Читать книгу By Request Collection Part 2 - Шантель Шоу, Natalie Anderson - Страница 32

HE LET HER go.

Nikos made no response to her outburst, and he didn’t even attempt to come after her, to try to stop her. He just stayed exactly where he was and watched in total silence as she walked away from him, down the corridor and up the stairs. And for that Sadie could only be intensely grateful.

If he had made one move to stop her or even said a single thing then she knew that she would have fallen apart, gone to pieces in the space between one heartbeat and another. But when he said nothing and simply let her go she managed to get to the top of the stairs before the tears that had been pushing at the back of her eyes spilled out on to her cheeks, and she had to pause for a moment to draw in a shaky breath, fight with herself for control.

He hadn’t even thought her worth fighting for. She had turned down his proposal of marriage—such as it was—and that was that. There was nothing more to do or say. She had said that she was leaving and that was the only alternative left open to her. She didn’t dare to think of what would happen when she got home and told her mother that they had to move out. But she would face that when the time came. For now, she had to pack.

It didn’t take long. She hadn’t brought very much with her, and she certainly wasn’t going to stay around to make sure everything was put neatly in the case. As long as she emptied the room and got out of here, that was all that mattered. She didn’t even expect to see Nikos again.

So it was a shock to her when, after a brief knock, the door swung open and Nikos came into the room. Sadie’s heart jolted against her ribs at the sight of him. Just for a moment she couldn’t stop herself from wondering…

But, no, of course he hadn’t come upstairs to try and persuade her not to leave, or even to talk to her. Instead, his face more shuttered and closed off than ever before, his eyes hooded, he waved a hand towards the case that she had just fastened where it lay on the bed.

‘This ready?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’ll take it down for you.’

So he had come to help her on her way. To make sure that she left the villa as speedily as possible. At least she didn’t feel she had to thank him for his consideration.

Instead she grabbed her handbag and jacket and followed Nikos down the stairs to the hall. No taxi, Sadie noted. Obviously it hadn’t yet arrived. She just wished it would hurry up and get here. Every moment that she had to stay seemed to be dragged out beyond endurance, stretching her strength to its limits.

‘You’ll need these.’

Nikos was holding something out to her. Her laptop and her mobile phone. It was as she took the latter, preparing to drop it into her bag, that realisation dawned with a kick of shock.

‘My mother!’

In the heady intoxication of the previous afternoon and night, the shock to the system that this morning had become, she had forgotten to phone and check how her mother was. And now, checking her phone, she saw that she had forgotten to charge it up too. The battery was completely dead.

‘Use the phone in the office.’

Nikos’s voice make her start, glancing up at him with wide startled eyes.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure. Do you think that the price of a phone call bothers me?’

The office was just as they had left it, the newspaper still lying opened on the surface of the desk. But somehow it was the other, earlier time they had been in there that now burned in Sadie’s mind. She couldn’t push from her thoughts the memory of how she had been half on and half off that polished surface, her clothes wildly disordered and her senses spinning off into ecstasies as she clung to Nikos’s powerful form, her mouth melded to his.

Feeling the fiery colour rush up into her cheeks at just the thought, she grabbed at the phone in a fury of embarrassment. But just as she did so Nikos’s hand came down on top of hers, making her start as the heat of his skin burned into hers.

‘One thing,’ he said abruptly, his voice harsh. ‘This feud stops now. Here. It’s over.’

‘Do you think that I would say something to my mother that would incite that appalling hatred all over again? I just want to put it all behind me.’

She knew that the way she snatched her hand out from under his looked antagonistic, even hostile, but she felt as if her fingers might actually be scorched by the touch of his, so that she would branded for life if she didn’t pull away.

Luckily Sarah was back on good form again, so the phone call to her mother took only minutes. Feeling both relieved and ill at ease, Sadie carefully replaced the receiver, glancing at the clock as she did so.

‘What time is the taxi coming?’

‘It isn’t,’ Nikos stunned her by saying. ‘At least not yet. We still need to talk.’

‘Didn’t you say everything? No?’

She was stunned to see him shake his dark head. But then she thought she saw where he was going with this. The conversation she had just had with her mother.

