Note to self, she castigated herself, the next time you decide to make love, don’t do it with a complete stranger! No, Chloe, let’s be grown up and honest here—it wasn’t making love, it was having sex.
It hadn’t been until she’d accepted that particular fact and realised that what they had shared that night had had absolutely nothing to do with a spiritual connection but everything to do with blind lust that she had been able to move on.
Move on—really? So why was she shaking?
She put the photo down carefully and smoothed her hands down over the fabric of her jumpsuit. She would not let that man do this to her again; she was not that silly naive girl any longer.
It had been a painful learning experience, but once her pride had stopped stinging and she had stopped feeling basically stupid she’d understood that while empty sex with anonymous strangers could obviously be physically satisfying, it probably wasn’t for her. She wasn’t exactly holding out for the love of her life, but she did think maybe a bit of mutual respect might be nice.
‘So that’s your brother Nik,’ she said flatly. Sometimes it seemed as if fate had a very warped sense of humour.
Her eyes skimmed the mantel. The same man, she recognised now, was in several of the photos. It wasn’t just the time difference that made him look younger, it was the absence of the cynicism and dangerous darkness she had sensed in him that night they’d had sex. What had happened to the man in these photos to turn him into the one she’d met only a few years later?
She dug her teeth into her plump lower lip as she squared her shoulders. Nik Latsis, her Nik—it was so weird to finally be able to put a full name to the man who had introduced her to sex and the fact it really was the only thing that some men were interested in. Well, his name was actually pretty irrelevant and she couldn’t care less what had happened to turn him into such a cold bastard.
Not that she wasn’t totally prepared to take her fair share of the blame. After all, ‘naive closet romantic meets utter bastard’—it was never going to end well, was it? But she was not that person any more.
‘I forgot, you haven’t met Nik...have you?’ Tatiana asked.
The truth or a lie?
Chloe settled for somewhere in the middle. ‘He does look a little familiar...’
It’s the clothes that threw me.
She brought her lashes down in a concealing sooty curtain and fanned her hot cheeks with a hand, causing the bangles she wore around her wrist to jingle. ‘I think summer might finally have arrived,’ she commented, ignoring the house’s perfect air-conditioning system.
‘You might have seen him on the television, perhaps?’
‘Television?’ A puzzled frown drew Chloe’s brows together above her small straight nose. ‘I don’t think so...’ Then it clicked; Tatiana wasn’t talking about the present day but her brother’s previous life. ‘Oh, when you said he was a journalist I thought you meant he was in print...’
His sister nodded. ‘He started out in print journalism but Nik was a war correspondent, and he was on the telly quite a lot actually. He won awards.’ Tatiana’s pride in her brother’s achievements was as obvious as her distress as she enlarged. ‘He spent the last two years of his journalistic career embedded with the military, in the worst war zones you can imagine. Nik has always been the sort of person who doesn’t do half measures.’
He had certainly been no half-measure lover or, for that matter, halfway callous!
‘On his last assignment his cameraman, his best friend, was shot.’
Chloe blanched in shock. ‘Did he...?’
Tatiana nodded. ‘He died in Nik’s arms, but the worst part—at least for the families—was that for three days we knew that there had been a fatality. There were about ten journalists, all from different media outlets pinned down, but we didn’t know their identities or who had died.’
Chloe gave an empathetic murmur of sympathy and touched her friend’s hand as the older woman closed her eyes and shuddered. ‘We all loved Charlie, he had just got engaged...but at the same time we were all so incredibly relieved that it wasn’t Nik. It made everyone feel so guilty.’
‘Survivor’s guilt,’ Chloe said, thinking of her sister who, after the accident from which she had escaped unscathed while Chloe had not, had been helped by a therapist. Well, Nik Latsis could afford the best help money could buy.
‘You’ve probably seen him, although professionally he used Mum’s maiden name, because he didn’t want to be accused of using the family name. Does Kyriakis ring a bell...? Nik Kyriakis?’
Chloe shook her head. ‘I’ve never watched much TV. There was a rule when we were growing up, half an hour’s television a day, and then when I could decide for myself I suppose it had become a habit I never really broke. Even now I listen to the radio rather than switch on the box. It must have been hard for your brother going back to work after what had happened...?’
She had gone back to the spot where the accident had happened—had it been therapeutic? Only in the sense that she had proved to herself that she could do it?
That had been how she had privately charted her recovery: the things she was able to do, the things she could move past—looking at her scars, showing them to her family, getting into a car, driving a car...going back to the winding mountain road where the accident had happened.
‘He didn’t go back. A day after he returned, our dad had his stroke and couldn’t run the company any more; the plan had always been for Nik to step up when the time came.’ She stopped, an expression of consternation crossing her face. ‘Nik doesn’t ever talk about what happened to Charlie, so don’t mention it tonight, will you?’ she finished anxiously.
If he wanted to bottle things up in a stupid manly way, that was fine by her; she definitely wouldn’t be getting him to unburden himself to her. In fact, the idea of seeing him, let alone passing the time of day with him, made the panic gathered like a tight icy ball in her stomach expand uncomfortably.
Ironically there had been a time when she would have paid good money to confront her runaway lover, but that time was long gone; she had no intention of having any sort of conversation with Nik Latsis.
He was history, a mistake, but not one she was going to beat herself up over any more, and one she really didn’t want to come face to face with, but, if she absolutely had to, she was going to do it with pride and dignity.
Well, that was the plan anyway.
‘I won’t,’ she promised as the voice in her head reminded her once again that her plans often had a habit of going wrong...
‘YOU’RE LATE.’ TATIANA kissed her brother’s lean cheek, grimacing a little as the sprinkling of designer stubble grazed her smooth cheek before one eyebrow rose. She struggled to hide her surprise as she shifted her gaze from her impeccably turned-out brother to the woman who stood with one hand possessively on his dark-suited arm.
‘You know Lucy Cavendish?’ Placing a hand across her shoulders, he drew the model, her famous dazzling smile firmly in place, close into his side. The redhead tilted her head. Unusually for a woman, in her heels she topped his shoulder.
‘I did Tatiana’s last catwalk show in Paris. What a lovely home you have.’ Lucy’s expertly made-up green eyes moved admiringly around the entrance hall with its chandeliers and dramatic staircase.
Tatiana inclined her dark head and delivered an air kiss. ‘Thank you. You’re looking well, Lucy...’ Tatiana looked up at her brother. ‘You growing a beard, Nik?’
‘With