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She had to remember that she no longer belonged here. That she wasn’t on her home territory but in Nikos’s domain. This was where he belonged now, where he ruled like some king of ancient Greece, absolute monarch of all he surveyed.
Absolute monarch—and possibly a tyrant too? She didn’t know what Nikos was like as a boss, but he had to be a ruthless and highly efficient one. It had only taken him five short years to turn round the fortunes of the Konstantos Corporation from the weakened position in which his father’s wild gambling on the stock exchange had left it. He’d turned the tables on her father, exacting a brutal revenge for the way Edwin had treated him in the past.
‘I’m sorry…’
Carefully she adjusted her pace so that she was no longer leading but had made space for Nikos to walk alongside her, take the lead if he preferred. But he didn’t take advantage of the change. Instead he stayed just behind her, a dark, looming shape at her right shoulder. Impossible to see. Impossible to judge his mood.
He was so close that she could almost feel the heat of his body reaching out to her. The scent of some cool, crisp aftershave tantalised her nostrils with thoughts of the ozone tang of the clear blue sea off the shores of the private island that the Konstantos family had once owned. That island had been part of the property empire Edwin had taken from them, so she supposed that it must now be once more back in Nikos’s hands—unless her father had sold it on to someone else.
Her conscience gave an uncomfortable little twist at the thought, knowing how much Nikos had loved that island. It had meant as much to him as Thorn Trees, the old house that had been part of her family for so long, meant to her mother. So surely he would understand why she had come here today.
‘Here…’
The touch of Nikos’s hand on her arm to bring her to a halt outside a door was soft and swift, barely there and then gone again, but all the same the faint brush of his fingers against her elbow sizzled right the way through to her skin underneath the fine navy wool, making her almost stumble in reaction. She had known that touch in the past, had felt it so intimately on her body, on her hungry flesh without any barrier of clothes. She’d felt his touch, his caress, his kiss along every yearning inch of her, and now, like a violin fine-tuned to a maestro’s hand, she felt herself quiver deep inside in shivering response as much to her memories as to the heat of his hand that barely reached her in reality.
‘I know!’
Unease pushed the words from her, as she faked impatience and irritation as an excuse to snatch her arm away from his hand as she twisted the door handle with unnecessary force and wrenched it open.
‘Of course you do.’ Nikos’s response was darkly cynical, the rough edge to his voice a warning that she had overstepped the mark as he reached a long arm across her shoulder and pushed at the door. ‘But allow me…’
Could the words be any more pointed? Could he make it any plainer that he was emphasising the fact that he owned this place now? That he, and not she, was in the position of power. Very definitely in charge.
And she would do well to remember that, Sadie told herself, pulling her scurrying thoughts back under control, forcing herself to take a couple of deep, calming breaths and remind herself just why she was here. She needed Nikos on her side and she would be foolish to anger and alienate him before she had even had a chance to put her case.
‘Thank you.’
Somehow she managed to make it polite, careful. Not quite the polite, submissive murmur she suspected would be more politic, but politic was beyond her. Her heart was pounding, ragged and uneven, so that her breath was jerky and raw. Tension, she told herself. Pure, unadulterated tension. She was nervous about what was coming, fearful about what she had to say and the way he might receive it.
It couldn’t be anything else, she told herself. It had to be that, could only be that. She wasn’t going to let it be anything else that was affecting her in this way. But with the heady scent of clean male skin in her nostrils, the brush of his hand along her neck as he reached for the door, the memory of those long ago sensual touches and caresses coming so very close to the surface of her mind, she knew that something else was knocking her dangerously off balance. Something she didn’t want to look at too closely for fear of what she might find.
‘Come in.’
Nikos was still keeping to that excessively polite tone, the one that warned her that she was in the presence of real danger. That she was trapped with a dark and menacing predator, one that had simply been biding its time before it decided to turn and pounce. And once inside this office, in the privacy that he had declared he was determined on, with no one close at hand to hear or to intervene should she need them, that surely would be the moment that he finally resolved to attack.
