The Konstantos Marriage Demand (8 page)

‘When will I meet your fiancée?’

Or even get to know her name? It was the first time she’d ever taken on a commission with so little information and no chance to meet the bride-to-be. She had never encountered a set-up like this.

‘You’ll have all the information you need when the time is right.’

At that moment a bell sounded and a light came on over the seats, an indication that they should fasten their seatbelts. Immediately Nikos held out his hand, palm upwards.

‘Phone…’ he snapped, with an impatient beckoning gesture of the hand that was between them.

Her mind still half on her mother and George, Sadie blindly followed the command that was in his rough, irritated voice. She had dropped her mobile phone into his upturned palm before it occurred to her to question what he wanted with it.

‘Hey—hang on…!’

But she had spoken too late. Even as she opened her mouth Nikos’s long fingers had snapped shut over her phone, and without another word he dropped it swiftly into the pocket of his jacket, out of sight and out of reach.

‘You can’t do that!’ she protested. ‘That’s my property!’

The look he turned on her said that he could do whatever he wanted and she couldn’t stop him.

‘I prefer to have your communication with the outside world under my control.’

‘But how can I keep in touch with my mother—with home?’

A touch of panic made her voice raw. How would her mother cope if she wasn’t at the end of a line to offer help if she was needed? The rough and ready support system she had been able to set in place might be enough, but only if Sarah could contact her daughter at any moment she felt she needed to.

‘You will be able to phone Thorn Trees once a day to see how things are. But other than that—’

‘It isn’t enough!’

‘It will have to be enough. Because that is how it is going to be.’

‘But my mother—is unwell.’

She was severely tempted to move forward, try to snatch the phone from the pocket of his immaculately tailored jacket, but the urgent sense of need warred uncomfortably with a strong sense of self preservation. She was here, on her own, in his plane, thousands of feet up in the air. If she caused a scene, started a struggle, then she was at a disadvantage from the off. Nikos would only have to raise his voice and call his staff…

No, don’t be ridiculous. He wouldn’t even need to call anyone, she acknowledged to herself. Nikos could see off her feeble attempt at resistance so easily that she would be a fool even to try it. But even so she still couldn’t give in to such domineering behaviour.

‘You have no right—!’

‘I have every right. I am the one who makes the rules, not you. You are here because I allow you to be here—no other reason. And you are here to do a job.’

‘A job I can’t do without a phone…’

Her eyes went to the laptop case still in his possession, carefully tucked under his arm, and a shiver of cold panic ran along every nerve. Did he really mean to isolate her totally, have her under his complete control?

‘Or my computer.’

‘Any information or help you need will be provided once we are in my villa. All you have to do is ask.’

‘I can’t work that way.’

‘You work any way that I ask of you.’

It was a deliberate verbal slap down, reminding her harshly just who was in charge here. And she would be every sort of a fool to forget that, Sadie reminded herself miserably. She had been in grave danger of forgetting just how important this job was to her.

She was grateful for the lifeline he had tossed her, the chance to let her mother stay in the only place where she felt safe. And now here she was, risking everything by setting herself against the only man who could ensure that would still happen. She should be thanking him, agreeing to go along with anything he suggested. But still—stealing her phone…!

‘I do not want the paparazzi finding out anything about this,’ Nikos went on, snatching the conversational rug from
under her feet and stunning her into silence in the space of a single heartbeat.

That she understood. She had no argument against it, and she couldn’t even try to find one. The paparazzi and the popular press had been the bane of their lives when she and Nikos had been together. They had plagued them incessantly, day in and day out. They had never had a moment’s peace or time to themselves. She had hated it, been made miserable by the constant hounding, the pushing and shoving, the shouted demands and the incessant flashing of a hundred or more cameras.

And at the end…Sadie shivered at just the memory. At the end the relentless attentions of those snoopers had made everything a thousand times worse.

She understood why Nikos couldn’t let his new fiancée go through that. But she wouldn’t be human if she didn’t feel a pang of jealousy at the protective way he was determined to shield her.

‘You can trust me!’

The look he turned on her told her that he felt the opposite was true.

‘Trust…’ he said, drawing out the word until it was a sound of pure doubt, cynical and rough. ‘Ah, yes, we had such a trusting relationship, didn’t we?’

Sadie winced away from the contemptuous mockery of his tone. She had trusted him with her heart, her future, her life. And he had torn it all to pieces and tossed it back in her face.

‘This isn’t about you and me. And I wouldn’t—’

‘I trust no one.’ It was a flat, cold statement. No room for negotiation. ‘I find it’s better that way. Now, if you will fasten your safety belt…’

‘What a terribly sad way to live your life,’ Sadie flung at him, but she knew that she had no option but to do as he said. The seat belt light was still flashing and the jet was already
beginning to alter its path to turn in the circle needed for descent. Personal safety, if nothing else, demanded that she acted sensibly.

