THE WOMAN IN the looking glass was beautiful. Fair hair, drawn back into an elegant chignon from a fine-boned face, luminous grey eyes enhanced with expensive cosmetics, lips outlined with subtle colour. At the lobes of her ears and around her throat pearls shimmered.
For several long moments she continued to stare, unblinking. Then abruptly she got to her feet and turned, the long skirts of her evening gown swishing as she headed to the bedroom door. She could delay no longer. Nikos did not care to be kept waiting.
Into her head, in the bleak reality of her life now, came the words of a saying that was constantly there.
‘“Take what you want,” says God. “Take it and pay for it.”’
She swallowed as she headed downstairs to her waiting husband. Well, she had taken what she’d wanted. And she was paying for it. Oh, how she was paying for it...
Six months previously
‘You do realise, Diana, that with probate now completed and your financial situation clearly impossible, you have no option but to sell.’
Diana felt her hands clench in her lap, but did not reply.
The St Clair family lawyer went on. ‘It won’t reach top price, obviously, because of its poor condition, but you should clear enough to enable you to live pretty decently. I’ll contact the agents and set the wheels in motion.’
Gerald Langley smiled in a way that she supposed he thought encouraging.
‘I suggest that you take a holiday. I know it’s been a very difficult time for you. Your father’s accident, his progressive decline after his injuries—and then his death—’
He might have saved his breath. A stony expression had tautened Diana’s face. ‘I’m not selling.’
Gerald frowned at the obduracy in her voice. ‘Diana, you must face facts,’ he retorted, his impatience audible. ‘You may have sufficient income from shares and other investments to cope with the normal running and maintenance costs of Greymont, or even to find the capital for the repairs your father thought were necessary, but this latest structural survey you commissioned after he died shows that the repairs urgently needed—that cannot be deferred or delayed—are far more extensive than anyone realised. You simply do not have the funds for it—not after death duties. Let alone for the decorative work on the interior. Nor are there any art masterpieces you can sell—your grandfather disposed of most of them to pay his own death duties, and your father sold everything else to pay his.’
He drew a breath,
‘So, outside of an extremely unlikely lottery win,’ he said, and there was a trace of condescension now, ‘your only other option would be to find some extremely rich man with exceptionally deep pockets and marry him.’
He let his bland gaze rest on her for a second, then resumed his original thread.
‘As I say, I will get in touch with the agents, and—’
His expression changed to one of surprise. His client was getting to her feet.
‘Please don’t trouble yourself, Gerald.’ Diana’s voice was as clipped as his. She picked up her handbag and made her way to the office door.
Behind her she heard Gerald standing up. ‘Diana—what are you doing? There is a great deal more to discuss.’
She paused, turning with her hand on the door handle. Her gaze on him was unblinking. But behind her expressionless face emotions were scything through her. She would never consent to losing her beloved home. Never! It meant everything to her. To sell it would be a betrayal of her centuries-old ancestry and a betrayal of her father, of the sacrifice he’d made for her.
Greymont, she knew with another stabbing emotion, had provided the vital security and stability she’d needed so much as a child, coping with the trauma of her mother’s desertion of her father, of herself... Whatever it might take to keep Greymont, she would do it.
Whatever it took.
There was no trace of those vehement emotions as she spoke. ‘There is nothing more to discuss, Gerald. And as for what I am going to do—isn’t it obvious?’
She paused minutely, then said it.
‘I’m going to find an extremely rich man to marry.’
* * *
Nikos Tramontes stood on the balcony of his bedroom in his luxurious villa on the Cote d’Azur, flexing his broad shoulders, looking down at Nadya, who was swimming languorously in the pool below.
Once he had enjoyed watching her—for Nadya Serensky was one of the most outstandingly beautiful of the current batch of celebrity supermodels, and Nikos had enjoyed being the man with exclusive access to her. It had sent a clear signal to the world that he had arrived—had acquired the huge wealth that a woman like Nadya required in her favoured men.
But now, two years on, her charms were wearing thin, and no amount of her pointing out what a fantastic couple they made—she with her trademark flaming red hair, him with his six-foot frame to match hers, and the darkly saturnine looks that drew as many female eyes as her spectacular looks drew male eyes—could make them less stale. Worse, she was now hinting—blatantly and persistently—that they should marry.
Even if he had not been growing tired of her, there would be no point marrying Nadya—it would bring him nothing that he did not already have with her.
Now he wanted more than her flame-haired beauty, her celebrity status. He wanted to move on in his life, yet again. Achieve his next goal.
Nadya had been a trophy mistress, celebrating his arrival in the plutocracy of the world—but now what he wanted was a trophy wife. A wife who would complete what he had sought all his life.
His expression darkened, as it always did when his thoughts turned to memories. His acquisition of vast wealth and all the trappings that went with it—from this villa on exclusive Cap Pierre to having one of the world’s most beautiful and famous faces in his bed, and all the other myriad luxuries of his life—had been only the first step in his transformation from being the unwanted, misbegotten ‘embarrassing inconvenience’ of his despised parents.
Parents who had conceived him in the selfish carelessness of an adulterous affair, discarding him the moment he was born, farming him out to foster parents—denying he had anything to do with them.
Well, he would prove them wrong. Prove that he could achieve by his own efforts what they had denied him.
Making himself rich—vastly so—had proved him to be the son of his philandering Greek shipping magnate father, with as much spending power as the man who had disowned him. And his marriage, he had determined, would prove himself the son of his aristocratic, adulterous French mother, enabling him to move in the same elite social circles as she, even though he was nothing more than her unwanted bastard.
Abruptly he turned away, heading back inside. Such thoughts, such memories, were always toxic—always bitter.
Down below, Nadya emerged from the water, realised Nikos was no longer watching her and, with an angry pout, seized her wrap and glowered up at the deserted balcony.
* * *
Diana sat trying not to look bored