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How on earth could she have forgotten? As long as that hateful certificate was out there, Nik was determined to stay married. Yesterday, for the first time, she had stood up to him, really stood up to him, and seemingly he was now afraid that she might choose to walk out regardless of the possible consequences to him and his family.
A tight coil of pain snaked up inside her. ‘You don’t have to say that...I over-reacted. I was embarrassed, maybe a little insensitive...’
‘A little?’ Highlights of gold flashed through his expressive eyes and for a split-second he both sounded and looked much more like himself until he screened his gaze and tightened his hold on her slender fingers to grate, ‘No, I was the one who was insensitive.’
Mentally she imagined her ears shooting out on stalks to catch such an un-Nik-like sentiment. ‘But I—’
‘It was my fault,’ he interrupted with more than a hint of aggression.
‘But I should have—’
‘I don’t wish to hear another word,’ he spelt out, with an incredibly forced-looking smile.
But she could feel the anger he could barely suppress thickening the atmosphere. If only it weren’t such an effort to concentrate, she thought, and she was suffering from a peculiar and unbelievably inappropriate urge to giggle like a drain.
‘Nik...I’m not going to walk out again.’ She felt horribly guilty that he should be forced to such lengths to try and placate her when it wasn’t necessary. ‘I know I can’t...unless I find that certificate—’
‘Impossible,’ he broke in with a suppressed violence that she quite understood.
‘But you’d let me go like a shot if it turned up—’
‘That is not quite how I would put it.’ His low-pitched response was uneven.
‘Uncork the champagne and dance?’
‘Now you are talking nonsense,’ he groaned, fan-shaped lashes almost hitting his cheekbones as they swept down.
He rescued her glass before she dropped it, set it aside.
‘Is that that church again...?’ she enquired without great concern, an unfamiliar feeling of insouciance enclosing her. ‘Do you think Giorgios is lost?’
Nik swept up the phone and said something to the chauffeur.
Leah flexed her stiff shoulders and kicked off her shoes and then wondered why she had done something so uncharacteristic. She just felt so incredibly relaxed and yet kind of...excitable at the same time. It was the weirdest sensation.
Nik watched her and then he reached for her other hand and drew her closer. Her breathing was fractured, her heartbeat a magnified thump against her ribcage; the blood in her veins was racing. She could feel her breasts straining against the light silk barrier of her bra, the sudden painful sensitivity of her nipples.
The silence throbbed and then in one sudden startling movement Nik dropped his hands to her hips and brought her down on top of him. But he uttered a stifled imprecation and flung his dark head back a split-second before his mouth met hers in what had seemed like a determined collision. He looked like a male in the throes of anguished conflict.
Leah studied him with out-of-focus eyes, her hands braced on his shoulders.
‘Nik?’
‘You don’t know what you’re doing,’ he muttered raggedly.
‘I know what I want to be doing,’ she giggled and, leaning forward, she ran the tip of her tongue teasingly along the compressed line of his mouth.
His hands clamped over her forearms as though he was about to thrust her back from him and then, with a harsh groan, he crushed her against him instead. He kissed her with so much passion that he bruised her lips. She loved it, excitement leaping through her in a rollercoaster wave.
Then abruptly he broke the connection and leant his brow against hers.
‘I am a sneaky, slippery, devious bastard,’ he mumbled thickly, his breath fanning her cheek. ‘I am everything you ever called me and right now I would give ten years of my life to make love to you. I’m in agony...’
‘But?’ She sensed the ‘but’ coming.
‘There was vodka in your drink. You’re plastered, Leah.’
‘Oh.’
‘It was a disgusting thing to do but I was desperate to make you talk...make you relax. Also, the car has been driving round in circles. Please forgive me.’
As she shifted he shuddered, every taut line of his big body betraying not only his tension but also the intensity of his arousal. And Leah laughed because all of a sudden it seemed terribly funny. As swiftly as she grasped what the matter with her was she knew she ought to be outraged by such duplicity but the idea of Nik being reduced to such desperate straits appealed to her far more. You have a conscience.’
‘And right now it is killing me,’ he confided thickly, knotting two unsteady hands slowly into her hair to prevent her from moving. ‘Theos, it is always like this with you! I want you so much, you could make me beg.’
That frank confession told Leah of a power she had not dreamt she possessed. She was knocked sideways by the concept. It had not occurred to her that he might find her that desirable. But Nik was telling her that this wild hunger that could surge up between them without warning was mutual. But then he was a very physical male. It might not be the true love which her adolescent fantasies had centred on but she sensed that she had vastly underrated the extent of her own attraction.
Even so, she argued, ‘I don’t have big boobs.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Or legs that go up to my armpits.’
‘Cristo, I think you’re perfect.’ He brushed his lips sensually back and forth across hers, a husky growl of hunger escaping him. ‘So very perfect, I can’t believe you’re mine.’
‘Tell me more...’ she invited, tilting her head back out of reach with a teasing smile.
Taking abrupt note of the fact that the limousine had drawn to a halt in a courtyard, he swore instead. ‘We have arrived.’
It took a second or two for Leah to dredge herself back to the real world again. Nik slid her back on to the seat and then suddenly cupped her cheekbone in a possessive palm and extracted another long, lingering kiss that did nothing to aid her efforts to pull herself together.
The fresh air made her feel dizzy. Nik curved an arm around her narrow back and steadied her while she smoothed down the short skirt of her raspberry-coloured suit. ‘If I trip over the furniture it’ll be your fault,’ she complained.
He laughed softly and bent his head. ‘You’re still weak from the effects of the flu,’ he told her smoothly. ‘You’ll definitely have to lie down to rest before dinner...and being a caring, concerned husband—’
‘A what?’
‘I will naturally accompany you,’ he completed even more smoothly.
As he guided her up the flight of shallow steps and through the double doors—already opened wide on to an impressive marble foyer—she dimly marvelled at the speed and dexterity with which he had returned their relationship to its former footing. She was relieved, she was suddenly happy again, but she was just a little intimidated by the ease with which he had performed that miracle.
Ponia appeared, looking frantic and far more formally clad than Leah had ever seen her, with her hair swept up, her tiny frame sheathed in an elegant dress. ‘You’re so late!’
‘We got lost,’ Nik said carelessly.
‘Lost?’ Ponia parroted.
‘But we found each other again,’ he murmured in an aside only audible to Leah.
‘Yes.’ A tremulous smile flashed across her lips, her sapphire eyes suddenly brilliant in her heart-shaped face.
‘Eleni’s here,’ Ponia said baldly from behind them.
Leah felt Nik stiffen and then he laughed. ‘What a delightful surprise!’
‘And the whole Kiriakos tribe are coming to dinner,’ Ponia proffered in a rush.
‘How very civilised,’ Nik responded, but he no longer sounded quite so amused.
Leah wanted to ask questions but it was too late. A manservan
t was opening a door and suddenly they were on the threshold of a vast reception-room which, dismayingly, was filled with people, every one of whom fell silent and turned to view their entrance.
Nik’s mother, Evanthia Andreakis, was a regal, still attractive woman who could easily have passed as being a decade younger than she was. She greeted Nik, shook Leah’s hand, barely looking at her, and then quite calmly turned her attention back to Eleni Kiriakos, who was seated by her side, and continued to converse in her own language.
