‘I can hear the sea,’ she murmured, finally identifying that rushing sound as waves surging up on to a shore.
‘Do you remember anything of the trip here?’ Unreadable dark eyes rested on her.
‘Nothing,’ she sighed.
‘We’re not in Athens. When you were ill, there was little point in taking you to my mother’s home. So I brought you here instead.’
‘And where is here?’
‘Thrathos, a small island which my father purchased shortly before his death. The perfect place for you to recuperate,’ Nik said smoothly.
‘An island?’ Leah raised an uncertain hand to her damp brow, her physical weakness slowing up her ability to think, but the one thought that did cross her dazed mind was that she knew precious little about her husband of five years.
A smiling, dark-eyed maid provided an interruption by arriving with a breakfast tray. Leah’s empty stomach gave a tiny leap as she registered just how hungry she was. ‘How long have I been here?’ she asked.
‘Two days—’
‘Two?’
A flying knock sounded on the door and a teenager in cerise cycle shorts and a cropped top, her long hair a mass of glossy black ringlets, erupted into the room with a wide grin. ‘Great, you’re feeling better...’
‘Leah, this is my niece, Apollonia—’
‘Everyone calls me Ponia,’ the tiny brunette broke in cheerfully. ‘I came to meet you at the airport but you won’t remember me. You were practically unconscious.’
‘I remember your voice.’ Leah smiled. Ponia’s friendliness was infectious. Yet once again she suffered that feeling of almost embarrassing ignorance. Nik’s niece. He could have a dozen for all she knew.
‘Leah has to rest, not be talked into a relapse,’ Nik warned.
Ponia reddened, obviously sensitive to any reference to her chatterbox tendencies.
‘But I’d love to have some company.’ Leah shot Nik’s hard profile a speaking glance of reproach.
‘Terrif!’ Ponia plonked herself down casually on the foot of the bed. ‘You know, I thought you’d be older—but then maybe you’re older than you look! What age are you?’
‘Ponia...’ Nik breathed.
‘Twenty-two—’
‘You got married at seventeen?’ Ponia swivelled her eyes, whose expression was a combination of shock and fascination, across to her uncle. ‘And you agreed with my parents that you think that is far too young for me to be seriously dating?’ she demanded.
Registering the gathering storm in Nik’s discomfited features and holding back her own sudden desire to laugh, Leah found herself surging to the ebullient teenager’s rescue. ‘You speak marvellous English, Ponia.’
‘I go to school in England. I wish I’d known what age you were,’ she complained afresh. ‘I would have visited and got to know you years ago...in spite of what everybody else said!’
Nik released his breath in a sudden hiss and addressed his niece in Greek. Ponia stiffened, a mutinous expression tightening her pretty face as she bent her head. What had the Andreakis family said about Nik’s wife whom they had never met? Leah could not help being curious.
‘Don’t let her tire you out,’ Nik sighed, heading for the door.
‘Men are really thick sometimes,’ Ponia muttered and then threw a comically dismayed look at Leah.
‘Aren’t they just!’ Leah laughed, belatedly realising how very depressed she had been feeling before Ponia’s arrival. It was the flu which had done that to her, she told herself.
‘I had to twist his arm to get to come here with you,’ Ponia confided. ‘Nik always feels sorry for me because I have such a drag of a time when I’m home between terms.’
‘I suppose all your friends are in England,’ Leah said.
‘Oh, it’s not that, it’s the family being so old.’ Ponia grimaced. ‘They’re all living in the last century!’
‘Your parents?’ Leah was trying not to smile.
‘Well, they’re the youngest, I guess,’ the teenager conceded grudgingly. ‘Only early fifties—’
‘The youngest? Nik’s only thirty...your mother, his sister, is that much older?’
‘And her two sisters are older again. My grandmother is well into her seventies.’
Nik must have been a very late baby. Leah found herself having to rearrange her assumptions. For some reason she had assumed that Nik was the eldest child, not the youngest. It was rather unusual to have a gap of over twenty years between children, she thought absently.
‘If only I’d known what you were like sooner,’ Ponia was still lamenting. ‘I was so madly curious about you, too.’
‘Is that why you came to meet us at the airport?’ Leah smiled again.
