Penniless and Purchased (10 page)

Oh, yes, she remembered, all right…

Instantly Sophie’s vision cut her back in time.

M
IDNIGHT
—they’d been to the theatre, eaten beforehand, then afterwards wandered along the South Bank, holding hands
,
counting the dolphins carved curlingly around the Victorian lampposts, talking of nothing and everything, until her feet in her high heels had ached. Nikos had conjured a car from nowhere and taken her home, and they’d realised how hungry they were. So she’d taken him down to the kitchen and made him a towering club sandwich with half the contents of the fridge. It had toppled over on the table and they had burst out laughing, and he’d caught her, and kissed her, and kissed her again…and she’d been dazed and dizzy with bliss…

Pain, like a knife, sliced through her memory, cutting it away. Deliberately she purged it.

‘It will only be cheese and ham,’ she warned, her voice terse. She didn’t want to make him a sandwich. Didn’t want him standing there, so damnably close. Didn’t want him anywhere near her. Disturbing her. Making her feel his overwhelming presence in the close, confining space.

Why does he have this impact on me? How? I’m not twenty any more, and I’m way, way past caring about men—but this one…

This one still overwhelmed her. This one still had the same power he’d always had! Four years had done nothing to change that.

Quiveringly aware of him, she yanked open the fridge door. At least making him a sandwich would distract her, give her something to focus on other than him. Extracting butter, ham and a hunk of cheese, she plonked them on the table, then pulled off the lid of the bread crock and roughly hacked two slices to make the sandwich he’d demanded. Deliberately blank-faced, she handed it to him on a plate. He took it with an abstracted thank-you, and nodded at the colander full of strawberries that was on the draining board.

‘Any chance of dessert?’ he enquired.

Wordlessly, she scooped some into a bowl.

‘Share them with me,’ he invited. ‘And let’s eat outside. I’ll take out one of these kitchen chairs for you.’

He hefted one up effortlessly and headed out for the garden, leaving a tight-lipped Sophie to follow him with the bowl of strawberries. She didn’t want to share dessert with him. She didn’t want to share anything with him—least of all her company. She wanted him to go. To stop disturbing her.

To leave her alone.

For ever.

Again.

She felt the knife slide into her side, a physical pain. Losing Nikos had been an agony.

He was never yours in the first place! Never! You were a fool—a selfish, stupid little fool! Weaving your infantile fantasies! Dreaming your puerile, egoistical happy ending to what was never real!

Angrily, she marched out into the garden, as if she could leave behind her tormenting thoughts. But the object of her
torment was sitting himself down at the little table she had lugged out onto the tiny patio, getting stuck into the doorstep sandwich with every appearance of relish. The hot sun beat down, and he had taken off his jacket, hitching it around the back of the chair. Worse, he had dragged his tie loose and undone the top button of his shirt, loosening his cuffs and rolling back his sleeves, exposing his strong, lean forearms.

She felt her stomach hollow.

Oh, God, he looked so good! The whiteness of his shirt against the Mediterranean dusk of his skin tone. She wanted to gaze and gaze and gaze.

The way she had the first time she had ever set eyes on him.
Every
time she had ever set eyes on him.

What is it about him—what is that draws me to him?

Her thoughts were anguished, self-hating, and impossible to endure.

He glanced up at her. ‘Come and sit down,’ he said.

Her legs as weak as a kitten’s, she sat, plonking down heavily on the chair. Her mind was in turmoil, her thoughts hopeless, jumbled, and as impossible to decipher as her maelstrom of emotions. She watched helplessly as he made short work of the sandwich. At least he wasn’t looking back at her—that would have been unendurable. Instead he was looking around him at the little walled garden, his eyes taking in the difference between the pristine, dug-through areas she had been tackling and the untouched overgrown ones. Where she’d last been working was a pile of weeds, fast wilting in the afternoon sun beside her abandoned gardening tools.

Nikos frowned. ‘You didn’t have to do any of this,’ he said abruptly.

