The Konstantos Marriage Demand (4 page)

‘No, it is not.’

Nikos’s golden eyes flicked over her face, catching and locking with her furious gaze just for one moment. Then he looked away again, heavy lids coming down to cut him off from her.

‘I thought it was, but now I find it just won’t do. It isn’t enough. It doesn’t give me the satisfaction that I wanted. I need to find some other way of making sure of that.’

And then she knew. With a terrible, sinking sense of despair she realised just what was going on here. Nikos Konstantos had always been determined to have his revenge for the way that Edwin had ruined his family. He had worked for that and for nothing else all the five years since she had last seen him. He’d taken the Carteret name, the Carteret business and stamped them into the mud, drained them of every last penny they possessed. He was even prepared to take the family home from them and throw her and her mother and little George out into the street.

And she had done the worst thing possible, made the most terrible mistake imaginable, by coming here to plead with him for a chance.

Because that had given Nikos one more chance to exact revenge on the member of the family he had the most personal reasons to hate. The one that he hadn’t yet crushed beneath his heel and laughed in triumph as he did so.

He hadn’t truly had his revenge on Sadie herself. Until now. And now it was strictly personal and totally ruthless. This wasn’t about the house or the past except as it pitted the two of them against each other. This was the last part that would make his campaign of revenge complete.

He had her in his sights and he wasn’t letting go.

‘And the way you’ve found is by making sure that my family don’t have a home to live in. How can you live with that on your conscience?’

‘No problem.’

Nikos’s shrug dismissed the question as being of no importance to him whatsoever. He didn’t care and he had no intention of caring.

‘I live with it as easily as you and your father could walk away from the devastation you made of my life—and my family’s.’

‘And you think that gives you the moral high ground? You were pretty damn good at playing games at that time, if I remember rightly.’

‘Not games, Sadie.’

Nikos shook his head, his expression almost sorrowful, but Sadie knew that sorrow was the furthest thing from what he was feeling. He might hide it well but she knew that deep inside he was probably taking a cruel delight in tormenting her like this, having her with her back to the wall, nowhere to run.

‘Believe me, I was serious. Deadly serious.’

‘Oh, yeah, deadly serious about perpetuating that damn family feud. And look what that did to you. It almost ruined your family.’

‘Almost,’ Nikos echoed with deadly emphasis. ‘Almost—
but it did not actually ruin us, did it? Not totally. And now the shoe is very definitely on the other foot.’

‘As I’m only too well aware,’ Sadie muttered belligerently.

She wondered what would happen if she told Nikos that the only reason that
‘almost’
was even there was because of her. Because of the choice she’d made.

He’d probably never believe her. The mood he was in, he wasn’t going to listen to anything she said.

‘So this is checkmate, is it?’ she went on. ‘You must know that I can’t leave it like this—without persuading you to let us stay in Thorn Trees….’

‘That isn’t going to happen,’ Nikos stated with cold obduracy.

‘So what do I do?’

Once more those powerful shoulders under the superbly tailored jacket lifted in an unfeeling and dismissive shrug.

‘You said you were prepared to do anything to get what you wanted,’ he drawled heartlessly. ‘Turn those wiles that you were using earlier on someone else and you might have more success with someone who doesn’t know you as well as I do.’

‘Wiles…’ Sadie spluttered in furious indignation. He really thought that she had set out to seduce him as a way to manipulate him into giving her what she wanted. ‘How dare you…?’

But Nikos ignored her angry interjection.

‘Find yourself another rich man and beg him to give you a chance to earn the price of the house. He might not find the offer so distasteful—his standards may not be as high as mine.’

Sadie gritted her teeth against the need to refute the implications of that cynical ‘
earn
,’ though her fingers twitched sharply at her side with the urge to lash out and swipe that cold sneer from his arrogant face. Whatever momentary satisfaction it would bring—and it would be very satisfying—it would also make things so much worse and only succeed in angering Nikos even further.

‘And if I did then you would only put the price up higher and higher each time.’

Nikos’s smile was pure cold evil. The smile of the devil.

‘How well you understand me,
glikia mou.
And, knowing me as you do, I am sure that you will recall that once I have made up my mind on a matter then I never change it. No matter what the temptation.’

And he had made up his mind on this, so it would be like battering her head against a brick wall if she continued to try to persuade him.

‘And now, as you have had more than twice the amount of time allotted to you, I really would prefer it if you left immediately.’

Striding across to the door, Nikos pulled it open and stood pointedly, waiting for her to leave.

‘I am sure that both of us would prefer to avoid the publicity that my calling Security might create.’

Knowing Nikos, Sadie recognised when she had come to the end of the road and there was nowhere else she could go. Defeat was staring her in the face and the only thing left to her was to accept it with as much dignity as she possibly could. Though the thought of going home and telling her mother…

Putting her head up high, stiffening her back and straightening her shoulders, she forced her feet to take her towards the door he had indicated. She had fully determined that she wouldn’t say another word. That she wouldn’t show him any weakness. She wouldn’t even look at him. But somehow as she had to pass him her footsteps faltered, and in spite of her determination her reluctant gaze was drawn to his dark, stunning face, meeting the icy glare of those golden eyes.

‘Is there nothing I can do…?’ she began and knew her mistake as she saw his face harden even more, hooded eyes closing off from her.

‘Yes,’ he said coldly, unbelievably. ‘The one thing you can do is go home and start packing—I want you out by the end of the week.’

It was the final blow, but at least his vicious tone was enough to stiffen her resolve.

‘I’ll do that,’ she flung at him, refusing to let him see the terrible sense of defeat that was tearing at her soul.

‘I’d appreciate it.’

Another couple of strides and she was beyond him, out of the room at last and marching straight down the long, soulless corridor, staring straight ahead.