‘No, that was because I wanted you to know how welcome you were. I think the way my family have treated you is horrible,’ Ponia said very earnestly.
Leah sipped at her coffee. ‘I—’
‘And you were the exact same age as I am now,’ the teenager continued heatedly as she sprang off the bed and wandered over to the window. ‘I know how I would feel if my husband’s family refused to have anything to do with me...I’d be very hurt and then I’d get furious!’
Illumination sank in on Leah. The Andreakis family had evidently rejected her sight unseen. Nik had not deliberately excluded her from his family circle. But Leah felt neither hurt nor furious. Theirs had not been a normal marriage. She had had more to worry about than the uninterest of Nik’s distant family...although she was suddenly distinctly grateful not to be a guest in her mother-in-law’s house.
‘I’m not furious,’ she said wryly.
‘But it was so unfair. It wasn’t your fault that Nik fell madly in love with you and backed out of his betrothal with Eleni Kiriakos!’ Ponia grimaced impressively in the pin-dropping silence. ‘I mean, that was just one of those things and it would have been a lot worse if he’d fallen for you after he’d married her...don’t you think?’
But mercifully Leah was saved from the necessity of a reply as a maid entered and addressed Ponia.
‘Rats! Mother on the phone,’ the teenager groaned, and then grinned. ‘She won’t ask any questions, I bet, but she has to be just gasping to know all about you! She’s terribly fond of Nik...’ She frowned, noticing Leah’s waxen pallor for the first time. ‘You should get some sleep. You look really drained. I’ll see you later.’
‘Lovely,’ Leah said shakily, flying on automatic pilot after a revelation which had literally depth-charged her out of her weak languor. She tasted blood in her mouth, registered that she had bitten down painfully on her tongue to prevent a shocked exclamation escaping her. Well, well, well, she thought, struggling manfully to recover from the shock.
CHAPTER SIX
ELENI AND NIK. Nik and Eleni. Leah was shattered. Five years ago they had been engaged to be married. Evidently Nik might not have been averse to a little Parisian flirtation but he had already had his future wife lined up. At least he had, Leah adjusted, until her father had intervened to demand a change of bride. Leah felt really sick as the full meaning of what she had learnt sank in.
Nik and Eleni Kiriakos were lovers. So why had Nik insisted that Leah remain his wife? Why had he refused to snatch at his freedom? Didn’t he want to marry Eleni? Or was he quite content to retain the good doctor as his mistress, his patently devoted mistress, who couldn’t even keep her paws off him in the presence of his wife?
Leah shuddered; she presumed that there was nothing in the Hippocratic oath that forbade such behaviour. No wonder Nik had been so bitter about their marriage! But Nik had not chosen to tell her the whole truth of what their marriage had cost him.
On the other hand, Nik was certainly beginning to settle the score for what he had suffered. Could that possibly be mere coincidence? Dear God, Nik had to hate her! It was a nonsense surely for him to say that he did not?
More wretched, more isolated than she had ever felt in her life before, Leah buried her aching head in the pillows. Just as Max Harrington had manipulated Nik and forcibly rearranged his life five years ago, Nik was now bringing to bear a similar pressure on Max’s daughter.
Nik had first revealed what might have been called a ‘sudden’ attraction towards his hitherto invisible wife the day Leah had told him she was in love with another man. Previous to that, he had believed that she still loved him and no doubt over the years he had reaped a vicarious satisfaction from punishing her for her father’s sins by demonstrating his complete indifference towards her.
He didn’t yet know that Paul was out of her life. But he had been ruthlessly determined to achieve that end. Why? An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? Nik had been deprived of Eleni five years ago. Was he intent on putting Leah through the same torment of losing a loved one? Was he capable of being that sadistic? Her father was out of reach, had been out of reach of any form of retribution even while alive by virtue of his blackmail, but Leah was very much within reach and always had been.
Yes, Nik could be sadistic. She remembered his cruel assurance that even Max couldn’t force him to perform like a stud in her bed. Her pounding head was whirling. She thought back shrinkingly to Nik’s passionate possession of her, only now recalled his unashamed admission that that had been a deliberate ploy. At the time she had believed that he meant he had slept with her both to reinforce his contention that they could have a real marriage and to tear a gaping hole in her confident assertion that she loved Paul... even to punish her for daring to defy him.