Bond Of Hatred

‘I disagree.’ Sarah had to struggle to hold her voice level and conceal the depth of her anger on her sister’s behalf. ‘Callie didn’t try to trap Damon. He had already asked her to marry him, bought her an engagement ring—’

‘Talk’s cheap, but where was he when the chips were down? Men!’ Gina said with rich cynicism. ‘He took off for Greece and she never saw him again. He never even answered her letters. Rat! I’d bury the two of them in the back garden with pleasure if it weren’t for little Nicky! Mind you, it would be a sinful waste to do away with rat’s big brother,’ she sighed reflectively. ‘Now, he really is gorgeous. Like Apollo the sun god...’

Unused to Gina making mythological references, Sarah stared at the other woman wide-eyed.

Gina flushed slightly as she drew up in front of her small terraced house. ‘I went on holiday to Greece once and I saw this statue... Forget it, I’m being silly!’

A neighbour had sat with Nicky while they were attending the funeral. Sarah rushed upstairs to see him. He was fast asleep, snug in his wicker basket. She had brought him home from hospital only yesterday. As she looked down at him, just itching to hold him again, her eyes moistened. In her darkest hours of grief, she had learned to thank God for the gift of Callie’s child. She felt needed again and that strengthened her.

Gina was out on the tiny landing. Her plump face was tight. ‘If you take that child on, you’ll never have any life of your own. Didn’t you sacrifice enough for Callie?’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘You’re only twenty-four and you’ve got lonely old maid written all over you!’ Gina looked her over in rueful despair, taking in the tightly restrained silver-blonde hair ruthlessly confined in a French pleat, the complete absence of cosmetics, the conservative navy suit that had seen better days and the sensible flat shoes. ‘Haven’t you ever wanted a man in your life?’

Sarah uttered an embarrassed laugh. She hated it when Gina started on about men as if they were the beginning, the middle and the end of a woman’s existence. She didn’t attract the opposite sex. As a teenager, she had been painfully shy and studious, the class swot. As an adult, she had had neither the time nor the opportunity. Sure there had been men who’d asked her out from time to time at work, and occasionally she had accepted, only to discover that they didn’t want her company, they wanted sex. And that was why they had approached her. She was plain and quiet and they had undoubtedly imagined that she would be so grateful for the attention that she would fall into their bed on the first date with the barest minimum of effort.

She made herself recall her painfully humiliating experience with the boy she had had a crush on at sixteen. He had invited her out to a disco one night and she had been electrified with delight...until she’d heard some of her classmates giggling about it in the ladies’ cloakroom. He had done it for a bet. Every giggle had been a knife in her heart, every cruel word engraved on her memory for life.

‘She looks like an albino.’

‘And she’s got no boobs at all.’

‘You don’t need boobs with an IQ like hers.’

‘Her IQ didn’t warn her that Ashley is setting her up for a bet... She’s too busy following him with those big moony eyes of hers...making a real idiot of herself... I wonder how far she’ll let him go when he gets her on her own?’

‘As if Ashley would fancy her! Can you even imagine it?’ And everybody had laughed themselves into hysterics at the mere idea.

‘Sarah...’

Sarah blinked rapidly and sank back to the present, pale as a ghost. Gina put a hand on her arm and murmured, ‘I’ve asked Alexis and Damon Terzakis back to the house...’

‘You’ve what?’

‘Well, somebody had to do it!’ Gina muttered. ‘You acted as though they weren’t there.’

‘If you let them in, I walk out,’ Sarah swore vehemently.

Slowly Gina shook her head, her troubled gaze clinging dazedly to Sarah’s blazing eyes and rigid facial expression. ‘Sarah, what’s got into you these last months?’ she asked in genuine confusion. ‘I don’t know you like this. It’s as if a stranger has taken possession of you—’

Sarah walked on downstairs. ‘There’s nothing the matter with me, Gina.’

‘You used to be the kindest, most gentle girl. A soft touch, I often thought,’ the older woman admitted uncomfortably. ‘But you’ve been changing ever since Callie told you she was pregnant. I know how much you loved her. I can understand how you feel—’

‘You couldn’t,’ Sarah cut in, woodenly controlled.

‘That boy must want to see little Nicky—’

‘If Damon wants to see Nicky, he’ll need a court order,’ Sarah asserted fiercely. ‘I’ll fight them every step of the way.’

