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Feeling weak as a kitten, she slumped back against the pillows. Her reply just leapt off her tongue. ‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll never forgive you either.’
It was a mistake. Halfway to the door, Nik stilled and spun back. ‘So now you tell me the truth.’
‘What truth?’
‘That this is a deliberate attempt to attract my attention,’ he condemned with splintering fury. ‘No wonder you left tracks a blind man could follow...no wonder I am treated to an open door and the sound of you exchanging sweet nothings with your lover!’
‘Attract your attention?’ Leah repeated, her exquisite face alight with unhidden incredulity, physical weakness banished as she sat up in one abrupt movement.
‘Which you have done beautifully,’ Nik conceded with a sudden blazing smile that chilled her to the marrow. ‘You haven’t even slept with him, have you? So far and no further. Perfect.’ He strolled back towards the bed, riveting dark eyes probing her with derisive brilliance. ‘Not enough to send me over the edge but enough to make me sit back and take notice...’
Momentarily she was stunned by the sheer depth of his conceit. Then she flung her head back, sapphire eyes flashing with fury. ‘I have slept with him!’ she lied hotly. ‘And I don’t want you over the edge or taking notice because I don’t give a damn about you!’
‘If he has laid one finger on your unclothed body, he’s dead. You do understand that?’ Nik surveyed her with hooded dark eyes, a lethal stillness to his lean, powerful body. ‘This is not some game. I warn you, pethi mou. If he’s had you, I’ll break him,’ he asserted with murderous cool.
Leah couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t credit that he could back her into a corner like that. And how could he possibly guess that her relationship with Paul had yet to become intimate? She had lied in temper but also out of a need to stress that it was a serious relationship, not some silly flirtation manufactured to attract an indifferent husband’s attention. The very suggestion that she might be guilty of such childishly manipulative, not to say pathetic behaviour made her blood boil in her veins. But she was simultaneously terrified that Nik might harm Paul.
‘You are having to think so hard about this, I feel almost embarrassed,’ Nik revealed smoothly.
And all the anger had gone as if it had never been, she registered in a daze. ‘OK,’ she muttered tightly, studying her tightly linked hands, hating Nik with so much venom that she was literally ill with the force of her feelings. ‘I haven’t slept with him but—’
‘And shall I tell you why? A Greek would divorce an unfaithful wife. So you went as far as you dared and no further. The only reckless thing you ever did in your life was marry me. Cristo.’ Nik expelled his breathe in a hiss. ‘What a fool I was to think for one second that you might risk losing your status as my wife!’
‘But that’s exactly what I want to lose!’ Leah shot back at him in untrammelled rage and frustration. ‘I don’t want you... I want my freedom!’
‘Like hell you do,’ Nik responded crushingly. ‘You’d sink like a stone in the real world. You couldn’t cut it out there. You’d be as helpless as a newborn baby without your credit cards!’
‘How dare you?’ Leah spat, white as snow.
A winged ebony brow elevated. ‘I was just telling it like it is. You are exactly what Max created: a beautiful, fragile ornament, the perfect wife for a very rich man, born to be waited on hand and foot...’
‘You swine,’ she gasped, pain tearing through her in a blinding wave.
‘That’s not to say that you’re not very good in your own rarefied milieu,’ he drawled in wry addition. ‘You’re a marvellous hostess. And you’re a real lady. But if you really want your freedom—’
‘I do!’ Leah practically sobbed at him.
‘Ask yourself why you’re still buying my socks.’ Unleashing a sardonic smile on her, Nik turned and strode out of the room.
What did his bloody socks have to do with anything? That was just a trivial task she had taken on early in their marriage and kept on doing without even thinking about it! Leah dived out of bed, snatching up the towelling robe and digging her arms frantically into it. She had to make him listen. She had to make him understand.
He was in the master bedroom. Leah halted on the threshold, discomfited to find him halfway out of his shirt.