‘That is my phone,’ she managed, determined to keep the defiance up as she sank back into the soft leather of her seat and reached for the belt. ‘And, paparazzi or not, you have no right…’

Except the right of possession, she acknowledged to herself as Nikos blatantly ignored her, strapping himself in. And in this case possession was all, because she had no hope that he would return the phone to her, no matter how she pleaded.

Miserably she yanked the seatbelt tight, tighter than it needed to be. And she forced herself to stare out of the window, blinking fiercely until the tears that burned at the back of her eyes ebbed away, leaving them dry and unfocussed. She wished she could do the same with her thoughts, driving away the bitter sting of the slap of reality right in her face.

Because nothing could bring home to her more definitely or more cruelly the way that, in Nikos’s mind, she was now no longer part of his life than the nasty little exchange she had just endured. Nothing could make it plainer that she was firmly on the outside, kept from the centre of his world by high, strong fences, the ‘Keep Out’ signs clearly and forcefully displayed. He didn’t even trust her, putting her so far outside any circle that could be termed his friends that she could only assume her place was amongst those he considered his enemies. And the thought of being considered an enemy by him made a sensation like the crawl of something cold and slimy slither down her spine.

Out beyond the window she could see the land below becoming clearer and clearer as the plane continued its descent. Down there was Greece, Venizelos Airport and the city of Athens itself. The last time she had been here it had been as the newly engaged fiancée of Nikos Konstantos. She had
stared out of the window with keen interest, bubbling with excitement at the thought that she was going to set foot in the homeland of the man she loved for the very first time. How different was this arrival, with no sense of excitement or joy, only a terrible feeling of oppression and apprehension, uncertainty about what was to come.

Then she had felt as if she was coming home. As if she was launching a new beginning, one that would put the tensions and stresses that had ruined her family life behind her and put her on the path to a much happier future.

This time she had no idea what to expect. The prospect of what was ahead of her made her insides twist into tight knots of panic at the realisation that this time she was truly alone, without a single ally on her side. No one she could turn to for help or support.

She might understand, rationally at least, just why Nikos had felt that he needed to take her phone and her laptop. But that didn’t stop the nasty, creeping sense of fear that there might be more to it than he was letting on.

Just what did he have planned for her? And why did she have the terrible feeling that in coming to Greece like this she had made the terrible mistake of jumping right out of the frying pan and into the fiercely blazing heart of a savagely burning fire?

M
AY WAS SUPPOSED
to be the best possible time to visit Greece. A time when the sun shone but the weather had yet to heat up to the baking temperatures of summer. Sadie had experienced some of that heat when she had visited Greece before and she had found it hard to cope. But then they had only stayed a couple of nights in the capital before flying to the tiny island of Icaros that had been owned by Nikos’s family for generations going way, way back. Once there, she’d found the breezes from the sea had helped to ease the scorching temperatures and made life more enjoyable.

But Icaros was no longer owned by the Konstantos family. Sadie’s father had seen to that. And the memory of just what Edwin had done was a troublesome worry, like the ache of a sore tooth, nagging at her mind all the time.

‘How are you this morning?’

Nikos’s voice startled her from her thoughts, making her jump nervously as he strolled out of the living room on to the wide main balcony where she had been trying to at least make a pretence of eating some of the breakfast that had been laid out on a table in the sunshine.

‘I trust you spent a comfortable night?’

‘That depends on what you mean by comfortable.’

Dressed more casually in the warmth of his native country, he was devastatingly dark and stunning in a soft white shirt and loose beige trousers. His feet were bare, lean and bronzed on the white stone of the balcony, so that he moved as silently and easily as some loose-limbed cat, every bit as lethally elegant and striking.

‘The room was not to your satisfaction?’

Nikos strolled over to the table and picked up a bunch of grapes, plucking one from the stalk and tossing it into his mouth.

‘My room was fine. As you know it had to be. This is a beautiful house.’

And if she needed anything to bring home to her just how far the Konstantos family had come since their lowest point five years before then this was it.

The villa had been a real surprise. The first of many. The first time Nikos had brought her to Athens they had stayed in his large apartment in the Kolonaki district, overlooking the Parthenon. That apartment had been impressive enough, but it was nothing when compared to the Villa Agnanti, where they had arrived late yesterday afternoon. Built into the side of a hill, the huge white house was on several levels, each one going lower down the cliff from the main road. From the lowest level you could walk out through the back gate, step out on to Schinias beach, where the crystal clear Aegean Sea lapped against the shore just metres away. Every single one of the bedrooms had a balcony that overlooked the ocean, but even the gentle sigh of the waves against the sand had not been soothing enough to ease Sadie into sleep last night. Instead she had lain awake and restless, wondering just what she had got herself into and how she was going to manage to handle things here.

