The Married Mistress (8 page)

‘My…’

Sarah could only shake her head in rejection and disbelief. But the violent movement had an unexpected benefit. It cleared her thoughts, focused her vision, and what she saw sent her temper rocketing up the Richter scale at the speed of light. He was still wearing only the navy silk robe. He hadn’t even taken the time and trouble to put on any clothes before he had appeared on her doorstep.

‘Coming to my
rescue
!’ she repeated, injecting every ounce of scorn she could possibly drag up into the words. ‘And how, precisely, did you feel you were doing that? I mean, look at you…’

A dramatic wave of her hand swept over him from the top of his crisp dark hair to the bare feet planted firmly on the tiled floor of the hall. He was leaning against the blue-painted wall, apparently totally indifferent to her tirade.

‘You came out of my house dressed like
that
! Or perhaps I should say
un
dressed like that. You must have known what they were bound to think!’

She recognised the look that slid down over Damon’s handsome face. She’d seen it many times before and it meant trouble. It was one part stubbornness, two parts pride—and injured pride at that—and a further quarter
sheer bad temper. It was the emotional equivalent of the instructions on a particularly explosive firework—‘Light the blue touch-paper and stand well back.’ Instinctively she nerved herself for the coming outburst.

For once, Damon surprised her. If anything, his face hardened even further, taking on the icily still cast of a marble statue, eyes carefully blanked off. And when he spoke it was in a tone that was as deadly as it was low and soft, coming very close to the hiss of a striking snake.

‘And that was what, exactly?’

Did she have to spell it out? As she looked into his unyielding glare, it seemed that she did.

‘You’re wearing a robe! N-nothing else. It must have looked as if you—as if we—had just got out of bed. And adding two and two together and getting five hundred, then they must have assumed that we had been sharing the
same
—’

‘They’d decided that already.’

‘And so—they what?’

‘They’d decided that already. It was why they were here.’ Damon levered himself away from the wall, turning and heading for the stairs. ‘I should have thought that was obvious.’

‘Not to me!’

How dared he dismiss her protests with a comment like that and then just walk away? Already she was only talking to his long, powerful back, and he was clearly intent on going upstairs without so much as another word.

‘Damon! Why would they think that?’

He glanced back briefly over his shoulder, but didn’t pause in his climb up the stairs.

‘Because someone had told them it was what was happening.’

‘Who?’

‘Think about it, darling. It’s pretty obvious really.’

Obvious? Not to her.

As Sarah stood at the bottom of the staircase, lost in thought and thoroughly confused, Damon disappeared from view. But then she heard him pause, turn…and a second later his dark head appeared over the edge of the banisters.

‘Lover boy,’ he declared succinctly before disappearing again in the direction of his bedroom.

‘Lover boy?’

Sarah set off upstairs after him at a trot. She practically ran down the landing, pushing open Damon’s door, not pausing to knock, and hurrying in without waiting for his reply.

‘Do you mean Jason? Because I— Oh!’

Her breath caught in her throat, choking off any words, and for a second she could only stand and stare. Damon had discarded the robe, tossing it onto the bed, but hadn’t yet had time to pull on any clothes. He stood in the centre of the room, naked except for a pair of jersey cotton boxer shorts that hugged the tight muscles of his buttocks, the bulge of his masculinity, exposing long, bronzed, powerful legs softly hazed with black hair. His torso was equally tanned, ridged with muscle, the width of shoulders and chest tapering to a narrow waist and lean hips without a spare ounce of flesh anywhere.

It was too late to look away. Both in the matter of time and emotionally. Damon had already seen her staring at him, unable to drag her eyes away from the sensual perfection of his body, and, besides, she knew that even if she closed her eyes, shutting off the view entirely, she would always see the image of him standing there stamped on the screen of her eyelids, impossible to erase.

‘Seen enough?’ Damon drawled, when she still couldn’t speak, couldn’t make herself look away. ‘Or were you perhaps planning on taking advantage of me while I—?’

‘I—I— No, of course not!’

