‘I do not need a lot of sleep.’
‘Apparently.’
Her cheeks flushed pink as she remembered the previous night—the way he had commanded her body’s full attention even when she had been exhausted. And she’d responded to his invitations willingly, rousing herself to join with him, needing him even from behind the veil of exhaustion.
He ate a scallop, though he wasn’t particularly hungry. It was divine. A perfect combination of sweetness and salt. He didn’t say anything, though, so Marnie continued to wonder if he’d enjoyed it or was simply being polite when he reached for another.
‘How was your day?’ she asked, after a moment of prickly silence had passed.
He regarded her for a long moment. ‘I spoke with your father, if that is your concern.’
Her face slashed with hurt before she concealed it expertly. ‘It wasn’t,’ she responded, shrugging as though he hadn’t scratched her with the sharp blade of recrimination. ‘I was simply making conversation.’
His eyes glowed with the strength of his feelings. Marnie pressed back in her chair, her own appetite waning. She thought of the fish she was baking in a salt crust. What a waste it would be if they couldn’t even make it through a few scallops without breaking into war.
‘Let us not pretend, Marnie, when there is no one here to benefit from the performance.’
CHAPTER SIX
SHE PLACED HER fork down carefully beside the plate, using the distraction to rally her rioting emotions. His mood and manner were on a knife’s edge. She felt the shift in him and wanted to protest. She wanted to address it. But the implacable set of his features thwarted any thought of that.
‘I’m not pretending,’ she said instead, with a direct stare that cost her a great deal of effort.
‘Of course you are.’ He was bored now, or at least he seemed it.
‘Really? Why? Because I asked about your day?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Because you act as though your primary concern in this marriage is not your father.’
Denying that assertion wasn’t an option—at least it wasn’t if she wanted to protect herself from seeming motivated by other more personal feelings. What would he say if she told him more than money had motivated her into marrying him? Would he run a mile? Or use her confused feelings to keep her exactly where he had her?
‘Well, Nikos,’ she said, impressed that she sounded almost condescending, ‘given that you used my father’s debts to blackmail me into this, are you really so surprised?’
‘I made no claim of surprise,’ he corrected. ‘I intended to point out the futility of your charade.’
‘Wow.’ She blinked and lifted her champagne, drinking several large gulps despite the pain of the bubbles erupting against her insides. ‘That’s spectacularly rude,’ she said when she’d settled the glass back on the table.
‘Perhaps.’ He shrugged insouciantly. ‘In any event, your father was both grateful and, I believe, resentful of my offer to help.’
She was startled, her enormous eyes flying to his face. ‘You’re not saying he turned you down?’
‘He has agreed to take the bare minimum from me to stave off foreclosure. That will buy him another month at the most.’ A frown crossed his features. ‘He is a stubborn man.’
‘Remind you of anyone?’ she snapped tartly, biting into another scallop.
‘I would not be so foolish as to turn away a lifeline if I were in his situation.’
‘He’s very proud,’ she said silkily, and though she’d meant it to be a subtle insult to Nikos it was ridiculous. She’d realised as soon as she’d uttered the words. For there was no man on earth with more pride than Nikos. She’d damaged it six years earlier and he’d moved heaven and earth to make her pay now.
‘To a fault.’
‘Thank you for speaking to him,’ she said quietly.
She meant it. Were it not for Nikos, her father would have no hope. At least he knew now that there was an option. An alternative to bleak bankruptcy and failure.
‘It was our deal, remember?’
The deal. The damned deal! She wanted to tear her hair out! But why? One day after their wedding, did she really think anything would have shifted? Just because they’d slept together, and her body had begun to vibrate at a frequency that only he could answer, it didn’t mean that it was the same for him.
‘Nonetheless, you didn’t have to do this. Any of it. You could have left him to suffer and watched from the sidelines.’
He braced his elbows on the table, his eyes pinning her to the chair as though his fingers were curled around her shoulders. ‘Where would the fun be in that?’