‘It has everything I need,’ Nikos responded, but the flat, unemotional level of his voice somehow communicated far more
than what he actually said. It was what he had not said that seemed to reverberate underneath the words and gave them a very different emphasis from the one he had used.

‘But you must know that I wouldn’t be able to rest properly without knowing what was going on at home.’

Sadie adjusted her position against the balustrade, turning so that she was resting her back against the white stonework and looking straight into Nikos’s dark, sculpted face, feeling the warmth of the morning sun beat down on the back of her head.

‘You phoned Thorn Trees just before dinner. All was well then.’

‘But I only had five minutes.’

Five minutes during which the door to the room she had been in was left open and she had been painfully aware of the way that Nikos was waiting for her beyond that door, no doubt listening to every word she said. She had felt like a prisoner under careful observation, unable to manage more than a few stilted sentences in response to her mother’s unrestrained delight at knowing that she was safe in Thorn Trees for the time being at least.

Not that Sarah fully understood that their reprieve was only temporary. The joy that had rung in her mother’s voice had been another twist of the knife in Sadie’s already worried and aching heart. Her mother might think that Nikos had been wildly generous and unbelievably forgiving, she might believe that the stay of execution was permanent and for all time, but Sadie knew it was just that—a stay. And the way Nikos had behaved on the flight here, the fact that her phone and her laptop, her only means of communication with the outside world, were still firmly in his possession left her in no doubt that he wasn’t planning on being forgiving or even kind, but on holding her ruthlessly to their bargain for as long as it took. And then…

And then?

The truth was that she had no idea at all what would happen next. When her time in Greece was up, when she had fulfilled her contract and Nikos and his fiancée were married, then what would happen?

Was the reprieve that he had granted them only for the length of time that she was working for him? And when that was done would he let them stay in Thorn Trees? She couldn’t see it happening.

‘Long enough to assure yourself that your mother is well. You are here to work.’

‘Then let me get some work done! There’s no way I can do anything without my laptop. And without meeting your bride.’

That came out more pointedly than she had planned. The truth was that just the thought of him marrying someone else twisted up her feelings so badly that she didn’t know what to think or how to feel.

‘My bride will not be here for some time. You will not be able to talk to her.’

‘But that’s ridiculous! How can I work on your—? We—’

To Sadie’s horror her mixed up feelings seemed to have tangled on her tongue, making her stumble over the word.

‘Your wedding—when I don’t know who she is or what she likes? I need to talk to her.’

‘You will talk to me.’

Nikos tossed another grape into his mouth and chewed on it before swallowing it down. Sadie found that the simple movement held her gaze transfixed on the lean line of his throat, the muscles moving under the smooth olive skin. She felt her own mouth dry in response, her own throat move as she swallowed too.

‘I will tell you everything you need to know.’

‘You will?’

Was that embarrassing croak really her voice? Sadie moved
to the table set out on the balcony and reached for a glass of orange juice, gulping it down to ease the tight constriction of her throat.

‘A wedding is a woman’s most special day. She would want it to be absolutely perfect.’

‘And it will be,’ Nikos returned with smooth arrogance, clamping sharp white teeth down on another beautifully fresh grape. A tiny trickle of juice slid out on to his lips and he swept it away with a slick of his tongue.

Sadie forced her eyes down to study the surface of her drink as if it held the answer to some vitally important question. Anything to distract herself from the way that her thoughts were heading. Deep inside she was having to struggle with the wild, crazy impulse to move forward, press her mouth to that one small spot on his lips, to savour the sweetness of the grape combined with the intensely personal taste of Nikos’s lips.

She was still fighting the sensual need, her fingers gripping her glass tightly, when Nikos spoke again.

‘I will see to that.’

In the face of his cold confidence the rush of physical response faded as rapidly as it had come, leaving her feeling shivery and unsure, as if in the grip of a sudden fever. For a moment she had let herself forget how icily controlling and ruthless Nikos could be. And forgetting that was not a good idea.

‘And you think that everything you do is so perfect? That you can never make a mistake?’

‘Not perfect, no.’

Nikos pulled out one of the chairs and lowered himself into it, stretching out long legs in front of him, crossing them at the ankle. The change of position should have made him look more relaxed, at ease, but strangely it had exactly the opposite effect. He looked like nothing so much as a hunting tiger,
lazily settling down to keep a watch on its prey before it decided whether it was worth the effort to pounce or not. The glass in her hand shook with the tremor of her grip and she hastily banged it down on the table, so as to avoid spilling some of the juice on to the stones of the balcony.

‘And as to making mistakes, well, if I was immune to them then I would never have had anything to do with you.’

