The Cozakis Bride

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.’