Книга - Bond Of Hatred

Bond Of Hatred
LYNNE GRAHAM


Sleeping with the enemy?Sarah Hartwell’s sister died in childbirth leaving a son she’s determined to protect him. So when Greek tycoon Alex Terzakis comes to claim his brother’s child Sarah stands firm in the face of his dizzying wealth and power. In a final, desperate attempt to get rid of Alex she gives him an ultimatum: if he wants the baby he’ll have to marry her!Believing Sarah is a gold-digger and expecting her to name a price for the child Alex is surprised by the beauty’s proposal…but astounds her by accepting. Yet Alex refuses to have a marriage in name only… he will claim his bride!












is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular and bestselling novelists. Her writing was an instant success with readers worldwide. Since her first book, Bittersweet Passion, was published in 1987, she has gone from strength to strength and now has over ninety titles, which have sold more than thirty-five million copies, to her name.

In this special collection, we offer readers a chance to revisit favourite books or enjoy that rare treasure—a book by a favourite writer—they may have missed. In every case, seduction and passion with a gorgeous, irresistible man are guaranteed!







LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon


reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.




Bond of Hatred

Lynne Graham





www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)




CHAPTER ONE


SARAH stood still as a statue at the glass viewing window. Her wide emerald eyes were burning. Every muscle in her body was rigid with tension. Every muscle ached. Only the most fierce self-discipline held back her exhaustion. It had been a long night and a devastating dawn. And every minute, every agonising hour of it was etched into her soul. The nurse wheeled over her nephew’s cot and displayed him with a wide smile.

She probably didn’t know, Sarah thought numbly. She looked back at the nurse, her fine-boned face ashen and strained, her facial muscles frozen into a mask. The nurse stopped smiling but Sarah didn’t notice. Her attention had locked into her nephew. He had a shock of black hair and a pair of furious dark eyes.

There was nothing of Callie in him. He was Mediterranean-dark, his foreign ancestry clearly apparent. He was screaming. He looked so unhappy. She wondered if on some strange wavelength he knew that his mother was dead. Dead. She flinched inwardly away from the word and began to walk up the corridor on legs that didn’t feel strong enough to support her.

Women didn’t die in childbirth these days. Or so she had believed. And Callie hadn’t even been a woman in her sister’s opinion. At eighteen, Callie had been on the shady boundary line between child and adult. A golden girl with beauty, intelligence and everything to live for...until Damon Terzakis had come into her life and laid it to waste. An immense bitterness gripped Sarah. The emotion was so intense, it literally frightened her.

‘Miss Hartwell...’

The sound of that voice halted her in her tracks. That dark, accented drawl cut into her like a razor. She shuddered. Slowly she raised her head. He stood several feel away. A male few would overlook. He had to be at least six feet three. His superbly tailored dark grey suit outlined broad, muscular shoulders and long, lean legs. The fabric and the cut alone screamed expense. He had the lethal, inborn grace of a wild animal and the intimidating and instinctive authority of a man born to command.

Sarah stared in disbelief as he extended a lean brown hand. The long fingers, she noticed absently, were beautifully shaped. ‘Please permit me to offer my most sincere condolences on your sister’s tragic death,’ he murmured in a taut undertone.

Sarah took a quick backward step, repulsed by the threat of any form of bodily contact. ‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded shakily.

‘You left an urgent message with my secretary,’ he reminded her.

‘Callie made me phone, but I didn’t ask for you to come, Mr Terzakis,’ Sarah breathed jerkily. ‘I asked for your brother.’

‘Damon is in Greece.’ Alexis Terzakis watched her with impassive eyes as dark as a winter’s night. ‘I have already informed him of your sister’s death. He is most deeply distressed,’ he asserted.

A hysterical laugh escaped Sarah. ‘Really?’ she gasped incredulously.

‘I would like to see my nephew,’ Alexis responded, ignoring her response with supreme cool.

‘No!’ Sarah gritted, her slight body stiffening with a sudden rush of raw aggression that came from fathoms deep down inside her. She hated and detested Alex Terzakis more than any man alive. Her hatred had festered over many months. Now it was like a cancer inside her, eating away until it consumed every other emotion.

‘Your right is no greater than mine—’

‘Right?’ Sarah echoed half an octave higher. ‘You dare to talk about rights after what you did to Callie? You have no rights over Callie’s child, no rights whatsoever! You sicken me!’

‘You are distraught,’ Alex Terzakis informed her with apparent calm, but she was not fooled. A dark line of blood had risen over his high cheekbones and his mouth had flattened into a pale line.

People did not speak to Alex Terzakis in such a tone. He was fabulously rich and terrifyingly powerful. His minions bowed and scraped. His family walked in awe of him. His word was law. He did not expect opposition. The media had published several bloodcurdling stories about what happened to those foolish enough to challenge Alex Terzakis in business. But Sarah had no fear of him. Sarah would have given twenty years of her life to have the power to hurt Alex Terzakis as he had hurt her sister.

‘You murdered her...you killed her with unkindness. I hope you’re satisfied now!’ Sarah shot back at him with raw venom.

‘Miss Hartwell.’ A strong hand caught her wrist as she attempted to walk past him.

‘Let go of me, you swine!’ Sarah hissed in outrage.

‘Were it not for the fact that I am capable of making allowances for your understandable grief, I would demand an apology,’ Alex slashed down at her from his imposing height, tiger’s eyes raking her enraged face. ‘But this is not the place for such a confrontation. Compose yourself before I lose my temper!’

Sarah was shivering as though she were caught in a force-ten gale. Outright fury controlled her as he retained that bruising hold on her wrist. She lifted her free hand and hit blindly up at that dark, arrogant face with all her strength. He released her with an incredulous growl, a lean hand flying up to one sculpted cheekbone.

Sarah staggered back. ‘Don’t ever come near me again!’ she slung wildly, dimly shocked by that raw surge of uncharacteristic violence. She could not remember ever striking another human being before. Even as a child she had been a pacifist.

For a split-second, she collided with splintering golden eyes, incandescent with disbelief. And then she tore her gaze from his and forced herself to walk straight-backed down the corridor and out of the hospital.

She was in shock, so deep in shock that she didn’t even know where she was going. Callie was dead. She could not yet accept that. Their parents had died in a car crash when Sarah was seventeen. There had been no money. Callie had only been eleven.

‘Look after Callie,’ her mother had moaned repeatedly in Intensive Care. Mary Hartwell had still been fretting about her youngest child when she’d breathed her last.

Sarah had left school, given up all hope of any further education and concentrated on her sister’s needs. She had persuaded her father’s cousin Gina to let them live with her. With Gina in the background, the social services had allowed Sarah to keep her sister. Sarah had worked as a waitress. Every day she had come home to cook and clean and tidy up after Gina, who had regarded her as unpaid domestic help and had, in addition, taken almost every penny of her meagre wages.

As soon as she was eighteen, Sarah had found other accommodation. She had done her utmost to give Callie a secure and loving home. She had made her sister her number one priority. And Callie had thrived. A golden girl with the long-legged lithe good looks of a Californian blonde. Smart into the bargain, Sarah observed with helpless pride. It hadn’t been easy to keep her lively extrovert sister’s mind on the necessity of studying to get on in the world.

But Sarah had managed it. Callie had passed her A levels and gone on to university to study languages. Sarah had been as proud as any mother could have been. She had taken on another job part-time in the evenings so that Callie wouldn’t be short of money. Everything had been going so well before Damon Terzakis had entered her sister’s life.

‘I’ve met this truly fabulous Greek!’ Callie had gushed down the phone. ‘He’s incredibly handsome and rich and crazy about me...’

‘Sounds too good to be true,’ Sarah had murmured tautly, disconcerted by Callie’s excitement. Callie’s boyfriends normally came and went without Callie enthusing about any of them. A beauty from her early teens, Callie had taken young men very much in her stride.

‘I’ll bring him over to meet you some time soon,’ Callie had promised.

But weeks had passed before Sarah had finally met Damon. He had been twenty-five, boyishly good-looking and full of careless charm. His lustrous brown eyes had helplessly followed Callie’s every move. He had talked to Sarah as though she were Callie’s mother rather than her sister, painstakingly courteous and deferential. By the end of the evening, Sarah had felt like a middle-aged matron of at least fifty.

