The Cozakis Bride

‘I see that your mother educated you to some degree about our culture,’ Nik noted. ‘I wish to avenge my honour. You shamed me before my family and my friends.’

‘Nik…I—’

‘I could just about bear you surviving in misery somewhere in the world as long as I never had to see you or think about you,’ Nik extended gently. ‘Then you came into my office and asked me if I was a man or a mouse and I found out which…just as you’re going to find out by the time I’m finished with you.’

‘I apologised—’

‘But you didn’t mean it, Olympia.’

‘I mean it now!’

Disconcertingly, Nik flung his handsome dark head back and laughed with reluctant appreciation at that qualification.

Olympia took strength from that sign of humanity. ‘You’re not serious about all this,’ she told him urgently. ‘You’re angry with me and you want to shake me up, and I wish…I really do wish now that I had never come near you.’

Nick dealt her a hard, angry smile. ‘I bet you do. Accept that you’ve brought this particular roof down on yourself!’

Olympia squared her aching shoulders. ‘All I did—’

‘All you did?’ Nik rasped with seething force, his lean strong face hard as iron, his fierce anger blazing out at her in a scorching wave of intimidation. ‘You dared to believe that you could buy me with your dowry!’

Olympia gulped. ‘I—’

‘Even worse, you dared to suggest that I, Nikos Cozakis, would sink to the level of cheating an elderly man whom I respect for the sake of profit. That elderly man is your grandfather…have you no decency whatsoever?’ he roared at her in disgust.

Olympia was cringing, devastated by the manner in which he seemed to be twisting everything around and making her sound like a totally horrible person. ‘It wasn’t like that. I thought—’

‘I’m not interested in hearing your thoughts…every time you open your mouth you say something more offensive than you last said. So if you have any wit at all, you’ll keep it closed!’ Nik advised with savage derision, a dark line of colour delineating his hard cheekbones. ‘You owe debts, and through me you will settle those debts.’

‘What are you t-talking about?’

‘What you did ten years ago cost your poor mother any hope of reconciliation with her father. What you did ten years ago savaged your grandfather. And what you did to me, you can find out the hard way,’ Nik concluded darkly.

Stabbed to the heart by that reminder about her mother, Olympia dropped her head, tears springing to her eyes. ‘It wasn’t my fault…what happened…I was set up—’

‘You’re embarrassing me,’ Nik slotted in with contempt. ‘Lies and fake shame are not going to protect you.’

‘You’re scaring me…’ Olympia condemned tearfully. ‘You are really scaring me!’

Nik bent down and closed his hands to hers and tugged her upright. ‘You’re getting too upset.’

‘You can’t mean all this stuff you’ve been saying…’

‘I do…but I don’t like seeing a woman cry.’ Linking his arms round her, Nik stared down at her from his immensely superior height, dark eyes smouldering gold over her damp upturned face.

Olympia’s breath tripped in her throat. Suddenly she could feel every individual nerve-ending in her trembling body coming alive. The effect was so immediate it made her head spin. The scent of him was in her nostrils. Warm, husky male with an intrinsic something extra which was somehow exotic and exciting and dizzily familiar. Her heart began to pound in her eardrums.

‘Even crocodile tears can get a reaction from me.’ Nik slid a big hand down over her hips and eased her so close to the muscular power of his thighs that she gasped, a sort of wild heat whipping over her entire skin surface, leaving every inch terrifyingly sensitive to the contact of his lean, hard physique.

‘Nik…no—’

‘Nik…yes, only you’ll learn to say it in Greek and it will be your favourite word,’ Nik husked, suddenly hauling her up to him and plunging his mouth down on hers with devouring force.

The hard, sensual shock of him engulfed her in a split second. She had never tasted passion like that before. The stab of his tongue inside the tender interior of her mouth hit her with such electrifying effect her whole body jerked and quivered, a low moan of response breaking deep in her throat. Instantly she was melting, burning, craving more. Her arms closed round him and an amount of hunger that blew her away erupted with the shuddering force of a dam breaking its banks within her.

Nik dragged his mouth free of hers and lowered her to the carpet again, a derision in his raking scrutiny that stabbed her to the heart. ‘Hungry, aren’t you?’

Devastated by what she had allowed to happen between them, and jolted by a sense of loss so strong it hurt, Olympia swung up her hand to strike him. Nik caught her wrist between firm fingers, the speed of his reaction shocking her. ‘Those kinds of games don’t excite me,’ he warned her drily.

Olympia whirled away from him in a fever of confusion and distress. She couldn’t believe that she had responded to him. She didn’t want to believe it, any more than she could come to terms with the stormy surge of sexual need which had betrayed her. ‘You wouldn’t tell my mother—’

‘Want to run that risk? And destroy the single character trait you have that I can admire?’

‘And what’s that?’ she muttered shakily.

‘You love your mother and you don’t want her to know what you’re really like.’

Olympia felt her jacket being draped round her slumped shoulders. ‘You can’t want to marry me—’

‘Why not? I get the Manoulis empire and a son and heir. Spyros gets a great-grandson—a reward and consolation which he certainly deserves. I also get a wife who really knows how to behave herself, a wife who never, ever questions where I go or what I do because we have a business deal, not a marriage,’ Nik enumerated lazily. ‘A lot of men would envy me. Especially as I didn’t even have to go looking for my bridal prize…she put herself on a plate for me.’

‘I hate you…’ Olympia whispered with real vehemence. ‘I’ll never marry you…do you hear me?’

‘I hope you’re not about to go all wimpy on me, Olympia,’ Nik sighed. ‘I’d find that very boring.’

‘You bastard…you rotten bastard…what are you doing?’ she demanded as he separated the fingers of her hand.

‘Here is your engagement ring… No, not the family heirloom you flung back at me ten years ago…you don’t qualify for a compliment like that.’

Olympia stared down mute and stunned at the diamond solitaire now adorning her engagement finger.

‘Romantic touch. Your mother will appreciate it even if you can’t.’

Nik walked her through a connecting door into another room and straight into a lift.

‘You can’t do this to me, Nik!’ Olympia argued weakly.

‘Damianos is waiting in the car park down below. He’ll see you get driven home. Get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ As Olympia’s cardigan threatened to fall off, Nik wrapped it round her like a blanket. Then he punched the relevant button on the lift control panel for her.

The doors whirred shut. Olympia snatched in a shivering breath, suddenly appreciating that she had a dreadful pounding headache and that she had never felt so exhausted in her entire life. She tottered out of the lift into a well-lit basement car park. Damianos glanced at her waxen face and averted his attention again.

Nik’s bodyguard had warned her that she would be eaten alive, she recalled dully. She hadn’t listened, hadn’t believed him, would not have credited in a million years that Nik Cozakis could run rings round her now that she was an adult of twenty-seven. But Nik had run so many rings round her that right now she might as well have been lurching one-legged through a swamp as she followed Damianos to the waiting limousine.

All of a sudden she saw herself as a fisherman, who had dangled a worm as bait and suffered the gut-wrenching shock of a man-eating shark rearing up out of the waves in front of her. And she couldn’t believe, didn’t believe, flatly refused to even begin to believe that Nik would carry through on such threats.

Olympia wakened with a heavy head the next morning.

When she had arrived home the night before, Irini Manoulis had already retired to bed. Olympia had lain awake far into the early hours, engaged in a frantic mental search for an escape. But there was only one possible escape route: she had to have the courage to call Nik’s bluff. Why on earth hadn’t she mentioned her mother’s weak heart? However much he hated and despised Olympia, Nik would not threaten the health of a sick and fragile woman.