The Unfaithful Wife

‘Maybe you don’t know where that certificate is,’ Nik conceded half under his breath, lowering his dark head. ‘Maybe he destroyed it, overlooked the copy. But maybe it’s still out there in somebody’s safekeeping, like a bomb waiting to be activated...’

His terminology made Leah shiver. Nik was slowly, smoothly turning her round to face him. She had never fully appreciated how much stronger than a woman a man could be until Nik, impatient of her unresponsiveness, simply lifted her clear off the carpet and spun her like a doll back to him.

Barefoot she didn’t even reach his shoulder and before he lowered her back down again her cheek brushed against his silk shirt-front as his jacket parted. Her breath caught in her throat, her nostrils flaring at the male scent of him, clean, citrusy...hot. For a timeless moment her senses spun wildly, her lashes dipping as she was flooded by dizzy discomfiture.

‘Look at me...’ His accented voice could sound like sandpaper on silk.

‘Please let me go,’ she mumbled in a rush as she relocated her tongue.

She might as well not have spoken. Long fingers tilted up her chin and lingered there as she was involuntarily ensnared by his blazing black eyes. And she knew as clearly as though he had spoken that the seething tension of the afternoon’s events and his subsequent furious dissatisfaction had all been temporarily tossed on a back burner. Far more basic urges were driving Nik now, a desire to vent all that pent-up tension in a fashion which she suddenly sensed would come as naturally to him as breathing.

Her skin prickled with a depth of awareness she would not have believed possible. The vibrations in the atmosphere were explosive.

‘Nik...’ Her own voice emerged jerkily and she wanted to back off fast but her feet were somehow welded to the carpet.

‘It’s so long since I heard you speak my name...’ His intonation was deep-pitched, disturbingly rough, lush ebony lashes low on a sliver of smouldering jet.

‘No...’ she heard herself whisper.

His thumb smoothed along the voluptuous curve of her lower lip and she trembled, attempted to move, but his other hand was splayed across her taut spine, holding her steady.

He watched her intently as he prised her lips apart with his thumb, intruded into the soft, damp interior, making her shiver violently as his palm cupped her delicate jawbone. It was the most insidiously erotic gesture she had ever experienced, and set up a terrifying chain reaction through her treacherous body.

He was playing with her, tracking her every tiny response with a mixture of satisfaction and amusement. And she understood that, read that in the eyes made famous by the financial press for being ‘as unreadable as a blackout’.

But he wasn’t testing the water...no, indeed. Nik was neither humble nor uncertain. This was a male wholly acquainted with every seductive and sensual technique necessary to heighten his own pleasure and a male, similarly given over to taking that pleasure whenever the mood took him.

‘I want—’ And her tongue felt too large for her mouth.

‘More?’ With devastating abruptness but immense cool, Nik released her and angled a sizzling smile down at her. ‘Next time, drop the towel when I ask, pethi mou,’ he advised softly.

She would have found a blow less degrading than that insolent conclusion. As she heard the bedroom door snap quietly shut in his wake, Leah went limp, her pallor pronounced. She had challenged him, angered him. She was shattered. All these years, nothing, and then...

Why now? She remembered him saying that her father could not force him into her bed as he had forced him into marriage. Her stomach twisted painfully. Max was dead now. And she had been available...in so much as she was female. Seemingly it took little else to attract Nik when he was in the mood for a little light sexual relief.

And the peculiar way he had made her feel... But then that had been sheer shock and nervous paralysis, Leah told herself urgently. She had only been doing the sensible thing in not fighting, not arguing. Nik was Greek and macho to the backbone. Telling him just at that moment either that she wanted a divorce or that she could not bear him to lay a single finger upon her might have been received like a thrown gauntlet and it might well have encouraged him to attempt further intimacies.

No, that had definitely not been the right moment to mention Paul.

Leah climbed back into her clothes, conscious that her hands were clumsy and still not quite steady. But then that was hardly surprising. Her husband had finally chosen to notice that she was alive...well, if not quite alive at least physically capable of providing the kind of entertainment he expected from her sex. She was disgusted, absolutely disgusted by his brazen disregard for decency in even daring to approach her!

