crowd of die-hard bachelors grouped around the roulette table, the same vacuous girls flirting
with any rich-looking man under seventy. This had been his way of life for years and he had
never questioned whether or not he enjoyed it, he thought as he detached himself from a
predatory blonde and walked towards the exit.
He didn’t know why he had come here. But that was a lie, he acknowledged, raking a hand
through his hair. He had come because he was scared to go home. Him—Nikos Angelaki—the
toughest kid on the streets, the most feared adversary in the boardroom. He had known this
churning feeling in his gut before; when he’d sat with his mother in the hospital and vowed he
would earn the money somehow for her cancer treatment, and she had smiled her soft smile at
him and said it was too late. He’d felt that same sickening sensation in his gut when he’d looked
at Greta, spaced out on cocaine, and realised she was telling him the truth about his baby.
But this was a different feeling, and it had been gnawing away at him all week while he had
been in the States missing Kitty so badly that he had only felt half alive. He had been blind for
weeks, or maybe so afraid of what he could see that he had closed his eyes and ignored it. He
couldn’t ignore it any longer—or avoid her, he brooded as he stepped off the kerb and hailed a
taxi. He didn’t belong in the nightclubs and casinos; he belonged at home with his wife.
It was almost midnight when he walked into the apartment. He had expected it to be in darkness,
and Kitty to have gone to bed, but a light glowed beneath the dining-room door. Frowning, he#p#分页标题#e#
opened it, and stopped dead. Someone had taken great care with the table—but he doubted Sotiri
had arranged the floral centrepiece or hung the birthday banner on the wall.
A faint noise from behind him told him he was no longer alone, and he jerked his head round to
see Kitty standing in the doorway. She was wearing a shimmery gold dress that displayed a
tantalising amount of her full breasts, and predictably desire surged through him. His gaze
moved up to her face. Unusually she was wearing her glasses instead of her contacts, but he
could see that her eyes were red-rimmed as if she had been crying.
‘How was your trip?’ she asked in a curiously flat voice.
‘Successful.’ He shrugged, unable to drum up much interest in the completion of a deal that a
few months ago would have had him buzzing for days. He glanced back at the table. ‘If I’d
known you had planned for us to have dinner together I would have come home earlier.’
It was a fair point, Kitty admitted silently. But she had been afraid to tell him of her plans for his birthday in case he rejected her. ‘It’s your birthday,’ she murmured, ‘and you have a right to
spend it how you choose.’
He gave a faint laugh. ‘I’d forgotten it was my birthday until I walked in and saw the banner.
The last birthday I celebrated was my sixteenth, before my mother died.’ He looked at the
wrapped parcel. ‘How did you know it was today?’
‘I looked in your passport.’ Kitty tried to imagine him at sixteen: a boy on the threshold of
manhood who less than a year later had been left without a single relative in the world. She
groped for courage and smiled at him. ‘Are you going to open your present?’ she asked softly.
Nikos did not know what he was expecting, or why his heart was jerking unevenly in his chest.
He couldn’t actually remember having a surprise birthday present in his life, and he didn’t know
how to react. Kitty was watching him, and after a moment’s hesitation he ripped off the paper
and stared in stunned silence at the portrait, feeling an unfamiliar stinging sensation behind his
eyelids.
‘Do you like it?’ Kitty could not bear the taut silence. ‘The artist worked from a copy of the
photo of your mother. I think he’s done a good job, don’t you?’
‘I…don’t know what to say.’ His throat felt raw as the emotions he had suppressed for so many
years burned a fiery path inside him. It was many long years since the woman captured so
perfectly on the canvas had smiled at him and told him that she loved him, but as Nikos stared at
the image of his mother he felt his heart crack open.
‘Nikos?’ His frozen stillness was not the reaction Kitty had hoped for and for a terrible moment
she thought he was angry. But then he looked over at her and she saw his wet lashes, and the
tension that had gripped her for the past few hours when she had been waiting for him to come
home snapped. ‘Oh, Nikos— don’t!’