‘I think you’re over-sexed,’ she whispered, sharply disconcerted by what was happening between them.
‘And you’re complaining?’ He dealt her a smouldering smile.
Leah attained the cool of what appeared to be the main reception-room, perspiration beading her short upper lip. She sank down on a sofa.
‘Theos, that’s so cute! Your feet don’t touch the floor!’ Nik laughed and, instead of picking another seat as she had hoped, crouched down in front of her. ‘So talk,’ he invited, studying her with heavy-lidded eyes.
Feeling cornered, Leah edged further back into the depths of the sofa. ‘I’ve been thinking—’
‘Dangerous...definitely a habit you have to break,’ Nik interrupted mockingly.
She had to steel herself to continue. ‘About that certificate.’
He uttered a very rude word she had never heard pass his lips before. Hard tension locked his strong features into immobility and he sprang upright and strode across to the stone fireplace. ‘You do pick your moments,’ he said grimly. ‘What can we possibly have to talk about on that subject?’
‘It has to be found...and I thought that maybe if you gave me some idea about what that certificate contains—’
‘No!’ He shot her a forbidding look and she suffered a weak moment of piercing regret for the speed with which his mood had altered.
‘I wouldn’t tell anybody, for goodness’ sake!’
Nik regarded her with pure steel in his hard gaze. ‘The fewer people who know, the safer my family is.’
She noticed something that a mere day earlier would have left her untouched. She noticed that she did not figure as a part of his precious family. ‘You don’t trust me.’
‘Trust doesn’t come into it.’
‘And the last person you’re likely to trust is Max Harrington’s daughter,’ she completed painfully.
‘I didn’t say that—’
‘You didn’t need to. You treated me like a leper for long enough!’ she added helplessly.
‘The past is behind us—’
‘How can you say that when you’re expecting me to live with it?’ she demanded unevenly, her sapphire gaze bright with pain. ‘I thought that maybe if I knew more I might be able to help you find that certificate...’
‘Ah...suddenly I understand.’ He slung her a glittering look of slashing derision, his hard jawline clenching fiercely. ‘You see it as your passport to freedom. Come up with the certificate and I set you free? Is that it?’
Her narrow shoulders rigid with strain, Leah forced herself to meet that savage scrutiny but she could feel the blood draining from her tense face. ‘Isn’t that what you want too?’
‘I wanted it so badly I could taste it five years ago!’ he delivered with cruel candour. ‘And a week ago I thought I had that certificate. But something changed for me when I emerged empty-handed from that filthy box. I knew I had reached the end of the road and I refuse to waste another single day brooding over a fruitless search. It’s over now!’
‘No, it isn’t,’ she dared unsteadily, tears springing to her distressed eyes but willed back with every ounce of her self-discipline. ‘Not while we are still together.’
‘You weren’t thinking of that when I was inside you,’ he breathed with raw contempt. ‘Or when you were sobbing with satisfaction in my arms.’
‘Please,’ she gasped, defenceless against the charge, shaken by his explicit reminder of her complete lack of restraint.
Closing the distance between them in two long, punishing strides, Nik clamped his hands over her shoulders and dragged her upright. ‘In my bed you’re as hot as hell for what I can give you. You love everything I do to you, you love everything I make you feel. With me you’re wanton, abandoned and out of control...’
Leah shivered violently, stunned by the attack she had somehow drawn down upon herself. ‘How can you speak to me like this?’
‘You can be a whore in my bedroom any time and I don’t give a damn about how you conduct yourself in the kitchen or the drawing-room!’ he misquoted with seething emphasis, his lean fingers biting into her narrow bones, dark eyes flailing her shattered face. ‘But get rid of your adolescent fantasies of true love in a cottage with Woods. It’s never going to happen unless I’m six feet under! You’re my wife. Face it and face it fast before I lose all patience with you!’
The door slammed thunderously in his wake. Leah dared to breathe again but her heart was pounding against her ribcage in near panic. Nik had exploded into rage like a bonfire rained on by paraffin. Dimly it occurred to her that she might have been wiser to tell him that Paul no longer featured in what he had called her ‘adolescent fantasies’. But that idea was wholly crushed as she relived the humiliation of the verbal attack she had just been forced to withstand.
‘Hot as hell...wanton...abandoned...a whore’. No doubt it was exactly what she deserved. She had reduced herself to his primitive level, allowed herself to forget every principle and every decent inhibition, number one of which should have been no sex without love. Well, he could just go back to his bimbos, then; it was absolutely no skin off her... Yes, it was, it was! Deeply hurt, positively savaged by the very idea of Nik with another woman, Leah vented a stifled sob and fled.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘IS NIK WORKING?’ Ponia enquired gently over dinner for two.
‘Probably.’ Leah contrived a stiff little smile meant to suggest that she had only just noticed his absence and was quite unconcerned by it. After all, she reminded herself doggedly, five years of almost continuous absence ought to have accustomed her to the value of her own company and counsel. Only somehow it hadn’t. Their relationship had changed so fast and so radically that Leah was in turmoil and her desperate attempts to regain he
r former detachment weren’t working one little bit.
‘He was in the taverna this afternoon; one of the fishermen at the harbour mentioned it,’ Ponia supplied, and looked uncomfortably at Leah. ‘He’s in a rage, isn’t he?’
‘We had an argument, yes,’ Leah conceded, wishing that the teenager would drop the subject.
‘He has a very hot temper.’ Ponia pushed her thick curls back from one small ear, a reflective curve to her mouth. ‘But he very rarely loses it—which is just as well, considering that the family just don’t know how to handle it. My grandmother never raises her voice. None of them do. They go white to the gills and back off when Nik blows up. The one and only time I saw it, it fascinated me.’
Nik’s niece was watching her almost expectantly. Leah’s brow furrowed but she said nothing.
Ponia concentrated on her plate but kept on talking. ‘I was about eleven when I overheard my two aunts talking about Nik. They were wondering who his natural parents were and I didn’t even know what that meant then—’
Leah froze. ‘His natural parents?’ she repeated, carefully keeping her voice level.
The teenager’s face was uncharacteristically serious. ‘Of course, I was stupid enough to go and ask my mother and she was really upset. It was years before I understood that adoption’s only something to be ashamed of in my family.’
‘Yes,’ Leah agreed, since some input appeared to be expected from her. She was so afraid of revealing her astonishment that she wouldn’t even let herself think about what she had just learnt.
Ponia visibly relaxed. ‘It’s never, ever mentioned. Everybody outside the family thinks Nik was born to my grandmother; how did she get away with it? She was forty-eight!’