The Unfaithful Wife

CHAPTER TWO

LEAH RECOVERED consciousness in the limousine. Nik was bending over her just as he had been doing before she’d passed out. In one frantic movement she jackknifed back from him and plastered herself up against the far door while she fumbled madly for the release mechanism, uncaring that they were in the midst of fast-moving traffic. ‘Get away from me!’ she screeched in panic.

‘Fragile little creature, aren’t you? A bundle of rampant nerves all of a sudden.’ Lounging back in a disturbing attitude of fluid relaxation, Nik surveyed her with unashamed satisfaction and a sardonic smile, his aggression cloaked, his temper back under control. ‘So where is that certificate?’

Her fingernails clenched painfully into her palms, etching purple crescents on the tender flesh. She needed that pain to be assured that Nik was still talking in the same nightmare fashion that he had been employing inside that suffocating little room. ‘I’ve already told you that I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Well, if you didn’t know you know now and I want an answer.’

‘I can’t believe my father was a blackmailer—’

‘Dirty, isn’t it?’ Nik treated her to a scrutiny empty of even the tiniest vein of compassion. ‘But then he was a professional of the very highest quality. His field was the rich and famous and the skeletons he dug out of closets had to be really juicy ones. He was very good at what he did,’ Nik drawled impassively. ‘He never milked his victims totally dry. He never drove anyone to the brink of trying to kill him. He made them pay for so long and then he let them off the hook but he kept the evidence of their misdeeds to protect himself. He made a fortune...’

‘I won’t believe it!’ Leah slung back shakily. ‘I won’t believe any of this!’

‘Do you think he kept pornographic pictures in that box just for fun?’

Leah’s stomach curdled. She lowered her pounding head.

‘Now if he took the trouble to retain a copy of the juicy skeleton he trailed out of my family closet—’ Nik’s deep voice held a renewed edge of harshness ‘—he also kept the original of the certificate, and since I have exhausted every other avenue it is obvious to me that he must have given it to you.’

‘He didn’t give anything to me!’ There was a quiver of hysteria in her tremulous response. She was in shock—deep shock—and in no state to combat his continuing pressure for her to produce something that she had not even known existed and certainly didn’t have.

‘You can’t hold it over me. Just try and I will break you...’

‘You’re crazy!’ she suddenly sobbed.

‘This far, I have been remarkably kind and patient. I have been on a leash for five years,’ Nik grated in an embittered undertone. ‘I was only safe as long as I stayed married to you. I thought you might run home to Daddy. But you never did and one thing did become clear to me, gruesomely clear over the years. You are in love with me—’

‘What?’ Leah interrupted shakily.

‘You are obsessed with me. Do you think I don’t know this?’ Nik sent her a shimmering look of contempt. ‘Any normal woman would have left me by now and given up all hope of having her love returned...but not you! You stayed the course, loyal to the bitter end, obscenely faithful and well-behaved, giving me no excuse to complain of the devil’s bargain I made!’

‘Faithful’? Hysteria was tearing at her convulsing throat. Dear heaven, he actually believed what he was saying! Nik believed that she loved him. He thought she had stayed because she loved him. Paul’s name hovered on the very tip of her tongue but sixth sense warned her not to muddy the waters further. One thing at a time...only which? she wondered wildly. Life as she knew it had been shattered in the space of a few hours.

‘I am not in love with you,’ she murmured with as much dignity as she could contrive, her teeth gritting behind her peach-tinted lips. Absolute humiliation engulfed her as she appreciated that all along Nik had been thinking that his neglected, unwanted wife was just dying of love for him in spite of his complete indifference towards her. The ego he must have...the utter, unashamed conceit.

‘Listen, you’re talking to the guy who was your seventeenth birthday present!’ he slung back with savage derision.

‘I b-beg your pardon?’

‘Did you pick me out of some society magazine? Or did you see me in the flesh first? Did you take one look and rush to Daddy and say, “Daddy, this is the one I want!”?’

He was serious. He was actually serious. Her lower lip had parted company from the upper, a hectic pink firing her cheeks to dispel her previous pallor. ‘You have to be out of your mind!’