Damon had gone out of his way to stress that his intentions were serious. Reaching for Callie’s hand, he had said, ‘I love your sister very much and I want to marry her.’

Behind her polite smile, Sarah had ironically been appalled. She had considered Callie far too young to make such a commitment. She had worried that Callie would abandon her studies outright or, at the very least, allow romance to take over to the detriment of her work. But Sarah had been too sensible to allow her feelings to show. One hint of opposition and Callie was likely to rebel. Her sister was headstrong and opinionated. Only tact and diplomacy were likely to win Sarah a hearing.

‘Of course marriage,’ Damon had stated smoothly, ‘it would be in the future.’

Sarah had rewarded him with a beaming smile. ‘I think that’s very sensible,’ she had said. ‘Both of you have all the time in the world.’

‘Don’t talk platitudes,’ Callie had snapped, withdrawing her hand from Damon’s abruptly.

‘But we have already discussed this, Callie mou,’ Damon had protested and, turning his attention back to Sarah, he had added, ‘Our love must be seen to have stood the test of time if I am to have any hope of winning my brother’s consent to our marriage.’

‘Your brother’s consent?’ Sarah had repeated helplessly.

‘Greek families function on the basis of a strict hierarchy,’ Callie had intervened witheringly. ‘At the top of the family pecking order is the dominant male. Damon’s father is dead. His brother, Alexis is the big wheel in the Terzakis tribe.’

Faint colour had darkened Damon’s good-looking features. He had cast Callie a look of surprisingly strong reproof.

‘I don’t think you should take cheap shots at Damon’s big brother,’ Sarah had told her unrepentant sister while she’d prepared supper in their tiny kitchen. ‘Or his family. He was offended—’

‘Stuff!’ Callie had muttered, still angry. ‘He’s a grown man with a responsible job. But when he talks about Alex he acts like a little boy. He never stops talking about him. Alex this...Alex that. You’d think Alex was God in his life.’

‘Damon is Greek,’ Sarah had reminded her gently. ‘His culture, his background and his upbringing are bound to differ greatly from yours. If you really love him, Callie...all that goes with the territory.’

Sarah surfaced from the past and found herself perched on a bench in the park down the road from the hospital. To think that all those months ago she had actually been relieved to hear Damon mentioning the necessity of obtaining his brother’s approval before he could marry!

Alarm bells had only really gone off the day she’d caught the name Terzakis on the evening news and glimpsed a forbiddingly handsome male, surrounded by executives and cameras, refusing to comment on his acquisition of some company in New York. She had bought a serious newspaper the next day on the way into work and she had read all about Alexis Terzakis with growing consternation. That evening she had rung Callie and asked her to come home for a night. Callie had come with bad grace, demanding to know what all the fuss was about.

‘You said that Damon was running his family’s hotel in Oxford,’ Sarah had reminded her. ‘What you didn’t say was that the Terzakis family are billionaires!’

‘Alex is the billionaire,’ Callie had said drily. ‘Damon just gets pocket money.’

‘I thought Damon’s family were hoteliers—’

Callie had burst out laughing. ‘Sarah, you are dumb! Don’t you ever read the business columns? Damon’s family own a shipping line, an international string of hotels, engineering plants, finance companies...you name it, they own it!’

Sarah had been disturbed. She had genuinely had no idea that her sister’s boyfriend was from so wealthy a background. Damon had seemed very unassuming. He had settled that evening into their shabby lounge without a shade of discomfort. She remembered Callie referring to her own job as secretarial and quickly dismissing the subject.

Actually Sarah was a humble filing clerk in a big anonymous office and she had not climbed the ladder any higher because the frequency with which she had held down two jobs had meant that she had no time to spare for evening classes. Sarah had spent countless evenings over the past seven years waitressing or cleaning for extra money to stretch their tight budget.

She had tried not to feel hurt that evening she’d first met Damon when Callie had asked her in advance not to mention those latter sources of income. Callie had been embarrassed by her sister’s acceptance of such low-grade employment. And, sadly, Sarah had understood. Callie had always wanted to be somebody and that vein of insecurity had been stirred when she’d found herself mixing with students from far more comfortable backgrounds than her own. She hadn’t wanted anyone to know that the source of the cheap but fashionable clothes she wore with such panache had been a sister, who regularly cleaned office blocks after closing time.

And now Callie was gone. Sarah raised trembling hands to her face as if she could somehow contain the anguish inside her. She could not imagine life without Callie. Callie with her raw energy, boundless untidiness and quick temper. Callie had been born when Sarah was six. Sarah, a quiet, rather lonely child, had delighted her parents by displaying not the smallest atom of jealousy. She had been enchanted by her baby sister. She had read her stories, picked her up when she fell over, taught her nursery rhymes before she started school and later helped her with her homework. With two parents working full-time, there had been plenty of opportunity for Sarah to fill in the gaps in Callie’s days when their mother was too tired or too busy.

‘Miss Hartwell.’

Sarah lifted her aching head like a sleepwalker and focused on Alex Terzakis in disbelief. He looked alien against the backdrop of the scruffy park.

‘Allow me to offer you a lift home,’ he drawled flatly.

Sarah burst out laughing, hysteria clawing like insanity at her cracking composure. Abruptly she covered her working face again, stricken that he of all people should see her in such a state. Dear lord, what did this barbarian want from her now. Couldn’t he even leave her to grieve in peace?

Only a couple of hours had passed since she had been bundled unceremoniously from her sister’s bedside and the crash team had attempted to get her sister breathing again. It had happened so fast and they had tried so hard. But Callie, once the leading light of her school athletics team, had died of a massive coronary, just days off her nineteenth birthday. Sarah had been shattered but she had been totally devastated by what she’d learnt from the consultant gynaecologist afterwards.

Early in her pregnancy, Callie had been warned that she had a weak heart. Routine testing had revealed what nobody had ever had any cause to suspect. She had been advised to have a termination and she had refused. She had not shared any of that with her sister. Sarah had been surprised by the sheer frequency of Callie’s ante-natal appointments but she had had no idea that there was anything wrong.

‘Callie was one hundred per cent determined to have her baby,’ the consultant had told her wryly. ‘That was her choice. Possibly she didn’t tell you because she was afraid that you might try to change her mind.’

‘Miss Hartwell?’ Alex Terzakis persisted grimly, impatiently.

Please God, make him leave me alone, she prayed feverishly, curving her arms round her churning stomach and involuntarily rocking back and forth on the edge of the bench.

‘I cannot leave you here in this condition,’ he continued, his accent growing more pronounced with every unanswered intervention. ‘I wish to see you safely to your home. I also wish to assume responsibility for the funeral arrangements—’

‘You bloody savage!’ Sarah, who never ever swore, found the word flying off her tongue. A stricken sense of horror had attacked her as he’d spoken. ‘You wouldn’t let her marry into your family but you can’t wait to bury her!’

‘I do not intend to stand here being insulted in a public place,’ he gritted through clenched teeth, and she could feel the force of his suppressed rage licking out at her like hungry flames, desperate for fuel to feed on. It was a curiously satisfying experience, warming her chilled bones.

‘Then you know what to do about it, don’t you?’ Sarah collided with blazing golden eyes set between incredibly luxuriant ebony lashes and felt oddly dizzy for a split-second. She tilted her chin. ‘Get lost.’

‘If you were not a woman...’ he launched at her with raw, splintering aggression. He was white beneath his bronzed skin, his classic bone-structure starkly prominent. He was rigid with fury and frustration.

‘You’d be dead,’ Sarah murmured shakily. ‘If I were a man, I’d have killed you for what you did to Callie in your fancy big office five months ago!’

His brilliant gaze had narrowed to piercing pin-points of light, arrowing over her very small, very slight figure and the huge green eyes dominating her triangular face. ‘On this occasion, I desired only to offer you my assistance at a time of severe trial to us all.’

He strode off. Incredibly good carriage, she noted abstractedly, and then it hit her finally. Callie gone... Callie gone forever. She had not cried a single tear. Her eyes had burned and scorched but remained dry through-out. And now the tears came in a silent tidal wave, streaming down her quivering cheeks in agonised relief. She was so terribly grateful that it hadn’t happened in front of him.

