Читать книгу The Unfaithful Wife - Lynne Graham - Страница 6

WITH A FLEETING glance over her shoulder, Leah hurried down the steps and into the wine bar. It was dark and crowded with lunchtime drinkers. She couldn’t see Paul. She wasn’t tall enough to see past the clumps of business-suited men standing around. A nervous tremor shot through her as she burrowed through the male clusters. She was so terrified of being seen, recognised. It was a relief to espy Paul’s golden head in a far corner.

He stood up as she approached, tall, sophisticated and very attractive, and her heart swelled with pride. ‘You’re late,’ he complained.

‘Sorry, I couldn’t get away.’ Short of breath, Leah dropped down on to a seat and couldn’t help spinning another glance around in fearful search of a familiar face.

‘Stop that. You’re on the wrong side of town to be seen.’

Leah bent her silver-blonde head, her face flushed and taut. ‘That man in the corner is staring at me!’

‘Most men stare at beautiful women...and you are exquisitely beautiful, my love,’ Paul murmured in a low, intimate tone, reaching for her slender-boned hand. ‘It gives me a real kick watching every male head turn when you walk by.’

‘Does it?’ Still unaccustomed to his compliments, Leah looked up at him with a shy uncertainty that was oddly at variance with her designer suit. Her flawless face between the wings of her sleekly swept up silver-blonde hair was rapt, her sapphire-blue eyes bright as the jewels in her ears.

‘Why don’t we go back to my apartment?’ Paul ran a finger along her full lower lip and smiled smoothly as her skin heated.

Leah stiffened. ‘I can’t...not yet; you know how I feel,’ she muttered in a stifled voice. Fear sprung up inside her as his handsome face turned hard and cold.

‘And you know how I feel, Mrs Andreakis. Bloody frustrated, if you must know!’

Leah went white. ‘Paul, please...’

‘For all I know, you’re just playing a little game with me while your husband’s out of town.’

Pain and distress filled her eyes. ‘I love you...’

‘Then when are you going to tell him you want a divorce?’ Paul demanded.

If possible, Leah went even paler, a hunted look tightening her exquisite features. ‘Soon... I just have to pick the right moment.’

‘Considering that on average he only sleeps one night a month under the same roof as you, I could still be sitting here this time next year. Maybe you’re in love with the bastard— ‘

‘How could I be?’ She bent her head, her hands clenching tightly together. ‘You know we don’t have a normal marriage.’

‘And wouldn’t the tabloids just love to get a load of that!’ Paul sniggered.

‘I don’t think that’s funny, Paul.’

‘Well, the only thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that I may not be your lover, but he isn’t either. And you’ve got to admit that that’s a real mystery. Look at you,’ Paul mused. ‘The virgin bride five years down the road and yet he’s rarely seen in public without some beautiful bimbo clinging to his arm. Maybe he’s a closet gay.’

Her sensitive stomach curdled. She must have been mad to tell Paul the truth about her marriage. Not, of course, that he would do anything with it. She trusted him absolutely but she was aware that she had been dangerously indiscreet in her need to soothe his jealousy of Nik. Nik... The very blood in her veins went cold when she faced up to what she still had ahead of her.

‘Don’t talk about him like that,’ she urged tightly.

‘You think the table is bugged? You’re scared stiff of him, aren’t you? I don’t think you’re ever going to pick up the courage to tell him you want your freedom. I think I’m wasting my time— ‘

‘No...no, never,’ Leah whispered frantically, the thought of losing him filling her with panic. She just couldn’t go back to what her life had been for the past five years. Empty, without focus, boring. Before Paul, every day had stretched endlessly in front of her. She didn’t have a social life. She didn’t have friends. She was watched everywhere she went. The door of her prison had slammed shut on her wedding-day and she had been so dumb, so naïve, she hadn’t even realised it until she’d tried to move beyond the bars.

‘Then when?’ he pressed moodily.

‘Soon...I promise you.’

‘I don’t see why you can’t just move out bag and baggage. It’s not as though you don’t have all the evidence you need to divorce him. Adultery is not about to go out of fashion with Nik Andreakis around.’

‘I have to do it right, Paul. Don’t you see that I owe him that?’

‘I don’t see that you owe him anything. In the eyes of the Church and the law, he’s not even your husband,’ Paul persisted impressively.

Leah glanced at her watch and uttered a gasp of dismay. ‘I have to go!’

Paul caught her by the shoulders and kissed her with practised expertise. ‘I’ll phone,’ he promised. ‘Love you, darling.’

