Page 31 of The Konstantos Marriage Demand

Then she had felt as if she was coming home. As if she was launching a new beginning, one that would put the tensions and stresses that had ruined her family life behind her and put her on the path to a much happier future.

This time she had no idea what to expect. The prospect of what was ahead of her made her insides twist into tight knots of panic at the realisation that this time she was truly alone, without a single ally on her side. No one she could turn to for help or support.

She might understand, rationally at least, just why Nikos had felt that he needed to take her phone and her laptop. But that didn’t stop the nasty, creeping sense of fear that there might be more to it than he was letting on.

Just what did he have planned for her? And why did she have the terrible feeling that in coming to Greece like this she had made the terrible mistake of jumping right out of the frying pan and into the fiercely blazing heart of a savagely burning fire?

CHAPTER SIX

MAY WAS SUPPOSED to be the best possible time to visit Greece. A time when the sun shone but the weather had yet to heat up to the baking temperatures of summer. Sadie had experienced some of that heat when she had visited Greece before and she had found it hard to cope. But then they had only stayed a couple of nights in the capital before flying to the tiny island of Icaros that had been owned by Nikos’s family for generations going way, way back. Once there, she’d found the breezes from the sea had helped to ease the scorching temperatures and made life more enjoyable.

But Icaros was no longer owned by the Konstantos family. Sadie’s father had seen to that. And the memory of just what Edwin had done was a troublesome worry, like the ache of a sore tooth, nagging at her mind all the time.

‘How are you this morning?’

Nikos’s voice startled her from her thoughts, making her jump nervously as he strolled out of the living room on to the wide main balcony where she had been trying to at least make a pretence of eating some of the breakfast that had been laid out on a table in the sunshine.

‘I trust you spent a comfortable night?’

‘That depends on what you mean by comfortable.’

Dressed more casually in the warmth of his native country, he was devastatingly dark and stunning in a soft white shirt and loose beige trousers. His feet were bare, lean and bronzed on the white stone of the balcony, so that he moved as silently and easily as some loose-limbed cat, every bit as lethally elegant and striking.

‘The room was not to your satisfaction?’

Nikos strolled over to the table and picked up a bunch of grapes, plucking one from the stalk and tossing it into his mouth.

‘My room was fine. As you know it had to be. This is a beautiful house.’

And if she needed anything to bring home to her just how far the Konstantos family had come since their lowest point five years before then this was it.

The villa had been a real surprise. The first of many. The first time Nikos had brought her to Athens they had stayed in his large apartment in the Kolonaki district, overlooking the Parthenon. That apartment had been impressive enough, but it was nothing when compared to the Villa Agnanti, where they had arrived late yesterday afternoon. Built into the side of a hill, the huge white house was on several levels, each one going lower down the cliff from the main road. From the lowest level you could walk out through the back gate, step out on to Schinias beach, where the crystal clear Aegean Sea lapped against the shore just metres away. Every single one of the bedrooms had a balcony that overlooked the ocean, but even the gentle sigh of the waves against the sand had not been soothing enough to ease Sadie into sleep last night. Instead she had lain awake and restless, wondering just what she had got herself into and how she was going to manage to handle things here.

‘It has everything I need,’ Nikos responded, but the flat, unemotional level of his voice somehow communicated far more than what he actually said. It was what he had not said that seemed to reverberate underneath the words and gave them a very different emphasis from the one he had used.

‘But you must know that I wouldn’t be able to rest properly without knowing what was going on at home.’

Sadie adjusted her position against the balustrade, turning so that she was resting her back against the white stonework and looking straight into Nikos’s dark, sculpted face, feeling the warmth of the morning sun beat down on the back of her head.

‘You phoned Thorn Trees just before dinner. All was well then.’

‘But I only had five minutes.’

Five minutes during which the door to the room she had been in was left open and she had been painfully aware of the way that Nikos was waiting for her beyond that door, no doubt listening to every word she said. She had felt like a prisoner under careful observation, unable to manage more than a few stilted sentences in response to her mother’s unrestrained delight at knowing that she was safe in Thorn Trees for the time being at least.

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