Only now did she see another, even more humiliating explanation for that night. A turn of the screw, a heightening of the victim’s torment...Nik, with all his considerable sexual savoir-faire, setting out with cool calculation to seduce his wife and thus throw her into absolute turmoil. Suddenly she felt painfully degraded by her own weakness in his arms, the unsuspected vulnerability which had made her a pushover for all that smouldering, sizzling Greek machismo. And Nik had just loved that discovery. The awareness was like a knife twisting in an open wound.
Exhaustion sent her into an uneasy sleep from which she awoke to find that it was after midnight. She had slept solid for more than twelve hours. But evidently it had done her good. Physically she was feeling much stronger...even if she did feel as though she was on the brink of starvation.
Pulling on a light robe, she went off in search of food. Her mind was awash with all the frightening thoughts she had endured earlier and, preoccupied as she was, she got the shock of her life when Nik appeared silently in a doorway just as she was passing.
A hiss of unformed sound erupted from her lips and she backed away in haste, her shoulder-blades colliding with the cold stone wall on the other side of the passageway.
‘Looking for a phone, pethi mou?’
In the dim light, his striking features might have been a bronze sculpture, eyes a mere sliver of black below the dark crescents of his lashes.
Leah pressed a helpless hand to the crazed thump of her heartbeat. ‘A ph—phone...?’ she stammered blankly.
‘Judging by the length of your calls to Woods, you were heavily into the substitute of telephone sex,’ Nik murmured with silken insolence. ‘And you’ve had forty-eight hours at least without your daily fix... Well, if that is what it takes, never let it be said that I shrank from the challenge. Go back to your room and I’ll use the internal line because I promise you anything he can do I can do better...’
Leah sucked in air in a whoosh, infuriatingly shattered by the smooth suggestion. ‘You pervert!’
Nik groaned. ‘It goes against the grain, but I’m actually beginning to pity your blond Adonis. He had—what? Two and a half months? What did you do with him? Hold hands, sigh and share deeply meaningful conversations?’
Red as a beetroot now and seething, Leah’s teeth gritted. ‘None of your business!’
‘But you see me here...’ Nik spread expressive brown hands in a movement that blatantly betrayed his savage amusement ‘...enslaved by my need to know every gory detail.’
Quivering with rage, Leah turned on her heel. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said in a frigid voice.
‘Not for him, you weren’t. Maybe you were hungry for a little attention and romance. I can understand that,’ Nik drawled in the tone of one attempting to hold a deeply meaningful conversation and struggling.
‘You’re so bloody basic, you ought to be in a cage!’ Leah suddenly slung at him, losing control at the arrogance with which he talked down to her.
‘At least I’m trying to understand what attracted you to a third-rate wimp like Woods!’ he slammed back at her in a devastatingly sudden explosion of raw anger.
‘I’ve got very bad taste, Nik. Don’t you know that? After all, once I chose you.’
Adrenalin was racing through Leah’s veins. She saw something in Nik which she had not seen before, and marvelled that she had been so blind. Nik was not jealous of Paul—no, that would have been far too exaggerated a description of what he was feeling right now. But it undoubtedly offended Nik’s macho pride to believe that his wife preferred another man to him. Right at that moment it would have killed Leah to admit that Paul was yesterday’s news and as third-rate as Nik had claimed.
His brilliant eyes glittered over her and she could feel the raw force of his powerful personality beating down on her. It was oddly exhilarating, not demeaning, as that little scene with the towel had been that day in Paris when Nik had fondly imagined that all he had to do was crook an arrogant finger and she would do what he wanted...willingly, eagerly, gratefully... the way all the other women had in Nik Andreakis’s roving existence.
‘You need—’ Nik began.
‘Well, I don’t need half my clothes ripped off me like the last time,’ Leah cut in, lifting her chin high and shooting him a look of sublime scorn.
The silence lay there, thick and impenetrable, disturbed only by the thump of her own heartbeat in her ears.
For a split-second Nik stared at her with black eyes as dense as the night and then his sensual mouth gave a sudden appreciative twist and he threw back his dark head and burst out laughing. Sharply disconcerted, Leah stared back at him, colour flooding her cheeks. Without warning, she felt achingly vulnerable.