Leah fled. It was three blocks to the fashionable hairdressers where she had been booked in for a long session of massage and beauty treatment. She took terrible risks to meet up with Paul and her head told her that the longer she put off asking Nik for a divorce, the more chance there was of her being found out. But, then, what would it really matter?

Nik didn’t care what she did. She saw him maybe once a month when he stopped over in London, sometimes not even that over the past year. He might request that she play hostess for a business dinner, but of late even those requests had been few and far between. If he had to communicate with her, he did so through his staff.

In their entire marriage, Nik had never once taken her out in public. Not for dinner, not to the theatre, not to a party. Nik pursued his glittering social life with other women on his arm...never, ever his wife. He slept in his own wing of the house...and even that handful of nights a year that he stayed under the same roof she had heard him go out late and return after dawn, so those nights didn’t really count either.

For an instant, as she flew through the side-entrance of the hairdressers, she remembered when she had lain awake crying and listening for him, wondering in despair what was wrong with her, what she had done, what she had not done, what she could possibly do to make him notice her and acknowledge her existence. Angrily she thrust the memory away. Time had taken care of that kind of nonsense. The child bride had grown up and wised up.

‘I’m so sorry. I forgot my appointment,’ Leah murmured at the reception desk and as usual she insisted on paying anyway and she tipped as if there were no tomorrow. The proprietor, Charlie, came up to her and offered to fit her in immediately but she sighed and said she was running late and sat down to wait for her chauffeur to draw up outside.

‘Oh, by the way, Mrs Andreakis— ‘ Charlie lowered his head, his beaded locks swinging colourfully ‘— your bodyguard called in with a message for you.’

Leah went rigid, turned white as a ghost.

‘Relax.’ Wry brown eyes met hers. ‘I said you were in the massage-room.’

Leah turned scarlet. ‘Thank you,’ she managed jerkily.

‘I’d better give you the message,’ he whispered. ‘Mr Andreakis is waiting for you at home.’

Nik was what? Nik was waiting for her...Nik who had never waited for her once in five years? Nik was home when he wasn’t due back in London for another fortnight? Involuntarily, Leah shivered, her stomach turning over sickly. For a split-second she was consumed by the sort of panic that made people jump out windows in a fire. Sheer cold terror.

Charlie settled down beside her, his hands planted on his knees. ‘Baby, you’re not cut out for this game you’re playing— ‘

‘I don’t know what you’re— ‘

‘You’ve been coming here every week for five years. And the last couple of months what you’ve been feeling has been just blazing all over your face.’ He sighed. ‘But I don’t want to go down in history as the idiot stupid enough to give Nik Andreakis’s wife an alibi. He’s the kind of guy who probably breaks fingers. I get the shakes just thinking about it.’

Shame washed over her. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘And I’m sorry I can’t be more help because it’s been kinda nice seeing you happy for a change.’

‘Mrs Andreakis...?’

Leah flinched as her bodyguard, Boyce, cast a big, dark shadow over her. As she stood, he cast a suspicious, cold look at Charlie, who had been too physically close to his employer’s wife for his liking.

As soon as the door slammed on the limousine, her composure collapsed. Charlie knew she was seeing someone. Dear God, she felt so humiliated. She also felt guilty as hell. Her hairdresser was afraid of being dragged into a marital furore. Not that there was the slightest chance of that happening when Nik couldn’t give two hoots what she did. But cheerful, wisecracking Charlie, who had laughed her out of many a depression over the years, had been genuinely scared.

Everyone was afraid of Nik. And yet she had never heard him shout. Early on in their marriage Leah had walked in mortal terror of him until it had slowly sunk in on her, with the drip effect of his icy indifference, that she barely existed as a human being on his scale of importance. He had married her to gain the shares her father had signed over to her. She had been part of a business deal, nothing more.

And yet there had been times at the beginning when she could have sworn that Nik looked at her with veiled loathing, when his voice could say the lightest things and sound like a whiplash of naked threat, when his very presence in the same room had made her feel menaced...and that was when she had learnt to hug the background, never draw attention to herself, avoid him whenever possible. She had assumed that he resented having had to marry her to get the shares. Yet divorce had always been within his reach. It was a mystery Leah had yet to fathom out.

And now Nik, who had not varied his schedule in five long, endless years, had come home unexpectedly. That fact returned to haunt her, anxious though she had been to evade it. Her fingers clenched white-knuckled around her bag as she climbed the steps of the vast Georgian terraced house. The unfaithful wife, she thought painfully.

But she wasn’t his wife, not his real wife, she reminded herself, just as she had often done in the weeks since she had met Paul. She should have demanded her freedom a long time ago. But her father would have been outraged and bitterly disappointed.

