Книга - The Unfaithful Wife

The Unfaithful Wife
LYNNE GRAHAM


How could he have got it so wrong?For five years Leah’s marriage to the man her father chose has been as cold as the empty bed on her wedding night. But now, finally free from her father’s manipulations, Leah will get Greek tycoon Nik Andreakis to agree to a divorce.Nik never trusted the woman he was blackmailed in to marrying. Believing her to have one final piece of evidence of his dark past, he whisks her away to a gorgeous Greek island in a bid to seduce it from her! But her innocence – in every way – leaves Nik determined to repair his marriage and win back his wife.












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.




The Unfaithful Wife

Lynne Graham





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




CHAPTER ONE


WITH A FLEETING glance over her shoulder, Leah hurried down the steps and into the wine bar. It was dark and crowded with lunchtime drinkers. She couldn’t see Paul. She wasn’t tall enough to see past the clumps of business-suited men standing around. A nervous tremor shot through her as she burrowed through the male clusters. She was so terrified of being seen, recognised. It was a relief to espy Paul’s golden head in a far corner.

He stood up as she approached, tall, sophisticated and very attractive, and her heart swelled with pride. ‘You’re late,’ he complained.

‘Sorry, I couldn’t get away.’ Short of breath, Leah dropped down on to a seat and couldn’t help spinning another glance around in fearful search of a familiar face.

‘Stop that. You’re on the wrong side of town to be seen.’

Leah bent her silver-blonde head, her face flushed and taut. ‘That man in the corner is staring at me!’

‘Most men stare at beautiful women...and you are exquisitely beautiful, my love,’ Paul murmured in a low, intimate tone, reaching for her slender-boned hand. ‘It gives me a real kick watching every male head turn when you walk by.’

‘Does it?’ Still unaccustomed to his compliments, Leah looked up at him with a shy uncertainty that was oddly at variance with her designer suit. Her flawless face between the wings of her sleekly swept up silver-blonde hair was rapt, her sapphire-blue eyes bright as the jewels in her ears.

‘Why don’t we go back to my apartment?’ Paul ran a finger along her full lower lip and smiled smoothly as her skin heated.

Leah stiffened. ‘I can’t...not yet; you know how I feel,’ she muttered in a stifled voice. Fear sprung up inside her as his handsome face turned hard and cold.

‘And you know how I feel, Mrs Andreakis. Bloody frustrated, if you must know!’

Leah went white. ‘Paul, please...’

‘For all I know, you’re just playing a little game with me while your husband’s out of town.’

Pain and distress filled her eyes. ‘I love you...’

‘Then when are you going to tell him you want a divorce?’ Paul demanded.

If possible, Leah went even paler, a hunted look tightening her exquisite features. ‘Soon... I just have to pick the right moment.’

‘Considering that on average he only sleeps one night a month under the same roof as you, I could still be sitting here this time next year. Maybe you’re in love with the bastard— ‘

‘How could I be?’ She bent her head, her hands clenching tightly together. ‘You know we don’t have a normal marriage.’

‘And wouldn’t the tabloids just love to get a load of that!’ Paul sniggered.

‘I don’t think that’s funny, Paul.’

‘Well, the only thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that I may not be your lover, but he isn’t either. And you’ve got to admit that that’s a real mystery. Look at you,’ Paul mused. ‘The virgin bride five years down the road and yet he’s rarely seen in public without some beautiful bimbo clinging to his arm. Maybe he’s a closet gay.’

Her sensitive stomach curdled. She must have been mad to tell Paul the truth about her marriage. Not, of course, that he would do anything with it. She trusted him absolutely but she was aware that she had been dangerously indiscreet in her need to soothe his jealousy of Nik. Nik... The very blood in her veins went cold when she faced up to what she still had ahead of her.

‘Don’t talk about him like that,’ she urged tightly.

‘You think the table is bugged? You’re scared stiff of him, aren’t you? I don’t think you’re ever going to pick up the courage to tell him you want your freedom. I think I’m wasting my time— ‘

‘No...no, never,’ Leah whispered frantically, the thought of losing him filling her with panic. She just couldn’t go back to what her life had been for the past five years. Empty, without focus, boring. Before Paul, every day had stretched endlessly in front of her. She didn’t have a social life. She didn’t have friends. She was watched everywhere she went. The door of her prison had slammed shut on her wedding-day and she had been so dumb, so naïve, she hadn’t even realised it until she’d tried to move beyond the bars.

‘Then when?’ he pressed moodily.

‘Soon...I promise you.’

‘I don’t see why you can’t just move out bag and baggage. It’s not as though you don’t have all the evidence you need to divorce him. Adultery is not about to go out of fashion with Nik Andreakis around.’

‘I have to do it right, Paul. Don’t you see that I owe him that?’

‘I don’t see that you owe him anything. In the eyes of the Church and the law, he’s not even your husband,’ Paul persisted impressively.

Leah glanced at her watch and uttered a gasp of dismay. ‘I have to go!’

Paul caught her by the shoulders and kissed her with practised expertise. ‘I’ll phone,’ he promised. ‘Love you, darling.’

Leah fled. It was three blocks to the fashionable hairdressers where she had been booked in for a long session of massage and beauty treatment. She took terrible risks to meet up with Paul and her head told her that the longer she put off asking Nik for a divorce, the more chance there was of her being found out. But, then, what would it really matter?

Nik didn’t care what she did. She saw him maybe once a month when he stopped over in London, sometimes not even that over the past year. He might request that she play hostess for a business dinner, but of late even those requests had been few and far between. If he had to communicate with her, he did so through his staff.

In their entire marriage, Nik had never once taken her out in public. Not for dinner, not to the theatre, not to a party. Nik pursued his glittering social life with other women on his arm...never, ever his wife. He slept in his own wing of the house...and even that handful of nights a year that he stayed under the same roof she had heard him go out late and return after dawn, so those nights didn’t really count either.

For an instant, as she flew through the side-entrance of the hairdressers, she remembered when she had lain awake crying and listening for him, wondering in despair what was wrong with her, what she had done, what she had not done, what she could possibly do to make him notice her and acknowledge her existence. Angrily she thrust the memory away. Time had taken care of that kind of nonsense. The child bride had grown up and wised up.

‘I’m so sorry. I forgot my appointment,’ Leah murmured at the reception desk and as usual she insisted on paying anyway and she tipped as if there were no tomorrow. The proprietor, Charlie, came up to her and offered to fit her in immediately but she sighed and said she was running late and sat down to wait for her chauffeur to draw up outside.

‘Oh, by the way, Mrs Andreakis— ‘ Charlie lowered his head, his beaded locks swinging colourfully ‘— your bodyguard called in with a message for you.’

Leah went rigid, turned white as a ghost.

‘Relax.’ Wry brown eyes met hers. ‘I said you were in the massage-room.’

Leah turned scarlet. ‘Thank you,’ she managed jerkily.

‘I’d better give you the message,’ he whispered. ‘Mr Andreakis is waiting for you at home.’

Nik was what? Nik was waiting for her...Nik who had never waited for her once in five years? Nik was home when he wasn’t due back in London for another fortnight? Involuntarily, Leah shivered, her stomach turning over sickly. For a split-second she was consumed by the sort of panic that made people jump out windows in a fire. Sheer cold terror.

Charlie settled down beside her, his hands planted on his knees. ‘Baby, you’re not cut out for this game you’re playing— ‘

‘I don’t know what you’re— ‘

‘You’ve been coming here every week for five years. And the last couple of months what you’ve been feeling has been just blazing all over your face.’ He sighed. ‘But I don’t want to go down in history as the idiot stupid enough to give Nik Andreakis’s wife an alibi. He’s the kind of guy who probably breaks fingers. I get the shakes just thinking about it.’

Shame washed over her. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘And I’m sorry I can’t be more help because it’s been kinda nice seeing you happy for a change.’

‘Mrs Andreakis...?’

