His face had closed. Shutting her out as if an iron gate had slammed down across it.
‘There is no purpose in further exchange. Go and pack.’
He was walking away, picking up the house phone on the sideboard, uttering the brief words necessary to set in motion her departure.
‘I have work to do,’ he said.
His voice was as curt as it had been to the person at the front desk. He walked over to where he’d tossed his briefcase, picked it up. Walked into the spare bedroom.
She heard the door snap shut.
Then there was silence.
Silence all around her.
CHAPTER NINE
BLACK, COLD ANGER filled Nikos. Like dark ink, it filled his veins, his vision. His gaze, just as dark, was fixed on the blackening cloudscape beyond the unscreened porthole of the first-class cabin of the jet, speeding into the night as far and as fast as it could take him.
Australia would do—the other side of the world from Diana.
Diana whom he had made his wife in good faith. Concealing nothing from her, having no hidden agenda.
Unlike his bride. His oh-so-beautiful ice maiden, his look-but-don’t-touch bride, who’d never intended, even from the start, to make their marriage work.
Over and over in his head, like a rat in a trap, he heard that last exchange with her. Telling him what she thought of him. What she wanted of him.
What she did not want.
Not him—no, never that.
‘It wasn’t why I married you.’
Her words—so stark, so brutally revealing—had told him all. All that she wanted.
Only my money, in order to give her what she wants most in all the world.
His eyes hardened like steel, like obsidian—black and merciless. Merciless against him. Against her.
And what she wants most in all the world is not me.
It was her house—her grand, ancestral home—and the lifestyle that went with it. That was all that was important to her. Not him. Never him.
Memory, bitter and acid, washed in his veins, burning and searing his flesh. A memory he could not exorcise from his mind. Driving up to that gracious Normandy chateau bathed in sunlight, so full of hope! Hope that now he was no longer a child, and now he had been told who his parents were by the lawyer who had summoned him to his offices on his eighteenth birthday, he had found the mother who had given him away at birth.
He had been hoping he would discover that there was some explanation for why she had disowned him—something that would unite them, finally, that would see her opening her arms to him in joy and welcome.
His mouth twisted, his face contorting. There had been no joy, no welcome. Only cold refusal, cold rejection. He’d been sent packing.
All I was to her was a threat—a threat to her aristocratic lifestyle. To the lifestyle that came with her title, her grand ancestral home. That was all she wanted. All that was important to her.
The revelation had been brutal.
As brutal as the revelation his wife, his bride, had just inflicted upon him.
He tore his mind away as anger bit again, and beneath the anger he felt another emotion. One he would not name. Would not acknowledge. For to acknowledge it would infect his blood with a poison he would never be able to cleanse it from. Never be free of again.
The jet flew on into the night sky.