Nik swept her up in his arms in spite of her feeble attempt to evade him.
‘Please!’ Her failure to get through to him or persuade him to put her down again drove her crazy. ‘I don’t want to go with you. I want to stay here.’
‘Theos...you’re expecting him, aren’t you?’ he raked down at her with barely restrained anger. ‘If you weren’t sick I’d shake you!’
Her cases were already gone, she saw in horror as Nik thrust open the door of her room, holding her steady with one powerful arm.
‘Let me go!’ Her swimming head fell back against his shoulder as he strode down the corridor.
‘If I let you go you’ll fall in a heap at my feet.’ He muttered something guttural in Greek, his set, dark features as unyielding as stone as he hit the call button for the lift again with positive violence.
‘I want a divorce...I’m not going to Greece!’ she gasped strickenly.
‘You should have thought of that last night.’ He stepped into the lift.
‘It was a mistake!’ she protested, unable even to lift her pounding head. ‘Put me down...’
‘You don’t know what you’re doing or saying,’ Nik contended with tenacious determination, refusing even to meet her distressed gaze.
‘I know...’ She would have screamed the assurance had she had the strength. As it was, the amount of energy she had expended on frantic argument and the stress of her own emotional conflict had absolutely drained her. Nick’s strong, dark features blurred as her weighted eyelids lowered. ‘I hate you,’ she mumbled hoarsely.
She drifted in and out of awareness from that point, too utterly wretched to consider anything but her own physical misery. Nik carried her on to the jet, wrapped in a blanket, and a while later she surfaced to hear a vaguely familiar voice sigh, ‘The poor thing. I feel so sorry for her,’ with a kind of oozing insincerity that grated on her hearing.
She recognised the stewardess, sultry wine-tinted mouth to the fore as she passed Nik a glass. As Nik lifted Leah and tilted the contents of the glass to her mouth, she said, ‘She hopes it’s fatal.’
‘Drink; it’ll make you feel better,’ Nik urged.
Nothing would. Bitterness enveloped Leah. Nik had taken cruel advantage of her illness. Was nothing sacrosanct? As another shiver racked her aching body and she drank the noxious liquid because she knew that argument was futile, she looked up at him with condemning sapphire eyes. An act which ran little short of kidnapping was inexcusable.
‘I couldn’t leave you alone in a hotel in this condition,’ Nik murmured as if she had spoken out loud.
‘I’ll never forgive you,’ Leah mumbled. ‘I hope you catch it!’
Unexpectedly he laughed, the arm cradled round her shoulders curving her close in a blatant challenging of contagion which didn’t surprise her. Nik was never ill. The very idea amused him. He had a godlike faith in his own robust health.
Her impressions became increasingly more fleeting from that point on. She lost her sense of time, her ability to distinguish between waking and sleeping. Had she been sleeping? she wondered when her eyes took in the crowds milling around them. A fleeting exchange of Greek told her that they must have landed. It was the airport, she decided bitterly, and shut her eyes again, engulfed by a drowning sense of failure.
A sharp exchange of voices dragged her back to awareness. She was laid down on something, the blanket removed, a thermometer thrust into her dry mouth. Her heavy eyelids lifted on a white ceiling. Not an airport, a hospital, she decided. She could hear Nik talking. He sounded angry, upset, and the other voice, which had been equally angry, was suddenly soft, soothing...a richly expressive, very female voice. With an enormous effort, Leah turned her head to one side.
A woman in a white coat stood in the circle of Nik’s arms. With one slim hand she was smoothing his black hair, caressing his hard jawline, and even as Leah looked she was reaching up to kiss him. Her lashes dropped again in shock.
The thermometer was removed...soon afterwards, a long time afterwards? She was sliding in and out of awareness. The next time she opened her eyes the woman was giving something to Nik and she saw her properly—the superb oval of her classically beautiful face below her crown of glossy black hair, the creamy skin and the great dark eyes brimming with so much warmth as they rested on Nik. A dry cough jolted through Leah and both heads spun round.
Nik moved first. ‘I thought you were asleep. This is Dr Kiriakos—’
‘Eleni,’ his companion inserted with an air of rather forced informality as she regarded Leah with cool, professional distance. ‘I am afraid that you will feel worse before you feel better, Leah.’