As she made a hurried movement to walk away, he caught her back with a powerful hand and guided her into the room he had recently vacated. ‘You said you were hungry. I’ll order some food,’ he said, abruptly prosaic.
But not a prosaic man, she reflected as she was thrust down unceremoniously on a comfortable sofa across from the cluttered desk he had clearly been working at. She linked her not quite steady hands, ruefully conscious of the internal upheaval that resulted from being in Nik’s radius. You never knew what was likely to happen next. Once that had fascinated her. He was so different from her. They were night and day, chalk and cheese. And yet when he had laughed she had been made shatteringly aware of the electrifying charisma that was so innate a part of him.
Why should she be surprised by that? Why should she feel threatened by that acknowledgement? Nik was devastatingly good-looking...sexy, very sexy. He couldn’t help being like that. She had watched him at dinner parties, the effortless cynosure of all female attention. He took it for granted. It had always been that way for Nik, she imagined. His mother and sisters probably worshipped the ground he walked on too. So really it was only natural that she should also be aware of that natural magnetism, should find momentarily that the ground lurched almost dizzily beneath her on receipt of one dazzling smile... Yes, it was only natural wasn’t it? It didn’t mean anything, just that she was female and alive.
‘I’m glad that you are feeling stronger but you look very serious,’ Nik drawled.
Leah took a deep breath. As she glanced up, she caught the dancing remnants of humour in his clear gaze and her mouth ran dry. Nik in charm mode—well, that was a new one to her, wasn’t it? Deliberately she fixed her gaze to one side of him. ‘We need to talk.’
Nik laughed softly. ‘The hour is too late, pethi mou.’
Her husband, the chauvinist pig. Any minute now he’d be telling her not to worry her pretty little head about anything. Nik, she appreciated with a stab of pain, had never taken her seriously. Maybe he never took any woman seriously or maybe it was because she was small and blonde and once she had been crazy about him and he knew it.
But five years ago Nik had put her on ice. He had left her to exist in limbo, neither free nor married. And in that interim it had not occurred to him that her feelings might have changed. He had not been interested in her feelings. He had been far too bound up in seething resentment and bitterness even to spare a thought for what she might be suffering.
It had not occurred to him that she might turn to another man. It had not occurred to him that she might be willing to sacrifice the financially privileged lifestyle that being an Andreakis gave her to gain her freedom. Nik had falsely assumed that the money and the status were very important to her. And those were the barriers she had to breach.
‘Nik, we have to talk, and, if it’s possible, without you getting angry, threatening or sarcastic,’ Leah murmured tightly.
Nik was lounging back against the edge of his desk, surveying her with an air of maddening indulgence, the same way that one might look at a child struggling to be amusingly mature beyond its years. And yet she could sense tension within him on another level.
‘Nik—’
‘Your meal.’ At spectacular speed, Nik strode across the room and whipped a tray from a dumbstruck manservant.
Leah was equally astonished. Had it been anyone else but Nik, who had all the sensitivity of a battering-ram, she would have thought he was being deliberately evasive.
‘Eat.’ The tray was placed on her lap.
‘Nik, I know about you and Eleni Kiriakos.’
He swung back to her, a frown-line pleating his winged ebony brows. ‘Ponia,’ he guessed grimly. ‘What do you know?’
‘I understand that you were engaged to her.’
‘For years,’ Nik conceded with disorientating casualness.
Leah looked at her exquisitely arranged salad with sinking appetite and lifted the cutlery. ‘Well, I can understand how you must have felt when Max put you in a position where you had to break that engagement and lose the woman you loved.’
‘The timing was inconvenient...’
Leah lifted her head. ‘Inconvenient?’ she echoed half an octave higher.
Nik released his breath with impatience. ‘I have known Eleni all my life. We were betrothed in our teens. The decision had nothing to do with us. It was what our fathers wanted, a merger between two shipping lines. Eleni wanted to be a doctor. Her father did not approve but my support brought him round. Both Eleni and I knew that eventually we would have to disappoint our families but in the interim it suited both of us to play along—’