The Konstantos Marriage Demand

Sitting down was the last thing Nikos had in mind. He had no intention of letting her get settled, allowing her to stay a moment longer than he had to. Just seeing her here like this was making him feel as if the room was suddenly at the centre of a wild and dangerous hurricane, with the day he had been living being picked up and whirled around, turned inside out.

And the sound of her voice was raking up memories he had pushed to the back of his mind for so long. He wanted them to stay there. He had never wanted to speak to Sadie Carteret ever again.

‘Tell him to go away, Daddy.’

The words she had tossed down the staircase at him, the last words he had ever heard her speak on the day that had been the worst day of his life, came back to haunt him, making savage anger flare like rocket fire inside his head.

‘Tell him the only interest he had for me was his money, and now that he has none I never want to see him again.’

And he had never wanted to see her, Nikos acknowledged, his whole body taut with rejection of her presence in his life once more. The disturbing tug of sensuality he had felt in the lift had evaporated, he was thankful to find. The memory of her callous rejection, the cold tight voice in which she’d flung it at him, not even bothering to come downstairs and tell him face to face, had driven that away, leaving behind just a cold savagery of hatred.

The sooner she said what she had to say and got out of here, the better.

‘Five minutes,’ he repeated with deadly emphasis. ‘And then I get Security to escort you out. You’ve wasted one of them already.’

‘I wanted to talk to you about buying Thorn Trees!’

That got his attention. His dark head went back, eyes narrowing sharply.

‘Buying? What is this? Have you suddenly come into a fortune?’

Belatedly Sadie realised her mistake. Nerves had got the better of her and she’d blurted out the first thing that came into her mind.

‘No—of course not.’

‘I didn’t mean buy—I could never afford that. I just…’

The sudden drop of those bronze eyes down to the gold watch on his wrist, watching the second hand tick by, incensed her, pushing her into rash, unguarded speech.

‘Damn you, you took everything we had. Every last thing my father had owned—except for this. I just hoped that I might be able to rent it from you.’

‘Rent?’

Her antagonism had been a mistake, sparking off an answering anger in Nikos, one that tightened every muscle in his face, thinning his lips to a hard, tight line.

‘That house is a handsome property in a prime position in London. With some restoration—a lot of restoration, admittedly—it would sell for a couple of million—maybe more. Why should I want to rent it out to you?’

‘Because I need it.’

Because my mother’s happiness—possibly even her sanity—her life—might depend on it. But Sadie wasn’t quite ready to expose every last detail of the worries that had driven her to come here today to plead with him. Not with Nikos standing there, dark and imposing, arms now folded across the width of his chest, jaw clamped tight, eyes as cold as golden ice, looking for all the world like the judge in some criminal court. And one who was just about to put the black cap on his head, ready to pronounce the sentence of execution.

Besides, her mother had already lost so very much. She wouldn’t deprive her of the last shreds of her dignity, her privacy, unless she really had no choice.

‘As you’ve admitted, it needs a great deal of restoration. There’s no way you would be able to get the market value for it right now.’

‘And no way I can get the necessary renovations done with you and your mother there. I thought I’d given instructions to my solicitor…’

‘You did.’

Oh, he had. She knew that only too well. The letter advising her family that Nikos Konstantos now owned Thorn Trees and that they should vacate the house by the end of the month had arrived a few days before. It had only been by a stroke of luck that Sadie had managed to intercept the envelope before her mother had shown any interest in the post. That way she had succeeded in keeping the bad news from Sarah for a while at least.

But not for good. Within twenty-four hours, her mother had somehow found the envelope and read its contents. Her panicked reaction had been everything Sadie had anticipated—and most dreaded. It was the final straw that had pushed her into action, bringing her to the realisation that there was only one way she could hope to handle this and that that was by going to see Nikos himself, appealing directly to his better nature in the hope that he would help them, let them stay at least until things improved just a little.

Not that Nikos, as he was now, looked as if he had a better nature at all. His face was set and stony, his eyes like glowing flints.

‘Your solicitor did exactly as you told him—don’t worry about that.’

‘Then you know what I have planned for the house. And it does not include a couple of sitting tenants.’

‘But we don’t have anywhere to go.’

‘Find somewhere.’

Could his voice get any more brutal, any more unyielding? There wasn’t even a flicker of emotion in it, nothing she could hope to appeal to. And what made it so much worse was the way a memory danced in front of her eyes. An image of the same man but five years younger. And so unlike the cold-faced monster who seemed intent on glaring her into submission that he looked like someone else entirely.

She’d loved that other man. Loved him so much she’d broken her own heart rather than break his. Only to find that in the end he hadn’t had a heart to break.

A terrible sense of loss stabbed at her and she felt bitter tears burn at the back of her eyes. She only managed to hold them back by sheer force of will.

‘It isn’t as easy as that,’ she managed, her voice rough and uneven. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, the economy…’

She swallowed down the last of the sentence, knowing that finishing it would only give him more ammunition to use against her. Of course he knew all about the economy, and the way things had changed so dramatically in a couple of years or so. It was what he had used against Edwin, manipulating the wild fluctuations in the stock market to his personal advantage and against the man he had hated so bitterly.

‘I thought that you had a business of your own,’ Nikos said now.

‘A small one.’

And one that wasn’t doing very well at all, Sadie acknowledged privately. With things as tight as they were for most people, no one was indulging in the luxury of having a wedding planner organise their ‘big day’. She hadn’t had an enquiry in weeks—and as for bookings, well, the last she’d had had cancelled the next month.

‘Then get yourself another house. There are plenty on the market.’

‘I can’t afford—’

‘Can’t afford a smaller house but yet you want me to rent you Thorn Trees? Have you thought about this? About the sort of rent that can be asked for a place like that?’

‘Yes, I’ve thought about it.’

And had quailed inside at the realisation of the fact that just the rent on her family home would probably be far more than she could possibly manage to rake together every month.

‘Or did you perhaps think that I might be a soft touch and give it to you for—what is that you say—mate’s rates?’

The slang term sounded weird on his tongue, his accent suddenly seeming so much thicker than before, mangling the words until they were almost incomprehensible. But even more disturbing was the knowledge that there was no way at all that they applied to the relationship between herself and Nikos. Whatever else they had been, they had never been ‘mates’. Never truly friends or anything like it. Hot, passionate lovers, fiancés, prospective bride and groom—or at least that was what had been intended.

Or had it? She had been overjoyed to accept Nikos’s proposal. Had looked forward to her wedding day with joyful anticipation and had wept out her devastated heart when she had been forced to cancel it. But what she had thought had been a broken heart had been as nothing when compared to the misery she had endured later, when she had learned the truth about what Nikos had really been planning.

The shattering of her dreams had coincided with such a major crisis in her family life that she had barely known what she was doing from day to day. In the end she had resorted to the policy of least resistance, letting her father dictate everything she did, the way she behaved. He had written the script for those appalling days and she had followed it exactly. At least that way her mother had been safe, and Edwin Carteret had made sure that Nikos had failed in his attempts to get back into her life, to try and see Sadie—and no doubt hurt her even more.

‘I…’