The Married Mistress (3 page)

She was speaking only to fill the silence, she knew. And to distract her own thoughts. There were too many things she didn’t want to think about—didn’t
dare
to think about—and for now it was so much easier to concentrate on the immediate present and what was happening in it.

After all, there was more than enough to face up to there. Sarah drew in her breath sharply and let it out again on a silent sigh. Jason might have gone—and Andrea. And quite frankly she was more than glad to see the back of both of them. But Damon was still here. And getting rid of him was a different prospect altogether.

Her shoulders, which had relaxed in the moments she had watched Jason and Andrea walk away, now tensed again. Her throat tightened so that she had to swallow hard to ease the dryness there, and her chin came up as defiance flared in the green depths of her eyes.

‘What are you doing here, Damon?’

‘I came to see you, of course, my darling…’

‘That’s not what I mean, and you know it!’ Sarah put in hastily and sharply, terrified of hearing that emotive word ‘wife’ on his lips.

Once she had been proud and happy—
so
happy—to be his wife, even if for his own reasons Damon had insisted that, for a while at least, they told no one the truth. But now their brief, painful façade of a marriage was something she desperately wanted to forget. To obliterate from her mind, if she couldn’t erase it from her past.

‘I want to know why you’re here—in London.’

‘I have business in town. Important meetings.’

It was not the truth, at least not the full truth, Damon admitted to himself. But the truth wasn’t something he was prepared to admit to. Not yet. Perhaps not ever at all.

He had had a meeting planned—one with Sarah to discuss their marriage, or what was left of it. The thoughts that had been in his mind as he’d arrived at the house such a short time before now came back to haunt him, mocking his gullible beliefs and the naïve hope that had been uppermost in his mind then.

He had given Sarah enough time to calm down, he had told himself. After six months of living on her own, stubbornly refusing to see him, returning every one of his letters unopened, surely she was now prepared to listen?

She
would
listen, he had told himself. No matter what he had to do to make her. He would talk—and she would listen. Somehow he would make her come back to Greece with him. To Mykonos. Where he would show her what he had done. And then…

He hadn’t got any further than that.

‘I see—business. Of course. What else?’

Sarah’s voice was cold and tight. If he didn’t know better, he’d have said she sounded disappointed. Which might have pleased him when he had first reached the house—when he’d still had hopes and illusions of a future. Before the appearance of Jason and his obvious familiarity with Sarah’s bedroom had shattered those illusions.

‘You know me,
ghineka mou
,’ he shot back. ‘Always busy, making deals, signing contracts.’

‘Acquiring land?’ Sarah returned with even more bite in her tone. Whatever disappointment she had been feeling a moment before, if disappointment was the right word, it was now totally submerged under the angry bitterness that
blazed from her eyes. ‘Built any nice extensions to your hotels lately, Damon?’

‘Not since you left, my love,’ he returned, his tone dripping saccharine-sweetness. ‘And, as I recall, you never signed the papers agreeing to the one that I wanted.’

‘No, I didn’t, did I? That must have made things rather awkward for you.’

Damon’s smile in reply to the barbed comment was grim, tight, totally without any warmth.

‘No more awkward than they were already,
agape mou
. I told you then that your ownership of that land was not why I married you.’

‘I know what you told me, husband, dear, but I also know what I believe.’

Let him think that what had driven them apart was the piece of land that the Nicolaides Corporation coveted most on all the island of Mykonos. That was the reason she had given him for leaving in the letter she had left behind, the one she had clung to when he had come after her in a towering rage, demanding that she return at once. That and the fact that she had grown tired of their marriage, bored with life on the small Cyclades island. And it was one she would far rather have him believe than the actual, the hatefully painful truth.

‘Admit it, it was remarkably inconvenient for you that I discovered that the land my grandfather had left me was just the part of the island that you wanted. Especially when the old man had declared to your father’s face that he would rather die than sign the land over to anyone from your family.’