Leah flinched as her bodyguard, Boyce, cast a big, dark shadow over her. As she stood, he cast a suspicious, cold look at Charlie, who had been too physically close to his employer’s wife for his liking.

As soon as the door slammed on the limousine, her composure collapsed. Charlie knew she was seeing someone. Dear God, she felt so humiliated. She also felt guilty as hell. Her hairdresser was afraid of being dragged into a marital furore. Not that there was the slightest chance of that happening when Nik couldn’t give two hoots what she did. But cheerful, wisecracking Charlie, who had laughed her out of many a depression over the years, had been genuinely scared.

Everyone was afraid of Nik. And yet she had never heard him shout. Early on in their marriage Leah had walked in mortal terror of him until it had slowly sunk in on her, with the drip effect of his icy indifference, that she barely existed as a human being on his scale of importance. He had married her to gain the shares her father had signed over to her. She had been part of a business deal, nothing more.

And yet there had been times at the beginning when she could have sworn that Nik looked at her with veiled loathing, when his voice could say the lightest things and sound like a whiplash of naked threat, when his very presence in the same room had made her feel menaced...and that was when she had learnt to hug the background, never draw attention to herself, avoid him whenever possible. She had assumed that he resented having had to marry her to get the shares. Yet divorce had always been within his reach. It was a mystery Leah had yet to fathom out.

And now Nik, who had not varied his schedule in five long, endless years, had come home unexpectedly. That fact returned to haunt her, anxious though she had been to evade it. Her fingers clenched white-knuckled around her bag as she climbed the steps of the vast Georgian terraced house. The unfaithful wife, she thought painfully.

But she wasn’t his wife, not his real wife, she reminded herself, just as she had often done in the weeks since she had met Paul. She should have demanded her freedom a long time ago. But her father would have been outraged and bitterly disappointed.

Leah had spent the first seventeen years of her life pleasing her father, Max, in every way she could. She had done as he advised five years ago. She had married Nik and it had been the biggest mistake of her life. Nik had taken her freedom and given nothing in return. But that time was past, she reminded herself. It was almost two months since her father had died, the heart condition which had endangered his health for years having finally taken its toll.

‘Mr Andreakis is waiting for you in the drawing-room,’ Petros the butler informed her.

Leah hovered, nervous tension biting. As a rule, she didn’t see Nik until he sat down at the dinner-table. The belief that something was wrong attacked her again.

He was standing by the marble fireplace, six feet two inches of overwhelmingly masculine male. Once she had looked at him and her heart had sung, her knees had weakened and her voice had caught in her throat. Now Leah saw him always as if through a glass wall. Learning to detach herself had been lesson one.

Nik Andreakis, the legendary Greek tycoon, possessor of fabled wealth and immense power. From his hand-stitched leather shoes to his fabulously tailored mohair-and silk-blend pearl-grey suit, he was effortlessly elegant, supremely sophisticated. A man to die for, she had thought at seventeen, her impressionable little teeny-bopper heart ready to burst with sheer excitement.

And Nik was a devastatingly handsome male animal, quite stunningly gorgeous by any standards. Thick ebony hair, golden skin, riveting black eyes as dark as night. Wherever he went he was the focus of female attention. And he knew it, was amused by it...used it when it suited him. Once, though she rarely allowed herself to recall it, Nik had focused that elemental aura of sexual energy on her.

Something had changed...something was different. Tension thrummed in the air. Deep-set dark eyes scanned her. ‘Your lipstick’s smudged.’

Her fingers flew up to her mouth in a gesture of dismay. ‘Is it?’

Winged ebony brows drew together in slight frown. Nik studied her intently. ‘We haven’t got much time, so I’ll just move to the baseline. We’re flying to Paris.’

Frozen with astonishment, Leah echoed, ‘Paris?’

Nik had already opened the door. ‘Come on,’ he said with unhidden impatience.

‘You want me to go to Paris with you?’ Leah stressed helplessly. ‘Now...like right now?’

‘Yes.’

‘But why?’

‘A little business tied up with your father’s estate.’ Hooded dark eyes probed the amazement that flashed across her face.

And Leah was amazed— amazed that there could be anything left to sort out concerning her father’s estate. Although Nik had not even bothered to attend Max’s funeral, he had arrogantly assumed responsibility for instructing his lawyers to deal with her father’s property and possessions. While Leah had been grieving, too bound up in her loss to consider the practicalities of death, everything her father owned had been sold— everything!

His beautiful house, his business investments, his very furniture and personal effects had all been liquidated into cash at Nik’s instruction. Leah had not been left with a single memento. Her father, Max Harrington, might never have existed for nothing remained to testify to his sixty-odd years on this earth. Leah had been appalled by Nik’s insensitivity but by the time she found out it had been too late for her to intervene. The deed had been done. As usual, Nik’s orders had been carried out with speedy efficiency by his obedient staff.

A quiver of helpless antagonism ran through her. She lifted her silver head high. ‘Something you actually overlooked?’

‘No. Something I was looking for has finally been located.’ Harsh emphasis accompanied the assurance. An almost savage tension was briefly stamped in his hard, strong features as he read her mystified expression. ‘At least I think it has been. For your own sake, pray that I am right,’ he completed tautly.

Paling, Leah stepped back from him, the chill, the sense of threat running along her every nerve-ending. ‘For my sake? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I hope not.’ He swung on his heel.

Leah made for the stairs. A hard hand stayed her. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘To get changed.’ Sudden fear licked at her. She stared in shock at the lean, powerful hand clamped to her slender forearm. Nik never touched her...never, not even in the most passing, casual gesture.

‘There’s no time for that. The jet’s ready for take-off.’

‘Will we be coming back tonight?’ Her voice rose an octave as he literally thrust her out of the house. ‘I have nothing packed!’

‘You’ll manage.’

‘What’s going on?’ Leah demanded frantically as the limousine drew away from the kerb.

Ignoring her with supreme disdain, Nik picked up the phone and proceeded to talk at length in Greek.

She didn’t understand a word. A fleeting recollection stirred. On their wedding-day she had told him she intended to learn his language. ‘Don’t waste your time,’ he had derided, and that had been the very first crack that appeared in her fantasy world. Before the day was at an end, the crack had widened into a yawning gulf but it had taken a lot longer for reality to banish that fantasy world she had wanted so badly.

Her temples throbbed with the tension in the air. But her inner turmoil did not show. She sat still, apparently composed, her manicured hands loosely resting on her lap. In Nik’s presence she had learnt to conceal her emotions. Only that did not still the stormy flood of her hidden consternation and incomprehension.

‘What is this all about?’ Leah asked a second time.

Silence.

Doggedly she persisted. ‘I understood that Dad’s estate was all settled.’

‘Did you really? I wonder,’ Nik responded murderously quietly.

Something in his intonation disturbed her. Her delicate profile turned. She encountered eyes as treacherous as black ice. Her stomach muscles clenched, her skin chilling. She had a sense of impending disaster so powerful that she felt briefly sick.

‘If you would just explain what— ?’ she began.

‘Why should I explain myself to you?’ It was so clearly a growl of lancing derision that she was silenced.

‘Young as you are, you are every man’s secret fantasy...’ Who would ever believe that those seductive words had been uttered by the husband who had ignored her very existence for five solid years? Yet Nik had said those words the first day they met. Why had he lied? Why had he pretended? Had he wanted those shares in that shipping line that badly? He must have done. It was patently obvious that she had never been Nik Andreakis’s secret fantasy. Bitterness tremored through her. Nik had used her without conscience...as had her father, who had gloried in Nik’s wealth and status.

Pained by the acknowledgement, Leah looked blankly out of the window. She longed for Paul— Paul, who hadn’t even known who she was when he’d first approached her, Paul, the very first man in her life to respond to her as an individual with feelings and needs and opinions of her own. He wanted only her. He wanted her for herself. He wasn’t trying to use her.

