‘Is that important?’
But Nikos didn’t answer her. Instead he was on his feet, pulling open a drawer in the desk.
‘Do you have a photo of your brother?’
‘Of George? Of course…’ Rooting in her bag, she pulled out her wallet, opened it to where the passport-size picture was kept. ‘But why?’
She took out the picture in the same moment that Nikos placed a large album on the desk, flicking through it until he found the photograph he wanted, one long bronzed finger pointing it out to her.
‘Oh, my…’
Sadie let the picture she was holding drop down beside the one Nikos was indicating.
‘It’s George.’
‘It’s my Uncle Georgiou,’ Nikos said flatly. ‘When you were in here yesterday you commented on it specially, and since then it has been nagging at me. It was just before Georgiou died that your father really started to stick the knife into my father’s company—it was one of the reasons why he was able to succeed so well so fast. Because when Dad was in mourning he was badly off balance—not focussing on business.’
‘And my dad was hell-bent on revenge for Georgiou’s affair with his wife!’
So much made sense now, in a way that it never had before.
‘It wasn’t just the feud—or rather it was that plus this new reason for anger, for revenge.’
And they had got caught up in it.
‘That damn feud tainted every person it touched.’
Nikos’s voice was filled with black anger and a touch of something else—something that Sadie would almost have labelled despair as he shook his dark head in disbelief over what had happened.
‘But it really does end here.’
Suddenly he looked up, amber gaze burning straight into hers.
‘It stops,’ he said fiercely. ‘And from now on things will be different. For a start, you will have no need to worry about Thorn Trees. The house will be my gift to your mother—and my cousin. And there will be more. Little George should have inherited all that his father had, and if he really is my uncle’s son—and looking at this photo, I am sure that he is—then I will make sure he has what is his by right.’
‘Thank you.’
Sadie made herself say it, though her tongue tripped up over the words. She found that her mind was seesawing from one emotion to another. She was full of relief for her mother, delight for George—but there was a terrible sense of uncertainty about what this would mean for herself. She had had to acknowledge that she had lost her chance of ever having Nikos love her. She had faced up to the prospect of a future without him and she had been prepared to leave. To head out into that future and try to cope with it as best she could. Now she saw that everything was going to be so much different. That with Nikos being George’s cousin—George’s family—inevitably he would want to be in the little boy’s life. It was only right, only fair.
But it meant that she would frequently be forced to see this man she loved and who had never loved her. And she didn’t know how she could handle that.
‘It—it will mean a lot to my mother. She admitted to me recently that she adored George’s father. That he was the love of her life. She was devastated when she learned he’d died.’
Suddenly something Nikos had said to start off this line of conversation came back to her, making her frown in confusion.
‘When you asked about my mother—you said you knew the signs.’
The question she needed wouldn’t form properly, but the urgency in her voice obviously hit home to Nikos and he nodded his understanding without her having to say any more.
‘My father. I know what it’s like to have to watch someone break down—to always feel that you need to check if they are all right. To worry that perhaps the depression will come back.’
‘And this all stems from the same vile mess.’
She didn’t have to ask, just as Nikos hadn’t needed to ask her. His clouded eyes gave her the answer without words.
‘When he lost everything—when your father took over everything and bankrupted him—it was soon after he’d lost his brother. Like your mother, he broke down. I came home one evening and found him…’
The way his face had lost colour warned that there had been something very wrong. Suddenly Nikos pushed himself from his seat on the desk and paced restively about the room, his actions like those of a wild hunting cat, caged up for far too long.
‘I was early. I wasn’t supposed to be there. He thought he had time.’
Suddenly Sadie thought she knew exactly what day Nikos had been talking about, and all the tiny hairs on the back of her neck lifted in fearful apprehension as Nikos paused in his restless pacing, standing by the window and staring out at the sea. But she was sure that those beautiful golden eyes saw nothing of the clear blue waves with their foamy white tops, the golden sands of the beach.
Nikos pressed his forehead against the window glass, closing his eyes in despair at his memories, and, seeing that, Sadie could not stay still at the other side of the room. In a rush she crossed to his side, reached out a hand and touched his arm, just above the elbow. It was all she dared do, even though her heart ached with misery at the way things had turned out.
Like their parents, both of them had been wounded, scarred by the dreadful feud between their families. But as a result of the fallout of that feud, a fallout that had tangled up their own lives, creating the mess they now lived with, neither of them could comfort the other properly.
‘That was the day I rang you…’
The day when she had had second thoughts about her father’s warnings that Nikos was simply out to use her, to make her part of his revenge on the Carteret family because of the feud. She hadn’t known then of his personal motives for making everything worse. She had broken off her engagement, cancelled her wedding at a day’s notice, but she had wanted to at least try to talk to Nikos himself…
‘You told me to go to hell.’
‘I know.’
Nikos’s sigh was weary, dragged up from somewhere deep inside him, and as he turned to her, his movements were slow and heavy, like those of a much older man.
‘But what the hell else could I have done? I was there in a room with my father who thought he had lost everything. He’d got a gun from somewhere and he meant to use it on himself.’
‘Oh, Nikos, no!’
It was worse than she had thought. Worse for Nikos and worse for herself.
Because of that phone call, and the way he had turned on her, she had moved herself firmly onto her father’s side.
‘I didn’t know—and I believed that my dad was right. I begged him to help me, asked him to tell me how to handle things. He said that if I did as he told me, said exactly what he wanted me to say, then all would be well. He would even look after my mother, let her stay in the house. He would raise her baby as his own.’
And her father had given her the final, cruel words that she had tossed down the stairs to where Nikos was standing in the hall on that final day.
‘I’m so sorry—I don’t know how I could have said those dreadful things.’
‘I do,’ Nikos astounded her by replying. ‘I know because I ended up getting caught in the same terrible mess. I was supposed to be helping my father, but I ended up getting so obsessed with you that I couldn’t think straight. I took my eye off the ball—focussed on you, not the business. And then when I found that while you and I were in that cottage,