* * *

‘You’ll never guess who just walked in.’ Gina nudged Sarah in the ribs seconds after the short funeral service began, her plump over-made-up face suddenly wreathed with rampant curiosity. ‘It’s them...got to be, hasn’t it? Who else could it be?’

‘Shush,’ Sarah urged, her head downbent as the service opened with a short prayer.

Alex and Damon Terzakis. The combined view of them hit her like a punch in the stomach at the graveside. She went white with outrage, considering their presence a desecration of Callie’s memory. How dared they come here and mourn her sister when between them they had made her sister’s last months a living hell? How dared they! Damon was studying the ground. He was thinner, older than she remembered, both hands clasped tightly before him.

‘Decent of them to come...the way you feel,’ Gina muttered out of the corner of her mouth. She was a large woman in her late forties and an inveterate talker, no matter what the occasion.

People began to leave, shaking her hand. Mostly very young people, Callie’s friends from her schooldays. Nobody from the university, but then Callie had abandoned her studies many months previously and broken all contact with the friends she had made there. Without warning, Gina darted from her side and approached the Terzakis males. Infuriated by her defection, Sarah walked on with the minister and parted from him beside Gina’s car.

Sickened, she stared at the black limousine with its tinted windows and chauffeur standing by on the other side of the churchyard. She hadn’t been able to afford even one funeral car. But then things like that weren’t important, she reminded herself painfully, and she had to conserve what little money she had for her nephew.

‘I’m going to call him Nikos, after Damon’s father,’ Callie had announced months ago, after a scan had revealed the sex of her unborn child. She had wanted to know whether she was carrying a boy or a girl and she had been over the moon when she’d learnt that it was a boy.

‘Damon won’t be able to stay away,’ Callie had forecast almost smugly, patting her swollen stomach. ‘Not from his son.’

Sarah had been amazed at the strength of her sister’s naïve faith in the man who had abandoned her to single parenthood. After all that had happened, she had been unable to comprehend how Callie could still hope, but during her sister’s pregnancy she had been reluctant to deprive her of any belief that bolstered her spirits. She had been dreading the aftermath of the birth when poor Callie would have been faced with reality. She would have waited in vain for a proud father to show up. Damon was a wimp, utterly under big brother’s thumb, and the threat of disinheritance and exile from his beloved family had completely overpowered his much vaunted great love for Callie!

Gina swam back to her, beaming all over her round face, and unlocked the car.

‘Why did you speak to them?’ Sarah whispered painfully.

‘Because you’re being absolutely stupid!’ Gina said bluntly. ‘If you want to keep that baby, be practical. Bite your lip and let them keep you both—’

‘I’d sooner be dead!’ Sarah exclaimed.

‘He’s little Nicky’s dad, isn’t he? Why shouldn’t he pay up?’ Gina demanded. ‘You can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll pay a packet to keep all this out of the newspapers.’

‘Gina—’ Sarah muttered, dismayed but not particularly surprised by the older woman’s calculation.

‘You’ve got to be realistic, love,’ Gina continued, not unkindly. ‘You want little Nicky and I think you’re crazy, but then you always were the maternal type, even as a kid. So keep him and raise him and make them pay through the nose for it!’

‘I don’t want anything from them!’

‘If you don’t take their money, you’ll have to live on benefit,’ Gina pointed out drily. ‘And the social services will pursue Damon.’

‘To Greece?’ A hysterical laugh was lodged like a sob in Sarah’s constricted throat.

‘Well, they wouldn’t have much trouble tracking him down, would they?’

‘I won’t take anything from them,’ Sarah stated tightly. ‘Ever!’

‘Callie would have wanted the very best for her son,’ the older woman said shortly. ‘And I think it’s time you faced the fact that Callie knew damned fine what she was doing when she got pregnant.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Sarah looked at her father’s cousin in shock and reproach.

‘It was no accident in my opinion. Callie wasn’t that careless. She wanted that boy and when things weren’t going as she wanted them to she let herself fall pregnant,’ Gina opined wryly. ‘Women have been using pregnancy to trap men into marriage for centuries, love. Teenage girls are particularly fond of the method. Unfortunately your sister miscalculated.’

‘I disagree.’ Sarah had to struggle to hold her voice level and conceal the depth of her anger on her sister’s behalf. ‘Callie didn’t try to trap Damon. He had already asked her to marry him, bought her an engagement ring—’

‘Talk’s cheap, but where was he when the chips were down? Men!’ Gina said with rich cynicism. ‘He took off for Greece and she never saw him again. He never even answered her letters. Rat! I’d bury the two of them in the back garden with pleasure if it weren’t for little Nicky! Mind you, it would be a sinful waste to do away with rat’s big brother,’ she sighed reflectively. ‘Now, he really is gorgeous. Like Apollo the sun god...’

Unused to Gina making mythological references, Sarah stared at the other woman wide-eyed.

Gina flushed slightly as she drew up in front of her small terraced house. ‘I went on holiday to Greece once and I saw this statue... Forget it, I’m being silly!’

A neighbour had sat with Nicky while they were attending the funeral. Sarah rushed upstairs to see him. He was fast asleep, snug in his wicker basket. She had brought him home from hospital only yesterday. As she looked down at him, just itching to hold him again, her eyes moistened. In her darkest hours of grief, she had learned to thank God for the gift of Callie’s child. She felt needed again and that strengthened her.

Gina was out on the tiny landing. Her plump face was tight. ‘If you take that child on, you’ll never have any life of your own. Didn’t you sacrifice enough for Callie?’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘You’re only twenty-four and you’ve got lonely old maid written all over you!’ Gina looked her over in rueful despair, taking in the tightly restrained silver-blonde hair ruthlessly confined in a French pleat, the complete absence of cosmetics, the conservative navy suit that had seen better days and the sensible flat shoes. ‘Haven’t you ever wanted a man in your life?’

Sarah uttered an embarrassed laugh. She hated it when Gina started on about men as if they were the beginning, the middle and the end of a woman’s existence. She didn’t attract the opposite sex. As a teenager, she had been painfully shy and studious, the class swot. As an adult, she had had neither the time nor the opportunity. Sure there had been men who’d asked her out from time to time at work, and occasionally she had accepted, only to discover that they didn’t want her company, they wanted sex. And that was why they had approached her. She was plain and quiet and they had undoubtedly imagined that she would be so grateful for the attention that she would fall into their bed on the first date with the barest minimum of effort.

She made herself recall her painfully humiliating experience with the boy she had had a crush on at sixteen. He had invited her out to a disco one night and she had been electrified with delight...until she’d heard some of her classmates giggling about it in the ladies’ cloakroom. He had done it for a bet. Every giggle had been a knife in her heart, every cruel word engraved on her memory for life.

‘She looks like an albino.’

‘And she’s got no boobs at all.’

‘You don’t need boobs with an IQ like hers.’

‘Her IQ didn’t warn her that Ashley is setting her up for a bet... She’s too busy following him with those big moony eyes of hers...making a real idiot of herself... I wonder how far she’ll let him go when he gets her on her own?’

‘As if Ashley would fancy her! Can you even imagine it?’ And everybody had laughed themselves into hysterics at the mere idea.

‘Sarah...’

Sarah blinked rapidly and sank back to the present, pale as a ghost. Gina put a hand on her arm and murmured, ‘I’ve asked Alexis and Damon Terzakis back to the house...’

‘You’ve what?’

‘Well, somebody had to do it!’ Gina muttered. ‘You acted as though they weren’t there.’

‘If you let them in, I walk out,’ Sarah swore vehemently.

Slowly Gina shook her head, her troubled gaze clinging dazedly to Sarah’s blazing eyes and rigid facial expression. ‘Sarah, what’s got into you these last months?’ she asked in genuine confusion. ‘I don’t know you like this. It’s as if a stranger has taken possession of you—’

Sarah walked on downstairs. ‘There’s nothing the matter with me, Gina.’

‘You used to be the kindest, most gentle girl. A soft touch, I often thought,’ the older woman admitted uncomfortably. ‘But you’ve been changing ever since Callie told you she was pregnant. I know how much you loved her. I can understand how you feel—’

‘You couldn’t,’ Sarah cut in, woodenly controlled.

‘That boy must want to see little Nicky—’

‘If Damon wants to see Nicky, he’ll need a court order,’ Sarah asserted fiercely. ‘I’ll fight them every step of the way.’

