The Married Mistress (11 page)

The sheets and the quilt had been stripped from the bed, dumped unceremoniously in the washing basket, but just the sight of the room itself, even with totally different bed coverings, was enough to make his blood race, hunger uncoiling, growing, demanding until he was ready to groan aloud with the frustration of it. He could still taste her skin on his lips, picture her luscious breasts naked and free and so, so close to his mouth…

‘Ohi, ohi!’
he muttered, shaking his head furiously in an attempt to clear it. ‘No, no, no!’

He had to get himself under control—think of something else.

Think of Jason! Think of Sarah
with
Jason! Surely that—

The door banged open without warning and the subject of his thoughts marched into the room, rich-coloured hair flying with the speed of her stride, red flashes of colour scoring her high cheekbones.

‘What the hell—?’

Jolted from his unwanted fantasies to be confronted by the reality of his dreams, Damon couldn’t manage to find the self-discipline to put a curb on his tongue, his temper flaring in an instant.

‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded, glaring at her furiously. ‘What do you want?’

Sarah glared right back at him, unconcerned by his an
ger; evidently she had other, more pressing matters on her mind.

‘This “make it real” business,’ she said sharply. ‘What exactly is involved?’

‘Ti?’

For a couple of unwelcome seconds, Damon couldn’t remember a word of anything but his own language. But then something of the red haze cleared from his mind and he managed to get his thoughts to function once again.

‘What? What the devil are you talking about?’

Sarah’s breath hissed in between her clenched teeth in a sound of pure exasperation. But she clearly mentally counted to ten and managed to answer him with a greater degree of calm than he had shown to her.

‘This idea that you had,’ she explained with insulting care. ‘The one about us pretending to be lovers to distract the flock of vultures outside. How far did you plan it to go? I mean—you didn’t exactly mean that we should actually…’

Her gaze drifted over to his bed then back again to his stony face, the colour spreading wildly across her cheeks.

‘That we would…’

Think of Jason. Sarah
and
Jason. Together.

‘That we should sleep together?
Kristos
—no! That was the furthest thing from my mind!’

Liar!
his conscience reproached him. Double-dyed liar. But perhaps it wasn’t so very far from the truth—at least not now. The thought of Sarah and Jason together in the bed that he had very nearly shared with her had acted with the force and efficiency of a very cold, very hard shower. In fact, at the moment the idea of sleeping with her made him frankly nauseous.

‘So it’s strictly a
pretence
. A fake relationship?’

‘Of course.’

He would have thought that his response would have made her feel better. That at least she would lose something
of the tension that held her slim body stiffly taut, the anxious look in her eyes. But if anything she appeared worse, the flaring colour ebbing from her face, the emerald gaze cloudy and bruised-looking.

‘An act put on to give the papers something to write about. Nothing more.’

He studied her face again through narrowed eyes, watching the play of emotions she was unable to hide. Uppermost in them was relief. And a certain amount of defiance.

‘What is this, Sarah?’ he demanded sharply. ‘Why the questions? Are you thinking of going along with the original plan after all? Are you planning to come to Paris with me?’

She didn’t speak but only nodded silently, unrolling the curled newspaper she held and dropping it down onto the table in front of him.

He didn’t have to look far to see what she wanted him to see. It was hard to miss.

The two photographs covered the top half of the front page. They had both been taken only that morning, on the front doorstep of this very house.

The first one was the kiss. The two of them tangled together, heads so close, arms around each other until it was impossible to tell where Damon ended and Sarah began. But the sensuality of the moment was there, sharply defined, unmistakable, raw and blatant in its power.

Seeing it, Damon closed his eyes for a brief second, muttering in thick Greek under his breath. But then he had to look at the other photo.

Himself and Sarah again. Of course.

But this one was of the moment when he had pulled Sarah close to him and her head had fallen back against his arm.
He
knew that she had been in shock at what he had done—the way he had kissed her. That the ordeal of being the centre of forceful media attention for the first time
in her life had drained her of her emotional strength, left her dazed and bewildered.

But in the photograph it seemed as if she had eyes for no one but him. That she was looking up at him, with wide, stunned eyes, and an expression of total devotion on her face. And the way her body was pressed against his only underlined the blinding impact he seemed to have had on her.

