Bond Of Hatred

‘I did not believe she was pregnant,’ Alex breathed curtly through perfect white teeth. It was obvious that the admission was wrenched from him.

‘I want you to get out,’ Sarah told him shakily. ‘You have no business in this house.’

He sent her a glittering black glance of startling ferocity and strode over to the window. ‘My brother is too ashamed to face you...’ he gritted in a driven undertone.

In a weird way, Sarah was beginning to enjoy herself. If the previous admission of faulty judgement had been wrenched from him, the latter had been ripped screaming from Alex Terzakis. Little brother was a wimp. And that offended and humiliated big brother no end! Family honour and all that macho nonsense. Alex was being forced to deal with a woman he despised in a situation in which he had no defence, she registered with increasing confidence. He was here to buy silence.

To buy her silence. Maybe he was scared she would talk to the newspapers. He was a very private man, this Greek tycoon with his barbaric arrogance and pride. He detested publicity. And it wasn’t a nice story, was it? A teenager led up the garden path by a rich, spoilt young playboy and then dumped at spectacular speed once he had had what he had wanted from her. Then that same teenager had been threatened by powerful lawyers, offered hush-money and told to get lost and forget she had ever known anyone with the name of Terzakis!

Sarah’s stomach filled with nausea. It was a horrible story but it only became tragedy if you knew that Callie had loved him right to the bitter end. Tears burned her lowered eyelids and she fought them back bitterly.

‘If by any means within his power Damon could restore her to life, he would.’ She clashed with hard, dark eyes as treacherous as black ice and briefly felt as though she had gone into a skid. The speed with which he had damped down his fury and reasserted rigorous self-discipline sharply disconcerted her. ‘But he cannot. However, he can take charge of his son and give him the life to which he should have been born by right.’

Sarah froze. Her throat closed over. Her long lashes fluttered as she simply stared at Alex Terzakis in disbelief. ‘Give h-him the life...?’ she stammered in a daze, thrown wildly off balance by the statement. ‘What did you say?’

Reading her astonishment, he smiled—he actually smiled. The merest twist of that sensual, perfectly shaped mouth but no less than a smile. ‘Naturally, Damon wishes to raise his child in his own home where he belongs.’

CHAPTER TWO

SARAH took several shocked seconds to absorb her incredulity. The Terzakis clan wanted Nicky! They wanted Callie’s child! It was a staggering suggestion and she couldn’t credit that Alex Terzakis could be serious.

Alex took her silence as encouragement. He studied her as a cat studied a mouse, calculation written all over him. ‘Damon adores children. Nikos would be greatly loved.’

‘I really...I really don’t believe I’m hearing this,’ Sarah admitted tremulously. ‘You wouldn’t let your brother marry her and yet you think he has the right to take her child? He cut her off, ignored her letters, allowed you to humiliate her and let her go through a very difficult pregnancy without any support...and you come here and you tell me that he wants her baby?’ As she spoke, her shaken voice strengthened with growing anger.

‘Whatever you feel for my brother, he is the father of your sister’s child,’ Alex delivered harshly, surprisingly silent and taut in receipt of her condemnation.

‘I can’t believe that you accept that—’

‘Damon inherited a rare blood group from my mother’s side of the family. I understand that Nikos also shares that blood group,’ he volunteered smoothly, seemingly unaware of the gross offence he was offering by admitting that he had taken up all the evidence available before conceding that Nicky was his brother’s child. ‘The chances of that occurring by coincidence are several million to one.’

‘And you’re probably still checking those out!’ Sarah slung at him in disgust.

‘I am not prepared to be drawn into argument with you, Miss Hartwell.’ He angled his gleaming dark head high and surveyed her with innate superiority and unhidden contempt. ‘I am only here for the child’s sake as negotiator on my brother’s behalf.’

‘Negotiator?’ Sarah echoed, trying and failing to swallow back her increasing distress.

‘Conciliator?’ he suggested with black velvet cool. ‘The past cannot be changed. We must consider my nephew’s future—’

‘Nicky’s f-future is with me!’ Sarah told him, but she was badly shaken by an offer she had never envisaged being made.

‘No doubt you think to drive the price up with this pretence of attachment to the child of a father you de-spise—’

‘The price?’ she whispered.

‘Any price...name it and it is yours,’ Alex Terzakis murmured softly, seductively, like a dope dealer dangling death before an addict.

Sarah was so appalled by his estimation of her character that she said nothing.

‘You hand over Nikos quietly, discreetly, keep your mouth shut and in return...in return,’ he repeated with golden eyes so intent on her that his gaze felt like a physical touch, ‘I will give you whatever you want. Think of that. You have had a hard life. What age are you? Thirty, thirty-one?’

Mesmerised, Sarah stared back at him, her trembling hands curving convulsively round a wooden chair-back. Thirty, thirty-one? Dear heaven, did she look that old?