Her grandfather had been half Greek on his mother’s side. Through that line he had inherited the land on Mykonos. The land in question lay between two of the Nicolaides Corporation’s smaller hotels, and it had been a long-held ambition of both Damon and his father to link
the hotels into one spectacular resort by building across the empty space. But Alexander Meyerson’s mother’s family had had a long-running feud with the Nicolaides clan, one that he had held fast to in spite of the increasingly huge amounts offered in exchange for the tiny portion of the island he owned, much to Aristotle Nicolaides’ increasing frustration.

So when Damon had learned that Sarah, as her grandfather’s only heir, would now own the land on Mykonos, he had come looking for her.

And she, poor blindly besotted fool that she was, had made matters so much easier for him by falling head over heels madly in love.

‘How you must have cursed those lawyers who wrote and let me know about my luck before you’d had time to get me to sign on any dotted lines.’

‘It was certainly, as you said—inconvenient,’ Damon growled, his stunning features setting into a dark frown. ‘But it was not necessarily fatal. Or it need not have been if you had only stayed to talk things over with me, or come back…’

‘Come back!’ Sarah couldn’t hold back the exclamation of shock and disgust that was pushed from her lips by his outrageous declaration. ‘Come back to a marriage that had never been a real one right from the start? That was built on nothing but lies and deceit? A marriage that you had been determined not to let anyone know about because you were ashamed of it?’

‘Not ashamed!’ Damon flung at her. ‘It just would have been…difficult to make our marriage public at that point.’

‘I’ll bet it would! Well, perhaps in the end I ought to thank you for that. After all, you spared me a lot of humiliation and the adverse publicity that I might have had to put up with if people had found out that we were married. Now all I have to do is wait for the legalities to be
sorted out and we can be divorced as quietly as we were married. Excuse me.’

She tried to sweep past him, only to have to come to an awkward halt as he blocked her way, coming between her and her path across the hall.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Upstairs.’

‘Why?’

‘Is it any business of yours?’

‘Humour me.’

Seeing the stubborn, unmoving set of his face, the taut line of his hard jaw, she sighed her exasperation, knowing only too well that he had no intention of letting her pass until she told him something.

‘I want to go and strip the sheets off the bed that—that Jason and his fancy piece used!’

Distaste curled her lip, tasted bitter on her tongue.

‘I have to put them in the wash immediately—though if I’m honest I’d prefer to burn the damn things!’

To her relief Damon sidestepped neatly, moving out of her way, but as she mounted the first of the stairs she realised that he was right there behind her, following close on her heels.

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No!’

But he totally ignored her protest and just kept on coming.

‘Damon…’

She whirled on the stairs until she was facing him. Looking down into his handsome face, she saw the determination stamped hard on it, the unyielding set to his jaw.

‘I don’t need you!’

Just the thought of having this man, the man who had been her husband for such a brief time, follow her into her bedroom spoke of an intimacy that she was totally unwill
ing to allow herself to recall. I don’t want you, she should have said. But the words had other, much more disturbing implications that meant her voice would not actually speak them with the conviction she needed.

‘It’ll be easier with two,’ Damon returned, and just kept on coming so that she was obliged to skip backwards hastily up the stairs if she was not to have him collide with her.

‘I’ve done it by myself many times…’

‘I’m sure you have.’

Another step upwards necessitated another couple of hasty jumps back and away to avoid a crash.

‘But I’m here now, so there’s no reason for you to have to do it alone today.’

‘Damon, it’s
my
room!’

Exasperation, a touch of breathlessness from the undignified scramble up the staircase, and a shockingly sensitive awareness of the man below her put a betraying shake into her voice. The physical strength of his chest and shoulders was emphasised from this angle, the gleam of the sunlight on the dark waves of his hair made it shine like glossy silk, and the flash of white teeth as he grinned up at her was startling against the olive skin of his face.