‘But they’re coming to the house!’

‘Let them. I’ll deal with it.’

The bell went one minute later. Gina gave her a pleading glance and then took herself off into the kitchen. Straightening her slight shoulders, Sarah answered the door. Alex Terzakis stood alone on the doorstep. For the first time in her life, Sarah found herself wishing that she were wearing four-inch heels instead of flats. Alex Terzakis towered over her like an apartment block, casting a long, dark shadow.

She took a hasty step back. ‘I didn’t invite you here. You’re not welcome.’

A powerful hand suddenly slammed up against the front door, forcing it out of her loose grasp and flattening it with a crash back against the hall table. The violence of the gesture shook her and instinctively she backed away out of reach. He strode in and closed the door behind him.

‘Now we will talk,’ he announced, exuding perceptible vibrations of all-male satisfaction.

She had very nearly given him a black eye, she noted with grim amusement, scanning the faint bruise adorning one high cheekbone. Pity she hadn’t had sufficient height to do so! Her heart was thudding a frantic drumbeat behind her ribcage. She felt charged with a sensation disturbingly akin to excitement. The tension in the atmosphere was so thick she could taste it.

Since she was not physically capable of ejecting him from the house, she chose to walk into the lounge ahead of him. ‘Frankly, Mr. Terzakis, we have nothing to discuss. Where’s little rat?’

‘Little rat?’ He scrutinised her with narrowed eyes.

‘Baby brother, the wimp,’ Sarah specified with lancing contempt.

‘You are the most poisonous woman I have ever met. Would that I had the curbing of that spiteful tongue!’ Alex swore in a vicious hiss, one lean hand visibly coiling into a fist.

Sarah laughed for the first time in days, really laughed. Callie had told her a lot about Alexis Terzakis, relaying it in gossip style over the phone in the early days of her romance with Damon. And she was realising that Damon’s awed view of his big brother was fatally flawed. Alex was Mr Ice-cool himself in business and in his private life—according to Damon, that was. So why was it that around her he seethed like a volcano ready to erupt?

‘Cristos... On the day of the funeral,’ he growled at her from a distance of ten feet. He didn’t trust himself any closer. She understood that. ‘Have you no decent feelings?’

‘About as many as you had when you called my sister a cheap little scrubber to my face five months ago!’ Sarah shot back tight-mouthed.

‘I did not employ such offensive terminology—’

‘You said she was after his money and she slept around... Tell me the difference?’ Sarah invited with only the slightest tremor in her voice.

‘I did not believe she was pregnant,’ Alex breathed curtly through perfect white teeth. It was obvious that the admission was wrenched from him.

‘I want you to get out,’ Sarah told him shakily. ‘You have no business in this house.’

He sent her a glittering black glance of startling ferocity and strode over to the window. ‘My brother is too ashamed to face you...’ he gritted in a driven undertone.

In a weird way, Sarah was beginning to enjoy herself. If the previous admission of faulty judgement had been wrenched from him, the latter had been ripped screaming from Alex Terzakis. Little brother was a wimp. And that offended and humiliated big brother no end! Family honour and all that macho nonsense. Alex was being forced to deal with a woman he despised in a situation in which he had no defence, she registered with increasing confidence. He was here to buy silence.

To buy her silence. Maybe he was scared she would talk to the newspapers. He was a very private man, this Greek tycoon with his barbaric arrogance and pride. He detested publicity. And it wasn’t a nice story, was it? A teenager led up the garden path by a rich, spoilt young playboy and then dumped at spectacular speed once he had had what he had wanted from her. Then that same teenager had been threatened by powerful lawyers, offered hush-money and told to get lost and forget she had ever known anyone with the name of Terzakis!

Sarah’s stomach filled with nausea. It was a horrible story but it only became tragedy if you knew that Callie had loved him right to the bitter end. Tears burned her lowered eyelids and she fought them back bitterly.

‘If by any means within his power Damon could restore her to life, he would.’ She clashed with hard, dark eyes as treacherous as black ice and briefly felt as though she had gone into a skid. The speed with which he had damped down his fury and reasserted rigorous self-discipline sharply disconcerted her. ‘But he cannot. However, he can take charge of his son and give him the life to which he should have been born by right.’