Face burning fiercely red, she shook her head violently, taking several unsteady steps back, away from him.

‘Of course not! I’m sorry—I shouldn’t…’

The nonchalant shrug of the broad, straight shoulders dismissed her stumbling apology as totally unnecessary, a faintly mocking smile curving the sensual mouth.

‘It’s not as if you’re seeing anything you haven’t seen already. When we were husband and wife—’

‘That was very different. And we aren’t husband and wife now!’

‘We are still, in the eyes of the law.’

‘Well, not in my eyes!’ Sarah flung at him, and saw the curve to his mouth flatten out completely, leaving it in just a cruel, narrow line.

‘That much is only too obvious,’ he returned flatly, squashing her totally.

‘I wouldn’t have minded…’ he continued a moment later, while she was still struggling to find the mental strength to respond to him.

‘Minded what?’

‘If you’d decided to take advantage of me. In fact I think I would rather have liked it. And it would have made a pleasant change to be the one who did the rejecting rather than you.’

‘I never…’ Sarah began protestingly but then, belatedly, she recalled the letter she had left him when she had walked out on their marriage. The one in which, her anguished pride keeping her from admitting that she knew about Damon’s relationship with Eugenia, she had claimed that she had found out about the land deal.

She couldn’t—wouldn’t—stay with someone who had lied to her, she’d declared. She was leaving and she never wanted to see him again.

‘What makes you so sure it was Jason?’

Her gaze skittered away from his and the mockery she could see there.

Coward!
He didn’t actually say it, but it was there in the glint in his eyes, the cynical twist to his mouth. But he reached for his jeans, stepped into them as he answered her.

‘It had his stamp on it. And you truly didn’t think that he was just going to take his dismissal yesterday and not try to retaliate?’

‘N-no.’

Sarah was thinking back, recalling the tension she had felt when Damon had told Jason to go, the fear that he would have just one final comeback at them both. And the rush of unexpected relief when he had turned and walked away instead.

‘As soon as I saw those reporters out there, I knew Jason had to have a hand in it somewhere.’ Damon zipped up his jeans with a decisive movement, crossed the room to open a drawer and took out a deep red polo shirt. ‘He must have phoned them with an exclusive.’

‘If you’re so sure he was responsible then why did you come out?’

‘You seemed to be having trouble.’ The words were muffled as he pulled the shirt over his head, pushed his arms into the sleeves. ‘I thought you needed help.’

Could she trust the tiny glow of warmth, the sense of being cherished that suddenly flooded through her? She
wanted
to feel that way, but wanting just wasn’t enough.

‘And when you kissed me?’

She hated having to say it, had to force the words past stiff, unwilling lips, but she could never live with herself if she didn’t face the truth.

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Why?’

Damon had smoothed his shirt down, leaving it loose at
the waist, and now he picked up a brush from the top of the dressing table, swept it through his springing hair with a couple of swift, brusque strokes.

‘I gave them what they wanted,’ he declared, black eyes meeting green through the medium of the glass. ‘They came to see a couple of lovers and that’s what I gave them. It meant nothing; harmed no one.’

Harmed no one.

Each word was like a blow from an icy fist right into Sarah’s wounded heart. Of course it would seem that it had harmed no one. There weren’t any ugly, raw, gaping wounds on display as evidence of the cruel injuries he had inflicted on her. The damage was all on the inside, deep within her, where her spirit was bleeding to death from a thousand savage cuts.

She had put her whole being into that kiss on the doorstep. Damon had taken her mouth in a caress that seemed to draw her soul right out of her body, and she had kissed him back with everything that was within her. She had put her love on the line in that response and she wouldn’t have cared if he had realised it.

And he had said with total carelessness that it had meant
nothing
.

‘So it was all just a cynical publicity stunt? A public-relations exercise—giving the reporters and the photographers exactly what they wanted.’

What would she do if he said no? Damon wondered. Would she laugh in his face and call him the fool he knew he was? Or would she fling at him once more, as she had already done in no uncertain terms, the fact that in her opinion they were no longer husband and wife, that their marriage, such as it had been, was totally in the past, and she was more than ready to move on?

