The Married Mistress (12 page)

But at the same time he pressed two fingers of each hand against his temples, massaging hard, and Sarah’s too-sensitive conscience gave her another unwanted tug.

‘Headache no better?’

‘Not yet. I’d probably feel better if I had something to eat. There’s a room-service menu somewhere—why don’t you take a look at it too, and see what you fancy?’

Was she being unduly suspicious, Sarah couldn’t help wondering, or had he successfully managed to distract her totally from the points of dissension between them? She’d been sidetracked from her attempts to question him about Eugenia; the argument about the bed had been abandoned uncompleted; and now the business of selecting and ordering food would further distance those problems and move the conversation on to more practical matters.

But Damon did seem less than his normally robust self, she admitted. He looked weary and drawn, and there were shadows under those stunning black eyes that seemed to look vaguely cloudy, washed out, quite unlike their usual gleaming jet brilliance.

It would do no harm to call a truce for a time, while they ate at least. Besides, if she was honest with herself, she would welcome the time of peace after a fraught couple of days in which her life, the life she had begun to feel had reached a certain calm, had been turned on its head so that it was impossible to know any longer which way was up.

‘When did you last take a break from work?’ she asked when the food had been delivered, the waiter sent away with a more than generous tip, and they were seated at the small dining table, sharing a bottle of delicious red wine with their meal.

‘Last year—May.’ Damon’s tone was brusque and she knew why.

May was when he had come to find her. When she had fallen desperately in love with him on sight. When all he had wanted was her signature on a document handing over the land on Mykonos for an extraordinary amount of money. And all she had wanted was him.

‘And that was a working holiday,’ she quipped, and knew from his face that the joke had fallen very badly flat indeed.

Damon sighed and stabbed his fork viciously into the steak on his plate.

‘I didn’t set out to get you to marry me.’

‘I never thought you did. You wanted my inheritance. But you must have thought that the fates were truly smiling on you when you found you could get it cheaper by making me your wife!’

The sense of betrayal had a bite that burned like acid,
eating into wounds that had already been ripped open afresh since his reappearance in her life.

‘What is it they say about the things Greeks value, hmm? Land first, money second—women a long way third? So was it worth it, Damon—five months of marriage to me in exchange for what your family had been after for generations?’

His smile was chilling, bleak as his eyes.

‘I had anticipated that it would take much longer.’

Like his lifetime.

He’d thought he had finally found the woman for him: his partner. He had taken one look and known that he was lost. That his life would never be his own again. And
she
had got bored within six months!

The meal he was eating suddenly seemed to lose all appeal, taking on the flavour of well-chewed sawdust. Throwing down his fork, he pushed his chair back and got up from the table.

‘Not hungry?’

Sarah’s surprise grated badly. It carried too much of a reminder of the early days of their marriage, when she had teased him about the amount he could eat, claiming that she could never cook enough to fill him.

‘No.’

He flung himself down onto the settee and dropped his head onto the back, staring moodily at the ceiling.

Six months seemed to be about Sarah’s limit. She’d got bored with him in six months. Moved back to England. Six months later, another man—Jason…

‘So where do you see yourself in six months’ time?’

‘What?’

He lifted his head again, turned to look at her where she still sat at the dining table. She looked frankly bewildered, as if the question was completely beyond her.

‘It’s a simple enough question. Where do you see yourself half a year from now? Not with Jason, obviously.’

‘Of course not!’

Her faint shudder gave emphasis to the statement.

‘Never with him!’

‘Then with who? What about this guy who runs the art gallery? Morgan?’

‘Rhys? No! He’s a great guy but he has emotional complications of his own.’

Well, that put him in his place. He was an ‘emotional complication’. And he’d be a fool to read anything into the ‘emotional’ bit.

Sarah got up from the table and came to sit in the chair opposite, bringing the two wine glasses with her.

‘Here,’ she said, holding one out to him. ‘I think I should tell you about Jason. The truth about Jason.’