That thought made her legs suddenly weak as cotton wool beneath her as she stumbled into the room, coming halfway across the office before they gave up completely and brought her to nervous halt, not knowing what to do next. And as she stood there, her thoughts whirling, trying to find some way of beginning, an opening that would start her off on the path to saying what she had come to say, the words to ask for what she needed so badly, she felt Nikos brush past her. He strode towards the big desk that dominated the room, his movements brusque and controlled, his long body held taut with some ruthlessly restrained emotion. And it was as he swung round to face her that she saw the dark expression etched onto his stunning features and felt her heart lurch painfully just once, before it plummeted downwards to somewhere beneath the soles of her neat patent court shoes.
Anger. The whole set of his face was tight with icy fury, his golden eyes blazing with it. Away from public scrutiny, from everyone else who might see them together, hear what he had to say, he had thrown off the careful veneer of civilised, cultured politeness. The real Nikos—dark, primitive and very, very angry—was exposed in total clarity, without any pretence to mute the shocking impact of the rage that gripped him. A rage that was directed straight at her.
The predator had decided to pounce—and this time he was very definitely going in for the kill.
Chapter Two
‘YOU LIED!’ NIKOS said, flinging the accusation at her almost as soon as the door had swung closed behind her, shutting them in together. ‘You lied about who you were—gave a false name.’
‘Of course I did!’
Sadie prayed that the control she was forcing into her voice kept it steady. She hoped that she had at least held it down so that it didn’t go soaring up too high under the influence of the panic that was tying her insides into tight, painful knots.
‘I had to. What else could I do? If I’d given my real name then there’s no way you would have ever agreed to see me, would you?’
‘You’re damn right I wouldn’t. You wouldn’t have got across the threshold. But the fact remains that you are here—and that you lied in order to get here. Which means that you have something you want to say. Something that is important enough for you to use that lie in order to get to say it. So what is that, I wonder?’
The look he turned on her seemed to sear right through her, the blaze of his eyes so intense that Sadie almost expected to see her clothes scorch and burn along the path that it traced over her body.
Nikos was behind his desk, and he leaned forward to stab one long finger down on a button by his phone. Sadie heard a woman’s voice, faintly blurred by the nervous buzzing in her head, respond almost immediately.
‘No calls.’ It was a command, and clearly one he meant to have obeyed. ‘And no interruptions. I am not to be disturbed until I say.’
And if the secretary or PA goes against those instruction, then she’s a braver woman than I am, Sadie told herself. But the next moment any other thoughts fled from her mind as Nikos nodded his satisfaction and turned his attention back to her.
‘So why are you here?’
‘I…’
Faced with that arctic glare, the ferocious bite of his demand, Sadie found that in that moment she couldn’t actually recall precisely why she was there, let alone form her response into any sort of coherent argument. One that might actually impress him, persuade him on to her side when she knew that he was guaranteed to take the opposite stance, simply because he was who he was and she was the one doing the asking.
She was suddenly very glad of the expanse of polished wood of his desk that came between them, acting as a barrier between the powerful dynamic force that was Nikos Konstantos.
It was totally irrational, but when he glowered at her like that she suddenly felt as if the room had shrunk, as if the walls had moved inwards, the ceiling coming down, contracting the space around her until she felt it hard to breathe. She felt trapped, confined in a room that had suddenly become too small to hold them both.
She had been shut in with him in the lift, in a far smaller space, but somehow, contradictorily, this seemed so much worse. Now Nikos seemed so much bigger, so much more powerful, dominating the space in which he stood and holding her captive simply by the pure force of his presence.
Or was it about the room? Because it was the office that had once been her father’s? But there was no sign at all of the previous occupant. Every last trace of anything that was personal to Edwin had been removed and replaced with something much more modern, more stylish—and much more expensive. Even in the good days of Carteret Incorporated the office had never looked like this.
