and she certainly wasn’t going to stay around to make sure everything was put neatly in the case. As long as she emptied the room and got out of here, that was all that mattered. She didn’t even expect to see Nikos again.
So it was a shock to her when, after a brief knock, the door swung open and Nikos came into the room. Sadie’s heart jolted against her ribs at the sight of him. Just for a moment she couldn’t stop herself from wondering…
But, no, of course he hadn’t come upstairs to try and persuade her not to leave, or even to talk to her. Instead, his face more shuttered and closed off than ever before, his eyes hooded, he waved a hand towards the case that she had just fastened where it lay on the bed.
‘This ready?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’ll take it down for you.’
So he had come to help her on her way. To make sure that she left the villa as speedily as possible. At least she didn’t feel she had to thank him for his consideration.
Instead she grabbed her handbag and jacket and followed Nikos down the stairs to the hall. No taxi, Sadie noted. Obviously it hadn’t yet arrived. She just wished it would hurry up and get here. Every moment that she had to stay seemed to be dragged out beyond endurance, stretching her strength to its limits.
‘You’ll need these.’
Nikos was holding something out to her. Her laptop and her mobile phone. It was as she took the latter, preparing to drop it into her bag, that realisation dawned with a kick of shock.
‘My mother!’
In the heady intoxication of the previous afternoon and night, the shock to the system that this morning had become, she had forgotten to phone and check how her mother was. And now, checking her phone, she saw that she had forgotten to charge it up too. The battery was completely dead.
‘Use the phone in the office.’
Nikos’s voice make her start, glancing up at him with wide startled eyes.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure. Do you think that the price of a phone call bothers me?’
The office was just as they had left it, the newspaper still lying opened on the surface of the desk. But somehow it was the other, earlier time they had been in there that now burned in Sadie’s mind. She couldn’t push from her thoughts the memory of how she had been half on and half off that polished surface, her clothes wildly disordered and her senses spinning off into ecstasies as she clung to Nikos’s powerful form, her mouth melded to his.
Feeling the fiery colour rush up into her cheeks at just the thought, she grabbed at the phone in a fury of embarrassment. But just as she did so Nikos’s hand came down on top of hers, making her start as the heat of his skin burned into hers.
‘One thing,’ he said abruptly, his voice harsh. ‘This feud stops now. Here. It’s over.’
‘Do you think that I would say something to my mother that would incite that appalling hatred all over again? I just want to put it all behind me.’
She knew that the way she snatched her hand out from under his looked antagonistic, even hostile, but she felt as if her fingers might actually be scorched by the touch of his, so that she would branded for life if she didn’t pull away.
Luckily Sarah was back on good form again, so the phone call to her mother took only minutes. Feeling both relieved and ill at ease, Sadie carefully replaced the receiver, glancing at the clock as she did so.
‘What time is the taxi coming?’
‘It isn’t,’ Nikos stunned her by saying. ‘At least not yet. We still need to talk.’
‘Didn’t you say everything? No?’
She was stunned to see him shake his dark head. But then she thought she saw where he was going with this. The conversation she had just had with her mother.
‘I know I didn’t tell her—and I’m sorry. I couldn’t do it like that, over the phone. But I promise you’ll get the house back. We’ll be out of there before you blink. We’ll…’
The words faded into oblivion as some subtle change in his expression told her that that was not what this was about. He wasn’t angry that she hadn’t told Sarah they had to leave Thorn Trees. There was something else.
‘Nikos…’
‘Tell me about your mother.’
It was the last thing she had expected, and she knew that her consternation must show on her face as she stared at him.
‘Tell me about your mother,’ Nikos repeated. ‘It seems to me that your problems with her are at the bottom of this situation. I know the signs.’
‘What signs?’
‘Tell me about your mother.’
He was clearly not going to concede an inch on this. And what could it hurt to tell him now? He had said the feud was over. She prayed that, for her mother’s sake, he had meant it.
‘She’s ill,’ Nikos said now.
‘How did you…? Well, yes. She’s—emotionally fragile. If you must know, she’s agoraphobic—desperately so. She hasn’t been out of the house in years. Not since George was born.’
She glanced nervously at Nikos, watching for his reaction. If he so much as looked shocked…
But Nikos simply nodded, his face calm, his expression attentive. With an elegant economy of movement he perched on the edge of the desk, one leg still resting on the floor, and waited.
‘She—she had a breakdown after George was born—terrible postnatal depression combined with…with…’
‘With the fact that her baby was not your father’s,’ Nikos put in, making Sadie blink in astonishment.
‘How did you know?’
‘It’s the only thing that makes sense—all the secrecy about the child, the way your father behaved. Like a man betrayed. A man out to make the world pay for what had happened to him.’
‘That was just how it was.’ Sadie nodded sadly, remembering the dreadful fights, the constant yelling and screaming.
‘Why didn’t your mother leave him? Had her lover abandoned her?’
‘He was dead. He died in an accident just before Mum found that she was pregnant. That was when my father found out too—and, well, everything together was just too much.’
‘Did you ever find out who she had been seeing?’
‘No. She would never say. And my father had made her promise that she never would. That was his condition for letting her stay. For not divorcing her. The only thing she ever told me was that he—her lover—drowned in a boating accident.’
‘Over five years ago?’
