‘So tell me about him,’ he invited dangerously quietly.
Her head spun round, silver hair flying back from her delicate cheekbones. He had cut off her intended exit route. ‘I don’t know what—’
‘Your lover...’ Eyes dark as an abyss rested on her expectantly.
A frisson of alarm snaked through her. ‘You can’t possibly want to hear about Paul.’
‘Can’t I?’ Nik challenged, treating her to a lethal smile that was pure unalloyed threat. ‘Where did you meet him?’
‘Harrods.’
‘Harrods?’
‘He knocked me over and insisted on buying me a coffee,’ she stated curtly.
‘You let yourself be picked up in Harrods?’ Nik murmured incredulously.
‘He did not pick me up!’
‘In Harrods,’ Nik said again as if he couldn’t believe it. ‘And where did it go from there?’
‘It didn’t go anywhere from there,’ Leah returned with spirit. ‘I ran into him again the next week—’
‘Let me guess...same day, same time, same place—’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘You were hoping to meet him again.’
Leah said nothing. She walked across to the window and stared out at the blackness studded by stars above the shimmering sea. Nik had no right to ask her such questions; no right, she told herself fiercely.
‘So this electrifying affair began in Harrods,’ Nik drawled. ‘Where in Harrods?’
Something snapped inside Leah. ‘What the heck does it matter where?’
He lowered himself down on to a sofa and stretched out his long, lean legs in an attitude of goading relaxation. ‘I’m trying to get a picture. Was it in Ladies’ Lingerie or the food hall?’
‘I refuse to dignify that with an answer.’
‘Much better to leave it to my imagination,’ Nik agreed silkily. ‘So tell me how he worked his way on to my territory.’
Leah’s teeth clenched. ‘Very easily.’
‘Temper, temper,’ Nik purred. ‘I wasn’t there. That’s the only reason he found it easy.’
And she knew then that she would not admit that her relationship with Paul was over, her much vaunted love nothing more than an infatuation. Nik’s arrogance inflamed her to the brink of spitting and clawing like an enraged cat. Paul was her one defence and she needed that defence. God forbid that Nik should guess that something more than sexual need had fired her in his arms. Life would absolutely not be worth living if he realised that she was in love with him.
She recalled his slashing contempt in the car that day in Paris when he had believed that she still loved him and inwardly she shrank from the threat of ever giving him that weapon.
Loving Nik didn’t make her blind. He was ruthless. He would use anything and anybody for his own ends. And this inconceivable love which should have died a decent death years ago was a weakness which made her vulnerable.
Maybe she was one of those crazy, sad women who associated love with pain, a victim of her own conditioning. How else could she explain how she felt about him? Right now she was so furiously angry with Nik that she wanted to scream and yet she was equally aware that on some twisted level deep down inside her she was enjoying the fact that he was with her, his entire attention focused on her to the exclusion of all else. And that acknowledgement just made her feel ashamed.
‘You don’t love him,’ Nik murmured softly. ‘If you had loved him you would have slept with him the first chance you got.’
Infuriated by his persistence, Leah spun back to him. ‘Believe it or not, some of us are capable of practising self-restraint!’
Nik shifted like a lunging tiger cat on the sofa and angled deceptively slumbrous eyes over her angry face. ‘You don’t practise it around me.’
The awareness that she had walked right into that smooth reminder outraged her.
‘Not that I’m complaining.’ Nik sent her a glittering smile that burned over her sensitive skin like acid. ‘Rampant lust appeals far more to my natural instincts than eyes meeting across a crowded basket of Brussels sprouts. It was the Food Hall, wasn’t it? True romance blossomed among the veg. Cristo, I am riveted by the sheer cliff-edge excitement of such an encounter.’
‘Paul has more romance in his little finger than you have in your entire body!’ Leah slung at him in shuddering rage.
‘Yes, he bought you coffee... I’d have taken you to the nearest hotel and poured champagne over your beautiful breasts and I can assure you that you would have found that far more exciting.’
Leah went white, stabbed by savage pain from an unexpected source. She had no problem envisaging Nik in such a role. Suddenly she wondered how many women had had champagne poured over their breasts by her husband. Her stomach churned. She dealt him a look of icy distaste. ‘Don’t get me mixed up with your bimbos. I’m going to bed!’
