The Konstantos Marriage Demand (9 page)

He’d piloted the helicopter himself, and every movement of his tanned, muscular arms, the strength of his long fingers on the controls, had her mouth drying in sensual response, her own hands tightening on each other where they lay in her lap. So it was with a sense of escape that she watched the land, the first they had seen for the last twenty minutes of a journey which had been mostly over sparkling blue sea, come closer and closer as the helicopter descended.

‘Where are we?’ she asked when at last they were on the ground, with the engine turned off, and she was able to look around.

But Nikos was already out of the craft and, ducking to avoid the slowing blades, coming round to open the door on her side. It was as she set foot on the ground, the blast of heat hitting her after the controlled temperature inside the plane,
that recognition hit, and with it a cruel wave of desperate memory. She knew this rugged shoreline, the steep cliffs that rose above the sea. And there in the distance was the low, white-painted, unexpectedly simple house where she had once spent a magical couple of days when Nikos had first brought her to Greece and to his family home.

‘This is Icaros!’

She knew she looked as startled as she sounded, her head coming up sharply in surprise, green eyes locking with cool gold. And it was then that she realised he had been aiming for just this response.

‘You got the island back?’

Nikos’s response was a curt nod.

‘I got the island back,’ he confirmed.

‘Oh, I’m so glad about that.’

That made his eyes narrow in frank disbelief.

‘You are?’

‘Of course! I know how much this island means to your family.’

It was in the tiny chapel here that his father and mother, his grandparents and every great-grandparent they could remember had been married. A tradition that was vital to the man Nikos was. And his sister, who had died as a baby, was buried in the chapel grounds.

‘So did your father.’

Nikos’s tone was so savage that Sadie actually flinched away from it, recoiling in her chair as if from a blow to her face.

‘That was why he sold it to someone else instead of keeping it for himself. An extra fortune for him, and more of a problem for me to get it back if I ever tried it. I would have to negotiate with someone else and he thought he would be able to watch.’

Sadie shivered both at that icy tone and at the thought of
how her father had behaved. The island had been one of the weapons Edwin had used against her when she had refused to believe that Nikos didn’t really love her. If it was a love-match, her father had said, wouldn’t she be marrying in the little island chapel, like every other Konstantos bride before her? And faced with that and so much other evidence, she had had no choice but to believe him.

She hadn’t wanted to think that her father was right. Hadn’t wanted to accept his bitter, cynical way of thinking about everything. He had been so totally obsessed with getting revenge on the Konstantos family that it had taken over his life. But she had no idea why.

‘Do you know what started this crazy feud in the first place?’ she asked impulsively, not caring if the question was wise or if it would push her even further into trouble with Nikos, raking up old bitter memories that were far better left buried.

‘There was always rivalry between the families—in business dealings. But then it became personal, when the woman my grandfather was supposed to marry ran off with your grandfather instead.
Pappous
never forgot—or forgave. And he made sure that the Carterets paid for it financially. After that, if one family could attack the other in any way, they did.’

Nikos moved away from the helicopter and paced over to the edge of the cliff to stand staring out at the sea. His long body was silhouetted dark against the sunlight, the width of his shoulders seeming even more impressive than ever.

Suddenly, painfully, Sadie was reminded of the days when they had been together. When, if she had seen him like this, she would have been able to go up to him, slide her arms around that narrow waist until they met over the flat stomach. She could have rested her head against the powerful back, felt the heat of his skin through his shirt and inhaled the rich, intimate scent of his body.

That was how she had always dealt with difficult times in the past. Whatever mood he had been in, she had always been able to bring him round that way, to make him relax and smile again. More often than not he would turn in her arms, gathering her close to kiss her fiercely, until her head was spinning with happiness and desire.

That was how they had ended up in bed together the first time on that weekend before her wedding…

No, no, no!

Desperately she dragged her thoughts back from the painful path they were following. She must not let herself remember how it had once been. It was too cruel, too distressing. And all those ‘once had beens’ had never really existed. She had been living in a dream world, swallowing every deliberate lie that Nikos tossed her way and believing she had found the love of her life. The risks of even allowing such memories back into her life was too great to contemplate with any degree of safety. If she let them back into her mind, into her heart, then she would never be able to cope.

‘There was more to it than that.’ She tried to continue the conversation in order to distract herself from the torment of her memories. ‘Something more recent that had made things even worse. My father was…
obsessed
is the only word. He’d always perpetuated the feud in a business sense, but something new happened to drive him even further into the depths of hatred for the Konstantos family. Into a determination to ruin them once and for all.’

‘And you didn’t know what that was?’

‘No,’ Sadie managed, her eyes now fixed on the horizon. Her heart was thudding erratically, making it difficult to breathe. She was too much on edge, too aware of the difference between being here now like this and the way things had been that first time to manage to control her voice.

‘But I do know, in the end, it never truly brought him any real satisfaction. He drove his family and friends away because nothing else mattered to him. And he broke my mother’s heart. I found out later that my mother had had an affair. It destroyed their marriage, but I’m sure it was because she felt neglected, abandoned because he was so obsessed.’

It was so much easier to talk like this when Nikos had his back to her. When she couldn’t see his dark, stunning face and the cold contempt that burned in his eyes, thinned his beautiful, sensual mouth. Like this she could still pretend that they had some sort of a civilised relationship.

‘We could—we could end it,’ she suggested, buoyed up on a sudden rush of hope. ‘We could say it stops right here and now and—’

‘And what?’ Nikos enquired, turning suddenly to face her again. ‘And what, Sadie,
agapiti mou?
Hmm? We end it now and—what? Become close friends?’

He didn’t have to explain how he felt about that. It was there in the disgust stamped clearly onto the beautifully carved features, in the twist to his lips, the bite of the words he flung into her face.

