the greek tycoon's blackmailed mistress(21)

‘A moment is really all we have,’ the older woman acknowledged tautly, scrambling up to wrap her arms round her taller daughter in a sudden jerky movement that betrayed the precarious state of her nerves. ‘I’ve missed you so much, particularly after Susie passed away. But Theo is outraged by this situation. He says that because of your very public affair he’s lost face.’

Ella hugged her mother back with warm affection. ‘For goodness’ sake, he always exaggerates—he is only my stepfather.’

‘You’ve embarrassed the whole family,’ another voice delivered in condemnation from the doorway.

Ella focused on her half-brother, Dmitri, as her mother backed away from her. ‘Stop making excuses for your father,’ Ella urged. ‘He found fault with everything I ever did because I stood up to him. He doesn’t like me and he never will.’

‘Mum…in a few minutes Dad will be looking for you. You need to come back downstairs.’ Having issued that warning, Dmitri turned away from Ella, who was livid with him for behaving like a pompous prat.

‘Do you still live at home?’ she asked her brother. Watching her mother turn pale with fear as she’d registered the risk of her husband discovering that she had defied his dictates took Ella back to all the years that she did not want to recall. Years blighted by sudden violence and discord, and Jane’s increasingly pathetic attempts to make their warped family life seem normal.

‘Not for years. Stavros and I have an apartment.’

‘So, I can’t ask you to look after Mum tonight,’ Ella remarked stiffly.

Immediately grasping her meaning, Dmitri reddened, said nothing and concentrated on hurrying the older woman out of the room. He was as desperate to avoid conflict with his father as Ella had once been. She would never forget the tension of living in the Sardelos household, where everyone had worked hard in speech and action to avoid doing anything that might annoy Theo. While the initial conflict in the marriage had arisen over her stepfather’s infidelity, he had soon found plenty of other issues to set his temper off.

‘I’ll try to phone you.’ Jane flung the promise over a thin shoulder.

‘Any time, and for any reason. I’ll always be here for you.’ Ella returned that assurance with a slight wobble in her strained voice. Until she had seen her mother again, she had not allowed herself to acknowledge how much she had missed the older woman’s presence in her life.

Ella settled Callie for her nap, and left the nursery to return to the female guests milling round the terrace and the spacious drawing-room. She discovered that she was very much the centre of attention, and was reminded of how curious people always were about Aristandros—his lifestyle, his possessions, his women, his family and background, all of which had supplied years of gossip fodder for newspaper and magazine articles. Tactfully sidestepping the more intrusive questions, she moved from one knot of women to the next.

The men filtered back in little groups to their partners, and the guests began to go home. Drakon Xenakis made a point of bidding Ella goodbye before his departure. She was filled with consternation, however, when she saw her stepfather halt on the threshold of the room and simply jerk his head in her mother’s direction in a peremptory signal that he wanted to leave. Even at a glance she could tell that the older man was incensed with anger, the colour high on his fleshy face, his mouth compressed into an aggressive whitened line. As she watched her stepfather, her brothers and her mother trooped out without a further word to anyone.

Ella tracked Aristandros down to the office that connected with the conference room.

‘What the heck did you say to my stepfather?’ she demanded curtly.

His personal assistants froze in incredulity, and she flushed, wishing she had exercised greater self-control, and waited until she could speak to him alone.

Face impassive, Aristandros lounged back against the edge of the desk behind him and viewed her with hard, dark eyes. ‘Don’t address me in that tone,’ he told her with a chilling bite.

Ella was mortified when only then did he dismiss his staff with a meaningful shift of one authoritative hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered. ‘I should have waited a moment.’

‘All that I ask is that you remember your manners,’ Aristandros responded grimly.

‘I was concerned—I saw Theo stomping out in a complete rage. What happened?’ she pressed, anxiously pacing the carpet in front of him.

‘I informed Sardelos and your brothers that they are not welcome here if they cannot treat you with respect.’

Ella shot him an appalled look. ‘I don’t need you to fight my battles for me!’

