Sadie shook her head violently so that her dark hair spun out wildly in the sunshine. ‘No—nothing like that!’
Did he really think that that was why she had proposed ending the feud? So that as her ‘friend’ he would feel obliged to let her off her debts and hand Thorn Trees over to her at a peppercorn rent? In the back of her mind she could hear once more that mocking ‘mate’s rates’ that he had tossed at her in his office a couple of days before.
‘You’re right! We could never be friends. And I wouldn’t want to be. All I meant was that we could call a halt to these stupid hostilities and—and live totally separate lives. There’s no way we ever have to even see each other again.’
The thought seemed to stop her breath in her throat. She’d managed to get on with her life these past years by refusing to let herself even think about Nikos and pushing away every memory when it tried to surface. It had nearly broken her but she had managed it. Now it would all be to do again. And, knowing how hard it had been the first time, she flinched away from the prospect of going through it once more.
‘And the sooner that happens, the better as far as I’m concerned.’
He was supposed to respond to that. She even paused, waiting for him to say something but Nikos remained strangely silent. Silent and still. Only the burn of his eyes, fixed on her, unblinking, seemed alive in his set and rigid face.
She should take that as a yes, Sadie decided. It certainly wasn’t any sort of a no. Nothing like a rush to say that, no, they must not separate, must not be apart again. Of course not. But she wished he would say something. Anything.
And suddenly she had to speak again, if only to break the disturbing, nerve-stretching silence that had been going on for far too long.
‘We’d better get this job done so that I can get out of here and be on my way.’
She would be professional if it killed her, she told herself. It was the only way she was going to get through this. She would do the best damn job she could, never put a foot wrong, and then Nikos would have no reason at all to find fault. No reason to go back on his word to let her mother stay in Thorn Trees.
But it was one thing to make that sort of a resolve, quite another to stick to it when every place they walked held a memory of the time when they had been together. Every path, every cove, even every rock, spoke of a happier time, a time when she had known the joy of love, even though it had all been a bitter deception and not the delight she had thought it to be.
It was almost as if Nikos knew what was in her thoughts, what had been in her heart when she had visited Icaros with him all those years before, and was now using it to torment her with the fact that this was where he would be marrying his new fiancée, the woman he loved. And it was when they crossed the little wooden bridge that led from the main island to the high headland, where the tiny chapel stood, that she knew she couldn’t hold back any more. Coming to an abrupt halt, she turned to Nikos, brushing back the dark silk of the her hair that the winds had whipped into wild disorder around her face.
‘Just why am I here?’ she demanded, not caring if the words were wise.
Had she gone completely mad? the look he turned on her said. Did he have to explain everything to her? In words of one syllable?
‘You are a wedding planner. I need to plan a wedding.’
The exaggerated clarity with which he spoke, a deliberate slowing down of his words, grated on her already overwrought nerves. He sounded as if he was having to explain to someone simple. Someone who would have difficulty in understanding what he said.
‘But you could have anyone you wanted. There must be much more established—more successful—fashionable—wedding planners you could hire.’
‘But I want you.’
What was it in his voice that made a shiver run over her skin, lifting the tiny hairs in a rush of apprehension? Sadie couldn’t define it, and she wasn’t sure that she really wanted to dig too deep and find out more than she wanted to know.
‘Why me? Why none of the others?’
Nikos pushed open the door of the little chapel, the wood making a harsh scraping sound over the stone-flagged floor.
‘You owe me,’ he declared harshly. ‘They don’t.’And then, with an abrupt turn onto another conversational path that threw her completely off balance, he continued, ‘Now, come inside and see the chapel.’
She didn’t want to see the chapel, felt that it would destroy her totally to do so. It would take what was left of her shattered heart and grind it in the dust beneath Nikos’s soft handmade boots. If the rest of the island had bitter memories for her, then the inside of the chapel belonged purely to Nikos and the woman he now planned to marry. He had never brought her in here when they had visited Icaros in the past. In fact, the tiny building had stayed securely locked and shuttered, and she had never even set foot on the worn wooden bridge that led to it. Further evidence, her father had said, of the way Nikos had never planned to make her his wife.
But when it came down to it, what choice did she have? She was here to do a job, as Nikos had just reminded her so brutally. And on that job depended her mother’s peace of mind—possibly even her sanity, with the resulting repercussions for her small brother’s happiness. She couldn’t let them down. And so she drew in a deep, hopefully strengthening breath, squared her shoulders and made herself step over the threshold into the cool, shadowed interior of the little church.
After the brightness of the sunlight outside, it was all so dark and dim that she was almost blinded, barely able to see a metre or two ahead of her down the single narrow aisle between the rows of rough wooden pews. Nikos himself, standing before the simple altar, was once more just a silhouette, a solid more substantial shape in the hazy light that came through the narrow windows.
Perhaps it was because of the blackness, because she couldn’t see his face or read his expression clearly. Perhaps it was that she had no choice but to accept that in planning to marry someone else Nikos had demonstrated so clearly that he had moved on from the bitter past they had once shared. But suddenly Sadie was hearing again her own voice inside her head.
We could end it, she had said, referring to the terrible feud between their families. The feud that had taken away too much and given nothing. We could say it stops right here and now…
If only they could. If only she and Nikos could find a way to start again, so that each of them could go on and live their lives without the terrible black shadow hanging over them. But how could she begin? If she could just get Nikos to trust her, even in the tiniest degree, then that would be a start.
A sudden rush of new-found determination pushed her up the aisle towards the still, silent figure standing by the altar steps. Face unreadable, arms folded across the width of his chest, Nikos watched her come.
‘If you really want to employ me as your wedding planner then you have to let me do my job properly,’ Sadie managed once she had drawn level with him, the words spluttering from her in a rush to get them out. ‘You really don’t need to keep my phone and my laptop under lock and key—I’m not going to sell your story.’
The cold-eyed look he turned on her told her that there was no way he believed her declaration.
‘You did damn nearly everything else in the past,’ Nikos flung at her. ‘So you’ll have to forgive me if I’m
