Читать книгу Bond Of Hatred - Линн Грэхем, Lynne Graham - Страница 6

SARAH took several shocked seconds to absorb her incredulity. The Terzakis clan wanted Nicky! They wanted Callie’s child! It was a staggering suggestion and she couldn’t credit that Alex Terzakis could be serious.

Alex took her silence as encouragement. He studied her as a cat studied a mouse, calculation written all over him. ‘Damon adores children. Nikos would be greatly loved.’

‘I really...I really don’t believe I’m hearing this,’ Sarah admitted tremulously. ‘You wouldn’t let your brother marry her and yet you think he has the right to take her child? He cut her off, ignored her letters, allowed you to humiliate her and let her go through a very difficult pregnancy without any support...and you come here and you tell me that he wants her baby?’ As she spoke, her shaken voice strengthened with growing anger.

‘Whatever you feel for my brother, he is the father of your sister’s child,’ Alex delivered harshly, surprisingly silent and taut in receipt of her condemnation.

‘I can’t believe that you accept that—’

‘Damon inherited a rare blood group from my mother’s side of the family. I understand that Nikos also shares that blood group,’ he volunteered smoothly, seemingly unaware of the gross offence he was offering by admitting that he had taken up all the evidence available before conceding that Nicky was his brother’s child. ‘The chances of that occurring by coincidence are several million to one.’

‘And you’re probably still checking those out!’ Sarah slung at him in disgust.

‘I am not prepared to be drawn into argument with you, Miss Hartwell.’ He angled his gleaming dark head high and surveyed her with innate superiority and unhidden contempt. ‘I am only here for the child’s sake as negotiator on my brother’s behalf.’

‘Negotiator?’ Sarah echoed, trying and failing to swallow back her increasing distress.

‘Conciliator?’ he suggested with black velvet cool. ‘The past cannot be changed. We must consider my nephew’s future—’

‘Nicky’s f-future is with me!’ Sarah told him, but she was badly shaken by an offer she had never envisaged being made.

‘No doubt you think to drive the price up with this pretence of attachment to the child of a father you de-spise—’

‘The price?’ she whispered.

‘Any price...name it and it is yours,’ Alex Terzakis murmured softly, seductively, like a dope dealer dangling death before an addict.

Sarah was so appalled by his estimation of her character that she said nothing.

‘You hand over Nikos quietly, discreetly, keep your mouth shut and in return...in return,’ he repeated with golden eyes so intent on her that his gaze felt like a physical touch, ‘I will give you whatever you want. Think of that. You have had a hard life. What age are you? Thirty, thirty-one?’

Mesmerised, Sarah stared back at him, her trembling hands curving convulsively round a wooden chair-back. Thirty, thirty-one? Dear heaven, did she look that old?

‘You could do something with yourself,’ Alex Terzakis pointed out lazily. ‘It’s not too late. Money can buy beauty. With concentrated effort and professional advice, you could be quite attractive—’

‘You don’t say.’ Sarah could hardly get out the response. Although she had few illusions about her looks, any she might have had were being insensitively ripped to shreds.

‘The world could be your oyster. You could travel. You’re a clever woman. You could probably find yourself a husband.’

Sarah shuddered as she breathed in deep. Desperate for a man...embittered by her lack of one. Clearly that was how Alex Terzakis saw her. With rigorous determination she suppressed a squirming sense of utter humiliation. He was Greek to the backbone. What Callie called ‘unreconstructed man’, what Sarah called a Neanderthal primitive. He belonged in a cave, not a civilised society. Or in a museum alongside the dinosaur display.

Even in the depths of the mortification she was struggling to conceal from him she was conscious of a helpless current of grotesque fascination. On the surface, he was so sophisticated...but underneath as earthy and as simplistic in his beliefs about the needs of a woman as any uneducated peasant. He was telling her politely that what she really needed was a man in her bed... Dear lord, even the dinosaur display would be too advanced for him! It would never occur to him that celibacy was a perfectly natural choice for many people.