‘What now?’ he grated with driven impatience.
‘I want you to listen to me.’ Twitching the neck of the robe higher with restive fingertips, she made herself meet his unreadable gaze. ‘I love Paul. I want a divorce.’
Nik strolled across the depth of the carpet towards her. ‘You’re my wife,’ he delivered in a soft tone of revelation. ‘And why are you my wife? Because you so badly wanted to be my wife.’
A hectic flush ran up her slender throat and her teeth clenched. ‘Did you hear what I said? I love him!’
‘You’re buying his socks too?’ Nik enquired without pause, savage amusement in his narrowed scrutiny.
Without her even thinking about it, her hand flashed up and she slapped him hard, so hard that she couldn’t feel her fingers for several taut seconds afterwards. Then she was shocked by what she had done, the unfamiliar violence which had simply surged up out of nowhere and spilt over. Fearfully, she flinched back from him as he reached out for her, all amusement banished from his hard, dark eyes.
‘No!’
‘Even when I think a bloody good slap might do you good I can restrain myself. You’re too small, too breakable. If I’d been the wife-beating type, don’t you think you would have known it by now?’
Nik tugged her resistant body closer with easy strength, another kind of threat entirely explicit in the slow-burn effect of his dark gaze wandering over her, lingering on the steadily widening V of pale skin revealed by the far too large robe as it slid down off one narrow-boned shoulder.
‘And I have to confess that my idea of entertainment is rather more intimate than violence and infinitely more satisfying.’
‘Don’t you dare touch me!’ Leah screeched so loudly that her voice cracked and her throat hurt.
‘A long, hot night in my bed is exactly what you need.’ A lean hand settled on her bare shoulder.
‘Don’t be disgusting!’ Leah’s facial muscles locked with revulsion.
‘And don’t dismiss out of hand what you have never experienced.’ Nik laughed softly as he lowered his darkly handsome head and dragged her relentlessly up against him, one hand curving to the swell of her hips.
‘Stop it—’
‘I feel so threatened,’ he mocked indolently, brushing a silvery strand of hair back from one delicate cheekbone in an almost tender gesture that struck her as so out of character that she found herself briefly losing track of her struggle for freedom.
‘Nik...’
His mouth came down on hers with mesmerising expertise and prised her soft lips apart. She stopped breathing. He gathered her closer, sealing her to every abrasively male angle of his taut body. Her back arched without her volition, increasing that contact. His tongue drove into the moist, tender interior she had yielded and explored. A river of fire flowed through her and she quivered, leaning against him, winding her arms sinuously round his neck. Darkness beckoned behind her lowered eyelids, the heat in the pit of her stomach twisting like a hot wire through her trembling length.
Nik freed her swollen mouth and studied her with complete impassivity. ‘What was his name?’ he derided.
‘His...oh, God!’ On unsteady legs, Leah went into retreat, her fingers flying up in stark distress and turmoil to her reddened lips.
‘”Frailty, thy name is woman!”’ Nik quoted with savage amusement. ‘But you’ve got your priorities wrong. I’m the husband.’
Leah struggled to think of something—anything to say in self-defence. Nothing occurred to her. As she hovered, prey to a number of conflicting violent emotions, Nik shed his shirt, displaying powerful muscles that rippled like flexing cords beneath his
golden skin. She didn’t want to stare but she stared all the same.
Nik moved past her, opened the door and thrust her unceremoniously out into the corridor, murmuring, ‘We’ll talk over breakfast.’
The door thudded shut in her confused face. Was she going out of her mind? Had the past twenty-four tension-filled hours been a nightmare? She got back into bed, curled up in the foetal position and hugged herself. Nik was a stranger. She didn’t know him like this...and just for a little while she hadn’t known herself either.
He had been so bitter, so enraged at the bank. He had devastated her. But since then his every switch of mood had caught her by surprise. It was as if there were a script running somewhere and she was the only one who hadn’t read it yet.
