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But then life wasn’t fair. Kate was learning that pretty fast.
With a heavy sigh, she flipped through the dresses she had brought with her, deciding which one to wear. Most of them had been bought years ago. when she’d been able to afford such luxuries, but they still served the purpose. She selected a dark red cocktail dress. One of her favourites, it was worn off the shoulder, with a fitted waist and a knee-length full skirt that twirled out when she spun around.
Not that Kate was planning on doing any twirling this evening. She would leave that strictly to the dancers. There was no frivolity to be had for her. She knew the form by now. Tonight was going to be another torturous evening, playing the part of Nikos’s new wife with a frozen smile and an aching heart, with any attempts on her part to talk business dismissed by the other diners, who would joke that she shouldn’t be concerning herself with work at a time like this.
It made a mockery of Nikos’s insistence that these were useful contacts, but frankly she was past caring.
Four days into this marriage, Kate was far more worried about how she was going to manage four weeks...four months...possibly even longer...being shackled to this formidable man. According to Nikos, the custody proceedings for Sofia were already well underway and it was now a question of doing everything they could to support the application while waiting for the courts to make their decision.
Though how long that would take was anybody’s guess. Kate couldn’t bring herself to look any further than one day at a time. She wasn’t sure her paper-thin defences or her poor fragile heart could take it.
* * *
Nikos leant back in his chair, folding his arms over his chest, having no desire to join in with the clapping, cheering audience. On the stage a group of young women were frenetically dancing, lifting their frilly red, white and blue skirts, kicking their legs unfeasibly high, baring their bottoms and doing the splits, much to the delight of the whooping crowd.
They were doing a job, he supposed, the same as the rest of them, but their efforts left him cold. As the music started to speed up even more, the noise becoming ever louder, he started to wonder how much more of this interminable show he could take.
He glanced across at Kate. She looked stunning this evening. But then she always did. When she had opened the door of her hotel room to him earlier that evening, her shoulders bare, her body held unnaturally straight, he had had to stop himself from crossing the threshold, taking her in his arms and kissing away all that pent-up tension with the soft, damp heat of his mouth. Then walking her backwards towards the bed, lifting up the full skirt and ravishing her there and then.
It had been an infinitely more attractive prospect than spending an evening watching this rowdy cabaret. It still was.
Being around Kate these past few days had been hard—far harder than he’d anticipated. He’d forgotten Kate’s kind nature—or at least refused to remember it. How she had a way of connecting with people wherever she went. Like when she had chatted to the doorman at their hotel this evening, solicitously asking after his baby son. How did she even know he had one? And she had rushed to the aid of an elderly lady the other day, who hadn’t been crossing the road quickly enough for impatient drivers. With her hands on her hips Kate had glared at the traffic, before helping the pensioner to the safety of the pavement, telling her to take all the time she needed. Miraculously, the tooting horns had stopped.
Nikos had been so sure he was over Kate O’Connor, so sure that she no longer meant anything to him, he’d thought he could have it tattooed across his forehead. But now doubts were creeping in. Doubts that he didn’t want to acknowledge. Doubts that were driving him crazy. Despite keeping his distance, trying never to be alone with her, he was still falling under her spell.
After their hideous break-up, the shameful way Kate had treated him, he had returned to Greece, determined to put their short, disastrous relationship behind him. Pumped up with anger at Kate, for the whole degrading debacle, but most of all at himself for being such a damned fool, he had thrown himself into doing something he’d known he could make a success of—his business with Philippos.