Then how could it occur to him? Alex Terzakis had not one but two mistresses. One in Athens, one in Paris. Sarah swallowed back her distaste, repelled by such rampant and unashamed promiscuity. Evidently his sexual appetite was voracious and uncontrolled. In today’s society, Alex Terzakis was a prehistoric savage, more to be pitied than anything else, she told herself, raising her chin. That she should have allowed such a barbarian to hurt and embarrass her was ridiculous!

‘Nicky is not for sale,’ Sarah said very drily, but her cheeks warmed as she dimly questioned her surprisingly intimate thoughts over the past few minutes.

‘I did not suggest that he was but I hardly think that you would wish to tie yourself down with a young and demanding child when you could make a new life for yourself.’

‘But I don’t want a new life. I am perfectly happy with the one that I have.’

His striking bone-structure tightened, hooded dark eyes resting on her without any perceptible emotion at all. ‘Then you force me to be blunt—’

‘Oh, I don’t think you need forcing,’ Sarah opined, sweetly sarcastic as she raked him with unhidden derision. ‘I would say that being blunt comes very naturally to you. The challenge would be sensitivity.’

‘You are a woman of discernment.’ Instead of reacting with the anger she had expected, Alex cast her a glittering threat of a smile. ‘Although I strive hard to pity you for your lack of femininity, your shrewish tongue and your unashamed malice, I do indeed find it a quite extraordinary challenge.’

Sarah turned crimson and then white in speedy succession. Her loathing for him was magnified into a murderous heat. Her teeth sank into the soft underside of her lower lip and she tasted the sweet tang of her own blood when what she most wanted was his.

‘Let us waste no further time. You are telling me that you wish to deprive Nikos of his natural heritage and his father out of spite,’ he asserted, icily contemptuous. ‘In opposition, what do you offer? A hovel for him to live in! The tag of illegitimacy to carry throughout his life! And the guardianship of a woman who is not of good character. Had you had any decency, you would not have encouraged your teenage sister to continue her relationship with my brother—’

Sarah was trembling with fury. ‘What control did you have over your wretched brother?’

‘I was not aware of their affair until it was too late. You knew from the beginning,’ Alex condemned. ‘You played your own part in your sister’s premature death—’

‘God forgive you!’ Sarah was stricken to the heart by the charge.

‘And, not content with that tragedy, you now seek to destroy my nephew’s future. I will not allow you to do it. He belongs with my family. We can give him everything,’ he stressed with harsh emphasis. ‘An extended family of supportive relatives, quite apart from a loving mother and father of his own...’

Sarah tensed, her fine brows drawing together.

‘The finest schools, a beautiful home, the ability to hold his head high wherever he is and in whatever company. He is a Terzakis.’ And to be a Terzakis was evidently the very zenith of anyone’s worldly ambition, she translated. She was facing a male fired by a powerful pride in his own blue-blooded, monied heritage. He could probably quote his family tree accurately back at least several generations. Little wonder, she thought, bitterly resentful, that Callie Hartwell, daughter of a factory supervisor and a nurse, had been less than nothing to him. No fancy pedigree there, just good working-class breeding.

Her reflections turned back to something that had puzzled her seconds earlier. She must have misheard him. He could not have said ‘a loving mother’. He could not have said that.

‘Androula would love him as her own. There is neither bitterness nor room for malice in her generous heart. She has had many months to adjust to the knowledge that another woman was carrying her husband’s child...’

Sarah was paralysed. Androula...her husband’s child? Dear God, Damon had got married to another woman while her poor sister had been pathetically pinning her hopes to an eventual reconciliation! He had actually got married! She was sick to the stomach, barely able to move on a stage to the even more staggering assertion that Callie’s no doubt triumphant rival was now most generously prepared to play mother to Damon’s illegitimate child...

‘Let me g-get this straight.’ Sarah formed the plea with an intonation wiped clean of emotion by extreme shock. ‘You are asking me to hand over Nicky to Damon and...and this And...’