The black banner headline above the pictures said it all.

‘It Must Be Love!’ it declared, a statement guaranteeing that no other possible interpretation would cross anyone’s mind.

‘Oh,’ he said. It was all that he could manage.

‘Yes—oh!’ Sarah echoed flatly, no life, no feeling in either her face or her tone. ‘So does that answer your question? Yes, I am thinking of coming to Paris with you. In fact I’m more than thinking—I’m going to
have
to go with you now. I really don’t think that I’ve got any choice.’

‘D
AMON
,
no!’

Sarah came to a determined halt in the middle of the huge, luxurious hotel room and turned to him in a fury, green eyes blazing, her delicate jaw set at a stubborn, rebellious tilt.

‘I am
not
sleeping here! No way.’

A dramatic wave of her hand indicated the equally huge, luxurious bed that stood against the far wall, dominating the space between them and the wide plate-glass window that in the daylight would give a wonderful view of the River Seine and the rest of Paris, spread out below. But now, late in the night, all that could be seen were myriad gleaming lights of all sizes and colours, no sound of the traffic or the city’s life reaching them in the high penthouse suite.

‘You said we would have separate bedrooms! That we wouldn’t sleep together! I’m not—’

‘I said no such thing!’ Damon interrupted harshly, striding in from the other room to stand beside her, a dark cloud of anger on his face. ‘And why would I? We are supposed to be acting like
lovers
, for God’s sake! So who’s going to believe that story for a second if the first thing we do when we reach our hotel in one of the most romantic cities in the world is demand separate rooms? See sense, can’t you?’

‘I am seeing sense!’ Sarah protested. ‘At least the sort of sense I want to see. You did say we wouldn’t sleep together…’

‘Meaning that we wouldn’t make love.’

‘Well, if you meant only that we wouldn’t
have sex
…’
Sarah amended the phrase with the deliberate bite of acid in her voice ‘…then you should have made it clearer—a lot clearer. Because when you said we wouldn’t sleep together I took it as meaning exactly that. And, as I naturally assumed that the penthouse suite would have more than one bedroom in it, I didn’t think there would be any problem. After all, we booked in here together; we came up to our suite together. No one would have had any idea of what went on in here once the doors closed behind us.’

‘And what about the maid? When she came round to do the rooms in the morning—’

‘I’m perfectly capable of making a bed! I could have tidied up after myself quite easily! And if I kept all my clothes and personal stuff in your bedroom, then no one would have been any the wiser. It wouldn’t have been much trouble.’

‘Well, now you won’t have to go to any trouble at all. Because there is only one bedroom and one bed—and we’re sharing both.’ ‘No!’

Sarah shook her head defiantly and then, as if that wasn’t definite enough, she shook her hand too, for additional emphasis. ‘You can sleep on the couch in the other room—or the floor.’

‘No way.’

It was Damon’s turn to shake his head.

‘We’re meant to be lovers. Lovers share a bed. We are sharing a bed—this bed. It’s big enough.’

It was more than big enough, Sarah had to concede that. If a big bed was a king-sized one, then this would be fit for an emperor. But it wasn’t the size that concerned her. It was the sheer
intimacy
of the situation. Even with heaven knew how many feet of mattress between them, she would
still be in bed with Damon. And just the thought of it made her pulse rate skyrocket.

‘I don’t want this…’

‘You’ve made that only too plain!’ Damon growled. ‘But to be honest, at this moment, I don’t give a damn what you want! I’m tired and I want a decent night’s sleep. Even if I was prepared to take the couch—which I’m not—it’s way too small for someone of my height. So it’s the bed or nothing.’

Glancing at him now, in the light, Sarah suddenly found that her conscience gave her an uncomfortable kick.

He
did
look tired, she admitted, and perhaps it wasn’t surprising. She knew he hadn’t slept much last night. It had been late, long after she’d gone to bed, that she’d finally heard him coming upstairs and she’d heard him moving around in his room at some point when she’d woken in the night. Then by the time she was up and dressed he was already in the kitchen, the laptop on the table in front of him, and had clearly been working for some time.

