Page 59 of The Konstantos Marriage Demand

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.’

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