Bond Of Hatred

‘Your brother’s consent?’ Sarah had repeated helplessly.

‘Greek families function on the basis of a strict hierarchy,’ Callie had intervened witheringly. ‘At the top of the family pecking order is the dominant male. Damon’s father is dead. His brother, Alexis is the big wheel in the Terzakis tribe.’

Faint colour had darkened Damon’s good-looking features. He had cast Callie a look of surprisingly strong reproof.

‘I don’t think you should take cheap shots at Damon’s big brother,’ Sarah had told her unrepentant sister while she’d prepared supper in their tiny kitchen. ‘Or his family. He was offended—’

‘Stuff!’ Callie had muttered, still angry. ‘He’s a grown man with a responsible job. But when he talks about Alex he acts like a little boy. He never stops talking about him. Alex this...Alex that. You’d think Alex was God in his life.’

‘Damon is Greek,’ Sarah had reminded her gently. ‘His culture, his background and his upbringing are bound to differ greatly from yours. If you really love him, Callie...all that goes with the territory.’

Sarah surfaced from the past and found herself perched on a bench in the park down the road from the hospital. To think that all those months ago she had actually been relieved to hear Damon mentioning the necessity of obtaining his brother’s approval before he could marry!

Alarm bells had only really gone off the day she’d caught the name Terzakis on the evening news and glimpsed a forbiddingly handsome male, surrounded by executives and cameras, refusing to comment on his acquisition of some company in New York. She had bought a serious newspaper the next day on the way into work and she had read all about Alexis Terzakis with growing consternation. That evening she had rung Callie and asked her to come home for a night. Callie had come with bad grace, demanding to know what all the fuss was about.

‘You said that Damon was running his family’s hotel in Oxford,’ Sarah had reminded her. ‘What you didn’t say was that the Terzakis family are billionaires!’

‘Alex is the billionaire,’ Callie had said drily. ‘Damon just gets pocket money.’

‘I thought Damon’s family were hoteliers—’

Callie had burst out laughing. ‘Sarah, you are dumb! Don’t you ever read the business columns? Damon’s family own a shipping line, an international string of hotels, engineering plants, finance companies...you name it, they own it!’

Sarah had been disturbed. She had genuinely had no idea that her sister’s boyfriend was from so wealthy a background. Damon had seemed very unassuming. He had settled that evening into their shabby lounge without a shade of discomfort. She remembered Callie referring to her own job as secretarial and quickly dismissing the subject.

Actually Sarah was a humble filing clerk in a big anonymous office and she had not climbed the ladder any higher because the frequency with which she had held down two jobs had meant that she had no time to spare for evening classes. Sarah had spent countless evenings over the past seven years waitressing or cleaning for extra money to stretch their tight budget.

She had tried not to feel hurt that evening she’d first met Damon when Callie had asked her in advance not to mention those latter sources of income. Callie had been embarrassed by her sister’s acceptance of such low-grade employment. And, sadly, Sarah had understood. Callie had always wanted to be somebody and that vein of insecurity had been stirred when she’d found herself mixing with students from far more comfortable backgrounds than her own. She hadn’t wanted anyone to know that the source of the cheap but fashionable clothes she wore with such panache had been a sister, who regularly cleaned office blocks after closing time.

And now Callie was gone. Sarah raised trembling hands to her face as if she could somehow contain the anguish inside her. She could not imagine life without Callie. Callie with her raw energy, boundless untidiness and quick temper. Callie had been born when Sarah was six. Sarah, a quiet, rather lonely child, had delighted her parents by displaying not the smallest atom of jealousy. She had been enchanted by her baby sister. She had read her stories, picked her up when she fell over, taught her nursery rhymes before she started school and later helped her with her homework. With two parents working full-time, there had been plenty of opportunity for Sarah to fill in the gaps in Callie’s days when their mother was too tired or too busy.

‘Miss Hartwell.’

Sarah lifted her aching head like a sleepwalker and focused on Alex Terzakis in disbelief. He looked alien against the backdrop of the scruffy park.

‘Allow me to offer you a lift home,’ he drawled flatly.

Sarah burst out laughing, hysteria clawing like insanity at her cracking composure. Abruptly she covered her working face again, stricken that he of all people should see her in such a state. Dear lord, what did this barbarian want from her now. Couldn’t he even leave her to grieve in peace?

Only a couple of hours had passed since she had been bundled unceremoniously from her sister’s bedside and the crash team had attempted to get her sister breathing again. It had happened so fast and they had tried so hard. But Callie, once the leading light of her school athletics team, had died of a massive coronary, just days off her nineteenth birthday. Sarah had been shattered but she had been totally devastated by what she’d learnt from the consultant gynaecologist afterwards.

Early in her pregnancy, Callie had been warned that she had a weak heart. Routine testing had revealed what nobody had ever had any cause to suspect. She had been advised to have a termination and she had refused. She had not shared any of that with her sister. Sarah had been surprised by the sheer frequency of Callie’s ante-natal appointments but she had had no idea that there was anything wrong.

‘Callie was one hundred per cent determined to have her baby,’ the consultant had told her wryly. ‘That was her choice. Possibly she didn’t tell you because she was afraid that you might try to change her mind.’

