‘I suppose not.’ She laughed—a brittle sound that made him sad for her.
‘Why?’ he prompted, pulling his coffee cup from the machine and holding it in one hand.
‘You’re bad for my husband’s blood pressure.’
Nikos laughed with true mirth. ‘Am I?’
‘He was in quite a mood this afternoon. Some birthday present...’
Curious, Nikos nodded. ‘Did he tell you what we discussed?’
Anne’s face was pinched. ‘He gave me an indication,’ she responded with cold civility. ‘I suppose you think I should thank you?’
Another moment he’d thought he would relish. He shook his head, though, brushing her words away. ‘It was no hardship for me to intervene.’
‘I’m surprised you bothered,’ she said quietly, imbibing more of her wine.
He shrugged. ‘For Marnie...’
He let the rest of the sentence hang in the air, knowing he couldn’t speak the bald-faced lie now. After all, it had all been for his own selfish gratification. None of this was really for his wife, was it?
‘She loves you,’ Anne said, her body so still she might have been carved from stone. ‘She always has.’
He heard the words without allowing them to find any credibility within him. ‘She loved me six years ago, when you forced her to end it.’
Anne didn’t visibly react. It was as though the past was a ribbon, pulling her backwards. ‘She was miserable afterwards. I doubt she ever forgave us.’
It was a strange sense; he was both hot and cold. He didn’t want to think of how Marnie had felt. He’d been so furious with her, so concerned with his own hurts, he’d never really given her situation any thought. She’d told him she’d been angry, though. Furious, she’d said. Had her fury matched his? It couldn’t have or she would have held their course.
‘She moved on,’ he said quietly. ‘Until recently.’
‘But she didn’t.’
Anne’s eyes were darkened by guilt. She pushed up from the bench and strode a little way across the kitchen, then froze once more—a statue in the room.
‘She continued to live and breathe, but that’s not the same as moving on. She thought I didn’t notice her reading about you in the papers. That I didn’t catch her looking at photos of you.’ She flicked her head over her shoulder, pinning him with a glance that spoke of true concern. ‘She was so careful, but I saw the way she missed you. The way she seemed to wither for a long time. It was almost like losing two daughters.’
Disgust, anger and guilt at the way they had all failed Marnie gnawed through him.
Anne sipped her wine and moved back to her original spot, opposite Nikos. ‘We introduced her to some lovely young men—’
‘Suitable men?’ he interjected, with a cynical strength to his words. But Anne’s statement was slicing through him. The idea of Marnie having pined for him was one he couldn’t contemplate.
‘Yes, suitable men. Nice men.’ She closed her eyes. ‘She never mentioned your name, but I always knew you to be the reason it didn’t work out. She never got over you.’
Nikos sipped his coffee but his mind was spinning back over their conversation in his office, when he’d first suggested they marry. She’d been so arctic. So cold!
But wasn’t that Marnie’s defence mechanism? Wasn’t that how she behaved when her emotions were rioting all over the place? And her being a virgin? Was that simply because she’d never found someone who made her body tremble as it did for him? Had she chosen not to get serious with another guy because she still wanted him?
‘I believed we were doing the right thing.’ Anne’s smile was tight. ‘After Libby, we just wanted Marnie to be safe.’
‘You thought I was somehow unsafe?’ he barked, anger and frustration and impotence to change the past ravaging his temper.
‘You aren’t safe,’ she responded sharply. ‘The way she feels about you is a recipe for disaster.’
Marnie didn’t still love him, did she? How could she after what he’d put her through? She might have loved him a year ago...even two months ago. But the way he’d burst back into her life had been the one thing that must have ruined any love between them.
He closed his eyes briefly.
Anne continued speaking, but she wasn’t particularly focussed on her son-in-law. ‘You must hate us. I know Marnie did for a long time. But I love her, Nikos. Everything I’ve done has been because I love her.’
‘Yet you sought to control her life? You told her you would disinherit her if she didn’t leave me?’
