just being ridiculous! Of course not! And I wouldn’t be living there on my own.’
That had his attention. She could tell by the way his back stiffened, cold eyes burning into her as the swept over her face. Sadie felt she could also tell just what was going through his mind—clearly his ‘keeping up to date’ hadn’t resulted in him finding out the story about her mother. At least that was one thing her father had done properly before he died.
But the waiter was back again, this time bringing their meals, and Nikos was forced to sit and wait—obviously burning up with impatience—to be served before he could find out more. The man barely had time to put the plates on the table before Nikos was waving him away, ignoring his questions as to whether there was anything else they wanted.
‘Who?’ he demanded, and Sadie allowed herself a moment or two to prolong the tension, knowing it would provoke him even more.
‘Did you have to send him away like that?’ she complained. ‘I might have wanted some parmesan…’
A flick of Nikos’s hand dismissed her protest as irrelevant and unimportant.
‘Who?’ he repeated.
‘Well, not what you’re thinking—so you can get your mind out of the gutter. Do you really think that I would ask you to finance my love life by providing a home for me and my lover?’
He wouldn’t put it past her, Nikos acknowledged to himself. Sadie Carteret had had a liking for the good things of life, always provided someone else was paying. The way she had discarded him so quickly when his family had been ruined and he had lost his personal fortune had been proof of that. And of course she had deliberately distracted him so that her father could work behind the scenes, planning hostile takeovers, finding ways to bring the Konstantos empire down. She had even been prepared to sacrifice her own virginity to ensure that the destructive plan succeeded.
Beyond the windows, yet another distant rumble of thunder after what he assumed was the flash of lightning just seemed to underline the point of her corruption.
‘Nothing would surprise me.’
‘Well, for your information, I share the house with my mother and little brother.’
That was so unexpected that it seemed to hit like a blow between his eyes, making his head go back in shock, eyes narrowing assessingly. This was information he had not been given.
‘You don’t have a brother.’
The look Sadie turned on his was wide-eyed, innocent, sharply contrasting with the way that her chin came up and she faced him defiantly over the table.
‘Well, that just goes to show that your amazing spy network isn’t as good as you thought. For your information, I do have a brother—a little brother called George. He was born—He’s not quite five.’
Five. Why did it seem that everything that had turned his life upside down had happened at the point not quite five years before? So her mother had been pregnant around the time when they had been together and planning to get married, or just after. And little George had been born into the maelstrom of action and reaction once her father’s plan to bring down the house of Konstantos had been put into motion.
And of course in those months he had been focusing only on holding things together. On keeping the corporation from going under and taking his beleaguered father with it. At the time he had felt that if he thought about anything else, focussed on anything else, then the dark waves of total disaster would break over his head and he would definitely go down for the third time—and never come up again.
But the fact that she had a brother put a different complexion on the fact that Sadie wanted to keep the house. This George was so young that there was no way he could have ever been involved in anything the adult Carterets had planned and implemented against his family.
‘I see,’ he said, the words loaded with dark meaning. ‘That explains why I never got to hear of it. So tell me…’
‘No.’
Ridiculously buoyed up by the small triumph she’d had in putting him mentally onto the wrong foot for once, Sadie waved the hand that had picked up her fork to dig into her pasta to silence him.
‘My turn.’
He might hold all the aces, but that didn’t mean that she was going to let him get away with monopolising the conversation and treating the meal as if it was a trial for fraud with him as the counsel for the prosecution.
‘I get to ask some questions too.’
Was that a grudging respect in his eyes, the inclination of his head? Just the possibility gave her a little surge of confidence as she forked up a mouthful of her pasta.
‘What questions?’
‘Well, the obvious, for a starter. Like—you said you wanted to talk to me about a job. What sort of a job could I do for you? I mean—what need would you have of a wedding planner?’
‘That really is asking the obvious,’ Nikos commented. ‘To plan a wedding, of course.’
The impact of his response hit home just in the moment that Sadie popped the forkful of pasta into her mouth and chewed. Too late she realised that she’d been in such a state of apprehension when she’d arrived at the restaurant that she’d blindly ordered her meal with an arrabiata sauce, instead of the one next to it on the menu. She loathed chillies, and this was heavily laced with them.
‘A wedding?’ she croaked through the burn in her mouth, tears of reaction stinging her eyes.
‘Here…’
Leaning forward, Nikos poured a glass of water, held it out to her, watching as she gulped it down gratefully.
‘You hate spicy food,’ he said, when she finally started to breathe more easily. ‘Particularly chillies.’
Did he remember everything about her? It was a scary thought.
‘So why order something that you were going to hate?’
‘It’s almost five years. I might have changed—people do.’
‘Obviously not that much,’ Nikos drawled, his dry tone making her wonder if there was so much more than her reaction to the chilli sauce behind his comment. ‘Would you like something else?’
‘No—thank you.’
Any appetite she had had fled in the moment he had made that stunning announcement. But at least the impact of the chillies had disguised the fact that a lot—oh, be honest!—most of her reaction had been in response to his declaration. Her heart was still thudding from the shock of it, her thoughts spinning, whirling from one emotion to another and back again.
And none of the reactions was one that she really wanted to take out and examine in detail. Not here, not now. Not with Nikos lounging back in his chair, watching every move she made.
‘Whose wedding?’ she managed to croak. ‘Are you telling me that you are getting married?’
Once more Nikos inclined his dark head in agreement.
‘Who