Sarah froze. Her throat closed over. Her long lashes fluttered as she simply stared at Alex Terzakis in disbelief. ‘Give h-him the life...?’ she stammered in a daze, thrown wildly off balance by the statement. ‘What did you say?’

Reading her astonishment, he smiled—he actually smiled. The merest twist of that sensual, perfectly shaped mouth but no less than a smile. ‘Naturally, Damon wishes to raise his child in his own home where he belongs.’

CHAPTER TWO

SARAH took several shocked seconds to absorb her incredulity. The Terzakis clan wanted Nicky! They wanted Callie’s child! It was a staggering suggestion and she couldn’t credit that Alex Terzakis could be serious.

Alex took her silence as encouragement. He studied her as a cat studied a mouse, calculation written all over him. ‘Damon adores children. Nikos would be greatly loved.’

‘I really...I really don’t believe I’m hearing this,’ Sarah admitted tremulously. ‘You wouldn’t let your brother marry her and yet you think he has the right to take her child? He cut her off, ignored her letters, allowed you to humiliate her and let her go through a very difficult pregnancy without any support...and you come here and you tell me that he wants her baby?’ As she spoke, her shaken voice strengthened with growing anger.

‘Whatever you feel for my brother, he is the father of your sister’s child,’ Alex delivered harshly, surprisingly silent and taut in receipt of her condemnation.

‘I can’t believe that you accept that—’

‘Damon inherited a rare blood group from my mother’s side of the family. I understand that Nikos also shares that blood group,’ he volunteered smoothly, seemingly unaware of the gross offence he was offering by admitting that he had taken up all the evidence available before conceding that Nicky was his brother’s child. ‘The chances of that occurring by coincidence are several million to one.’

‘And you’re probably still checking those out!’ Sarah slung at him in disgust.

‘I am not prepared to be drawn into argument with you, Miss Hartwell.’ He angled his gleaming dark head high and surveyed her with innate superiority and unhidden contempt. ‘I am only here for the child’s sake as negotiator on my brother’s behalf.’

‘Negotiator?’ Sarah echoed, trying and failing to swallow back her increasing distress.

‘Conciliator?’ he suggested with black velvet cool. ‘The past cannot be changed. We must consider my nephew’s future—’

‘Nicky’s f-future is with me!’ Sarah told him, but she was badly shaken by an offer she had never envisaged being made.

‘No doubt you think to drive the price up with this pretence of attachment to the child of a father you de-spise—’

‘The price?’ she whispered.

‘Any price...name it and it is yours,’ Alex Terzakis murmured softly, seductively, like a dope dealer dangling death before an addict.

Sarah was so appalled by his estimation of her character that she said nothing.

‘You hand over Nikos quietly, discreetly, keep your mouth shut and in return...in return,’ he repeated with golden eyes so intent on her that his gaze felt like a physical touch, ‘I will give you whatever you want. Think of that. You have had a hard life. What age are you? Thirty, thirty-one?’

Mesmerised, Sarah stared back at him, her trembling hands curving convulsively round a wooden chair-back. Thirty, thirty-one? Dear heaven, did she look that old?

‘You could do something with yourself,’ Alex Terzakis pointed out lazily. ‘It’s not too late. Money can buy beauty. With concentrated effort and professional advice, you could be quite attractive—’

‘You don’t say.’ Sarah could hardly get out the response. Although she had few illusions about her looks, any she might have had were being insensitively ripped to shreds.

‘The world could be your oyster. You could travel. You’re a clever woman. You could probably find yourself a husband.’

Sarah shuddered as she breathed in deep. Desperate for a man...embittered by her lack of one. Clearly that was how Alex Terzakis saw her. With rigorous determination she suppressed a squirming sense of utter humiliation. He was Greek to the backbone. What Callie called ‘unreconstructed man’, what Sarah called a Neanderthal primitive. He belonged in a cave, not a civilised society. Or in a museum alongside the dinosaur display.

Even in the depths of the mortification she was struggling to conceal from him she was conscious of a helpless current of grotesque fascination. On the surface, he was so sophisticated...but underneath as earthy and as simplistic in his beliefs about the needs of a woman as any uneducated peasant. He was telling her politely that what she really needed was a man in her bed... Dear lord, even the dinosaur display would be too advanced for him! It would never occur to him that celibacy was a perfectly natural choice for many people.