Leah had spent the first seventeen years of her life pleasing her father, Max, in every way she could. She had done as he advised five years ago. She had married Nik and it had been the biggest mistake of her life. Nik had taken her freedom and given nothing in return. But that time was past, she reminded herself. It was almost two months since her father had died, the heart condition which had endangered his health for years having finally taken its toll.

‘Mr Andreakis is waiting for you in the drawing-room,’ Petros the butler informed her.

Leah hovered, nervous tension biting. As a rule, she didn’t see Nik until he sat down at the dinner-table. The belief that something was wrong attacked her again.

He was standing by the marble fireplace, six feet two inches of overwhelmingly masculine male. Once she had looked at him and her heart had sung, her knees had weakened and her voice had caught in her throat. Now Leah saw him always as if through a glass wall. Learning to detach herself had been lesson one.

Nik Andreakis, the legendary Greek tycoon, possessor of fabled wealth and immense power. From his hand-stitched leather shoes to his fabulously tailored mohair-and silk-blend pearl-grey suit, he was effortlessly elegant, supremely sophisticated. A man to die for, she had thought at seventeen, her impressionable little teeny-bopper heart ready to burst with sheer excitement.

And Nik was a devastatingly handsome male animal, quite stunningly gorgeous by any standards. Thick ebony hair, golden skin, riveting black eyes as dark as night. Wherever he went he was the focus of female attention. And he knew it, was amused by it...used it when it suited him. Once, though she rarely allowed herself to recall it, Nik had focused that elemental aura of sexual energy on her.

Something had changed...something was different. Tension thrummed in the air. Deep-set dark eyes scanned her. ‘Your lipstick’s smudged.’

Her fingers flew up to her mouth in a gesture of dismay. ‘Is it?’

Winged ebony brows drew together in slight frown. Nik studied her intently. ‘We haven’t got much time, so I’ll just move to the baseline. We’re flying to Paris.’

Frozen with astonishment, Leah echoed, ‘Paris?’

Nik had already opened the door. ‘Come on,’ he said with unhidden impatience.

‘You want me to go to Paris with you?’ Leah stressed helplessly. ‘Now...like right now?’

‘Yes.’

‘But why?’

‘A little business tied up with your father’s estate.’ Hooded dark eyes probed the amazement that flashed across her face.

And Leah was amazed— amazed that there could be anything left to sort out concerning her father’s estate. Although Nik had not even bothered to attend Max’s funeral, he had arrogantly assumed responsibility for instructing his lawyers to deal with her father’s property and possessions. While Leah had been grieving, too bound up in her loss to consider the practicalities of death, everything her father owned had been sold— everything!

His beautiful house, his business investments, his very furniture and personal effects had all been liquidated into cash at Nik’s instruction. Leah had not been left with a single memento. Her father, Max Harrington, might never have existed for nothing remained to testify to his sixty-odd years on this earth. Leah had been appalled by Nik’s insensitivity but by the time she found out it had been too late for her to intervene. The deed had been done. As usual, Nik’s orders had been carried out with speedy efficiency by his obedient staff.

A quiver of helpless antagonism ran through her. She lifted her silver head high. ‘Something you actually overlooked?’

‘No. Something I was looking for has finally been located.’ Harsh emphasis accompanied the assurance. An almost savage tension was briefly stamped in his hard, strong features as he read her mystified expression. ‘At least I think it has been. For your own sake, pray that I am right,’ he completed tautly.

Paling, Leah stepped back from him, the chill, the sense of threat running along her every nerve-ending. ‘For my sake? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I hope not.’ He swung on his heel.

Leah made for the stairs. A hard hand stayed her. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘To get changed.’ Sudden fear licked at her. She stared in shock at the lean, powerful hand clamped to her slender forearm. Nik never touched her...never, not even in the most passing, casual gesture.

‘There’s no time for that. The jet’s ready for take-off.’

‘Will we be coming back tonight?’ Her voice rose an octave as he literally thrust her out of the house. ‘I have nothing packed!’

‘You’ll manage.’

‘What’s going on?’ Leah demanded frantically as the limousine drew away from the kerb.

Ignoring her with supreme disdain, Nik picked up the phone and proceeded to talk at length in Greek.

She didn’t understand a word. A fleeting recollection stirred. On their wedding-day she had told him she intended to learn his language. ‘Don’t waste your time,’ he had derided, and that had been the very first crack that appeared in her fantasy world. Before the day was at an end, the crack had widened into a yawning gulf but it had taken a lot longer for reality to banish that fantasy world she had wanted so badly.