In Paris, she would tell Nik that she wanted a divorce. There would be no more procrastination. She would not risk losing Paul. And she was hungry to live a life of her own, hungry for the freedom which beckoned so tantalisingly on the horizon. Nik had stolen her youth, the teenage years when she should have been dating and having fun and loving. Why shouldn’t she be greedy for what she had never had?

On the private jet she flicked through magazines but her mouth curled several times as she watched the stewardess hover round Nik like some harem concubine, desperate to attract the sultan’s favour. The beautiful brunette had a bad dose of infatuation. Who better than Leah to recognise the symptoms? After all, she had once been a victim herself. But now she was utterly detached from Nik and prided herself on the fact.

Nik Andreakis, with his smouldering Greek temperament and movie-star looks, didn’t touch her on any physical or emotional level. He was volatile, ruthless and unpredictable. The cloak of civilisation was thin. He was also manipulative, arrogant and vicious towards those who opposed or antagonised him. If she had been his real wife, she wouldn’t have dared to sneak around with another man behind his back...

A limousine collected them at Charles de Gaulle Airport, carrying them through the heavy late afternoon traffic. The car drew up on a busy, crowded street. Leah climbed out, too proud to ask yet again where they were going but looking around. Nik strode ahead of her into the nearest building. He was carrying an executive case. And the building was a bank, she registered.

Three men were waiting in the foyer. One of them, whom she recognised as her father’s solicitor, attempted to speak to her. But Nik cut him off very rudely. From below her lashes she stole a glance at her husband. Dear God, but he was ignorant. In the wrong mood— too frequently the only mood in which Leah saw him— his manners were atrocious towards those unfortunates he considered to be lesser beings. As one of them, Leah felt a creature sympathy for the middle-aged man with his flushed, strained face.

A lift took them down to the vaults. The magical mystery tour, she reflected grimly. Were there more shares in that precious shipping line on offer? How could any man with Nik’s fabulous wealth and assets be so disgustingly greedy? He had married her out of greed, hadn’t he? Something for nothing. The shares had come free as her dowry.

The solicitor stuffed a key in her hand abruptly and then turned away.

“Give it to me,’ Nik grated in a driven undertone, his simmering tension leaping out at her in an electrifying wave.

The key for a safety-deposit box, presumably belonging to her father, for why else would it have been put in her hand? She ignored him. For the very first time in their marriage she ignored her husband, moving forward to watch the bank executive produce the box and leave it on the table before quietly leaving the small, bare room.

‘Leah...’ Nik growled.

She refused to look at him. ‘If it’s my father’s, it’s mine...’

‘Be very careful of what you claim.’

His savage warning pierced cold to the very centre of her body. She looked at him and was paralysed. Naked violence and aggression were etched in his ferociously taut features. She blenched, and cast the key on the table by the box in sudden surrender.

‘If it’s in here you can relax,’ Nik murmured between clenched white teeth. ‘If it isn’t, you’ll be lucky to see the dawn break tomorrow.’

If what was in there? Perspiration broke on her short upper lip. Her legs suddenly felt weak and wobbly. Her sapphire-blue eyes clung to him in sick disbelief. But he wasn’t looking at her. He was inserting the key in the box with a hand that wasn’t quite steady.

She licked her dry lips. There was something more than shares at stake, something terrible enough to make even Nik Andreakis threaten to come apart at the seams... She had never seen him close to the edge, never dreamt that he could lose control, but she was seeing it now.

The box was full of papers. With a burst of guttural Greek, Nik began to rifle through them, discarding letters and photos which spilled in careless disarray across the table. He was pale and taut, his evident search becoming visibly more agitated.

Leah focused on an envelope addressed to someone she had never heard of. She didn’t even recognise the writing. And then she glimpsed a large, glossy photograph. In stark colour, it depicted a number of men and women engaged in... In shock and disgust, Leah averted her eyes again. She started to tremble. Why had her father kept such an obscene thing in his possession?

‘What is this stuff?’ she whispered, since it was blatantly obvious that Nik knew far more about the contents of that box than she did. He had flicked past that photo without an ounce of reaction or surprise.

‘What is it?’ An edged laugh fell from his compressed mouth but there was no humour in the sound. ‘It’s a box of broken lives! Other people’s secrets. Your father lived off his victims and their fear like some filthy cockroach!’

White as a sheet, Leah gaped at him. ‘How dare you talk about my father like that?’

Nik wasn’t listening to her. He was still feverishly sorting through the papers. ‘That he should leave me to clear up this filth is the final insult. I, Nik Andreakis, reduced to soiling my hands because I cannot trust any other person alive with this obscene collection of human errors! His trophies! He kept them to the last instead of destroying them! Cristo...the evil old bastard...’

Only the cold wall was supporting Leah. She could not credit the crime that her late father was being accused of. Her mind was a complete blank over a seething sea of sick turmoil. ‘What are you saying?’ Her voice was so weak it was a thread of sound.

‘Are you deaf?’ Nik slung her a savage look of unconcealed loathing. ‘Why do you think I married you? For your chocolate-box looks and your convent education?’ he sneered. ‘For your ability to act like a lady and fix stupid flower arrangements all over my house?’

‘The shares,’ she mumbled, shaking all over.

‘There were no shares!’ he raked back at her, the volume of his voice echoing off the walls with a rage that made her quail helplessly. ‘There were never any shares. That shipping line didn’t even exist!’

‘You’re lying,’ Leah framed through bloodless lips, barely able to stay upright.

Nik’s attention was on the document he held in his hand. Suddenly, without any warning, he smashed his clenched fist down brutally hard on the tabletop. ‘Theos mou...’ he intoned with vicious bite. ‘It’s only a copy!’

‘A c-copy of what?’ As the table jumped, Leah flinched, plastering herself back against the wall, sick and dizzy.

‘And this is the end of the trail...’

Nik prowled towards her like a tiger about to spring for her throat and drag her down. ‘He gave the original to you, didn’t he?’ he murmured with lethal quietness, glittering black eyes settling on her with violent force. ‘He gave it to you to keep safe...’

‘G-gave what to me?’ Leah was so distraught she could barely articulate. She couldn’t think either.

‘You know what I’m talking about. Not so innocent after all, it seems,’ he breathed, backing her into a corner. ‘If it isn’t here, you have it. Max was no fool. He knew I’d dump you like a hot potato if I got my hands on it. So he gave it to you...so where is it?’

‘Stop it!’ Leah gasped strickenly, fearfully. ‘Leave me alone!’

‘If you don’t tell me where that certificate is... you’re in more danger now than you have ever been in your life,’ Nik spelt out, waves of raw aggression splintering from his lowering stance a mere foot from her. ‘I have lived with blackmail for five years to protect my family. I will not live with it one day longer!’

He had said the word, that terrifying word, and it danced about on the edges of the living nightmare she was being forced to endure. ‘Blackmail’... It wasn’t true, couldn’t be true. Her father could not have been a blackmailer. On the edge of collapse, Leah fought to stand her ground.

‘I always wondered whether he intended it this way...that you should be my life sentence,’ Nik vented in a seething undertone. ‘But I tell you now, pethi mou, I would sooner go to prison for putting my hands round that scrawny little throat and strangling the life force from your body. That would be the only life sentence I could live with!’

Terrified beyond endurance, Leah watched his dark, threatening face above hers black out and finally, mercifully vanish as she slid down the wall in a dead faint.




CHAPTER TWO


LEAH RECOVERED consciousness in the limousine. Nik was bending over her just as he had been doing before she’d passed out. In one frantic movement she jackknifed back from him and plastered herself up against the far door while she fumbled madly for the release mechanism, uncaring that they were in the midst of fast-moving traffic. ‘Get away from me!’ she screeched in panic.

‘Fragile little creature, aren’t you? A bundle of rampant nerves all of a sudden.’ Lounging back in a disturbing attitude of fluid relaxation, Nik surveyed her with unashamed satisfaction and a sardonic smile, his aggression cloaked, his temper back under control. ‘So where is that certificate?’

