phrase was still repeating inside her head when, fresh from her shower, naked and with dripping hair, she wandered back into the bedroom. Only to stop dead at the sight of the dark figure standing by the window.
‘Nikos!’
With the sun blazing behind him, his imposing frame was just a black silhouette, his face a shadowed blank. But there was something about the way he stood, a tension in the broad shoulders under the soft blue linen shirt, in the way his hands were pushed deep into the pockets of his pale trousers, that warned her about his mood. He was not here for light conversation, and if she was any judge he was definitely not here to resume the lovemaking that had occupied so much of the night.
‘What is it?’ she asked sharply in the same moment that he spoke too.
‘We need to talk.’
It clashed with her own words, but she caught it and it sent her spirits, already only precariously balanced between good and low, plummeting right down on to the floor beneath her bare feet. How many ominous, difficult conversations had begun with just those words? We need to talk implied that something had gone wrong—or was about to go wrong.
But what?
‘OK.’
It was all she could manage, and in a way that was totally ridiculous after the night they had just spent together she found herself wishing that she had wrapped a towel around her before she had left the bathroom. Standing here like this, totally naked, she felt so vulnerable and exposed, needing to hide. She certainly didn’t feel up to any ‘we need to talk’ type of discussion anyway.
‘Not like this. Get some clothes on first.’
Obviously Nikos felt the same about her appearance. Which should have been a relief but, in fact, only added to her tension. Last night, nothing would have distracted him from the fact that she was naked—or from taking full advantage of it. Now it was an awkward obstacle in the way of what he wanted to get done.
Which didn’t promise well for this talk.
‘Of course.’
But her clothes were in her room, not here in Nikos’s bedroom where they had spent the night.
‘I’ll…’
But Nikos was already moving, heading for the door as if he couldn’t get out of there quickly enough.
‘I’ll be in my office,’ he tossed over his shoulder at her.
‘I’ll be there.’
Somehow Sadie managed to keep her tone buoyant, when in fact, it should have been sinking with her spirits. She had admitted to herself that she expected her dismissal from his life to come sooner rather than later, but not this soon. She doubted if Nikos even heard her anyway, as the door swung to behind his hasty exit.
He was a fool, Nikos told himself as he headed for the stairs, the pace of his steps matching the state of his thoughts. A stupid, total fool and he had just proved it to himself.
He should have known. He did know, damn it! He’d left Sadie sleeping in his bed this morning and she had been totally naked then. And then, when he had gone into the room and heard the shower running in the bathroom, any idiot would have assumed that when she emerged she was not likely to be wearing any clothes.
But he had not been thinking straight. With his mind so full of the news he had been given this morning, he hadn’t been thinking about anything else at all. And so when Sadie had finally emerged, beautifully naked, with her soft skin still pink and glowing from the shower, the sight had hit him like a blow to his already unfocussed head. And that was something he didn’t need. In two ways.
He already had the image of Sadie’s naked body in his mind. Gamato, after last night he knew that it was etched there permanently, never to be erased. If he had hoped that the sensory indulgence of the past eighteen hours or so would sate him on her charms and leave him free to live his life again, then he had been very badly mistaken. There was no way he was sated at all. The truth was that he doubted if he ever would be. There was no way he could have enough of Sadie Carteret, and one passionate night of total abandon had done nothing to appease the appetite he had for her.
If anything, it had only whetted it so that he was far hungrier now than he had ever been in the years they had been apart.
And that was why the article he had read in the English gossip columns had sent his mental temperature soaring, making any sort of rational thought impossible.
‘Gamoto!’
It was also impossible to sit down and wait for Sadie to appear. The thought that he might have actually started to trust her when the truth was that he was being led around by his nose—or another part of his anatomy—twisted cruelly in his guts.
She was down quicker than he had anticipated. And where he had been sure that, realising something was up, she would dress carefully for maximum impact—something like the fantasy come true of that red dress came to mind—he found he couldn’t have been more wrong.
Sadie had clearly rushed into her clothes, grabbing at the first thing that came to hand. And the first thing was a pair of worn denim jeans and a plain white v-necked tee shirt, her face clear of any make-up, pale against the still-damp darkness of her hair. Not that it helped any. The truth was that she was hellishly sexy in anything. And with the memory of her gloriously naked body in his arms, in his bed—underneath him, warm and willing all through the night and again in the bedroom just now—he had to make a fearsome effort to keep his eyes on her face. Because it was her face that he needed to see. He needed to look into her eyes, read her expression. That way he might have some chance of finding out what was going on in her conniving little mind.
‘What is it?’
So she was going for wide-eyed innocence. With just a touch of defiance. It was the look she’d had on her face the last time he’d seen her five years before. He didn’t want to look too closely at the memories that dredged up.
The newspaper was still lying on the desk, exactly as he had left it to go upstairs. He picked it up and tossed it towards her.
‘Read that.’
He knew exactly the moment she registered what the photograph showed by the way that the colour shifted in her face and she bit down hard on her lower lip, white teeth digging into the soft pink. With an effort Nikos suppressed an urge to go to her and tell her to stop, to run his thumb over the damage she was inflicting on herself.
‘Well?’ he barked, when she had obviously taken in all she needed to, had dropped the paper back on to the desk and was preparing her answer.
‘Well, what?’
What did he expect her to say? Sadie asked herself. And, perhaps more to the point, was there really any point in saying anything? From the thunderous dark frown on his face, he had clearly already tried her, acting as judge and jury, found her guilty and was now prepared to pronounce sentence.
‘I don’t know anything about this.’
A wave of her hand indicated the incriminating photograph. And she had to admit that she understood only too well just why he was so angry.
She
