The Konstantos Marriage Demand (6 page)

‘I had to do something to earn a living,’ Sadie managed from between tight lips. ‘And that at least was a way of using my design course.’

The one her father had paid for as a reward for doing as he asked of her. She wouldn’t need it, Edwin had told her. After all, she was going to be a great catch—a very wealthy young woman now that he had seen off the opposition, which was the way he had described his takeover of almost everything the Konstantos family had owned.

But Sadie had known that she couldn’t just sit around at home. For one thing, the atmosphere there between her parents had been so poisonous that it had been an endurance test simply to breathe the same air. And, for another, the last thing she had wanted to do was to consider the prospect of another suitor who would only want to marry her because of the huge inheritance that was going to come to her when her father died.

She’d been through that once. And once was more than enough.

‘And it was something I could do from home.’

Nikos nodded slowly, turning the stem of his glass round and round in his tanned fingers.

‘And of course Thorn Trees is a prestigious address from which to run a business that would attract society brides and their wealthy families.’

‘But that isn’t why I want to keep the house!’

A deliberately lifted eyebrow questioned her overemphatic outburst.

‘Then why would you want to live in a huge London mansion with—what?—seven bedrooms and an indoor pool? Preferably for free, or at the most for a tiny rent. So, tell me exactly why you need a house like Thorn Trees? Do you plan to sleep in each of the bedrooms on a different day of the week?’

‘Oh, now you’re just being ridiculous! Of course not! And I wouldn’t be living there on my own.’

That had his attention. She could tell by the way his back stiffened, cold eyes burning into her as the swept over her face. Sadie felt she could also tell just what was going through his mind—clearly his ‘keeping up to date’ hadn’t resulted in him finding out the story about her mother. At least that was one thing her father had done properly before he died.

But the waiter was back again, this time bringing their meals, and Nikos was forced to sit and wait—obviously burning up with impatience—to be served before he could find out more. The man barely had time to put the plates on the table before Nikos was waving him away, ignoring his questions as to whether there was anything else they wanted.

‘Who?’ he demanded, and Sadie allowed herself a moment or two to prolong the tension, knowing it would provoke him even more.

‘Did you have to send him away like that?’ she complained. ‘I might have wanted some parmesan…’

A flick of Nikos’s hand dismissed her protest as irrelevant and unimportant.

‘Who?’
he repeated.

‘Well, not what you’re thinking—so you can get your mind out of the gutter. Do you really think that I would ask you to finance my love life by providing a home for me and my lover?’

He wouldn’t put it past her, Nikos acknowledged to himself. Sadie Carteret had had a liking for the good things of life, always provided someone else was paying. The way she had discarded him so quickly when his family had been ruined and he had lost his personal fortune had been proof of that. And of course she had deliberately distracted him so that her father could work behind the scenes, planning hostile takeovers, finding ways to bring the Konstantos empire down. She had even been prepared to sacrifice her own virginity to ensure that the destructive plan succeeded.

Beyond the windows, yet another distant rumble of thunder after what he assumed was the flash of lightning just seemed to underline the point of her corruption.

‘Nothing would surprise me.’

‘Well, for your information, I share the house with my mother and little brother.’

That was so unexpected that it seemed to hit like a blow between his eyes, making his head go back in shock, eyes narrowing assessingly. This was information he had not been given.

‘You don’t have a brother.’

The look Sadie turned on his was wide-eyed, innocent, sharply contrasting with the way that her chin came up and she faced him defiantly over the table.

‘Well, that just goes to show that your amazing spy network isn’t as good as you thought. For your information, I
do
have a brother—a little brother called George. He was born—He’s not quite five.’

Five. Why did it seem that everything that had turned his life upside down had happened at the point not quite five years before? So her mother had been pregnant around the time when they had been together and planning to get married, or just after. And little George had been born into the maelstrom of action and reaction once her father’s plan to bring down the house of Konstantos had been put into motion.

And of course in those months he had been focusing only on holding things together. On keeping the corporation from going under and taking his beleaguered father with it. At the time he had felt that if he thought about anything else, focussed on anything else, then the dark waves of total disaster would break over his head and he would definitely go down for the third time—and never come up again.

But the fact that she had a brother put a different complexion on the fact that Sadie wanted to keep the house. This George was so young that there was no way he could have ever been involved in anything the adult Carterets had planned and implemented against his family.

‘I see,’ he said, the words loaded with dark meaning. ‘That explains why I never got to hear of it. So tell me…’

‘No.’

Ridiculously buoyed up by the small triumph she’d had in putting him mentally onto the wrong foot for once, Sadie waved the hand that had picked up her fork to dig into her pasta to silence him.

‘My turn.’

He might hold all the aces, but that didn’t mean that she was going to let him get away with monopolising the conversation and treating the meal as if it was a trial for fraud with him as the counsel for the prosecution.

‘I get to ask some questions too.’

Was that a grudging respect in his eyes, the inclination of his head? Just the possibility gave her a little surge of confidence as she forked up a mouthful of her pasta.

‘What questions?’

‘Well, the obvious, for a starter. Like—you said you wanted to talk to me about a job. What sort of a job could I do for you? I mean—what need would you have of a wedding planner?’

‘That really is asking the obvious,’ Nikos commented. ‘To plan a wedding, of course.’

The impact of his response hit home just in the moment that Sadie popped the forkful of pasta into her mouth and chewed. Too late she realised that she’d been in such a state of apprehension when she’d arrived at the restaurant that she’d blindly ordered her meal with an
arrabiata
sauce, instead of the one next to it on the menu. She loathed chillies, and this was heavily laced with them.

‘A wedding?’ she croaked through the burn in her mouth, tears of reaction stinging her eyes.

‘Here…’

Leaning forward, Nikos poured a glass of water, held it out to her, watching as she gulped it down gratefully.