Her fingernails clenched painfully into her palms, etching purple crescents on the tender flesh. She needed that pain to be assured that Nik was still talking in the same nightmare fashion that he had been employing inside that suffocating little room. ‘I’ve already told you that I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Well, if you didn’t know you know now and I want an answer.’

‘I can’t believe my father was a blackmailer—’

‘Dirty, isn’t it?’ Nik treated her to a scrutiny empty of even the tiniest vein of compassion. ‘But then he was a professional of the very highest quality. His field was the rich and famous and the skeletons he dug out of closets had to be really juicy ones. He was very good at what he did,’ Nik drawled impassively. ‘He never milked his victims totally dry. He never drove anyone to the brink of trying to kill him. He made them pay for so long and then he let them off the hook but he kept the evidence of their misdeeds to protect himself. He made a fortune...’

‘I won’t believe it!’ Leah slung back shakily. ‘I won’t believe any of this!’

‘Do you think he kept pornographic pictures in that box just for fun?’

Leah’s stomach curdled. She lowered her pounding head.

‘Now if he took the trouble to retain a copy of the juicy skeleton he trailed out of my family closet—’ Nik’s deep voice held a renewed edge of harshness ‘—he also kept the original of the certificate, and since I have exhausted every other avenue it is obvious to me that he must have given it to you.’

‘He didn’t give anything to me!’ There was a quiver of hysteria in her tremulous response. She was in shock—deep shock—and in no state to combat his continuing pressure for her to produce something that she had not even known existed and certainly didn’t have.

‘You can’t hold it over me. Just try and I will break you...’

‘You’re crazy!’ she suddenly sobbed.

‘This far, I have been remarkably kind and patient. I have been on a leash for five years,’ Nik grated in an embittered undertone. ‘I was only safe as long as I stayed married to you. I thought you might run home to Daddy. But you never did and one thing did become clear to me, gruesomely clear over the years. You are in love with me—’

‘What?’ Leah interrupted shakily.

‘You are obsessed with me. Do you think I don’t know this?’ Nik sent her a shimmering look of contempt. ‘Any normal woman would have left me by now and given up all hope of having her love returned...but not you! You stayed the course, loyal to the bitter end, obscenely faithful and well-behaved, giving me no excuse to complain of the devil’s bargain I made!’

‘Faithful’? Hysteria was tearing at her convulsing throat. Dear heaven, he actually believed what he was saying! Nik believed that she loved him. He thought she had stayed because she loved him. Paul’s name hovered on the very tip of her tongue but sixth sense warned her not to muddy the waters further. One thing at a time...only which? she wondered wildly. Life as she knew it had been shattered in the space of a few hours.

‘I am not in love with you,’ she murmured with as much dignity as she could contrive, her teeth gritting behind her peach-tinted lips. Absolute humiliation engulfed her as she appreciated that all along Nik had been thinking that his neglected, unwanted wife was just dying of love for him in spite of his complete indifference towards her. The ego he must have...the utter, unashamed conceit.

‘Listen, you’re talking to the guy who was your seventeenth birthday present!’ he slung back with savage derision.

‘I b-beg your pardon?’

‘Did you pick me out of some society magazine? Or did you see me in the flesh first? Did you take one look and rush to Daddy and say, “Daddy, this is the one I want!”?’

He was serious. He was actually serious. Her lower lip had parted company from the upper, a hectic pink firing her cheeks to dispel her previous pallor. ‘You have to be out of your mind!’

‘We are going to have this conversation. I have waited five years to stage it!’ Nik asserted, skimming her with glittering dark eyes. ‘All I know is that dear Max did your dirty work for you. I was hunted down like an animal—’

‘You are an animal...an insult to the species!’ Leah abruptly burst out. ‘And your conceit is staggering!’

‘Cristo...my perfect lady of a wife can actually raise her voice,’ Nik drawled, surveying her with flaring dark eyes. ‘You don’t like the truth. It hurts your pride. But I know I was trapped quite deliberately. I didn’t even know who your father was that first time I came to the house. I was lured there by a third party, offering me a business proposition. And your father just so happened not to be available when I arrived.

‘But, lo and behold, you were. Romantically tending flowers in the conservatory, wearing something understated and white, literally armed to the teeth with virginal wiles...Theos, I remember it so well.’

‘It wasn’t like that!’ she gasped in outrage.

‘Any hot-blooded Greek would have looked twice and lingered,’ Nik told her with scorn. ‘And there you were, all shy smiles and blushes, eating me up with those big blue eyes as if you hadn’t had a square meal in a week!’

‘Stop it!’ Leah hissed, her voice breaking.

Nik studied her with unyielding derision, his beautiful mouth twisting. ‘So I was invited to dinner and you played the piano like a concert pianist and sang like an angel. Your every cultured virtue was paraded for my philistine benefit and somehow business never came into it. It might interest you to know, pethi mou, that I only had two questions I wanted answered that night but couldn’t ask—’

‘Really?’ Leah was staring blankly into space, every ounce of her remaining self-discipline directed at rescuing her shattered composure and combating the painful tidal wave of memories threatening to assail her. Two very different people...one encounter...such differing recollections of the same event.

‘Were you over the age of consent? And did Daddy intend to protect you from the big bad world out there and sexual predators like me? Marriage was not, nor would it ever have been, on my mind.’

Nausea stirred inside her, and a bitter tide of mortification she could not withstand followed in its wake.

‘Whose idea was it that I stay to dinner?’

Leah froze.

‘I thought so,’ Nik breathed. ‘Your idea. You told him you wanted me and that was that. He went digging and he dug up something that only two people alive knew about and neither of them would ever have talked about it!’

‘What did he dig up?’ she heard herself whisper helplessly.

‘You know...Max had plenty of warning that he was on borrowed time. He didn’t go to his grave without passing that secret on to you,’ Nik asserted softly.

‘He passed nothing on to me...’

‘And if you don’t have it you have to know who has.’

The chauffeur opened the door beside her and she almost fell out into the fresh air. She gazed down the quiet residential street in near panic. She wanted to run. She knew where she was: Nik’s Paris apartment where she had spent a quite unforgettable wedding night alone. He was unleashing everything on her at once, drowning her in a sea of shattering revelations, grinding her down with confusion, pain and humiliation.

‘Try it,’ Nik said very quietly. ‘Run and see what happens. I wouldn’t let you get as far as the street corner.’

Trembling, ashen, Leah entered the foyer in front of him and stepped into the lift.

‘Memories...’ Nik taunted, with a barbaric smile, as if he could see inside her.

Leah knew she was still in shock. She said nothing, knew she wasn’t up to the challenge. Nik had been prepared. Nik had been waiting for this day, craving its arrival, longing for his revenge...just as he must have longed for her father’s death to set him free from her.

‘There are many functions I can perform to order but sharing a bed with you sadly wasn’t one of them,’ he delivered. ‘He could make me marry you but he couldn’t follow me into the bedroom and force me to—’

‘Shut up!’ she screamed at him, the hysterical demand reverberating around the steel walls of the lift.

‘So why did you never tell him that?’ Nik persisted, going for the jugular when she was at her lowest ebb with predictable calculation. ‘Why didn’t you ever tell him the truth about our marriage? Don’t tell me that Max wasn’t desperate to hear the patter of tiny feet which would have made your position more secure!’

Her hands flew up to cover her convulsing face, a stinging flood of moisture dammed up behind her eyelids. ‘Please...no more,’ she whispered, and she didn’t care that she was begging.

A pair of hands gripped her narrow shoulders. ‘Ne...yes, you kept quiet about your pitifully empty marital bed all these years. Why?’