‘Androula,’ he filled in obligingly.

‘Damon’s wife,’ she repeated, just to be sure that she could not have misunderstood.

‘She is a gentle, loving young woman,’ Alex emphasised with unconcealed pride in his freedom to make such a claim.

Not a little scrubber like Callie, Sarah interpreted in a passion of pain. She had not misunderstood. She was so appalled by what he was daring to suggest that only the fiercest discipline kept her nausea under control. That this savage did not even appreciate that he was contravening Sarah’s every moral principle underscored how very sick the Terzakis clan was in terms of basic decency.

Dear heaven, had Callie lived, would they have approached her to demand her child from her? Would Alex Terzakis have accused Callie of spitefully denying her son the wealth and material advantages which Damon alone could supply? Very probably. This was a male who had treated Callie like dirt from the outset, who had never for a single second even considered the possibility that she might be fit to marry his kid brother...no matter that she was already pregnant with his child. Self-evidently, Alex Terzakis did not even allow for the fact that such a low-class, common person as Sarah Hartwell could even have finer feelings!

Callie would have died sooner than hand over her son to Damon’s wife. The acrid taste of bile in her dry mouth, Sarah walked over to the phone. ‘If you don’t get out of this house right now, I intend to call the police,’ she told him unsteadily. ‘After all, you did force your way in.’

‘Is this all you have to say to me?’ Alex raked at her incredulously. ‘Are you completely without shame? I tell you of Androula’s generosity—’

‘Generosity—th-that’s a good one!’ Sarah lifted the receiver, fully prepared to carry out her threat. ‘What you have just dared to suggest is so frankly obscene it does not require any further discussion, Mr Terzakis. It is the sickest, most vile proposition I have ever heard.’

‘Obscene?’ He made it sound like a strange word.

Reluctantly, Sarah forced herself to look at him. Perceptibly she shuddered as she clashed with black ice eyes of enquiry. ‘Get out!’ she told him ferociously.

‘I have no intention of departing before we reach agreement.’ Rock-like resolution emanated from him in teeth-clenchingly arrogant waves.

‘If you don’t get out,’ Sarah swore between clenched teeth, abandoning the phone to employ a far more realistic form of intimidation, ‘I’ll approach the dirtiest tabloid available and tell all...’

Absolute outrage paralysed him. Violence shimmered rawly in his brilliant golden stare. ‘You would do that to Androula?’ he prompted very, very quietly.

A shiver ran down her taut backbone but she stood tall in spite of it. ‘I don’t give that—’ she snapped her fingers with a sharp crack ‘—for your precious, saintly Androula!’

‘Were you of my sex, I would break every bone in your vindictive body...slowly,’ he told her wrathfully.

‘You’d get your fingers burnt,’ she derided. ‘You can’t touch me and you know you can’t—that’s what’s making you so angry. If either you or your brother approaches me again, I go to the Press. Damon could have had his child, Mr Terzakis. He had his chance and he blew it. My sister gave her life to bring Nicky into the world. That’s how precious he was to her and that’s how precious he is to me!’

‘You have no right to keep Nikos!’

‘Watch me...or fight me in court...where all will be revealed,’ she reminded him with satisfaction, now that she had established his Achilles’ heel. He was too proud to face the washing of the Terzakis dirty linen in public. ‘Damon and his wife will never ever take possession of Callie’s child. Accept that and stay out of our lives.’

He was white beneath his sun-bronzed skin, white with savage anger that he was visibly fighting to rein back. ‘This, then, is your revenge—’

‘It is not one atom of what I would like to do to you and your family,’ Sarah admitted, powered by a surge of helpless aggression. ‘Damon was a wimp but you are the one who destroyed my sister’s life. Why? Because she wasn’t good enough...she didn’t meet your snobbish standards and she was poor—’

‘I am innocent of such prejudice!’ he slashed back at her. ‘And to use an infant as a weapon of revenge is the true obscenity!’

