‘Get yourself another house, Sadie,’ Nikos commanded. ‘Nothing else is on offer.’
‘I don’t want another house—I want…’
I want Thorn Trees was all she had to say. And then he would ask her why.
And if she answered with the truth, how would he react? Would he sympathise, as the Nikos she’d thought she had known all those years ago would have sympathised? Or would the Nikos he was now see yet another opportunity to further deepen his revenge against the family who had ruined his father and taken almost everything from him?
Not knowing whether telling him the truth would help or simply put another weapon into his hands, she swallowed hard against the uncomfortable dryness of her throat.
‘Look…’
Her voice croaked embarrassingly.
‘Do you think I could have a coffee or something? Even some water?’
Seeing the look he gave her, she felt her heart clench at the savage contempt that burned in his eyes.
‘Of course not,’ she commented bitterly. ‘That would eat into the paltry five minutes you’ve allotted me. It’s all right.’
Despair blurred her eyes, tiredness making the room seem to swing round her. Why didn’t she just admit defeat, give up and go home? But the memory of her mother’s face as she’d left the house was there, urging her to try again. Sarah needed a home and so did little George. And right now Sadie was their only chance of keeping the house.
‘Here…’
The abrupt word made her start, jump back slightly. Nikos sounded suddenly so very close. Disturbingly so. She blinked hard to clear her vision and found herself staring at a glass filled with water, bubbles rising inside, beads of moisture sliding down the sides. Feeling as she did, it had the effect of discovering a cool oasis in the centre of a blazing desert.
‘Thank you.’ It was genuinely grateful.
Reaching out a hand to take the glass from him, she misjudged the distance, the right approach, and found that although she aimed to grasp it at the base, well below his hand, in fact she closed her fingers over his, feeling their strong warmth in contrast to the cold hardness of the glass.
‘I’m sorry!’
A sensation like the shock from a bolt of lightning shot up all the nerves in her arm, so that she wanted to snatch her hand away, and yet at the same time it seemed that the sudden heat had welded their fingers together, so she couldn’t peel hers away without a terrible effort.
Nikos seemed to have no such problem, though his eyes held hers, darkly mesmeric, as he adjusted his hold on the glass, eased his hand away, waiting just a moment to make sure that she had a good grip before he finally let his arm drop to his side.
Still with their eyes locked together, Sadie lifted the glass of water to her parched lips, swallowed a mouthful, finding it suddenly intensely difficult to force the cool liquid past the disturbing knot that seemed to have closed off her throat.
She wished he would look away, and yet at the same time she knew that she would feel lost and strangely bereft if he did.
‘Thank…’
Her voice failed her, seeming to shrivel in the heat of that intent gaze. Something had happened to his eyes, so that the colour of the iris seemed to have disappeared and there were just the deep dark pools of his widened pupils, edged only at the rim with burning molten bronze.
Almost snatching at the glass, she drank again, gulping down water that did nothing to cool the sudden heat that had flooded her body or ease the sudden heavy pounding of her heart.
‘Thank you.’
At least her voice sounded stronger now, without that appalling crack in the middle that gave away far too much of what she was feeling.
She held out the glass to him, expecting him to take it back, check his watch again to see just how long of her allotted time she had left. But instead, to her total shock, he ignored the gesture and, extending one long, tanned finger, reached out to touch it to her cheek just below the corner of her right eye. Instinctively Sadie flinched and would have backed away, but once more something in that intent expression caught and held her frozen where she was.
‘Tears?’ he said on a softly spoken note of blank disbelief. ‘Tears—for a house!’
Tears?
Sadie’s hand flew up to her face, the backs of her fingers brushing her cheek to discover the shocking truth of his words. Tears that she had been totally unaware of having shed had slipped onto her skin, moistening her eyelashes. But even as she recognised that they were there, she looked deep into Nikos’s darkly assessing gaze and knew a terrible sense of despair as she acknowledged that he couldn’t be more wrong about the reason why they were there.
‘Not just a house.’
Had she said the words aloud or just heard them inside her head? She couldn’t tell, only knew that they blazed so hard they seemed to be etched into her thoughts in letters of fire.
Not just the house—not even though it was the home that she loved, that her mother needed. It wasn’t anything to do with Thorn Trees or even her angry frustration at not being able to persuade Nikos round to her way of thinking that was twisting a brutal knife in her devastated heart. Instead it was the sudden terrible sense of loss that she’d known in the moment she’d looked into Nikos’s eyes as he came close to her.
She’d armoured herself against this meeting. Told herself that what she had once felt for him was all over, that time had healed the scars and put a distance between her and the love she had once felt for this man. That his final betrayal and the way he had behaved since, the terrible revenge he had exacted so cold-bloodedly, had left her immune to him, not even hatred surviving of the onslaught of feelings she had been through.
But if this was immunity, then she would hate to have to try and face a fully developed fever! Her whole body was fizzing with awareness, coming to burning life in response to just that one, tiny touch.
No—not just the touch. She was responding to the look in his darkened eyes, the scent of his skin, the sound of his voice, even of his soft breathing, his very presence. Everything about him made her burn as if she stood in the direct line of the sun. And yet, contradictorily, it held her frozen to the spot, unable to move or look away. And hunger, dark and disturbing physical craving, throbbed like a heavy pulse in her blood.
‘It’s not just a house,’ she tried again, hoping to stir him into movement, away from her.
But it seemed that Nikos too had fallen under something of the same spell. After that one harsh question he stood as transfixed as her. His eyes locked with hers, his burning gaze so fixed, so unwavering that it seemed he barely even blinked. And Sadie sensed rather than actually saw the way his long tanned throat moved as he swallowed deeply.
‘Sadie…’ he said at last, his voice seeming to be becoming unravelled at the edges.
And the sound of her name on his lips had the effect of stabbing a stiletto dagger