‘But they’re coming to the house!’

‘Let them. I’ll deal with it.’

The bell went one minute later. Gina gave her a pleading glance and then took herself off into the kitchen. Straightening her slight shoulders, Sarah answered the door. Alex Terzakis stood alone on the doorstep. For the first time in her life, Sarah found herself wishing that she were wearing four-inch heels instead of flats. Alex Terzakis towered over her like an apartment block, casting a long, dark shadow.

She took a hasty step back. ‘I didn’t invite you here. You’re not welcome.’

A powerful hand suddenly slammed up against the front door, forcing it out of her loose grasp and flattening it with a crash back against the hall table. The violence of the gesture shook her and instinctively she backed away out of reach. He strode in and closed the door behind him.

‘Now we will talk,’ he announced, exuding perceptible vibrations of all-male satisfaction.

She had very nearly given him a black eye, she noted with grim amusement, scanning the faint bruise adorning one high cheekbone. Pity she hadn’t had sufficient height to do so! Her heart was thudding a frantic drumbeat behind her ribcage. She felt charged with a sensation disturbingly akin to excitement. The tension in the atmosphere was so thick she could taste it.

Since she was not physically capable of ejecting him from the house, she chose to walk into the lounge ahead of him. ‘Frankly, Mr. Terzakis, we have nothing to discuss. Where’s little rat?’

‘Little rat?’ He scrutinised her with narrowed eyes.

‘Baby brother, the wimp,’ Sarah specified with lancing contempt.

‘You are the most poisonous woman I have ever met. Would that I had the curbing of that spiteful tongue!’ Alex swore in a vicious hiss, one lean hand visibly coiling into a fist.

Sarah laughed for the first time in days, really laughed. Callie had told her a lot about Alexis Terzakis, relaying it in gossip style over the phone in the early days of her romance with Damon. And she was realising that Damon’s awed view of his big brother was fatally flawed. Alex was Mr Ice-cool himself in business and in his private life—according to Damon, that was. So why was it that around her he seethed like a volcano ready to erupt?

‘Cristos... On the day of the funeral,’ he growled at her from a distance of ten feet. He didn’t trust himself any closer. She understood that. ‘Have you no decent feelings?’

‘About as many as you had when you called my sister a cheap little scrubber to my face five months ago!’ Sarah shot back tight-mouthed.

‘I did not employ such offensive terminology—’

‘You said she was after his money and she slept around... Tell me the difference?’ Sarah invited with only the slightest tremor in her voice.

‘I did not believe she was pregnant,’ Alex breathed curtly through perfect white teeth. It was obvious that the admission was wrenched from him.

‘I want you to get out,’ Sarah told him shakily. ‘You have no business in this house.’

He sent her a glittering black glance of startling ferocity and strode over to the window. ‘My brother is too ashamed to face you...’ he gritted in a driven undertone.

In a weird way, Sarah was beginning to enjoy herself. If the previous admission of faulty judgement had been wrenched from him, the latter had been ripped screaming from Alex Terzakis. Little brother was a wimp. And that offended and humiliated big brother no end! Family honour and all that macho nonsense. Alex was being forced to deal with a woman he despised in a situation in which he had no defence, she registered with increasing confidence. He was here to buy silence.

To buy her silence. Maybe he was scared she would talk to the newspapers. He was a very private man, this Greek tycoon with his barbaric arrogance and pride. He detested publicity. And it wasn’t a nice story, was it? A teenager led up the garden path by a rich, spoilt young playboy and then dumped at spectacular speed once he had had what he had wanted from her. Then that same teenager had been threatened by powerful lawyers, offered hush-money and told to get lost and forget she had ever known anyone with the name of Terzakis!

Sarah’s stomach filled with nausea. It was a horrible story but it only became tragedy if you knew that Callie had loved him right to the bitter end. Tears burned her lowered eyelids and she fought them back bitterly.

‘If by any means within his power Damon could restore her to life, he would.’ She clashed with hard, dark eyes as treacherous as black ice and briefly felt as though she had gone into a skid. The speed with which he had damped down his fury and reasserted rigorous self-discipline sharply disconcerted her. ‘But he cannot. However, he can take charge of his son and give him the life to which he should have been born by right.’

Sarah froze. Her throat closed over. Her long lashes fluttered as she simply stared at Alex Terzakis in disbelief. ‘Give h-him the life...?’ she stammered in a daze, thrown wildly off balance by the statement. ‘What did you say?’

Reading her astonishment, he smiled—he actually smiled. The merest twist of that sensual, perfectly shaped mouth but no less than a smile. ‘Naturally, Damon wishes to raise his child in his own home where he belongs.’




CHAPTER TWO


SARAH took several shocked seconds to absorb her incredulity. The Terzakis clan wanted Nicky! They wanted Callie’s child! It was a staggering suggestion and she couldn’t credit that Alex Terzakis could be serious.

Alex took her silence as encouragement. He studied her as a cat studied a mouse, calculation written all over him. ‘Damon adores children. Nikos would be greatly loved.’

‘I really...I really don’t believe I’m hearing this,’ Sarah admitted tremulously. ‘You wouldn’t let your brother marry her and yet you think he has the right to take her child? He cut her off, ignored her letters, allowed you to humiliate her and let her go through a very difficult pregnancy without any support...and you come here and you tell me that he wants her baby?’ As she spoke, her shaken voice strengthened with growing anger.

‘Whatever you feel for my brother, he is the father of your sister’s child,’ Alex delivered harshly, surprisingly silent and taut in receipt of her condemnation.

‘I can’t believe that you accept that—’

‘Damon inherited a rare blood group from my mother’s side of the family. I understand that Nikos also shares that blood group,’ he volunteered smoothly, seemingly unaware of the gross offence he was offering by admitting that he had taken up all the evidence available before conceding that Nicky was his brother’s child. ‘The chances of that occurring by coincidence are several million to one.’

‘And you’re probably still checking those out!’ Sarah slung at him in disgust.

‘I am not prepared to be drawn into argument with you, Miss Hartwell.’ He angled his gleaming dark head high and surveyed her with innate superiority and unhidden contempt. ‘I am only here for the child’s sake as negotiator on my brother’s behalf.’

‘Negotiator?’ Sarah echoed, trying and failing to swallow back her increasing distress.

‘Conciliator?’ he suggested with black velvet cool. ‘The past cannot be changed. We must consider my nephew’s future—’

‘Nicky’s f-future is with me!’ Sarah told him, but she was badly shaken by an offer she had never envisaged being made.

‘No doubt you think to drive the price up with this pretence of attachment to the child of a father you de-spise—’

‘The price?’ she whispered.

‘Any price...name it and it is yours,’ Alex Terzakis murmured softly, seductively, like a dope dealer dangling death before an addict.

Sarah was so appalled by his estimation of her character that she said nothing.

‘You hand over Nikos quietly, discreetly, keep your mouth shut and in return...in return,’ he repeated with golden eyes so intent on her that his gaze felt like a physical touch, ‘I will give you whatever you want. Think of that. You have had a hard life. What age are you? Thirty, thirty-one?’

Mesmerised, Sarah stared back at him, her trembling hands curving convulsively round a wooden chair-back. Thirty, thirty-one? Dear heaven, did she look that old?

‘You could do something with yourself,’ Alex Terzakis pointed out lazily. ‘It’s not too late. Money can buy beauty. With concentrated effort and professional advice, you could be quite attractive—’

‘You don’t say.’ Sarah could hardly get out the response. Although she had few illusions about her looks, any she might have had were being insensitively ripped to shreds.

‘The world could be your oyster. You could travel. You’re a clever woman. You could probably find yourself a husband.’

Sarah shuddered as she breathed in deep. Desperate for a man...embittered by her lack of one. Clearly that was how Alex Terzakis saw her. With rigorous determination she suppressed a squirming sense of utter humiliation. He was Greek to the backbone. What Callie called ‘unreconstructed man’, what Sarah called a Neanderthal primitive. He belonged in a cave, not a civilised society. Or in a museum alongside the dinosaur display.

Even in the depths of the mortification she was struggling to conceal from him she was conscious of a helpless current of grotesque fascination. On the surface, he was so sophisticated...but underneath as earthy and as simplistic in his beliefs about the needs of a woman as any uneducated peasant. He was telling her politely that what she really needed was a man in her bed... Dear lord, even the dinosaur display would be too advanced for him! It would never occur to him that celibacy was a perfectly natural choice for many people.