What on earth had she done it for? It just didn’t square with anything he’d expected. He’d expected to find her sulking, outraged
at being relegated to this mouldering, deserted house, bored out of her pampered skin, itching for the bright lights, wanting someone—anyone—to spend some money on her! Wanting the easy life she’d always had, always wanted to keep…

His eyes hardened unconsciously. But not at his expense, thank you! He’d seen to that four years ago—and he was seeing to it now, as well. He’d settle her debts, but he was damned if she was going to get a luxury holiday, as well!

Yet as he gazed about him, seeing the evidence of hard manual labour all around him, he started to feel his thoughts shifting. They shifted even further when she answered him.

‘I told you. I enjoy it,’ she said tightly. ‘It’s very peaceful.’

Nikos’s gaze snapped back to her. She didn’t look like someone at peace—tension was visible in the set of her shoulders, the straightness of her back. His eyes worked over her, oblivious for the moment of the stiffening in her pose under his scrutiny. He still couldn’t get over how totally different she looked from when he had last set eyes on her.

His eyes rested on her. She looked a million times better like this! Straggling hair, smut of dirt on her cheek, shabby T-shirt—none of it could distract from what was keeping his eyes on her.

Her beauty. Her sheer, extraordinary, breathtaking beauty! Her bones, her eyes, her mouth—all were just so…so…

He stopped analysing and just gazed, feeling an emotion go through him that seemed to be scouring him out from the inside. Memory kept pouring down into his consciousness—so many memories! Each one a vivid, vibrant picture in his head—of Sophie, Sophie, Sophie…So young, so beautiful…so magical…

Oh, she was older now, but her beauty had ripened, filled out, and without that tawdry mask of make-up it was as if he was seeing her all over again for the first time.

Abruptly she snapped her head away, sheering her gaze from him, her complexion paling beneath the honeyed hue that the summer sun had tinted her exposed skin with. The movement severed the moment. With a mental wrench, Nikos pushed aside his empty plate and reached for one of the luscious ruby strawberries glistening in their bowl. The warm ripeness was lush on his tongue, and he focussed on savouring it—blocking out as best he could his urge to scrutinise Sophie again.

Leave her alone! There’s no point at all in looking…she’s not for you, ever again!

But his thoughts seemed to be ringing hollow in his brain. Oh, he knew the score, all right—how could he not? He’d ripped Sophie Granton from him four long years ago, and he had no intention—none whatsoever—of letting her take root again. None. The hell with what he’d felt when he’d seen her again! That disastrous, fatal flash of desire. That had to be killed again, stone dead.

Which was exactly why he’d come to see her. Not because he wanted to see her again—never that!—but simply to drive home to her that, pay her debts he might, but pamper her he would
never
do! She’d have to put up with being dumped here, with all the privations it entailed, however much she resented it!

Except that she didn’t seem to be resenting it…

Seemed, indeed, to have made herself at home here—humble though it was, self-reliant though she had to be. Seemed, indeed, to have got stuck in, quite unnecessarily, to diligent peasant labour! And found it peaceful!

Nikos found his gaze going out again over the garden. But then it
was
peaceful…

Warm and sunny and somnolent, with bees buzzing and birds chirruping. Unconsciously he reached for another strawberry,
savouring again its sweet ripeness. He felt his muscles relax, and out of nowhere a sense of well-being start to steal over him. He stretched his long legs out and crossed them at the ankle, hooking an arm around the back of the chair as he continued with the strawberries. Across the table he could see Sophie’s fingers reach out tentatively, stiffly, and take a strawberry for herself.

‘They’re very good,’ he remarked. ‘Are they from that bed over there?’ He nodded in the direction.

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘They’re ripening every day now. I had to clear away the weeds first.’

‘Well worth it,’ responded Nikos. His eye was drawn as a bird darted down to the pile of weeds and hopped on to the bared earth, pecking suddenly.

‘What’s that?’ he enquired lazily, indicating the bird with his hand.

‘It’s a robin. It’s after the grubs and worms in the soil. It’s been dropping in every day. It’s probably got a nest somewhere.’ She was trying to talk normally, but it was hard. Harder still to go on sitting here, tense and awkward, while just across from her Nikos was stretching out in all his masculine glory, making himself at home, replete and relaxed.

Why can’t he just go away? Why can’t he clear off and leave me alone?

