‘Young woman with no money, a not very successful business as a wedding planner…’
Seeing her start of surprise, he gave a tight smile.
‘I make sure I keep up to date with what is happening to anyone I have had dealings with in the past.’
So how much did he know? The idea of being kept under surveillance like that when she hadn’t known he was watching made her skin crawl.
That smile grew darker, more dangerous, the blaze of the candles reflected in the depths of his penetrating gaze.
‘I always thought that it was something of a very black irony that someone who walked out on her own wedding just the day before it was due to take place should now make her living organising other women’s “big days.”’
Nikos’s sensual mouth twisted on the words.
‘But then the one thing I could never deny is that you always had that very special sense of style. When other people were paying, of course.’
‘I had to do something to earn a living,’ Sadie managed from between tight lips. ‘And that at least was a way of using my design course.’
The one her father had paid for as a reward for doing as he asked of her. She wouldn’t need it, Edwin had told her. After all, she was going to be a great catch—a very wealthy young woman now that he had seen off the opposition, which was the way he had described his takeover of almost everything the Konstantos family had owned.
But Sadie had known that she couldn’t just sit around at home. For one thing, the atmosphere there between her parents had been so poisonous that it had been an endurance test simply to breathe the same air. And, for another, the last thing she had wanted to do was to consider the prospect of another suitor who would only want to marry her because of the huge inheritance that was going to come to her when her father died.
She’d been through that once. And once was more than enough.
‘And it was something I could do from home.’
Nikos nodded slowly, turning the stem of his glass round and round in his tanned fingers.
‘And of course Thorn Trees is a prestigious address from which to run a business that would attract society brides and their wealthy families.’
‘But that isn’t why I want to keep the house!’
A deliberately lifted eyebrow questioned her overemphatic outburst.
‘Then why would you want to live in a huge London mansion with—what?—seven bedrooms and an indoor pool? Preferably for free, or at the most for a tiny rent. So, tell me exactly why you need a house like Thorn Trees? Do you plan to sleep in each of the bedrooms on a different day of the week?’
‘Oh, now you’re just being ridiculous! Of course not! And I wouldn’t be living there on my own.’
That had his attention. She could tell by the way his back stiffened, cold eyes burning into her as the swept over her face. Sadie felt she could also tell just what was going through his mind—clearly his ‘keeping up to date’ hadn’t resulted in him finding out the story about her mother. At least that was one thing her father had done properly before he died.
But the waiter was back again, this time bringing their meals, and Nikos was forced to sit and wait—obviously burning up with impatience—to be served before he could find out more. The man barely had time to put the plates on the table before Nikos was waving him away, ignoring his questions as to whether there was anything else they wanted.
‘Who?’ he demanded, and Sadie allowed herself a moment or two to prolong the tension, knowing it would provoke him even more.
‘Did you have to send him away like that?’ she complained. ‘I might have wanted some parmesan…’
A flick of Nikos’s hand dismissed her protest as irrelevant and unimportant.
‘Who?’ he repeated.
‘Well, not what you’re thinking—so you can get your mind out of the gutter. Do you really think that I would ask you to finance my love life by providing a home for me and my lover?’
He wouldn’t put it past her, Nikos acknowledged to himself. Sadie Carteret had had a liking for the good things of life, always provided someone else was paying. The way she had discarded him so quickly when his family had been ruined and he had lost his personal fortune had been proof of that. And of course she had deliberately distracted him so that her father could work behind the scenes, planning hostile takeovers, finding ways to bring the Konstantos empire down. She had even been prepared to sacrifice her own virginity to ensure that the destructive plan succeeded.
Beyond the windows, yet another distant rumble of thunder after what he assumed was the flash of lightning just seemed to underline the point of her corruption.
‘Nothing would surprise me.’
‘Well, for your information, I share the house with my mother and little brother.’
That was so unexpected that it seemed to hit like a blow between his eyes, making his head go back in shock, eyes narrowing assessingly. This was information he had not been given.
‘You don’t have a brother.’
The look Sadie turned on his was wide-eyed, innocent, sharply contrasting with the way that her chin came up and she faced him defiantly over the table.
‘Well, that just goes to show that your amazing spy network isn’t as good as you thought. For your information, I do have a brother—a little brother called George. He was born—He’s not quite five.’
Five. Why did it seem that everything that had turned his life upside down had happened at the point not quite five years before? So her mother had been pregnant around the time when they had been together and planning to get married, or just after. And little George had been born into the maelstrom of action and reaction once her father’s plan to bring down the house of Konstantos had been put into motion.
And of course in those months he had been focusing only on holding things together. On keeping the corporation from going under and taking his beleaguered father with it. At the time he had felt that if he thought about anything else, focussed on anything else, then the dark waves of total disaster would break over his head and he would definitely go down for the third time—and never come up again.
But the fact that she had a brother put a different complexion on the fact that Sadie wanted to keep the house. This George was so young that there was no way he could have ever been involved in anything the adult Carterets had planned and implemented against his family.
‘I see,’ he said, the words loaded with dark meaning. ‘That explains why I never got to hear of it. So tell me…’
‘No.’
Ridiculously buoyed up by the small triumph she’d had in putting him mentally onto the wrong foot for once, Sadie waved the hand that had picked up her fork to dig into her pasta to silence him.
‘My turn.’
He might hold all the aces, but that didn’t mean that she was going to let him get away with monopolising the conversation and treating the meal as if it was a trial for fraud with him as the counsel for the prosecution.
‘I get to ask some questions too.’
Was that a grudging respect in his eyes, the inclination of his head? Just the possibility gave her a little surge of confidence as she forked up a mouthful of her pasta.
‘What questions?’
‘Well, the obvious, for a starter. Like—you said you wanted to talk to me about a job. What sort of a job could I do for you? I mean—what need would you have of a wedding planner?’
‘That really is asking the obvious,’ Nikos commented. ‘To plan a wedding, of course.’