‘Dad used to give me money too,’ Leah shared flatly. ‘It’s OK. I never expected anything else. The only time he ever gave me a present—’
‘Me?’ Nik vented a grim laugh, his expressive mouth twisting. ‘And I wasn’t much of a gift, was I?’
‘I was going to say, the only thing he ever gave me was my mother’s writing bureau.’ Her smooth forehead furrowed. ‘And you know it’s not at all valuable. It’s pretty but he wasn’t remotely attached to it. In fact it was kept in one of the attic rooms and he had to have it restored but he said... Nik, do you know what he said?’ she muttered with growing excitement.
‘I’m not remotely interested!’ he asserted with sudden impatience, clear frustration mingling with other intense emotions in his lean, hard features as he reached for her, determined to gain her full attention. ‘I’m trying to tell you that...’ Uncharacteristically, he hesitated. ‘Theos, I wish I hadn’t spent five years being a self-centred, arrogant bastard, making you pay for what Max did...although I didn’t see it like that at the time!’
His lean fingers were biting into her narrow wrist, eloquently betraying just how hard he found it to admit such sentiments. And the writing bureau which Max had told her to ‘guard well’ simply evaporated from her mind.
‘But I can understand why you behaved that way...now,’ Leah murmured wryly.
Nik grimaced. ‘You were only seventeen and you were infatuated with me.’
She dropped her eyes, her skin heating, and drank her wine.
‘And I think even then I accepted that you were innocent of all knowledge of your father’s blackmail. I could have been kinder. You were little more than a child. You were far more naïve than Ponia is at the same age. When I saw you together here...I saw things I didn’t want to see five years ago,’ he completed in a constrained undertone.
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ she muttered, troubled by his introspective mood.
‘I must have hurt you a great deal.’
‘Yes.’ There was little point in denying it. ‘But I got over it.’ Forcing a smile to her not quite steady mouth, Leah sat up on her knees and reached into the box of food to begin unloading it. ‘What would you like—?’
‘You...now!’ Nik breathed rawly without warning.
Reaching up, he pulled her down again with two impatient hands. He laced long brown fingers painfully tightly into her silky hair as he gazed down at her startled face with incandescent black eyes. ‘Forget the food,’ he added with a sudden ragged intonation she recognised, only this time it combined apology with desire.
And she did forget, the same instant that he brought his mouth swooping down into explosive connection with hers. The smooth control she was accustomed to was absent. Nik unleashed a passion that devastated her. It was no slow, gentle seduction of the senses but an erotic assault in which clothes were thrust aside rather than removed. Excitement took over, blanking out everything but her body’s insanely instinctive need for him.
She gasped and threw her head back as he drove into her, rejoiced in his answering groan of satisfaction and from that point on there was nothing but wild sensation, rising to ecstatic heights she had never touched before and finally throwing her over the edge into a shattering release.
Nik mumbled something in Greek, his arms closing convulsively round her as she stirred. ‘Did I hurt you?’ he breathed unsteadily.
He had shocked her, she acknowledged, unable to resist sending a possessive hand travelling over his damp brown back, feeling his muscles flex in response. But then Nik frequently shocked her, both in and out of bed. She was getting used to it. A rather dazed smile curved her lips as she uttered a reassuring negative.
‘Theos mou...I could lie like this all day.’ Sliding on to his side, he carried her with him and viewed her with slumbrous dark eyes and an undeniable air of indolent satisfaction. ‘Every time I look at you you get more beautiful, agape mou. At seventeen you looked like an angel, pure, untouchable. Now you look like a woman, your mouth swollen from my kisses, your hair in a mess,’ he murmured, his sensual lips curving with rueful amusement, ‘and you still take my breath away.’
‘Do I?’
‘How can you doubt it? The last time I made love on a beach I was a teenager.’ He pulled her up with him and cast her a mocking smile. ‘Now we eat.’
All his tension had gone. He had said what he obviously felt he had to say. He had expressed regret for those five years. Guilt had taken a long while to hit him, but then, it was only now that Nik actually felt married, only now that he could make the effort to understand that he had not been her father’s only victim.