‘But you can’t take control of someone else’s life like this. I would never let you get away with it…What?’ she questioned in surprise as Nikos’s low laughter broke into her outburst.

‘I am only too well aware of that,
agapiti mou.’
The cynical emphasis on that
my dear
turned it into the exact opposite of any term of affection and the gleam in the golden eyes as he laughed up at her was totally lacking in any sort of warmth. ‘Why do you think that I would prefer I kept you to myself while we work on plans for the wedding?’

‘If you intend to go ahead and marry this girl this time.’

No sooner had the words escaped her than she wished them back. Too sharp, too bitter, they revealed far more of her personal thoughts than she had ever wanted. The last thing she wanted was for Nikos to feel there was any lingering bitterness about the fact that their marriage had never taken place. She was free of that—wasn’t she?

‘Do you doubt it?’

‘What do you think? I have personal experience of just how much you mean your marriage proposals, remember?’

Nikos’s mouth twisted slightly, his penetrating stare seeming to burn right into her soul.

‘But I always intended to go ahead and marry you.’

‘You did?’

Nikos swallowed some of his coffee, then grimaced in distaste.

‘This stuff is cold. But no matter.’ Pushing back his chair, he got to his feet again. ‘We should be heading out anyway.’

‘Heading out? Why? Where are we going?’

‘You said that you wanted to know more about the wedding. What better way to start than with the place I have in mind for the ceremony? Go and collect whatever you will need. We leave in ten minutes.’

It was going to be a long day, Nikos reflected as he watched Sadie’s retreating back, the sensual sway of her hips, as she made her way into the house. The morning sun beat down on his head and down below, at the bottom of the cliffs, the roar of the surf pounding against the shore was a constant background sound to everything.

A sound that fitted the restless hammering of his thoughts as he fought a constant battle to keep his more primitive male impulses under control. He was beginning to wonder just how long he could keep up this pretence of wanting to work with her on the wedding. The truth was that work had nothing at all to do with what he wanted to do with Sadie Carteret.

When he had walked out on to the balcony and seen her standing there, it had been all that he could do not to march across and grab her, pulling her hard against him and bringing his mouth down roughly on top of hers, kissing her until they were both reeling with hunger, their thoughts obliterated in the need that he knew would flare between them.

The sun had gleamed on the dark gloss of her hair, gilding the pale shoulders in the sleeveless red sundress. A red sundress that had big black buttons all the way from the dipping neckline right to where the hem swirled around her slender shapely calves. Those buttons had put the devil’s torment into his mind, tempting him almost beyond endurance with images of closing his fingers over each one, sliding it carefully, slowly from its fastening, and then moving down. Exposing first the
soft creamy curves of her breasts, the shadowed valley between them. A valley that he knew from experience—all too short an experience—would be warm and slightly moist, the intimate scent of her skin heightened by the heat of her body, reaching out to him and then falling away with each hasty, unevenly snatched breath she took.

And then moving lower, down to her waist, letting the folds of the soft material part over her hips, where the shadow of her sex showed beneath the delicate covering of her underwear. Lower still, until it fell away from her body, leaving her exposed and revealed to the hunger of his eyes, the touch of his hands.

No! With a rough jerk of his head, he pulled his mind away from the sensual thoughts that plagued him and forced them back on to the here and now.

Because here and now he had to concentrate on other things. But it was damn near impossible to concentrate on anything when all he wanted to do was to take Sadie to bed and spend the rest of the day sating himself in the soft warmth of her body.

She would let him too. Or at least she wouldn’t put up much of a fight. He had seen it in her eyes when they had been on the balcony. The sensual awareness that she hadn’t been able to hide. The way her head had gone back, her lips parting slightly, softly. The way that the dark pupils of her eyes had enlarged until her eyes were almost all black, only the faintest trace of mossy green at their edges.

If he had walked across to her then, taken the glass from her hand and replaced it against her lips with his own mouth, then she would not have protested. Or not much.

It would be that moment in his office all over again. The response that neither of them could hide. That he was damn sure he didn’t want to hide. And that he knew Sadie was fighting to conceal from him now because she believed he was going to marry someone else.

A faint smile crossed his mouth as he followed Sadie inside. He was enjoying watching her struggle with the flames that flared between them and the feeling that she could not, must not act on them. He would keep her on that particular rack for a while longer. The end result, when he finally let her off, would be well worth waiting for.

‘We’re here.’

Sadie had to struggle to bite back the exclamation of relief when Nikos made his announcement perhaps fifty minutes later. Helicopter flights were not her favourite form of travel, and from the moment Nikos had led her from the house to his private helipad, where a gleaming machine that looked like nothing so much as a giant black dragonfly had waited for them, her stomach had been twisting tight with tension. And that sensation had been made all the worse by the way the limited space inside had forced her into close confinement with Nikos for the length of the flight.