‘I won’t be here...I’m going out on the town tonight!’ Sarah blazed down the receiver, her fingers crushing it. ‘You want war, you got it. If you can dance till dawn, so can I! If you can sleep around, so can I! In fact there is nothing you can do to me, you sneaky, hateful toad, that I can’t do back more nastily, more publicly and more painfully! The name of Terzakis will be a byword for scarlet woman! You’ll be down on your knees for a divorce by the time I’m finished with you!’
‘If you go out tonight...if you dare,’ Alex was growling incredulously.
Sarah cut the connection. Dinner with his stepmother—whoopee, wouldn’t that make him sweat when he found out? And then she astounded herself by bursting into floods of tears, the false edge of anger suddenly swamped by the most suffocating misery she had ever experienced. Dear God, why had she said all those utterly stupid, childish things? Why had she stooped to his level? Because she had wanted to hurt back...because she loved the swine. And how could she love someone like that? How could any sane woman love a monster?
CHAPTER NINE
‘YOU had the rat for twenty years...how come you didn’t poison him?’ Sarah muttered feverishly, downing another mansized slug of pink champagne. ‘How come you didn’t instil some basic moral principles with the aid of a whip and a chair?’
Vivien looked eaten by guilt. ‘I never thought Alex would behave like this,’ she said for the twentieth time. ‘He’s gone off the rails. Damon was always the one with the roving eye.’
‘Alex sought safety in numbers...and Olive Oil.’ Sarah referred to Elise with venom.
Vivien chuckled. ‘Imagine you having the nerve to throw her out!’
‘She had her five minutes of fame first and boy, did she enjoy it,’ Sarah recalled, reaching for her glass again, ignoring the food untouched on her plate. She wondered how much champagne it would take to wipe out the horrible images inside her head. Teetotal all her life, driven to drink by Alex.
‘Nicky isn’t your child,’ the little blonde woman said abruptly. ‘He isn’t Alex’s either, is he?’
Sarah stared across the table in a state of frozen animation.
‘Andy gave it away—didn’t even know she’d done it,’ Vivien sighed. ‘He’s Damon’s little accident...am I right?’
‘I just can’t talk about this to you, Vivien,’ Sarah whispered in horror.
‘Look, I know,’ Vivien stressed. ‘I wanted so badly to believe that my suspicions were wrong, but Alex... It just didn’t make sense. But if you aren’t that baby’s mother, who is?’
‘My sister. She’s dead.’ And Sarah couldn’t stop it—the whole story just came tumbling out, short, unsweet, shorn of all but the most basic details.
‘Their marriage was in deep trouble last year,’ Vivien told her, and reached for her hand to squeeze it gratefully. ‘Thank you for not treating me like an idiot. Sooner or later Andy will tell me and I’ll be prepared. I won’t badmouth Damon and put my feet in it and I won’t tell anyone that I already knew. Now, let’s talk about something else.’
‘How do I go about getting a divorce and keeping Nicky?’ Sarah enquired, happy to oblige.
Vivien’s eyebrows almost vanished below her feathery fringe. ‘You’re not thinking of divorce, are you?’ she exclaimed in consternation.
‘What else would I think about?’ Sarah’s voice slurred slightly.
‘Strategy,’ her mother-in-law supplied with enthusiasm.
‘I have no desire to fight for Alex,’ Sarah responded as gently as she could. ‘This is a marriage of convenience that went badly wrong from the word go, not a romance that went tragically off course.’
‘Let’s go on to a nightclub, relax,’ Vivien suggested rather abruptly, having glanced at her watch.
‘Dance till dawn, stay out all night,’ Sarah added facetiously.
‘If you like,’ Vivien beamed, encouraged by such remarks.
Sarah followed her into the chauffeur-driven limousine awaiting them outside. She leaned back, smiling fixedly, while Vivien rabbited on about how to hold on to her marriage. What marriage? she almost said before she learnt to block her ears and switch off. In the grip of grief and bitterness, she had demanded that Alex marry her. She had been blind to the threat that Alex might have a hidden agenda. In retrospect that seemed incredibly dim of her, nor was it at all surprising that disaster had resulted. Now it was time to stop drifting with the tide, pick herself up out of the debris and sort her life out. But what about Nicky? a little voice screamed, throwing her back into chaos.
Her jangling emotions felt savaged. And she blamed herself entirely for her state of maudlin misery. She had fallen in love with Alex. In one blow, she had deprived herself of the ability to fight back. Love had addled her wits, decimated her pride and torn her in two. If she hadn’t loved Alex, if she hadn’t succumbed to the lure of all that dark Greek machismo, she would have been untouchable.
‘Freshen up your lipstick, look bright and happy,’ Vivien instructed chirpily.
The nightclub was noisy, full of a crush of people and heaving bodies on the dance-floor. As she slid behind a table, she noticed a little man staring at her over the back of his seat. As fast as she noticed his interest, he hurriedly turned away again.
‘Have another drink!’ Vivien told her loudly.
Another bucket of pink champagne had magically appeared. Vivien stuffed a roll of notes into the waiter’s hand, pressed the glass across to Sarah helpfully. Sarah obliged out of politeness and surveyed her surroundings, admitting that she was on the way to getting very drunk while knowing that a lady did not do that—ever.