The Cozakis Bride
LYNNE GRAHAM
A deal with her husband!Olympia has no choice. She must beg Nik Cozakis to reconsider a marriage of convenience, if her mother is to get the medical treatment she needs. Nik agrees, but on his terms: in return for a generous allowance, Olympia must bear him a son and heir.Finally, Nik has both vengeance and his fiancé within his reach. Ten years ago, Nik broke their engagement because Olympia had betrayed him with his best friend. Now he is about to realise how mistaken he was… when he discovers that his bride is a virgin!
is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular and
bestselling novelists. Her writing was an instant
success with readers worldwide. Since her first
book, Bittersweet Passion, was published in 1987, she has gone from strength to strength and now has over ninety titles, which have sold more than thirty-five million copies, to her name.
In this special collection, we offer readers a
chance to revisit favourite books or enjoy that rare
treasure—a book by a favourite writer—they may
have missed. In every case, seduction and passion
with a gorgeous, irresistible man are guaranteed!
LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon
reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.
The Cozakis Bride
Lynne Graham
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ONE
‘YOU have ruined your life just as your mother did,’ Spyros Manoulis condemned.
Olympia studied her Greek grandfather with shuttered eyes the colour of sea jade. She was sick with nerves but she had come on a begging mission. If venting his spleen put the older man into a better mood and made him look more sympathetically on her mother’s plight, she could stand the heat of any attack.
Well-built and fit, for all his seventy-plus years, the white-haired older man paced the lounge of his luxurious London hotel suite, his lined features forbidding. ‘Look at you, still single at the age of twenty-seven! No husband, no children,’ he cited grimly. ‘Ten years ago, I opened my home to you and I attempted to do my best for you…’
As he paused for a necessary breath, broad chest expanding, Olympia knew what was coming next. Beneath the mahogany hair she wore confined in a French plait, her pallor became pronounced.
‘And how was my generosity repaid?’ Spyros was working himself up into a rage at the memory. ‘You brought dishonour on the family name. You disgraced me, destroyed your own reputation and offered unforgivable insult to the Cozakis family—’
‘Yes…’ Olympia was desperate enough to own up to murder itself if it calmed her grandfather down and gave her the chance to plead her mother’s cause.
‘Such a marriage as I arranged for you…and very grateful you were to have Nikos Cozakis at the time! You wept when he gave you your betrothal ring. I remember the occasion well!’
Olympia clenched her teeth together: a necessary self-restraint. Hot, cringing humiliation was eating into her self-discipline.
‘Then you threw it all away in a wanton moment of madness,’ Spyros Manoulis ground out with bitter anger. ‘Shamed me, shamed yourself—’
Olympia whispered tautly, ‘Ten years is a long time—’
‘Not long enough to endow me with forgetfulness!’ her grandfather countered harshly. ‘I was curious to see you again. That’s why I agreed to this meeting when you wrote asking for it. But let me tell you now without further waste of time that you will receive no financial assistance from me.’
Olympia reddened. ‘I want nothing for me…but my mother, your daughter—’
Spyros interrupted her before she could mention her mother’s name. ‘Had my foolish daughter raised you to be a decent young woman, according to our Greek traditions, you would never have brought dishonour upon me!’
At that judgmental assurance, Olympia’s heart sank. So her innocent parent was still to suffer for her daughter’s sins. Squaring her slim shoulders, she lifted a chin every bit as determined as his own. ‘Please let me speak freely—’
‘No, I will not hear you!’ Spyros stalked over to the window. ‘I want you to go home and think about what you have lost for you and your mother. Had you married Nik Cozakis—’
‘I’d have castrated him!’ Olympia’s control over her temper slipped as the older man made it clear that their meeting was already at an end.
Her grandfather’s beetling brows rose almost as high as his hairline.
Olympia coloured. ‘I’m sorry—’
‘At least Nik would have taught you to keep a still tongue when a man is speaking to you!’
Olympia sucked in a deep, steadying breath. He was as mad as fire now. She had done nothing but add fuel to the flames. No doubt she ought to have arrived steeped in sackcloth and ashes and hung her head with anguished regret when he referred to her broken engagement.
Spyros Manoulis moved his hand in a gesture of finality. ‘You could only win my forgiveness by marrying Nik.’
Fierce disappointment filled Olympia to overflowing. ‘Why don’t you just throw in climbing Everest too?’
‘I see you get the picture,’ her grandfather said drily.
But there was a little red devil buzzing about now inside Olympia’s head. ‘If I could get him to marry me, would I still come dowered with the Manoulis empire?’
The older man dealt her a thunderous appraisal. ‘What are you suggesting? Get him to marry you? Nikos Cozakis, whom you insulted beyond belief, who could have any young woman he wanted—’
‘Few young women come with as large a dowry as you offered as a sweetener to the deal over me ten years ago.’
Spyros Manoulis was aghast at her bluntness. ‘Have you no shame?’
‘When you tried to flog me off like one of your tankers, I lost my illusions and my sensitivity,’ his granddaughter asserted curtly. ‘You still haven’t answered my question.’
‘But what is the point of a question that crazy?’ The older man flung both hands up in complete exasperation.
‘I’d just like to know.’
‘I would have signed control of Manoulis Industries over to Nik on your wedding day…and I would still gladly do so, were it possible!’ Weary now, his big shoulders slumping, Spyros vented an embittered laugh at what he saw as a total impossibility. ‘My only desire was to pass on the business I spent a lifetime building into capable hands. Was that so much to ask?’
Olympia’s generous mouth compressed. The longevity of his name in the business world meant so much more to her grandfather than family ties. But then to be fair that was not her gentle mother’s view. Irini Manoulis might long to be reconciled with her estranged father, but the older woman had never blamed him for turning his back on her. However, an increasing sense of despair was creeping over Olympia. Her grandfather was immovable. He had admitted to only seeing her out of curiosity. So why was she still hanging around where she wasn’t welcome?
Olympia walked stiff-backed to the door and then decided to make one last attempt to be heard. ‘My mother’s health is failing—’
Spyros growled something at her in outraged Greek, his refusal to listen instantaneous.
Olympia spun back, sea-jade eyes flashing like gems. ‘If she dies poor and miserable, as she is now, I hope your conscience haunts you to the grave and beyond, because that’s what you’ll deserve!’
For a second, Spyros Manoulis stared at her with expressionless dark eyes. Then he swung away, his broad back stiff as an iron bar.
Leaving her grandfather’s suite, Olympia got into the lift before she slumped. Minutes later, having got herself back under control, she crossed the busy hotel foyer back out into the open air. Maybe she should run really insane and kidnap Nik Cozakis, she thought with enormous bitterness. If she’d had the money she could have hired hitmen to snatch him out of his stretch limo. And she could have personally starved and tortured Nik in some dark, dank cellar with a completely clear conscience. After all, she hated him. She really, really hated him.
Although already wealthy beyond avarice, greed had led Nik at the age of nineteen into getting engaged to a plain, overweight girl who’d had no attraction for him but her value as the promised Manoulis heiress. Nik Cozakis had broken her heart, dragged her pride in the dirt and ultimately ensured that there was no prospect of Spyros ever forgiving either her or her mother.
But then maybe her mother had been born under an unlucky star, Olympia conceded, wincing at the hardness of the pavement beneath shoe soles worn thin as paper with overuse. For the first twenty-one years of her life Irini had been cocooned in a world of wealth and privilege. Then she had made the fatal mistake of falling in love with an Englishman. Meeting with heavy paternal opposition, Irini had fled to London to be with her boyfriend. But the day before their wedding was to take place Olympia’s father had crashed his motorbike and died.
Shortly afterwards, Irini had discovered that she was pregnant. From that point on there had been no turning back: she was expecting a child and she was unmarried. Her only talent a willingness to take any manual work available, Irini had raised Olympia alone. Throughout her childhood, Olympia could only recall her mother with a wan, exhausted face, for Irini Manoulis had never been strong. And the reality was that all those years of taxing physical labour had wrecked what health she did have and weakened her heart.
Once Olympia had been old enough to get a job of her own, matters had improved. For a few years, Olympia recalled with painful regret, they had been happy in a tiny flat which had seemed like a palace to them both. Then, eighteen months ago, the firm where Olympia had worked as a receptionist had gone bankrupt. Since then she had only managed to get temporary employment, and even that had been thin on the ground in recent months. They had had to give up the flat, and the savings which Olympia had painstakingly built up were long since gone.