‘I know I didn’t tell her—and I’m sorry. I couldn’t do it like that, over the phone. But I promise you’ll get the house back. We’ll be out of there before you blink. We’ll…’

The words faded into oblivion as some subtle change in his expression told her that that was not what this was about. He wasn’t angry that she hadn’t told Sarah they had to leave Thorn Trees. There was something else.

‘Nikos…’

‘Tell me about your mother.’

It was the last thing she had expected, and she knew that her consternation must show on her face as she stared at him.

‘Tell me about your mother,’ Nikos repeated. ‘It seems to me that your problems with her are at the bottom of this situation. I know the signs.’

‘What signs?’

‘Tell me about your mother.’

He was clearly not going to concede an inch on this. And what could it hurt to tell him now? He had said the feud was over. She prayed that, for her mother’s sake, he had meant it.

‘She’s ill,’ Nikos said now.

‘How did you…? Well, yes. She’s—emotionally fragile. If you must know, she’s agoraphobic—desperately so. She hasn’t been out of the house in years. Not since George was born.’

She glanced nervously at Nikos, watching for his reaction. If he so much as looked shocked…

But Nikos simply nodded, his face calm, his expression attentive. With an elegant economy of movement he perched on the edge of the desk, one leg still resting on the floor, and waited.

‘She—she had a breakdown after George was born—terrible postnatal depression combined with…with…’

‘With the fact that her baby was not your father’s,’ Nikos put in, making Sadie blink in astonishment.

‘How did you know?’

‘It’s the only thing that makes sense—all the secrecy about the child, the way your father behaved. Like a man betrayed. A man out to make the world pay for what had happened to him.’

‘That was just how it was.’ Sadie nodded sadly, remembering the dreadful fights, the constant yelling and screaming.

‘Why didn’t your mother leave him? Had her lover abandoned her?’

‘He was dead. He died in an accident just before Mum found that she was pregnant. That was when my father found out too—and, well, everything together was just too much.’

‘Did you ever find out who she had been seeing?’

‘No. She would never say. And my father had made her promise that she never would. That was his condition for letting her stay. For not divorcing her. The only thing she ever told me was that he—her lover—drowned in a boating accident.’

‘Over five years ago?’

What had she said to sharpen his tone, narrow his eyes like that?

‘Is that important?’

But Nikos didn’t answer her. Instead he was on his feet, pulling open a drawer in the desk.

‘Do you have a photo of your brother?’

‘Of George? Of course…’ Rooting in her bag, she pulled out her wallet, opened it to where the passport-size picture was kept. ‘But why?’

She took out the picture in the same moment that Nikos placed a large album on the desk, flicking through it until he found the photograph he wanted, one long bronzed finger pointing it out to her.

‘Oh, my…’

Sadie let the picture she was holding drop down beside the one Nikos was indicating.

‘It’s George.’

‘It’s my Uncle Georgiou,’ Nikos said flatly. ‘When you were in here yesterday you commented on it specially, and since then it has been nagging at me. It was just before Georgiou died that your father really started to stick the knife into my father’s company—it was one of the reasons why he was able to succeed so well so fast. Because when Dad was in mourning he was badly off balance—not focussing on business.’

‘And my dad was hell-bent on revenge for Georgiou’s affair with his wife!’

So much made sense now, in a way that it never had before.

‘It wasn’t just the feud—or rather it was that plus this new reason for anger, for revenge.’

And they had got caught up in it.

‘That damn feud tainted every person it touched.’

Nikos’s voice was filled with black anger and a touch of something else—something that Sadie would almost have labelled despair as he shook his dark head in disbelief over what had happened.

‘But it really does end here.’

Suddenly he looked up, amber gaze burning straight into hers.

‘It stops,’ he said fiercely. ‘And from now on things will be different. For a start, you will have no need to worry about Thorn Trees. The house will be my gift to your mother—and my cousin. And there will be more. Little George should have inherited all that his father had, and if he really is my uncle’s son—and looking at this photo, I am sure that he is—then I will make sure he has what is his by right.’

‘Thank you.’

Sadie made herself say it, though her tongue tripped up over the words. She found that her mind was seesawing from one emotion to another. She was full of relief for her mother, delight for George—but there was a terrible sense of uncertainty about what this would mean for herself. She had had to acknowledge that she had lost her chance of ever having Nikos love her. She had faced up to the prospect of a future without him and she had been prepared to leave. To head out into that future and try to cope with it as best she could. Now she saw that everything was going to be so much different. That with Nikos being George’s cousin—George’s family—inevitably he would want to be in the little boy’s life. It was only right, only fair.