Then how could it occur to him? Alex Terzakis had not one but two mistresses. One in Athens, one in Paris. Sarah swallowed back her distaste, repelled by such rampant and unashamed promiscuity. Evidently his sexual appetite was voracious and uncontrolled. In today’s society, Alex Terzakis was a prehistoric savage, more to be pitied than anything else, she told herself, raising her chin. That she should have allowed such a barbarian to hurt and embarrass her was ridiculous!

‘Nicky is not for sale,’ Sarah said very drily, but her cheeks warmed as she dimly questioned her surprisingly intimate thoughts over the past few minutes.

‘I did not suggest that he was but I hardly think that you would wish to tie yourself down with a young and demanding child when you could make a new life for yourself.’

‘But I don’t want a new life. I am perfectly happy with the one that I have.’

His striking bone-structure tightened, hooded dark eyes resting on her without any perceptible emotion at all. ‘Then you force me to be blunt—’

‘Oh, I don’t think you need forcing,’ Sarah opined, sweetly sarcastic as she raked him with unhidden derision. ‘I would say that being blunt comes very naturally to you. The challenge would be sensitivity.’

‘You are a woman of discernment.’ Instead of reacting with the anger she had expected, Alex cast her a glittering threat of a smile. ‘Although I strive hard to pity you for your lack of femininity, your shrewish tongue and your unashamed malice, I do indeed find it a quite extraordinary challenge.’

Sarah turned crimson and then white in speedy succession. Her loathing for him was magnified into a murderous heat. Her teeth sank into the soft underside of her lower lip and she tasted the sweet tang of her own blood when what she most wanted was his.

‘Let us waste no further time. You are telling me that you wish to deprive Nikos of his natural heritage and his father out of spite,’ he asserted, icily contemptuous. ‘In opposition, what do you offer? A hovel for him to live in! The tag of illegitimacy to carry throughout his life! And the guardianship of a woman who is not of good character. Had you had any decency, you would not have encouraged your teenage sister to continue her relationship with my brother—’

Sarah was trembling with fury. ‘What control did you have over your wretched brother?’

‘I was not aware of their affair until it was too late. You knew from the beginning,’ Alex condemned. ‘You played your own part in your sister’s premature death—’

‘God forgive you!’ Sarah was stricken to the heart by the charge.

‘And, not content with that tragedy, you now seek to destroy my nephew’s future. I will not allow you to do it. He belongs with my family. We can give him everything,’ he stressed with harsh emphasis. ‘An extended family of supportive relatives, quite apart from a loving mother and father of his own...’

Sarah tensed, her fine brows drawing together.

‘The finest schools, a beautiful home, the ability to hold his head high wherever he is and in whatever company. He is a Terzakis.’ And to be a Terzakis was evidently the very zenith of anyone’s worldly ambition, she translated. She was facing a male fired by a powerful pride in his own blue-blooded, monied heritage. He could probably quote his family tree accurately back at least several generations. Little wonder, she thought, bitterly resentful, that Callie Hartwell, daughter of a factory supervisor and a nurse, had been less than nothing to him. No fancy pedigree there, just good working-class breeding.

Her reflections turned back to something that had puzzled her seconds earlier. She must have misheard him. He could not have said ‘a loving mother’. He could not have said that.

‘Androula would love him as her own. There is neither bitterness nor room for malice in her generous heart. She has had many months to adjust to the knowledge that another woman was carrying her husband’s child...’

Sarah was paralysed. Androula...her husband’s child? Dear God, Damon had got married to another woman while her poor sister had been pathetically pinning her hopes to an eventual reconciliation! He had actually got married! She was sick to the stomach, barely able to move on a stage to the even more staggering assertion that Callie’s no doubt triumphant rival was now most generously prepared to play mother to Damon’s illegitimate child...

‘Let me g-get this straight.’ Sarah formed the plea with an intonation wiped clean of emotion by extreme shock. ‘You are asking me to hand over Nicky to Damon and...and this And...’

‘Androula,’ he filled in obligingly.

‘Damon’s wife,’ she repeated, just to be sure that she could not have misunderstood.

‘She is a gentle, loving young woman,’ Alex emphasised with unconcealed pride in his freedom to make such a claim.

Not a little scrubber like Callie, Sarah interpreted in a passion of pain. She had not misunderstood. She was so appalled by what he was daring to suggest that only the fiercest discipline kept her nausea under control. That this savage did not even appreciate that he was contravening Sarah’s every moral principle underscored how very sick the Terzakis clan was in terms of basic decency.

Dear heaven, had Callie lived, would they have approached her to demand her child from her? Would Alex Terzakis have accused Callie of spitefully denying her son the wealth and material advantages which Damon alone could supply? Very probably. This was a male who had treated Callie like dirt from the outset, who had never for a single second even considered the possibility that she might be fit to marry his kid brother...no matter that she was already pregnant with his child. Self-evidently, Alex Terzakis did not even allow for the fact that such a low-class, common person as Sarah Hartwell could even have finer feelings!

Callie would have died sooner than hand over her son to Damon’s wife. The acrid taste of bile in her dry mouth, Sarah walked over to the phone. ‘If you don’t get out of this house right now, I intend to call the police,’ she told him unsteadily. ‘After all, you did force your way in.’

‘Is this all you have to say to me?’ Alex raked at her incredulously. ‘Are you completely without shame? I tell you of Androula’s generosity—’

‘Generosity—th-that’s a good one!’ Sarah lifted the receiver, fully prepared to carry out her threat. ‘What you have just dared to suggest is so frankly obscene it does not require any further discussion, Mr Terzakis. It is the sickest, most vile proposition I have ever heard.’

‘Obscene?’ He made it sound like a strange word.

Reluctantly, Sarah forced herself to look at him. Perceptibly she shuddered as she clashed with black ice eyes of enquiry. ‘Get out!’ she told him ferociously.

‘I have no intention of departing before we reach agreement.’ Rock-like resolution emanated from him in teeth-clenchingly arrogant waves.

‘If you don’t get out,’ Sarah swore between clenched teeth, abandoning the phone to employ a far more realistic form of intimidation, ‘I’ll approach the dirtiest tabloid available and tell all...’

Absolute outrage paralysed him. Violence shimmered rawly in his brilliant golden stare. ‘You would do that to Androula?’ he prompted very, very quietly.

A shiver ran down her taut backbone but she stood tall in spite of it. ‘I don’t give that—’ she snapped her fingers with a sharp crack ‘—for your precious, saintly Androula!’

‘Were you of my sex, I would break every bone in your vindictive body...slowly,’ he told her wrathfully.

‘You’d get your fingers burnt,’ she derided. ‘You can’t touch me and you know you can’t—that’s what’s making you so angry. If either you or your brother approaches me again, I go to the Press. Damon could have had his child, Mr Terzakis. He had his chance and he blew it. My sister gave her life to bring Nicky into the world. That’s how precious he was to her and that’s how precious he is to me!’

‘You have no right to keep Nikos!’

‘Watch me...or fight me in court...where all will be revealed,’ she reminded him with satisfaction, now that she had established his Achilles’ heel. He was too proud to face the washing of the Terzakis dirty linen in public. ‘Damon and his wife will never ever take possession of Callie’s child. Accept that and stay out of our lives.’

He was white beneath his sun-bronzed skin, white with savage anger that he was visibly fighting to rein back. ‘This, then, is your revenge—’

‘It is not one atom of what I would like to do to you and your family,’ Sarah admitted, powered by a surge of helpless aggression. ‘Damon was a wimp but you are the one who destroyed my sister’s life. Why? Because she wasn’t good enough...she didn’t meet your snobbish standards and she was poor—’

‘I am innocent of such prejudice!’ he slashed back at her. ‘And to use an infant as a weapon of revenge is the true obscenity!’

‘Do you know what real revenge would be?’ Harshly she laughed, acknowledging that he was unhappily out of her reach. ‘It would be making you suffer for what you did to Callie. It’s your fault that Nicky is illegitimate, nobody else’s,’ she spelt out. ‘Your filthy family pride came before honour and decency. When you said I was not of good character, I should have laughed in your face!’

