The Married Mistress (10 page)

The silence that descended as her words died away was so deep, so disturbing that it drew every nerve in her body taut with tension. Damon remained silent and completely motionless for so long that it was scary and eventually, deeply reluctantly, Sarah couldn’t take it any longer. She didn’t want to look at him, was afraid of what she might see on his face, but she just had to.

She barely had time to take in his coldly blanked out expression, the bleak opacity of his eyes, before he suddenly snapped into action.

‘All right!’ he said, cold and crisp. ‘I will.’

He was almost out of the door before she found her tongue again. Something in that ruthlessly determined ‘I will’ had set her teeth on edge, bringing with it a sensation of something icy cold and damp slithering slowly down her tautly held spine. She didn’t know what he was up to but she was suddenly very, very suspicious that she wasn’t going to like it.

‘Wait!’

Had he even heard her? Would he stop?

Apprehensively she held her breath, then let it out again in a heavy, rushing sigh, as, just when she had become convinced that he wouldn’t, Damon paused, turned on his heel and swung slowly round to face her.

‘What?’

His eyes were still closed off from her, the gleaming black totally impenetrable, and no trace of emotion showing in their burning depths.

‘Wh-what are you going to do?’

His sigh was a masterpiece. A blend of impatience, ir
ritation and exasperation. With perhaps a little bit of contempt at the stupidity of the question thrown in for good measure.

‘Exactly what you asked me to do. You wanted me to speak to them. That’s what I’m doing.’

‘But—but
what
are you going to say?’

Another of those terrible scathing looks scoured a protective layer of skin from her face, leaving her feeling intensely raw and vulnerable.

‘Well, you don’t want me to lie and claim that you’re my mistress, so after the line we spun them this morning—and that kiss—I can see only one possible alternative.’

‘And what’s that?’

She didn’t want to have to ask. She had the hopeless, fearful conviction that she wasn’t going to like what he said in the least.

‘The truth.’

‘The…’

Twice Sarah opened her mouth to say the word and both times her voice failed her, fading away to an embarrassing, breaking croak that said nothing at all. With an effort she swallowed hard and tried again.

‘The truth? What truth?’

‘Isn’t it obvious? I’m going to tell them that you’re my wife. That we married secretly a year ago. What else can I say?’

‘
No!
Oh, no!’

Shock and horror pushed Sarah out of her chair, scrambling to her feet in an ungainly rush. Her legs were shaking so badly that she wasn’t quite steady and had to reach out to grab at a nearby table for support.

‘You can’t do that!’

How could she bear to have everyone know that she had once loved him enough to marry him? That she had foolishly committed her life to his, had worn his ring, shared his bed, in the naïve, blind belief that he loved her? But it
had all been a lie and if the world found out about her marriage then one day it would find out about the lie too. They would know how little he had loved her when Damon carelessly tossed her aside and married instead the woman he had always wanted—Eugenia.

And it would all be the worse for having been brought out in the open like this and used as fodder for the hungry gossip industry.

‘I won’t let you! I insist!’

‘Insist all you like,’ Damon returned imperturbably. ‘We have to tell them something.’

But not this! Surely it would work against Damon’s own best interests too, if their marriage became public knowledge. He had to be bluffing—or did he? Looking into his hard, set face, she couldn’t be sure.

‘So?’ Damon pushed for an answer.

Her face was so pale that the skin was practically translucent, and she looked as if she’d just been told that her best friend had died, emerald eyes huge and bruised-looking above ashen cheeks.

Was it really so horrific to her to think that he might claim her as his? That the world might know they were not just lovers but also husband and wife, linked together legally as well as emotionally?

Hell—had she ever loved him at all? Once, at the beginning, he would have staked his life on the fact, but now he was forced to wonder. It was a road he didn’t want to go down, one he’d been avoiding ever since she’d walked out on him.