But it meant that she would frequently be forced to see this man she loved and who had never loved her. And she didn’t know how she could handle that.

‘It—it will mean a lot to my mother. She admitted to me recently that she adored George’s father. That he was the love of her life. She was devastated when she learned he’d died.’

Suddenly something Nikos had said to start off this line of conversation came back to her, making her frown in confusion.

‘When you asked about my mother—you said you knew the signs.’

The question she needed wouldn’t form properly, but the urgency in her voice obviously hit home to Nikos and he nodded his understanding without her having to say any more.

‘My father. I know what it’s like to have to watch someone break down—to always feel that you need to check if they are all right. To worry that perhaps the depression will come back.’

‘And this all stems from the same vile mess.’

She didn’t have to ask, just as Nikos hadn’t needed to ask her. His clouded eyes gave her the answer without words.

‘When he lost everything—when your father took over everything and bankrupted him—it was soon after he’d lost his brother. Like your mother, he broke down. I came home one evening and found him…’

The way his face had lost colour warned that there had been something very wrong. Suddenly Nikos pushed himself from his seat on the desk and paced restively about the room, his actions like those of a wild hunting cat, caged up for far too long.

‘I was early. I wasn’t supposed to be there. He thought he had time.’

Suddenly Sadie thought she knew exactly what day Nikos had been talking about, and all the tiny hairs on the back of her neck lifted in fearful apprehension as Nikos paused in his restless pacing, standing by the window and staring out at the sea. But she was sure that those beautiful golden eyes saw nothing of the clear blue waves with their foamy white tops, the golden sands of the beach.

Nikos pressed his forehead against the window glass, closing his eyes in despair at his memories, and, seeing that, Sadie could not stay still at the other side of the room. In a rush she crossed to his side, reached out a hand and touched his arm, just above the elbow. It was all she dared do, even though her heart ached with misery at the way things had turned out.

Like their parents, both of them had been wounded, scarred by the dreadful feud between their families. But as a result of the fallout of that feud, a fallout that had tangled up their own lives, creating the mess they now lived with, neither of them could comfort the other properly.

‘That was the day I rang you…’

The day when she had had second thoughts about her father’s warnings that Nikos was simply out to use her, to make her part of his revenge on the Carteret family because of the feud. She hadn’t known then of his personal motives for making everything worse. She had broken off her engagement, cancelled her wedding at a day’s notice, but she had wanted to at least try to talk to Nikos himself…

‘You told me to go to hell.’

‘I know.’

Nikos’s sigh was weary, dragged up from somewhere deep inside him, and as he turned to her, his movements were slow and heavy, like those of a much older man.

‘But what the hell else could I have done? I was there in a room with my father who thought he had lost everything. He’d got a gun from somewhere and he meant to use it on himself.’

‘Oh, Nikos, no!’

It was worse than she had thought. Worse for Nikos and worse for herself.

Because of that phone call, and the way he had turned on her, she had moved herself firmly onto her father’s side.

‘I didn’t know—and I believed that my dad was right. I begged him to help me, asked him to tell me how to handle things. He said that if I did as he told me, said exactly what he wanted me to say, then all would be well. He would even look after my mother, let her stay in the house. He would raise her baby as his own.’

And her father had given her the final, cruel words that she had tossed down the stairs to where Nikos was standing in the hall on that final day.

‘I’m so sorry—I don’t know how I could have said those dreadful things.’

‘I do,’ Nikos astounded her by replying. ‘I know because I ended up getting caught in the same terrible mess. I was supposed to be helping my father, but I ended up getting so obsessed with you that I couldn’t think straight. I took my eye off the ball—focussed on you, not the business. And then when I found that while you and I were in that cottage, away for the weekend…’

The look in his eyes told her without doubt exactly which weekend. The one she had arranged. The one where, half crazy with her physical hunger for this man, she had pushed him into anticipating his marriage vows. The resulting explosion of passion had kept them both locked in sensual obsession, barely even surfacing for food for the three days they were there.

For the space of the three days in which her father had finally made his move.

