She understood all right and she felt revulsion shimmer through her.
Be grateful you're not marrying him for real!
But marrying him she was—if she wanted money for Kim then she must go through this farce of a wedding ceremony.
Not one mistress but two! Her mouth twisted. My, my, what a busy lad Nikos Vassilis was! And still intended to be, so it seemed! Well, that might be the way Greek males saw the world, but she would be having none of it!
The pop of a champagne bottle made her jump, exacerbating her jittery nerves. One of the servants was pouring out foaming liquid into tall glasses. Andrea sipped at hers and looked around her.
All this money, all this wealth, all this opulence and luxury, she thought. I've been drowning in it for two weeks, nearly three.
I want to go home!
The thought caught at her, making her want to cry out with it. She wanted to go home, back to Kim, back to the poky, damp flat that Nikos Vassilis would be appalled to know she had grown up in! He thought he was marrying the Coustakis heiress. What a joke! What a ludicrous, ridiculous joke!
Well, the joke would be on him before the night was out.
But she didn't feel like laughing.
Andrea sat in the Louis Quinze armchair, her eyes shut. The champagne had been drunk, she had endured the painfully polite congratulations of the household staff, and now she was waiting for her brand-new husband to emerge out of the library, where her grandfather was finally allowing him to sign the merger contracts. A bevy of men in suits had arrived on the doorstep an hour ago, all with aides and briefcases, and disappeared into the inner sanctum of Yiorgos Coustakis to conduct the real business of the day.
Her legs ached. Carefully she rubbed them through the material of her trousers. Zoe had helped her change out of the long ivory satin gown she had worn for the ceremony, and now she was back in the clothes she had arrived in. Although the staff had emptied just about the whole of the closet into half a dozen suitcases to see her through her honeymoon. Andrea had insisted on her own small case—the one she had brought with her—being handed to her personally. She had packed it the night before, with all her own clothes and the make-up bag containing the key to the airport locker holding her money and passport, right after phoning Tony and telling him that she was coming home in forty-eight hours, and asking him, as always, to give her love to Kim. She hadn't spoken to her mother since arriving here. Hadn't been able to bring herself to. She knew Kim would understand, would make do with having her love passed on every day by Tony.
The ormolu clock on the gilded mantelpiece ticked quietly. The room was silent. The only sound in it was Andrea's heavy heartbeat.
Let me just get through tonight, and then 1 can be gone!
There was the click of a door opening across the marbled hall, and the sound of voices. She opened her eyes. She could hear the besuited visitors taking their leave, their business done.
Time for Nikos to move on to the next item on his agenda— taking his bride on honeymoon, thought Andrea viciously. Being angry seemed like a good idea right now.
Safer.
She heard Nikos's voice in the hallway, and her grandfather answering shortly. Then footsteps as her grandfather trod heavily back to his own affairs. It must have been a good day's work for him, Andrea thought, selling his company and his bastard granddaughter at the same time.
Something flickered in the corner of her eye, and she twisted her head. It was just a drape, fluttering in the breeze from the open window. The day was warm, the sun inviting. Something caught at her heart, an echo from very long ago, from long before she was born.
Out of nowhere a memory came. A memory of something that had never happened but that she had so often, as a child, wished so ardently were real, and not a mere hopeless longing. The memory of her father, kind and smiling, calling her his princess, her mother his queen, crowning them both with happiness ...
But it had never happened. Never. Instead he had died before she was born.
It shouldn't have been like this!
The silent cry came from deep inside her.
But it is like this, and there's nothing more I can do about it than I have already done.
'Are you ready?'
Nikos's voice was harsh, cutting through her sombre thoughts. He sounded tense.
She got to her feet.
'Yes,' she answered, and walked towards him where he stood in the doorway.
They took their places in the back of her grandfather's vast limousine, Andrea sinking back so far into the seat that she felt she would disappear. Nikos threw himself into the other corner. The car moved forward smoothly.
They did not talk, and Andrea was glad. She had nothing to say to this man now. After tomorrow morning she would never see him again. He was a passing stranger, nothing more.