‘Do you know what real revenge would be?’ Harshly she laughed, acknowledging that he was unhappily out of her reach. ‘It would be making you suffer for what you did to Callie. It’s your fault that Nicky is illegitimate, nobody else’s,’ she spelt out. ‘Your filthy family pride came before honour and decency. When you said I was not of good character, I should have laughed in your face!’

‘Cristos...’ With the charged and splintering aura of a wild animal at bay, Alex Terzakis shot a guttural stream of Greek at her, spreading both hands wide in a raking arc of dark, smouldering rage.

‘You daring to say that to me,’ Sarah continued, pressing on with the fearlessness of outrage. ‘You with your women you have to pay to have sex with you! You with your ignorant, chauvinist double standards and sickening hypocrisy! Lay one finger on me, Mr Terzakis, and I will see you in prison with pleasure!’

‘Some day...some incredibly lucky man will beat you stupid and teach you respect!’ Alex Terzakis swore with two clenched fists.

Sarah was on a high of quite extraordinary energy. The sight of him standing there, seethingly frustrated by a desire to kill her just to shut her up, boosted her adrenalin with amazing efficiency. ‘Do you want to know what you really deserve?’ she asked with saccharine sweetness, venom dripping from every syllable. ‘A wife who would make your life a living hell—a real bitch!’

‘Like you?’ He vented a cruelly amused laugh, raking her with merciless derision.

‘I wouldn’t touch you with a barge-pole!’ Sarah’s face was hectically flushed. ‘You are the most utterly repellent man I have ever met,’ she said with impressive conviction. ‘I may not rejoice in much in the way of physical beauty—’ she flung her head high as she made the admission in a small, tight voice ‘—but my standards are very high, unlike yours.’

He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Still as the Greek statue Gina had fancifully compared him to, Alex Terzakis was studying her with almost compulsive intensity. ‘No woman has ever found me...repellent.’ He could hardly get the word past his compressed lips, he was so outraged by the label.

‘Money obviously talks.’ Sarah cast wide the lounge door in an open invitation for his departure. For a split-second, she really thought he was going to take a fighting chance at landing himself in a prison cell. He was possessed by the force of his own fury. He smouldered, he vibrated, he emanated violent rage into an atmosphere that positively sizzled, ready to burst into open flames. And all in silence. She discovered that she couldn’t take her eyes off him either. Involuntarily she was mesmerised by the sheer passion of so volatile a temperament.

Unexpectedly, he strode past her. And then she realised why. Gina was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, eyes out on stalks, too shaken by what she had heard even to pretend not to have been eavesdropping.

‘You will hear from our lawyers.’ The announcement was hissed over one broad, set shoulder halfway out of the front door.

‘One visit, one attempt at intimidation, one even mildly threatening letter and I’ll sing like a canary for the Press,’ Sarah slung before she slammed the door in his wake.

Gina was gaping at her with a dropped jaw. The silence seemed to go on forever.

‘I doubt if he will bother us again,’ Sarah finally muttered stiffly, wondering just how much the older woman had contrived to overhear.

Slowly Gina shook her head, still staring. ‘I just can’t believe what I’ve been listening to...that that was you baiting him, taunting him...’

‘I handed him a few home truths. That’s all. And Mr Ice-cool he’s not,’ Sarah could not resist savouring. ‘I bet every woman he meets fawns on him, feeds his ego...’

‘Is that why you felt you had to tell him that he was repellent,’ Gina enquired not quite steadily, ‘and that he had to pay for sex?’

‘I wanted to hit him where it hurt.’ But Sarah couldn’t meet Gina’s gaze. In retrospect, she was ashamed that she had revealed her knowledge of his sex-life but she was not remotely ashamed that she had accidentally stumbled on the brand of attack he found hardest to tolerate.

‘I don’t believe he has to pay for sex...he’s breathtakingly handsome...and you’re saying that he consorts with hookers?’ Gina probed with rampant curiosity.