Not only did he have no right to touch her, he wasn’t even faithful to whomever he was currently sharing a bed with. And if she had been willing she had not the slightest doubt that Nik would have taken advantage of her willingness. He was made that way. A taker, not a giver.

He had had a hard fight building his father’s holdings up into the vast international power base that was the Andreakis heritage today. Nobody had given Nik any favours...so he gave none back. He went after his enemies like a warlord, slaughtered them and came back primitively victorious. He hid no light under a bushel, left no stone unturned in his fight for supremacy.

And it was all those traits which her father had gloried in and dished up to her in suitable euphemisms to persuade her that though Nik had made no mention of love he would make her a wonderful husband.

Her mouth curved downwards in grim amusement. What husband? She had never had a husband. But five years ago she hadn’t had the benefit of a crystal ball...

Doubtless memory failed her for her recollection of their first meeting was radically different from his. Before that day, Leah had neither seen nor heard of Nik Andreakis. She had just completed one term at finishing school, perfecting her technique with stupid flower arrangements... A course on men would have been far more useful, she reflected now.

Nik had appeared in the doorway of the conservatory, uninvited and unexpected. The maid had put him in the drawing-room to wait for her father and he must have seen her through the window because to get to the conservatory he had had to leave the drawing-room, cross the hall, go through another room and enter the conservatory by the French windows there. So how come he’d accused her of setting him up for a meeting?

She had looked up and seen him in the doorway and, yes, at one glance had fallen head over heels in love with him. Nik had struck her as the most utterly gorgeous creation she had ever seen walk on two feet. He had stood there like a golden Greek god and her knees had wobbled, helpless excitement quivering through her.

‘You are a breath of spring in this winter scene,’ he had drawled almost stiltedly, dark eyes literally riveted to her.

Yes, he had said it—probably read it somewhere and memorised it for effect, but those most un-Nik-like words had indeed emerged from him. Her pruning scissors had dropped from her nerveless fingers. He had picked them up and hovered. Yes, definitely hovered, as though one part of him was urging him to retreat and another urging him to stay.

It had never occurred to Leah that he had deliberately sought her out. She had assumed that he was interested in the plants and a conversation that years on should have filled her with hilarity but somehow failed to do so had taken place. Nik had not revealed either his ignorance or his uninterest. He had asked appropriate questions and contrived to conceal the fact that he had undoubtedly never touched or examined a plant in his life before.

He had even told her that her eyes matched the gentian violets, and that compliment had emerged almost as awkwardly as the first, giving Leah the impression that though he looked staggeringly sophisticated he was almost shy. Shy? Nik?

How much time had gone by in that conservatory? He hadn’t mentioned his appointment with her father, indeed had given all the appearance of having forgotten it until the flustered maid had come in search of Leah to tell her that her father wanted her and had been disconcerted to find Nik with her.

‘I’ll tell him you’re waiting,’ Leah had told him, and she had flown upstairs to her father’s library.

‘Who is he?’ she had asked straight off, after giving the kind of description that had probably sounded like something that leapt off the page of one of the torrid romances that she had then been so fond of.

‘Nik Andreakis...’ Max had surveyed her glowing face with cool, narrowed eyes.

‘He’s been here absolutely ages,’ she had burbled. ‘Don’t you think we should ask him to stay to dinner?’

‘He appears to have been quite a hit.’

‘Is he married?’

And Nik had duly been invited—her fault, entirely her fault. Her father had come down to make his apologies and then left them alone and Nik had spent all the time before dinner asking her about herself. He had had no need to wonder whether she was over the age of consent. She had told him exactly what age she was...and he had visibly winced...

The following day he had taken her out for a drive but Max had been very dubious about it and she’d suspected that Nik had been made embarrassingly aware of the fact that her father was extremely protective of her.

‘I think your father may have you dusted for fingerprints when you go home, so I won’t kiss you,’ he had said drily. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here with you. You’re far too young for me.’

And she had been hurt, terribly hurt in the week that followed, when he’d neither phoned nor visited. Max had been coolly amused by her misery and had wryly told her not to wear her heart on her sleeve.