With a sudden superhuman effort which took him by surprise, Leah tore herself free and fled across the hall of the huge penthouse apartment and down the bedroom corridor. She picked a room at the very end and vanished into the en suite bolting the door behind her. Slowly she slid down the back of the door and then she was forced to fly up again and cope with the shuddering spasms of sickness tearing at her abdomen. When it was over, she took off her clothes with the attitude of a sleepwalker and entered the shower cubicle.

My father, the blackmailer. She repeated the words to herself over and over as she sank down in a corner of the shower and let the water descend on her in sheets. She felt so dirty. For the first time in her life she felt dirty and she didn’t know what on earth she could possibly do to make herself feel clean again. Nik had torn the safe foundations of her very childhood from her.

Her mother, who had died when Leah was four, was no more than a dim memory. The daughter of a minor English aristocrat, she had been cut off by her family for marrying Max. Max had never told his daughter why. He had never felt the need to explain himself.

Leah’s childhood had consisted of a procession of nannies followed by a succession of boarding-schools from an early age. Max had travelled incessantly. Whenever she had pleaded with him to let her live with him, he had always had a ready excuse. She had reached adolescence before she finally appreciated that she was excess baggage in her father’s life and he was essentially a remote, self-contained and cold man. None the less she had always been aware that he cared about her as he cared about nobody else.

He had been proud of her beauty, her education, her musical gifts. Those had all been saleable social commodities, she registered now. Max had been ambitious for her. He had wanted her to marry a man of wealth and position. He had always lived on the fringes of high society. He had been keen for his daughter to achieve a passport into that same society. Leah had grown up denied the warmth of family life but cocooned from harsh realities. Dependancy had been bred into her bones, along with a desperate need to win her father’s love and approval.

How could she ever have guessed that Max was not a legitimate business man? How could she ever have dreamt that her privileged upbringing had been financed by something so vile as the contents of that safety-deposit box? And how could she have even begun to suspect that he had blackmailed Nik into marrying her?

Finally she understood the cruel charade of her marriage, too late for her to do anything any differently. The five years had gone, couldn’t be reclaimed either for her or for Nik. No wonder he despised her; no wonder he was so willing to believe that she knew the secret he had been prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to conceal. ‘To protect my family’, he’d said. Ironically, she didn’t want to know the source of the pressure put on him.

He could keep that skeleton in the closet forever. In any case, Nik’s family were strangers to her. He had a mother and three sisters whom she had never met. She had often wondered whether they wondered about her and how Nik had explained so peculiar a marital relationship. But had he even bothered to explain? Like Max, Nik was not in the habit of explaining himself unless he chose to do so.

How could he think she loved him? The ultimate humiliation. Not only a husband forced virtually at the point of a gun into marrying her, but a male convinced that even after five years of his excruciating neglect, indifference and infidelity she still loved him! The wife from hell who would cling like a limpet through thick and thin.

Yet as the water continued to beat down on her, Leah slowly began to register a curious sense of burgeoning inner strength which she had never felt before. She even managed to feel sorry for Nik. He was afraid that she intended to try and employ her father’s blackmail beyond the grave...hence all the threats, the bullying, the intimidation. The news that she was in love with another man and couldn’t wait to get a divorce would surely be manna from heaven, a bolt of joyous blue across Nik’s horizon!

She had wasted five years of her life...not one hour, not one day more would she sacrifice! Her father had once been her sole authority. She had allowed Nik to take over that role. Without any argument, she had tolerated Nik’s behaviour, even protected him sooner than let her father know that she had not been able to make a success of her marriage. Pride had done that, stupid pride.

And she had been afraid, afraid of so much for so long. Afraid of leaving her safe cocoon of monied privilege to face the outside world. Afraid of her father’s contempt and fury. Afraid that the truth about her marriage might literally kill her father with his weak heart. No more fear, she told herself now.

If Nik had been a victim, she had been too. And at least she wasn’t making as much noise about it as he was, she reflected grimly. His conceit still staggered her. Did he really think that that tender first love of a particularly naïve teenager had outlasted the first six months?

A loud knock sounded on the door.

‘Open it!’ Nik demanded roughly.

Mentally she blocked her ears. She had had enough of him for one day...enough of him forever. She tasted the concept, and experienced a surge of positively heady relief. Nik did not possess a single virtue which appealed to her. Five years ago it had been an attraction of total opposites on her side. Sweet seventeen, choosing with her heart and her leaping pulses, not with her head.

‘Leah!’ Nik raked with driven impatience.

He was not a male who respected her sex. He pursued one bimbo after another. Brunette, redhead, blonde. He didn’t discriminate. But they all had motorway-length legs, bounteous breasts and big hair. Leah possessed none of those attributes and once that had been a source of torment to her, damaging an already weak self-image.

But she was worth so much more than that and she had Paul to thank for that discovery. Paul had woken her up from her slough of inadequacy and passive acceptance. Paul had taught her to put herself first. The way Nik did; the way Nik had always done. Nik had rejected and humiliated her from the outset of their marriage. What did she have to feel guilty about now? Hadn’t she already paid for her father’s sins? And the payments in terms of her pain, loneliness and misery stopped now for all time, she swore to herself.

Standing up, switching off the shower, she was in the act of reaching for a towel when the door was suddenly struck with shocking force. The lock buckled and gave, the door slamming back on its hinges, framing Nik in the doorway. His lean, powerful body whipcord-taut, he glowered at her with eyes of flaming jet.

‘What did you lock yourself in here for?’ he demanded ferociously.

Clutching her towel to her small, slender frame, Leah was shattered by his violent intrusion but she was also furious. ‘Have you gone out of your mind?’

White teeth flashed against sun-bronzed skin, his narrowed gaze outraged. ‘I was concerned for your welfare!’

Her welfare? Or her safety? Was that why he had kicked down the door like the Neanderthal he was? Had he been afraid that she planned to throw herself out the window? Of course that might have been embarrassing for him.

Dealing him a veiled glance of disbelief, Leah stopped to gather up her discarded clothes.

‘Your skin has the bloom of a camellia.’

Her lashes lifted slowly as she straightened. She blinked. Nik was staring at her in the most unbelievably disturbing way, his veiled gaze working intently over every exposed inch of flesh in view, resting on her full mouth, lingering unapologetically on the pale swell of her breasts above the towel.

‘Drop the towel,’ he said thickly.

Shocked into rigidity, Leah quivered with incredulity. Nik regarded her expectantly. And he was expecting that towel just to drop at his request. It was written all over him, in every poised line of his lounging stance.

Unintentionally, she collided with burning black eyes and it was like having a blowtorch turned on her. Her mouth ran dry, her lungs struggled for oxygen. Heat flamed over her skin as it tightened over her bones, a tiny twisting sensation spiralling through her stomach. Her breasts felt peculiar, suddenly heavy and full, her nipples tautening into almost painful sensitivity.

‘You’re so tiny and yet so perfectly proportioned,’ he mused lazily in the pulsing silence.

Leah just couldn’t believe that he was talking to her like this. And yet on some subconscious level she wasn’t surprised. This was Nik as she had never known him and yet as she had always known he could be. There was something dangerously fascinating about the raw sexual charge that emanated from him, the elemental atavism of a very physical male. A ‘predator’, he had called himself with astonishing candour. And a predator he was, she registered.

‘Would you please excuse me while I get dressed?’ she murmured without any expression at all.

‘You are not serious?’ he breathed, as if she were the one behaving oddly.

Leah shivered with fury, disgust flooding through her in waves. Nothing but bitterness, loathing and resentment lay between them but Nik could obviously rise above all that to think about sex. Why? Purely because she was half-naked. Seemingly that was all it took to stoke the ever glowing coals of Nik’s powerful libido.

‘I want to get dressed,’ she said shakily.

‘You’re shy.’ Nik tasted the word with purring satisfaction. ‘And you have waited one hell of a long time for me.’

Leah laughed. She couldn’t help it. Laughter with an hysterical edge just spilled from her strained lips, shattering the silence like breaking glass.