‘You work too hard,’ she said now. ‘You ought to lighten up a bit.’

‘My father’s been ill. He’s finally had to agree to handing over the reins of some of his companies to me.’

‘I’ll bet he didn’t like that!’ Sarah declared with feeling.

Aristotle Nicolaides was a totally unreformed, unmodernised Greek male. He clearly thought no one else could handle his businesses the way he wanted, not even his own son. And he had never liked the fact that Damon had brought one ‘of that family’ into his home. But at least the old man had been honest with her. Which was more than Damon had been.

Bitter memories surfaced, unsought and unwelcome, making her swing away from Damon and dump her handbag on the dresser before making a pretence at examining
the wardrobe space, of which there was enough to provide clothes storage for a regiment.

‘And how’s Eugenia?’

She couldn’t stop herself from asking it, though she could have bitten off her tongue as soon as the words were out of her mouth. The stunned silence behind her seemed to tell its own story, and feelings of misery and dread stabbed at her as she waited.

‘Damon?’ she asked again, letting the door swing shut so that she could see his reflection in the mirror. He was standing behind her, absolutely still, staring at her as if she had suddenly turned into a snake.

‘Eugenia?’ Even to speak the other woman’s name seemed an effort for him. ‘Why did you ask about her?’

Just what had made her suddenly bring Eugenia into the conversation? To call it a surprise would be a major understatement, Damon thought. It was almost as if she had somehow latched on to the concerns that had preoccupied him last night, the phone call he had received on his cellphone in the early hours of the morning.

‘I just wondered about her.’

There was something wrong with Sarah’s tone. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on or interpret properly. If he’d had a decent night’s sleep then perhaps his head would be clearer, but, after spending the first night in London lying awake, fighting dreams of Sarah, last night had been no better. Genie’s phone call had seen to that. And the throbbing headache he’d developed on the flight over didn’t help.

‘I didn’t think you knew her all that well.’

He was trying to remember just how well Sarah had got on with Eugenia. Would they have confided in each other? Maybe shared secrets?

‘You only met her once, as far as I remember.’

‘So?’

It was definitely aggressive now, but for no reason he could think of. Just how had he stepped on her toes?

‘I can still ask, can’t I?’

‘Of course.’

He had to tread carefully. If he said the wrong thing then it could cause all sorts of problems. If only he hadn’t promised Genie!

‘Eugenia’s fine,’ he said carefully. ‘She had her twenty-third birthday party last week. She’s grown up a lot these last few months—turned into a beautiful woman.’

‘She always was—lovely.’

Sarah was prowling round the room, running her fingers over the polished wood surfaces, tracing the shape of a ceramic vase.

‘And how’s her father? He’d been ill too, hadn’t he? A heart attack?’

‘Yes. He was in hospital for a while but he’s back home now.’

She’d moved around to the side of the bed, switching first one set of lights and then another on and off again as if testing that they were working. Then, losing interest, she picked up the remote control for the television and started pressing buttons. Her unsettled restlessness was getting on his nerves.

‘He has to take things very easy, but— Do you
have
to do that?’

‘Sorry!’

Sarah hastily clicked off the loud music video that had suddenly started blaring into the room and dropped the remote down onto a chair.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ Damon told her wearily. ‘I’m not in the best of moods. I have a blinding headache—you don’t happen to have anything that would help, do you?’

‘There’s some paracetamol in my bag.’

Sarah hunted through her handbag, then tossed him a silver-foil strip of tablets.

‘You do look rough.’

‘I didn’t sleep too well last night.’

‘Why’s that? My gran always used to say that not being able to sleep was the sign of a guilty conscience.’

The comment sounded light enough, but there was an edge to it that had Damon stopping on his way to the
en suite
bathroom to fill a glass with water.

‘And what would I have on my conscience?’

‘How should I know?’

She had turned away from him and was unzipping the lid of her case, her tone perfectly casual, throwaway almost. But then she paused, glanced over her shoulder at him, the green eyes disturbingly intent. A second later she blinked, and the strange look vanished so completely that he was forced to wonder if in fact it had been a trick of the light. Certainly she now seemed purely interested in removing some shirts from her suitcase and placing them carefully in the top drawer of the dresser.