‘Andreakis can have just about any woman he wants,’ he had volunteered. ‘But I don’t want him around you unless he’s got marriage in mind.’

‘And did you tell him that?’ she had gasped in horror.

‘You may not value yourself but I do,’ her father had retorted crushingly. ‘I sent you to the finest schools to ensure that you could take your place in any company. I want you to marry well, Leah. A sordid little fling with Andreakis is not on your agenda. And you can be assured that he won’t offer anything more unless it’s profitable.’

Nik had shown up unexpectedly the second week, moody and almost aggressive in his attitude towards her. He had stayed to dinner again. Max had been in an unusually good mood but quiet, very quiet, watching them both, adding little to the conversation.

Two days after that her father had called her into his library and calmly informed her that he owned a considerable number of shares in a shipping line called Petrakis International, shares which Nik was extremely keen to acquire.

‘So I offered them to him gratis as a wedding present,’ Max had smoothly concluded.

Leah had been appalled and deeply upset. Yes, she had been crazy about Nik but that her father should have coolly approached him and offered him a bribe to marry her had made her feel sick with humiliation.

‘Nik’s Greek. He understands these kinds of arrangements,’ Max had assured her witheringly. ‘And I suggest that you understand that a man as tough as Nik Andreakis wouldn’t even consider marriage unless it was financially advantageous. Those shares could be your dowry. The choice is yours. Do you want him or don’t you?’

She had run out of the room, choked with the sobs of her distress. The next morning Max had informed her quite unemotionally of his heart condition. He had said that he didn’t know how long he had left and he was very worried about what would happen to her if he died in the near future. Leah had been shattered by the news.

He had praised Nik to the skies. Nik might be something of a rough diamond by virtue of his hard upbringing but he would treat her with respect and honour as his wife. Such marriage arrangements were common in Greece. If she married Nik she would be safe, secure for the...for the rest of her life. As that phrase returned to haunt her, Leah searched her ashen reflection in the bedroom mirror.

‘But he doesn’t love me!’ she had protested.

Max had looked at her with icy contempt. ‘He wants you...’

‘Not as much as he wants those blasted shares,’ she had whispered strickenly.

‘It’s up to you what you make of the marriage. I’m giving you the chance to marry the man you love...’

Leah came fully back to the present and clasped her cold hands together. I’m giving you Nik Andreakis on a silver platter, Max might as well have said. She shuddered with distaste, despising her own naïveté. Nik had been delivered to her handcuffed and chained by blackmail and even Max hadn’t pretended that love had anything to do with it. Where had her intelligence been?

A knock sounded on the door. It was a servant announcing dinner. Leah was shaken. Could it really be that time already? Paul phoned her at eight every evening. He knew she never went out at night. Would Petros have told him that she was in Paris? She lifted the phone by the bed and dialled the number of his apartment. The call was answered almost immediately.

‘Where the hell are you?’ Paul demanded sharply. ‘Petros told me that Mr and Mrs Andreakis were “unavailable”. What the heck is that supposed to mean?’

‘We had to fly to Paris—’

‘We?’ he interrupted, an octave higher.

‘Look, there was a problem with Max’s estate and I had to be with him,’ Leah framed tautly. ‘I’ll be home tomorrow, darling. I love you.’

‘What sort of a problem?’ Paul sounded very edgy.

‘Nothing important,’ she said breathlessly. No way did she intend to unload the sordid revelations Nik had forced her to endure on Paul. At least not on the phone...and not yet, she adjusted, reminding herself that a strong relationship needed to be based on honesty and trust.

‘Good...so is he taking you out to see the joys of Paris?’ Paul mocked.

‘Nik...take me out? You’ve got to be kidding.’ She forced a laugh, relieved that he wasn’t angry any more. ‘I miss you so much. I haven’t stopped thinking about you for a second.’

‘Tomorrow can’t come soon enough,’ he swore.

‘I can’t wait...but I can’t use Charlie’s again,’ she abruptly recalled, her nervous tension rocketing as she wondered frantically how she was going to ditch Boyce, short of swinging out of her bedroom window on a rope like Tarzan’s Jane.