The council had rehoused them in a tough inner city estate. Her mother was so terrified of the aggressive youths there that she no longer dared to venture out. Olympia had been forced to watch the mother she adored decline before her eyes, growing ever more thin and weak, her brave smiles of cheer pathetic to witness. It was as if Irini Manoulis had given up on life itself.
She was dying, Olympia reflected sickly, dying inch by inch, always talking about the distant past now, because the unlovely present was too much for her weakened spirit to handle. A rundown apartment they couldn’t afford to heat, no telephone, no television, noisy, threatening neighbours and surroundings bereft of all beauty. Nothing, nothing whatsoever to look forward to with the smallest anticipation.
If only Olympia had had the benefit of a crystal ball ten years ago…if only! Would she have made the same decision as she had made then? A despairing laugh was dredged from Olympia. Guilt and all the regret her grandfather could ever had wished on her washed over her now. She would have been married to a billionaire! Long before her health had failed her mother would once again have enjoyed security and comfort. Now, with bitter, realistic hindsight, Olympia knew that had she had the benefit of a crystal ball at the age of seventeen she would have married a monster for her mother’s sake!
So what if Nik had been snogging the face off a gorgeous Italian model not ten feet from her?
So what if Nik had confided in his second cousin, Katerina, that Olympia was, ‘Fat and stupid and sexless, but literally worth her weight in gold!’?
So what if he would have been continually unfaithful throughout their marriage and a total arrogant, loathsome pig to live with?
So what if he had said to her face, without scruple, conscience or decency, the morning after that dreadful night, ‘You’re a slapper! And I, Nik Cozakis, refuse to marry another man’s leavings!’?
Gripped by those painfully degrading recollections, Olympia hovered by a shop window. She knew that right now Nik was sure to be over in London for the same reason as her grandfather was. It had featured in the newspapers: a meeting of powerful Greek tycoons with shared interests in British business. And, unlike Spyros Manoulis, Nik had a massive office headquarters in the City of London, where he very likely was this very minute…
What did she have to lose? He was still single. And Spyros Manoulis never joked about money. Spyros would happily pay millions and millions of pounds to marry her off to Nik Cozakis. Personalities didn’t come into it: primarily it would be the linking of two enormous business empires. And with that size of a dowry still available, even a plain Jane slapper ought to have the gumption to put a late offer on the table! Was she crazy? No, she owed a huge debt to her mother. Irini Manoulis had sacrificed so much to bring her into the world and raise her to adulthood. What had she ever given back?
Olympia squinted at her reflection in the shop window. A dark-haired woman of five foot five inches, clad in a grey skirt and jacket shabby with age. Even on a restricted diet she was never going to be thin. Her shape was lush—horribly, embarrassingly lush. She must have inherited such generous curves from her father’s side, because her mother was slim and slight. Well, she was worth her weight in gold, she reminded herself bracingly. And if there was one thing Nik Cozakis reputedly excelled at, it was ruthlessly exploiting any proposition likely to enrich his already overflowing coffers…
Nik was planning a major deal.
All calls were on hold, with only the direst emergency excuse for an interruption of any kind. So when even the softest of knocks sounded hesitantly on the door of his office his dark head came up, well-defined black brows rising in exasperated enquiry. His British PA, Gerry, hurried to the door, where a whispered exchange took place.
Gerry moved back to his powerful employer’s side. ‘I’m sorry, but there’s a woman asking to see you urgently, sir.’
‘No interruptions, particularly not of the female variety,’ Nik cut in with harsh impatience.
‘She says she’s Spyros Manoulis’s granddaughter, Olympia. But the receptionist isn’t convinced of her identity. I gather the woman doesn’t look like someone you would be acquainted with, sir.’
Olympia Manoulis? Arrested into tangible stillness, Nik Cozakis frowned in silent disbelief. Olympia Manoulis. Rooted deep in his subconscious lurked a tender spot still raw with a rage that had yet to dim. How dared that whore enter his office block and have the effrontery to ask to see him? He plunged upright, startling his staff so much that everybody jumped, and one unfortunate dropped several files.
Striding over to the tall tinted windows like a leopard on the prowl for fresh meat, Nik stilled again. Spyros had sworn he would never forgive her. Spyros was a man of his word. And Nik still pitied the older man, whose deep shame over his erring granddaughter’s behaviour had been painful to witness. His only son had drowned in a yacht race and his daughter had become an unwed mother. Bad blood in that family, Nik’s own father had decided, implying that his headstrong son had had a narrow escape.
Yet still Nik simmered like a boiling cauldron when he recalled the humiliation of being publicly confronted with the fact that his fiancée, his doe-eyed supposedly virginal bride-to-be, had gone out to his car with a drunken friend and had sex with him. It was disgusting; it was filthy. In fact, just thinking about that degrading, utterly inexcusable episode still had the power to make Nik regret that he had never had the opportunity to punish Olympia Manoulis as she had so definitely deserved.
The atmosphere was so explosive that the silence was absolute. His staff exchanged uncertain glances. Gerry Marsden waited, and then slowly breathed in. ‘Sir…?’
Nik wheeled back. ‘Let her wait…’
His PA concealed his surprise with difficulty. ‘At what time will I tell your secretary that you will see her?’
‘No time.’ His eyes cold enough to light the way to Hades, Nik threw back his proud dark head. ‘Let her wait.’
As the hours crept past into the lunch hour, and then on into the late afternoon, Olympia was conscious that quite a few people seemed to pass suspiciously slowly through the impressive reception area and steal a covert glance in her direction.
She held her head high, neck aching from that determined show of indifference. She had her foot in the door, she told herself bracingly. Nik hadn’t had her escorted off the premises. Nik had not flatly refused to see her. And if he was very, very busy, that was only what she had expected, and she could not hope for any favours. Curiosity would eventually penetrate that arrogant, macho and bone-deep stubborn skull of his. Even Nik Cozakis had to be that human.
Despair was the mother of invention, she conceded. Nik Cozakis was literally her last hope. And why should her fierce pride hurt? No false pride had held her mother back from scrubbing other people’s floors so that she could feed and clothe her daughter.
Just before five o’clock, the receptionist rose from behind her desk. ‘Mr Cozakis has left the building, Miss Manoulis.’
Olympia paled to the colour of milk. Then she straightened her stiff shoulders and stood up. She stepped into the lift and let it carry her back down to the ground floor. She would be back tomorrow to keep the same vigil, she told herself doggedly. She would not be embarrassed into retreat by such tactics. But, even so, she was as badly shaken as if she had run into a hard brick wall.
As she stood on the bus that would eventually bring her within walking distance of home, she realised that she had read the situation wrong. Nik was no longer the teenager she had once been so pathetically infatuated with: impatient and hot-tempered, with not a lot in the way of self-control. The eldest son of two adoring parents, he had been the natural leader in his sophisticated social set of bored but gilded youth.
And so beautiful, so heartachingly, savagely beautiful that it must have seemed like a crime to his unlovely friends that he should be matched with an unattractive, plump and charmless bride-to-be…
But now Nik was a fully grown adult male. A Greek male, subtly different from others of his sex. Like her grandfather, he saw no need to justify his own behaviour. There had been no quiet announcement that he was unavailable. He had let her wait and cherish hope. That had been cruel, but she should have been better prepared for that tack.
The scent of cooking greeted Olympia’s return to the flat she shared with her mother. She hurried into the tiny kitchen and watched her mother gather her spare frame and turn with a determined smile to greet her. Her heart turned over sickly at the grey pallor of the older woman’s worn face.
“I thought we agreed that I do all the cooking, Mum.’
‘You’ve been out looking for a job all day. It’s the least that I can do,’ Irini Manoulis protested.
Later, as Olympia climbed into bed, she was consumed by guilt for the evasions she had utilised with her mother. But how could she have told the older woman what she had really been doing all day? Irini would have been upset by the knowledge that her daughter had secretly got in touch with her grandfather, but unsurprised by the outcome. However, an admission that Olympia had tried to see Nik Cozakis would have left her mother bereft of breath and a frank explanation of why her daughter had sought that meeting would have appalled her quiet and dignified parent.