Her temples throbbed with the tension in the air. But her inner turmoil did not show. She sat still, apparently composed, her manicured hands loosely resting on her lap. In Nik’s presence she had learnt to conceal her emotions. Only that did not still the stormy flood of her hidden consternation and incomprehension.

‘What is this all about?’ Leah asked a second time.

Silence.

Doggedly she persisted. ‘I understood that Dad’s estate was all settled.’

‘Did you really? I wonder,’ Nik responded murderously quietly.

Something in his intonation disturbed her. Her delicate profile turned. She encountered eyes as treacherous as black ice. Her stomach muscles clenched, her skin chilling. She had a sense of impending disaster so powerful that she felt briefly sick.

‘If you would just explain what— ?’ she began.

‘Why should I explain myself to you?’ It was so clearly a growl of lancing derision that she was silenced.

‘Young as you are, you are every man’s secret fantasy...’ Who would ever believe that those seductive words had been uttered by the husband who had ignored her very existence for five solid years? Yet Nik had said those words the first day they met. Why had he lied? Why had he pretended? Had he wanted those shares in that shipping line that badly? He must have done. It was patently obvious that she had never been Nik Andreakis’s secret fantasy. Bitterness tremored through her. Nik had used her without conscience...as had her father, who had gloried in Nik’s wealth and status.

Pained by the acknowledgement, Leah looked blankly out of the window. She longed for Paul— Paul, who hadn’t even known who she was when he’d first approached her, Paul, the very first man in her life to respond to her as an individual with feelings and needs and opinions of her own. He wanted only her. He wanted her for herself. He wasn’t trying to use her.

In Paris, she would tell Nik that she wanted a divorce. There would be no more procrastination. She would not risk losing Paul. And she was hungry to live a life of her own, hungry for the freedom which beckoned so tantalisingly on the horizon. Nik had stolen her youth, the teenage years when she should have been dating and having fun and loving. Why shouldn’t she be greedy for what she had never had?

On the private jet she flicked through magazines but her mouth curled several times as she watched the stewardess hover round Nik like some harem concubine, desperate to attract the sultan’s favour. The beautiful brunette had a bad dose of infatuation. Who better than Leah to recognise the symptoms? After all, she had once been a victim herself. But now she was utterly detached from Nik and prided herself on the fact.

Nik Andreakis, with his smouldering Greek temperament and movie-star looks, didn’t touch her on any physical or emotional level. He was volatile, ruthless and unpredictable. The cloak of civilisation was thin. He was also manipulative, arrogant and vicious towards those who opposed or antagonised him. If she had been his real wife, she wouldn’t have dared to sneak around with another man behind his back...

A limousine collected them at Charles de Gaulle Airport, carrying them through the heavy late afternoon traffic. The car drew up on a busy, crowded street. Leah climbed out, too proud to ask yet again where they were going but looking around. Nik strode ahead of her into the nearest building. He was carrying an executive case. And the building was a bank, she registered.

Three men were waiting in the foyer. One of them, whom she recognised as her father’s solicitor, attempted to speak to her. But Nik cut him off very rudely. From below her lashes she stole a glance at her husband. Dear God, but he was ignorant. In the wrong mood— too frequently the only mood in which Leah saw him— his manners were atrocious towards those unfortunates he considered to be lesser beings. As one of them, Leah felt a creature sympathy for the middle-aged man with his flushed, strained face.

A lift took them down to the vaults. The magical mystery tour, she reflected grimly. Were there more shares in that precious shipping line on offer? How could any man with Nik’s fabulous wealth and assets be so disgustingly greedy? He had married her out of greed, hadn’t he? Something for nothing. The shares had come free as her dowry.

The solicitor stuffed a key in her hand abruptly and then turned away.

“Give it to me,’ Nik grated in a driven undertone, his simmering tension leaping out at her in an electrifying wave.

The key for a safety-deposit box, presumably belonging to her father, for why else would it have been put in her hand? She ignored him. For the very first time in their marriage she ignored her husband, moving forward to watch the bank executive produce the box and leave it on the table before quietly leaving the small, bare room.

‘Leah...’ Nik growled.

She refused to look at him. ‘If it’s my father’s, it’s mine...’

‘Be very careful of what you claim.’

His savage warning pierced cold to the very centre of her body. She looked at him and was paralysed. Naked violence and aggression were etched in his ferociously taut features. She blenched, and cast the key on the table by the box in sudden surrender.

‘If it’s in here you can relax,’ Nik murmured between clenched white teeth. ‘If it isn’t, you’ll be lucky to see the dawn break tomorrow.’