‘Stop it...’

Her clothes fell from her arms as she turned away and covered her contorted face with spread hands that were trembling. The hysteria had come from nowhere and attacked without warning. She was furious that he should witness her loss of control. But she was even more devastated when she felt his arms close round her from behind. For a split-second she was so rigid that she imagined herself cracking under the stress of shock and breaking into pieces.

He was pulling her back into the hard, masculine heat of his body, threatening her with a disturbing physical contact she had never had. And she couldn’t believe that he was actually touching her. It was so unreal. For five years this man had treated her like a leper. And now all of a sudden, when she was least equipped to deal with him, he was reaching out and touching as though that were his right. But it was not his right and she did not want his hands on her.

‘Maybe you don’t know where that certificate is,’ Nik conceded half under his breath, lowering his dark head. ‘Maybe he destroyed it, overlooked the copy. But maybe it’s still out there in somebody’s safekeeping, like a bomb waiting to be activated...’

His terminology made Leah shiver. Nik was slowly, smoothly turning her round to face him. She had never fully appreciated how much stronger than a woman a man could be until Nik, impatient of her unresponsiveness, simply lifted her clear off the carpet and spun her like a doll back to him.

Barefoot she didn’t even reach his shoulder and before he lowered her back down again her cheek brushed against his silk shirt-front as his jacket parted. Her breath caught in her throat, her nostrils flaring at the male scent of him, clean, citrusy...hot. For a timeless moment her senses spun wildly, her lashes dipping as she was flooded by dizzy discomfiture.

‘Look at me...’ His accented voice could sound like sandpaper on silk.

‘Please let me go,’ she mumbled in a rush as she relocated her tongue.

She might as well not have spoken. Long fingers tilted up her chin and lingered there as she was involuntarily ensnared by his blazing black eyes. And she knew as clearly as though he had spoken that the seething tension of the afternoon’s events and his subsequent furious dissatisfaction had all been temporarily tossed on a back burner. Far more basic urges were driving Nik now, a desire to vent all that pent-up tension in a fashion which she suddenly sensed would come as naturally to him as breathing.

Her skin prickled with a depth of awareness she would not have believed possible. The vibrations in the atmosphere were explosive.

‘Nik...’ Her own voice emerged jerkily and she wanted to back off fast but her feet were somehow welded to the carpet.

‘It’s so long since I heard you speak my name...’ His intonation was deep-pitched, disturbingly rough, lush ebony lashes low on a sliver of smouldering jet.

‘No...’ she heard herself whisper.

His thumb smoothed along the voluptuous curve of her lower lip and she trembled, attempted to move, but his other hand was splayed across her taut spine, holding her steady.

He watched her intently as he prised her lips apart with his thumb, intruded into the soft, damp interior, making her shiver violently as his palm cupped her delicate jawbone. It was the most insidiously erotic gesture she had ever experienced, and set up a terrifying chain reaction through her treacherous body.

He was playing with her, tracking her every tiny response with a mixture of satisfaction and amusement. And she understood that, read that in the eyes made famous by the financial press for being ‘as unreadable as a blackout’.

But he wasn’t testing the water...no, indeed. Nik was neither humble nor uncertain. This was a male wholly acquainted with every seductive and sensual technique necessary to heighten his own pleasure and a male, similarly given over to taking that pleasure whenever the mood took him.

‘I want—’ And her tongue felt too large for her mouth.

‘More?’ With devastating abruptness but immense cool, Nik released her and angled a sizzling smile down at her. ‘Next time, drop the towel when I ask, pethi mou,’ he advised softly.

She would have found a blow less degrading than that insolent conclusion. As she heard the bedroom door snap quietly shut in his wake, Leah went limp, her pallor pronounced. She had challenged him, angered him. She was shattered. All these years, nothing, and then...

Why now? She remembered him saying that her father could not force him into her bed as he had forced him into marriage. Her stomach twisted painfully. Max was dead now. And she had been available...in so much as she was female. Seemingly it took little else to attract Nik when he was in the mood for a little light sexual relief.

And the peculiar way he had made her feel... But then that had been sheer shock and nervous paralysis, Leah told herself urgently. She had only been doing the sensible thing in not fighting, not arguing. Nik was Greek and macho to the backbone. Telling him just at that moment either that she wanted a divorce or that she could not bear him to lay a single finger upon her might have been received like a thrown gauntlet and it might well have encouraged him to attempt further intimacies.

No, that had definitely not been the right moment to mention Paul.

Leah climbed back into her clothes, conscious that her hands were clumsy and still not quite steady. But then that was hardly surprising. Her husband had finally chosen to notice that she was alive...well, if not quite alive at least physically capable of providing the kind of entertainment he expected from her sex. She was disgusted, absolutely disgusted by his brazen disregard for decency in even daring to approach her!

Not only did he have no right to touch her, he wasn’t even faithful to whomever he was currently sharing a bed with. And if she had been willing she had not the slightest doubt that Nik would have taken advantage of her willingness. He was made that way. A taker, not a giver.

He had had a hard fight building his father’s holdings up into the vast international power base that was the Andreakis heritage today. Nobody had given Nik any favours...so he gave none back. He went after his enemies like a warlord, slaughtered them and came back primitively victorious. He hid no light under a bushel, left no stone unturned in his fight for supremacy.

And it was all those traits which her father had gloried in and dished up to her in suitable euphemisms to persuade her that though Nik had made no mention of love he would make her a wonderful husband.

Her mouth curved downwards in grim amusement. What husband? She had never had a husband. But five years ago she hadn’t had the benefit of a crystal ball...

Doubtless memory failed her for her recollection of their first meeting was radically different from his. Before that day, Leah had neither seen nor heard of Nik Andreakis. She had just completed one term at finishing school, perfecting her technique with stupid flower arrangements... A course on men would have been far more useful, she reflected now.

Nik had appeared in the doorway of the conservatory, uninvited and unexpected. The maid had put him in the drawing-room to wait for her father and he must have seen her through the window because to get to the conservatory he had had to leave the drawing-room, cross the hall, go through another room and enter the conservatory by the French windows there. So how come he’d accused her of setting him up for a meeting?

She had looked up and seen him in the doorway and, yes, at one glance had fallen head over heels in love with him. Nik had struck her as the most utterly gorgeous creation she had ever seen walk on two feet. He had stood there like a golden Greek god and her knees had wobbled, helpless excitement quivering through her.

‘You are a breath of spring in this winter scene,’ he had drawled almost stiltedly, dark eyes literally riveted to her.

Yes, he had said it—probably read it somewhere and memorised it for effect, but those most un-Nik-like words had indeed emerged from him. Her pruning scissors had dropped from her nerveless fingers. He had picked them up and hovered. Yes, definitely hovered, as though one part of him was urging him to retreat and another urging him to stay.

It had never occurred to Leah that he had deliberately sought her out. She had assumed that he was interested in the plants and a conversation that years on should have filled her with hilarity but somehow failed to do so had taken place. Nik had not revealed either his ignorance or his uninterest. He had asked appropriate questions and contrived to conceal the fact that he had undoubtedly never touched or examined a plant in his life before.

He had even told her that her eyes matched the gentian violets, and that compliment had emerged almost as awkwardly as the first, giving Leah the impression that though he looked staggeringly sophisticated he was almost shy. Shy? Nik?

How much time had gone by in that conservatory? He hadn’t mentioned his appointment with her father, indeed had given all the appearance of having forgotten it until the flustered maid had come in search of Leah to tell her that her father wanted her and had been disconcerted to find Nik with her.

‘I’ll tell him you’re waiting,’ Leah had told him, and she had flown upstairs to her father’s library.

‘Who is he?’ she had asked straight off, after giving the kind of description that had probably sounded like something that leapt off the page of one of the torrid romances that she had then been so fond of.

‘Nik Andreakis...’ Max had surveyed her glowing face with cool, narrowed eyes.

