Page 21 of The Cozakis Bride

She rolled over to the side of the bed closest to him, lying on her tummy, sleepy face propped on one hand, sea-jade eyes open and unguarded. 'Nik...what time is it?'

'Afternoon. Two o'clock. We haven't eaten since we came on board, nor have we emerged from this state room. I imag­ine my crew are well satisfied with my virility.'

Olympia didn't really think that dry comment through, merely interrupting on impulse to say shyly, 'I certainly am!'

Nik stilled. She dropped her eyes, reddened fiercely. Odd how daylight could banish all sense of intimacy, she recognised too late. She was annoyed that she had made a com­ment that would make her mother faint dead away in ladylike disbelief. She had sounded so gauche as well. That final awareness plunged her into an agony of embarrassment. 'It was good,' Nik conceded, without any expression at all. Good? she almost shrieked back at him in shock. Good? Like a meal, a nice day out, a satisfactory piece of work? Suddenly she was marvelling at the happy contentment she had woken up with only minutes earlier. Had her brain and her memory gone on holiday while she slept?

'But then why shouldn't it have been?' Nik remarked with a slight dismissive shrug. 'I knew we would be sexually com­patible.'

Her swollen mouth trembled. She compressed her lips hard. A hollow and sick sense of rejection was swallowing her up like a big black hole. The chill in the air raised goose-flesh on her exposed arms. She had to force herself to look directly at Nile again. She discovered that she needed armour cladding to protect herself from the cool distance in those black eyes, and unfortunately she only had flesh.

Pale and taut now, she muttered, 'I thought we understood each other better now.'

Hadn't there been a closeness which might not have been spelt out in actual words but which had surely been shared, not just in the breathtaking intensity of their lovemaking but in the aftermath too, when he had continued to hold her in his arms?

'Only when we're in the same bed,' Nik delineated with precision.

Olympia felt as if he had slid a knife beneath her ribs and she was fighting not to bleed in front of him. 'I get the mes­sage,' she said tightly.

'I'm leaving for a few days,' Nik divulged smoothly, lean, strong features cool as glass. 'Don't ask me when I'll be back. I don't know.'

'I do hope it won't be any time soon,' Olympia told him sincerely, temper beginning to mount in response to the treat­ment she was receiving.

Nik froze in his path to the door.

'I'll call you if I'm pregnant. With a little bit of luck you won't have to come back at all!' Olympia added for good measure.

In one accelerated movement Nik swung back. Outraged black eyes lanced into her flushed and furious face.

'However, I should warn you that all that flattering effort you expended on me during the early hours may well prove to have been unsuccessful as it's not really the most prom­ising time of the month for me,' Olympia shared in a tone of bitter satisfaction.

'Christos...how can you be so crude?' Nik launched with a flash of white gritted teeth. 'You will not refer to the con­ception of our child in such offensive terms!'

'Silly me...' Olympia barely recognised herself in the pro­vocative persona which had sprung up inside her own skin. 'I forgot what a feeling and sensitive guy you were. I'm so sorry.'

Nik's big hands coiled into fists: Olympia surveyed that evidence of vulnerability and her heart truly sang a trium­phant chorus.

'You are my wife,' Nik growled, not quite levelly.

'No...no...no, I'm not. I'm your partner in this deal, the sleeping partner,' Olympia reminded him gently, but her own rage was as fierce as his own. Fury poured through her like petrol ready to ignite, blaze and burn him up, for he had hurt her, he had humiliated her, and he wasn't allowed to do that. No. Not this time. Not ever again.

Nik studied her with smouldering penetration, jaguar-gold eyes rising to the challenge. 'No doubt you would like me to lose control and turn violent. Then you could divorce me and take off to freedom with millions of banknotes...is that what you think?' Olympia frowned, giving the suggestion serious thought.

Strange how the prospect of freedom, even accompanied by millions of banknotes, failed to tempt her, she conceded wor­riedly.

'Get down and dirty with good legal counsel,' Nik advised in abrasive continuance. 'As you should have done before you signed our marriage contract.'

Completely in the dark as to his meaning, Olympia mut­tered, 'Sorry?'