‘We are going to have this conversation. I have waited five years to stage it!’ Nik asserted, skimming her with glittering dark eyes. ‘All I know is that dear Max did your dirty work for you. I was hunted down like an animal—’

‘You are an animal...an insult to the species!’ Leah abruptly burst out. ‘And your conceit is staggering!’

‘Cristo...my perfect lady of a wife can actually raise her voice,’ Nik drawled, surveying her with flaring dark eyes. ‘You don’t like the truth. It hurts your pride. But I know I was trapped quite deliberately. I didn’t even know who your father was that first time I came to the house. I was lured there by a third party, offering me a business proposition. And your father just so happened not to be available when I arrived.

‘But, lo and behold, you were. Romantically tending flowers in the conservatory, wearing something understated and white, literally armed to the teeth with virginal wiles...Theos, I remember it so well.’

‘It wasn’t like that!’ she gasped in outrage.

‘Any hot-blooded Greek would have looked twice and lingered,’ Nik told her with scorn. ‘And there you were, all shy smiles and blushes, eating me up with those big blue eyes as if you hadn’t had a square meal in a week!’

‘Stop it!’ Leah hissed, her voice breaking.

Nik studied her with unyielding derision, his beautiful mouth twisting. ‘So I was invited to dinner and you played the piano like a concert pianist and sang like an angel. Your every cultured virtue was paraded for my philistine benefit and somehow business never came into it. It might interest you to know, pethi mou, that I only had two questions I wanted answered that night but couldn’t ask—’

‘Really?’ Leah was staring blankly into space, every ounce of her remaining self-discipline directed at rescuing her shattered composure and combating the painful tidal wave of memories threatening to assail her. Two very different people...one encounter...such differing recollections of the same event.

‘Were you over the age of consent? And did Daddy intend to protect you from the big bad world out there and sexual predators like me? Marriage was not, nor would it ever have been, on my mind.’

Nausea stirred inside her, and a bitter tide of mortification she could not withstand followed in its wake.

‘Whose idea was it that I stay to dinner?’

Leah froze.

‘I thought so,’ Nik breathed. ‘Your idea. You told him you wanted me and that was that. He went digging and he dug up something that only two people alive knew about and neither of them would ever have talked about it!’

‘What did he dig up?’ she heard herself whisper helplessly.

‘You know...Max had plenty of warning that he was on borrowed time. He didn’t go to his grave without passing that secret on to you,’ Nik asserted softly.

‘He passed nothing on to me...’

‘And if you don’t have it you have to know who has.’

The chauffeur opened the door beside her and she almost fell out into the fresh air. She gazed down the quiet residential street in near panic. She wanted to run. She knew where she was: Nik’s Paris apartment where she had spent a quite unforgettable wedding night alone. He was unleashing everything on her at once, drowning her in a sea of shattering revelations, grinding her down with confusion, pain and humiliation.

‘Try it,’ Nik said very quietly. ‘Run and see what happens. I wouldn’t let you get as far as the street corner.’

Trembling, ashen, Leah entered the foyer in front of him and stepped into the lift.

‘Memories...’ Nik taunted, with a barbaric smile, as if he could see inside her.

Leah knew she was still in shock. She said nothing, knew she wasn’t up to the challenge. Nik had been prepared. Nik had been waiting for this day, craving its arrival, longing for his revenge...just as he must have longed for her father’s death to set him free from her.

‘There are many functions I can perform to order but sharing a bed with you sadly wasn’t one of them,’ he delivered. ‘He could make me marry you but he couldn’t follow me into the bedroom and force me to—’

‘Shut up!’ she screamed at him, the hysterical demand reverberating around the steel walls of the lift.

‘So why did you never tell him that?’ Nik persisted, going for the jugular when she was at her lowest ebb with predictable calculation. ‘Why didn’t you ever tell him the truth about our marriage? Don’t tell me that Max wasn’t desperate to hear the patter of tiny feet which would have made your position more secure!’

Her hands flew up to cover her convulsing face, a stinging flood of moisture dammed up behind her eyelids. ‘Please...no more,’ she whispered, and she didn’t care that she was begging.

A pair of hands gripped her narrow shoulders. ‘Ne...yes, you kept quiet about your pitifully empty marital bed all these years. Why?’