But how much more shattered would her trusting mother have been had Olympia ever told her the whole dreadful truth of what had happened in Athens a decade earlier? Olympia had never told that story, and her awareness of that fact still disturbed her. Then, as now, Olympia had kept her own counsel to protect her mother from needless distress…
The next morning, Olympia took up position in the waiting area on the top floor of the Cozakis building three minutes after nine o’clock.
She made the same request to see Nik as she had made the day before. The receptionist avoided eye contact. Olympia wondered if this would be the day that Nik lost patience and had her thrown out of the building.
At ten minutes past nine, after a mutually mystified consultation with another senior member of staff, Gerry Marsden approached Nik, who had started work as usual at eight that morning. ‘Miss Manoulis is here again today, sir.’
Almost imperceptibly the Greek tycoon tensed and the silence thickened.
‘Have you the Tenco file?’ Nik then enquired, as if the younger man hadn’t spoken.
The day wore on, with Olympia praying that a pretence of quiet, uncomplaining humility would ultimately persuade Nik to spare her just five minutes of his time. By the end of that day, when the receptionist apologetically announced that Mr Cozakis had again left the building, Olympia experienced such a violent surge of bitter frustration that she could have screamed.
On the third day, Olympia felt hugely conspicuous as she stepped out of the lift on to the top floor.
Before leaving home she would have liked to have filled a vacuum flask and made herself some sandwiches, but to have done so would have roused her mother’s suspicions and her concern. Since Olympia had yet to admit to her mother that their slender resources were now stretched unbearably tight. Irini fondly imagined that her daughter bought lunch for herself while she was out supposedly seeking employment.
However, at noon, when Olympia returned from a visit to the enviably luxurious cloakroom on the top floor, she found a cup of tea and three biscuits awaiting her. Her strained face softened with her smile. The receptionist gave her a decidedly conspiratorial glance in return. By then, Olympia was convinced that just about every person of importance in the building had traversed the reception area to take a peek at her. Sympathy was now softening the discomfiture her initial vigil had inspired. Not that it was going to do her much good, she conceded heavily, when Nik obviously had an alternative exit from his office.
At three that afternoon, when the last of her patience had worn away, her desperation started to mount. Nik would soon be on his way back to Greece and even more out of her reach. Olympia reached a sudden decision and got up swiftly from her seat. Hurrying past the reception desk that she had previously respected as a barrier, she started down the wide corridor that had to lead to Nik’s inner sanctum.
‘Miss Manoulis, you can’t go down there!’ the young receptionist exclaimed in dismay.
She would be a loser now whatever she did, Olympia reflected with despairing bitterness. Forcing a confrontation with Nik was the wrong line to take. No Greek male appreciated an in-your-face female challenge. He would react like a caveman, every aggressive primal cell outraged by such boldness.
As she headed for the door at the foot of the corridor, a set of male hands whipped round her forearms from behind and stopped her dead in her tracks.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Manoulis, but nobody goes in there without the boss’s say-so,’ an accented Greek voice spelt out tautly.
‘Damianos…’ Even after ten years Olympia recognised that gravelly voice, and her rigid shoulders bowed in defeat. Nik’s bodyguard, who was built like a tank. ‘Couldn’t you have looked the other way just once?’
‘For your grandfather’s sake, go home,’ Damianos urged in a fierce undertone. ‘Please go home, before you are eaten alive.’
Olympia trembled as the older man’s fingers loosened their hold. But that reluctance on his part to treat her like any other unwanted visitor was Damianos’s mistake. Breaking free without hesitation, she literally flung herself the last ten feet and burst through that door.
There was a blur of movement from behind the desk: Nik rising with startled abruptness at so explosive an interruption.
In the split second that she knew was all she had at her disposal before Damianos intervened again, with greater effect, Olympia parted her lips and breathed rawly, ‘Are you a man or a mouse that you won’t face one woman?’
CHAPTER TWO
FROM behind Olympia, Damianos read Nik’s face and avoided seeing the slight inclination of his employer’s head which signified his own dismissal.
Out of breath, and expecting at any minute to be dragged out again, Olympia focused on Nik Cozakis for the first time in ten long years. Shock shrilled through her. He had got taller, his shoulders wider, and he had been tall and wide even to begin with. Well over six feet, he had towered over his relatives and friends. Now he cast a shadow like an intimidating stone monolith.
Olympia could feel his outrage like a physical entity, churning up the heavy silence, beating down on her in suffocating waves. Man or mouse? A truly insane, derisive opening likely to push the average Greek male to violent response. She marvelled at his self-control, even as she winced at the loss of her own. Had she been a man, Nik would have knocked her through the wall for such an insult.
‘I’m sorry,’ Olympia said, though she wasn’t one bit sorry.
‘Damianos…’ Nik murmured flatly.
The door behind her finally closed.
Olympia stared at him, couldn’t help it. His sheer impact hit her and she reeled back an involuntary step, her tummy full of butterflies, her skin dampening. She took all of him in, all at once, in a single, almost greedy visualising burst. The devastating dark good looks, the raw, earthy force of his sexual aura, the contrasting formal severity of his beautifully cut dark suit. All male, nothing of the boy left but that aching beauty which had once entrapped her foolish heart. And those eyes, amber-gold as a jaguar cat, spectacularly noticeable in that lean, strong face.
‘Why are you humiliating yourself in this way?’ Nik enquired in a drawl as lazy as a hot summer afternoon.
Belatedly, Olympia recognised her disorientation for the weakness it was. Angry dismay trammelled through her. She dredged her dilated pupils from his and stilled a shiver. ‘I haven’t humiliated myself.’
‘Have you not? Were it not for the respect I have for your grandfather, I would have had you forcibly ejected on the first day,’ Nik shared in the same conversational tone.
That dark, deep drawl betrayed no anger, but still a reflexive quiver snaked down Olympia’s taut spinal cord. Colour ran up over her cheekbones. She forced her head high, dared a second collision with those stunning eyes, but was now careful to blank them out. ‘I have a proposition to put to you.’
‘I’m not listening to any proposition,’ Nik asserted drily.
But in spite of that cool intonation the atmosphere sizzled. She could feel goosebumps rising on her arms. She forgot to look through him without focusing and registered that those extraordinary eyes of his were now roaming over her with unconcealed derision. And instantly she became aware of her creased suit, the flyaway tendrils of hair that had dropped round her hot face, indeed of how very, very plain she was. In fact, just plain ugly next to him: Beauty and the Beast with a transfer of sexes.
And it was that harsh, long-accepted reality that hardened Olympia and gave her the backbone she had almost lost. Ten years ago it had broken her heart not to have even a smidgen of the beauty that might have attracted Nik to her. Now, that contemptuous look of his only reminded her of the pain he had caused her.
‘How can you look me in the face?’ Nik growled in sudden disgust.
‘Easily…a clean conscience.’ She flung her head back, challenging him.
‘You’re a little whore,’ Nik contradicted with purring insolence.
Untouched by an accusation so far removed from the truth, Olympia was, however, quite amazed that he still felt a need to abuse her so long after the event. It struck her as almost hilariously ironic that she appeared to have made a bigger impression on Nik with her apparent infidelity than she had ever contrived to make on him as his fiancée.
As a rueful laugh fell from her lips, his darkly handsome features clenched hard. ‘Call me what you like,’ she advised with patent indifference. ‘But I have genuinely come here with the offer of a business deal.’
‘Spyros Manoulis would not employ you as his messenger,’ Nikos derided.
‘Well…in this particular case, of the three of us, it seems that only I have the indelicacy it requires to make this direct approach,’ Olympia informed him in taut and partial apology for what she was about to spring on him. ‘Can’t you just take your mind off what happened ten years ago and listen to me?’
‘No.’
Olympia frowned in honest surprise. ‘Why not?’
Nik studied her with blazing golden eyes full of even greater incredulity.
Refusing to be discouraged, Olympia breathed in very deep. ‘My grandfather still wants you to take over Manoulis Industries. Now, let’s face it…that’s all he ever wanted, and all your father ever wanted was to ensure that you got it. I was just the connecting link…I wasn’t remotely important except as a sort of guarantee of family kinship and mutual trust.’
‘What is this nonsense?’ Nik demanded with raw distaste.
‘I’m stripping matters back to their bones…OK?’
‘No, it is not OK. Get out,’ Nik said flatly.
‘No…no, I am not getting out!’ Olympia’s hands trembled and she clenched them into fierce fists. ‘You’ve had ten years of revenge already—’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he grated.
