years. Nothing could change him, restore him to the man he had once been. The man who had stolen her heart. The man she had been going to marry.
No.
Shaking herself roughly, she snapped her head up sharply, forcing herself to face facts once and for all.
She had to stop deceiving herself. That Nikos was a fantasy, a deception—a lie. The Nikos she had loved had never truly existed; he had simply been playing with her, manipulating her until he got exactly what he wanted. If her father hadn’t moved in to protect her then the end result could have been far worse than it had. And it had been terrible enough.
The lift came to a halt, the doors sliding open, and Sadie pushed herself into motion, now desperate to get away, to be free of the tainted atmosphere of hatred.
It was as she crossed the wide, marble-floored foyer that she heard the beeping sound from her mobile phone. A text message. She knew who it would be from even before she had taken it from her bag, though the sight of ‘New message from Mum’ on the screen almost made her switch it off and not look.
But that would be the coward’s way out. She had to face her family and let them know that she had failed some time. Taking a deep breath, she pressed the ‘view’ key.
How did you get on? her mother asked, as Sadie had known she would. Have you got good news? Can we stay?
Standing in the middle of the foyer, Sadie could only stare at the tiny screen until the backlighting blinked off and the whole thing went black. How was she going to do this? What could she say to soften the blow?
‘Miss Carteret?’
It took a moment or two to register that the voice was speaking to her. That the receptionist she had talked to earlier had come up behind her and was now trying to get her attention.
‘Excuse me, Miss Carteret, I have a message.’
‘A message?’
Sadie stared blankly at the folded sheet of paper the other woman held out to her.
‘From who?’
But even as she asked the question she knew there could only be one person who could have sent it. Only one man who could have dashed off the note and had it brought down to her in the executive lift, so it had caught up with her before she left the building.
Nikos. Just the thought of his name made her hand shake as she reached for the note.
‘Thank you.’
She barely noticed the receptionist move away, her attention closely focussed on the piece of paper she held. After the way she had left Nikos upstairs, the brutal harshness of that final ‘nothing’, this was the last thing she had expected. He had been adamant that he was not going to help her, so why…?
Her fingers fumbled with the note as she unfolded it, tension blurring her vision as she tried to focus.
The note had neither greeting nor signature, but it didn’t need one. There was no mistaking Nikos’s dark, slashing scrawl. Just four brief words, dashed off in haste, and the sight of them made Sadie blink hard in bewilderment and confusion.
Cambrelli’s 8:00 p.m. Be there.
Be there.
It was a blunt decree, a command that she would be wise to obey—or risk the consequences.
Be there.
And Cambrelli’s. Dear heaven, but the man knew how to stick the knife in. Cambrelli’s was the small Italian restaurant he had taken her to on their very first date.
Rebellion rose hotly in Sadie’s heart. Who the hell was this man that he could issue such an order and expect to have it obeyed? Her fingers tightened on the paper, the impulse to crumple it into a ball and toss it away from her almost overwhelming. She was damned if she…
But even as she lifted her hand to do so, common sense reasserted itself and froze the defiant gesture. What was she thinking of? She knew exactly who this man was.
He was Nikos Konstantos, and he was in the position of having every command he issued obeyed at once, without any hint of a question. He also held all the cards very tightly in his hands.
‘And, knowing me as you do, I am sure that you will recall that once I have made up my mind on a matter then I never change it.’
The words that Nikos had flung at her sounded so clearly inside her head that she almost believed that the man himself had come up behind her and spoken them out loud.
He had sworn that he would not help her and made it plain that every one of her entreaties had fallen on totally stony ground.
And yet…
Her gaze went back to the note in her hand as she smoothed it out and read over once again.
Cambrelli’s 8:00 p.m. Be there.
She didn’t know what it meant, but it seemed that Nikos had tossed her some kind of lifeline. It wasn’t much but it was all she had, and she would be a fool not to grab at it while she could.
The receptionist was still hovering close at hand, obviously waiting for an answer. Glancing down at her phone, reading the message from her mother again, Sadie drew in a deep breath and came to a decision.
‘Tell Mr Konstantos that I will meet him as arranged.’
CAMBRELLI’S RESTAURANT HAD changed very little in the past five years. It was perhaps a little cleaner and brighter—they had obviously put a fresh coat of paint on the walls—but not much else had altered.
There were the same dark wood tables and chairs, some in small booths with red fake leather banquettes on either side, the same red-and-white checked tablecloths, the same candles stuck into empty wine bottles on each table, with wax dripping down the neck and over the label. She was sure that there were even the same rather worn and faded posters on the walls. One of the Colosseum in Rome and one of St Mark’s Square in Venice. It was like stepping back in time and reliving a small part of her life.
If only she really could do that, Sadie thought as she followed the waiter to one of the booths near the back of the room, well away from the window, she noted. If only she could be arriving here as a rather naive twenty year old, still at university, her head in a whirl of excitement and her feet barely seeming to touch the ground as she headed for a date with the most exciting man she had ever met. Anticipating the most wonderful night she had ever known.
And it had been just that. That night and the days, the months that had followed had been the happiest, the most glorious times Sadie had ever known. But if it was at all possible, if she really could go back in time, then she would grab hold of her younger self, try to shake some sense into her.
‘Poor stupid little fool,’ she muttered to herself, the bitterness of memory pushing the words from her mouth in spite of the fact that she wasn’t really speaking to anyone.
‘I