With a sudden superhuman effort which took him by surprise, Leah tore herself free and fled across the hall of the huge penthouse apartment and down the bedroom corridor. She picked a room at the very end and vanished into the en suite bolting the door behind her. Slowly she slid down the back of the door and then she was forced to fly up again and cope with the shuddering spasms of sickness tearing at her abdomen. When it was over, she took off her clothes with the attitude of a sleepwalker and entered the shower cubicle.

My father, the blackmailer. She repeated the words to herself over and over as she sank down in a corner of the shower and let the water descend on her in sheets. She felt so dirty. For the first time in her life she felt dirty and she didn’t know what on earth she could possibly do to make herself feel clean again. Nik had torn the safe foundations of her very childhood from her.

Her mother, who had died when Leah was four, was no more than a dim memory. The daughter of a minor English aristocrat, she had been cut off by her family for marrying Max. Max had never told his daughter why. He had never felt the need to explain himself.

Leah’s childhood had consisted of a procession of nannies followed by a succession of boarding-schools from an early age. Max had travelled incessantly. Whenever she had pleaded with him to let her live with him, he had always had a ready excuse. She had reached adolescence before she finally appreciated that she was excess baggage in her father’s life and he was essentially a remote, self-contained and cold man. None the less she had always been aware that he cared about her as he cared about nobody else.

He had been proud of her beauty, her education, her musical gifts. Those had all been saleable social commodities, she registered now. Max had been ambitious for her. He had wanted her to marry a man of wealth and position. He had always lived on the fringes of high society. He had been keen for his daughter to achieve a passport into that same society. Leah had grown up denied the warmth of family life but cocooned from harsh realities. Dependancy had been bred into her bones, along with a desperate need to win her father’s love and approval.

How could she ever have guessed that Max was not a legitimate business man? How could she ever have dreamt that her privileged upbringing had been financed by something so vile as the contents of that safety-deposit box? And how could she have even begun to suspect that he had blackmailed Nik into marrying her?

Finally she understood the cruel charade of her marriage, too late for her to do anything any differently. The five years had gone, couldn’t be reclaimed either for her or for Nik. No wonder he despised her; no wonder he was so willing to believe that she knew the secret he had been prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to conceal. ‘To protect my family’, he’d said. Ironically, she didn’t want to know the source of the pressure put on him.

He could keep that skeleton in the closet forever. In any case, Nik’s family were strangers to her. He had a mother and three sisters whom she had never met. She had often wondered whether they wondered about her and how Nik had explained so peculiar a marital relationship. But had he even bothered to explain? Like Max, Nik was not in the habit of explaining himself unless he chose to do so.

How could he think she loved him? The ultimate humiliation. Not only a husband forced virtually at the point of a gun into marrying her, but a male convinced that even after five years of his excruciating neglect, indifference and infidelity she still loved him! The wife from hell who would cling like a limpet through thick and thin.

Yet as the water continued to beat down on her, Leah slowly began to register a curious sense of burgeoning inner strength which she had never felt before. She even managed to feel sorry for Nik. He was afraid that she intended to try and employ her father’s blackmail beyond the grave...hence all the threats, the bullying, the intimidation. The news that she was in love with another man and couldn’t wait to get a divorce would surely be manna from heaven, a bolt of joyous blue across Nik’s horizon!

She had wasted five years of her life...not one hour, not one day more would she sacrifice! Her father had once been her sole authority. She had allowed Nik to take over that role. Without any argument, she had tolerated Nik’s behaviour, even protected him sooner than let her father know that she had not been able to make a success of her marriage. Pride had done that, stupid pride.

And she had been afraid, afraid of so much for so long. Afraid of leaving her safe cocoon of monied privilege to face the outside world. Afraid of her father’s contempt and fury. Afraid that the truth about her marriage might literally kill her father with his weak heart. No more fear, she told herself now.

If Nik had been a victim, she had been too. And at least she wasn’t making as much noise about it as he was, she reflected grimly. His conceit still staggered her. Did he really think that that tender first love of a particularly naïve teenager had outlasted the first six months?

A loud knock sounded on the door.

‘Open it!’ Nik demanded roughly.