And not his bed either, she decided hotly, snatching up a few necessities on her stalking progress through the master bedroom suite and out again.
Fifteen minutes later she was ensconced in a bed at the far end of the corridor behind a securely locked door. They might be stuck with each other but she didn’t need to sleep with him! In fact, she would have had a whole lot more respect for herself had she never slept with him. What was she...some kind of masochist? As she had stood there tonight listening to him ridicule her relationship with Paul, she had found out all over again that hate and love were but two sides of the same coin.
A slight noise made her tense and turn over. She was just in time to see a tall, dark shadow drop fluidly and almost silently over the sill of the lowered window. On the edge of a scream, Leah stared in disbelief as a shaft of moonlight illuminated Nik’s starkly handsome features.
‘Tell me,’ he said conversationally, ‘is this game of musical beds aimed at adding a little romance to our relationship? Was I supposed to climb in with a rose between my teeth and a box of chocolates?’
Leah unglued her tongue from the roof of her dry mouth. ‘There’s a two-hundred-foot drop down to the beach out there!’
A flash of white teeth revealed his amusement. ‘And wouldn’t you have had a lot of explaining to do if I’d fallen?’
Her lashes fluttered. He was quite untouched by the horror which had enclosed her the instant she had registered the risk he had taken. An unthinkable, illogical risk for anyone as prudent as Leah. But not for Nik. Nik thrived on danger. Nik loved to be challenged. ‘You are c-crazy!’ she gasped, feeling quite sick as she thought of what could have happened.
‘Kicking in the door wasn’t an option with Ponia under the same roof. And it would have brought the servants running. I would hate to embarrass you like that.’
‘And kicking in a door wouldn’t embarrass you?’ Leah countered, so taken aback by his behaviour that she couldn’t think straight.
‘Not if it was the door to my wife’s bedroom and it was locked,’ Nik fielded, calmly shedding his clothes in an untidy heap. ‘For a Greek, that is grounds for extreme provocation.’
‘You might have bloody well killed yourself!’ Leah suddenly heard herself scream at him, on the brink of physical attack. ‘And would it have been worth it?’
‘Nik slid into the other side of the bed and angled a feral smile at her, all teeth and macho self-satisfaction. ‘Ask me in the morning,’ he suggested, reaching for her.
‘No!’ Leah shrieked, backing off so fast that she fell out of the bed with a bone-jarring thud. ‘If you’re sleeping here, I’m sleeping somewhere else!’
‘You don’t sleep with me, you sleep on the floor.’
‘Like hell I will!’ she blazed back at him. ‘What do you think I am?’
‘No bimbo ever gave me this amount of aggro,’ Nik sighed, lazing back against the pillows. ‘You’re holding out for an apology for what I said this afternoon—’
‘I’m what?’
‘But what you took as an insult I see as a compliment,’ he drawled smoothly. ‘Find me a married man who doesn’t want a passionate wife and I’ll show you a liar.’
Leah shuddered. His innate deviousness only further inflamed her. ‘You called me a whore.’
‘I did not. I said you were welcome to behave like one in my bed...any time,’ he completed huskily.
‘No, thanks!’
‘Although you would need a few lessons to make the grade,’ he murmured with naked provocation. ‘And I can hardly wait to give them to you. What more can I say in my own defence?’
Leah drew in a shaky breath. On a level she did not want to examine, Nik fascinated her even when she was furious with him. But then no natural born womaniser with his looks had ever won notoriety without an equally natural flair for the field. He had tremendous charisma when he chose to exert it. But she fought the awareness as she fought him.
‘We can’t live together like this—’
Nik sprang back out of bed. ‘But we’ve only just begun. Come here...’ He reached for her and caught her up in his strong arms before she could retreat.
‘No—’ The raw force of his mouth silenced her, the strength of his hunger catching her unawares. Her hands balled into fists and struck out at him and then the hunger caught her too. It was like being swept up by a tidal wave. His tongue prised her lips apart and probed within, sending waves of instant excitement flooding through her taut body. The blood raced in her veins, heat exploding like a sunburst deep in the very heart of her.