She was angry over the land deal, he’d told himself. And she had every right to be. He’d messed up there. Badly. So he’d wait until she’d calmed down and then they could start trying to build bridges. But the longer he’d waited, the less likely it seemed that the land was the real reason she’d ended their marriage. Which left him with what?

With the boredom she’d claimed. And, of course, with Jason.

Jason.

The name twisted in his stomach, tying his nerves into knots. If he’d been asked, he would have sworn on his life that Sarah wasn’t the type to leap into bed with just anyone, but he had barely been in the house for five minutes before evidence to the contrary had been thrown right in his face. Jason was clearly so well settled in the house that he even brought his bits on the side into the bedroom he and Sarah shared.

Which brought his unwilling mind right back up against the question of whether Sarah had ever loved him in the first place. Eugenia had unwillingly suggested a reason—that she had married him for his money—but, blinded by passion, he had refused to accept it. Now he was not so sure.

‘All right, so maybe telling them we’re married isn’t the best plan.’

Suddenly the thought of going out there to the Press and declaring that he was married to Sarah lost all the false appeal it had had. They would love that story. The one about the supposedly sophisticated, worldly-wise tycoon who fell for the oldest trick in the book. Who lost his heart to a beautiful, innocent-looking face and a stunning body—and found himself married to a greedy, grasping gold-digger instead.

Though he supposed no one would blame him. They only had to look at her with her auburn hair tumbled around her face, the curvy body that even those appalling clothes couldn’t disguise.

The way she was standing, leaning on the table, thrust her upper body forward, pushing her luscious breasts in sharp relief. And the curve of her tight backside against the worn denim was a temptation to any living, breathing man. If he wasn’t very much mistaken, there was enough space
in those loose jeans for him to slide his hands down inside both them and her panties, cup the peach-smooth softness of each buttock…

Oh, hell, no! He mustn’t let his thoughts wander down that sexually distracting path. He had to think of Jason and the bastard’s scheming that had got them into this mess.

‘So what else is there? Any ideas?’

‘Ideas!’ Sarah scoffed, anger helping her regain just a little composure. ‘You’re supposed to be the ideas-man! The one who
knows how to handle the Press
! You should be the one coming up with suggestions.’

‘I already did that,’ Damon snarled. ‘But you didn’t like any of them.’

‘And does that surprise you? I mean—look at what’s happened as a result of the “idea” you came up with this morning!’

Remembering his idea, and that kiss, and the searing effect it had had on her, together with the devastation of knowing he had only done it for show, brought her up sharp, destroying the rush of confidence and bravado.

‘I wish you had never kissed me!’ she declared, choking on the bitter taste of a terrible sense of betrayal.

‘So do I,’ Damon tossed back darkly. ‘You can’t believe how much. But I did and we have to deal with that.’

To Sarah’s intense relief he had at least turned back, his determined progress towards the door apparently abandoned for now. Standing in the doorway, he raked both hands through the midnight-darkness of his hair, frowning thoughtfully.

‘How about this? If we go back to the original plan, let them think we’re lovers, then I promise that whenever we go out—whenever you have to face them—I’ll be right there, at your side, to see you through it. I’ll answer all the questions, make sure you’re harassed as little as possible. How does that sound?’

It sounded wonderful, Sarah had to admit. ‘I’ll be right there, at your side.’ What more could she ask?

That he would be there because he loved her; not just because he’d been forced into it by circumstances and Jason’s machinations. But that was the impossible dream, and one she had learned there was no point at all in hoping for.

‘I don’t know,’ she said uncertainly.

How could she answer when her mind was threatening to split in two? Her thoughts were warring between horror at the idea of having to endure the reporters’ attentions without him and fear of the pain she would have to endure at being with Damon and knowing that every smile, every touch, every gesture of affection that he made to her was a fake, a lie, an act put on purely for the public and to look good in the paparazzi’s photographs.

Of course, her marriage had been like that: a lie from start to finish. But at least she hadn’t known at the time. She had spent a few short months in blissful ignorance until the truth had been brought home to her with painful clarity.

