Page 41 of The Konstantos Marriage Demand

‘In order to do that I will need to meet her—talk with her.’

‘No way.’

Leaning back in his chair, Nikos laced his hands behind his head, lifting his legs so that they rested on the polished wood surface, feet crossed at the ankles.

‘But that’s ridiculous. Impossible!’

His one-sided shrug dismissed her protest as totally irrelevant.

‘That’s how it’s going to be.’

‘But there’s no way I can do my job if you won’t tell me anything, not even her name.’

But once again they had reached a sticking point. She could see it in his eyes, in the set of his stubborn jaw. She had had all the factual information he was going to allow her.

But there was one more thing he wanted to tell her.

‘All you need to know is that she is the only woman I have ever wanted to marry.’

Nikos was still lounging back in his chair, feet still on the desk. He looked supremely at ease, totally relaxed. But there was nothing comfortable or casual about the way that he added that final comment. Instead, he slipped it into her hard-won composure like the sharpest stiletto blade, sliding in between two of her ribs, aiming straight for her heart.

And it hurt so much that it destroyed every last trace of the already precarious self-control that she had been fighting to maintain ever since this conversation had started.

‘I can’t do this!’ she declared, shaking her head in despair at the situation in which she found herself. ‘I really can’t! You have to see that. Here I am, trying to arrange a wedding for a bride who to all intents and purposes doesn’t seem to exist.’

A stunning thought hit her, and she turned to glare into Nikos’s watchful face, green eyes clashing with gold in deliberate challenge.

‘She does exist, doesn’t she?’ He couldn’t have brought her here on some sort of wild goose chase, could he? And if he had, then why?

Nikos adjusted his position, taking his hands from behind his head and raking both of them through his hair, ruffling its sleek darkness in a way that was dangerously appealing. Sadie’s hands itched with the recollection of how it had felt to have the freedom to smooth through the black silky strands, curling them round her fingers.

‘Oh, she exists,’ he assured her. ‘She’s very definitely real.’

‘Then I want you to get in touch with her.’

Reaching for the phone, she snatched it up and held it out to him.

‘Get her on the phone—talk to her. You don’t even have to let me speak to her. I’ll just ask you the questions I need and you can get me her answers. At least that way I’ll know she’s been consulted—go on!’ she insisted, when Nikos simply stayed where he was, watching her without moving.

But now the relaxed sprawl of his long body had changed, much as his expression had changed only moments before. There was a new tension in the muscular limbs, a tautness like that of a wary hunting animal, waiting and watching before it pounced upon its prey.

Furiously, she waved the telephone receiver in his face, not caring that the wildness of the gesture gave away far too much of the turmoil raging inside her.

‘Talk to her!’

Another of those long silences, then at last Nikos shook his head, slowly and adamantly.

‘No,’ was all he said, making her stare at him in stupefied bewilderment.

‘What do you mean, no?’

‘I mean, I cannot call my prospective bride on the phone.’

‘Why not? Where is she?’

‘Right here.’

‘What?’

The answer was so totally unexpected that Sadie actually jumped, looking round in shock. She almost expected to see Nikos’s fiancée standing right behind her.

‘There’s no one—just me.’

A terrible, unbelievable thought dawned on her as she spoke, and slowly she turned back to face Nikos again.

‘There’s no one else here,’ she said again, but this time it was a challenge.

‘Exactly.’

Nikos removed his feet from the desk, stretched lazily and stood up, every moment slow and leisurely.

‘The woman I want is right here.’

‘But your fiancée…’

‘There is no fiancée.’

He couldn’t have said…Sadie found it impossible to believe that she had heard right. Desperately she shook her head, trying to clear her muddled thoughts.

‘You brought me here to plan your wedding,’ she protested, knowing she was grasping at straws. Nikos’s blank, emotionless face told her that he was not going to help her out in any way. ‘You told me you had a fiancée…’

‘If you remember rightly, I never said anything of the sort,’ Nikos put in, with the sort of cold reasonableness that made her head spin in disbelief. ‘I said that I wanted you to come here to arrange a wedding. But I never said who I planned to marry. And I never said that there was any other woman involved.’

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