‘You could do something with yourself,’ Alex Terzakis pointed out lazily. ‘It’s not too late. Money can buy beauty. With concentrated effort and professional advice, you could be quite attractive—’

‘You don’t say.’ Sarah could hardly get out the response. Although she had few illusions about her looks, any she might have had were being insensitively ripped to shreds.

‘The world could be your oyster. You could travel. You’re a clever woman. You could probably find yourself a husband.’

Sarah shuddered as she breathed in deep. Desperate for a man...embittered by her lack of one. Clearly that was how Alex Terzakis saw her. With rigorous determination she suppressed a squirming sense of utter humiliation. He was Greek to the backbone. What Callie called ‘unreconstructed man’, what Sarah called a Neanderthal primitive. He belonged in a cave, not a civilised society. Or in a museum alongside the dinosaur display.

Even in the depths of the mortification she was struggling to conceal from him she was conscious of a helpless current of grotesque fascination. On the surface, he was so sophisticated...but underneath as earthy and as simplistic in his beliefs about the needs of a woman as any uneducated peasant. He was telling her politely that what she really needed was a man in her bed... Dear lord, even the dinosaur display would be too advanced for him! It would never occur to him that celibacy was a perfectly natural choice for many people.

Then how could it occur to him? Alex Terzakis had not one but two mistresses. One in Athens, one in Paris. Sarah swallowed back her distaste, repelled by such rampant and unashamed promiscuity. Evidently his sexual appetite was voracious and uncontrolled. In today’s society, Alex Terzakis was a prehistoric savage, more to be pitied than anything else, she told herself, raising her chin. That she should have allowed such a barbarian to hurt and embarrass her was ridiculous!

‘Nicky is not for sale,’ Sarah said very drily, but her cheeks warmed as she dimly questioned her surprisingly intimate thoughts over the past few minutes.

‘I did not suggest that he was but I hardly think that you would wish to tie yourself down with a young and demanding child when you could make a new life for yourself.’

‘But I don’t want a new life. I am perfectly happy with the one that I have.’

His striking bone-structure tightened, hooded dark eyes resting on her without any perceptible emotion at all. ‘Then you force me to be blunt—’

‘Oh, I don’t think you need forcing,’ Sarah opined, sweetly sarcastic as she raked him with unhidden derision. ‘I would say that being blunt comes very naturally to you. The challenge would be sensitivity.’

‘You are a woman of discernment.’ Instead of reacting with the anger she had expected, Alex cast her a glittering threat of a smile. ‘Although I strive hard to pity you for your lack of femininity, your shrewish tongue and your unashamed malice, I do indeed find it a quite extraordinary challenge.’

Sarah turned crimson and then white in speedy succession. Her loathing for him was magnified into a murderous heat. Her teeth sank into the soft underside of her lower lip and she tasted the sweet tang of her own blood when what she most wanted was his.

‘Let us waste no further time. You are telling me that you wish to deprive Nikos of his natural heritage and his father out of spite,’ he asserted, icily contemptuous. ‘In opposition, what do you offer? A hovel for him to live in! The tag of illegitimacy to carry throughout his life! And the guardianship of a woman who is not of good character. Had you had any decency, you would not have encouraged your teenage sister to continue her relationship with my brother—’

Sarah was trembling with fury. ‘What control did you have over your wretched brother?’

‘I was not aware of their affair until it was too late. You knew from the beginning,’ Alex condemned. ‘You played your own part in your sister’s premature death—’

‘God forgive you!’ Sarah was stricken to the heart by the charge.

‘And, not content with that tragedy, you now seek to destroy my nephew’s future. I will not allow you to do it. He belongs with my family. We can give him everything,’ he stressed with harsh emphasis. ‘An extended family of supportive relatives, quite apart from a loving mother and father of his own...’

Sarah tensed, her fine brows drawing together.

‘The finest schools, a beautiful home, the ability to hold his head high wherever he is and in whatever company. He is a Terzakis.’ And to be a Terzakis was evidently the very zenith of anyone’s worldly ambition, she translated. She was facing a male fired by a powerful pride in his own blue-blooded, monied heritage. He could probably quote his family tree accurately back at least several generations. Little wonder, she thought, bitterly resentful, that Callie Hartwell, daughter of a factory supervisor and a nurse, had been less than nothing to him. No fancy pedigree there, just good working-class breeding.

Her reflections turned back to something that had puzzled her seconds earlier. She must have misheard him. He could not have said ‘a loving mother’. He could not have said that.

‘Androula would love him as her own. There is neither bitterness nor room for malice in her generous heart. She has had many months to adjust to the knowledge that another woman was carrying her husband’s child...’

Sarah was paralysed. Androula...her husband’s child? Dear God, Damon had got married to another woman while her poor sister had been pathetically pinning her hopes to an eventual reconciliation! He had actually got married! She was sick to the stomach, barely able to move on a stage to the even more staggering assertion that Callie’s no doubt triumphant rival was now most generously prepared to play mother to Damon’s illegitimate child...