Parting her lips tremulously, Leah expressed that latter belief out loud. Nik slung her a seething glance, negating her assumption that she had chosen a safe subject. ‘That is not a risk I am prepared to take.’
‘I’m starting to think that you’re covering up a murder, something really ghastly!’ Leah shot back shakily.
‘Nothing so dramatic.’ He vented a harsh laugh, his jawline clenching hard. ‘Your conscience may rest in peace.’
‘I wish you’d tell me,’ she said unsteadily.
‘And put temptation in your way? Do you think I don’t know how desperate you are to be free? Do you really think I’m that stupid?’
Leah paled but she defended herself. ‘I wouldn’t hurt your family.’
‘Wait until you meet them,’ he breathed with dark satire. ‘You are not about to step into a living, breathing episode of The Waltons.’
Leah tensed. ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You’ll see.’
He lounged back into the corner in one fluid motion, black eyes shielded to a sliver of light in his impassive face by the thick dark crescents of his lashes. His expressive mouth had a decidedly embittered curve. It finally dawned on her that he was not looking forward to an ecstatic family reunion . Or was it that?
Why did she continue to ignore the fact that those wretched photographs had been as much of a shock to him as they had been to her yesterday? New and fragile bonds had been shattered by too brutal a reminder of the recent past.
And in her determination to defend herself she had used those photos as an excuse to vent her own bitterness. Maybe she had chosen the wrong issue on which to make a stand...and very possibly the wrong target as well. It wasn’t Nik’s fault that she was still furiously angry with herself for not trying to take control of her own life sooner, for playing the martyr to the bitter end to retain her father’s approval, and, finally, for being taken in by someone as superficial as Paul Woods.
No, Leah had to face that that frustration, regret and humiliation had all been self-induced. Nik had played little part in her passive acceptance of a marriage which was a charade. He had taken his lead from her. That was a devastating truth for her to accept but she saw that it was the truth, and what made it worse was the fact that she had long been happy to avoid it.
Not once in five years had she objected, demanded or even attempted to discuss the situation and Nik had not been in a position to demand his own freedom. Little wonder that he had decided that she was either obsessed with him or determined not to lose the status and wealth which being his wife had granted her.
So only now did she try to imagine how she would have felt presented with Nik in a series of intimate photos with another woman... She would have felt savaged. But Nik had never done that to her. He had been discreet. He had never featured in a clinch with another woman in newsprint. There had been no kiss-and-tell revelations—plenty of gossip-column inches of suggestion but never any actual proof that he was intimately involved with any of his beautiful companions.
Besides, whether she liked it or not, Nik had had a right to say that he had not considered himself married then. Forced into marriage with a seventeen-year-old, he had simply got on with his life as best he could. He had never been unkind to her. He had never set out to hurt her. In front of other people he had accorded her every respect. He had given her the status which her father had demanded as the price of silence. What more could she have expected? Love hadn’t been part of the deal even then. And one way or another she would have to learn to live with that.
‘Yesterday—’ she began, without even knowing what she intended to say but painfully aware that she had to make an attempt to bridge the gulf which had opened up between them.
‘I wanted to kill you,’ Nik murmured flatly.
Her head jerked. His sculpted profile was as emotionally uninformative as his intonation.
‘But then I didn’t realise how bitter you were. I don’t think I ever looked at those years from your point of view before. You always appeared content...ludicrously content,’ he acknowledged, with a wry twist of his eloquent mouth. ‘But you never betrayed any sign of unhappiness.’
Leah laced her unsteady hands together. ‘You weren’t there to see it and I learnt how to hide my feelings.’
‘Why did you stay with me? I have to know that,’ he breathed, turning hooded dark eyes on to her without warning. ‘I’m well aware that it couldn’t have been my wealth, not when you were prepared to give it all up to be with Woods. So why did you stay for so long?’