‘Cristos...’ With the charged and splintering aura of a wild animal at bay, Alex Terzakis shot a guttural stream of Greek at her, spreading both hands wide in a raking arc of dark, smouldering rage.

‘You daring to say that to me,’ Sarah continued, pressing on with the fearlessness of outrage. ‘You with your women you have to pay to have sex with you! You with your ignorant, chauvinist double standards and sickening hypocrisy! Lay one finger on me, Mr Terzakis, and I will see you in prison with pleasure!’

‘Some day...some incredibly lucky man will beat you stupid and teach you respect!’ Alex Terzakis swore with two clenched fists.

Sarah was on a high of quite extraordinary energy. The sight of him standing there, seethingly frustrated by a desire to kill her just to shut her up, boosted her adrenalin with amazing efficiency. ‘Do you want to know what you really deserve?’ she asked with saccharine sweetness, venom dripping from every syllable. ‘A wife who would make your life a living hell—a real bitch!’

‘Like you?’ He vented a cruelly amused laugh, raking her with merciless derision.

‘I wouldn’t touch you with a barge-pole!’ Sarah’s face was hectically flushed. ‘You are the most utterly repellent man I have ever met,’ she said with impressive conviction. ‘I may not rejoice in much in the way of physical beauty—’ she flung her head high as she made the admission in a small, tight voice ‘—but my standards are very high, unlike yours.’

He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Still as the Greek statue Gina had fancifully compared him to, Alex Terzakis was studying her with almost compulsive intensity. ‘No woman has ever found me...repellent.’ He could hardly get the word past his compressed lips, he was so outraged by the label.

‘Money obviously talks.’ Sarah cast wide the lounge door in an open invitation for his departure. For a split-second, she really thought he was going to take a fighting chance at landing himself in a prison cell. He was possessed by the force of his own fury. He smouldered, he vibrated, he emanated violent rage into an atmosphere that positively sizzled, ready to burst into open flames. And all in silence. She discovered that she couldn’t take her eyes off him either. Involuntarily she was mesmerised by the sheer passion of so volatile a temperament.

Unexpectedly, he strode past her. And then she realised why. Gina was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, eyes out on stalks, too shaken by what she had heard even to pretend not to have been eavesdropping.

‘You will hear from our lawyers.’ The announcement was hissed over one broad, set shoulder halfway out of the front door.

‘One visit, one attempt at intimidation, one even mildly threatening letter and I’ll sing like a canary for the Press,’ Sarah slung before she slammed the door in his wake.

Gina was gaping at her with a dropped jaw. The silence seemed to go on forever.

‘I doubt if he will bother us again,’ Sarah finally muttered stiffly, wondering just how much the older woman had contrived to overhear.

Slowly Gina shook her head, still staring. ‘I just can’t believe what I’ve been listening to...that that was you baiting him, taunting him...’

‘I handed him a few home truths. That’s all. And Mr Ice-cool he’s not,’ Sarah could not resist savouring. ‘I bet every woman he meets fawns on him, feeds his ego...’

‘Is that why you felt you had to tell him that he was repellent,’ Gina enquired not quite steadily, ‘and that he had to pay for sex?’

‘I wanted to hit him where it hurt.’ But Sarah couldn’t meet Gina’s gaze. In retrospect, she was ashamed that she had revealed her knowledge of his sex-life but she was not remotely ashamed that she had accidentally stumbled on the brand of attack he found hardest to tolerate.

‘I don’t believe he has to pay for sex...he’s breathtakingly handsome...and you’re saying that he consorts with hookers?’ Gina probed with rampant curiosity.

‘He keeps two mistresses. If he keeps them, he’s paying for his pleasure—’

‘That’s not the same thing at all!’

‘Why are you defending him?’

Gina groaned. ‘Sarah, he is not responsible for Callie’s death. Nobody is responsible for that. You’re becoming obsessed. You’re hurting, yes,’ she conceded, ‘but you are taking this all too personally—’

‘Losing Callie w-was very personal.’ A shuddering sob suddenly trembled through Sarah’s slight frame.

Gina put her arms round her in an awkward hug. ‘But you have to think of Nicky, love...’

‘Are you telling me that you think I should hand him over to Damon and his wife?’ Sarah asked sickly.

‘If his wife is willing and it’s not just a front to keep Damon sweet...but then, how could you ever know whether it is or not? Don’t look so betrayed,’ Gina pleaded, her round face uncertain and engraved with lines of strain. ‘I’m all mixed up too. I really don’t know what to think any more. But the one thing I do feel is that Nicky’s welfare ought to come first, and with the best will in the world...how can you match a tenth of what they can give him?’

‘Money’s not everything,’ Sarah protested, distressed by Gina’s candour and pierced on her weakest flank by the grudging acknowledgement that Nicky did have the right to a share of the Terzakis wealth...but surely not at the expense of grossly offending against Callie’s memory? However, Gina was right... Ultimately, Nicky’s needs and future happiness had to be considered first and her own bitter feelings, painful as they were, must not be allowed to colour her response to an offer of a loving, caring home from the other side of Nicky’s family.

But, dear lord, Alex Terzakis had accused her of using Nicky as a weapon of revenge when nothing could be further from the truth! If Damon and his wife genuinely wished to bring Nicky up as their child, let them come and make that offer personally, let them demonstrate their sincerity and their whole-hearted desire to take him into their family... It was not Alex’s job to do their talking for them! And then Sarah might well be forced to think again of what was best for Nicky. In the meantime, Nicky was not some kind of parcel to be posted off into the unknown. Dear God, she loved him!

‘He’s a tiny little baby and I reckon you’re going to find him a far heavier burden than you ever found Callie,’ Gina sighed. ‘You’ll have to live here with me. There is no other way.’

* * *

The following week was a period of turmoil for Sarah. Nicky was adorable but he didn’t sleep very much. He didn’t want to eat every four hours either; he wanted to eat constantly. Gina had never had anything to do with babies. She tried to help, but Sarah relied heavily and slavishly on every word of advice advanced by the health visitor. At the same time, she was still struggling to adjust to the reality that Callie really was gone.

The phone rang and she expected it to be Callie. She saw someone with long blonde hair in the street and was jolted. She visited her sister’s grave three times in an anguished attempt to teach herself acceptance, but what made her alternately sob and rage most was the anger. And the anger was what she was least equipped to deal with.

Only with Alex Terzakis had she been able to let the anger out. She found that she couldn’t open up with Gina. Presumably her hatred for Damon’s brother allowed her to vent her true emotions freely, and that was good, not peculiar, good, she told herself repeatedly. And he had been a most satisfying target.

One week later to the day, Alex turned up again without warning. Gina was out. It was about eight in the evening. Sarah had just got out of her bath and she was on the way to bed, having decided that the only sensible way to manage was to sleep when Nicky condescended to sleep. When the bell went, she groaned, reckoning it was yet another of Gina’s friends, who frequently came round to gossip at night over a long gin and tonic.

But it was Alex Terzakis. Sarah was appalled. One slim hand grabbed at the loose neckline of her faded floral robe, the other frantically attempting to tighten the sash. She was immediately conscious that she was naked beneath the thin fabric, and that both embarrassed and infuriated her. ‘What do you want now?’ she muttered shakily.

He stepped gracefully past her. ‘Five minutes of your time.’

‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ll get dressed,’ she enunciated frigidly.

Coming through the door, he hadn’t even looked at her. Now he did. Golden eyes wandered a most unwelcome path over her in the dim hall light. ‘Why bother?’ he drawled flatly. ‘It wouldn’t bother me if you were stark naked.’

Crimson ran up in a river of colour to her hairline. Her mouth closed tightly. She stalked past him and settled herself down on the sofa without any ceremony. The towel wrapped turban-style round her small head began to fall and with a jerky hand she trailed it off and threw it aside.

A cascade of silver-blonde hair fell in a silky tangle of disarray almost to her waist. He stopped dead in his tracks and dealt her an arrested glance. Sarah searched his suddenly narrowed golden gaze blankly and then looked over her shoulder to see what had attracted his attention. Gina’s floral wallpaper covered by blooms the size of dinner-plates? The cuckoo clock?

