolt had struck it.

  He was sitting there just as he had before, a lifetime ago—invading her life again, taking it over, seeking to destroy it.

  She swayed. I can’t, I can’t go through this again, I can’t, I haven’t the strength …

  But she had to find that strength—had to. Had to find the strength to fight him. She waited for her anger to kick in, as it always did, giving her the strength to fight him, as it always did. But anger did not come. Only that other emotion that swept through her—terrifying her.

  No! She couldn’t let herself feel that—she had to control it, subdue it. Crush it back down with steel, with ice, with cold, stinging words.

  ‘How the hell,’ she demanded, ‘did you get in?’

  ‘I had your keys copied while you were in Switzerland,’ he said.

  His voice was clipped, impatient, as though her question was irrelevant and his answer nothing untoward. His jawline was taut, as though under tension. His whole body the same. She could see a muscle working in his cheek, his eyes like steel. Angelos Petrakos was angry.

  But so what if he was? He was always angry with her …

  For a moment so brief it might not have existed she felt her throat catch. Then the catch was gone, leaving only the emotion she had always felt about Angelos Petrakos.