Max had been too shrewd a man not to foresee Nik’s resentment and bitterness at being forced into marriage and he could hardly have failed to be aware that Nik had other women. But Max hadn’t cared, hadn’t asked questions, hadn’t worried that she might be unhappy, Leah acknowledged painfully. He had caught her a very wealthy, influential husband and he had been very proud of that feat.
‘Why so serious?’ Nik probed.
‘I was thinking about Max.’
‘Wherever he is, he’s probably laughing like a hyena right now, you can be sure of that,’ he returned witheringly. ‘Here we are, doing exactly what he always wanted us to do, and sooner or later we’ll even have a child—’
‘A child?’ Leah was arrested by the concept, eyes wide.
His gaze narrowed, suddenly cool as winter. ‘One of those wriggly little pink things which scream a lot and require exhaustive house training,’ he extended very drily. ‘Most people find their helplessness cute and appealing...but maybe you don’t.’
She flushed, looked down into her glass. ‘I do...I just never thought about it,’ she muttered unevenly, forbearing to admit that she hadn’t thought along such lines in many years. But sudden warmth flooded her as she imagined carrying his baby.
He curved an arm round her, hauling her into the shelter of his sun-warmed body. ‘I thought maybe next year,’ he imported huskily, treating her to a dazzling smile in reward for having given the desired response.
‘It would be rather awkward for you if I refused, wouldn’t it?’ she said, abruptly rebelling against that arrogant stamp of approval. ‘Considering that you’re stuck with me anyway!’
‘Is that what you think?’
Leah wished she had kept her mouth shut. She could see the ambience of the last few glorious days going up in smoke in front of her eyes. ‘It’s the truth, isn’t it?’ she whispered tightly.
‘Our marriage is what we make of it.’ Shifting, Nik enclosed her in his strong arms, turned her round and settled her between his spread thighs. Insistent dark eyes levelled on hers, holding her fast. ‘Understand that, accept it,’ he instructed. ‘Don’t look back.’
And then he kissed her and refilled her glass and offered her some food but she wasn’t really hungry any more. She watched him eat with unblemished appetite and for the first time she allowed herself to think with optimism about their future. If he could put the past behind him so could she, and maybe the first thing she ought to do was tell him the truth about Paul...
‘Nik...?’
At the same time as she spoke someone called down from the top of the steep path that wound down from the villa. Nik uttered an imprecation and sprang upright in a movement indicative of his raw impatience. ‘I said no calls, no interruptions!’
She watched him stride closer and shout back. Then he spread his hands in a gesture of exasperation. ‘Urgent,’ he grated. ‘It had better be very urgent! Stay here...wait for me.’
He went up the path at speed. Leah helped herself to some luscious strawberries which had caught her eye. She studied her ring from all angles and smiled, quite euphorically happy all of a sudden. It was an effort to recall that she had to tell him about Paul when he returned because in all truth, she registered sleepily, she just didn’t want to remember how foolish she had been.
She woke up to noise, startled, disorientated. She saw a helicopter far above, hanging like a giant black bird, a second before it swept out across the bay. Pushing her hair off her hot face, she frowned down at her watch. She had been asleep for a couple of hours and Nik hadn’t come back.
Dimly she remembered the phone call—at least she assumed it had been a phone call. An urgent one. Clearly urgent enough to make Nik forget about her. She discovered her panties and pulled them on with a rueful giggle, tugging down her dress again, feeling deliciously abandoned.
She strolled into the cool of the villa and noticed the silence. She laid down the picnic stuff she had hauled up from the beach. The staff seemed to have vanished. An odd little shiver ran up her backbone—a premonition that something was wrong. Nik was in his office, studying something on his desk.
‘You forgot about me but I forgive you,’ she teased uncertainly from the doorway.
He raised his dark head and straightened. Eyes as treacherously cold and threatening as black ice focused on her and right there and then, in one devastating second, Leah knew that sixth sense had not betrayed her. She could feel the suppressed rage he was struggling to control, see it in the rigidity of his golden features as he stood there staring her down with all the silent intimidation he was capable of transmitting.