Nikos pushed open the door of the little chapel, the wood making a harsh scraping sound over the stone-flagged floor.
‘You owe me,’ he declared harshly. ‘They don’t.’And then, with an abrupt turn onto another conversational path that threw her completely off balance, he continued, ‘Now, come inside and see the chapel.’
She didn’t want to see the chapel, felt that it would destroy her totally to do so. It would take what was left of her shattered heart and grind it in the dust beneath Nikos’s soft handmade boots. If the rest of the island had bitter memories for her, then the inside of the chapel belonged purely to Nikos and the woman he now planned to marry. He had never brought her in here when they had visited Icaros in the past. In fact, the tiny building had stayed securely locked and shuttered, and she had never even set foot on the worn wooden bridge that led to it. Further evidence, her father had said, of the way Nikos had never planned to make her his wife.
But when it came down to it, what choice did she have? She was here to do a job, as Nikos had just reminded her so brutally. And on that job depended her mother’s peace of mind—possibly even her sanity, with the resulting repercussions for her small brother’s happiness. She couldn’t let them down. And so she drew in a deep, hopefully strengthening breath, squared her shoulders and made herself step over the threshold into the cool, shadowed interior of the little church.
After the brightness of the sunlight outside, it was all so dark and dim that she was almost blinded, barely able to see a metre or two ahead of her down the single narrow aisle between the rows of rough wooden pews. Nikos himself, standing before the simple altar, was once more just a silhouette, a solid more substantial shape in the hazy light that came through the narrow windows.
Perhaps it was because of the blackness, because she couldn’t see his face or read his expression clearly. Perhaps it was that she had no choice but to accept that in planning to marry someone else Nikos had demonstrated so clearly that he had moved on from the bitter past they had once shared. But suddenly Sadie was hearing again her own voice inside her head.
We could end it, she had said, referring to the terrible feud between their families. The feud that had taken away too much and given nothing. We could say it stops right here and now…
If only they could. If only she and Nikos could find a way to start again, so that each of them could go on and live their lives without the terrible black shadow hanging over them. But how could she begin? If she could just get Nikos to trust her, even in the tiniest degree, then that would be a start.
A sudden rush of new-found determination pushed her up the aisle towards the still, silent figure standing by the altar steps. Face unreadable, arms folded across the width of his chest, Nikos watched her come.
‘If you really want to employ me as your wedding planner then you have to let me do my job properly,’ Sadie managed once she had drawn level with him, the words spluttering from her in a rush to get them out. ‘You really don’t need to keep my phone and my laptop under lock and key—I’m not going to sell your story.’
The cold-eyed look he turned on her told her that there was no way he believed her declaration.
‘You did damn nearly everything else in the past,’ Nikos flung at her. ‘So you’ll have to forgive me if I’m in no rush to believe you can be trusted now. We do this my way or not at all. And if you can’t agree then you’ll be on the first plane out of here…’
And if she was on the first plane out of Athens, then what would happen to her mother and George? Nikos had said that he would not take revenge on a child, but if she did not fulfil her part of the contract then what was to stop him going back on the deal and throwing her mother and brother out of the only home where they felt safe? Her insides knotted in raw panic at the thought.
She had promised her mother that she would keep her safe in her home for as long as she possibly could, and she would keep that promise if it killed her, she told herself. The one thing she had going for her in this situation was the fact that Nikos was getting married and, for reasons known best to himself, he wanted her to plan the event for him.
She was just going to have to ignore the fact that even thinking about it brought with it a sensation like a cruel knife being scraped over raw, sensitive skin. That the concern that Nikos showed for preserving his fiancée’s anonymity, his involvement in this early stage of things, rubbed her face right in the difference between this wedding and the one he had been planning with her.
Had appeared to be planning with her, she corrected painfully.
She needed to put all those difficult feelings out of her mind. She had to refuse to let herself remember that she was trapped here, isolated with the man who had ruined her life and her family’s. A man who now seemed hell-bent on using the hold he had over her to his own advantage, and taking a cruel and sadistic pleasure in doing just that.
Somehow she was going to have to pretend to herself that Nikos was just a client. Sighing inwardly, Sadie faced the impossibility of that task. Nikos could never be ‘just’ anything. But that was her only way through this situation. The only way she could handle this. Because she did have to handle this.
The truth was that Nikos held all the cards and he could play them as he chose. The only single option left to her was to do the best job she could—and hope that Nikos had some sort of kind cell in his body that would push him to help her when she was done.
Otherwise she would be right back where she had started—or worse. And all of this would have been for nothing.
‘YOU WILL WANT to phone your mother.’
After a journey back to the villa that had been completed in almost total silence, Nikos’s first words on their arrival caught Sadie distinctly off balance, so that for a moment or two she could only stare at him in confusion, not quite sure she had heard him right.
‘Did you not tell me that you needed to check on your mother and brother?’
‘Oh, yes—but…’ But she hadn’t expected him to remember or, if he did, that he would be the one to prompt her into action rather than the other way about. After everything he’d said, she had never thought that he would be so generous—or so trusting.
‘You can use the phone in my office—it’s just through here.’
He led the way into a room at the back of the villa. One that had disturbing echoes of the office at the Konstantos building in which she had faced him—was it really only a couple of days before? Memories of that encounter threatened to drain the strength from her legs as she followed him, putting a fine tremor into the hand she held out for the phone he snatched up and passed to her.
‘If you need the code for England then this is it…’
Nikos scrawled a number on a piece of paper and pushed it towards her. Then he pulled out a chair at the head of the desk and dropped down into it, switching on the computer before him as he did so.
Not quite so generous or so trusting after all, Sadie acknowledged privately to herself. He might have handed her the phone, but he was still staying around in the office to make sure that she didn’t say anything he objected to. She was not to have any privacy with her phone call.
But she wasn’t going to look any gift horses in the mouth. Her mother’s mental balance and her own peace of mind were too important for that. So she pulled the sheet of paper towards her, punched in the numbers and pressed ‘Dial’. Perching on the edge of the desk, with her back to Nikos, she waited anxiously for her mother to answer. She would know how things were from the moment that happened.
‘H-Hello?’
Oh, no! Sadie closed her eyes briefly in distress, her shoulders tightening as tension held them