‘He’s been here absolutely ages,’ she had burbled. ‘Don’t you think we should ask him to stay to dinner?’

‘He appears to have been quite a hit.’

‘Is he married?’

And Nik had duly been invited—her fault, entirely her fault. Her father had come down to make his apologies and then left them alone and Nik had spent all the time before dinner asking her about herself. He had had no need to wonder whether she was over the age of consent. She had told him exactly what age she was...and he had visibly winced...

The following day he had taken her out for a drive but Max had been very dubious about it and she’d suspected that Nik had been made embarrassingly aware of the fact that her father was extremely protective of her.

‘I think your father may have you dusted for fingerprints when you go home, so I won’t kiss you,’ he had said drily. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here with you. You’re far too young for me.’

And she had been hurt, terribly hurt in the week that followed, when he’d neither phoned nor visited. Max had been coolly amused by her misery and had wryly told her not to wear her heart on her sleeve.

‘Andreakis can have just about any woman he wants,’ he had volunteered. ‘But I don’t want him around you unless he’s got marriage in mind.’

‘And did you tell him that?’ she had gasped in horror.

‘You may not value yourself but I do,’ her father had retorted crushingly. ‘I sent you to the finest schools to ensure that you could take your place in any company. I want you to marry well, Leah. A sordid little fling with Andreakis is not on your agenda. And you can be assured that he won’t offer anything more unless it’s profitable.’

Nik had shown up unexpectedly the second week, moody and almost aggressive in his attitude towards her. He had stayed to dinner again. Max had been in an unusually good mood but quiet, very quiet, watching them both, adding little to the conversation.

Two days after that her father had called her into his library and calmly informed her that he owned a considerable number of shares in a shipping line called Petrakis International, shares which Nik was extremely keen to acquire.

‘So I offered them to him gratis as a wedding present,’ Max had smoothly concluded.

Leah had been appalled and deeply upset. Yes, she had been crazy about Nik but that her father should have coolly approached him and offered him a bribe to marry her had made her feel sick with humiliation.

‘Nik’s Greek. He understands these kinds of arrangements,’ Max had assured her witheringly. ‘And I suggest that you understand that a man as tough as Nik Andreakis wouldn’t even consider marriage unless it was financially advantageous. Those shares could be your dowry. The choice is yours. Do you want him or don’t you?’

She had run out of the room, choked with the sobs of her distress. The next morning Max had informed her quite unemotionally of his heart condition. He had said that he didn’t know how long he had left and he was very worried about what would happen to her if he died in the near future. Leah had been shattered by the news.

He had praised Nik to the skies. Nik might be something of a rough diamond by virtue of his hard upbringing but he would treat her with respect and honour as his wife. Such marriage arrangements were common in Greece. If she married Nik she would be safe, secure for the...for the rest of her life. As that phrase returned to haunt her, Leah searched her ashen reflection in the bedroom mirror.

‘But he doesn’t love me!’ she had protested.

Max had looked at her with icy contempt. ‘He wants you...’

‘Not as much as he wants those blasted shares,’ she had whispered strickenly.

‘It’s up to you what you make of the marriage. I’m giving you the chance to marry the man you love...’

Leah came fully back to the present and clasped her cold hands together. I’m giving you Nik Andreakis on a silver platter, Max might as well have said. She shuddered with distaste, despising her own naïveté. Nik had been delivered to her handcuffed and chained by blackmail and even Max hadn’t pretended that love had anything to do with it. Where had her intelligence been?

A knock sounded on the door. It was a servant announcing dinner. Leah was shaken. Could it really be that time already? Paul phoned her at eight every evening. He knew she never went out at night. Would Petros have told him that she was in Paris? She lifted the phone by the bed and dialled the number of his apartment. The call was answered almost immediately.

‘Where the hell are you?’ Paul demanded sharply. ‘Petros told me that Mr and Mrs Andreakis were “unavailable”. What the heck is that supposed to mean?’

‘We had to fly to Paris—’

‘We?’ he interrupted, an octave higher.

‘Look, there was a problem with Max’s estate and I had to be with him,’ Leah framed tautly. ‘I’ll be home tomorrow, darling. I love you.’

‘What sort of a problem?’ Paul sounded very edgy.

‘Nothing important,’ she said breathlessly. No way did she intend to unload the sordid revelations Nik had forced her to endure on Paul. At least not on the phone...and not yet, she adjusted, reminding herself that a strong relationship needed to be based on honesty and trust.

‘Good...so is he taking you out to see the joys of Paris?’ Paul mocked.

‘Nik...take me out? You’ve got to be kidding.’ She forced a laugh, relieved that he wasn’t angry any more. ‘I miss you so much. I haven’t stopped thinking about you for a second.’

‘Tomorrow can’t come soon enough,’ he swore.

‘I can’t wait...but I can’t use Charlie’s again,’ she abruptly recalled, her nervous tension rocketing as she wondered frantically how she was going to ditch Boyce, short of swinging out of her bedroom window on a rope like Tarzan’s Jane.

Charlie had had a point, she acknowledged unhappily. She wasn’t cut out for this game of sneaking around. She so badly wanted everything to be above board. No matter how much her intelligence told her that she was not a married woman except on paper—which she told herself on a very regular basis—her conscience reminded her that she had taken her vows in a church and had meant them at the time she made them.

‘Why not ask him for the divorce? Use the opportunity,’ Paul suggested meaningfully. ‘Stop being such a coward. The guy is totally indifferent to you. Why should he care?’

A tiny sound sent Leah’s head flying up. A surge of bone-chilling horror paralysed her to the spot—but not before she dropped the phone with a clatter.

She had forgotten to close the door again. Nik stood there, as incredibly still and silent as a centuries-old statue. Literally traumatised by the sight, Leah stared back at him with very wide sapphire-blue eyes as if he had just dropped down through the ceiling without warning.

Nik...she tried to say lightly, but when she opened her dry mouth no sound emerged at all.

‘Dinner...’ he murmured smoothly, and smiled. ‘But finish your call first.’

Reaching down, she fumbled for the phone. ‘Bye,’ she said, and cut the connection.




CHAPTER THREE


HER HEART hammering wildly behind her breastbone, Leah watched Nik swing on his heel and depart and then all her muscles gave and she was ready to flop with almost sick relief. He couldn’t have heard anything. He would have said something if he had... wouldn’t he? Or reacted in some way, which he hadn’t. He had actually smiled.

As she left the bedroom, fighting to regain her smashed composure, she heard the manservant tell Nik that the car was waiting. As she neared the hall, she heard Nik cancel it. Had he been planing to dine out and then changed his mind? Well, she certainly hoped he wasn’t staying in for her benefit. A little voice told her how exceedingly unlikely it was that Nik would do anything for her benefit.

‘I have some calls of my own to make,’ Nik delivered in a flat aside as she drew almost level. ‘Don’t wait for me.’

Leah ate without even being aware of what she was eating. She felt guilty, enervated, dismayingly confused. Her temples throbbed with strain. All her life she had been open and honest...well, that was until three short months ago when Paul had accidentally sent her flying in Harrods. Deception was abhorrent to her but it hadn’t occurred to her at the outset that she would become involved with him. He had insisted on taking her into the restaurant. They had laughed and chatted over coffee. Nothing could have been more innocent. The second meeting had been entirely accidental as well...

Pushing her plate away, Leah gulped down a glass of wine but it didn’t take the nasty taste from her mouth. Why on earth did she feel like this? All she had to do was ask Nik for a divorce soon and it would all be over. Maybe she should stop seeing Paul until then. Was that what she should be doing? Or maybe she should just walk out and leave Nik a note to find the next time he was in London. Cowardly, but probably all he deserved.

