‘Then you’ve got a problem.’ Trembling like a leaf, Leah stood up, and all but drowned in the sexual charge of his glittering gaze. And she wanted him so much in spite of everything that she hated herself.
He caught her hand, preventing her from walking away. ‘I shouldn’t have asked...it wasn’t what I meant to say,’ he grated.
‘But it was exactly what you were bloody well thinking about!’ she shot down at him, and trailed her fingers free to walk back to the piano.
All he ever thought about, if anyone had cared to ask her. He still wanted her. It had taken him a month to appreciate the fact that sexually he had still to sate that inconvenient craving in her direction. So what did he do? She shivered with sheer rage. He just asked, ‘Will you sleep with me tonight?’ In Greece he had said ‘you could make me beg’. And she would. She would make him crawl over broken glass and beg and she would still say no! But it wouldn’t make her feel a whole lot better.
Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him spring up and stride out of the bar. And that didn’t make her feel better either although it certainly should have done. She wanted to put her head down and sob her heart out but she had an audience of at least twenty people and a job to consider.
It was four in the morning before she slept. Her bed-sit felt claustrophobic. There was no room to pace. Her mattress had the consistency of rock. But she didn’t cry; she was damned if she would cry over him.
Someone banged on the door at eight. And whoever it was was persistent. Leah dragged herself up, pulled on her wrap and opened it. A huge bunch of red roses was stuffed into her startled arms, Nik in their wake, devious as ever, taking advantage of her sleepy astonishment to walk in and shut the door behind him.
‘And what do you expect me to do with these?’ she rose above her disbelief to screech, murderously conscious of the make-up she hadn’t bothered to take off the night before, the panda circles round her eyes, the hair standing on end and Nik poised there like an advert for Italian suits and perfect grooming.
‘You put them in water,’ he suggested doggedly.
Leah pushed unsteady fingers through her messy hair and just stared at him, her bewilderment writ large in her eyes. ‘What is the matter with you?’
He studied her for several taut seconds and then swung away in silence. Leah took the opportunity to wash her face at the sink and drag a comb through her hair and was filled with self-loathing for herself as she did both.
‘There was only a very small number of women I actually slept with during those years,’ he volunteered stiffly. ‘Most the first year, nobody at all the last.’
The dreaded tears lashed her prickling eyes in an acid surge. And how was she supposed to react to that startling piece of information?
But she didn’t have to think. It just happened. She lifted those roses and hit him with them from behind. He turned, but instead of making an effort to defend himself he just stood there without even putting his hands up to protect his face as she battered him again. Several buds dropped on the worn carpet and the bouquet just dropped out of her suddenly nerveless hands. She felt like a maniac in the grip of a compulsive need to kill but the fact that he simply let her attack him defeated her.
Absolutely drained, she collapsed down on the foot of the bed and bowed her head, tears raining soundlessly down her cheeks. Nik crouched down in front of her and grabbed at her hands. ‘Please come home,’ he breathed roughly.
‘I can’t!’
‘I won’t ever ask what you’ve been doing this last month. I promise. I won’t ever mention Woods again,’ he swore feverishly. ‘I can do it. I can stop being jealous. You think I can’t but I can!’
Her tongue snaked out to moisten her lips. She opened wet eyes and focused on his downbent glossy head. ‘You were jealous?’
‘Devoured by it; what do you think I am—a stone?’ he muttered savagely. ‘When I saw those photos I was ripped apart. I couldn’t handle them and I knew if I didn’t I would lose you...and I have. But I’ve got over it now.’
‘Nik...’ Her throat had gone all tight.
‘That night in Athens I could see you were thinking about him,’ he said with dark emphasis. ‘And I thought, How am I going to live with this?’
‘I was thinking about you. Stavros had just dumped your parentage on me and I felt so guilty knowing what you didn’t know,’ she explained in a rush.