'I can be the biggest bastard on the surface of this earth, but if you choose to walk out you leave our children behind and you leave the marriage as poor as you entered it,' Nik informed her with grim satisfaction. 'My lawyers said you'd never sign so punitive a contract. They said you'd throw hysterics when you read the first clause and that by the time you read the final one you'd be in need of resuscitation. But then, they don't know you the way I know you.'

Olympia was now hanging on his every word. 'Don't they?'

'All you were thinking about was the money,' Nik com­pleted with derision.

'No...not that,' she muttered.

Nik reached the door.

Her blood ran cold as she recognised the amount of control Nik wanted over her; he was even willing to use any children they might have as a weapon against her. He might be fond of calling their marriage a deal, but it was not a term she should take literally. Nik had no plans to treat her as a part­ner, even of the junior variety. Nik was more into ownership than partnership.

In genuine shock at that realisation, Olympia whispered shakily, 'How can you still hate me this much?'

Teach me, she was thinking crazily, teach me how to hate as hard and for as long as you have hated. It was a lesson she seemed in dire need of learning.

Nik turned back his arrogant dark head. Black eyes without a single softening shade of liquid gold met hers with a coldness that frightened the life out of her. 'I really loved you once. Or is that too deep and sensitive a connection for you to understand?'

Three days later, Olympia congratulated herself: she wasn't crying any more.

'I really loved you once. An admission made with the darkest, deepest and most bitter sincerity. A statement she could not dismiss, protest or doubt. And, not to put too fine a point on it, that confession had slaughtered Olympia where she sat. It had ruined her appetite and destroyed her ability to sleep. It had ripped apart the entire fabric of her view of the past and in so doing had sunk her into deep emotional turmoil.

She slid from the extreme of wanting to kill Nik for telling her ten years too late to the extreme of wanting to kill Nik for telling her and then taking off in his wretched helicopter, leaving neither forwarding address nor phone number. Why had he left her? Where had he gone?

Meanwhile Aurora kept on sailing, without ever putting into port. Olympia became acquainted with the gym, the sauna, the swimming pool, the library, the fantastic meals and the level of luxury and personal care now available to her at any hour of the day and night. If she wanted her hair done her maid was a hairdresser, with two dozen styles at her fingertips. If she wanted to listen to music the yacht had two bars, a dance floor and a state-of-the-art sound system. And if she wanted to phone her mother the satellite com­munications systems could handle anything.

Unfortunately talking to Irini Manoulis entailed skilled di­plomacy as Olympia bent over backwards not to actually tell a lie. Yes, she was having a wonde

rful, stupendous time on her honeymoon. Just one problem—and that she did not choose to share with her mother. She was enjoying it solo.

So Nik had loved her. Never mentioned it though, never brought himself to the dangerous brink of saying the words which might have kept them together and encouraged her to fight Katerina's lies. The fiancé’ who had never held hands with her, who had backed off fast when she threatened to get slushy, who had never given her flowers, cute gifts, cards, anything that might have spoke for him! Nik had been such a cool guy at nineteen. Except when he'd proposed...

And she put her head down and wept again, because at twenty-seven, armed with the knowledge of the love she had doubted at seventeen, she found that clumsy, unromantic marriage proposal of Nik's back then especially poignant, especially painful. She remembered his intense relief when she'd just said yes and then proceeded to do all his talking for him.

And now, in the present, she agonised over why Nik had left her alone on Aurora. After the night they had shared, she hadn't expected that. Maybe getting her to bed had just been a challenge for Nik. Or maybe he had simply got bored with her, bored with the whole set-up. She hadn't been much of a challenge. Nor could she had been an exciting partner for so experienced a lover. What had been so special for her had not necessarily been remotely special for Nik, and she was ashamed of her own naivety. She had been so happy when she'd wakened, but Nik had been stone-cold and remote.

Out of bed, he truly did hate her. Why? Once he had loved her and she had hurt him. Forgiving and forgetting wasn't on his agenda. Nik was ready to fight to the last ditch to hang on to his bitter desire for revenge. She had compromised his sense of honour, shamed him in front of others. Too late did she recognise the intensity with which her Greek husband still felt those wounds on his masculinity. What a number Katerina and Lukas had worked on them both that night! Only now did Olympia find that she could accept Nik's side of the story. Lukas must have spiked Nik's drink and invited Nik's ex-girlfriend to join them at that club. It was all so far in the past, yet that night was still poisoning the present and causing her unimaginable pain.

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