She’d taken it better than he’d thought, Nikos admitted as he watched her go. Just for a moment there he had suspected that she was going to show him that she meant her declaration that she would do
anything
and turn back to him, coming close with smiles and deliberate kisses in an attempt to seduce him into giving her what she wanted.

And if she had done just that? The way his heart kicked and his body tightened gave him his answer.

Gamoto!
Was he really going to let her walk out of his life once again, just as she had done five years before? With the taste of her still on his lips, with his body still in the grip of the burning arousal that just that one kiss had sent flaring through him, he knew that the answer was no. For almost five years he had tried to put this woman out of his mind and now, after less than an hour in her company, he knew why he had never fully managed to do it.

He still wanted her.

He wanted her like hell, in the way that he had never wanted any other woman in his life. And even the knowledge of the vile way she had behaved, the way she’d used an e-mail message to tell him she was backing out of their marriage—less than twenty-four hours before the ceremony—the cold-
voiced rejection that she’d tossed down the stairs, couldn’t erase the yearning hunger that plagued his senses. Watching the sway of her hips, the swing of the glossy dark hair as she walked away from him, he found he was actually considering calling her back, offering to renegotiate.

‘You’ve had five years of taking your revenge. Haven’t you done enough, had enough?’

The echo of her angry voice, just moments before, sounded inside his head. And his own answer came back at him fast, forcing him to face the truth.

‘I thought it was, but now I find it just won’t do. It isn’t enough. It doesn’t give me the satisfaction that I wanted. I need to find some other way of making sure of that.’

When Edwin Carteret had died, he’d thought he was done with the whole, hateful family. He’d clawed back every last penny of the fortune that had been taken from them and doubled it. He’d taken every asset the Carterets had owned—Thorn Trees being the last on the list—and seen his hated enemy reduced to total bankruptcy and ruin. To the black despair that his father had known and had barely even recovered from now. And he had thought that it was enough.

But one meeting with his nemesis in the seductive form of Sadie Carteret had brought that belief crashing down around him. Now at last he could put his finger on the feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction that had plagued him in recent months. Before then he had been working too hard, barely even raising his eyes from his desk, from the files of stock market dealings, the takeover details and investments that had brought him to where he was now. It could never be enough because he hadn’t dealt with the one remaining insult the Carterets had dealt him. Only this time it wasn’t ‘the Carterets’ he had in his sights, but one member of that family in particular.

This time it was personal. Personal between him and seductive, manipulating Sadie Carteret.

And by coming here today Sadie had handed him just the weapon he needed. She was desperate to get her hands on her ancestral family home. Almost as desperate as he was to get his hands on her silken skin, her feminine curves. To have her under him in his bed once more. And the way she’d responded to his kiss had left him in no doubt that she still felt the passion that had brought them together in that one explosive weekend that had just been enough to awaken his appetite, never enough to sate it.

She would do anything she could to get Thorn Trees, she had said. Well, now he’d see how far she was prepared to go to do just that. If things went the way he planned, then she would get the damn house, and he could find the satisfaction he needed and get Sadie Carteret out of his system once and for all. In the most enjoyable way.

For a moment he thought about calling her back, and then paused, shaking his head as he rethought. If he sent a message down in the executive lift then she would get it before she left the building.

Kicking the door shut, he went back to his desk and reached for pen and paper.

The long, long corridor ahead of her blurred and danced as Sadie fought with the tears that burned at her eyes, but this time she was not looking back, she told herself. Not a single glance. Even when it seemed to be an extraordinarily long time before she finally heard the door to Nikos’s office bang shut behind her.

Somehow she made it to the lift, and only once inside did she let herself collapse back against the wall, her whole body sagging limply and her head dropping forward as her eyes closed. It was some moments before she could even think of pressing the button for the ground floor.

She’d tried her best, given it her best shot. And she’d failed. Nothing, it seemed, could prevail against the black, brutal hatred that Nikos had let fester for all these years. Nothing could change him, restore him to the man he had once been. The man who had stolen her heart. The man she had been going to marry.

No.

Shaking herself roughly, she snapped her head up sharply, forcing herself to face facts once and for all.

She had to stop deceiving herself. That Nikos was a fantasy, a deception—a lie. The Nikos she had loved had never truly existed; he had simply been playing with her, manipulating her until he got exactly what he wanted. If her father hadn’t moved in to protect her then the end result could have been far worse than it had. And it had been terrible enough.

The lift came to a halt, the doors sliding open, and Sadie pushed herself into motion, now desperate to get away, to be free of the tainted atmosphere of hatred.

It was as she crossed the wide, marble-floored foyer that she heard the beeping sound from her mobile phone. A text message. She knew who it would be from even before she had taken it from her bag, though the sight of ‘New message from Mum’ on the screen almost made her switch it off and not look.

But that would be the coward’s way out. She had to face her family and let them know that she had failed some time. Taking a deep breath, she pressed the ‘view’ key.

How did you get on?
her mother asked, as Sadie had known she would.
Have you got good news? Can we stay?

Standing in the middle of the foyer, Sadie could only stare at the tiny screen until the backlighting blinked off and the whole thing went black. How was she going to do this? What could she say to soften the blow?

‘Miss Carteret?’

It took a moment or two to register that the voice was speaking to her. That the receptionist she had talked to earlier had come up behind her and was now trying to get her attention.

‘Excuse me, Miss Carteret, I have a message.’

‘A message?’

Sadie stared blankly at the folded sheet of paper the other woman held out to her.

‘From who?’

But even as she asked the question she knew there could only be one person who could have sent it. Only one man who could have dashed off the note and had it brought down to her in the executive lift, so it had caught up with her before she left the building.

Nikos. Just the thought of his name made her hand shake as she reached for the note.