Can I do it? Marry Nikos Tramontes?
The cheque in her hand demanded an answer. Accept or reject it. Accept or reject the man who’d signed it.
The phone on her desk rang, startling her. It was her architect, politely, tactfully enquiring whether she was yet in a position to set a start date for the work that needed to be done. Work that could not start without Nikos to pay for it.
Her hand clenched, her signet ring with the St Clair crest on her little finger catching on the mahogany surface of the desk. Emotion bit into her, forcing a decision. The decision she had to make now. Could postpone no longer. If she did not restore Greymont it would decay into ruins or she would have to sell. Either way, it would be lost.
I can’t be the St Clair who loses Greymont. I can’t betray my father’s devotion and sacrifice. I can’t!
The offer that Nikos Tramontes had put in front of her was the best she could ever hope to find. It was a gift from heaven.
Nothing else can save Greymont.
She could feel her heart thumping in her chest, her mouth drying, suddenly, at the enormity of what she was doing.
It will be all right—it will be all right...
She heard the words in her head, calming her, and she clung to them urgently.
Slowly—very, very slowly—she breathed out. Then she spoke. ‘Yes,’ she said to her architect. ‘I think we can now make a start.’
CHAPTER FOUR
THE WEDDING VENUE WAS the ballroom of an historic London hotel, with impeccable upper-crust ambience and timelessly stylish art deco décor, and it was packed with people.
Apart from the guests who were Nikos’s business acquaintances, Diana had rounded up everyone from her own circles whom Nikos Tramontes was marrying her in order to meet: those people who represented upper-class English society, based on centuries of land ownership and ‘old money’, who had all gone to school together, intermarried over the years, and would socialise together for ever. It was a closed club, open only to those born into it. Or to those who, like her new husband, had married into it.
She was glad so many had accepted her invitation—it made her feel she was definitely keeping her side of the bargain she’d struck with the man she was marrying. He wanted a society wife—she was making sure he got one, in return for funding the repairs now actively underway at Greymont.
The ongoing work had been her main preoccupation during the three months of their engagement, but she had made time to meet up with Nikos whenever he was in London, including attending a lavish engagement party at his newly purchased town house in Knightsbridge. The fact that his business affairs seemed to require his continuous travel around the globe suited her fine.
All the same, he’d taken pains to allow her to get used to him, to come to terms with being his fiancée, just as he’d promised he would. He’d taken her out and about to dinner, to the theatre and the opera, and to meet some of her friends or his business acquaintances.
He was no longer a stranger by any means. And, although she had been unable to banish that unwanted hyperawareness of his compelling masculinity that made her so constantly self-conscious about him, she had, nevertheless, become far easier in his company. More comfortable being with him. His manners were polished, his conversation intelligent, and there was nothing about him to make her regret her decision to accept marriage to him as a solution for Greymont.
Becoming engaged to Nikos had proved a lot more easy than she had feared. He’d certainly set aside her lingering disquiet that her disturbing awareness of his sexual magnetism might cause a problem. He seemed oblivious to it, and she was grateful. It would be embarrassing, after all, if a man to whom she was making a hard-headed marriage of convenience were to be inconvenienced by a fiancée who trembled at his touch.
Not that he did touch her. Apart from socially conventional contact, such as taking her arm or guiding her forw
ard, which she was studiously trying to inoculate herself against, he never laid a finger on her. Not even a peck on the cheek.
It was ironic, she thought wryly, that her friends all assumed her sudden engagement was a coup de foudre...
She’d let Toby Masterson think so, out of kindness for him, and he’d said sadly, ‘I could tell you were smitten, from the off,’ before he wished her well.
The only dissenting voice against her engagement had come from Gerald, the St Clair family lawyer.
‘Diana, are you sure this is what you want to do?’ he’d asked warningly.
‘Yes,’ she’d said decisively, ‘it is.’
As she’d answered that old saying had come into her head. ‘Take what you want,’ says God. ‘Take it and pay for it.’
She’d shaken it from her. All she was paying was two years of her life. She could afford that price. Two years in which to grace the arm of Nikos Tramontes in their marriage of convenience, a perfectly civil and civilised arrangement. She had no problem with that.
And no problem with standing in the receiving line beside him now, greeting their guests as his wife. She stood there smiling, saying all that was proper for the occasion, and continued to smile throughout the reception.
Only when, finally, she sank back into the plush seat of the vintage car that was to take them to the airport, from where they would fly off on their honeymoon in the Gulf—where Nikos had business affairs to see to—did she feel as if she’d come offstage after a bravura performance.