If what was in there? Perspiration broke on her short upper lip. Her legs suddenly felt weak and wobbly. Her sapphire-blue eyes clung to him in sick disbelief. But he wasn’t looking at her. He was inserting the key in the box with a hand that wasn’t quite steady.

She licked her dry lips. There was something more than shares at stake, something terrible enough to make even Nik Andreakis threaten to come apart at the seams... She had never seen him close to the edge, never dreamt that he could lose control, but she was seeing it now.

The box was full of papers. With a burst of guttural Greek, Nik began to rifle through them, discarding letters and photos which spilled in careless disarray across the table. He was pale and taut, his evident search becoming visibly more agitated.

Leah focused on an envelope addressed to someone she had never heard of. She didn’t even recognise the writing. And then she glimpsed a large, glossy photograph. In stark colour, it depicted a number of men and women engaged in... In shock and disgust, Leah averted her eyes again. She started to tremble. Why had her father kept such an obscene thing in his possession?

‘What is this stuff?’ she whispered, since it was blatantly obvious that Nik knew far more about the contents of that box than she did. He had flicked past that photo without an ounce of reaction or surprise.

‘What is it?’ An edged laugh fell from his compressed mouth but there was no humour in the sound. ‘It’s a box of broken lives! Other people’s secrets. Your father lived off his victims and their fear like some filthy cockroach!’

White as a sheet, Leah gaped at him. ‘How dare you talk about my father like that?’

Nik wasn’t listening to her. He was still feverishly sorting through the papers. ‘That he should leave me to clear up this filth is the final insult. I, Nik Andreakis, reduced to soiling my hands because I cannot trust any other person alive with this obscene collection of human errors! His trophies! He kept them to the last instead of destroying them! Cristo...the evil old bastard...’

Only the cold wall was supporting Leah. She could not credit the crime that her late father was being accused of. Her mind was a complete blank over a seething sea of sick turmoil. ‘What are you saying?’ Her voice was so weak it was a thread of sound.

‘Are you deaf?’ Nik slung her a savage look of unconcealed loathing. ‘Why do you think I married you? For your chocolate-box looks and your convent education?’ he sneered. ‘For your ability to act like a lady and fix stupid flower arrangements all over my house?’

‘The shares,’ she mumbled, shaking all over.

‘There were no shares!’ he raked back at her, the volume of his voice echoing off the walls with a rage that made her quail helplessly. ‘There were never any shares. That shipping line didn’t even exist!’

‘You’re lying,’ Leah framed through bloodless lips, barely able to stay upright.

Nik’s attention was on the document he held in his hand. Suddenly, without any warning, he smashed his clenched fist down brutally hard on the tabletop. ‘Theos mou...’ he intoned with vicious bite. ‘It’s only a copy!’

‘A c-copy of what?’ As the table jumped, Leah flinched, plastering herself back against the wall, sick and dizzy.

‘And this is the end of the trail...’

Nik prowled towards her like a tiger about to spring for her throat and drag her down. ‘He gave the original to you, didn’t he?’ he murmured with lethal quietness, glittering black eyes settling on her with violent force. ‘He gave it to you to keep safe...’

‘G-gave what to me?’ Leah was so distraught she could barely articulate. She couldn’t think either.

‘You know what I’m talking about. Not so innocent after all, it seems,’ he breathed, backing her into a corner. ‘If it isn’t here, you have it. Max was no fool. He knew I’d dump you like a hot potato if I got my hands on it. So he gave it to you...so where is it?’

‘Stop it!’ Leah gasped strickenly, fearfully. ‘Leave me alone!’

‘If you don’t tell me where that certificate is... you’re in more danger now than you have ever been in your life,’ Nik spelt out, waves of raw aggression splintering from his lowering stance a mere foot from her. ‘I have lived with blackmail for five years to protect my family. I will not live with it one day longer!’

He had said the word, that terrifying word, and it danced about on the edges of the living nightmare she was being forced to endure. ‘Blackmail’... It wasn’t true, couldn’t be true. Her father could not have been a blackmailer. On the edge of collapse, Leah fought to stand her ground.

‘I always wondered whether he intended it this way...that you should be my life sentence,’ Nik vented in a seething undertone. ‘But I tell you now, pethi mou, I would sooner go to prison for putting my hands round that scrawny little throat and strangling the life force from your body. That would be the only life sentence I could live with!’

Terrified beyond endurance, Leah watched his dark, threatening face above hers black out and finally, mercifully vanish as she slid down the wall in a dead faint.