Leah closed her eyes, shutting them out in self-defence. She already felt a hundred times worse. She could feel her crumpled clothes, shiny, perspiring face and limp, damp hair. Her very bones were hurting. She wanted to cry but she didn’t have the energy. Dear God, he brought me to his mistress for treatment; only Nik could be that cruel. Never in her life had Leah felt more savaged.
‘I was really scared,’ Nik muttered roughly as he carried her somewhere. ‘You looked so ill. I thought it might be pneumonia or something. And I didn’t know what to do and I panicked.’
Panicked? Nik? It was an unlikely image in Leah’s disorientated mind. Then he was talking to someone in Greek, yet another female, this one younger, warmer, less controlled. Leah was dimly aware of what sounded like a pretty heated argument and then she drifted off again, too wretched to care what was happening to her or around her.
* * *
There was a rushing sound somewhere in the background. Leah’s memory banks produced a jumbled mass of images and feelings. She had had a fever. She had gone from perspiring, shivering misery into the heat of what had felt like hell, with a whirling Catherine wheel of pain behind her temples. Day and night had merged indistinguishably.
She remembered being sponged down repeatedly and being so weak that even speaking was beyond her. And she remembered Nik, silhouetted against the lamplit darkness of an unfamiliar room, Nik, hunched in a seat, oddly grey-looking in the dawn light. There had been other people too but it felt like too much effort to remember them.
Her eyes opened. A maid was drawing curtains back on a spectacular wall of glass through which Leah could see a slice of cloudless, densely blue sky. Then the sunlight blinded her and she turned her head away, gratefully recognising that her throat didn’t hurt, her head didn’t ache and her muscles no longer protested against every movement. The door closed. A sudden pressing need for the bathroom assailed her.
She attempted to sit up. Her body was disobedient. With a moan of impatience she rolled her legs off the edge of the divan and slid down in an ungraceful heap on to the mercifully thick, deep pile of the carpet. It was a vast room. Lamplight had confusingly shrunk its contours.
Using the bed as a brace, she pushed herself upright and swayed like a drunk, registering that she was not quite as recovered as she had fondly imagined. But obstinacy got her to the en suite.
An accidental meeting with her own reflection in a mirror horrified her. Who was that white scarecrow with the lank hank of hair? Fighting her own weakness, she knelt beside the bath to turn on the taps. At least if she was clean she would feel better.
‘Cristo! What the hell do you think you are doing?’
Leah flinched and clutched the side of the bath. Nik towered over her, intimidatingly tall and dark. He looked tremendously elegant in a fabulously well-cut cream suit which merely accentuated his exotic colouring.
‘Are you crazy?’ he thundered, not content with having frightened her half out of her wits. ‘You should be in bed!’
‘I want a bath.’ Leah rested her cheek dully down on the cold ceramic edge, weak as a kitten. And then it came to her... Like a slow-motion replay from some distant dream, she saw him with Eleni Kiriakos again. Her heart seemed to stop beating. A chill like an icy winter wind enclosed her shrinking flesh.
‘A bath when you can’t even stand up?’ Nik derided as he bent down to lift her.
Leah burst into floods of tears, disconcerting him as much as herself. But she had had no warning, no chance to stem those tears. They simply gushed forth as though someone had thrown an overload switch and forced their release. And the effect on Nik was little short of staggering.
With a stifled imprecation in Greek, he scooped her up and cradled her while he apologised profusely for upsetting her and assured her that of course she could have a bath if she wanted one that badly. It was just that she had been so ill, he stressed, and he was naturally afraid that she would over-exert herself and suffer a relapse. It was Nik metaphorically on his knees, Nik as she had never known him.
Ten minutes later, Leah slid into her bath, and had not the image of the beautiful doctor still been lingering she might almost have been touched by the amount of concern Nik was displaying. As it was, she simply didn’t understand and was still too weak to devote her low energy resources to the vexing question of why Nik should have gone to such lengths to force her to come to Greece to put a front on a marriage that had never been anything other than a charade for both of them.
Washing her hair exhausted her. When she emerged from the bathroom, she made no objection to being carried back to bed by Nik, although she was amazed that he had waited with such patience for her.