‘If you marry me, I’ll sign everything over to you…’ Olympia told him shakily.
She really had Nik’s attention now. His brilliant eyes rested on her with a quality of stunned stillness she had never seen etched there before.
‘Not a proper or normal marriage…just whatever would satisfy my grandfather—and he doesn’t give a damn about me either, so he really wouldn’t be looking for much!’ Olympia pointed out, frantically eager to state her case before Nik emerged from what had to be a rare state of paralysis. ‘I’d stay on here in England…all I’d need is an allowance to live on, and in return you’d have the Manoulis empire all to yourself and not even the annoyance or embarrassment of me being around…’
A dark flush of red had now risen to accentuate the prominence of Nik’s fabulous cheekbones. He grated something in guttural Greek.
‘Nik…try to understand that I’m desperate or I wouldn’t be suggesting this. I know you think—’
‘How dare you approach me with such an offer?’ Nik demanded thunderously.
‘I—’
Striding forward, Nik Cozakis fastened powerful hands to her slim forearms before she could back away. ‘Are you insane?’ he questioned rawly. ‘You must be out of your mind to come to me like this! How could you think for one moment that I would marry an avaricious, brazen little tramp like you?’
‘Think business contract, not marriage.’ Although Olympia was shaking like a leaf in his hold, she was determined not to be sidetracked by meaningless personal insults. After all, she didn’t give two hoots what he thought of her.
His outraged amber-gold gaze raked her pale oval face. ‘A woman who went out to a public car park to lift her skirt for one of my friends like a common prostitute picked up out of the street?’
Not having been prepared for Nik to get quite that graphic, Olympia jerked and lost every scrap of colour. She parted tremulous lips. ‘Not that it matters now…but that never happened, Nik.’
He thrust her away from him in unconcealed disgust. ‘It was witnessed. That you should offend me with such an offer—’
‘Why should it be an offence?’ Olympia demanded fiercely. ‘If you could just turn your back on the past, you would see that this is exactly what you wanted ten years ago and more…because I’m not expecting to be your wife or live with you or interfere with you in any way.’
‘Spyros would strike you dead where you stand for this…’
Olympia loosed a shaken laugh. ‘Oh, he would cringe at my methods, but not three days ago he told me that the only way I would ever win his forgiveness would be to marry you…so it’s not like I have a choice, is it?’
‘You made your choice ten years ago in the car park.’
Studying the carpet, Olympia felt drained. She saw the pointlessness of protesting her innocence now when she had failed to do so at the time—when, indeed, silence had been so much a part of her revenge.
Warily, she glanced up again, and noticed in some surprise that his attention was welded to her chest. Lowering her own gaze, she saw that a button had worked loose on her blouse and exposed the full swelling upper curves of her breasts. With unsteady hands, her cheeks hot and flushed, she hastily redid the button. Nik slowly lifted his eyes, inky black spiky lashes low on a glimmer of smouldering gold that entrapped her eyes and burned through her like a blowtorch.
‘I just wish I’d had you first…if I’d had you, you wouldn’t have been desperate enough to go out to that car park.’
‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ she muttered, seriously disconcerted both by that statement and the offensive manner in which Nik was looking her over.
A hard curve to his wide, sensual mouth, he watched her fumbling efforts to tug her jacket closed over her blouse with derisive amusement. ‘I’ll talk whatever way I want to you. Did you think you’d cornered the market on forthright speech?’
‘No, but—’
Nik flung back his handsome head and laughed outright. ‘You thought you could come here and ask me to marry you and get respect?’
‘I thought you would respect what I could be worth to you in terms of financial profit,’ Olympia framed doggedly.
A tiny muscle jerked tight at the corner of his unsmiling mouth. ‘You play with fire and you don’t even know it. How desperate are you, Olympia?’
Her knees were wobbling. Something had changed in Nik. She sensed that, but she couldn’t see or understand what. The atmosphere was so tense, and yet he was now talking with smooth, calm control, and she couldn’t believe that he was still angry. Perhaps he had finally let go of that anger, seeing how irrational it was to still rage about something which had only briefly touched his ego. After all, it wasn’t as though he had cared one jot about her as a person.
‘My mother’s not been well—’
‘Oh, not the sob story, please,’ Nik cut in very drily. ‘What sort of idiot do you take me for?’
Olympia’s hands curled into tight, defensive fists by her sides. ‘Maybe I’m just sick of being poor…what does it matter to you?’
‘It doesn’t.’ Making that confirmation, Nik lounged back with innate poise and grace against the edge of his desk and surveyed her where she hovered tautly in the centre of his office carpet. ‘However, one fact I will acknowledge. You have more nerve than any woman I’ve ever met.’
A little natural colour eased back into Olympia’s drawn cheeks.
‘You must indeed be desperate to approach me with a marriage proposal. I’ll think it over,’ Nik drawled with soft, silken cool.
The rush of hope she experienced left her light-headed.
‘Giftwrapped with the Manoulis empire, you saw no reason why I shouldn’t consider your proposition?’ Nik questioned in smooth addition.
She frowned uncertainly. ‘You’re a businessman, like my grandfather. You would have nothing to lose by agreement, and so much to gain…’
‘So much,’ Nik Cozakis savoured, regarding her with veiled eyes that were nonetheless surprisingly intent on her.
But then he wasn’t really seeing her, Olympia reckoned. He was thinking of the power he stood to gain. Yet the sizzle of unbearable tension still licked at her senses. Her breath shortened in her throat, her heart-rate speeding up. She collided head-on with his steady gaze and the most disturbing sense of dizziness almost overwhelmed her. It vaguely reminded her of the way she’d used to feel around Nik, electrified in all sorts of deeply embarrassing ways by his mere proximity in the same room. But now she put the reaction down to hunger, stress and sheer mental exhaustion, because she wasn’t attracted by him any more. It had only been the initial shock of seeing him again which had discomfited her at the outset of their interview.
‘So where do I contact you?’ Nik enquired.
She stiffened. Her fierce pride was reasserting itself now. There had been nothing personal in the proposal she had made to him: that had been strictly business. But she really didn’t want him to know that she couldn’t even afford a telephone line. Indeed, she couldn’t bear the idea of him finding out just how deep she had sunk into the poverty trap because that felt like a very personal failure. ‘I’ll give you a number but it’s not my own…you can leave a message for me there.’
‘Why the secrecy?’
Olympia ignored the question. After a moment, he extended a notepad and pen to her. She scrawled down the number of the only neighbour she and her mother had become friendly with. Mrs Scott was the middle-aged widow who lived opposite them.
‘I’ll go now, then…’ she said, suddenly awkward again now that she had nothing more to say.
Nik shifted a careless shoulder, signifying his indifference.
And she thought then that he wouldn’t ever use that phone number. Her own shoulders downcurved. Without another word, she walked out of his big fancy office and closed the door with a quiet snap. Damianos was waiting outside, his broad features stiff and troubled.
‘He didn’t eat me alive,’ Olympia announced with a weak but reassuring smile, for she had always liked the older man.
‘He will…’ The bodyguard muttered heavily. ‘But that’s none of my business, Miss Manoulis.’
She reached Reception before her head began to swim and her legs threatened to buckle. She dropped down into a seat and bowed her head, breathing in slow and deep, struggling to get a hold on herself again. It was as if she had used up every resource she possessed. Never had she felt so totally drained. But a minute later she got up, hit the lift button and raised her head high again. She had done what she had to do and she was not about to waste time regretting it.
Before she let herself into the flat she shared with her mother, Olympia called in on Mrs Scott to mention that she might be receiving a phone call. The older woman looked amused when Olympia added with palpable embarrassment that if a call did come, she would be grateful if any message was passed on to her personally, rather than to her mother.
But three days later Nik hadn’t called.
Exactly a week after she had stood in Nik’s office, Olympia was on the way back from posting yet another pile of job applications when she saw Mrs Scott waving to attract her attention from the other side of the road.
Olympia forced a smile onto her downcurved mouth and waited at the lights to cross. She had been thinking how easy it was to fall into the poverty trap and find it all but impossible to climb out again. Did prospective employers just take one look at her less than impressive address and bin her application, writing her off as a no-hoper? It had been ten months since she had even got as far as an interview for a permanent job.
‘That call came this morning,’ Mrs Scott delivered with lively curiosity in her eyes as Olympia drew level with her.
‘What call? Oh…’ Olympia just froze to the pavement.