‘Miss Hartwell?’ Alex Terzakis persisted grimly, impatiently.

Please God, make him leave me alone, she prayed feverishly, curving her arms round her churning stomach and involuntarily rocking back and forth on the edge of the bench.

‘I cannot leave you here in this condition,’ he continued, his accent growing more pronounced with every unanswered intervention. ‘I wish to see you safely to your home. I also wish to assume responsibility for the funeral arrangements—’

‘You bloody savage!’ Sarah, who never ever swore, found the word flying off her tongue. A stricken sense of horror had attacked her as he’d spoken. ‘You wouldn’t let her marry into your family but you can’t wait to bury her!’

‘I do not intend to stand here being insulted in a public place,’ he gritted through clenched teeth, and she could feel the force of his suppressed rage licking out at her like hungry flames, desperate for fuel to feed on. It was a curiously satisfying experience, warming her chilled bones.

‘Then you know what to do about it, don’t you?’ Sarah collided with blazing golden eyes set between incredibly luxuriant ebony lashes and felt oddly dizzy for a split-second. She tilted her chin. ‘Get lost.’

‘If you were not a woman...’ he launched at her with raw, splintering aggression. He was white beneath his bronzed skin, his classic bone-structure starkly prominent. He was rigid with fury and frustration.

‘You’d be dead,’ Sarah murmured shakily. ‘If I were a man, I’d have killed you for what you did to Callie in your fancy big office five months ago!’

His brilliant gaze had narrowed to piercing pin-points of light, arrowing over her very small, very slight figure and the huge green eyes dominating her triangular face. ‘On this occasion, I desired only to offer you my assistance at a time of severe trial to us all.’

He strode off. Incredibly good carriage, she noted abstractedly, and then it hit her finally. Callie gone... Callie gone forever. She had not cried a single tear. Her eyes had burned and scorched but remained dry through-out. And now the tears came in a silent tidal wave, streaming down her quivering cheeks in agonised relief. She was so terribly grateful that it hadn’t happened in front of him.

* * *

‘You’ll never guess who just walked in.’ Gina nudged Sarah in the ribs seconds after the short funeral service began, her plump over-made-up face suddenly wreathed with rampant curiosity. ‘It’s them...got to be, hasn’t it? Who else could it be?’

‘Shush,’ Sarah urged, her head downbent as the service opened with a short prayer.

Alex and Damon Terzakis. The combined view of them hit her like a punch in the stomach at the graveside. She went white with outrage, considering their presence a desecration of Callie’s memory. How dared they come here and mourn her sister when between them they had made her sister’s last months a living hell? How dared they! Damon was studying the ground. He was thinner, older than she remembered, both hands clasped tightly before him.

‘Decent of them to come...the way you feel,’ Gina muttered out of the corner of her mouth. She was a large woman in her late forties and an inveterate talker, no matter what the occasion.

People began to leave, shaking her hand. Mostly very young people, Callie’s friends from her schooldays. Nobody from the university, but then Callie had abandoned her studies many months previously and broken all contact with the friends she had made there. Without warning, Gina darted from her side and approached the Terzakis males. Infuriated by her defection, Sarah walked on with the minister and parted from him beside Gina’s car.

Sickened, she stared at the black limousine with its tinted windows and chauffeur standing by on the other side of the churchyard. She hadn’t been able to afford even one funeral car. But then things like that weren’t important, she reminded herself painfully, and she had to conserve what little money she had for her nephew.

‘I’m going to call him Nikos, after Damon’s father,’ Callie had announced months ago, after a scan had revealed the sex of her unborn child. She had wanted to know whether she was carrying a boy or a girl and she had been over the moon when she’d learnt that it was a boy.

‘Damon won’t be able to stay away,’ Callie had forecast almost smugly, patting her swollen stomach. ‘Not from his son.’

Sarah had been amazed at the strength of her sister’s naïve faith in the man who had abandoned her to single parenthood. After all that had happened, she had been unable to comprehend how Callie could still hope, but during her sister’s pregnancy she had been reluctant to deprive her of any belief that bolstered her spirits. She had been dreading the aftermath of the birth when poor Callie would have been faced with reality. She would have waited in vain for a proud father to show up. Damon was a wimp, utterly under big brother’s thumb, and the threat of disinheritance and exile from his beloved family had completely overpowered his much vaunted great love for Callie!

Gina swam back to her, beaming all over her round face, and unlocked the car.

‘Why did you speak to them?’ Sarah whispered painfully.

‘Because you’re being absolutely stupid!’ Gina said bluntly. ‘If you want to keep that baby, be practical. Bite your lip and let them keep you both—’

‘I’d sooner be dead!’ Sarah exclaimed.

‘He’s little Nicky’s dad, isn’t he? Why shouldn’t he pay up?’ Gina demanded. ‘You can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll pay a packet to keep all this out of the newspapers.’

‘Gina—’ Sarah muttered, dismayed but not particularly surprised by the older woman’s calculation.

‘You’ve got to be realistic, love,’ Gina continued, not unkindly. ‘You want little Nicky and I think you’re crazy, but then you always were the maternal type, even as a kid. So keep him and raise him and make them pay through the nose for it!’