Hell, but he needed these tablets!

He had filled the glass with water and was swallowing the pills down when Sarah’s voice drifted through to him again.

‘Unless you have something you want to confess?’

‘Should I have?’

Coming back into the bedroom so that he could at least see her face again, only to find that it gave him no clue at all as to what was on her mind, he frowned in irritated confusion.

‘Is there a point you’re trying to make here, Sarah?’

‘Me? Not at all.’

It still sounded as if she was trying to needle him.

‘Is this some sort of interrogation?’

The wide green eyes that turned his way were guileless and innocent.

‘Only if you see it that way. We have a saying in England about “if the cap fits”. That means—’

‘I know damn well what it means!’ Damon growled. ‘My English
is
up to that! And if you’ve got something to say I wish you’d come right out with it. I don’t have the energy or the inclination for mind games.’

‘So your lack of sleep wasn’t down to a guilty conscience?’

‘It certainly wasn’t! Unless you think I should feel sorry for a few deliberate lies I’ve told the reporters, in which case, tough—I think they deserve everything they get. Especially as they were told to protect your blushes.’

‘I know they were—and I’m grateful.’

How the blazes did he do that? Sarah was forced to wonder. How did he manage to divert her purpose, deflect her attention away from a determination to see if he had any conscience at all where his affair with Eugenia was concerned, and turn it instead to an appreciation of how he had handled things today?

Because he hadn’t put a foot wrong; she had to give him that. From the moment that they had stepped outside the front door to face the barrage of cameras and microphones, the deafening pandemonium of questions piled upon questions, with no pause in between, no chance to answer one before another butted in, Damon had been in control. He had answered the questions he could with a smile and an easy charm, sticking strictly to the story they had agreed on, the details they had worked out between them the night before.

And he had kept his promise to perfection.

‘I promise that whenever we go out,’ he had said, ‘whenever you have to face them, I’ll be right there, at your side to see you through it.’

Sarah couldn’t fault him on that. Even before he had opened the door he had held out his hand to her, the strong, square-tipped fingers looking totally dependable, a perfect support. And she had put her own hand into it, feeling the warmth of those fingers close around her, their power enclosing her, their size completely dwarfing the frail slenderness of hers.

They had gone outside together, linked, sharing—a team. And Damon had been the stronger partner. Sarah had never had to speak once. Never had to do anything except be there with him, move when he moved, smile for the cameras in response to a gentle nudge from his elbow in her ribs.

And when the crush had become too intense, when she had started to feel surrounded, trapped, and the panic had started to clutch at her stomach, seeming to tie knots in her throat, he had sensed that too. He hadn’t paused in his answer to a question, but an arm had come round her shoulder, warm and strong, drawing her close and into the protection of his lean body. There had been nowhere she could put her cheek but against his chest; nowhere her arms could have gone but round his waist. And when he’d moved forward, she had moved with him, steps in perfect unison, blinded by the camera flashes, but totally confident that he would get her to their car, and safety, and get her out of there.

He’d done just that. He’d promised to be at her side, and he’d never left it. He had stayed so close that when at last, having boarded his private plane and closed the door on all the fuss and attention, Damon had finally moved away to settle into his seat, Sarah had felt lost, strangely bereft, as if a part of her was missing.

The cruellest irony about the whole situation was that, now that she was officially his ‘mistress’ in the public eye, he was treating her with the open respect and affection that
he should have accorded her while she was his wife. But while she had been his wife he had never even acknowledged the fact.

Still, he had looked after her wonderfully today. And she’d never actually thanked him for that.

‘You were a great help today,’ she said, wincing at the way the words sounded rather stiff and grudging.

She was still too uptight at the way he had blocked her questioning over Eugenia. Couldn’t he see that she had been trying to give him the opportunity to talk—to confess—to explain if he wanted to? So had he really not understood what she was getting at? Or did he still not feel any trace of guilt at the way he had treated her, using her and her love for him callously for his own ends?

‘I appreciated it.’

That wasn’t any better, and clearly Damon thought so too, to judge by the way his black eyebrows drew together in a swift frown.

‘No problem,’ he returned, giving it a decidedly ambiguous intonation.