The Married Mistress

‘I came to see you, of course, my darling…’

‘That’s not what I mean, and you know it!’ Sarah put in hastily and sharply, terrified of hearing that emotive word ‘wife’ on his lips.

Once she had been proud and happy—so happy—to be his wife, even if for his own reasons Damon had insisted that, for a while at least, they told no one the truth. But now their brief, painful façade of a marriage was something she desperately wanted to forget. To obliterate from her mind, if she couldn’t erase it from her past.

‘I want to know why you’re here—in London.’

‘I have business in town. Important meetings.’

It was not the truth, at least not the full truth, Damon admitted to himself. But the truth wasn’t something he was prepared to admit to. Not yet. Perhaps not ever at all.

He had had a meeting planned—one with Sarah to discuss their marriage, or what was left of it. The thoughts that had been in his mind as he’d arrived at the house such a short time before now came back to haunt him, mocking his gullible beliefs and the naïve hope that had been uppermost in his mind then.

He had given Sarah enough time to calm down, he had told himself. After six months of living on her own, stubbornly refusing to see him, returning every one of his letters unopened, surely she was now prepared to listen?

She would listen, he had told himself. No matter what he had to do to make her. He would talk—and she would listen. Somehow he would make her come back to Greece with him. To Mykonos. Where he would show her what he had done. And then…

He hadn’t got any further than that.

‘I see—business. Of course. What else?’

Sarah’s voice was cold and tight. If he didn’t know better, he’d have said she sounded disappointed. Which might have pleased him when he had first reached the house—when he’d still had hopes and illusions of a future. Before the appearance of Jason and his obvious familiarity with Sarah’s bedroom had shattered those illusions.

‘You know me, ghineka mou,’ he shot back. ‘Always busy, making deals, signing contracts.’

‘Acquiring land?’ Sarah returned with even more bite in her tone. Whatever disappointment she had been feeling a moment before, if disappointment was the right word, it was now totally submerged under the angry bitterness that blazed from her eyes. ‘Built any nice extensions to your hotels lately, Damon?’

‘Not since you left, my love,’ he returned, his tone dripping saccharine-sweetness. ‘And, as I recall, you never signed the papers agreeing to the one that I wanted.’

‘No, I didn’t, did I? That must have made things rather awkward for you.’

Damon’s smile in reply to the barbed comment was grim, tight, totally without any warmth.

‘No more awkward than they were already, agape mou. I told you then that your ownership of that land was not why I married you.’

‘I know what you told me, husband, dear, but I also know what I believe.’

Let him think that what had driven them apart was the piece of land that the Nicolaides Corporation coveted most on all the island of Mykonos. That was the reason she had given him for leaving in the letter she had left behind, the one she had clung to when he had come after her in a towering rage, demanding that she return at once. That and the fact that she had grown tired of their marriage, bored with life on the small Cyclades island. And it was one she would far rather have him believe than the actual, the hatefully painful truth.

‘Admit it, it was remarkably inconvenient for you that I discovered that the land my grandfather had left me was just the part of the island that you wanted. Especially when the old man had declared to your father’s face that he would rather die than sign the land over to anyone from your family.’

Her grandfather had been half Greek on his mother’s side. Through that line he had inherited the land on Mykonos. The land in question lay between two of the Nicolaides Corporation’s smaller hotels, and it had been a long-held ambition of both Damon and his father to link the hotels into one spectacular resort by building across the empty space. But Alexander Meyerson’s mother’s family had had a long-running feud with the Nicolaides clan, one that he had held fast to in spite of the increasingly huge amounts offered in exchange for the tiny portion of the island he owned, much to Aristotle Nicolaides’ increasing frustration.

So when Damon had learned that Sarah, as her grandfather’s only heir, would now own the land on Mykonos, he had come looking for her.

And she, poor blindly besotted fool that she was, had made matters so much easier for him by falling head over heels madly in love.

‘How you must have cursed those lawyers who wrote and let me know about my luck before you’d had time to get me to sign on any dotted lines.’

‘It was certainly, as you said—inconvenient,’ Damon growled, his stunning features setting into a dark frown. ‘But it was not necessarily fatal. Or it need not have been if you had only stayed to talk things over with me, or come back…’

‘Come back!’ Sarah couldn’t hold back the exclamation of shock and disgust that was pushed from her lips by his outrageous declaration. ‘Come back to a marriage that had never been a real one right from the start? That was built on nothing but lies and deceit? A marriage that you had been determined not to let anyone know about because you were ashamed of it?’

‘Not ashamed!’ Damon flung at her. ‘It just would have been…difficult to make our marriage public at that point.’

‘I’ll bet it would! Well, perhaps in the end I ought to thank you for that. After all, you spared me a lot of humiliation and the adverse publicity that I might have had to put up with if people had found out that we were married. Now all I have to do is wait for the legalities to be sorted out and we can be divorced as quietly as we were married. Excuse me.’

She tried to sweep past him, only to have to come to an awkward halt as he blocked her way, coming between her and her path across the hall.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Upstairs.’

‘Why?’

‘Is it any business of yours?’

‘Humour me.’

Seeing the stubborn, unmoving set of his face, the taut line of his hard jaw, she sighed her exasperation, knowing only too well that he had no intention of letting her pass until she told him something.

‘I want to go and strip the sheets off the bed that—that Jason and his fancy piece used!’

Distaste curled her lip, tasted bitter on her tongue.

‘I have to put them in the wash immediately—though if I’m honest I’d prefer to burn the damn things!’

To her relief Damon sidestepped neatly, moving out of her way, but as she mounted the first of the stairs she realised that he was right there behind her, following close on her heels.

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No!’

But he totally ignored her protest and just kept on coming.

‘Damon…’

She whirled on the stairs until she was facing him. Looking down into his handsome face, she saw the determination stamped hard on it, the unyielding set to his jaw.

‘I don’t need you!’

Just the thought of having this man, the man who had been her husband for such a brief time, follow her into her bedroom spoke of an intimacy that she was totally unwilling to allow herself to recall. I don’t want you, she should have said. But the words had other, much more disturbing implications that meant her voice would not actually speak them with the conviction she needed.

‘It’ll be easier with two,’ Damon returned, and just kept on coming so that she was obliged to skip backwards hastily up the stairs if she was not to have him collide with her.

‘I’ve done it by myself many times…’

‘I’m sure you have.’