‘Hell, I’ll even let you officially end it. You can dump me,’ Damon went on, in the tone of someone making a major concession.

For him it probably
was
a huge surrender, Sarah admitted with a wry smile. Damon Nicolaides didn’t get ‘dumped’ by the women in his life. He made all the running, called all the shots, deciding who he was dating and for how long. He was the one who said when a relationship had run its course and when he did there was no way back, no hope of appeal against the decision. He said goodbye and never looked back.

‘We can stage some huge public row if you like—in a restaurant…at the theatre. And you can just storm out, declaring that you never want to see me again. And I can play the broken-hearted lover, lost without the woman I adore.’

He couldn’t be serious. Sarah stared into his dark, handsome face, unable to accept what she was hearing.

‘You’d do that for me?’ she said in shocked and disbelieving tones.

‘If it’ll get us out of this fix.’

Suddenly a gleam of bleak amusement appeared in the depths of his eyes and his sensual mouth twisted into a wry smile.

‘I’ll even give you a ring that you can throw at me, just to make the perfect dramatic gesture.’

But that was just too much. The thought of throwing a ring in his face came far too close to the truth for any sort of comfort. Sarah couldn’t meet the cynical humour in his gaze, couldn’t raise so much as a flicker of a smile. She could never forget the agony of taking her wedding ring from her finger, knowing it was for the very last time—and forever.

Nothing in the world could induce her to go through anything like that ever again.

‘I’ll have to think about it,’ she said flatly, her voice as dead as her heart.

Another of those exasperated sighs greeted her response and Damon shook his head impatiently.

‘Then think about it!’ he snapped. ‘But don’t take forever about it. We need to make some sort of decision and fast. Because unless you have enough provisions in for a week-long siege, pretty soon one or both of us is going to have to go out that door. And when we do, believe me, all hell is going to break loose.’

Sarah thought about it.

In fact, she thought about nothing else all afternoon. An afternoon in which the house was plunged into unnatural darkness by the way that the curtains on the ground floor were kept drawn shut, blotting out the sunshine.

As a result every room became gloomy and oppressively stuffy and uncomfortable. If she kept the windows closed
she couldn’t breathe, but the only time she opened one, even at the back of the house, she found that it brought the sounds of the Press pack, the shuffle of feet, the murmur of voices, the occasional almost conspiratorial laughter, right into the house. She couldn’t get away from them and she couldn’t settle to anything to distract her.

At least Damon had the decency to stay well out of her way. He shut himself up in his room with his laptop and spent the afternoon working, apparently, and infuriatingly, oblivious to the crowd outside.

By the time the afternoon began to turn into evening, Sarah still hadn’t come to a decision. She would have to do so eventually, she knew, if only because once Monday morning came around she would be obliged to go to work—which, of course, meant going out through the door and facing the hunting pack outside. It made her shudder just to think of it. What could she say? And would they follow her right to the art gallery?

Oh, boy. Rhys would just
love
that!

She was crossing the hall on the way to the kitchen, struggling to ignore the small snowfall of notes pleading for ‘exclusives’ that lay on the doormat, when the rattle of the letterbox announced the arrival of the evening paper. Automatically Sarah caught it up and unfurled it from the roll the delivery boy had made.

One swift glance at the front page had her heading upstairs in a rush.

Damon glared at the small square screen before him and cursed out loud in savage Greek as he realised that once again he had pressed a succession of invalid keys, inputting totally the wrong data into a file. He would have to go back and start over
again
! And this should have been just a simple task.

Well, what did you expect? he reproached himself. Your mind’s not on the job. In fact, it couldn’t be further from
it. All his thoughts and what little was left of his concentration were centred on the woman downstairs, and no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t switch off from her.

It was her face he saw in the screen of his computer, superimposed on the spreadsheet he was supposed to be working on. Her perfume seemed to linger all around the house, hanging on the air wherever he walked. And it was her body he remembered, hot and hungry on top of his, when he walked past her bedroom on his way down to the kitchen to make yet another cup of coffee.