She turned back to him irritably. For some reason, he still looked riveted and he very narrowly missed tripping over one of the tiny wine-tables which cluttered the room. He snaked out a speedy hand and restored the rocking article, his perfectly shaped mouth twisting with annoyance.

‘May I sit down?’ He surveyed her expectantly.

‘Suit yourself.’

‘You could offer me a drink,’ he suggested drily.

‘You are not a welcome guest, Mr Terzakis.’

Under her stunned scrutiny, he strolled over to the tray of alcoholic beverages on the sideboard, located the whisky, selected a glass and helped himself. ‘I should warn you that I find it impossible to be even slightly courteous in your vicinity.’

Sarah took refuge in silence but her nerves were singing like a soldier’s on the brink of a battlefield.

He sank down with indolent grace into an armchair opposite and regarded her with utterly unreadable black ice eyes fringed by ridiculously long, luxuriant lashes. ‘Last week, I made several miscalculations,’ he murmured smoothly. ‘It is obvious that you have no intention of giving up Nikos—’

‘Nicky,’ Sarah slotted in shortly.

‘Nicky—how cute.’

But he was saying it, she noted with rich satisfaction.

‘No intention of giving him up...am I correct?’

‘Very rarely, but on this occasion, yes.’ But was that quite true? Sarah had tossed in her bed over several nights, questioning whether she was doing the right thing in utterly rejecting the proposal he had made for Nicky’s future. In material terms certainly the Terzakis family had a great deal to offer Nicky, and the further suggestion of two parents... But then, it was the potential parents that worried Sarah the most.

‘It was perhaps...tactless,’ he selected softly, ‘of me to suggest that my brother and his wife assume responsibility for him.’

Sarah was not acquainted with him in this mood. She frowned. He was purring like a sensuous cat and toeing the line, a line she had frankly not expected him to abandon so easily. ‘Not tactless,’ she said. ‘Brutally insensitive.’

‘The child’s future could be secured in another way,’ Alex proffered. ‘I could adopt him and bring him up as my son.’

Sarah was thrown by the proposal, tossed casually at her without the smallest of preliminaries. The tip of her tongue snaked out to moisten her dry lips. His darkened eyes suddenly flamed into gold, his attention dropping to the surprisingly voluptuous curve of her lower lip and lingering. Faint colour threw his hard cheekbones into prominence. He tautened, shifting slightly in the chair, a tiny muscle pulling tight at the corner of his unsmiling mouth.

There was a thrumming tension in the air. She didn’t know where it had come from but it unsettled her, brought her skin out in goose-flesh. She stiffened, and watched that so expressive mouth of his suddenly slide into the faintest of smiles. It was there and then it was gone as though she had imagined it, leaving her scrutinising him with uneasy suspicion of she knew not what.

What was the matter with him? Had he been drinking? Perhaps that was why he had to help himself to whisky—dire need rather than simple ignorant bad manners. He had nearly fallen, she reminded herself. In addition, he couldn’t seem to hold his concentration.

And he wasn’t the only one, she registered, although she could scarcely be blamed for losing focus on the conversation when he was behaving so oddly. As for his proposal that he adopt Nicky! Barely worth the breath required to answer. No...no...no.

‘You would hand Nicky over to your brother. That’s what you would do.’ She spoke her thoughts out loud.

‘I am a man of my word, a man of honour.’ Night-dark eyes rested on her again. ‘But then I doubt that you believe that. Yet it is imperative that—er—Nicky should be accepted as a Terzakis.’

‘Imperative to whom?’ Sarah demanded.

‘Do you really think that one day that child will be grateful to you for denying him his rightful place in society?’

Sarah paled, bent her head, assailed all over again by doubt and uncertainty which she was determined not to show him.

‘Your determination to deny my nephew what my family could give him is wholly selfish,’ he derided harshly.

Taut and strained, Sarah studied the carpet at her feet. Was it selfish? She was greatly disturbed by the accusation. Didn’t he see that from her side of the fence the Terzakis men were a particularly abhorrent yardstick by which to measure the rest of his family? Damon: weak, cruel and uncaring, as revealed by his treatment of her sister. Alex: ruthless, arrogant and equally cruel and uncaring of those less fortunately placed in the world. She did not seek to retain custody of her nephew out of revenge and respect for Callie’s memory alone. No, indeed...

A child needed more than wealth and status to thrive. A child needed time, understanding and love to grow into a responsible adult. Was it even reasonably possible that Nicky would find those needs fully met by the Terzakis family? Sarah thought not, but she desperately wished she had a crystal ball to see into the future because she was frightened by the fear that she could be making the wrong decision on Nicky’s behalf. And if that was true, she would never forgive herself...and Nicky might never forgive her either, she reflected painfully.

She cleared her throat and lifted her head, sure on one point. ‘I wouldn’t trust you with Nicky. He’s a helpless little baby and you’re a self-centred workaholic shark who would probably dump him in the full-time care of a nanny—’

The long fingers of one lean brown hand flexed. ‘Your insolence astounds me,’ he admitted in a roughened undertone.

Ironically, Sarah had merely been honest. For once she had not sought to offend deliberately. She had simply been truthful. ‘And what would happen when you married?’ she continued doggedly. ‘Nicky would get a stepmother who would very probably resent him and favour her own children over him.’

‘By what right do you dare to pass an opinion on my character?’ he demanded, springing upright with the restive energy of a prowling tiger.

Sarah tensed. One word of criticism and he was on the brink of explosion. ‘And then,’ she added helplessly, ‘there’s your temper—’

‘My temper?’ he repeated with a stark flash of grinding white teeth.

‘You appear to have little control over it,’ she murmured. ‘Children can be very trying. They can test your patience to the utmost.’

‘You know nothing of my temper!’ he intoned, incensed. ‘I am a very disciplined man.’

Sarah elevated a brow. ‘Oh, I expect you’re an absolute pussycat as long as everybody around you is bowing and scraping and you’re getting your own way.’ She rose to her feet, hoping he was on his way out. ‘What you cannot handle is opposition from a mere female...’

A pin-dropping silence stretched. Hooded dark eyes regarded her almost slumbrously. ‘I could handle you with one hand tied behind my back...but you wouldn’t like my methods.’

For some reason the full onslaught of that disturbingly intent dark stare made her breath catch in her throat. Something deep in the pit of her stomach tightened almost painfully. Her breasts felt curiously heavy. Time seemed to have slowed down. And then he turned his head away, tautening, and strode over to the door.

‘Nikos is crying,’ he informed her flatly, as though that in itself were an offence.

‘Nikos?’ Blinking in confusion, Sarah had to dredge herself out of the strange spell she had fallen under for a few dismaying seconds. Involuntarily she shook her head. It was tiredness, stress. Little wonder she was feeling odd.

With a stifled sound of raw impatience at the slowness of her response, Alex strode out of the room and up the stairs, but he hung back for a split-second to breathe in a tone of forbidding censure, ‘A baby should never be left to cry.’




CHAPTER THREE


ALEX had already lifted Nicky by the time Sarah reached the bedroom. Her nephew was howling at the top of his lungs, his adorable little face scarlet with misery. Sarah’s heart clenched at the mere sight of him. He looked so pathetic.

‘Let me take him,’ she said, reaching out instinctively for him, eager to proffer all the comfort that any baby could possibly require.

Alex cast her a coldly amused glance. ‘I do know what to do with a baby. How often do you leave him to cry?’

Fury coursed through her. ‘I never leave him to cry!’

‘In my home, he would have instant attention every hour of the day,’ he informed her.

Sarah’s teeth ground together. ‘If you put him down, I’ll go and heat his bottle.’

‘I will remain here with Nikos until you return.’

That totally bloody man! Sarah banged about the kitchen, furious that Alex Terzakis was actually holding Callie’s child in his arms! She refused to recognise the bond of blood between them. Neither brother had any right to such an acknowledgment, she told herself.

All of a sudden she was reliving the past again, hugging her bitterness to her like a warm blanket to ward off the freezing chill of Alex’s presence in the house.

Seven months ago, Damon had gone over to Greece on business. He had known then that Callie was pregnant, had, according to Callie, been absolutely delighted at the news. Callie had naturally suggested that surely it was time for Damon to introduce her to his brother. With that whopping engagement ring on her finger and Damon’s child on the way, hadn’t Callie had every excuse to have expectations of a quick marriage?

