‘Sadie…’
At first he found that his voice wouldn’t work and he had to clear his throat and try again.
‘Sadie.’
This time she heard and lifted her head, slowly and with difficulty. Her eyes, still hazed by the storm that had assailed her, the explosive climax that had erupted like a volcano in her slender form, blinked and tried to focus, almost but not quite succeeding.
‘We need to talk—’ Nikos began, then broke off as the sound of the phone ringing broke through the silence, tearing apart the atmosphere that was rich with the heavy clouds of sensuality and jolting them back to the real world in a second.
Automatically Nikos reached for it, lifted the receiver.
‘Yes?’
Hearing his father’s voice, he knew that he had no alternative but to deal with whatever Petros had on his mind.
‘I have to take this,’ he said to Sadie. ‘And I may be some time.’
She looked as if she needed the time anyway. How could they talk when she was so clearly not yet capable of doing so? Besides, he would prefer to have some time to collect his thoughts himself. Decide just where he was going to go from here.
But first he had to deal with his father. And if Petros discovered who was with him—if Sadie spoke or gave herself away—then they would be back on the terrible old treadmill of the family feud before he could stop it. That had complicated his relationship with Sadie once before. He was not about to let it happen again.
‘Go and clean yourself up…’
His eyes swept over her dishevelled state, the red linen dress hanging open heavily crumpled and creased, her bra half on and half off, and her knickers discarded in two separate tiny pieces on the office floor. Stooping, he picked them up and dropped them into her hand while she was still clearly gathering her thoughts.
‘But…’ she began, but Nikos shook his head, hunching one shoulder to hold the phone between it and his ear as he turned her and propelled her firmly towards the door.
‘Take a shower—or maybe swim in the pool. I’ll come and find you when I’m ready. What?’
The sound of his father’s voice drew his attention back to the phone conversation.
‘No,’ he said, in response to the older man’s enquiry as to whether the person he was with should take priority over him. ‘No one important. Nothing that can’t wait.’
It was only when the door slammed closed behind Sadie that he realised that he had spoken in English. Even when talking to his father.
WELL, THAT WAS her well and truly dismissed.
Finding herself in the corridor outside the study door without quite realising how she had got there, Sadie did not quite know whether to explode in fury or to burst into shocked, bewildered tears. She was quite capable of both, and the resulting combination was so volatile that any one tiny incident would be enough to spark it off.
For a moment she actually considered spinning round, marching back into the room and confronting Nikos over what he had said. Snatching the phone receiver from his hand and tossing it well out of reach if she had to. She even half turned, ready to do just that. But the thought of the danger she might put herself in—and her mother and George—as a result stayed her movement and kept her feet moving right in the direction that was safest: away from the office and back up to the safety of her bedroom, moving as quickly as she could for fear that she might meet some member of staff which, in her present dishevelled and disreputable state, would be just the worst thing possible.
It couldn’t be more obvious just what she had been up to. Her crumpled dress was still gaping over her exposed breasts and her underwear barely existed. Looking down at the totally destroyed knickers she held in her hand, she couldn’t suppress a shudder of revulsion at the sight of them and the thought of just how they had got into that appalling mess.
And she had only herself to blame.
‘All right.’ She could hear her own voice in her thoughts, husky and inviting—seductively so. ‘Let’s deal with what there is between us.’
And of course Nikos had taken her at her word. Who could blame him? She’d handed herself to him on a plate, without a care or thought for the consequences.
Reaching her bedroom, she hurried inside and slammed the door shut, leaning back against it as the last of her mental strength deserted her, leaving her shaking and distraught.
She hadn’t even had the sense to insist that he use a condom! She had made every possible mistake in the book. The sort of thing that even her twenty-year-old self had managed to handle so much better in the past. So she had no right to complain if Nikos had treated her like the easy conquest he obviously believed her to be.
The easy conquest she had let herself be.
With a cry of disgust and horror, Sadie flung the ruined knickers into the wastepaper bin, not caring that one part of them fell far short, fluttering down on to the deep gold carpet like a wounded and dying bird. A moment later the dress and bra followed them, tossed aside in total revulsion. She couldn’t wait to get out of them as soon as possible. Just the thought of ever wearing them again made her stomach heave.
Take a shower, Nikos had said. He was damn right. She would take a shower. She needed to wash the scent of him from her body, the taste of him from her mouth. If only she could erase her memories as easily, she told herself as she stood under a hot shower, letting the water pound down on her head, sluice over her skin. She scrubbed every inch of her body, shampooed her hair twice, but she still couldn’t get rid of the feeling of having been used and then discarded without a second thought.
‘Damn him!’
Finally having to get out of the shower, before she reduced her skin to the state of a prune, Sadie rubbed at her hair with a towel, ruffling it impossibly.
‘Damn, damn, damn him!’
She was strongly tempted to put on fresh clothes, stamp back down to the study—but to do so would reveal to Nikos just how much his behaviour had upset her. That and the fact that as long as she didn’t push things to the ultimate extreme then her mother and George were still safe in Thorn Trees. If she made one mistake, took a wrong step, then she had little doubt that Nikos would carry out his threat to have them thrown out of their home and on to the streets.
Or would he do that anyway? The frantic movements of Sadie’s hands stopped and she stared at herself in the mirror, looking anxiously at her face where the flush of colour from the heat of the shower was now fading rapidly from her cheeks. Just what did Nikos plan to do next?
He had got her here under false pretences, claiming that he needed her to plan and organise his wedding. But there had been no wedding to organise at all. It had been nothing but a deceit from start to finish. So had this really been his plan? To get her back into his bed—not that she had actually been in his bed, she acknowledged grimly. She had fallen right into his hands like a ripe plum the first time he had kissed her in his London office and that must have given him the cue he had needed—if in fact he’d needed any such thing—to go ahead with the scheme that she now saw was his ultimate attack on her family and his personal revenge on her.
‘But there must be some arrangement we can come to! Surely there’s something I can do—anything…’ Her own words came back to haunt her, making hot colour flood every inch of her body. She could see just how that had sounded—and how Nikos would naturally have interpreted it.
‘And exactly what sort of services did you have in mind?’ he had come back at her. ‘What exactly are you offering…?’
She’d