The heavy, dark desk and chairs had all been removed and replaced by modern furniture in a pale wood. Thick golden rugs covered the floor, and in the window area there was a comfortable-looking settee and armchairs for relaxing.
It spoke of Nikos Konstantos of Konstantos Corporation. The man who had taken everything her father had thrown at him and refused to go down under it. He had seen everything his own father had worked for snatched away, had stared bankruptcy and total ruin in the face and still come out fighting. And in five short years he had built up his business empire to what it had once been—and then outstripped that. The Konstantos Corporation was bigger, stronger, richer than it had ever been. And it had swallowed up Carteret Incorporated and absorbed it whole on its way to the top.
And Nikos was the Konstantos Corporation.
As she hesitated, Nikos shot back the cuff on his immaculate white shirt and glanced swiftly and pointedly at his watch.
‘You have five minutes to explain yourself—and that is more than you would have had if I’d known it was you,’ he stated curtly. ‘Five minutes. No more.’
Which was guaranteed to dry Sadie’s tongue, make it feel as if it was sticking to the roof of her mouth, and no matter how hard she swallowed, she couldn’t quite force herself to speak.
‘Could—could we sit down?’ she tried, looking longingly at the cream cushions on the padded chairs. Perhaps with her attention taken off the need to concentrate on keeping her legs from shaking so that she could stay upright she might manage to put her thoughts—and the necessary arguments to convince him—into some sort of coherent order.
Sitting down was the last thing Nikos had in mind. He had no intention of letting her get settled, allowing her to stay a moment longer than he had to. Just seeing her here like this was making him feel as if the room was suddenly at the centre of a wild and dangerous hurricane, with the day he had been living being picked up and whirled around, turned inside out.
And the sound of her voice was raking up memories he had pushed to the back of his mind for so long. He wanted them to stay there. He had never wanted to speak to Sadie Carteret ever again.
‘Tell him to go away, Daddy.’
The words she had tossed down the staircase at him, the last words he had ever heard her speak on the day that had been the worst day of his life, came back to haunt him, making savage anger flare like rocket fire inside his head.
‘Tell him the only interest he had for me was his money, and now that he has none I never want to see him again.’
And he had never wanted to see her, Nikos acknowledged, his whole body taut with rejection of her presence in his life once more. The disturbing tug of sensuality he had felt in the lift had evaporated, he was thankful to find. The memory of her callous rejection, the cold tight voice in which she’d flung it at him, not even bothering to come downstairs and tell him face to face, had driven that away, leaving behind just a cold savagery of hatred.
The sooner she said what she had to say and got out of here, the better.
‘Five minutes,’ he repeated with deadly emphasis. ‘And then I get Security to escort you out. You’ve wasted one of them already.’
‘I wanted to talk to you about buying Thorn Trees!’
That got his attention. His dark head went back, eyes narrowing sharply.
‘Buying? What is this? Have you suddenly come into a fortune?’
Belatedly Sadie realised her mistake. Nerves had got the better of her and she’d blurted out the first thing that came into her mind.
‘No—of course not.’
‘I didn’t mean buy—I could never afford that. I just…’
The sudden drop of those bronze eyes down to the gold watch on his wrist, watching the second hand tick by, incensed her, pushing her into rash, unguarded speech.
‘Damn you, you took everything we had. Every last thing my father had owned—except for this. I just hoped that I might be able to rent it from you.’
‘Rent?’
Her antagonism had been a mistake, sparking off an answering anger in Nikos, one that tightened every muscle in his face, thinning his lips to a hard, tight line.
‘That house is a handsome property in a prime position in London. With some restoration—a lot of restoration, admittedly—it would sell for a couple of million—maybe more. Why should I want to rent it out to you?’
‘Because I need it.’
Because my mother’s happiness—possibly even her sanity—her life—might depend on it. But Sadie wasn’t quite ready to expose every last detail of the worries that had driven her to come here today to plead with him. Not with Nikos standing there, dark and imposing, arms now folded across the width of his chest, jaw clamped tight, eyes as cold as golden ice, looking for all the world like the judge in some criminal court. And one who was just about to put the black cap on his head, ready to pronounce the sentence of execution.