Damon’s fingers clenched over the delicate stem of the glass until his knuckles showed white. He was frankly stunned that it didn’t shatter under the pressure.

‘I don’t give a damn about Jason!’

Who was he trying to kid? The thought of her and Jason together had stuck in his throat like a stone ever since he had first seen the other man coming out of her bedroom. He’d never been able to get rid of the image and he’d tried. God help him, he’d tried!

‘Well, I’m going to tell you whether you want to hear it or not.’

Sarah took a long swallow of her wine, and Damon was tempted to do exactly the same, to fortify himself for what was to come. But he had the unnerving feeling that he would find it impossible to swallow and he wasn’t prepared to take the risk.

‘He was never my lover. Not even really my boyfriend. We only had a couple of friendship dates. I asked him to be in my house to take in a delivery I was expecting.’

‘Oh, yeah!’

Now he was truly glad that he hadn’t drunk any wine! He would have choked on it for sure.

‘I should have known you wouldn’t believe me!’

Damon opened his mouth to retort that along with the saying about the cap fitting, the English also had one about pulling legs and bells. But even as he did so something totally inexplicable happened.

Looking deep into Sarah’s eyes, seeing the way that their stunning emerald had turned to a deeper, softer, mossy green, he suddenly knew, totally without reason, that she was telling him the truth. Hastily he caught back the words he’d been about to speak, changing them rapidly and completely.

‘OK, I believe you.’

It was Sarah’s turn to freeze, the hand that held the glass she had raised to her mouth stilling instantly. Staring at him across the top of it, she blinked hard, swallowed.

‘You…’

Her voice cracked, turned into an embarrassing croak.

‘I believe you.’

‘But why?’

‘Why? I wasn’t married to you for five months for nothing. I can tell when you’re lying to me.’

He could tell?

Sarah’s heart missed several beats, then skipped into double-quick time in order to catch up.

Damon
could tell when she was lying
? Desperately she thought back over the things she’d said to him, both in the last few days and when he had come after her, when she’d fled from Mykonos.

What
had
she said?

She decided to tough it out. Trying another sip of wine, she was relieved to find that at least it slipped down her throat without any problems.

‘So when have I lied to you?’ she challenged.

Damon placed his drink on the glass surface of the coffee-table with deliberate care. Then, leaning forward, confident black eyes locking with wary green, he began a list.

‘When you claimed to “quite like” the taste of retsina when in fact you hated it. When you said you weren’t scared of flying, that you’d travelled by plane before.’

He ticked off each item on the fingers of his left hand as he detailed them.

‘When you said you loved the gold jewellery I bought you and in fact you preferred silver. When—’

‘OK, OK! You’ve made your point!’

So he really did know. What
had
she said to him?

She’d said that she’d left because of the deception over the land. It was true—as far as it went. She’d said she hated him—and she had. At least at the time she’d said it. She’d said…

‘And when you said you didn’t mind the fact that I wanted to keep our wedding a secret for a while.’

‘What?’

Sarah could actually feel the colour drain from her cheeks and she knew that her eyes were wide and staring. But she couldn’t actually focus on his handsome features. They blurred and distorted before her as she struggled with the realisation that all the time she’d thought she’d convinced him, he had known otherwise.

It had hurt to know that she couldn’t tell anyone about the wedding that had so delighted her, or wear the ring that she had been so proud to have on her finger. In the moment that Damon had put it there and the priest had pronounced them man and wife she had thought that she would faint away from the complete delight of it, her thoughts spinning in an ecstasy of joy. It had almost broken her heart to take it off and put it in her jewellery box until Damon said she could display it publicly.

‘You said it was because of your father and my grandfather—some feud they’d had between them.’

‘Between the families for generations. And because of the sort of publicity and scandal-hunger it would unleash on the part of the Press. The sort of thing you’ve just had a taste of in the past couple of days.’

