To her own ears her voice was cool and detached, despite the way her heart was stammering painfully against her ribs. Standing by the windows, he turned to face her at the receptionist’s pronouncement, the midafternoon sun casting a pale glow over him that focussed her attention on him as a spotlight might have.
The six years since she’d last seen him had been generous to Nikos. The face she’d loved was much the same, perhaps enhanced by wisdom and the hallmarks of success. Dark eyes, wide-set and rimmed by thick black lashes, a nose that had a bump halfway down from a childhood accident, and a wide mouth set above a chin with a thumbprint-sized cleft. His cheekbones were as pronounced as always, as though the features of his face had been carved from stone at the beginning of time. It was a face that conveyed strength and power—a face that had commanded her love.
He wore his dark hair a little shorter now, but it still brushed his collar at the back and had the luxuriant thickness that had always begged her to run her fingers through it. His dark eyes, so captivating, flashed with an emotion that seemed to Marnie almost mocking.
With pure indolent arrogance he flicked his gaze over her face, then lower, letting it travel slowly across her unimpressive cleavage down to her slim waist. She felt a spike of warmth travel through her abdomen as feelings long ago suppressed slammed against her.
Where his eyes travelled, her skin reacted. She was warm as though he’d touched her, as though he’d glided his fingertips over her body, promising pleasure and satisfaction.
‘Marnie.’
Her gut churned. She’d always loved the way he said her name, with the emphasis on the second syllable, like a note from a love song.
The door clicked shut behind her and Marnie had to fight against the instinct to jump like a kitten. Only with the greatest of effort was she able to maintain an impassive expression on her subtly made-up face.
Under normal circumstances Marnie would have done what was expected of her. Even in the most awkward of encounters she could generally muster the basics in small talk. But Nikos was different. This was different.
‘Well, Nikos?’ she said, a tight smile her only concession to social convention. ‘You summoned me here. I presume it’s not just to stare at me?’
He arched a thick dark brow and her stomach flopped. She’d forgotten just how lethal his looks were in person. And it wasn’t just that he was handsome. He was completely vibrant. When he frowned it was as if his whole body echoed the feeling. The same could be said when he smiled or laughed. He was a passionate man who hid nothing. She felt his impatience now, and it burned the little part of her heart that had survived the explosive demise of their relationship.
‘Would you like a drink?’ His accent was flavoured with cinnamon and pepper: sweet and spicy. Her pulse skittered.
‘A drink?’ Her lips twisted in an imitation of disapproval. ‘At this hour? No. Thank you,’ she added as an afterthought.
He shrugged, the bespoke suit straining across his muscled chest. She looked away, heat flashing to the extremities of her limbs. When he began walking towards her, she was powerless to move.
He stopped just a foot or so across the floor, his expression impossible to interpret. His fragrance was an assault on her senses, and the intense masculinity of him was setting her body on fire. Her knees felt as if they might buckle. But although her fingers were fidgeting it was the only betraying gesture of her unease. Her face remained impassive, and her eyes were wide with unspoken challenge.
‘You said you needed to speak to me. That it was important.’
‘Yes,’ he murmured, his gaze once again roaming her face, as though the days, months and years they’d spent separated were a story he could read in it if he looked long enough.
Marnie tried to catalogue the changes that had taken place in her physically in the six years since he’d walked out of Kenington Hall for the last time. Her hair, once long and fair, was shoulder-length and much darker now, with a sort of burnt sugar colour that fell with a fashionable wave to her shoulders. She hadn’t worn make-up back then, but now she didn’t leave the house without at least a little cosmetic help. That was the wariness she had learned to demonstrate when a scrum of paparazzi was potentially sitting in wait, desperate to capture that next unflattering shot.
‘Well?’ she asked, her voice a throaty husk.
‘What is your rush, agape mou?’
She started at the endearment, her fingertips itching as though of their own free will they might slap him. It felt as though a knife had been plunged into her chest.
She flattened the desire to correct him. She needed to stay on point to get through this encounter unscathed. ‘You’ve kept me waiting twenty minutes. I have somewhere else to be after this,’ she lied. ‘I can’t spare much more time. So, whatever you’ve called me here to say, I suggest you get it over with.’
Again, his brow arched imperiously. His disapproval pleased her in that moment. It eclipsed, all too briefly, other far more seductive thoughts.
‘Wherever you’ve got to be after this, I suggest you cancel it.’ He repeated her directive back to her with an insouciant shrug.
‘Just as dictatorial as ever,’ she said.
His laugh whipped around the room, hitting her hard. ‘You used to like that about me, I seem to recall.’
Her heart was racing. She lifted her arms, crossing them over her chest, hoping they might hide the way her body was betraying her. ‘I’m definitely not here to walk down memory lane,’ she said stiffly.
‘You have no idea why you’re here.’
She met his gaze, felt flame leaping from one to the other. ‘No. You’re right. I don’t.’
Wishing she’d obeyed her instincts and refused to see him, she began to walk towards the door. Being in the same room as him, feeling the force of his enmity, she knew only that nothing could be important enough to go through this wringer.
Some paths were best unfollowed—their relationship was definitely one of them.
‘I don’t know why I listened.’ She shook her head and her hair loosened a little, dropping a tendril from her temple across her cheek. ‘I shouldn’t have come.’
He laughed again, following her to the door and pressing the flat of his palm against it. ‘Stop.’
She started, and it dawned on him that Marnie was nervous. Her facade was exceptional. Cold, unfeeling, composed. But Marnie was uncertain, too. Her enormous almond-shaped eyes, warm like coffee, flew to his face before she seemed to regain her footing and inject her expression with an air of impatience.
But she wasn’t impatient. How could she be? The past was claiming her. He was him, and she was her, but they were kids again. Teenagers madly in love, sure of nothing and everything, unable to keep their hands off each other in the passionate way of illicit love affairs.
Sensing her prevarication, he spoke firmly. ‘Your father is on the brink of total ruin, and if you don’t listen to me he’ll be bankrupt within a month.’
She froze, all colour draining from her face. She shook her head slowly from side to side, mumbling something about not being able to believe it, but her mind was shredding through that silly denial. After all, she’d seen for herself the change in him recently. The stress. The anger. The drinking too much. The weight loss. Disturbed sleep. Why hadn’t she pushed him harder? Why hadn’t she demanded that he or her mother tell her honestly what was going on?
‘I have no interest in lying to you,’ he said simply. ‘Sit down.’
She nodded, her throat thick, as she crossed the room and took a chair at the meeting table. He followed, his eyes not leaving her face as he poured two glasses of water and slid one across the table, before hunkering his large frame into the chair opposite.
His