Bond Of Hatred

‘I don’t want anything from them!’

‘If you don’t take their money, you’ll have to live on benefit,’ Gina pointed out drily. ‘And the social services will pursue Damon.’

‘To Greece?’ A hysterical laugh was lodged like a sob in Sarah’s constricted throat.

‘Well, they wouldn’t have much trouble tracking him down, would they?’

‘I won’t take anything from them,’ Sarah stated tightly. ‘Ever!’

‘Callie would have wanted the very best for her son,’ the older woman said shortly. ‘And I think it’s time you faced the fact that Callie knew damned fine what she was doing when she got pregnant.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Sarah looked at her father’s cousin in shock and reproach.

‘It was no accident in my opinion. Callie wasn’t that careless. She wanted that boy and when things weren’t going as she wanted them to she let herself fall pregnant,’ Gina opined wryly. ‘Women have been using pregnancy to trap men into marriage for centuries, love. Teenage girls are particularly fond of the method. Unfortunately your sister miscalculated.’

‘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.