‘He didn’t leave his name. He just asked me to tell you that he’d see you at eight tonight at his office.’
Olympia tried and failed to swallow, her mind rushing on from shock to register that she couldn’t make any assumption on the basis of that brief a message. It was more than possible that Nik Cozakis simply wanted to watch her squirm while he turned her down flat. ‘Thanks,’ she said tautly, averting her eyes.
‘Job interview?’ the older woman prompted doubtfully.
‘Something like that.’
‘Shameless as it is of me, I was really hoping it was an illicit assignation! You could do with a little excitement in your life, Olympia.’
At that disconcerting statement of opinion, Olympia looked up in frank surprise.
‘I’ll sit with your mother tonight. I know she doesn’t like to be on her own after dark,’ Mrs Scott completed ruefully.
Excitement, Olympia later thought grimly as she teamed a long navy skirt with a loose, concealing cardigan jacket. Nik Cozakis had squashed her girlish dreams flat ten years back. Oh, it had been exciting to begin with, then agonising to sit by on the sidelines and appreciate that, never mind her lack of her looks, she was so colourless to someone like him that he simply forgot she existed.
A fiancé who couldn’t even be bothered making a pass at her! She studied herself in the wardrobe mirror. She looked sensible. She had always looked sensible. Once she had experimented with make-up and clothes and she had been proud of her good skin and clear eyes. After all, who was perfect? Only after that disastrous trip to Greece had Olympia lost every ounce of her confidence…
Every year her mother had sent a Christmas card to her father, Spyros, always enclosing a photograph of Olympia, who had been named for her late grandmother. Her grandfather had not responded but Irini’s diligence had ensured that the older man always knew where they were living. Then out of the blue, when Olympia was sixteen, had come the first response—a terse three-line letter informing them of the death of her mother’s only sibling, Andreas. The following spring an equally brief letter had arrived inviting Olympia out to Greece to meet her grandfather.
‘But he’s not asking you…’ Olympia had protested, deeply hurt on her mother’s behalf.
‘Perhaps in time that may come.’ Irini Manoulis had smiled with quiet reassurance at her angry teenage daughter. ‘It is enough that my father should want to meet you. That makes me very happy.’
Olympia really hadn’t wanted to go, but she had known how much that invitation meant to her mother. And while Irini Manoulis had often talked about how prosperous a businessman Olympia’s grandfather was, Olympia had genuinely not appreciated the kind of lifestyle her mother had once enjoyed until a chauffeur-driven limousine had picked her up at the airport and wafted her out to a magnificent villa on the outskirts of Athens.
On first meeting, Olympia had sensed her grandfather’s disappointment with a granddaughter who had only a handful of Greek words in her vocabulary. And although Spyros spoke fluent English he had been a stranger to her, a stiff and disagreeable stranger too, who had sternly asked her not to mention her mother in his presence. Indeed, within hours of arriving at her grandfather’s home Olympia had wanted to turn tail and run back home again.
The very next day, Spyros had sent her out shopping with the wife of one of his business acquaintances.
‘What a lucky girl you are to have such a generous grandfather!’ she had been told.
Olympia had suppressed the sneaking suspicion that her grandfather was ashamed of her appearance. The acquisition of a large and expensive new wardrobe had been exciting, even if she hadn’t been terribly fussed about the staid quality of those outfits. Nothing above the knee, nothing more than two inches below her throat. It hadn’t occurred to Olympia that she was being carefully packaged to create the right impression.
The following day, Spyros had informed her that he had invited some young people to his home for the afternoon, so that she could have the opportunity to make friends her own age. While Olympia had been agonising over what to wear, a light knock had sounded on her bedroom door. A very pretty brunette with enormous brown eyes and a friendly smile had strolled in to introduce herself.
‘I’m Katerina Pallas. My aunt took you shopping yesterday.’
Her aunt had seemed a pleasant woman, and Olympia had soon come to think of the other girl as her closest friend. She had been grateful for the sophisticated Katerina’s advice on what to wear and how to behave. Katerina had never once so much as hinted that full skirts and swimsuits with horizontal stripes might be less than kind to Olympia’s somewhat bountiful curves. For all her seeming pleasantness, Katerina’s aunt had contrived to buy Olympia a remarkably unflattering wardrobe to wear that summer.
Looking back to those early days in Greece, and recalling how naive and trusting she had been, now chilled Olympia to the marrow. Wolves, who had worn smiles inside of snarls, had surrounded her. When friendship had been offered she had believed it was genuine, and she had accepted everything at face value. She hadn’t known that Spyros was planning to make her his heir. She hadn’t known that the possibility of her marrying Nik Cozakis had been discussed long before she’d even met him…or that others might find that possibility both a threat and a source of jealousy.
A security man let Olympia into the Cozakis building just before eight that evening.
She crossed the echoing empty foyer and entered the lift. After hours, with the lights dimmed, she found the massive office block kind of spooky. It felt strange to walk past the deserted reception desk on the top floor and head straight for Nik’s office without any fuss or fanfare.
Her heartbeat feeling as if it was thudding at the foot of her throat, she raised her hand and knocked on the door before reaching for the handle with a not quite steady hand and entering.
Only the desk lamp was burning. The tall windows beyond were filled with a magnificent view of the City skyline at night. A million lights seemed to twinkle and sparkle, disorientating her. Then Nik Cozakis moved out of the shadows and strolled forward into view. His superb silver-grey suit lent him formidable elegance.
‘Punctual and polite this evening, I note,’ Nik remarked.
A wash of colour stained Olympia’s cheeks. The balance of power had changed. A week ago she had been strengthened by the power of surprise and her own daring, sufficiently desperate not to care about anything but being heard. But all that was past now. She had come here tonight to hear Nik’s answer and she had politely knocked on the door. He knew the difference as clearly as she now felt it. The whip-hand was his.
‘Would you like a drink?’
Olympia nodded jerkily, suddenly keen for him to be otherwise occupied for a minute while she regained her composure.
A faintly amused look tinged Nik’s vibrantly handsome features. ‘What would you like?’
‘Orange juice…anything.’ She heard the tremulous note in her own response and almost winced, her full mouth tightening.
He strolled over to a cabinet, his long stride lithe and graceful. She remembered how clumsy she had once felt around him. Had that been nerves or over-excitement? Right at that moment she was so nervous she could feel a faint tremor in her knees. As he bent his well-shaped dark head over the cabinet the interior light gleamed over his blue-black hair and she relived how those springy strands had once felt beneath her palms. Flinching, she tried to drag her thoughts into order, but her attention only strayed to the bold line of his patrician nose, the taut slant of a clean-cut masculine cheekbone and the hard angle of his jaw.
‘You were always fond of watching me,’ Nik mused lazily as he crossed the carpet to extend a crystal tumbler to her. ‘Like a little brown owl. Every time I caught you looking, you would blush like mad and look away.’
Embarrassed by that recollection, which was way too accurate for her to dare to question it, Olympia managed a jerky shrug. ‘It was a long time ago.’
Nik sank down on the edge of his desk, his attitude one of total relaxation. He saluted her with his glass. ‘You were a class act. I was a hundred per cent positive you were a virgin.’
Suddenly Olympia was feeling uncomfortably warm in her cardigan jacket, and although she wanted to meet his eyes with complete indifference, she was finding that her eyes were unwilling to go anywhere near him. She hadn’t known what to expect from Nik tonight, but she definitely hadn’t expected him to refer with such apparent calm to that long-ago summer.
‘So…’ Nik trailed the word out in his darkly sensual drawl. ‘I have only one question to ask before we get down to business. It’s like a trick question, Olympia—’
Confusion was starting to grip her. ‘I don’t want to hear it, then—’
‘But you have to answer it with real honesty,’ he continued with the same unnerving cool. ‘It would not be in your best interests to lie. So don’t give me the answer you think I want to hear because you might well end up regretting it.’
Her mouth was dry as a bone. She tipped her orange juice to her lips. Her hand was trembling and the rim of the glass rattled against her teeth. The tension was so thick she could taste it. But she couldn’t think straight because Nik Cozakis now, tonight, was not behaving remotely as he had done a week earlier.
‘That night at the club, you may have seen me with another girl…Theos, I hope I’m not embarrassing you with this rather adolescent walk down memory lane,’ Nik murmured in a voice dark and smooth as black velvet as Olympia perceptibly jerked in shock at what he had thrown at her without warning.