‘He keeps two mistresses. If he keeps them, he’s paying for his pleasure—’

‘That’s not the same thing at all!’

‘Why are you defending him?’

Gina groaned. ‘Sarah, he is not responsible for Callie’s death. Nobody is responsible for that. You’re becoming obsessed. You’re hurting, yes,’ she conceded, ‘but you are taking this all too personally—’

‘Losing Callie w-was very personal.’ A shuddering sob suddenly trembled through Sarah’s slight frame.

Gina put her arms round her in an awkward hug. ‘But you have to think of Nicky, love...’

‘Are you telling me that you think I should hand him over to Damon and his wife?’ Sarah asked sickly.

‘If his wife is willing and it’s not just a front to keep Damon sweet...but then, how could you ever know whether it is or not? Don’t look so betrayed,’ Gina pleaded, her round face uncertain and engraved with lines of strain. ‘I’m all mixed up too. I really don’t know what to think any more. But the one thing I do feel is that Nicky’s welfare ought to come first, and with the best will in the world...how can you match a tenth of what they can give him?’

‘Money’s not everything,’ Sarah protested, distressed by Gina’s candour and pierced on her weakest flank by the grudging acknowledgement that Nicky did have the right to a share of the Terzakis wealth...but surely not at the expense of grossly offending against Callie’s memory? However, Gina was right... Ultimately, Nicky’s needs and future happiness had to be considered first and her own bitter feelings, painful as they were, must not be allowed to colour her response to an offer of a loving, caring home from the other side of Nicky’s family.

But, dear lord, Alex Terzakis had accused her of using Nicky as a weapon of revenge when nothing could be further from the truth! If Damon and his wife genuinely wished to bring Nicky up as their child, let them come and make that offer personally, let them demonstrate their sincerity and their whole-hearted desire to take him into their family... It was not Alex’s job to do their talking for them! And then Sarah might well be forced to think again of what was best for Nicky. In the meantime, Nicky was not some kind of parcel to be posted off into the unknown. Dear God, she loved him!

‘He’s a tiny little baby and I reckon you’re going to find him a far heavier burden than you ever found Callie,’ Gina sighed. ‘You’ll have to live here with me. There is no other way.’

* * *

The following week was a period of turmoil for Sarah. Nicky was adorable but he didn’t sleep very much. He didn’t want to eat every four hours either; he wanted to eat constantly. Gina had never had anything to do with babies. She tried to help, but Sarah relied heavily and slavishly on every word of advice advanced by the health visitor. At the same time, she was still struggling to adjust to the reality that Callie really was gone.

The phone rang and she expected it to be Callie. She saw someone with long blonde hair in the street and was jolted. She visited her sister’s grave three times in an anguished attempt to teach herself acceptance, but what made her alternately sob and rage most was the anger. And the anger was what she was least equipped to deal with.

Only with Alex Terzakis had she been able to let the anger out. She found that she couldn’t open up with Gina. Presumably her hatred for Damon’s brother allowed her to vent her true emotions freely, and that was good, not peculiar, good, she told herself repeatedly. And he had been a most satisfying target.

One week later to the day, Alex turned up again without warning. Gina was out. It was about eight in the evening. Sarah had just got out of her bath and she was on the way to bed, having decided that the only sensible way to manage was to sleep when Nicky condescended to sleep. When the bell went, she groaned, reckoning it was yet another of Gina’s friends, who frequently came round to gossip at night over a long gin and tonic.

But it was Alex Terzakis. Sarah was appalled. One slim hand grabbed at the loose neckline of her faded floral robe, the other frantically attempting to tighten the sash. She was immediately conscious that she was naked beneath the thin fabric, and that both embarrassed and infuriated her. ‘What do you want now?’ she muttered shakily.

He stepped gracefully past her. ‘Five minutes of your time.’

‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ll get dressed,’ she enunciated frigidly.