Anne winced as though he’d slapped her. ‘Yes. Well, Arthur did...’ A whisper. A hollow, tormented, grief-soaked admission. ‘At the time I told myself that she must have known we were right. She broke up with you. And Marnie knew her own head and heart. If she’d really loved you, I told myself, she would have fought harder.’
Nikos felt a familiar sentiment echo within him.
‘But she couldn’t. We were holding on by a thread and Marnie knew that.’
‘And what about Marnie?’ he asked with dark anger, though he couldn’t have said if it was directed at Anne, Arthur or himself.
‘She was Marnie,’ Anne said finally, drinking more wine with a small shrug. ‘Determined to act as though everything was fine even if it was almost killing her.’
Nikos angled his head away, his dark eyes resting on their reflections in the window. Anne appeared smaller there, shrunken. Surprised, he looked at her and realised that the changes had taken place in real time—he just hadn’t noticed them. She was smaller, wizened, stressed.
‘How could you let her go through this?’ he muttered, but his blame and recriminations were focussed on himself.
Anne pinned him with eyes that reminded him once more of Libby. ‘Libby was such an easy child—so like me. I just understood her. But with Marnie... She’s a puzzle I can’t fathom.’
Nikos rubbed a hand across his jaw. ‘Marnie is all that is good in the world,’ he said finally. ‘Often to her own detriment. She wants the best for those she loves, even when it means sacrificing her own happiness.’
Guilt over their marriage was a knife, deep in his gut.
‘Yes!’ Anne expelled an angry sigh. ‘I love that girl, Nikos, but I don’t always know how to love her. I suppose that sounds tremendously strange to you—she’s my child, after all.’
His smile was thin. For Anne’s words had lodged deep in his mind and begun to unravel with condemnation and acceptance. He had loved Marnie once, too, but never in the way she’d needed to be loved. His faults were on a par with Anne and Arthur Kenington’s.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MARNIE STOOD UNSTEADILY as the plane pitched yet again, rolled mercilessly by the thick cotton wool clouds that had clogged the entire journey from London to Athens.
Nikos, in the middle of a newspaper article, lifted his gaze curiously. He had been distracted for the entire flight, and he seemed almost to be rousing himself from a long way away now.
‘Travel sickness,’ she explained, moving quickly away from him towards the back of the plane.
She burst into the toilet, relieved to have made it just a second before losing the entire contents of her stomach. Her brow broke out in sweat and still she heaved, her whole body quivering with the exertion.
She moaned as the taste of metal filled her mouth and finally, spent, straightened. The mirror showed how unwell she’d been: the face that stared back at her was bright red, sweaty, and her eyes were slightly bloodshot in the corners.
She flushed the toilet and ran the cold water, washing her hands and splashing water over her face, enjoying the relief of the ice-cold liquid.
As a child she’d been prone to travel sickness. Even a short journey had brought on a spell of nausea. But it had been a long time since she’d felt it. Years. In fact the last time she’d been sick she’d been ten or eleven.
But what else could it be?
Marnie froze midway through patting her cheeks with a plush hand towel. Mentally she counted back the days to their wedding, her mind moving with an alacrity she wouldn’t have thought it capable of a moment ago, while doubled over an aeroplane toilet.
They’d been married just over a month and they’d made love on their wedding night. And since that time a certain something had been glaringly absent.
She’d started the pill in plenty of time for it to have been effective. So what did that mean? Had going on birth control simply changed her normal cycle? Was that it? Or was she pregnant with Nikos’s baby? Because what she was feeling felt altogether different, and a little terrifying.
The idea was a tiny seed she couldn’t shake. It put roots down through her mind, so that by the time she returned to her seat, looking much more like her normal self, she was almost certain that she was indeed pregnant.
She’d need to do a test to be sure, but there was no room in her mind for doubt.
She barely spoke for the rest of the flight, and she was too caught up in her own imaginings to notice that Nikos was similarly silent. Brooding, even.
Athens was cool but humid when they landed; the clouds that had made their flight so bumpy were thick in the air, making the ground steam.