‘Why should you be embarrassing me?’ she asked between gritted teeth.
‘Then let me plunge right to the heart of the matter that engages my curiosity even now,’ Nik continued softly. ‘Did you go out to my car with Lukas because you were drunk and distressed by what you may have seen, and did he then take advantage of you in that state? Or…’
Olympia stared fixedly at the desk lamp, outraged resentment and sheer hatred clawing at her. She wanted to toss the remains of her drink in his arrogant face and then hit him so hard, he wouldn’t pick himself up for a month. Ten years on, having been judged and found guilty for a sin she had not committed, why should she admit the agonies that he had put her through that night? Why should she further humiliate herself with that kind of honesty? Where did he get off asking her such questions? He darned well hadn’t asked her them at the time! Nor had there been any reference to the possibility that she might have seen him carrying on with another girl!
‘Or…what?’ she prompted in a hissing undertone.
‘Or…’ Nik responded without the smallest audible hint of discomfiture. ‘Did you go out to my car with him either because you thought you could get away with not being seen or because—’
‘I went out to your car with him because I fancied him like mad!’ Olympia suddenly erupted, provoked beyond bearing by his sardonic probing, her sea-jade eyes hot with defiance and loathing.
Dark eyes with a single light of gold held to her flushed and furious face. His outrageously long, lush lashes lowered, leaving only the dark glimmer of his gaze visible.
Her tummy clenched and she trembled, an odd coldness spreading inside her, as she met those dark, dark eyes. She spun away, shocked at the gross lie she had thrown at him, shocked that even ten years on her own desire for revenge could still burst back into being and send her off the edge into an insane response, for at the exact same moment she recalled exactly why she had come to Nik’s office.
‘You’re just toying with me for your own amusement!’ Olympia flung him an agitated glance of condemnation. ‘You’re going to say no, of course you’re going to say no…I really don’t know why I bothered coming here tonight!’
‘You were desperate,’ Nik reminded her with dulcet cool.
‘Well, why don’t you just say no?’ Olympia was beyond all pretence now, and she didn’t care that she sounded childish. He was winding her up and making a fool of her. She couldn’t wait to get away from him.
Nik rose lithely upright. ‘No need to get so rattled, Olympia,’ he mocked. ‘Why don’t you take that baggy cardy off and sit down?’
Her hot face got even hotter. She was boiling alive in her jacket, but she folded her arms.
Nik laughed with a sudden amusement that she found even more unnerving.
‘What’s so funny?’ she demanded sharply.
‘You always seemed so quiet. I awarded you all these qualities that you never actually possessed.’ His expressive mouth twisted with derision. ‘But now I’m seeing the real Olympia Manoulis. Hot-tempered, stubborn and reckless to the point of self-destruction.’
‘These are hardly normal circumstances. Don’t presume to know anything about me…because you don’t!’ Olympia slung back at him defensively.
‘But if you don’t take the ugly cardy off, I’m going to rip it off,’ Nik spelt out softly.
Olympia backed off a startled step. Only now was it dawning on her that she had never really known Nik Cozakis either. Clashing with brilliant dark eyes, she watched him extend a lean brown hand to receive the jacket, and suddenly it didn’t seem worth arguing about any more. Tight-mouthed, she peeled it off and tossed it to him. ‘You like throwing your weight around, don’t you? I should’ve remembered that.’
Ignoring that comment, Nik cast the jacket on a nearby chair. ‘Now sit down, so that you can hear my terms for marriage.’
Her eyes opened very wide and she froze.
‘Né…yes. What you want is within reach, but you may yet choose not to pay the price.’
‘The price…?’ Thrown by that smooth acknowledgement that he was seriously considering her proposition, Olympia backed hurriedly down into the armchair closest.
‘All good things come at a price…haven’t you learnt that yet?’ Nik murmured in a voice as smooth and rich as honey.
All of a sudden she couldn’t concentrate. Having forgotten to keep Nik out of focus, she collided head-on with amber-gold eyes. It was like being suddenly dropped from a height. Such beautiful lying eyes, she thought helplessly, curling her taut fingers into the fabric of her skirt. A quivering, insidious warmth snaked up between her thighs, making her tense, jerk her lashes down and freeze, no longer under any illusion about what was happening to her. As she felt her breasts stir and swell, their soft peaks pinch into straining sensitivity, she was aghast. A tidal wave of embarrassment surged up over her. Already her heart was banging as if she had run a race.
‘Olympia…?’
She crossed her arms and lifted her head again with pronounced reluctance. Nik was over by the window at a comfortable distance. He was planning to agree; he was going to marry her. She was home and dry, she reminded herself. What did it matter if her stupid body still reacted to him? He was really gorgeous, really, really gorgeous. It was a chemical response, nothing more. So she didn’t like it, in fact she hated that out-of-control feeling, but it wasn’t as if she would be seeing much of him in the future.
‘You’re in shock…I’m surprised,’ Nik admitted. ‘You seemed so confident last week that you could win my agreement.’
‘You weren’t very encouraging,’ she pointed out unevenly, no longer looking anywhere near him. It might just be a chemical response but she didn’t want to encourage it.
‘I thought your proposition over at length. I feel I should warn you that I tend to be ruthless when I negotiate…’
‘Tell me something I didn’t expect.’
‘I have certain conditions you would have to agree to. And there is no room for negotiation at all,’ Nik imparted gently.
‘Just tell me what you want,’ Olympia urged.
‘You sign a pre-nuptial contract—’
‘Of course.’
‘You sign over everything to me on our wedding day—’
‘Apart from a small—’
‘Everything,’ Nik slotted in immovably. ‘I’ll give you an allowance.’
She glanced up in surprise and dismay. ‘But that’s not—’
‘You’ll just have to trust me.’
‘I want to buy a house for my mother.’
‘Naturally I will not see your mother suffer in any way. If you marry me, I promise you that she will live in comfort for the rest of her life,’ Nik asserted. ‘I will regard her as I would regard a member of my own family and I will treat her accordingly.’
It was a more than generous offer, and she was impressed and pleased that there was no lack of respect in the manner in which he referred to her mother.
‘Your grandfather was born seventy-four years ago,’ Nik pointed out, as if he could see what she was thinking. ‘He’s from a very different generation. Your birth outside the bonds of marriage was a source of enormous shame and grief to him.’
Fierce loyalty to her mother stiffened Olympia. ‘I know that, but—’
‘No, you don’t know it, or even begin to understand it,’ Nik incised with sudden grimness. ‘Your mother brought you up to be British. She made no attempt to teach you what it was to be Greek. She stayed well away from the Greek community here in London. I am not judging her for that, but don’t tell me that you understand our culture because you do not.’
Lips compressed, Olympia cloaked her unimpressed gaze.
‘Greek men have always set great value on a woman’s virtue—’
‘We’re getting off the subject,’ Olympia said in curt interruption, tensing at the recollection of the names he had called her. In retrospect, she recognised that she now felt sensitive to his low opinion of her morals, and she wondered why on earth that should be.
Just as quickly, she marvelled at her stupidity in allowing him to demand, unchallenged, that she sign away any claim on the Manoulis empire and trustingly depend on his generosity. ‘What you said about me signing away everything—’
‘Non-negotiable,’ Nik interrupted with gleaming dark eyes. ‘Take it or leave it.’
Olympia breathed in deep. ‘I don’t care about the money—’
‘If you don’t care, why are you arguing?’
She didn’t trust him. But she did nonetheless trust the promise he had made about her mother, and that was all that mattered, she reminded herself. After all, she would be living with her mother and looking after her. Why had she argued?
Nik shot her a sardonic appraisal. ‘Do you think I would keep my wife in penury?’
She flushed. ‘No.’
He glanced down at the slim gold watch on his wrist and then back at her. ‘This is progressing very slowly, Olympia. May I move on?’
She nodded.
‘Your belief that we could marry and separate immediately after the ceremony is ridiculous. Your grandfather would not accept a charade of that nature, and nor would I be prepared to deceive him in that way.’
She tensed. ‘So what are you suggesting?’
‘You will have to live in one of my homes…for a while, at least.’
She focused her mind on her mother’s needs and gave him another reluctant nod.
‘You give me a son and heir.’
Olympia blinked, lips falling slightly apart.
‘Yes, you did hear that.’ Nik surveyed her shocked face with cynical cool. ‘I need a son and heir, and if I have to marry you, I might as well make the most of the opportunity.’
