Page 60 of The Konstantos Marriage Demand

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.

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