Damon had promised to speak to his brother while he was at home. He had returned, pale and hunted-looking, shorn of his usual insouciance. Alex was immovable, he had told Callie. Alex was not even prepared to meet her. Only then had Callie informed Sarah that she was pregnant. She had dragged Damon with her to make that announcement and Sarah had endured an evening of hideous embarrassment.

No doubt she had been terribly naïve but she had not realised before that evening that Callie and Damon were sleeping together. In the same way she had not known that Callie was actually living with Damon in the apartment he had taken in Oxford. Callie had concealed that fact from her, passing off her change of address and phone number as a move to a cheaper flat with other girls.

‘I am not in a position to marry Callie at this moment in time,’ Damon had informed her stiffly.

‘Alex is threatening to cut him off without a penny! Have you ever heard of such melodrama in this day and age?’ Callie had demanded hotly.

Damon had not been able to meet Sarah’s questioning gaze. Finally, when he could no longer bear the silence, he had said almost pleadingly, ‘I cannot defy my brother...at least, not at present.’

And Sarah’s heart had sunk. It had been an excuse and not a good enough one in the circumstances. Callie had become hysterical. Sarah suspected that somehow her kid sister had expected her to be able to wave a magic wand and make everything fine again. But the reality had been that Damon was a grown man. If he did not have the courage to stand up to his tyrannical brother and forge his own path in life until such time as his family came round to accepting his choice of bride, nobody else could give him that courage.

A week later, Damon had taken off for Greece again with very little warning.

‘Did you know that he was going?’ Sarah had asked her sister worriedly.

‘Don’t worry...he’ll be back. He really wants this baby,’ Callie had asserted doggedly, seemingly unconcerned by the suspicions assailing Sarah.

Sarah had gone over and over Damon’s demeanour that evening in her own mind, wondering if it was wickedly cynical of her to suspect that the young Greek was no longer quite so sure of his feelings for her sister. He had not reiterated his once dramatic assurances that he loved Callie. His strain and the alteration in his behaviour had been pronounced. She had not wanted to worry her sister with her fears.

But a fortnight later a suave lawyer had turned up at Damon’s Oxford apartment and served Callie with a notice of eviction. Callie had run home to Sarah, outraged by what had happened but convinced that the eviction could not possibly have had anything to do with Damon. It was, she’d insisted, a stupid misunderstanding with the landlord. She had refused to return to university. Sarah had pleaded with her but Callie had refused to listen to her.

In despair, Sarah had decided that perhaps it was her duty to confront Alex Terzakis and attempt to reason with him. Callie had asked her to do it but Sarah hadn’t wanted to do it. Only her sister’s unblemished faith in Damon had persuaded her. She had been pleasantly surprised when Alex’s very correctly spoken secretary had come back to her within the hour with his agreement. He would meet them the next time he was in London.

She remembered that day in his office. It had been unforgettable. Now that day he had intimidated her. Right from the first moment she’d laid eyes on him, her stomach had churned. She had gone in good faith to that meeting, angry and defensive on Callie’s behalf, but so foolishly certain that when he met Callie he would realise that his prejudice against her was unreasonable.

But Alex Terzakis had never actually met Callie. He had let the two of them enter his palatial office and had then fixed his attention solely on Sarah. ‘I think that you and I should talk alone, Miss Hartwell.’

A chill ran over her flesh, remembering that instant. He had been so very clever about it. She had not realised that the room he smoothly showed Callie into was about to be invaded by two nasty lawyers, set on frightening her sister to death. Divide and conquer. He had deliberately separated her from Callie.

And Sarah had been so stupid; she had been relieved by Callie’s removal from the proceedings, believing that she would be able to talk more freely without her sister’s presence and assuming that Callie would be invited back in once the trickiest part of the confrontation was over.

Alex had lounged back in his imposing chair behind his equally imposing desk and murmured silkily, ‘You have my full attention, Miss Hartwell.’

‘I’m here to ask what you find so objectionable about my sister,’ Sarah had framed tightly. ‘And why you refused even to consider meeting her.’

An ebony brow had elevated, a sardonic smile that was incredibly chilling curving his mouth. ‘That you should even ask that question tells me much. I have no desire to meet your sister. I merely want her out of Damon’s life.’

‘You haven’t answered my question,’ Sarah had persisted.

‘Why should I?’ he had countered with unvarnished insolence. ‘Your sister shared a bed with my brother...that is all.’

‘He asked her to marry him...’

He had shot her a blatant look of ridicule, backed by cold aggression. ‘Pillow-talk...what else? This is not the nineteenth century, Miss Hartwell. Damon is Greek and his blood runs hot. He is also very young—’

‘So is Callie!’ Sarah had gasped in outrage. ‘And she is also pregnant.’

‘I don’t believe that. I don’t think either of you is that stupid,’ he had dismissed without hesitation.

‘Callie is expecting your brother’s child—’

‘I cannot see where you imagine this claim could possibly lead,’ he had interrupted very drily. ‘And I had hoped that you would have the intelligence to know when you are beaten. The bird that lays the golden eggs has flown, Miss Hartwell. He’s back in Greece and he’s staying there. His affair with your sister is finished.’

‘Because you threatened him!’

‘I have never threatened my brother in his life. Damon knows what is expected of him,’ he had asserted grimly, subjecting her to a contemptuous appraisal. ‘And a calculating little bimbo with her eye firmly fixed to his wallet never had any hope of turning Damon from what he knows to be his duty.’

Shocked by his insults, Sarah had burst into speech in defence of her sister’s character and reputation. And Alex Terzakis had thrown back his dark head and laughed scornfully.

‘Your sister, young though she may be, was no virgin. Indeed I understand that she was rather free with her favours long before Damon met her, and not noticeably faithful while he was with her either.’

‘How...dare...you?’ Sarah had leapt to her feet, affronted beyond belief by his attack on Callie’s morals.

‘I’m calling your bluff, Miss Hartwell. If we are to talk of daring, I marvel that you had the impertinence to come here. A word of advice,’ he had purred silkily, indolently amused by her distress. ‘The next time you help your sister to get her claws into a rich Greek, tell her to keep her mouth shut about her previous lovers. Greek men are notoriously backward when it comes to female liberation. They always like to be the first with a woman, or at least to be allowed to pretend they are.’

Dumbstruck by his insolence, she had simply stood there until she’d finally unpeeled her tongue from the roof of her mouth. ‘You foul-mouthed—’

‘And if she wants that wedding-ring, tell her to keep her legs firmly locked together until she gets to the church. Moving in with Damon was her second mistake.’ Glittering golden eyes had dwelt on her shattered face with cruel satisfaction. ‘You can get out now. I’ve said all I want to say.’

Callie had been sitting in tears in the reception area, trembling and equally shaken, clutching a cheque for an enormous sum of money. Sarah had torn it up and thrown it in the bin and it had been hours before she was able to get the full story out of Callie. But one thing Callie had said was, ‘They made me feel dirty, Sarah...they made me feel like a blackmailer!’

That tremulous confession was engraved on Sarah’s soul like an acid burn. Her sister had been faced with two lawyers, who had proceeded to threaten her with nebulous but, to a teenager, terrifying repercussions should she ever feel tempted to talk about Damon to the Press.

Callie might have bounced back relatively fast from that day. Sarah hadn’t. Callie had continued to write to Damon, angry when she got no replies but amazingly not losing hope. ‘I bet my letters are being stopped before he gets them,’ she had decided. ‘I wouldn’t put anything past Alex Terzakis. Just wait until my son is born. It’ll be a different story then. Nothing will keep Damon away from me.’

The loathsome memory of that day lived for Sarah again now. The hatred came back, borne on a seething tidal wave of bitterness. She paused on the threshold of Nicky’s bedroom.

An unexpected scene met her eyes. Alex was reclining on her single bed with her nephew closely cradled against him. He was talking to him in Greek and Nicky was no longer crying. In fact he was making those endearing little snuffling sounds that signified that his attention was being fully engaged. Sarah’s stomach heaved at the deceptive imagery.

Alex looked so human. But his treatment of Callie had been inhuman. And now he wanted her child, simply expected him to be handed over like a parcel. Why? Nicky was also Nikos, with all that that implied. He was a Terzakis. Incredibly, Callie had correctly estimated the worth of her unborn child to the Terzakis family.





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