Then how could it occur to him? Alex Terzakis had not one but two mistresses. One in Athens, one in Paris. Sarah swallowed back her distaste, repelled by such rampant and unashamed promiscuity. Evidently his sexual appetite was voracious and uncontrolled. In today’s society, Alex Terzakis was a prehistoric savage, more to be pitied than anything else, she told herself, raising her chin. That she should have allowed such a barbarian to hurt and embarrass her was ridiculous!

‘Nicky is not for sale,’ Sarah said very drily, but her cheeks warmed as she dimly questioned her surprisingly intimate thoughts over the past few minutes.

‘I did not suggest that he was but I hardly think that you would wish to tie yourself down with a young and demanding child when you could make a new life for yourself.’

‘But I don’t want a new life. I am perfectly happy with the one that I have.’

His striking bone-structure tightened, hooded dark eyes resting on her without any perceptible emotion at all. ‘Then you force me to be blunt—’

‘Oh, I don’t think you need forcing,’ Sarah opined, sweetly sarcastic as she raked him with unhidden derision. ‘I would say that being blunt comes very naturally to you. The challenge would be sensitivity.’

‘You are a woman of discernment.’ Instead of reacting with the anger she had expected, Alex cast her a glittering threat of a smile. ‘Although I strive hard to pity you for your lack of femininity, your shrewish tongue and your unashamed malice, I do indeed find it a quite extraordinary challenge.’

Sarah turned crimson and then white in speedy succession. Her loathing for him was magnified into a murderous heat. Her teeth sank into the soft underside of her lower lip and she tasted the sweet tang of her own blood when what she most wanted was his.

‘Let us waste no further time. You are telling me that you wish to deprive Nikos of his natural heritage and his father out of spite,’ he asserted, icily contemptuous. ‘In opposition, what do you offer? A hovel for him to live in! The tag of illegitimacy to carry throughout his life! And the guardianship of a woman who is not of good character. Had you had any decency, you would not have encouraged your teenage sister to continue her relationship with my brother—’

Sarah was trembling with fury. ‘What control did you have over your wretched brother?’

‘I was not aware of their affair until it was too late. You knew from the beginning,’ Alex condemned. ‘You played your own part in your sister’s premature death—’

‘God forgive you!’ Sarah was stricken to the heart by the charge.

‘And, not content with that tragedy, you now seek to destroy my nephew’s future. I will not allow you to do it. He belongs with my family. We can give him everything,’ he stressed with harsh emphasis. ‘An extended family of supportive relatives, quite apart from a loving mother and father of his own...’

Sarah tensed, her fine brows drawing together.

‘The finest schools, a beautiful home, the ability to hold his head high wherever he is and in whatever company. He is a Terzakis.’ And to be a Terzakis was evidently the very zenith of anyone’s worldly ambition, she translated. She was facing a male fired by a powerful pride in his own blue-blooded, monied heritage. He could probably quote his family tree accurately back at least several generations. Little wonder, she thought, bitterly resentful, that Callie Hartwell, daughter of a factory supervisor and a nurse, had been less than nothing to him. No fancy pedigree there, just good working-class breeding.

Her reflections turned back to something that had puzzled her seconds earlier. She must have misheard him. He could not have said ‘a loving mother’. He could not have said that.

‘Androula would love him as her own. There is neither bitterness nor room for malice in her generous heart. She has had many months to adjust to the knowledge that another woman was carrying her husband’s child...’

Sarah was paralysed. Androula...her husband’s child? Dear God, Damon had got married to another woman while her poor sister had been pathetically pinning her hopes to an eventual reconciliation! He had actually got married! She was sick to the stomach, barely able to move on a stage to the even more staggering assertion that Callie’s no doubt triumphant rival was now most generously prepared to play mother to Damon’s illegitimate child...

‘Let me g-get this straight.’ Sarah formed the plea with an intonation wiped clean of emotion by extreme shock. ‘You are asking me to hand over Nicky to Damon and...and this And...’

‘Androula,’ he filled in obligingly.

‘Damon’s wife,’ she repeated, just to be sure that she could not have misunderstood.

