don’t see that you owe him anything. In the eyes of the Church and the law, he’s not even your husband,’ Paul persisted impressively.
Leah glanced at her watch and uttered a gasp of dismay. ‘I have to go!’
Paul caught her by the shoulders and kissed her with practised expertise. ‘I’ll phone,’ he promised. ‘Love you, darling.’
Leah fled. It was three blocks to the fashionable hairdressers where she had been booked in for a long session of massage and beauty treatment. She took terrible risks to meet up with Paul and her head told her that the longer she put off asking Nik for a divorce, the more chance there was of her being found out. But, then, what would it really matter?
Nik didn’t care what she did. She saw him maybe once a month when he stopped over in London, sometimes not even that over the past year. He might request that she play hostess for a business dinner, but of late even those requests had been few and far between. If he had to communicate with her, he did so through his staff.
In their entire marriage, Nik had never once taken her out in public. Not for dinner, not to the theatre, not to a party. Nik pursued his glittering social life with other women on his arm...never, ever his wife. He slept in his own wing of the house...and even that handful of nights a year that he stayed under the same roof she had heard him go out late and return after dawn, so those nights didn’t really count either.
For an instant, as she flew through the side-entrance of the hairdressers, she remembered when she had lain awake crying and listening for him, wondering in despair what was wrong with her, what she had done, what she had not done, what she could possibly do to make him notice her and acknowledge her existence. Angrily she thrust the memory away. Time had taken care of that kind of nonsense. The child bride had grown up and wised up.
‘I’m so sorry. I forgot my appointment,’ Leah murmured at the reception desk and as usual she insisted on paying anyway and she tipped as if there were no tomorrow. The proprietor, Charlie, came up to her and offered to fit her in immediately but she sighed and said she was running late and sat down to wait for her chauffeur to draw up outside.
‘Oh, by the way, Mrs Andreakis— ‘ Charlie lowered his head, his beaded locks swinging colourfully ‘— your bodyguard called in with a message for you.’
Leah went rigid, turned white as a ghost.
‘Relax.’ Wry brown eyes met hers. ‘I said you were in the massage-room.’
Leah turned scarlet. ‘Thank you,’ she managed jerkily.
‘I’d better give you the message,’ he whispered. ‘Mr Andreakis is waiting for you at home.’
Nik was what? Nik was waiting for her...Nik who had never waited for her once in five years? Nik was home when he wasn’t due back in London for another fortnight? Involuntarily, Leah shivered, her stomach turning over sickly. For a split-second she was consumed by the sort of panic that made people jump out windows in a fire. Sheer cold terror.
Charlie settled down beside her, his hands planted on his knees. ‘Baby, you’re not cut out for this game you’re playing— ‘
‘I don’t know what you’re— ‘
‘You’ve been coming here every week for five years. And the last couple of months what you’ve been feeling has been just blazing all over your face.’ He sighed. ‘But I don’t want to go down in history as the idiot stupid enough to give Nik Andreakis’s wife an alibi. He’s the kind of guy who probably breaks fingers. I get the shakes just thinking about it.’
Shame washed over her. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘And I’m sorry I can’t be more help because it’s been kinda nice seeing you happy for a change.’
‘Mrs Andreakis...?’
Leah flinched as her bodyguard, Boyce, cast a big, dark shadow over her. As she stood, he cast a suspicious, cold look at Charlie, who had been too physically close to his employer’s wife for his liking.
As soon as the door slammed on the limousine, her composure collapsed. Charlie knew she was seeing someone. Dear God, she felt so humiliated. She also felt guilty as hell. Her hairdresser was afraid of being dragged into a marital furore. Not that there was the slightest chance of that happening when Nik couldn’t give two hoots what she did. But cheerful, wisecracking Charlie, who had laughed her out of many a depression over the years, had been genuinely scared.
Everyone was afraid of Nik. And yet she had never heard him shout. Early on in their marriage Leah had walked in mortal terror of him until it had slowly sunk in on her, with the drip effect of his icy indifference, that she barely existed as a human being on his scale of importance. He had married her to gain the shares her father had signed over to her. She had been part of a business deal, nothing more.
And yet there had been times at the beginning when she could have sworn that Nik looked at her with veiled loathing, when his voice could say the lightest things and sound like a whiplash of naked threat, when his very presence in the same room had made her feel menaced...and that was when she had learnt to hug the background, never draw attention to herself, avoid him whenever possible. She had assumed that he resented having had to marry her to get the shares. Yet divorce had always been within his reach. It was a mystery Leah had yet to fathom out.
And now Nik, who had not varied his schedule in five long, endless years, had come home unexpectedly. That fact returned to haunt her, anxious though she had been to evade it. Her fingers clenched white-knuckled around her bag as she climbed the steps of the vast Georgian terraced house. The unfaithful wife, she thought painfully.
But she wasn’t his wife, not his real wife, she reminded herself, just as she had often done in the weeks since she had met Paul. She should have demanded her freedom a long time ago. But her father would have been outraged and bitterly disappointed.
Leah had spent the first seventeen years of her life pleasing her father, Max, in every way she could. She had done as he advised five years ago. She had married Nik and it had been the biggest mistake of her life. Nik had taken her freedom and given nothing in return. But that time was past, she reminded herself. It was almost two months since her father had died, the heart condition which had endangered his health for years having finally taken its toll.
‘Mr Andreakis is waiting for you in the drawing-room,’ Petros the butler informed her.
Leah hovered, nervous tension biting. As a rule, she didn’t see Nik until he sat down at the dinner-table. The belief that something was wrong attacked her again.
He was standing by the marble fireplace, six feet two inches of overwhelmingly masculine male. Once she had looked at him and her heart had sung, her knees had weakened and her voice had caught in her throat. Now Leah saw him always as if through a glass wall. Learning to detach herself had been lesson one.
Nik Andreakis, the legendary Greek tycoon, possessor of fabled wealth and immense power. From his hand-stitched leather shoes to his fabulously tailored mohair-and silk-blend pearl-grey suit, he was effortlessly elegant, supremely sophisticated. A man to die for, she had thought at seventeen, her impressionable little teeny-bopper heart ready to burst with sheer excitement.
And Nik was a devastatingly handsome male animal, quite stunningly gorgeous by any standards. Thick ebony hair, golden skin, riveting black eyes as dark as night. Wherever he went he was the focus of female attention. And he knew it, was amused