‘Sarah, it’s
my
house!’ he retorted, with an infuriatingly deliberate echo of her own tone, her own emphasis.

And what could she say in response to that? There was no answer she could give him. At least not one that he would accept, pay any heed to. It was his house, and that was the fact. She hadn’t wanted to take anything from him, but she had desperately needed a roof over her head. And for all she knew Damon had already built on her disputed land. He was perfectly capable of ignoring any morality in the case and just going right ahead.

With inelegant haste she hurried up the remaining stairs
and arrived safely on the landing, facing him with determined defiance.

‘You said I could live here!’ she protested, and shivered as she saw a dark tide of change cross his face, shadowing his eyes.

‘I said
you
could live here,’ he acceded. ‘Not you and sundry assorted hangers-on.’

Now was the time to tell him the truth, Sarah knew. The time to point out that, no matter how it had seemed, Jason had had neither her agreement nor her permission to be in the house. At least not in her bedroom, and certainly not in her bed.

So why did the words stick in her throat? Why could she not just fling them in his face and be done with it?

Because he had no right to interfere in her life. He had given up any rights to that when he had betrayed her trust and treated her as a thing, a chattel, something to be used for his own ends, not as a true wife of his heart.

Wife of his heart!

Hah! That was a joke. A very sick, very black sort of joke. One that slashed at her heart, her soul, like a rusty knife, reopening old wounds that had barely even begun to heal.

She had never really been Damon’s wife, not in the truest sense of the word—not in
any
sense of the word, except perhaps the sexual one. She had been his wife in bed and nowhere else. He had wanted her physically. There was no way he could have hidden, or faked, the passionate desire he had felt for her. And that must have made the rest of his scheme so much easier for him to carry out.

The pain that came along with the rush of memory drove all thought of common sense from her mind and instead had her spitting at him in blind rage.

‘And I suppose that you’ve been living a pure and celibate life for the last six months!’

He actually looked taken aback by her attack. It even silenced him, and she watched him withdraw into himself, shutters coming down behind the gleaming jet eyes, hiding his thoughts from her.

‘Nothing to say, Damon? I thought not. Ever heard of the saying about pots calling kettles black?’

‘I know the saying, yes. But I do not see its relevance to the current situation.’

He had the nerve to look innocent—and it was unnerving just how innocent he could appear, with his deep, dark eyes wide open in apparent ingenuousness.

For a brief second Sarah closed her own lids against the pain of memory. Against the hated recollection of the moment that Aristotle Nicolaides had revealed the truth about his son’s relationship with Eugenia Stakis. About the marriage that had been planned for so long and that would unite the fortunes of the two Greek dynasties as well as the two lovers. In a moment, he had explained just why Damon had insisted that this pragmatic, purely business deal of a marriage should be kept secret from everyone.

But of course Damon didn’t even know that his poor deceived wife had any knowledge of his machiavellian behaviour and so he still thought he could get away with pretending he was blameless.

‘Of course you don’t.’

Opening her eyes again, but carefully avoiding meeting any lying glance that Damon might send in her direction, she swung away, turning her attention to the rumpled bed before her.

‘I didn’t give Jason free run of my house!’ she said abruptly, covering the savage bite of misery with a sudden rush into action as she snatched up a pillow and shook it roughly out of its pale gold case. ‘And I certainly wouldn’t even have given him a key if I’d known the use he was going to put it to.’

‘But, as you’ve made only too plain, the way you’ve lived your life this past six months is no business of mine.’

Damon’s voice had grown colder by the second. Now it sounded positively glacial, sending icy shivers sliding down Sarah’s spine.

She managed some unintelligible murmur that he could take as agreement or not as he wished and dumped the denuded pillow on the floor, flinging the cotton case after it. It was as she reached for the crumpled sheet that a sudden recollection of how she had felt as she’d stood outside on the landing and heard the sound of Jason’s voice attacked without warning, making her sway weakly, fingers clenching on the bedding until the knuckles showed white.