‘You’ve got to be joking!’ Olympia gasped, so taken aback by that calm announcement she could barely vocalise.
Nik elevated a black brow. ‘The son and heir is also non-negotiable. And, unless I change my mind at some future date, a daughter will not be an acceptable substitute. Sorry if that sounds sexist, but there are still a lot of daughters out there who do not want to be leaders in industry!’
Olympia sat in the armchair staring at him as if he had taken leave of his wits. ‘You hate me, you can’t possibly w-want to—’
‘Wouldn’t faze me in the slightest, Olympia. You may be damaged goods, but I’m not over-sensitive when it comes to practicality,’ Nik delivered, running slumbrous dark eyes over her as if he was already stripping off her clothes piece by piece. ‘And as I have no respect for you whatsoever, conceiving a child should be fun.’
‘You’d have to make me!’ Olympia breathed in growing outrage.
Nik winced and regarded her with semi-screened eyes. ‘Oh, I don’t think so…I think you’ll cling and beg me to stay with you like all my other women do. I’m a hell of a good lay, believe me. You’ll enjoy yourself.’
Olympia jerked up out of her chair, so shattered by that speech she was at screaming point. ‘You invited me here to try and humiliate me—’
‘Trying doesn’t come into it. Sit down, Olympia, because I haven’t finished yet.’
Olympia threw him a look of fierce disgust. ‘Get lost!’
She stalked over to the chair where he had tossed her jacket and snatched it up.
‘If I were you, I wouldn’t push me,’ Nik drawled in a soft undertone that danced down her rigid spine like a gypsy’s curse. ‘I’ve got you where I want you.’
‘No way!’ she launched at him, in such a temper that if he had come any closer she would have swung a fist at him with pleasure.
‘Does your mother know about the sordid little encounter in the car park that concluded your visit to Greece ten years ago?’
Olympia’s feet welded to the carpet. Her face drained of colour as if he had pulled a switch. So appalled was she by that question she just stared into space, her stomach knotting with instant nausea.
‘Lesson one, Olympia,’ Nik murmured with soft, sibilant clarity. ‘When I say I’ve got you where I want you…listen!’
CHAPTER THREE
NIK COZAKIS strolled across his enormous office and gently eased the jacket from Olympia’s loosened grasp to cast it aside again.
He closed his hand over hers and guided her back to the armchair. Positioning her in front of it, he gave her a gentle push downward, and her knees bent without her volition. She sank down in slow motion but settled heavily as a stone.
‘You wouldn’t…you couldn’t approach my mother…’
Nik hunkered down in front of her with innate athletic grace. Level now with her, he scanned her ashen face and appalled eyes. ‘Oh what a dark, dark day it was for you when you walked into my office, Olympia…’ he murmured with silken satisfaction.
Olympia was now in so much shock she was shaking. ‘You don’t know what my mother knows—’
‘What do you think I’ve spent the last week having done? I’ve had enquiries made,’ Nik told her levelly. ‘Your mother was very friendly with your next-door neighbour at your last address, and she was a very talkative woman.’
‘Mrs Barnes wouldn’t remember—I mean, you couldn’t possibly…’ Olympia was stammering helplessly now, so horrified by the threat he had made she could barely string two coherent thoughts together.
‘Unfortunately for you, the lady remembered very well, for the simple reason that your disappointment that summer ten years ago has long been an ongoing source of regret to your mother, Irini, and a subject to which she often referred.’
‘No—’
‘You came home to loads of tea and sympathy, you little liar,’ Nik framed with slashing scorn, his dark, deep drawl flaming through her like a cutting steel knife. ‘You lied your head off about why our engagement was broken!’
Transfixed, Olympia gasped strickenly. ‘It wasn’t all lies, j-just a few evasions…I mean, I never did what you thought I did in that car park anyway, so why would I mention it?’
Nik shook his arrogant dark head at that claim and sighed, ‘You’re getting just a little desperate here, and really there’s no need.’
‘No need? After what you just—?’
‘If you do as you’re told, you have nothing to be afraid of. I will take your sordid little secret to the grave with me,’ Nik promised evenly. ‘Hand on my heart, I would really hate to be a prime mover in distressing your mother.’
‘Then don’t!’
Nik vaulted fluidly upright again and spread lean brown hands wide. ‘I’m afraid there’s a problem there…’
‘What problem?’ Olympia rushed in to demand jerkily.
‘I have a powerful personal need for revenge,’ Nik admitted, without a shadow of discomfiture.
‘Revenge?’ Olympia stressed with incredulity.
‘You dishonoured me ten years ago. Philotimo…or do you not even know what that word means?’ he derided.
Olympia had turned even paler. Philotimo could not be translated into one simple English word. It stood for all the attributes that made a man feel like a real man in Greece. His pride, his honesty, his respect for himself and for others.
‘I see that your mother educated you to some degree about our culture,’ Nik noted. ‘I wish to avenge my honour. You shamed me before my family and my friends.’
‘Nik…I—’
‘I could just about bear you surviving in misery somewhere in the world as long as I never had to see you or think about you,’ Nik extended gently. ‘Then you came into my office and asked me if I was a man or a mouse and I found out which…just as you’re going to find out by the time I’m finished with you.’
‘I apologised—’
‘But you didn’t mean it, Olympia.’
‘I mean it now!’
Disconcertingly, Nik flung his handsome dark head back and laughed with reluctant appreciation at that qualification.
Olympia took strength from that sign of humanity. ‘You’re not serious about all this,’ she told him urgently. ‘You’re angry with me and you want to shake me up, and I wish…I really do wish now that I had never come near you.’
Nick dealt her a hard, angry smile. ‘I bet you do. Accept that you’ve brought this particular roof down on yourself!’
Olympia squared her aching shoulders. ‘All I did—’
‘All you did?’ Nik rasped with seething force, his lean strong face hard as iron, his fierce anger blazing out at her in a scorching wave of intimidation. ‘You dared to believe that you could buy me with your dowry!’
Olympia gulped. ‘I—’
‘Even worse, you dared to suggest that I, Nikos Cozakis, would sink to the level of cheating an elderly man whom I respect for the sake of profit. That elderly man is your grandfather…have you no decency whatsoever?’ he roared at her in disgust.
Olympia was cringing, devastated by the manner in which he seemed to be twisting everything around and making her sound like a totally horrible person. ‘It wasn’t like that. I thought—’
‘I’m not interested in hearing your thoughts…every time you open your mouth you say something more offensive than you last said. So if you have any wit at all, you’ll keep it closed!’ Nik advised with savage derision, a dark line of colour delineating his hard cheekbones. ‘You owe debts, and through me you will settle those debts.’
‘What are you t-talking about?’
‘What you did ten years ago cost your poor mother any hope of reconciliation with her father. What you did ten years ago savaged your grandfather. And what you did to me, you can find out the hard way,’ Nik concluded darkly.
Stabbed to the heart by that reminder about her mother, Olympia dropped her head, tears springing to her eyes. ‘It wasn’t my fault…what happened…I was set up—’
‘You’re embarrassing me,’ Nik slotted in with contempt. ‘Lies and fake shame are not going to protect you.’
‘You’re scaring me…’ Olympia condemned tearfully. ‘You are really scaring me!’
Nik bent down and closed his hands to hers and tugged her upright. ‘You’re getting too upset.’
‘You can’t mean all this stuff you’ve been saying…’
‘I do…but I don’t like seeing a woman cry.’ Linking his arms round her, Nik stared down at her from his immensely superior height, dark eyes smouldering gold over her damp upturned face.
Olympia’s breath tripped in her throat. Suddenly she could feel every individual nerve-ending in her trembling body coming alive. The effect was so immediate it made her head spin. The scent of him was in her nostrils. Warm, husky male with an intrinsic something extra which was somehow exotic and exciting and dizzily familiar. Her heart began to pound in her eardrums.
‘Even crocodile tears can get a reaction from me.’ Nik slid a big hand down over her hips and eased her so close to the muscular power of his thighs that she gasped, a sort of wild heat whipping over her entire skin surface, leaving every inch terrifyingly sensitive to the contact of his lean, hard physique.
‘Nik…no—’
‘Nik…yes, only you’ll learn to say it in Greek and it will be your favourite word,’ Nik husked, suddenly hauling her up to him and plunging his mouth down on hers with devouring force.