Mentally she blocked her ears. She had had enough of him for one day...enough of him forever. She tasted the concept, and experienced a surge of positively heady relief. Nik did not possess a single virtue which appealed to her. Five years ago it had been an attraction of total opposites on her side. Sweet seventeen, choosing with her heart and her leaping pulses, not with her head.

‘Leah!’ Nik raked with driven impatience.

He was not a male who respected her sex. He pursued one bimbo after another. Brunette, redhead, blonde. He didn’t discriminate. But they all had motorway-length legs, bounteous breasts and big hair. Leah possessed none of those attributes and once that had been a source of torment to her, damaging an already weak self-image.

But she was worth so much more than that and she had Paul to thank for that discovery. Paul had woken her up from her slough of inadequacy and passive acceptance. Paul had taught her to put herself first. The way Nik did; the way Nik had always done. Nik had rejected and humiliated her from the outset of their marriage. What did she have to feel guilty about now? Hadn’t she already paid for her father’s sins? And the payments in terms of her pain, loneliness and misery stopped now for all time, she swore to herself.

Standing up, switching off the shower, she was in the act of reaching for a towel when the door was suddenly struck with shocking force. The lock buckled and gave, the door slamming back on its hinges, framing Nik in the doorway. His lean, powerful body whipcord-taut, he glowered at her with eyes of flaming jet.

‘What did you lock yourself in here for?’ he demanded ferociously.

Clutching her towel to her small, slender frame, Leah was shattered by his violent intrusion but she was also furious. ‘Have you gone out of your mind?’

White teeth flashed against sun-bronzed skin, his narrowed gaze outraged. ‘I was concerned for your welfare!’

Her welfare? Or her safety? Was that why he had kicked down the door like the Neanderthal he was? Had he been afraid that she planned to throw herself out the window? Of course that might have been embarrassing for him.

Dealing him a veiled glance of disbelief, Leah stopped to gather up her discarded clothes.

‘Your skin has the bloom of a camellia.’

Her lashes lifted slowly as she straightened. She blinked. Nik was staring at her in the most unbelievably disturbing way, his veiled gaze working intently over every exposed inch of flesh in view, resting on her full mouth, lingering unapologetically on the pale swell of her breasts above the towel.

‘Drop the towel,’ he said thickly.

Shocked into rigidity, Leah quivered with incredulity. Nik regarded her expectantly. And he was expecting that towel just to drop at his request. It was written all over him, in every poised line of his lounging stance.

Unintentionally, she collided with burning black eyes and it was like having a blowtorch turned on her. Her mouth ran dry, her lungs struggled for oxygen. Heat flamed over her skin as it tightened over her bones, a tiny twisting sensation spiralling through her stomach. Her breasts felt peculiar, suddenly heavy and full, her nipples tautening into almost painful sensitivity.

‘You’re so tiny and yet so perfectly proportioned,’ he mused lazily in the pulsing silence.

Leah just couldn’t believe that he was talking to her like this. And yet on some subconscious level she wasn’t surprised. This was Nik as she had never known him and yet as she had always known he could be. There was something dangerously fascinating about the raw sexual charge that emanated from him, the elemental atavism of a very physical male. A ‘predator’, he had called himself with astonishing candour. And a predator he was, she registered.

‘Would you please excuse me while I get dressed?’ she murmured without any expression at all.

‘You are not serious?’ he breathed, as if she were the one behaving oddly.

Leah shivered with fury, disgust flooding through her in waves. Nothing but bitterness, loathing and resentment lay between them but Nik could obviously rise above all that to think about sex. Why? Purely because she was half-naked. Seemingly that was all it took to stoke the ever glowing coals of Nik’s powerful libido.

‘I want to get dressed,’ she said shakily.

‘You’re shy.’ Nik tasted the word with purring satisfaction. ‘And you have waited one hell of a long time for me.’

Leah laughed. She couldn’t help it. Laughter with an hysterical edge just spilled from her strained lips, shattering the silence like breaking glass.

‘Stop it...’

Her clothes fell from her arms as she turned away and covered her contorted face with spread hands that were trembling. The hysteria had come from nowhere and attacked without warning. She was furious that he should witness her loss of control. But she was even more devastated when she felt his arms close round her from behind. For a split-second she was so rigid that she imagined herself cracking under the stress of shock and breaking into pieces.