‘I should have been there, checking on things, making sure he made no mistakes. Instead, I was the one who made the worst mistake.’

The ‘worst mistake’ being spending time with her. Sadie flinched inside at the pain of his words.

‘I felt so terribly guilty as a result. I was guilty, and that guilt twisted me up inside. I blamed your family for everything that had happened—I blamed you.’

Pushing his fingers through his hair, Nikos pressed the heels of his hands against his temples, as if to ease some intolerable ache.

‘So when you came to me for help—because your mother needed a home where she could be safe—I just saw the opportunity to take my revenge. Thee mou, my darling, I thought that I was immune to this damn feud and I was so proud of being so. Now I see that I was eaten up with it all the time. I thought the worst of you because that was what I expected from a member of the Carteret family. But I wasn’t dealing with just one of the Carterets—I was dealing with you.’

Did he know what he had said? Sadie wondered, not daring to ask the question for fear that, with the raw pain thickening Nikos’s accent, she had misheard him and that ‘my darling’ had been something else entirely.

‘You—you weren’t completely to blame,’ she stammered, feeling as if she was treading over delicate eggshells with infinite care. ‘I had said some terrible things—done some…’

But Nikos was shaking his head again, his eyes dark and shadowed in a way that made her heart twist in pain.

‘And even then I was deceiving myself. Even then I wasn’t admitting to my real motives. I wasn’t even acknowledging that revenge had nothing to do with it, not deep down. Deep down, from the moment I saw you again, I knew that I couldn’t live without you in my life. That once I had you again I could never let you go. So I resorted to stupid subterfuge to get you here and keep you. I was sure that if we could just spend time together then it would be as it had always been.’

‘It could—it was!’ Sadie couldn’t bear to let him go on berating himself any more. ‘Didn’t yesterday—last night—tell you something? That I wanted to be with you.’

‘In my bed, perhaps,’ Nikos responded heavily. ‘But I wanted more than that. I wanted you in my life for good. And I was so desperate to do that that—to keep you with me—that I offered you anything—everything that I thought might keep you there. But I offered all the wrong things. You didn’t want the house—or money…’

‘No,’ Sadie put in softly, her voice breaking suddenly as he reached out and took each of her hands in his, pulling her gently towards him. Her heart was racing so hard that it set her blood pounding in her ears, the sound like thunder inside her head. ‘No, I don’t want those.’

The hands that held hers tightened, drawing her even closer, so that they were almost touching, only their clasped hands coming between them, holding them just a breath apart. The eyes that looked down into hers were blazingly intent, blindingly so. But now they were wide and clear, the clouds and the darkness burned away by the open sincerity that told her everything she needed to know.

‘So now I’m going to offer you the only thing that really matters,’ Nikos told her, his voice so deep, so serious, that it took her breath away, made her freeze into immobility, unable to blink or look away. ‘Though the truth is that the only thing I have to give you, you already have. I gave it to you in the moment we met, but I never really knew it until now. As a result I’ve been lost and wandering—not knowing who to be or how to live.’

Suddenly, unexpectedly, he lowered himself slowly to the floor until he was on one knee at her feet, looking up into her face with his feelings clear and open for her to read.

‘You have my heart, Sadie,’ Nikos told her. ‘You have my heart and my love—they are yours for ever, no matter what answer you give. I am yours. There is no other woman in the world for me. What I’m asking is will you be mine? Will you be my wife and help me to put this dreadful feud far behind us, to heal the hurts that it brought and create a future that is so different, so loving, that there will be nothing but bright days ahead of us?’

‘Oh, Nikos…’

Sadie turned her hands in his so that she could hold him, draw him up again to face her, until she could look deep into his eyes and see the way they changed as she gave him her answer.

‘You have my heart too, and I never, ever want it back. All I want is a chance to go into that future with you, to create those bright days and to love you as I have always wanted to do. And so of course my answer is yes. It never could be anything else. It’s—’

But she never managed to get any more words out. Whatever she had been about to say was crushed into silence by the force and passion of the kiss that Nikos pressed against her lips. And as he swept her up into his arms, crushed her against him, she knew that no words were needed anyway.

Words were totally redundant when there were much better ways to express the way they were feeling.

‘Can we go yet? Can we go?’