The air crackled and hummed with the intensity of his statement.
‘You find this fun?’
His smile was pure sensual seduction. Like warmed chocolate being dripped over her flesh.
‘Last night was certainly pleasurable.’
Memories seared her soul. She shifted a little in the chair as her insides slicked with pleasurable anticipation. ‘I’m glad you think so,’ she murmured, her heart racing like a butterfly trapped against a window.
His smile was pure arrogance. It said that he knew she thought so, too. ‘You disagree?’
Damn it. The wedge between a rock and hard place was a little constricting. She dropped her gaze, unable and unwilling to duel with him in a battle she’d never win.
But Nikos wasn’t going to let it go. ‘You seemed to enjoy yourself...’ he pushed, one hand flicking lazily across the tablecloth, trapping her fingers beneath his. He turned her palm skywards and began to trace an invisible circle across the soft pad of her hand.
‘Now who’s acting?’ Her question was breathy, infused with the hot air in her lungs.
‘When it comes to my desire for you there is no necessity to lie.’
‘Thank heavens for small mercies.’ The statement was lacking sass; it fell flat. She cleared her throat and pulled her hand away. ‘How much money?’
The change in conversation, and the removal of her hand, confused him momentarily. But not for long. Nikos hadn’t built an empire from scratch by being slow on the uptake.
‘Why does it matter? Do you want to make sure you haven’t overpaid your end of our bargain?’
She made a sound of surprise and shook her head.
‘You did offer your virginity. Perhaps you feel anything less than a hundred mill isn’t quite fair on you.’
‘How dare you?’ Her voice quivered with the force of her hurt. ‘How dare you equate what we did with an amount of money?’
He had gone too far. He realised that, but it was out of Nikos’s character to apologise. Instead he came back to the original question, speaking as though he hadn’t just virtually equated their marriage with prostitution.
‘I have helped him enough for now,’ he said, his words soft to placate the rage he’d breathed into her. ‘He will not go broke, Marnie. I will not allow that to happen.’
She pulled her lower lip between her teeth, her feelings jumping awkwardly from one extreme to the other. Hurt was making her body sag, and her throat was thick with tears that she damned well would not let fall. But there was relief and gratitude, too. Because she did trust Nikos. Despite all this, all that he’d done, she believed that he would keep her father from destitution.
He lifted another scallop and ate it, then another, and Marnie watched, a frown unconsciously etched across her face.
‘Are you going to have any more?’ he prompted, reaching for the second-last.
She shook her head. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’
He placed his fork down and stared at her. ‘Your father has asked us to return to England for his birthday.’
Marnie nodded thoughtfully. ‘He doesn’t like to do much, but Mum generally twists his arm into a small party.’
His expression was guarded. ‘Would you like to travel home again so soon?’
Home.
The word was one syllable that throbbed with an enormous weight of meaning. She reached for the last scallop, despite having just given up her claim to it. She needed to distract herself and to hide her face as she unpacked the impact that single word was having.
Home.
Other than here.
Home.
Not here. Not in his home.
She blinked and shook her head a tiny bit, pushing the thoughts away. ‘I’d like to see them,’ she said cautiously. ‘But it is soon. I didn’t really imagine that we’d go to England again yet.’
Her family complicated matters. What hope did Nikos and she have of forming any kind of relationship with her parents and his antipathy towards them in the foreground?
‘You want to refuse?’
She toyed with her ring, turning it round her finger. ‘I didn’t say that.’
‘No. You didn’t say anything,’ he drawled, the words lightly teasing.
But Marnie was not in the mood to be teased.
‘God, Nikos, you’re impossible.’
He laughed throatily, the sound doing something strange to her fractured nerves.
‘I am honestly asking what you would like. It occurred to me that I would have more success persuading your father to be reasonable if we were to meet in person.’
The tears he’d brought to the surface were closer now, and she had to dig her nails into her palms to stop from weakening and letting her eyes become moist.