Charlie had had a point, she acknowledged unhappily. She wasn’t cut out for this game of sneaking around. She so badly wanted everything to be above board. No matter how much her intelligence told her that she was not a married woman except on paper—which she told herself on a very regular basis—her conscience reminded her that she had taken her vows in a church and had meant them at the time she made them.

‘Why not ask him for the divorce? Use the opportunity,’ Paul suggested meaningfully. ‘Stop being such a coward. The guy is totally indifferent to you. Why should he care?’

A tiny sound sent Leah’s head flying up. A surge of bone-chilling horror paralysed her to the spot—but not before she dropped the phone with a clatter.

She had forgotten to close the door again. Nik stood there, as incredibly still and silent as a centuries-old statue. Literally traumatised by the sight, Leah stared back at him with very wide sapphire-blue eyes as if he had just dropped down through the ceiling without warning.

Nik...she tried to say lightly, but when she opened her dry mouth no sound emerged at all.

‘Dinner...’ he murmured smoothly, and smiled. ‘But finish your call first.’

Reaching down, she fumbled for the phone. ‘Bye,’ she said, and cut the connection.

CHAPTER THREE

HER HEART hammering wildly behind her breastbone, Leah watched Nik swing on his heel and depart and then all her muscles gave and she was ready to flop with almost sick relief. He couldn’t have heard anything. He would have said something if he had... wouldn’t he? Or reacted in some way, which he hadn’t. He had actually smiled.

As she left the bedroom, fighting to regain her smashed composure, she heard the manservant tell Nik that the car was waiting. As she neared the hall, she heard Nik cancel it. Had he been planing to dine out and then changed his mind? Well, she certainly hoped he wasn’t staying in for her benefit. A little voice told her how exceedingly unlikely it was that Nik would do anything for her benefit.

‘I have some calls of my own to make,’ Nik delivered in a flat aside as she drew almost level. ‘Don’t wait for me.’

Leah ate without even being aware of what she was eating. She felt guilty, enervated, dismayingly confused. Her temples throbbed with strain. All her life she had been open and honest...well, that was until three short months ago when Paul had accidentally sent her flying in Harrods. Deception was abhorrent to her but it hadn’t occurred to her at the outset that she would become involved with him. He had insisted on taking her into the restaurant. They had laughed and chatted over coffee. Nothing could have been more innocent. The second meeting had been entirely accidental as well...

Pushing her plate away, Leah gulped down a glass of wine but it didn’t take the nasty taste from her mouth. Why on earth did she feel like this? All she had to do was ask Nik for a divorce soon and it would all be over. Maybe she should stop seeing Paul until then. Was that what she should be doing? Or maybe she should just walk out and leave Nik a note to find the next time he was in London. Cowardly, but probably all he deserved.

She was quite sure that Nik hadn’t agonised over any of his women. He certainly hadn’t cared about Leah’s feelings. Leah had had to live with humiliation in newsprint as well as in private. Nik was extremely photogenic and a gossip columnist’s dream, the married man who led the adulterer’s dream existence without any apparent interference from his wife. For Nik to say that he had been on a leash for five years was errant nonsense. But then two wrongs did not make a right. Why should she stoop to Nik’s level?

Deciding against coffee, the exhaustion of extreme stress creeping over her like a suffocating blanket, Leah decided to go to bed. Her strained mouth compressed when she remembered that she had no nightwear. The towelling robe hung in the bathroom for the use of guests was too bulky for comfort. In the end she slid naked between the smooth percale sheets and in the comforting darkness she reached a decision. Tomorrow morning she would tell Nik that she wanted a divorce. Then there would be no further need for her over-active conscience to torment her with this ridiculous sense of being in the wrong.

She awakened from a deep sleep with a start. The overhead lights were on full and she blinked in complete disorientation as she sat up, momentarily not even recalling where she was. And then her sleepy eyes focused on Nik where he was poised several feet from the bed and flew wide. He looked like hell; that was her first thought as she clutched the sheet protectively round herself, belatedly recalling her nudity.