Besides, her mother had already lost so very much. She wouldn’t deprive her of the last shreds of her dignity, her privacy, unless she really had no choice.
‘As you’ve admitted, it needs a great deal of restoration. There’s no way you would be able to get the market value for it right now.’
‘And no way I can get the necessary renovations done with you and your mother there. I thought I’d given instructions to my solicitor…’
‘You did.’
Oh, he had. She knew that only too well. The letter advising her family that Nikos Konstantos now owned Thorn Trees and that they should vacate the house by the end of the month had arrived a few days before. It had only been by a stroke of luck that Sadie had managed to intercept the envelope before her mother had shown any interest in the post. That way she had succeeded in keeping the bad news from Sarah for a while at least.
But not for good. Within twenty-four hours, her mother had somehow found the envelope and read its contents. Her panicked reaction had been everything Sadie had anticipated—and most dreaded. It was the final straw that had pushed her into action, bringing her to the realisation that there was only one way she could hope to handle this and that that was by going to see Nikos himself, appealing directly to his better nature in the hope that he would help them, let them stay at least until things improved just a little.
Not that Nikos, as he was now, looked as if he had a better nature at all. His face was set and stony, his eyes like glowing flints.
‘Your solicitor did exactly as you told him—don’t worry about that.’
‘Then you know what I have planned for the house. And it does not include a couple of sitting tenants.’
‘But we don’t have anywhere to go.’
‘Find somewhere.’
Could his voice get any more brutal, any more unyielding? There wasn’t even a flicker of emotion in it, nothing she could hope to appeal to. And what made it so much worse was the way a memory danced in front of her eyes. An image of the same man but five years younger. And so unlike the cold-faced monster who seemed intent on glaring her into submission that he looked like someone else entirely.
She’d loved that other man. Loved him so much she’d broken her own heart rather than break his. Only to find that in the end he hadn’t had a heart to break.
A terrible sense of loss stabbed at her and she felt bitter tears burn at the back of her eyes. She only managed to hold them back by sheer force of will.
‘It isn’t as easy as that,’ she managed, her voice rough and uneven. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, the economy…’
She swallowed down the last of the sentence, knowing that finishing it would only give him more ammunition to use against her. Of course he knew all about the economy, and the way things had changed so dramatically in a couple of years or so. It was what he had used against Edwin, manipulating the wild fluctuations in the stock market to his personal advantage and against the man he had hated so bitterly.
‘I thought that you had a business of your own,’ Nikos said now.
‘A small one.’
And one that wasn’t doing very well at all, Sadie acknowledged privately. With things as tight as they were for most people, no one was indulging in the luxury of having a wedding planner organise their ‘big day’. She hadn’t had an enquiry in weeks—and as for bookings, well, the last she’d had had cancelled the next month.
‘Then get yourself another house. There are plenty on the market.’
‘I can’t afford—’
‘Can’t afford a smaller house but yet you want me to rent you Thorn Trees? Have you thought about this? About the sort of rent that can be asked for a place like that?’
‘Yes, I’ve thought about it.’
And had quailed inside at the realisation of the fact that just the rent on her family home would probably be far more than she could possibly manage to rake together every month.
‘Or did you perhaps think that I might be a soft touch and give it to you for—what is that you say—mate’s rates?’
The slang term sounded weird on his tongue, his accent suddenly seeming so much thicker than before, mangling the words until they were almost incomprehensible. But even more disturbing was the knowledge that there was no way at all that they applied to the relationship between herself and Nikos. Whatever else they had been, they had never been ‘mates’. Never truly friends or anything like it. Hot, passionate lovers, fiancés, prospective bride and groom—or at least that was what had been intended.
Or had it? She had been overjoyed to accept Nikos’s proposal. Had looked forward to her wedding day with joyful anticipation and had wept out her devastated heart when she had been forced to cancel it. But what she had thought had been a broken heart had been as nothing when compared to the misery she had endured later, when she had learned the truth about what Nikos had really been planning.