‘No—not friends. We could never be that…’

‘Not friends,’ Nikos repeated with a brutal emphasis, his tongue curling in distaste on the word. ‘Because friends would never turn friends out of their home. Because friends would waive the cost of the rent—or even the purchase price of a very expensive house.’

‘No!’ Sadie shook her head violently so that her dark hair spun out wildly in the sunshine. ‘No—nothing like that!’

Did he really think that that was why she had proposed ending the feud? So that as her ‘friend’ he would feel obliged to let her off her debts and hand Thorn Trees over to her at a peppercorn rent? In the back of her mind she could hear once
more that mocking ‘mate’s rates’ that he had tossed at her in his office a couple of days before.

‘You’re right! We could never be friends. And I wouldn’t want to be. All I meant was that we could call a halt to these stupid hostilities and—and live totally separate lives. There’s no way we ever have to even see each other again.’

The thought seemed to stop her breath in her throat. She’d managed to get on with her life these past years by refusing to let herself even think about Nikos and pushing away every memory when it tried to surface. It had nearly broken her but she had managed it. Now it would all be to do again. And, knowing how hard it had been the first time, she flinched away from the prospect of going through it once more.

‘And the sooner that happens, the better as far as I’m concerned.’

He was supposed to respond to that. She even paused, waiting for him to say something but Nikos remained strangely silent. Silent and still. Only the burn of his eyes, fixed on her, unblinking, seemed alive in his set and rigid face.

She should take that as a yes, Sadie decided. It certainly wasn’t any sort of a no. Nothing like a rush to say that, no, they must not separate, must not be apart again. Of course not. But she wished he would say something. Anything.

And suddenly she had to speak again, if only to break the disturbing, nerve-stretching silence that had been going on for far too long.

‘We’d better get this job done so that I can get out of here and be on my way.’

She would be professional if it killed her, she told herself. It was the only way she was going to get through this. She would do the best damn job she could, never put a foot wrong, and then Nikos would have no reason at all to find fault. No reason to go back on his word to let her mother stay in Thorn Trees.

But it was one thing to make that sort of a resolve, quite another to stick to it when every place they walked held a memory of the time when they had been together. Every path, every cove, even every rock, spoke of a happier time, a time when she had known the joy of love, even though it had all been a bitter deception and not the delight she had thought it to be.

It was almost as if Nikos knew what was in her thoughts, what had been in her heart when she had visited Icaros with him all those years before, and was now using it to torment her with the fact that this was where he would be marrying his new fiancée, the woman he loved. And it was when they crossed the little wooden bridge that led from the main island to the high headland, where the tiny chapel stood, that she knew she couldn’t hold back any more. Coming to an abrupt halt, she turned to Nikos, brushing back the dark silk of the her hair that the winds had whipped into wild disorder around her face.

‘Just why am I here?’ she demanded, not caring if the words were wise.

Had she gone completely mad? the look he turned on her said. Did he have to explain everything to her? In words of one syllable?

‘You are a wedding planner. I need to plan a wedding.’

The exaggerated clarity with which he spoke, a deliberate slowing down of his words, grated on her already overwrought nerves. He sounded as if he was having to explain to someone simple. Someone who would have difficulty in understanding what he said.

‘But you could have anyone you wanted. There must be much more established—more successful—fashionable—wedding planners you could hire.’

‘But I want you.’

What was it in his voice that made a shiver run over her skin, lifting the tiny hairs in a rush of apprehension? Sadie
couldn’t define it, and she wasn’t sure that she really wanted to dig too deep and find out more than she wanted to know.

‘Why me? Why none of the others?’

Nikos pushed open the door of the little chapel, the wood making a harsh scraping sound over the stone-flagged floor.

‘You owe me,’ he declared harshly. ‘They don’t.’ And then, with an abrupt turn onto another conversational path that threw her completely off balance, he continued, ‘Now, come inside and see the chapel.’

She didn’t want to see the chapel, felt that it would destroy her totally to do so. It would take what was left of her shattered heart and grind it in the dust beneath Nikos’s soft handmade boots. If the rest of the island had bitter memories for her, then the inside of the chapel belonged purely to Nikos and the woman he now planned to marry. He had never brought her in here when they had visited Icaros in the past. In fact, the tiny building had stayed securely locked and shuttered, and she had never even set foot on the worn wooden bridge that led to it. Further evidence, her father had said, of the way Nikos had never planned to make her his wife.

But when it came down to it, what choice did she have? She was here to do a job, as Nikos had just reminded her so brutally. And on that job depended her mother’s peace of mind—possibly even her sanity, with the resulting repercussions for her small brother’s happiness. She couldn’t let them down. And so she drew in a deep, hopefully strengthening breath, squared her shoulders and made herself step over the threshold into the cool, shadowed interior of the little church.

After the brightness of the sunlight outside, it was all so dark and dim that she was almost blinded, barely able to see a metre or two ahead of her down the single narrow aisle between the rows of rough wooden pews. Nikos himself, standing before the simple altar, was once more just a sil
houette, a solid more substantial shape in the hazy light that came through the narrow windows.

Perhaps it was because of the blackness, because she couldn’t see his face or read his expression clearly. Perhaps it was that she had no choice but to accept that in planning to marry someone else Nikos had demonstrated so clearly that he had moved on from the bitter past they had once shared. But suddenly Sadie was hearing again her own voice inside her head.

We could end it,
she had said, referring to the terrible feud between their families. The feud that had taken away too much and given nothing.
We could say it stops right here and now…

If only they could. If only she and Nikos could find a way to start again, so that each of them could go on and live their lives without the terrible black shadow hanging over them. But how could she begin? If she could just get Nikos to trust her, even in the tiniest degree, then that would be a start.