‘I had no idea you had been talking to Stavros. And when you gave me that key the next day...the way you did it, your attitude...I knew the reward you expected was your freedom,’ he murmured tautly. ‘I couldn’t force you to stay, not if you were in love with Woods. It would have been pointless. The decision had to be yours...and I really did not want to be around when you made it.’
It was an admission of cowardice which she had never expected to hear from Nik. She saw how her insecurity and her fear of putting her pride on the line had made her leap to conclusions and misinterpret his words. He had been the one who had pressured her into staying with their marriage. Once he had that key, he had believed that what happened next had to be her choice, her decision, for all along Leah had been the partner seeking a way out of their marriage.
She swallowed hard. ‘I’m not in love with Paul—’
‘Those photographs say different.’ Releasing her hands, Nik sprang up and walked over to the window.
‘Photos can be deceptive. I haven’t even seen Paul since that time he came to the house and it was over then.’ In a few words she explained why. ‘It was just an infatuation, an adventure...whatever you want to call it. I was bored and lonely and I suppose I wanted what I had never had.’
‘What you could have had with me had I not been too bitter and too proud to offer it.’ Nik swung back to her, his strong features clenched hard. ‘You have been more honest with me than I deserve, pethi mou. Had I lost you it would have been my own fault. I did fall in love with you the first time I saw you...you did not mistake my feelings. It was like being hit by lightning and when I got over the shock all I wanted to do was run—’
Arrested by what he was telling her, Leah tried and failed to swallow. ‘But—?’
‘But you might as well have tied my ankles together,’ he muttered with raw self-derision, his mouth taking on a sardonic curve. ‘I couldn’t stay away. You were too young. I wasn’t ready for marriage. But if I was not I knew that some other man might be...that if I walked away there was very little chance that you would be around when I chose to come back.’
‘I can’t believe you felt like that,’ Leah whispered, afraid to believe in what he had denied for so long, afraid to believe that she had not, after all, been wrong about what she had sensed in Nik all those years ago, that that instant desperate attraction had indeed been mutual.
Lustrous dark eyes rested on her levelly. ‘I did. But I didn’t know how to handle it and I’m afraid I resented the hold you had on me. Then Max changed everything. He made my mind up for me. Suddenly I had no choice...’
Ashamed of what her father had done, she studied the carpet beneath her bare toes.
‘Nobody had ever made me do anything I didn’t want to do before. I couldn’t believe that I could be that powerless,’ he admitted harshly. ‘I felt like some kind of stud stallion your father was buying for you! Trapped by a teenager. I was in a rage for months on end after it. And I swore to myself that you would get nothing that I did not choose to give out of our marriage!’
Thank you, Max, Leah thought bitterly. Thank you so much for smashing what we could have had together before it even got off the ground. She knew Nik well enough to know exactly how he had felt then. Caged, blackmailed, humiliated. She remembered the aura of silent menace that had surrounded him during the first year of their marriage but he had never once let any of it out, which said one hell of a lot for his self-control.
‘I can understand that.’
‘We had been married for a couple of years before I began to want you again.’ Nik held her startled scrutiny with fierce determination. ‘No, I didn’t show it. I would have cut off my hands sooner than come near you!’ he admitted. ‘My pride revolted against the concept of surrendering further to Max’s blackmail. You were the one woman in the world I wouldn’t touch.’
That hurt so much but she should have seen it for herself. He had told her this before. ‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t consider you. It was a fight between me and Max and you were the pawn in the middle. I didn’t have to consider you. In the back of my mind you were there, in my house, my wife, I couldn’t touch you but nobody else could either. And I could just about live with that.’
‘I was on ice,’ she said, with a jagged laugh.
‘But by the time Max died I had already decided that you would stay as my wife and then, when the choosing was mine, it would become a real marriage. You know, it did not cross my mind that you would have any other ideas,’ he confessed with a stark flush illuminating his hard cheekbones, a combination of discomfiture and shame in his clear gaze. ‘You had accepted the situation for so long—’