‘Oh, she will, will she? What’s this—you’re reverting to type and determined to get yourself a sweet little innocent wife who daren’t say a word against you.’
‘Unlike the wife I would have had if I’d married you?’ Nikos drawled cynically, swilling the rich red wine around in his glass before taking a long drink from it. ‘No one could ever have described you as “sweet”—or “innocent.”’
‘But then you never really wanted to marry me in the first place,’ Sadie flashed back, still fighting with the pain of her memories.
She’d been an innocent when he’d met her—still a virgin at twenty. But naively, crazily, head over heels in love, and thinking she was going to be married to the love of her life, she had thrown that special gift away, giving it to the man who she believed loved her but who had in fact just been using her cynically and cruelly as a way to get at her father.
‘On the contrary…’ Nikos countered. ‘I wanted you very much indeed. So much so that I was out of my head with it.’
‘So that’s all I was to you—a mental aberration?’
She had needed the reminder of how ruthlessly he had behaved. He might have wanted her, all right, but only physically. And she had offered herself to him on a plate, pushing to anticipate their wedding vows.
It was that same night when she had discovered just what Nikos had really been up to when he had claimed he wanted to marry her.
‘You certainly drove me crazy. Are you going to eat that?’
He nodded his dark head towards the plate of rapidly cooling pasta that now was beginning to look nastily congealed and even more unappealing.
‘No chance.’
Sadie gave an exaggerated shudder, and to her astonishment a smile flickered on Nikos’s lips. Brief, barely there, but it did at least have a trace of real warmth, real amusement.
‘I knew that would happen when you ordered it. Remembering how much you hate chillies…’
‘Then why didn’t you say something?’ she demanded, causing Nikos to hold up his hands in front of himself in a gesture of appeasement.
‘I also remember what you were like when anyone tried to tell you what to do,’ he said dryly.
And for a moment, as their eyes met across the table, it was as if the years had fallen away and they were back on that very first date, with every part of their relationship brand-new and fresh. When they had both been just learning about each other and everything had seemed bright and clear, with so much potential lying ahead.
As the flickering candle-light played over Nikos’s stunning face it emphasised shadows, showed up lines that she hadn’t seen before. Lines that five years of experience had put on his face, under his eyes, around his mouth. But somehow the marks of time seemed only to enhance rather than reduce the powerful masculine appeal of his hard features. At this time of day his strong jaw was already shaded with the darkness of a day’s growth of beard and, seeing it, Sadie suddenly had a rush of vivid, painful memory of just how she had loved the feel of that faint roughness against her skin when he kissed her, the lightly stinging response it had always left behind.
Nikos’s eyes were dark, deep pools above the broad slash of his cheekbones, and his sensual mouth was stained faintly by the rich red wine he had just drunk, his lips still moist from it. As their gazes clashed, froze, locked together with an intensity that made it seem as if the whole of the restaurant and everyone in it had faded into a hazy blur, the murmur of conversation blended together until it made a sound like the distant buzzing of a thousand bees—there, but making no real sense at all.
All the breath seemed to stop in her throat, making her lips part in an attempt to snatch in air that she had almost forgotten how to breathe. She felt as if she was drowning in those eyes, losing herself and going down for the third time as hot waters of sensuality swirled around her head, making her senses swim dangerously. Outside, in the darkened rainswept street, the lightning flashed again, but Sadie barely saw it. It was only when a growl of thunder made her jump that she came back to herself in a rush.
‘Nikos…’
She barely knew she had spoken, only that the sound of his name had escaped on a breath that had somehow formed into the word. And when she looked around, with things coming back into focus again, she saw how she had actually put her hand out to him, trying to make contact. Her arm lay across the gingham tablecloth, her fingers stretched towards his, almost making contact.
In the space of a jolting heartbeat she knew what a mistake she had made. She saw the way the man before her blinked hard, just once, and when he opened his eyes again it was as if all trace of any emotion, any warmth, had been washed from them leaving them, opaque and cold as a pebble at the bottom of a mountain stream. With that blink the silent connection that seemed to have formed between was broken, shattered, and Nikos suddenly straightened up, reaching for his napkin and dabbing it to his mouth.