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Up until last night, that was.
Having been immersed in work for a couple of hours, Nikos hadn’t noticed the time to start with. But it hadn’t been long before he’d found himself clock-watching, wondering when Kate would be back. Looking forward to seeing her again.
He’d told himself that he just wanted to make sure that Sofia had been safely returned to her school party, but in reality he’d known it wasn’t that. Kate had got to him. No matter how much he fought against it, somehow she had insidiously wound her way around his heart. And that was deeply troubling.
When Kate had finally swept into their hotel suite Nikos had known immediately that something was wrong. His enquiry about whether they’d had a good time had been answered curtly, and Kate’s reassurance that Sofia had been delivered back to her hotel had been uncharacteristically brusque.
There had been no mistaking her change of mood—especially when Kate had announced that she was very tired and taken herself off to her own room without even meeting his eye. Nikos had been left staring at her closed bedroom door, with the thrum of blood in his ears, wondering what on earth that had all been about. And, more importantly, why he cared? How the hell did she manage to have such an effect on him?
Much to his irritation, he’d found himself still mulling over the events of last night the next morning. Logic told him that a cooling in relations between them was a good thing. If Kate was making a tactical withdrawal he should be doing the same thing. This was the reality check he needed.
Their enforced honeymoon was almost at an end. It had served its purpose. Nikos had made sure they’d been seen together pretty much wherever they went, and posed photos of ‘the happy couple’ were gracing the gossip columns both here in Europe and in the US. It was all good PR for him, and Kandy Kate was benefitting too. Kate’s marriage to a billionaire Greek tycoon had already seen the company’s share price shoot up.
But logic refused to explain why Kate’s rejection stuck like a fishhook in his skin. Why the more he tried to ignore it, the more it dug into him. If he didn’t know better, he would say he was becoming infatuated with Kate O’Connor Nikoladis. And that was something he needed to avoid at all costs.
Nikos stood up again, pacing up and down in front of the wall of windows. He needed to put some space between them, that was all. There was no reason why they shouldn’t be able to go their separate ways for a while now—they both had businesses to run, after all. The Greek courts couldn’t expect them to be together all the time. At a later date, he would fly Kate out to Crete and then, with her by his side, he would make an appointment to see the clerk of the court and find out how his guardianship application was progressing.
But not yet. Right now he needed space to think.
Nikos checked his watch again. Where was she? He had gone to some considerable trouble to set up this meeting with the CEO of a leading confectionery company here in the UK. He’d been looking forward to telling Kate, seeing the surprise on her face. Okay, it wasn’t the most romantic of gestures, but potentially this could mean a huge deal for Kandy Kate.
But as it turned out he hadn’t had the chance to tell her anything before she’d taken herself off to bed. So he’d ended up sending her a text message, telling her to meet him at Rosebury’s head office in the Shard at ten o’clock. As Nikos had pressed ‘send’ he’d told himself this would be his final involvement in Kate’s business. After this she was on her own.
Leaning forward, he picked up one of the newspapers that were neatly lined up on the table—one of the red tops. It wasn’t his usual sort of reading material, but he was just killing time. After flipping through the pages of scaremongering politics and salacious gossip about footballers’ wives, he was just about to toss it back on the table when a headline caught his eye.
Wrenching the page open, he stared at it in abject horror.
Randy Kate! the headline screamed at him. And below there was a photograph of Kate, sprawled on top of a man on the ground. What the hell? And, if that wasn’t bad enough, amongst the group of people surrounding them there was Sofia, looking down on them with a panicked expression on her face.
