bundle of rampant nerves all of a sudden.’ Lounging back in a disturbing attitude of fluid relaxation, Nik surveyed her with unashamed satisfaction and a sardonic smile, his aggression cloaked, his temper back under control. ‘So where is that certificate?’
Her fingernails clenched painfully into her palms, etching purple crescents on the tender flesh. She needed that pain to be assured that Nik was still talking in the same nightmare fashion that he had been employing inside that suffocating little room. ‘I’ve already told you that I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Well, if you didn’t know you know now and I want an answer.’
‘I can’t believe my father was a blackmailer—’
‘Dirty, isn’t it?’ Nik treated her to a scrutiny empty of even the tiniest vein of compassion. ‘But then he was a professional of the very highest quality. His field was the rich and famous and the skeletons he dug out of closets had to be really juicy ones. He was very good at what he did,’ Nik drawled impassively. ‘He never milked his victims totally dry. He never drove anyone to the brink of trying to kill him. He made them pay for so long and then he let them off the hook but he kept the evidence of their misdeeds to protect himself. He made a fortune...’
‘I won’t believe it!’ Leah slung back shakily. ‘I won’t believe any of this!’
‘Do you think he kept pornographic pictures in that box just for fun?’
Leah’s stomach curdled. She lowered her pounding head.
‘Now if he took the trouble to retain a copy of the juicy skeleton he trailed out of my family closet—’ Nik’s deep voice held a renewed edge of harshness ‘—he also kept the original of the certificate, and since I have exhausted every other avenue it is obvious to me that he must have given it to you.’
‘He didn’t give anything to me!’ There was a quiver of hysteria in her tremulous response. She was in shock—deep shock—and in no state to combat his continuing pressure for her to produce something that she had not even known existed and certainly didn’t have.
‘You can’t hold it over me. Just try and I will break you...’
‘You’re crazy!’ she suddenly sobbed.
‘This far, I have been remarkably kind and patient. I have been on a leash for five years,’ Nik grated in an embittered undertone. ‘I was only safe as long as I stayed married to you. I thought you might run home to Daddy. But you never did and one thing did become clear to me, gruesomely clear over the years. You are in love with me—’
‘What?’ Leah interrupted shakily.
‘You are obsessed with me. Do you think I don’t know this?’ Nik sent her a shimmering look of contempt. ‘Any normal woman would have left me by now and given up all hope of having her love returned...but not you! You stayed the course, loyal to the bitter end, obscenely faithful and well-behaved, giving me no excuse to complain of the devil’s bargain I made!’
‘Faithful’? Hysteria was tearing at her convulsing throat. Dear heaven, he actually believed what he was saying! Nik believed that she loved him. He thought she had stayed because she loved him. Paul’s name hovered on the very tip of her tongue but sixth sense warned her not to muddy the waters further. One thing at a time...only which? she wondered wildly. Life as she knew it had been shattered in the space of a few hours.
‘I am not in love with you,’ she murmured with as much dignity as she could contrive, her teeth gritting behind her peach-tinted lips. Absolute humiliation engulfed her as she appreciated that all along Nik had been thinking that his neglected, unwanted wife was just dying of love for him in spite of his complete indifference towards her. The ego he must have...the utter, unashamed conceit.
‘Listen, you’re talking to the guy who was your seventeenth birthday present!’ he slung back with savage derision.
‘I b-beg your pardon?’
‘Did you pick me out of some society magazine? Or did you see me in the flesh first? Did you take one look and rush to Daddy and say, “Daddy, this is the one I want!”?’
He was serious. He was actually serious. Her lower lip had parted company from the upper, a hectic pink firing her cheeks to dispel her previous pallor. ‘You have to be out of your mind!’
‘We are going to have this conversation. I have waited five years to stage it!’ Nik asserted, skimming her with glittering dark eyes. ‘All I know is that dear Max did your dirty work for you. I was hunted down like an animal—’
‘You are an animal...an insult to the species!’ Leah abruptly burst out. ‘And your conceit is staggering!’
‘Cristo...my perfect lady of a wife can actually raise her voice,’ Nik drawled, surveying her with flaring dark eyes. ‘You don’t like the truth. It hurts your pride. But I know I was trapped quite deliberately. I didn’t even know who your father was that first time I came to the house. I was lured there by a third party, offering me a business proposition. And your father just so happened not to be available when I arrived.
‘But, lo and behold, you were. Romantically tending flowers in the conservatory, wearing something understated and white, literally armed to the teeth with virginal wiles...Theos, I remember it so well.’
‘It wasn’t like that!’ she gasped in outrage.
‘Any hot-blooded Greek would have looked twice and lingered,’ Nik told her with scorn. ‘And there you were, all shy smiles and blushes, eating me up with those big blue eyes as if you hadn’t had a square meal in a week!’
‘Stop it!’ Leah hissed, her voice breaking.
Nik studied her with unyielding derision, his beautiful mouth twisting. ‘So I was invited to dinner and you played the piano like a concert pianist and sang like an angel. Your every cultured virtue was paraded for my philistine benefit and somehow business never came into it. It might interest you to know, pethi mou, that I only had two questions I wanted answered that night but couldn’t ask—’
‘Really?’ Leah was staring blankly into space, every ounce of her remaining self-discipline directed at rescuing her shattered composure and combating the painful tidal wave of memories threatening to assail her. Two very different people...one encounter...such differing recollections of the same event.
‘Were you over the age of consent? And did Daddy intend to protect you from the big bad world out there and sexual predators like me? Marriage was not, nor would it ever have been, on my mind.’
Nausea stirred inside her, and a bitter tide of mortification she could not withstand followed in its wake.
‘Whose idea was it that I stay to dinner?’
Leah froze.
‘I thought so,’ Nik breathed. ‘Your idea. You told him you wanted me and that was that. He went digging and he dug up something that only two people alive knew about and neither of them would ever have talked about it!’
‘What did he dig up?’ she heard herself whisper helplessly.
‘You know...Max had plenty of warning that he was on borrowed time. He didn’t go to his grave without passing that