The shattering of her dreams had coincided with such a major crisis in her family life that she had barely known what she was doing from day to day. In the end she had resorted to the policy of least resistance, letting her father dictate everything she did, the way she behaved. He had written the script for those appalling days and she had followed it exactly. At least that way her mother had been safe, and Edwin Carteret had made sure that Nikos had failed in his attempts to get back into her life, to try and see Sadie—and no doubt hurt her even more.
‘I…’
‘Get yourself another house, Sadie,’ Nikos commanded. ‘Nothing else is on offer.’
‘I don’t want another house—I want…’
I want Thorn Trees was all she had to say. And then he would ask her why.
And if she answered with the truth, how would he react? Would he sympathise, as the Nikos she’d thought she had known all those years ago would have sympathised? Or would the Nikos he was now see yet another opportunity to further deepen his revenge against the family who had ruined his father and taken almost everything from him?
Not knowing whether telling him the truth would help or simply put another weapon into his hands, she swallowed hard against the uncomfortable dryness of her throat.
‘Look…’
Her voice croaked embarrassingly.
‘Do you think I could have a coffee or something? Even some water?’
Seeing the look he gave her, she felt her heart clench at the savage contempt that burned in his eyes.
‘Of course not,’ she commented bitterly. ‘That would eat into the paltry five minutes you’ve allotted me. It’s all right.’
Despair blurred her eyes, tiredness making the room seem to swing round her. Why didn’t she just admit defeat, give up and go home? But the memory of her mother’s face as she’d left the house was there, urging her to try again. Sarah needed a home and so did little George. And right now Sadie was their only chance of keeping the house.
‘Here…’
The abrupt word made her start, jump back slightly. Nikos sounded suddenly so very close. Disturbingly so. She blinked hard to clear her vision and found herself staring at a glass filled with water, bubbles rising inside, beads of moisture sliding down the sides. Feeling as she did, it had the effect of discovering a cool oasis in the centre of a blazing desert.
‘Thank you.’ It was genuinely grateful.
Reaching out a hand to take the glass from him, she misjudged the distance, the right approach, and found that although she aimed to grasp it at the base, well below his hand, in fact she closed her fingers over his, feeling their strong warmth in contrast to the cold hardness of the glass.
‘I’m sorry!’
A sensation like the shock from a bolt of lightning shot up all the nerves in her arm, so that she wanted to snatch her hand away, and yet at the same time it seemed that the sudden heat had welded their fingers together, so she couldn’t peel hers away without a terrible effort.
Nikos seemed to have no such problem, though his eyes held hers, darkly mesmeric, as he adjusted his hold on the glass, eased his hand away, waiting just a moment to make sure that she had a good grip before he finally let his arm drop to his side.
Still with their eyes locked together, Sadie lifted the glass of water to her parched lips, swallowed a mouthful, finding it suddenly intensely difficult to force the cool liquid past the disturbing knot that seemed to have closed off her throat.
She wished he would look away, and yet at the same time she knew that she would feel lost and strangely bereft if he did.
‘Thank…’
Her voice failed her, seeming to shrivel in the heat of that intent gaze. Something had happened to his eyes, so that the colour of the iris seemed to have disappeared and there were just the deep dark pools of his widened pupils, edged only at the rim with burning molten bronze.
Almost snatching at the glass, she drank again, gulping down water that did nothing to cool the sudden heat that had flooded her body or ease the sudden heavy pounding of her heart.
‘Thank you.’
At least her voice sounded stronger now, without that appalling crack in the middle that gave away far too much of what she was feeling.
She held out the glass to him, expecting him to take it back, check his watch again to see just how long of her allotted time she had left. But instead, to her total shock, he ignored the gesture and, extending one long, tanned finger, reached out to touch it to her cheek just below the corner of her right eye. Instinctively Sadie flinched and would have backed away, but once more something in that intent expression caught and held her frozen where she was.