Little George was almost dancing on the spot in impatience, tapping his smart patent shoes on the floor and risking crumpling his crisp white shirt and pressed black trousers as he chanted his request over and over again.

‘Can we go, pleeeease? I want to see Niko.’

‘So do I,’ Sadie told him, her smile mirroring that on her brother’s face at the thought of the way that Nikos would be waiting for them, just a very short distance away on this special morning. ‘And we’ll be leaving very soon.’

George had adored his big cousin on sight, and in the time since they had first met that love had grown into a sort of idolatry as Nikos filled the role of the father the little boy had never had.

‘But we just have to wait for—’

She broke off as the door opened and her mother, elegant in peach and cream, stepped into the room. Her eyes went straight to her daughter, taking in the full effect of the simple white sheath dress with its overskirt of lace, the simple wreath of flowers on Sadie’s shining dark hair.

‘You look gorgeous, my darling—every inch the beautiful bride. Nikos is going to be knocked for six when he sees you.’

‘I hope so…’ Sadie smoothed a hand down her dress as she drew in a deep calming breath. ‘And what about you—are you OK, Mum?’

It was impossible to iron out the edge of concern in her voice as she studied her mother’s face. Sarah looked calm and in control, but underneath her carefully applied make-up she was still slightly pale and drawn, revealing the effort she had made to be here. The therapist Nikos had found for her had worked wonders, and that, together with the new-found happiness that came from knowing all their worries about Thorn Trees and everything else were far behind them, had created an incredible transformation in her mother’s life. But all the same the journey to Greece, to Icaros, was more than she had ever been able to imagine her mother could manage.

‘I’m fine,’ Sarah assured her now. ‘I’m exactly where I want to be—by my daughter’s side on her wedding day.’

‘And I’m so happy that you’re here with me.’

Happier than she could possibly put into words, Sadie told herself as she collected her bouquet of creamy roses. Today was literally the happiest day of her life. The day on which she was marrying the man she adored, and the day that marked once and for all the final ending of any last trace of the feud that had threatened to tear her and Nikos and their families apart.

Not only had she been welcomed into the Konstantos family, but George too had brought a new happiness to Nikos’s father, the little boy’s uncle. Petros had been overjoyed to find such a special link to his beloved dead brother in the little boy, and Sarah, as George’s mother and the woman Georgiou had loved, had been gathered into the warmth and welcomed too.

‘Can we go now?’ George was chanting again. ‘Is it time? I don’t want to wait another minute.’

‘It’s time,’ Sadie told him, keeping her bouquet in one hand as she held the other out to her mother. ‘And I don’t want to wait another minute, either.’

Arm in arm, with the little boy dancing around them, she and Sarah made their way out into the sunshine, taking the short walk towards the ancient wooden bridge, now beautifully decorated with flowers and ribbons that fluttered in the gentle breeze, leading to the open door of the tiny private chapel where Nikos waited for her.

Just for a moment, as she paused on the worn stone steps that led into the church, Sadie had a momentary flashback to the first time she had set foot inside the chapel. But that only lingered long enough for her to be able to drive it right out of her mind, knowing that such moments of doubt and insecurity were so far behind her now it was almost as if they had never happened. The promise of the happiness of her new life was now stretching out in front of her.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness inside the old building, but as soon as they did her gaze went straight to the tall, dark and powerful figure of the man standing at the altar.

Standing at the altar, waiting to make her his wife.

Immediately it was as if there was no one else in the place. As if the world and everyone in it had faded away and there was only this one man. The man to whom she had given her heart so completely that it was no longer a part of her but his to keep, to hold with him for ever.

‘Nikos,’ she breathed, tears of pure joy blurring his beloved image just for a moment.

It was impossible for him to have heard the sound of his name on her lips, but all the same in that instant something made Nikos turn and glance towards the back of the chapel. And the transformation that came over his face when he saw her standing there made her heart soar, her feet feel as if they were not touching the floor but floating inches above the worn stone flags.

‘Sadie…’

She saw his lips move on her name, saw the smile that made his stunning eyes burn like bronze fire.

‘Sadie—kardia mou—my love, my heart…’

When he held out both his hands to her, opening his arms wide to welcome her home, she didn’t hesitate but practically flew the short distance down the aisle towards her future with the man she loved.