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She nodded and rose from the bed but she didn’t lean over and kiss him and, for Drakon, it felt as if all the intimacies of the previous few hours hadn’t happened. As if she’d filed them all away under Sexy Lucy and gone back to being Sensible Lucy. He told himself he liked it that way. That it would be easier if they compartmentalised their lives like that all the time. But then she went and spoilt it all.
‘Drakon?’
Something in the way she said his name warned him, for it contained that curious note of emphasis which women made whenever they were about to start prying. Perhaps hoping to distract her with the sight of his ever-present desire, he pushed back the rumpled duvet and got out of bed. ‘What?’
But she deliberately kept her gaze fixed on his face, not his groin. ‘Earlier on, when you said...when you said you knew how destructive infidelity can be... Were you talking about your own experiences?’
He made no attempt to hide his displeasure. ‘Does it really matter?’
‘I think it does, yes. Did someone cheat on you?’
In a way, yes, though not in the way he suspected she meant. ‘Go and have your shower, Lucy.’
‘But—’
‘I said go.’
He went into the second bathroom and stood beneath the fierce jets of the shower before quickly shaving and dressing and hoping Lucy would have had the sense to forget it and move on. But when eventually she’d finished getting ready—standing in front of him in a velvet dress the colour of the night sky outside the window—he could see that look of stubborn determination still on her face.
‘Are we going to talk about it?’ she questioned.
‘About what?’ he said, deliberately misunderstanding.
‘About the infidelity you were referring to earlier.’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Doesn’t sound like nothing to me. And weren’t you the one who suggested the necessity of intimacy in this relationship?’
It was a clever twisting of his own words and Drakon felt trapped—but he could hardly storm out of the room and tell her to go to hell, could he? Not on the second night of his honeymoon. ‘Is this what they taught you to do at nursing school, Lucy?’ he demanded. ‘To keep digging and digging until you got your answer?’
Biting back an exclamation of impatience, he walked over to the dressing table and extracted a pair of golden cufflinks from one of the drawers. But he was aware that he was playing for time and he suspected Lucy was aware of it, too. He could sense her watching him, and waiting—but the overriding feeling he was getting from her was one of compassion rather than prurience. And suddenly Drakon found himself wondering why he was so intent on keeping his memories locked away, because it wasn’t as if anything he told her was going to affect the practical nature of their relationship, was it?
Slowly, he slotted the second cufflink in place so that it lay flush and gleaming against the cream silk. Mightn’t it be a relief to confide in her something he’d only ever discussed with his mother? His mouth twisted. His lying mother. He felt the knot of pain in his gut tighten as he turned back to face his new wife.
‘Okay.’ He watched as she sat down on the end of the bed, her eyes fixed unwaveringly on his face, and it was only then that he began to speak. ‘You’re probably aware that I grew up in extreme luxury?’
She gave a short laugh. ‘There were no poor boys at Milton school, Drakon.’
He nodded. ‘No. I guess there weren’t,’ he agreed thoughtfully. ‘My father was the only child of an extremely wealthy man, but he didn’t follow my grandfather into the business. In fact, he’d never worked—he just lived off the profits of the company which my grandfather had painstakingly built up from scratch. Maybe the fact that everything had always been handed to him on a plate and the lack of purpose in his life were what lay behind what I was to later discover were his fundamental lack of self-worth and low self-esteem. But from the outside, at least, things looked perfect. He married my mother, who worshipped the ground he walked on, which only made his sense of entitlement all the greater. Everything she did was for my father. It was my first experience of unconditional female adoration, though it certainly wasn’t to be my last. She spent the majority of her time completely preoccupied with her appearance. Trying to stay young. Trying to fight nature’s natural progression with one surgical procedure after another. By the time she was in her forties, her face was so cosmetically altered that she could barely move her mouth to smile.’
‘And what was she like towards you—and Niko?’
‘We were superfluous to requirements. In short, we got in the way.’ His mouth twisted. ‘When Niko and I were seven they sent us away to school in England, and after that I felt as though I had two very different lives. My life in England and my life in Greece. But every time I went home on vacation, I could sense things weren’t right. I remember the atmosphere as being incredibly tense. I knew the marriage wasn’t happy, but since I had no idea what a happy marriage looked like, I just accepted it. But things seemed to be getting worse and every time I asked my mother if anything was wrong she would just fob me off and tell me everything was just fine. Tell me that my father was nothing less than a genius and it was none of my business.’
‘But it wasn’t fine?’ she interjected, into the silence which followed.
He gave a bitter laugh. ‘You could say that. Behind the scenes everything was breaking down at an unbelievable speed. She knew that and she must have known how the outcome of the decline would impact on all our lives but she lied to me.’ His voice grew silent for a moment. ‘But it wasn’t until my father’s death that it came out just how comprehensively she’d lied. One sordid fact came spilling out after another—and the bubble which had been the perceived perfection of Konstantinou family life burst in the most spectacular way.’
‘How?’
He didn’t answer straight away and when he did, he winced, as if he had just bitten into something sour. ‘I learned that for years my father had been entertaining a series of high-class hookers. Women who indulged him in whatever depravity was his current favourite and, from what I could gather, there were plenty of those. In turn he indulged them with whatever took their fancy—anything ranging from large diamonds to fancy apartments. He became a regular at the world’s biggest casinos and high-rollers like him always attract a following of low-lifers. As a result, the business was in tatters and there was barely anything left. It wasn’t what Niko had been led to believe would be his inheritance and that was the beginning of his descent into addiction. That was when he disappeared. I should have done something,’ he added bitterly. ‘I should have prevented it.’
‘But what could you have done, Drakon?’ she questioned urgently. ‘Because I’m getting the feeling that you’re shouldering most of the blame here.’
Drakon clenched his fists as familiar feelings of anger and frustration pulsed through him. ‘Because by then I had some idea how commerce worked and could have helped,’ he bit out. ‘I could have found some sort of rescue package to have halted the decline of the company, or implored my father to seek help. If my mother had told me the truth instead of pretending nothing was wrong, then I could have done everything in my power to turn it around.’
She shook her head. ‘But sometimes the best will in the world won’t make people do what you want them to do!’ she said, holding the palms of her hands towards him in silent appeal. ‘Even if you’d known about it, your father might have blocked all your attempts to save the company—he might still have chosen his life of depravity. Sometimes you’re powerless to do anything except sit back and watch while other people make their own mistakes, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.’