His luxuriant black hair was tousled, his tie was missing and the white silk dress-shirt he wore beneath his dinner-jacket was half-open, displaying a disturbing wedge of bronzed chest, liberally sprinkled with curling dark whorls of hair. His strong, dark features were fiercely clenched and for someone of his usually vibrant skintone he was staggeringly pale. Almost as though he was in shock, she thought uncertainly... severe shock.

“Wh—what’s wrong...what time is it?’ she mumbled, pushing a hand through the silken disarray of the silvery hair falling round her shoulders, swallowing back a yawn as she glanced at her watch to discover that it was the early hours of the morning.

‘You have dishonoured my name,’ Nik breathed in what sounded more like broken English by virtue of the unusual thickness of his accent and his decidedly rough delivery.

Leah cleared her throat and looked back at him, still not quite awake, fighting through the fog of her slow reactions. Eyes as black as pitch clashed on a violent collision course with hers and the explosive tension emanating from him in electrifying waves was finally communicated to her.

‘Excuse me?’ she muttered, certain that he couldn’t possibly have said what she had thought he had said.

‘My wife with another man...’ He could hardly get the words out as he continued to stare at her with unwavering force as though she were some alien entity he had never seen before.

Ghostly fingers danced up her taut spinal cord. She tried and failed to swallow. But what ironically struck Leah hardest was not his evident discovery that she had been seeing another man but that truly staggering designation of ‘my wife’, a label which until now Nik had never once been heard to voice. In turn, Leah found that same label almost unbelievably offensive, not to mention ridiculous in the context of their marriage.

‘You do not deny it,’ Nik murmured, every powerful angle of his lean body rigid with raw tension.

Leah hugged the sheet, wondering dazedly why he was so incensed. For shock she should have read disbelief. Had he expected her to sit there like some wet, faithful Penelope forever, watching her life drain away into nothingness? All right, so she had been a doormat for a very long time, but surely even Nik could not have expected that to last indefinitely? And, in any case, what was it to him?

‘How did you find out?’ she asked, not as steadily as she would have liked, but fighting the intimidation of his dark, menacing attitude with all her strength.

‘You do not even seem to appreciate the magnitude of your offence.’ Nik studied her with outraged dark eyes and, if possible, he was even paler than he had been minutes earlier.

‘Have you been drinking?’ Leah prompted weakly, wondering if that was what lay at the foot of such utterly unwarranted melodrama. Coming into her room in the middle of the night, confronting her like a wronged husband...how could he possibly consider himself wronged?

‘What the hell has that to do with anything?’ Moving an unwelcome step closer, Nik abruptly spread two lean hands in a violent arc of eloquent expression. ‘I hear you on the phone with your lover. What I hear I cannot believe!’

‘Oh.’ Leah bent her head. She should have guessed. But Nik was so naturally devious, he hadn’t given a sign at the time. She tried to recall what she had said but she couldn’t, the conversation having been rushed and overshadowed by Nik’s appearance. Well, she thought, sucking in a deep breath, it wouldn’t have been the way she would have chosen for Nik to find out, but maybe it was for the best that it was all finally out in the open.

‘I had the London phone bills faxed to me and then I used the redial facility on the phone you had employed and checked it against the number you call most frequently.’

Devious didn’t begin to describe him. An odd squirming sensation afflicted Leah and she fought it, glancing up to say tightly, ‘I would have told you about him if you had asked.’

‘Told me about him? Cristo...do you have no shame?’

Her chin came up. ‘Why should I be ashamed?’ But for some inexplicable reason his attitude was having that effect on her and that made her angry.

‘You...are...my...wife,’ Nik spelt out with a flash of even white teeth and an aura of pure violence, on the brink of being unleashed.

Instinctively, Leah edged across to the far side of the bed, assailed by bewilderment and something that was coming perilously close to fear in spite of her anger. When he said she was his wife she wanted to scream back at him that she was no more his wife than a stranger in the street but his mood forestalled her. He was scaring her. She didn’t want to risk adding fuel to the fire.