in freely.
When she blinked a moment later, Nikos was holding a glass of water just in front of her. She took it and drank gratefully, her throat parched.
‘It is not a difficult equation. Marriage to me in exchange for a sum of money that will answer your father’s debts.’
‘That makes no sense,’ she contradicted flatly.
‘No?’
‘No!’
It seemed like the right reaction. It was an absurd proposal, after all. Wasn’t it? She should have felt panicked by the very idea. And perhaps a part of her did. This was the man who had disappeared from her life but never fully from her heart.
But panic and wariness were only tiny components of her emotional tangle. Hope and an intense flare of passionate resonance also filled her.
‘Marriage...’ Her heart squeezed. Her words were a whisper. ‘Marriage...is for people in love. That’s not us. How can you be so cavalier about it?’
He took a step closer, curling his fingers around the glass. Instead of taking it from her he kept his hand over hers. Electricity sparked along the length of her arm, shooting blue fire through her body.
‘Call it...righting a wrong,’ he said darkly, his eyes scanning her face with hard emotion. ‘Or repaying a debt.’
Her stomach rolled.
‘Your father paid me a considerable sum to get out of your life six years ago.’
Her mouth formed a perfect ‘o’ and she gasped in surprise. He gathered she hadn’t known that little piece of information. It didn’t make him proud, but he enjoyed seeing her sense of betrayal and outrage before she schooled her features once more. Her mask was excellent, though the more tightly she held on to it the more he wanted to force her to drop it. To shock her, surprise her, make her feel so strongly that she could no longer remain impassive.
He put his thumb-pad over her lower lip, remembering how soft they were to kiss.
‘I didn’t know.’ Her eyes were earnest and it didn’t enter his mind to doubt her.
‘No.’ He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t necessary, in any event. He obviously didn’t realise that you had already conclusively ended things.’
Marnie’s heart squeezed. ‘I had no choice.’
‘Of course you had a damned choice.’ He controlled his temper with effort. ‘You could have told him that you’d fallen in love with me. That no amount of comment about the fact that I didn’t live up to his exalted expectations would change how you felt about me. You could have told him to shove his snobbery and his stupidity. You could have fought for what we were—as I would have.’
She sucked in a deep breath. The pain was as fresh in that instant as if it was six years ago. She ached all over. ‘You know what we’d been through.’ She squeezed her eyes shut. ‘What my family had lost. I couldn’t hurt him. I had to choose between him and...what I felt for you.’
‘And you chose him.’ His stare was filled with a startling wave of resentment. ‘You switched something in here—’ he lifted a finger to her chest, pointing at her heart ‘—and that was it. It was over.’
She swallowed convulsively. It had been nothing like that. He made it sound easy. As if she’d simply decided to forget Nikos and move on. But she hadn’t. She’d agonised over the decision.
She’d tried to explain to her parents that she didn’t care that Nikos didn’t have money or come from one of the established families they approved of. But arguments had led to the unsupportable—her mother in tears, her father furious and not speaking to Marnie, and the certainty that they just wanted Libby back—perfect Libby—to make good choices and be the daughter they were proud of.
‘In any event, the financial...compensation for leaving you helped to soften the blow. At first I swore I wouldn’t take it. But then...’
He spoke with gravelled inflection, sucking Marnie back to the present.
‘I was so angry with you, with him. I took it and I told myself I’d double it—just to prove him wrong. To prove a point.’
Marnie’s cheeks were flushed. His hand moved to cup her face. She could have pulled away, but she didn’t. ‘I think you did more than that.’
His smile was grim. ‘Yes.’
So Arthur had given her boyfriend money to get out of her life? A chill ran the length of her spine. It seemed like a step too far. Pressuring her to end it was one thing, but actually forcing Nikos out?
‘I’m sorry he got involved like that. It wasn’t his place to...to pay you off.’
‘Not when you’d already done his bidding,’ Nikos responded with a lift of his shoulders. ‘Your father forbade you from seeing me and, like a good little Lady Heiress, you jumped when he clicked his fingers.’
‘Don’t call me that,’ she said distractedly, hating the tabloid press’s moniker for her.
It wasn’t that it was cruelly meant, only that they mistook her natural reserve for something far more grandiose: snobbery. Pretension. Airs and graces. The kind of aristocratic aspirations that Marnie had never fallen in line with despite the value her parents put on them. The values that had been at the root of their disapproval of Nikos.
‘So this is revenge?’ she murmured, her eyes clashing fiercely with his. Pain lanced through her.
‘Yes.’
‘A dish best served cold?’ She shook her head sadly, dislodging his hand. ‘You’ve waited six years for this.’
‘Yes.’ He brought his body closer, crushing her with his strong thighs, his broad chest. ‘But there will be nothing cold about our marriage.’
Desire lurched through her. The world began to spin wildly off its axis. ‘There won’t be a marriage,’ she said, with a confidence that was completely forged. Already the options were closing in around her. ‘And there certainly won’t be...what you’re...suggesting.’
‘What’s the matter, agape mou? Do you worry that we won’t still feel as we did then?’
He ground his hips against her and she groaned as sensations that had long since been relegated to the past flared in her belly. Of their own volition her fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt, the warmth from his chest a balm to her fraught nerves.
‘Do you remember how I respected your innocence?’ He brought his mouth close to hers, so that his words were a breath on her lips. ‘How I told you we should wait until we were married, or at least engaged?’
Shame, desire, misery and despair slid through her like a headless snake, twisting and writhing in her heart. She pulled her lower lip between her teeth and nodded once.
‘How, even though I had kissed your body all over, and you had begged me to take you, I insisted that I wanted to wait? Because I thought I loved you and that it mattered.’
He