The hard, sensual shock of him engulfed her in a split second. She had never tasted passion like that before. The stab of his tongue inside the tender interior of her mouth hit her with such electrifying effect her whole body jerked and quivered, a low moan of response breaking deep in her throat. Instantly she was melting, burning, craving more. Her arms closed round him and an amount of hunger that blew her away erupted with the shuddering force of a dam breaking its banks within her.
Nik dragged his mouth free of hers and lowered her to the carpet again, a derision in his raking scrutiny that stabbed her to the heart. ‘Hungry, aren’t you?’
Devastated by what she had allowed to happen between them, and jolted by a sense of loss so strong it hurt, Olympia swung up her hand to strike him. Nik caught her wrist between firm fingers, the speed of his reaction shocking her. ‘Those kinds of games don’t excite me,’ he warned her drily.
Olympia whirled away from him in a fever of confusion and distress. She couldn’t believe that she had responded to him. She didn’t want to believe it, any more than she could come to terms with the stormy surge of sexual need which had betrayed her. ‘You wouldn’t tell my mother—’
‘Want to run that risk? And destroy the single character trait you have that I can admire?’
‘And what’s that?’ she muttered shakily.
‘You love your mother and you don’t want her to know what you’re really like.’
Olympia felt her jacket being draped round her slumped shoulders. ‘You can’t want to marry me—’
‘Why not? I get the Manoulis empire and a son and heir. Spyros gets a great-grandson—a reward and consolation which he certainly deserves. I also get a wife who really knows how to behave herself, a wife who never, ever questions where I go or what I do because we have a business deal, not a marriage,’ Nik enumerated lazily. ‘A lot of men would envy me. Especially as I didn’t even have to go looking for my bridal prize…she put herself on a plate for me.’
‘I hate you…’ Olympia whispered with real vehemence. ‘I’ll never marry you…do you hear me?’
‘I hope you’re not about to go all wimpy on me, Olympia,’ Nik sighed. ‘I’d find that very boring.’
‘You bastard…you rotten bastard…what are you doing?’ she demanded as he separated the fingers of her hand.
‘Here is your engagement ring… No, not the family heirloom you flung back at me ten years ago…you don’t qualify for a compliment like that.’
Olympia stared down mute and stunned at the diamond solitaire now adorning her engagement finger.
‘Romantic touch. Your mother will appreciate it even if you can’t.’
Nik walked her through a connecting door into another room and straight into a lift.
‘You can’t do this to me, Nik!’ Olympia argued weakly.
‘Damianos is waiting in the car park down below. He’ll see you get driven home. Get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ As Olympia’s cardigan threatened to fall off, Nik wrapped it round her like a blanket. Then he punched the relevant button on the lift control panel for her.
The doors whirred shut. Olympia snatched in a shivering breath, suddenly appreciating that she had a dreadful pounding headache and that she had never felt so exhausted in her entire life. She tottered out of the lift into a well-lit basement car park. Damianos glanced at her waxen face and averted his attention again.
Nik’s bodyguard had warned her that she would be eaten alive, she recalled dully. She hadn’t listened, hadn’t believed him, would not have credited in a million years that Nik Cozakis could run rings round her now that she was an adult of twenty-seven. But Nik had run so many rings round her that right now she might as well have been lurching one-legged through a swamp as she followed Damianos to the waiting limousine.
All of a sudden she saw herself as a fisherman, who had dangled a worm as bait and suffered the gut-wrenching shock of a man-eating shark rearing up out of the waves in front of her. And she couldn’t believe, didn’t believe, flatly refused to even begin to believe that Nik would carry through on such threats.
Olympia wakened with a heavy head the next morning.
When she had arrived home the night before, Irini Manoulis had already retired to bed. Olympia had lain awake far into the early hours, engaged in a frantic mental search for an escape. But there was only one possible escape route: she had to have the courage to call Nik’s bluff. Why on earth hadn’t she mentioned her mother’s weak heart? However much he hated and despised Olympia, Nik would not threaten the health of a sick and fragile woman.
Olympia clawed up into a sitting position, using both hands to throw back the heavy mane of hair that rippled in tumbled mahogany waves almost to her waist. She grimaced. A grown woman of her age with hair still that long! She remembered her mother brushing it when she was a little girl, but most of all she remembered Nik skimming light fingertips through those glossy strands and saying, ‘I love your hair…’
Ten years ago, ferocious bitterness and a mindless need to hit back at Nik Cozakis the only way she could had controlled her. That was why she hadn’t defended herself when she’d been accused of betraying Nik with Lukas Theotokas. By then convinced that she had been used and abused by everyone who surrounded her, she had preferred the tag of being shameless to the reality of being exposed as she really was.
Number one wimp and patsy and fool! That was what she had been. She had only been a means to an end to her grandfather, human goods to be traded through marriage to the most prestigious bidder. Nik and his ambitious father had only seen the Manoulis empire, on offer for the price of a wedding ring. Hands had been shaken on the deal before she had even set foot on Greek soil.
And though she didn’t want to relive the past, emotional turmoil had released memories she usually kept buried, and her treacherous subconscious summoned up afresh her first sight of Nikos Cozakis at her grandfather’s villa…
Nik by the pool, with a drink in his hand, sleek and designer casual in cream chinos and a black T-shirt. There had been at least ten other young people present that afternoon but Olympia, shy and self-conscious and nervous at being among so many strangers, had seen only Nik.
Nik, laughing at a friend’s quip, jaguar eyes glittering in the sunshine. He had stared fixedly at her as she’d emerged from the villa. Deliberate slow cue to double take. Olympia reflected bitterly now on that moment. He had probably looked and thought, She’s even plainer than her photographs! But back then Olympia had lacked all such perception, and she had been as transfixed by Nik as an eager new convert before a golden idol.
With a distinct lack of subtlety her grandfather had urged Nik over so that he could immediately introduce them. And Olympia had duly mumbled and stammered and blushed like an idiot, staring a hole in Nik’s black T-shirt. Her mind had been a blank while she’d struggled without success to come up with something verbally witty and memorable to hold his attention. But she needn’t have worried, Nik had done all the talking for her.
Pained by that memory of her own naivety, Olympia emerged from her reverie and made herself concentrate on the present. The even more hideous present. If she told her mother the truth of what had happened that summer, Irini Manoulis would be devastated. Her mother would believe her daughter’s version of events, but the humiliation of what Olympia had endured would cause her deep distress. And her gentle parent would never, ever understand why Olympia had failed to hotly defend her own reputation.
But how could she have defended herself? Her supposed best friend, Katerina, had backed up Lukas’s lying confession of having betrayed Nik with Olympia. Olympia had been sick to the heart, and so bitter after seeing Nik with that beautiful model that all she had cared about was hitting back. Revenge… Yes, Olympia understood both the concept and the craving. Her revenge, her punishment of Nik and her grandfather for misjudging her, had been allowing them to go on believing that she was the shameless little tramp they had already decided she was. Nik had been incandescent with stunned rage, his rampant ego severely dented by the shocking discovery that his plain and seemingly adoring fiancée could stray.
Only now did Olympia see how wrong she had been to try to punish them all with their own blind stupidity. Though she could not imagine even now how she could possibly have proved her innocence in the face of the lies that had been told, she knew that her frozen defiance that awful day must have contributed to that guilty verdict. And left Nik fired up with outrage and a desire for retribution that refused to dim even ten years on.
Well, he had given her a blasted good fright the previous evening, Olympia acknowledged. But in the light of day she was too practical, too down to earth to credit that he could have meant all that he had threatened. Giving him a son and heir, for goodness’ sake! And what about that extraordinary kiss? The way he had just grabbed her? What point had he been trying to make? That he could kiss her and fantasise about some other infinitely more sexually appealing woman?
Bitterness black as bile consumed her. Of course Nik couldn’t be serious…or could he be? He had taken her desperate offer and twisted it into something so threatening her brain had gone into freefall. Having a baby with Nik—worse, going to bed with Nik…sheer madness!
In the midst of her feverish thoughts, Olympia glanced at her alarm clock and gasped. Why hadn’t her mother woken her up? It was ten to twelve in the morning! Scrambling off the bed, she hurried out of her bedroom and skidded into the lounge, hearing too late the deep burst of masculine laughter that might have forewarned her that her mother had a male visitor.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/lynne-graham/the-cozakis-bride/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.