That rang true. Thinking back over the intrusion into her life that she had had to endure since Jason had told them about Damon’s presence in her house, Sarah could believe that trying to avoid it might actually have been a consideration.

‘This feud between our families,’ she said slowly, carefully. ‘What was it about?’

‘Oh, you know—the sort of things Greeks value.’ Cynically Damon echoed her own words of just moments before. ‘Land first, money second—women a long way third.’

Sarah winced inside, hearing the cruelty in his tone. She’d believed him with his story of the feud. Parts of it were true; she’d heard snippets of stories from her grandfather before he died. But now she knew that Damon had had a totally different motivation from the plausible explanation he had offered.

He hadn’t wanted Eugenia Stakis and her father to know anything about his pragmatic and inconvenient marriage. Especially seeing as he’d planned to be rid of it as soon as he could and then marry the younger girl in order to add her fortune to his own.

Land first, money second—women a long way third.

‘What a pity you didn’t stick to the belief that our two families should remain sworn enemies,’ she said rashly, pushed into unthinking speech by the savage slash of pain her thoughts brought. ‘Then we would both have been happier.’

‘You think so?’

‘I know so!’

Belatedly recalling his claim that he would know when she was lying, she hastily lowered her eyes to stare down into her drink, swirling the rich red wine round and round in the bottom of the glass. But then a terrible thought struck her and her gaze swung up again, raw and agonised, to fix on his unreadable, withdrawn features.

‘Unless of course you
were
sticking to the feud all the time! Is that it, Damon? Were you avenging your family’s honour or something? Did you marry me only to gain the land and then plan to divorce me—walk out and leave me—?’

The words died abruptly as Damon’s glass slammed down onto the coffee-table with a loud crash. And this time the fine crystal did break, splintering into many pieces, what was left of his wine spattering out and running over the table top like a pool of freshly spilled blood.

Damon barely spared it a glance. Instead the blazing fire of his eyes was fixed on Sarah’s white and stricken face.

‘If you think that, then you’re out of your bloody mind,’ he tossed at her, his voice never lifting above the quiet, conversational tone he had used before, but injected with a deadly intensity that rocked her back in her seat, flinching away into the chair.

‘I…’ she tried, but he swept on, totally ignoring her.

‘And can I remind you that it was you and not me who walked out on our marriage? While I was away on business. You didn’t even give me a chance to defend myself.’

‘Oh, yes, and you’d have come crawling to me on bended knee, I suppose!’ Sarah scorned, with the knowledge she was holding back, the fear that he might be able to know of that too, driving her to a point where she hardly cared what she said.

The temptation to throw it all in his face and have the whole truth out in the open was almost overwhelming, but
some foolish touch of pride held her back. It was bad enough that he had deceived her over the land, that he had used her to his own ends that way. She couldn’t bear it if he should find out that she knew about Eugenia too. That she was aware of just how total her humiliation at his hands had been.

‘You’d have been begging me to forgive you—take you back?’

Damon’s face had set so hard that it seemed to be carved from a single slab of granite. Even his eyes had gone dead, blank and opaque, so that she could read nothing in them. But at his right temple, in exactly the same spot where he had tried to rub away the ache earlier, a heavy pulse throbbed, revealing the savage fury he was fighting to keep under tight rein.

‘Well, seeing as you weren’t there to greet me, you never found out the answer, did you? And now you never will.’

He swung onto his feet in one lithe, furious movement, kicking the coffee-table and the devastation on its top out of his way as he headed for the door to the bedroom.

‘Heaven help me, it’s no wonder that my head aches! The only real surprise,
ghineka mou
…’ He used the term of affection with a savage bite that took every last drop of warmth from it ‘…is that when you’re around it never does anything else. You make me regret that I ever came to England—ever—’

‘The feeling,
andhras mou
,’ Sarah used the first two words of Greek she had ever wanted to learn—the words that meant ‘my husband’—to equally deadly effect. ‘The feeling is entirely mutual. You can’t know how much I regret that you came back into my life.’