‘She is a gentle, loving young woman,’ Alex emphasised with unconcealed pride in his freedom to make such a claim.

Not a little scrubber like Callie, Sarah interpreted in a passion of pain. She had not misunderstood. She was so appalled by what he was daring to suggest that only the fiercest discipline kept her nausea under control. That this savage did not even appreciate that he was contravening Sarah’s every moral principle underscored how very sick the Terzakis clan was in terms of basic decency.

Dear heaven, had Callie lived, would they have approached her to demand her child from her? Would Alex Terzakis have accused Callie of spitefully denying her son the wealth and material advantages which Damon alone could supply? Very probably. This was a male who had treated Callie like dirt from the outset, who had never for a single second even considered the possibility that she might be fit to marry his kid brother...no matter that she was already pregnant with his child. Self-evidently, Alex Terzakis did not even allow for the fact that such a low-class, common person as Sarah Hartwell could even have finer feelings!

Callie would have died sooner than hand over her son to Damon’s wife. The acrid taste of bile in her dry mouth, Sarah walked over to the phone. ‘If you don’t get out of this house right now, I intend to call the police,’ she told him unsteadily. ‘After all, you did force your way in.’

‘Is this all you have to say to me?’ Alex raked at her incredulously. ‘Are you completely without shame? I tell you of Androula’s generosity—’

‘Generosity—th-that’s a good one!’ Sarah lifted the receiver, fully prepared to carry out her threat. ‘What you have just dared to suggest is so frankly obscene it does not require any further discussion, Mr Terzakis. It is the sickest, most vile proposition I have ever heard.’

‘Obscene?’ He made it sound like a strange word.

Reluctantly, Sarah forced herself to look at him. Perceptibly she shuddered as she clashed with black ice eyes of enquiry. ‘Get out!’ she told him ferociously.

‘I have no intention of departing before we reach agreement.’ Rock-like resolution emanated from him in teeth-clenchingly arrogant waves.

‘If you don’t get out,’ Sarah swore between clenched teeth, abandoning the phone to employ a far more realistic form of intimidation, ‘I’ll approach the dirtiest tabloid available and tell all...’

Absolute outrage paralysed him. Violence shimmered rawly in his brilliant golden stare. ‘You would do that to Androula?’ he prompted very, very quietly.

A shiver ran down her taut backbone but she stood tall in spite of it. ‘I don’t give that—’ she snapped her fingers with a sharp crack ‘—for your precious, saintly Androula!’

‘Were you of my sex, I would break every bone in your vindictive body...slowly,’ he told her wrathfully.

‘You’d get your fingers burnt,’ she derided. ‘You can’t touch me and you know you can’t—that’s what’s making you so angry. If either you or your brother approaches me again, I go to the Press. Damon could have had his child, Mr Terzakis. He had his chance and he blew it. My sister gave her life to bring Nicky into the world. That’s how precious he was to her and that’s how precious he is to me!’

‘You have no right to keep Nikos!’

‘Watch me...or fight me in court...where all will be revealed,’ she reminded him with satisfaction, now that she had established his Achilles’ heel. He was too proud to face the washing of the Terzakis dirty linen in public. ‘Damon and his wife will never ever take possession of Callie’s child. Accept that and stay out of our lives.’

He was white beneath his sun-bronzed skin, white with savage anger that he was visibly fighting to rein back. ‘This, then, is your revenge—’

‘It is not one atom of what I would like to do to you and your family,’ Sarah admitted, powered by a surge of helpless aggression. ‘Damon was a wimp but you are the one who destroyed my sister’s life. Why? Because she wasn’t good enough...she didn’t meet your snobbish standards and she was poor—’

‘I am innocent of such prejudice!’ he slashed back at her. ‘And to use an infant as a weapon of revenge is the true obscenity!’

‘Do you know what real revenge would be?’ Harshly she laughed, acknowledging that he was unhappily out of her reach. ‘It would be making you suffer for what you did to Callie. It’s your fault that Nicky is illegitimate, nobody else’s,’ she spelt out. ‘Your filthy family pride came before honour and decency. When you said I was not of good character, I should have laughed in your face!’

‘Cristos...’ With the charged and splintering aura of a wild animal at bay, Alex Terzakis shot a guttural stream of Greek at her, spreading both hands wide in a raking arc of dark, smouldering rage.