Faint pink burnished her cheeks and then drained away again under the onslaught of that probing scrutiny. She veiled her eyes and opted for honesty. ‘The first time I saw you...’ She uttered a jerky laugh. ‘It sounds so stupid now but for me, well, it was love at first sight.’
‘That doesn’t sound stupid,’ he said.
God, this was so embarrassing and he was trying to help her out by acting as if what she had just said was not embarrassing. But talking about feelings did embarrass Leah. It had been so easy to say ‘I love you’ to Paul when he had said it first. Nothing further had been required from her.
‘Has it ever happened to you? I mean, like, at first sight?’ she muttered almost inaudibly.
‘Yes.’ Nik then provided a slight hiatus by choosing to lift the phone and communicate with his chauffeur in Greek before continuing. ‘It was instantaneous and as terrifying as jumping out of a plane without a parachute. I felt out of control, taken over. I didn’t like it.’
Disconcerted by his candour, Leah bent her head, knowing that he was talking about Eleni Kiriakos. He had only been eighteen, she remembered that. But still it hurt to know that another woman had been capable of rousing that kind of emotional intensity in Nik. And no doubt had Eleni been less preoccupied with her medical studies Nik would have stayed in love.
‘You were telling me how you felt,’ he reminded her.
Leah bit her lip and tasted blood. ‘I was so naïve... At the beginning I thought you felt the same way. You were only flirting but I didn’t have the experience to recognise that,’ she said brittlely. ‘So you can blame me entirely for what Max did. If I hadn’t fallen for you and made it so obvious, he would never have thought of dragging any skeletons out of closets.’
‘That wasn’t your fault. I know that I blamed you that day at the bank but I was lashing out at the easiest target,’ he admitted with unusual quietness. ‘You were not to blame but you were Max’s daughter and the pressure I had been under since his death combined with the discovery that that box did not contain what I sought made me lose my head. It may be coming a little late but I am sorry for the manner in which you learnt of your father’s...trade.’
‘I had to find out some time.’ Confused by his soothing manner and simultaneously surprised that they still had not arrived at his mother’s home, which she had vaguely understood to be no great distance across the city, Leah stole a glance at him, and was further bewildered by the intensity of his appraisal.
And then comprehension hit her. Naturally Nik did not wish to introduce her to his family when they were obviously at daggers drawn, so he had evidently buried his own anger in an effort to paper over the cracks for the sake of appearances.
‘I think it’s very important that we should be honest with each other,’ he asserted, lowering his dense black lashes. ‘You say that you loved me when you married me...when did you stop?’
‘Stop what?’ Inexcusably her attention had strayed as she’d looked at him. He could stop her heart dead in its tracks just with one smile. And he was right—it was terrifying to love like that, to lurch from the heights of heaven to the depths of hell, to have one’s entire hope of happiness centred solely on one person...and in this case a volatile and ruthless individualist as difficult to read as a blank canvas.
‘Loving me?’ Nik pressed with impressive casualness, almost as if they were discussing something as impersonal as the weather.
Leah tensed. Somehow—and she didn’t quite understand how—she had stumbled into a nightmare conversation. ‘I just shut you out...I don’t remember when—’
‘So why did you stay?’
His persistence was remorseless. Yet she could understand his need to know. Her lashes screened her eyes. ‘Marrying you was the one thing I ever did that made my father proud of me...that was one reason. I was very hooked on trying to win his love and approval,’ she muttered with audible self-loathing. ‘Just as at the start I was trying to win yours...’
He released his breath in a sharp hiss.
Leah was in a what-the-hell mood now. Why pretend, why struggle to conceal the obvious? She loosed a jagged laugh. ‘Look, it really doesn’t matter now. I wasn’t trying to make you feel bad but, you see, it was your bad luck that I was the way I was then. Max always ignored me and then you ignored me. It was no big deal. It was what I was used to—my whole life set out for me, a nice safe little cocoon—’
‘But I hurt you...I must have hurt you continually.’