‘You hate spicy food,’ he said, when she finally started to breathe more easily. ‘Particularly chillies.’

Did he remember everything about her? It was a scary thought.

‘So why order something that you were going to hate?’

‘It’s almost five years. I might have changed—people do.’

‘Obviously not that much,’ Nikos drawled, his dry tone making her wonder if there was so much more than her reaction to the chilli sauce behind his comment. ‘Would you like something else?’

‘No—thank you.’

Any appetite she had had fled in the moment he had made that stunning announcement. But at least the impact of the chillies had disguised the fact that a lot—oh, be honest!—most of her reaction had been in response to his declaration. Her heart was still thudding from the shock of it, her thoughts spinning, whirling from one emotion to another and back again.

And none of the reactions was one that she really wanted to take out and examine in detail. Not here, not now. Not with Nikos lounging back in his chair, watching every move she made.

‘Whose wedding?’ she managed to croak. ‘Are you telling me that you are getting married?’

Once more Nikos inclined his dark head in agreement.

‘Who to?’

‘I prefer not to say. One never knows when the paparazzi might be hanging around, looking for a story. I prefer that they do not find out about this just yet. I want to protect my fiancée.’

A protection he hadn’t offered her, Sadie recalled with a stab of bitterness. Then he had been happy that the world should know about their engagement, their upcoming wedding. With the result that she had begun to feel she was living her life in a goldfish bowl, with a huge, powerful spotlight directed right at it all the time.

Which had made their final break-up into a media circus that had left her shattered and devastated.

‘And you don’t trust me?’ she asked, as much to distract herself from the particularly vivid, particularly painful memories that had risen to the surface of her mind, no matter how much she tried to push them down.

‘You will find out soon enough—when the time is right for you to know.’

It seemed that Nikos too had abandoned all pretence at hav
ing an appetite for his meal. His ignored sea bass was rapidly cooling on his plate as he focussed only on her.

‘And of course when you are in Greece…’

‘What?’

She couldn’t have heard that right.

‘No—wait a minute—back up a bit here. What was that? I thought you said…I’m not going to Greece!’

‘Of course you are.’

Nikos’s half smile was perfectly composed, totally in control.

‘How else will you organise the wedding?’

‘Your wedding?’

The croak in her voice was worse than the one inflicted by the bite of the chillies. She could hardly believe that she had heard anything right. Had he really said?

She couldn’t…She
wouldn’t!
How could he expect her to organise and arrange a wedding at which he—the man she had once been going to marry herself—would become someone else’s husband? He couldn’t ask it of her! It was too cruel. Too monstrous.

But the reality was that Nikos wasn’t
asking
. He was simply stating a fact. As far as he was concerned this was what was going to happen. She was going to take on the arranging of his wedding—to his fiancée. Because he said so.

‘No…’

It was all she could manage. Even after a long, shaken gulp of cooling water, her throat refused to allow her to say any more.

‘I said that I had a job for you.’

‘This
is the job? This is what you brought me here to talk about?’

And what sort of twisted vindictiveness had driven him to bring her here, to the restaurant where they had shared their first meal together, and where, barely two months later, he had proposed to her in one of the other candlelit booths?

‘Well, thank you for the offer, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to decline the commission. I can’t go to Greece.’

And she couldn’t possibly work with him on his plans to marry someone else.

‘I’m afraid that you do not have that option.’ Nikos’s tone took his response to a place light years away from any real regret. In fact, it made it only too plain that the very last thing he was was sorry. ‘This is not a job that you can turn down—or even stop to think about. Not if you really meant what you said when you told me you would do anything if I would just let you live in Thorn Trees.’

‘So…’ Sadie drew in a slow, deep breath and let it out again on a thoughtful sigh. ‘This is your price for what I asked? I work for you—plan your wedding—and you’ll allow me to stay in…’

‘I’ll allow your mother and brother to stay in the family home. For now,’ Nikos put in, making it plain that his concern was only for them.

‘What made you change your mind? Only this morning you were saying that you wouldn’t even consider it.’

‘Your mother played no part in what happened in the past. Neither did your brother. Because of that I am prepared to make some concessions for them.’

Which once again put the emphasis of what he was doing firmly on the personal, between Nikos and herself. And what he wanted from her was for her to organise this wedding for him and so rub her nose in the fact that he had not only moved on but totally replaced her in his life. The cruel sting of that thought made her wish again that she had let him pour her some wine. At least then she could have lifted her glass, sipped from it—even if she was only pretending to drink. She could have fiddled with the glass, hidden her face behind it, anything that would distract him from the hurt, the feeling of being at a loss, she knew must show in her face.

‘But I don’t know anything about Greek weddings—you would do better with someone else, someone who knows all about—’

‘I don’t want anyone else. I want you.’

‘Surely your bride-to-be will have some say in the matter?’

‘My bride-to-be will leave things entirely in my hands.’

‘Oh, she will, will she? What’s this—you’re reverting to type and determined to get yourself a sweet little innocent wife who daren’t say a word against you.’

‘Unlike the wife I would have had if I’d married you?’ Nikos drawled cynically, swilling the rich red wine around in his glass before taking a long drink from it. ‘No one could ever have described you as “sweet”—or “innocent.”’

‘But then you never really wanted to marry me in the first place,’ Sadie flashed back, still fighting with the pain of her memories.

She’d been an innocent when he’d met her—still a virgin at twenty. But naively, crazily, head over heels in love, and thinking she was going to be married to the love of her life, she had thrown that special gift away, giving it to the man who she believed loved her but who had in fact just been using her cynically and cruelly as a way to get at her father.

‘On the contrary…’ Nikos countered. ‘I wanted you very much indeed. So much so that I was out of my head with it.’