had had second thoughts about the passion they had shared in the night and was going to tell her it was all over. That had been bad enough. But this she was totally unprepared for.
‘I don’t!’ she repeated when he turned a frankly sceptical look on her, making it plain that he had no intention of believing a word she said.
The picture was of the two of them in Cambrelli’s just a few nights before. And it had been taken in the moment that she had leaned forward, stretched out a hand to touch him. She hadn’t actually made contact at the time, but from the angle the photograph had been taken it looked as if she had. And in the way their heads were inclined towards each other, eyes locked, seeing nothing else, no one else, the picture seemed to tell a story. A totally inaccurate story, but one that was encapsulated in the headline that ran along the top of the page.
‘Together again!’ it read, and the rest of the short article interpreted the scene in the way that she supposed it must have looked to an outsider. The sexy Greek billionaire and his marriage-shy ex-fiancée seemed to be back together, it claimed. They had met for a secret tryst in a down-market restaurant where they’d appeared to be getting closer by the second.
‘Well, I don’t see why you’re so angry that we were seen together. I mean…’
Desperate to lighten the atmosphere, she tried a flippant shrug and knew immediately that she’d hit the wrong note.
‘Look, it’s not as if you really have a fiancée who would be worried or hurt by it.’
‘Do you think that I give a damn about that?’
Sadie had no answer for him. Instead, she was busy trying to work out just what had happened.
‘The storm…’ she said slowly as realisation dawned. ‘There was a storm that night, and what I thought was lightning…’
‘Was in fact the paparazzo you had tipped off that we would be there.’
‘What? No—of course not! How could you think that I would do that? Why would I do that?’
‘Two words,’Nikos stated with deadly venom. ‘Thorn Trees.’
‘Th-Thorn Trees?’
Sadie frowned disbelievingly, rubbed hard at her temples where a headache was beginning to form. The abrupt transition from waking up happy and sensually contented to this fraught and tension-filled atmosphere was a terrible shock to her system. And now that Nikos seemed even more aggressive and antagonistic she was finding it even harder to think straight.
‘I don’t understand—why would this have anything to do with Thorn Trees?’
‘Don’t play games, agapiti mou,’ Nikos scorned savagely. ‘Do you think that I cannot add two and two together?’
‘And come up with five, obviously!’ Sadie flung back. ‘Or more like five hundred. I don’t see how you can make the connection, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
‘Not to me. You’re going to have to explain yourself.’
Nikos flung up his hands in an exaggerated expression of exasperation and his breath hissed in through his teeth in a sigh of dark irritation
‘“I won’t let it happen, Mum,”’ he said suddenly. ‘“I’ve made sure of that. I’ve got everything in hand.”’
For a second Sadie didn’t realise what was happening, couldn’t understand where the words had come from. But then she realised that he was quoting her own conversation with her mother on the phone the day before.
‘I was talking about the wedding planning job I was doing—I thought I was doing—for you.’
Her legs felt distinctly unsteady beneath her so she pulled out the chair from the desk and rested her hands on the back of it, letting it support her as she faced him.
‘I don’t know what else you think I had planned.’
The furious glare Nikos shot her told her that he still believed she knew exactly what he was saying, but she refused to be intimidated by it, staring him out though it took all her courage to do so. Eventually he raked both hands through his hair again and muttered something dark and hostile in thickly accented Greek.
‘The dinner at Cambrelli’s was after you came to my office to ask—to beg—for a way of staying in Thorn Trees.’
‘I know. And after you refused to help at all.’
‘Exactly. In response to which you said that you would do anything—anything at all—if it meant you could stay in the house.’
The realisation of the truth hit her in the face like a slap, and she was so very grateful for the fact that she was supporting herself on the back of the chair as the shock of it made her head spin nauseously.
‘You really believe that in order to get what I want I alerted the press to the fact that we were meeting—gave them a photo opportunity?’
The swift, sharp inclination of his dark head to one side was Nikos’s silent acknowledgement that she was on the right track. But it still didn’t make any sense that she could see.
‘But I don’t understand—why would that help me twist your arm over Thorn Trees?’
‘Because we had been seen together. Because it was assumed—implied—that our relationship was back on.’
‘But it isn’t—wasn’t…’
Which did she mean? Which was right? She really didn’t know.
‘We knew that. No one else. And not knowing that, how would it have looked if it became known that I had taken possession of Thorn Trees after all. That I had thrown my fiancée’s mother and little brother out of their home? Perhaps out of spite for the fact that you had refused to get back with me again…’
‘You think that I would have used this picture as some sort of moral blackmail—a bargaining tool to get what I wanted?’
‘Why not? It is a technique worthy of your father at his best—or do I mean his worst? He would be proud of you, Sadie mou. You have clearly learned a great deal from him.’
‘I’ve learned nothing!’
Raising her voice like this was probably a big mistake, but to be honest she didn’t really care. She wanted to make her point as emphatically as she could.
‘I’ve learned nothing from my father—and I wouldn’t want to! The cold-blooded way he went about everything appalled me. I hated it. My father thought he could run people’s lives—rather like you, in fact. It made my life a misery—my mother’s too—and everyone else’s around us!’
‘And you expect me to believe that?’
‘Do you know what?’
Sadie flung up her arms now, in a gesture that was very similar to the one that Nikos had used a few moments earlier—and expressing the