Coming through the door, he hadn’t even looked at her. Now he did. Golden eyes wandered a most unwelcome path over her in the dim hall light. ‘Why bother?’ he drawled flatly. ‘It wouldn’t bother me if you were stark naked.’

Crimson ran up in a river of colour to her hairline. Her mouth closed tightly. She stalked past him and settled herself down on the sofa without any ceremony. The towel wrapped turban-style round her small head began to fall and with a jerky hand she trailed it off and threw it aside.

A cascade of silver-blonde hair fell in a silky tangle of disarray almost to her waist. He stopped dead in his tracks and dealt her an arrested glance. Sarah searched his suddenly narrowed golden gaze blankly and then looked over her shoulder to see what had attracted his attention. Gina’s floral wallpaper covered by blooms the size of dinner-plates? The cuckoo clock?

She turned back to him irritably. For some reason, he still looked riveted and he very narrowly missed tripping over one of the tiny wine-tables which cluttered the room. He snaked out a speedy hand and restored the rocking article, his perfectly shaped mouth twisting with annoyance.

‘May I sit down?’ He surveyed her expectantly.

‘Suit yourself.’

‘You could offer me a drink,’ he suggested drily.

‘You are not a welcome guest, Mr Terzakis.’

Under her stunned scrutiny, he strolled over to the tray of alcoholic beverages on the sideboard, located the whisky, selected a glass and helped himself. ‘I should warn you that I find it impossible to be even slightly courteous in your vicinity.’

Sarah took refuge in silence but her nerves were singing like a soldier’s on the brink of a battlefield.

He sank down with indolent grace into an armchair opposite and regarded her with utterly unreadable black ice eyes fringed by ridiculously long, luxuriant lashes. ‘Last week, I made several miscalculations,’ he murmured smoothly. ‘It is obvious that you have no intention of giving up Nikos—’

‘Nicky,’ Sarah slotted in shortly.

‘Nicky—how cute.’

But he was saying it, she noted with rich satisfaction.

‘No intention of giving him up...am I correct?’

‘Very rarely, but on this occasion, yes.’ But was that quite true? Sarah had tossed in her bed over several nights, questioning whether she was doing the right thing in utterly rejecting the proposal he had made for Nicky’s future. In material terms certainly the Terzakis family had a great deal to offer Nicky, and the further suggestion of two parents... But then, it was the potential parents that worried Sarah the most.

‘It was perhaps...tactless,’ he selected softly, ‘of me to suggest that my brother and his wife assume responsibility for him.’

Sarah was not acquainted with him in this mood. She frowned. He was purring like a sensuous cat and toeing the line, a line she had frankly not expected him to abandon so easily. ‘Not tactless,’ she said. ‘Brutally insensitive.’

‘The child’s future could be secured in another way,’ Alex proffered. ‘I could adopt him and bring him up as my son.’

Sarah was thrown by the proposal, tossed casually at her without the smallest of preliminaries. The tip of her tongue snaked out to moisten her dry lips. His darkened eyes suddenly flamed into gold, his attention dropping to the surprisingly voluptuous curve of her lower lip and lingering. Faint colour threw his hard cheekbones into prominence. He tautened, shifting slightly in the chair, a tiny muscle pulling tight at the corner of his unsmiling mouth.

There was a thrumming tension in the air. She didn’t know where it had come from but it unsettled her, brought her skin out in goose-flesh. She stiffened, and watched that so expressive mouth of his suddenly slide into the faintest of smiles. It was there and then it was gone as though she had imagined it, leaving her scrutinising him with uneasy suspicion of she knew not what.

What was the matter with him? Had he been drinking? Perhaps that was why he had to help himself to whisky—dire need rather than simple ignorant bad manners. He had nearly fallen, she reminded herself. In addition, he couldn’t seem to hold his concentration.

And he wasn’t the only one, she registered, although she could scarcely be blamed for losing focus on the conversation when he was behaving so oddly. As for his proposal that he adopt Nicky! Barely worth the breath required to answer. No...no...no.