‘I invited them, and this is my house. Their behaviour was unacceptable. What I say goes, khriso mou.’ Aristandros spelt out that reminder without a second of hesitation

‘I’ve never seen my stepfather so angry, and no wonder! You humiliated him in front of his sons, and he’ll blame me for that as well!’ Ella lamented. ‘I could kill you for interfering in something that has nothing to do with you.’

‘I defended you and you’re behaving as if I did something wrong?’ Aristandros growled, his eyes smouldering dark gold with angry disbelief. ‘You’ve let your stepfather bully you for so long that you can’t see the wood for the trees. He needs to be shown his boundaries by someone he can’t influence or control.’

Ella spun away from Aristandros, her thoughts heavily preoccupied with the likely fallout from the comeuppance which Theo had been given. Her stepfather set great store on his association with the Xenakis family; the sudden loss of that favourable social standing would not only humble him but also harm his business prospects. She wanted to yell and shout at Aristandros for acting with a heavy hand, but knew he had no comprehension of the likelihood that her mother would ultimately pay for her husband’s sins.

‘You interfered by inviting them here when you knew there was a serious rift between us,’ she accused tautly.

‘For goodness’ sake, my mother phoned me in Paris to tell me that they thought I was acting like a whore with you!’

Aristandros went rigid. ‘A whore?’

‘Nobody suffers from the illusion that I’m the one paying for the designer dresses and the jewellery!’ Ella slashed back bitterly. ‘How do you expect people to view me?’

His brilliant gaze semi-screened by his lush, black lashes, Aristandros stared broodingly back at her, his eloquent mouth clenching hard. ‘It’s not a question I paused to consider—’

Ella raised a dubious brow. ‘You didn’t? Well, my goodness, you considered everything else that related to image. Why else was I repackaged as a dress-up doll?’

But Aristandros wasn’t listening. He was frowning darkly. ‘So that’s why you walked out on me in Paris…’

Ella tossed her head, her pale hair fanning back across a flushed cheekbone and brushed away by an impatient hand. ‘That phone call may have made me a little touchier than I should have been.’

He treated her to an austere appraisal. ‘But once again it underlines how little you listen to what I tell you, khriso mou.’

The intimidating tension in the atmosphere was ringing alarm-bells in Ella’s head. Aware of his renewed anger, but at a loss as to its cause, she blinked in bemusement. ‘I’m not sure I know what you’re getting at.’

‘That you should have told me about that phone call that distressed you,’ Aristandros grated impatiently.

‘And don’t you dare tell me that it was none of my business, because your behaviour that night spoke for you! I don’t like the way you keep secrets from me. It’s dishonest.’

Ella sucked in a startled breath at that hard-hitting denunciation. She could not credit what he was saying to her. ‘You have some nerve to say that to me!’ she slung back. ‘Maybe there’s a lot about you I don’t like: a guy who uses lawyers to blackmail me into an indefensible agreement to let him do whatever he likes, while I do only as he likes. Is that what you call having a relationship? No wonder none of them last longer than five minutes! On what basis do you think I would give you my trust?’

‘Stop there before this gets blown out of all proportion,’ Aristandros advised harshly.

But Ella was trembling with pent-up emotion, and she could no more have held back what she was feeling inside than she could have contained a tornado. Her blue eyes were as bright a blue as the heart of a flame. ‘Do you think I could trust a man who once told me he loved me and wanted to marry me, but who dumped me less than an hour later? And why—because I couldn’t match the perfect blueprint of a wife that you had in your head? Because I had the audacity to want something more than love and your money to focus on? Would you have given up business and the art of making money to marry me?’

Aristandros had lost colour below his bronzed skin, and it lent a curious ashen quality to his usual healthy glow. He stared steadily back at her, however, predictably not yielding an inch of ground. ‘We’re not having this conversation,’ he told her.

‘I’m not asking for permission, and I’m not having a conversation. You may not have noticed yet but I’m shouting at you!’ Ella yelled at him at full tilt, inflamed by his stony resistance to her verbal attack and his refusal to respond.