said that I successfully avoided…consummating our marriage…’
Eggs could have fried on Prudence’s hot cheeks. She could not believe that, eight years after the event, she had got so upset that she had sunk to the level of actually throwing that humiliating fact at him.
Scorching dark golden eyes locked to her discomfited face. ‘Are you saying that nothing happened between us on our wedding night? Nothing…at all?’
‘I hardly think that can be news to you,’ Prudence muttered, ducking her head down, talking to her toes.
Rage roared through Nik’s lean, powerful frame like a flaming fireball. He felt light-headed with the force of it. In all his life he could never recall being so angry. Yet at the same time what he had just found out banished the dark spectre of guilt that had dogged him for so many years. He had not touched her in anger or in desire on their wedding night. He felt amazingly liberated by that knowledge. With a swift jerk of his head he dismissed the waiter entering with a laden trolley. Closing his hand over Prudence’s, he pulled her out of the room in his imperious wake. An unexpected emergency, he told the hotel manager. His bodyguards bringing up the rear and depriving them of privacy, he headed back out to the helicopter, still without offering Prudence a word of explanation.
What’s happening? Where are we going? What about lunch? Why are you acting like this? All those questions flashed through her head but caution kept her silent. Had he just flipped at the reminder that their wedding night had been the non-event of the decade? But it didn’t fit his character; the Nikolos Angelis she had always known was a lot cooler than that.
Back at the farmhouse, Nik thrust wide the front door and strode into the sitting room. His stunning eyes welded to her in a blaze of wrath. ‘Do you realise that for eight years I’ve been blaming myself for something that never happened?’
Prudence gazed back at him, her brow furrowed with confusion. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. What have you been blaming yourself for?’
Nik strode forward, dominating the room with the strength of his sheer presence and size. ‘When I woke up the morning after our wedding, I was naked—’
‘Your friends did that—’
‘The bed had been stripped and remade…’
‘You asked me for a drink of water and I spilt it all over the bed, so I changed it.’ Prudence was frowning. ‘Are you saying you were too drunk that night to remember anything the next day?’
‘It’s still a blank. I don’t remember the evening part of the reception or anything until late the next morning. I had a complete blackout…I told you that at the time.’
Prudence looked away, tension thrumming through her. The room felt suffocatingly warm and she pulled open the patio door to let cooler air flow in from the terrace outside. ‘I assumed that was just an excuse, something you were just saying to cover up—’
‘Why would I lie?’ Nik incised curtly.
She heaved a rueful sigh. ‘Because people do when they’ve taken too much alcohol—’
‘By all accounts your mother had a problem telling the truth sober or under the influence. So don’t compare us.’
‘You’re not being fair to her when you say that.’ But Prudence was painfully aware that Nik and her mother had mixed like oil and water. Trixie had bitterly resented her daughter’s refusal to profit from her marriage into the wealthy Angelis clan and accept an allowance from Nik. Her mother’s acid comments when Nik visited had led Prudence to suggest that she see Nik in London instead.
Nik rested grim, dark golden eyes on her. ‘I wasn’t lying to you when I said I had a blackout—’
‘That may be the case,’ Prudence conceded reluctantly. ‘But I didn’t know you well enough then to be able to tell the difference.’
His burning anger undimmed, Nikolos stepped back from her and swung away, tension emanating from him in waves. ‘The day after our wedding you shrank away from me,’ he breathed thickly. ‘You wouldn’t meet my eyes. You couldn’t even bear me to touch your hand—’
‘I just don’t want to talk about this!’ Prudence exclaimed, emotion whipping up a storm inside her because she was already recalling her anguished sense of rejection that day. She had learned to live with it but she still despised herself for the love that had cost her so dear.
Nik swung back to her, astonishingly fast and light on his feet for all his size. ‘Tough,’ he pronounced. ‘You’re going to talk about it. I’m not tiptoeing round your strait-laced notions of sexual propriety this time around.’
Utterly off-balanced by his aggressive stance and his hostility, Prudence drew in a quivering breath. ‘I would suggest that the practice of propriety is not one of your skills—’
‘You throw it up like a barrier between us.’ Nik strolled almost lazily round her, brilliant dark eyes watching the way sunshine lit up the lighter streaks of gold and amber in her hair while he wondered when he had last seen hair that natural and abundant. ‘But I won’t tolerate that again—’
Oddly uneasy with the way he was watching her, Prudence was standing as straight and stiff as a board. ‘I don’t want to discuss—’
‘What about what I want and need?’ Nik shot back at her, hard as a diamond cutting through steel. ‘You still speak as if I chose to get drunk that night. My drink was spiked—’
‘So you said at the time.’ Prudence was keen to get the discussion over with, since it seemed there was no hope of silencing him.
Nik bit out an incredulous laugh. ‘You didn’t believe that either, did you?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘But it was the truth. Someone spiked my drink with a drug. I can only believe it was someone’s idea of a joke but it wasn’t very funny for either of us,’ Nik pronounced harshly. ‘It ruined our wedding, humiliated me and made trouble between us.’
Even though Prudence was now prepared to accept that he had been telling the truth, she turned her head away. She was very pale. All the wedding guests had known why Nik was marrying her and he had come in a good deal of sympathy. As the outsider and the grandchild of an unpopular man, she had been despised. But had drugging Nik into a state of unconsciousness on his wedding night been intended as a joke? Or as a favour to him? Certainly, Nik had been in no condition to act the bridegroom. Some might well have assumed that that would be a welcome escape from an unpleasant task when the bride was plain and unattractive. She was convinced that the stifled sniggers of amusement that she had heard that night would live with her to her dying day.
‘I was more humiliated than you were,’ she muttered in a rush, swallowing hard, but it was no use: she just could not keep the tears from hitting the backs of her eyes and threatening to overflow.
In a movement that took Nik by surprise she spun round and walked hurriedly out into the garden. She came to a halt below the apple trees and dragged in a great gulp of fresh air, fighting for her composure.
‘How do you make that out?’
Startled, Prudence whirled round. Nik was on the terrace. Raw pain sliced