‘You would hand Nicky over to your brother. That’s what you would do.’ She spoke her thoughts out loud.

‘I am a man of my word, a man of honour.’ Night-dark eyes rested on her again. ‘But then I doubt that you believe that. Yet it is imperative that—er—Nicky should be accepted as a Terzakis.’

‘Imperative to whom?’ Sarah demanded.

‘Do you really think that one day that child will be grateful to you for denying him his rightful place in society?’

Sarah paled, bent her head, assailed all over again by doubt and uncertainty which she was determined not to show him.

‘Your determination to deny my nephew what my family could give him is wholly selfish,’ he derided harshly.

Taut and strained, Sarah studied the carpet at her feet. Was it selfish? She was greatly disturbed by the accusation. Didn’t he see that from her side of the fence the Terzakis men were a particularly abhorrent yardstick by which to measure the rest of his family? Damon: weak, cruel and uncaring, as revealed by his treatment of her sister. Alex: ruthless, arrogant and equally cruel and uncaring of those less fortunately placed in the world. She did not seek to retain custody of her nephew out of revenge and respect for Callie’s memory alone. No, indeed...

A child needed more than wealth and status to thrive. A child needed time, understanding and love to grow into a responsible adult. Was it even reasonably possible that Nicky would find those needs fully met by the Terzakis family? Sarah thought not, but she desperately wished she had a crystal ball to see into the future because she was frightened by the fear that she could be making the wrong decision on Nicky’s behalf. And if that was true, she would never forgive herself...and Nicky might never forgive her either, she reflected painfully.

She cleared her throat and lifted her head, sure on one point. ‘I wouldn’t trust you with Nicky. He’s a helpless little baby and you’re a self-centred workaholic shark who would probably dump him in the full-time care of a nanny—’

The long fingers of one lean brown hand flexed. ‘Your insolence astounds me,’ he admitted in a roughened undertone.

Ironically, Sarah had merely been honest. For once she had not sought to offend deliberately. She had simply been truthful. ‘And what would happen when you married?’ she continued doggedly. ‘Nicky would get a stepmother who would very probably resent him and favour her own children over him.’

‘By what right do you dare to pass an opinion on my character?’ he demanded, springing upright with the restive energy of a prowling tiger.

Sarah tensed. One word of criticism and he was on the brink of explosion. ‘And then,’ she added helplessly, ‘there’s your temper—’

‘My temper?’ he repeated with a stark flash of grinding white teeth.

‘You appear to have little control over it,’ she murmured. ‘Children can be very trying. They can test your patience to the utmost.’

‘You know nothing of my temper!’ he intoned, incensed. ‘I am a very disciplined man.’

Sarah elevated a brow. ‘Oh, I expect you’re an absolute pussycat as long as everybody around you is bowing and scraping and you’re getting your own way.’ She rose to her feet, hoping he was on his way out. ‘What you cannot handle is opposition from a mere female...’

A pin-dropping silence stretched. Hooded dark eyes regarded her almost slumbrously. ‘I could handle you with one hand tied behind my back...but you wouldn’t like my methods.’

For some reason the full onslaught of that disturbingly intent dark stare made her breath catch in her throat. Something deep in the pit of her stomach tightened almost painfully. Her breasts felt curiously heavy. Time seemed to have slowed down. And then he turned his head away, tautening, and strode over to the door.

‘Nikos is crying,’ he informed her flatly, as though that in itself were an offence.

‘Nikos?’ Blinking in confusion, Sarah had to dredge herself out of the strange spell she had fallen under for a few dismaying seconds. Involuntarily she shook her head. It was tiredness, stress. Little wonder she was feeling odd.

With a stifled sound of raw impatience at the slowness of her response, Alex strode out of the room and up the stairs, but he hung back for a split-second to breathe in a tone of forbidding censure, ‘A baby should never be left to cry.’