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‘You don’t ever want to marry?’ Saskia was startled into asking.
‘Well, let’s just say that since I have reached the age of thirty-five without meeting a woman who has made me feel my life is unliveable without her by my side, I somehow doubt that I am likely to do so now. Falling in love is a young man’s extravagance. In a man past thirty it is more of a vain folly.’
‘My father fell in love with my mother when he was seventeen,’ Saskia couldn’t stop herself from telling him. ‘They ran away together...’ Her eyes clouded. ‘It was a mistake. They fell out of love with one another before I was born. An older man would at least have had some sense of responsibility towards the life he had helped to create. My father was still a child himself.’
‘He abandoned you?’ Andreas asked her, frowning.
‘They both did,’ Saskia told him tersely. ‘If it hadn’t been for my grandmother I would have ended up in a children’s home.’
Soberly Andreas watched her. Was that why she went trawling bars for men? Was she searching for the male love she felt she had been denied by her father? His desire to exonerate her from her behaviour irritated him. Why was he trying to make excuses for her? Surely he hadn’t actually been taken in by those tears earlier.
‘It’s time for us to leave,’ he told her brusquely.
CHAPTER FOUR
IF SOMEONE had told her two weeks ago that she would be leaving behind her everything that was familiar to fly to an unknown Greek island in the company of an equally unknown man to whom she was supposed to be engaged, Saskia would have shaken her head in denial and amusement—which just went to show!
Which just went to show what a combination of male arrogance, self-belief and determination could do, especially when it was allied to the kind of control that one particular male had over her, Saskia fretted darkly.
In less than fifteen minutes’ time Andreas would be picking her up in his Mercedes for the first leg of their journey to Aphrodite, the island Andreas’s grandfather had bought for his wife and named after the goddess of love.
‘Theirs was a love match but one that had the approval of both families,’ Andreas had told Saskia when he had been briefing her about his background.
A love match...unlike their bogus engagement. Just being a party to that kind of deceit, even though it was against her will, made Saskia feel uncomfortable, but nowhere near as uncomfortable as she had felt when she had had to telephone her grandmother and lie to her, saying that she was going away on business.
Andreas had tried to insist that she inform her grandmother of their engagement, but Saskia had refused.
‘You may be happy to lie to your family about our supposed “relationship”,’ she had told him with a look of smoky-eyed despair. ‘But I can’t lie to my grandmother about something so...’ She hadn’t been able to go on, unwilling to betray herself by admitting to Andreas that her grandmother would never believe that Saskia had committed herself and her future to a man without loving him.
Once the fall-out from the news of her ‘engagement’ had subsided at work, her colleagues had treated her with both wary caution and distance. She was now the boss’s fiancée and as such no longer really ‘one of them’.
All in all Saskia had spent the week feeling increasingly isolated and frightened, but she was too proud to say anything to anyone—a hang-up, she suspected, from the days of her childhood, when the fact that her parents’ story was so widely known, coupled with the way she had been dumped on her grandmother, had made her feel different, distanced from her schoolmates, who had all seemed to have proper mummies and daddies.
Not that anyone could have loved her more than her grandmother had done, as Saskia was the first to acknowledge now. Her home background had in reality been just as loving and stable, if not more so, than that of the majority of her peers.
She gave a small surreptitious look at her watch. Less than five minutes to go. Her heart thumped heavily. Her packed suitcase was ready and waiting in the hall. She had agonised over what she ought to take and in the end had compromised with a mixture of the summer holiday clothes she had bought three years previously, when she and Megan had gone to Portugal together, plus some of her lightweight office outfits.