She was quite sure that Nik hadn’t agonised over any of his women. He certainly hadn’t cared about Leah’s feelings. Leah had had to live with humiliation in newsprint as well as in private. Nik was extremely photogenic and a gossip columnist’s dream, the married man who led the adulterer’s dream existence without any apparent interference from his wife. For Nik to say that he had been on a leash for five years was errant nonsense. But then two wrongs did not make a right. Why should she stoop to Nik’s level?

Deciding against coffee, the exhaustion of extreme stress creeping over her like a suffocating blanket, Leah decided to go to bed. Her strained mouth compressed when she remembered that she had no nightwear. The towelling robe hung in the bathroom for the use of guests was too bulky for comfort. In the end she slid naked between the smooth percale sheets and in the comforting darkness she reached a decision. Tomorrow morning she would tell Nik that she wanted a divorce. Then there would be no further need for her over-active conscience to torment her with this ridiculous sense of being in the wrong.

She awakened from a deep sleep with a start. The overhead lights were on full and she blinked in complete disorientation as she sat up, momentarily not even recalling where she was. And then her sleepy eyes focused on Nik where he was poised several feet from the bed and flew wide. He looked like hell; that was her first thought as she clutched the sheet protectively round herself, belatedly recalling her nudity.

His luxuriant black hair was tousled, his tie was missing and the white silk dress-shirt he wore beneath his dinner-jacket was half-open, displaying a disturbing wedge of bronzed chest, liberally sprinkled with curling dark whorls of hair. His strong, dark features were fiercely clenched and for someone of his usually vibrant skintone he was staggeringly pale. Almost as though he was in shock, she thought uncertainly... severe shock.

“Wh—what’s wrong...what time is it?’ she mumbled, pushing a hand through the silken disarray of the silvery hair falling round her shoulders, swallowing back a yawn as she glanced at her watch to discover that it was the early hours of the morning.

‘You have dishonoured my name,’ Nik breathed in what sounded more like broken English by virtue of the unusual thickness of his accent and his decidedly rough delivery.

Leah cleared her throat and looked back at him, still not quite awake, fighting through the fog of her slow reactions. Eyes as black as pitch clashed on a violent collision course with hers and the explosive tension emanating from him in electrifying waves was finally communicated to her.

‘Excuse me?’ she muttered, certain that he couldn’t possibly have said what she had thought he had said.

‘My wife with another man...’ He could hardly get the words out as he continued to stare at her with unwavering force as though she were some alien entity he had never seen before.

Ghostly fingers danced up her taut spinal cord. She tried and failed to swallow. But what ironically struck Leah hardest was not his evident discovery that she had been seeing another man but that truly staggering designation of ‘my wife’, a label which until now Nik had never once been heard to voice. In turn, Leah found that same label almost unbelievably offensive, not to mention ridiculous in the context of their marriage.

‘You do not deny it,’ Nik murmured, every powerful angle of his lean body rigid with raw tension.

Leah hugged the sheet, wondering dazedly why he was so incensed. For shock she should have read disbelief. Had he expected her to sit there like some wet, faithful Penelope forever, watching her life drain away into nothingness? All right, so she had been a doormat for a very long time, but surely even Nik could not have expected that to last indefinitely? And, in any case, what was it to him?

‘How did you find out?’ she asked, not as steadily as she would have liked, but fighting the intimidation of his dark, menacing attitude with all her strength.

‘You do not even seem to appreciate the magnitude of your offence.’ Nik studied her with outraged dark eyes and, if possible, he was even paler than he had been minutes earlier.

‘Have you been drinking?’ Leah prompted weakly, wondering if that was what lay at the foot of such utterly unwarranted melodrama. Coming into her room in the middle of the night, confronting her like a wronged husband...how could he possibly consider himself wronged?

‘What the hell has that to do with anything?’ Moving an unwelcome step closer, Nik abruptly spread two lean hands in a violent arc of eloquent expression. ‘I hear you on the phone with your lover. What I hear I cannot believe!’

‘Oh.’ Leah bent her head. She should have guessed. But Nik was so naturally devious, he hadn’t given a sign at the time. She tried to recall what she had said but she couldn’t, the conversation having been rushed and overshadowed by Nik’s appearance. Well, she thought, sucking in a deep breath, it wouldn’t have been the way she would have chosen for Nik to find out, but maybe it was for the best that it was all finally out in the open.

‘I had the London phone bills faxed to me and then I used the redial facility on the phone you had employed and checked it against the number you call most frequently.’

Devious didn’t begin to describe him. An odd squirming sensation afflicted Leah and she fought it, glancing up to say tightly, ‘I would have told you about him if you had asked.’

‘Told me about him? Cristo...do you have no shame?’

Her chin came up. ‘Why should I be ashamed?’ But for some inexplicable reason his attitude was having that effect on her and that made her angry.

‘You...are...my...wife,’ Nik spelt out with a flash of even white teeth and an aura of pure violence, on the brink of being unleashed.

Instinctively, Leah edged across to the far side of the bed, assailed by bewilderment and something that was coming perilously close to fear in spite of her anger. When he said she was his wife she wanted to scream back at him that she was no more his wife than a stranger in the street but his mood forestalled her. He was scaring her. She didn’t want to risk adding fuel to the fire.

‘Perhaps you’ll be feeling more reasonable in the morning.’ She placed gentle stress on the last three words.

‘Why?’ Nik demanded in a low, seething undertone, striding round the bed. ‘Why would I be feeling more reasonable?’

As Leah attempted to repeat the evasive manoeuvre she had utilised mere seconds earlier, Nik disconcerted her entirely by suddenly coming down on the bed and clamping a bruising hand round her arm to hold her in place.

‘What are you doing?’ she shrieked in sudden panic.

He spat something in Greek at her and pinned her down by her other arm as well when she attempted to pull free. White as a sheet, her teeth chattering with shock, she gazed up at him with frightened eyes.

Blazing black eyes bit down into her. ‘How often have you been with him?’

‘I...I didn’t count.’ Her mind was a total terrified blank.

‘Theos.’ Nik intoned with vicious intent. ‘I will kill him... I will wipe him from the face of this earth! He’s dead. He may still be walking around but he is dead.’

‘Don’t s-say things like that!’ Leah gasped in horror.

‘And what about you? What do I do with you?’

‘Me?’ On the edge of hysteria and frozen there, Leah stared up at him aghast. He was unhinged. That was the only possible explanation.

‘Where did you meet him?’

‘I’m not telling you anything about him!’ she asserted, shivering as she recalled his threats.

‘Paul Stephen Woods. He’s twenty-eight. He’s a would-be artist, part-time salesman. He’s an only child, blond, blue-eyed, six feet tall and he is very ambitious. I don’t need you to tell me any of that.’

Leah was transfixed. The tip of her tongue snaked out to moisten her dry lips. She trembled. ‘Why are you behaving like this? Why should it matter to you? I’m not your wife—not really your wife...’

‘Ohi...no?’ he probed dangerously. ‘You carry my name. You wear my ring. You live in my house. I feed you, I clothe you, I keep you.’

Mortified beyond bearing, Leah reddened fiercely. ‘And I hate you!’

‘If that is true, you will hate me a lot more by the time I am finished,’ Nik responded darkly in the pulsating silence.

‘Let me go,’ she whispered shakily.

‘You will never see him again,’ he swore, his eyes smouldering down at her in barely leashed rage. In a sudden fluid movement he shifted back from her, releasing her arms. ‘But I will never forgive you for this...’

Feeling weak as a kitten, she slumped back against the pillows. Her reply just leapt off her tongue. ‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll never forgive you either.’

It was a mistake. Halfway to the door, Nik stilled and spun back. ‘So now you tell me the truth.’

‘What truth?’

‘That this is a deliberate attempt to attract my attention,’ he condemned with splintering fury. ‘No wonder you left tracks a blind man could follow...no wonder I am treated to an open door and the sound of you exchanging sweet nothings with your lover!’

‘Attract your attention?’ Leah repeated, her exquisite face alight with unhidden incredulity, physical weakness banished as she sat up in one abrupt movement.





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