But the anguished rhetoric sounded hollow. Her sense, her sanity, might want him to disappear, but there was a part of her—a weak, dangerous part of her—that only wanted to let her gaze rest on him again, now that he was no longer looking at her, and gaze and gaze and gaze…

Feast on him even as he was feasting on the strawberries she’d picked.

‘Feeding her chicks?’ mused Nikos.

‘
His
chicks,’ she corrected. ‘That’s the male.’

‘How can you tell?’ His enquiry was as lazily voiced as his pose was relaxed.

‘His red breast. Very handsome. Pulls the females.’ There was a tart note in her voice.

Nikos gave a low chuckle. His gaze flicked to hers.

Mistake.

Mistake, mistake, mistake.

Nikos smiling—laughing. How many times had she seen him smiling at her, laughing with her? Her breath caught.

Oh, God, don’t let me remember—don’t let me remember!

She stifled the memories, fought them back. Fought just as hard against the tug of unstoppable attraction that pulled like a rope, lassoing her. Four years had only made him even more devastating, more magnetically compelling!

‘So what do the females look like?’ His question pulled her round.

‘Very dull. Brown. Boring. Plain.’

He cocked an eyebrow again. ‘How curious that nature is so different from humans. With us, it is the female who lures with her beauty—the male is the dull one, the plain one.’

Her eyes went to him.
Not you! Never, never you!

She shifted in her seat, taking yet another strawberry. Focussing on that, not on him.

‘So, tell me, what do you think of the place?’ His query came invitingly, at odds with his former riling provocation.

‘What?’ She looked across at him again.

He took another strawberry too. ‘You’ve been here four days—what do you make of the place? I take it you’ve wandered around? Not just confined yourself to this small garden? So, what do you think? Who knows? Once I’ve restored it and it’s a hotel you might stay here one day.’

He spoke lightly, nonchalantly. But even as he did so he could suddenly see in his mind’s eye Sophie as a guest at the hotel. A thought stabbed at his mind—what if there were no blighted past between them? What if he were to meet her at the hotel in the future for the first time? Attraction, unfettered by poisonous memories, flared in him.

How can she be so beautiful, even making no effort, like now
,
so full of natural grace that I cannot take my eyes from her?

His eyes rested on her, and Sophie felt her emotions plunge wildly, her breath catch.
No, he mustn’t have that effect on me any more—he mustn’t!

But then he was getting to his feet, polishing off the last strawberry as he did so. He held a hand out to her. ‘Come and tell me what you like about the place and what you don’t,’ he said.

He was holding out a hand to her. Almost,
almost
she put hers into it, as if taking his hand were nothing at all. Once holding Nikos’s hand had been bliss itself. Now it would be nothing less than torture.

She got haltingly to her feet. Nikos was gesturing towards the garden door that led through into the main grounds. Numbly, she let herself be ushered out. Self-consciousness burned through her. They gained the terrace reaching along the front façade, and her gait was still stiff and awkward, then rounded the corner to the carriage sweep that led up to the grand front entrance. Skewed across the weed-infested gravel was a sight that brought her to a sudden halt.

She recognised it instantly—it was the same highpowered, low-slung car that he had been driving the very first day she’d ever set eyes on him. The exact same—she knew, because she’d become so besotted with him she’d learned the make, model and number plate. Memory overwhelmed her—the
first time she’d seen him, driving along the street to her father’s house. The first time she’d been in the car herself.

And the last.

The time when he’d been driving her home late that last night, when her heart had been pounding with what she had been intending to do, her hands clammy with nerves.

And the sound of its engine had been the last noise she’d heard as he’d roared off into the night, leaving her weeping, demented, destroyed—clinging to the wall after he’d peeled her from him like a dirty rag…

‘You’ve got the same car.’

The words broke from her before she could stop them. Nikos twisted his head, pausing in his stride. She’d gone pale again, pale beneath the flush of the honey-tan that was already gilding her fair skin.

She’d been pale as milk when he’d first met her. Long hours indoors, in music studios, had made her as fair as porcelain. His hand on hers had been striking in its contrast, with its olive Mediterranean skin.

Not just his hand on her hand.