‘I’ll do that,’ she flung at him, refusing to let him see the terrible sense of defeat that was tearing at her soul.
‘I’d appreciate it.’
Another couple of strides and she was beyond him, out of the room at last and marching straight down the long, soulless corridor, staring straight ahead.
She’d taken it better than he’d thought, Nikos admitted as he watched her go. Just for a moment there he had suspected that she was going to show him that she meant her declaration that she would do anything and turn back to him, coming close with smiles and deliberate kisses in an attempt to seduce him into giving her what she wanted.
And if she had done just that? The way his heart kicked and his body tightened gave him his answer.
Gamoto! Was he really going to let her walk out of his life once again, just as she had done five years before? With the taste of her still on his lips, with his body still in the grip of the burning arousal that just that one kiss had sent flaring through him, he knew that the answer was no. For almost five years he had tried to put this woman out of his mind and now, after less than an hour in her company, he knew why he had never fully managed to do it.
He still wanted her.
He wanted her like hell, in the way that he had never wanted any other woman in his life. And even the knowledge of the vile way she had behaved, the way she’d used an e-mail message to tell him she was backing out of their marriage—less than twenty-four hours before the ceremony—the cold-voiced rejection that she’d tossed down the stairs, couldn’t erase the yearning hunger that plagued his senses. Watching the sway of her hips, the swing of the glossy dark hair as she walked away from him, he found he was actually considering calling her back, offering to renegotiate.
‘You’ve had five years of taking your revenge. Haven’t you done enough, had enough?’
The echo of her angry voice, just moments before, sounded inside his head. And his own answer came back at him fast, forcing him to face the truth.
‘I thought it was, but now I find it just won’t do. It isn’t enough. It doesn’t give me the satisfaction that I wanted. I need to find some other way of making sure of that.’
When Edwin Carteret had died, he’d thought he was done with the whole, hateful family. He’d clawed back every last penny of the fortune that had been taken from them and doubled it. He’d taken every asset the Carterets had owned—Thorn Trees being the last on the list—and seen his hated enemy reduced to total bankruptcy and ruin. To the black despair that his father had known and had barely even recovered from now. And he had thought that it was enough.
But one meeting with his nemesis in the seductive form of Sadie Carteret had brought that belief crashing down around him. Now at last he could put his finger on the feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction that had plagued him in recent months. Before then he had been working too hard, barely even raising his eyes from his desk, from the files of stock market dealings, the takeover details and investments that had brought him to where he was now. It could never be enough because he hadn’t dealt with the one remaining insult the Carterets had dealt him. Only this time it wasn’t ‘the Carterets’ he had in his sights, but one member of that family in particular.
This time it was personal. Personal between him and seductive, manipulating Sadie Carteret.
And by coming here today Sadie had handed him just the weapon he needed. She was desperate to get her hands on her ancestral family home. Almost as desperate as he was to get his hands on her silken skin, her feminine curves. To have her under him in his bed once more. And the way she’d responded to his kiss had left him in no doubt that she still felt the passion that had brought them together in that one explosive weekend that had just been enough to awaken his appetite, never enough to sate it.
She would do anything she could to get Thorn Trees, she had said. Well, now he’d see how far she was prepared to go to do just that. If things went the way he planned, then she would get the damn house, and he could find the satisfaction he needed and get Sadie Carteret out of his system once and for all. In the most enjoyable way.
For a moment he thought about calling her back, and then paused, shaking his head as he rethought. If he sent a message down in the executive lift then she would get it before she left the building.
Kicking the door shut, he went back to his desk and reached for pen and paper.
The long, long corridor ahead of her blurred and danced as Sadie fought with the tears that burned at her eyes, but this time she was not looking back, she told herself. Not a single glance. Even when it seemed to be an extraordinarily long time before she finally heard the door to Nikos’s office bang shut behind her.
Somehow she made it to the lift, and only once inside did she let herself collapse back against the wall, her whole body sagging limply and her head dropping forward as her eyes closed. It was some moments before she could even think of pressing the button for the ground floor.
She’d tried her best, given it her best shot. And she’d failed. Nothing, it seemed, could prevail against the black, brutal hatred that Nikos had let fester for all these years. Nothing could change him, restore him to the man he had once been. The man who had stolen her heart. The man she had been going to marry.
No.
Shaking herself roughly, she snapped her head up sharply, forcing herself to face facts once and for all.
She had to stop deceiving herself. That Nikos was a fantasy, a deception—a lie. The Nikos she had loved had never truly existed; he had simply been playing with her, manipulating her until he got exactly what he wanted. If her father hadn’t moved in to protect her then the end result could have been far worse than it had. And it had been terrible enough.
The lift came to a halt, the doors sliding open, and Sadie pushed herself into motion, now desperate to get away, to be free of the tainted atmosphere of hatred.
It was as she crossed the wide, marble-floored foyer that she heard the beeping sound from her mobile phone. A text message. She knew who it would be from even before she had taken it from her bag, though the sight of ‘New message from Mum’ on the screen almost made her switch it off and not look.
But that would be the coward’s way out. She had to face her family and let them know that she had failed some time. Taking a deep breath, she pressed the ‘view’ key.
How did you get on? her mother asked, as Sadie had known she would. Have you got good news? Can we stay?
Standing in the middle of the foyer, Sadie could only stare at the tiny screen until the backlighting blinked off and the whole thing went black. How was she going to do this? What could she say to soften the blow?
‘Miss Carteret?’
It took a moment or two to register that the voice was speaking to her. That the receptionist she had talked to earlier had come up behind her and was now trying to get her attention.
‘Excuse me, Miss Carteret, I have a message.’
‘A message?’
Sadie stared blankly at the folded sheet of paper the other woman held out to her.
‘From who?’
But even as she asked the question she knew there could only be one person who could have sent it. Only one man who could have dashed off the note and had it brought down to her in the executive lift, so it had caught up with her before she left the building.
Nikos. Just the thought of his name made her hand shake as she reached for the note.
‘Thank you.’
She barely noticed the receptionist move away, her attention closely focussed on the piece of paper she held. After the way she had left Nikos upstairs, the brutal harshness of that final ‘nothing’, this was the last thing she had