Tossing the brush back down onto the dressing table, he
turned to face her. She looked furious, high colour washing her cheeks, her eyes blazing like emeralds.

‘Jason had clearly told them that you were my mistress and that was what they came here expecting to find. That was the story they wanted and that was what they got.’

‘But it wasn’t what
I
wanted!’

Sarah paced the room in evident exasperation, her hands coming up in a gesture expressive of her mood.

‘I don’t want to be known as your lover—your
mistress
! How could you ever think that? It’s the last thing on earth I could want!’

‘Apart from being my wife.’

The speaking look she flung him told him exactly what she felt about
that
. And this was the woman he had tried to protect! The woman he had foolishly wished he could find some way of keeping near!

He really was losing his mind.

‘I know the Press,’ he explained, enunciating his words coolly and calmly as if he was speaking to a difficult and bad-tempered child. ‘If you look like you have something to hide then they’re like terriers who can smell a rat. They never give up. And they’ll use every dirty trick they can think of to find out what’s really going on.’

‘But nothing
is
going on! I’ve nothing to hide!’

‘Oh, no?’

Sarah shook her head so fiercely that the band slid from her hair and the red-gold locks flew in a wild haze around her head. ‘No!’

But even as she made the vehement declaration he could see that something had come into her mind, snagged her attention. She paused in her pacing, looked him straight in the eye for a moment and then shook her head, but less emphatically this time.

He could almost see the tiny seed of doubt take root in
her mind, leaching the colour from her face, clouding the bright green of her eyes.

‘Nothing at all?’

‘No…’

‘Not even a certain day in June last year? A tiny church—’

‘Stop it!’

‘The words “I do”…’

‘I told you to stop it!’

‘The truth is,
ghineka mou
,’ Damon said, throwing himself onto the bed and lounging back against the pillows, strong arms crossed firmly over his broad chest, long legs stretched out, ‘it’s way too late to stop it now. The time for backtracking was in those breathless moments just after the priest said “Speak now or forever hold your peace”.’

‘Stop it…’ Sarah muttered, but in a very different tone.

If he had wanted to pick on a memory that had the most impact then he couldn’t have been more successful. Somehow, subconsciously or knowingly, he had homed in on a moment that she still recalled so very vividly from the secret wedding ceremony they had gone through just over twelve months before.

They had only known each other a few sweet weeks. She had been so nervous, actually shaking with the shock of what she was doing. She still couldn’t quite believe that this wonderful, amazing man, Damon Nicolaides, a man who could have his pick of all the world’s beauties, who had them lining up outside his door, begging for his attention, had actually chosen
her
.

And so, when the priest had spoken the traditional words about knowing of any reason why the two should not be joined together in holy matrimony—‘Speak now or forever hold your peace’—she had tensed in a form of panic. She had actually cast a surreptitious glance over one shoulder towards the back of the church as if in fear that someone
might appear at the end of the short, stone-flagged aisle, and shout, Stop! Wait! This wedding can’t go on!

She had never felt that any of it could be real. Men like Damon just didn’t fall head over heels in love and marry quiet little nothings like her.

And the terrible, the foul, bitter irony was that her fears had all come true. Not at that moment, of course. The tense, scary seconds had passed, and she and Damon had taken their vows. They had exchanged rings and the traditional kiss, and they had walked out of there as Mr and Mrs Nicolaides, and it had all seemed as perfect as a fairy tale. But there was none of that fairy-tale happy-ever-after.

Because Damon had never truly loved her and had only married her to use her to get what he wanted.

And the death of all her dreams had caused her so much more pain by coming later, when she had known some of the happiness she had never believed could be hers.

‘If we had denied Jason’s story,’ Damon went on, relentlessly ignoring her protest, ‘the paparazzi would have thought there was no smoke without fire. They would have wanted to know why we were together at all, and they would have rooted around until they found something—and believe me, those guys don’t give up easily.’