Out of the brightness of the day into the dark.
* * *
The taxi from the train station made its slow way along the rutted drive that led up to Greymont. The state of the drive was still on her ‘to-do’ list like a great deal else—including all the interior décor and furnishing work, conserving curtains and restoring ceilings. But the majority of the essential structural work was nearing completion, and work on the electrics and the plumbing were well underway.
Yet the very thought of them burned like fire on Diana’s skin.
How could I have got it so wrong? So disastrously, catastrophically wrong!
The question went round and round in her tired, aching head as she walked into her bedroom, collapsed down upon her bed. It had been going round and round ever since she’d walked out of the hotel and into waiting car waiting to take her to the airport, her suitcase having been packed by the maids, her ticket all arranged.
Nikos had stayed immured in his room, the door locked against her. Refusing to have anything more to do with her. Sending her away.
She’d walked out of the hotel like a zombie, feeling nothing. Nothing until she’d taken her seat on the plane and faced up to what the reality of her marriage was.
Completely and utterly different from what Nikos had thought it would be.
That was what she could not bear. That all along Nikos had assumed their oh-so-mutually convenient marriage was going to include oh-so-mutually convenient sex...
He’d assumed that from the start! Intended it from the start!
And she’d blinded herself to it. Wilfully, deliberately, not wanting to admit that right from that very first moment she’d seen him looking at her it had been with desire.
I told myself he was just assessing me, deciding whether I would fit the bill for his trophy wife, if had the right connections, the right background—the right ancestral home.
Bitter anger at herself writhed within her. How could she have been such a fool not to have realised what Nikos had assumed would be included in their marriage deal? What he’d taken for granted would be included right from the start.
But it was easy to see why. Because she’d wanted to believe that her only role in his life would be to give him an entrée into her upper-class world. Because that had meant she would be able to yield to the desperate temptation that he’d offered her—the means of saving Greymont.
It meant I could take his money and get what I wanted. Easily and painlessly. Safely.
Without any danger to herself.
A smothered cry came from her and she forced her fist into her mouth to keep it from happening again.
Danger? She had wanted to avoid danger—the danger she’d felt from that very first moment of realising that of all the men she had ever encountered it was Nikos Tramontes who possessed the power she had feared all her life.
I walked right into the lion’s den. Blindly and wilfully.
And now she was being eaten alive.
The smothered cry came again.
What have I done? Oh, what have I done?
But she knew—had known it the moment she’d surfaced on that rooftop, in the arms of the man she should never have yielded to. She had committed the greatest and most dangerous folly of her life.
Into her head that old saying came: Take what you want, says God. Take it and pay for it.
Her eyes stared out bleakly across her familiar childhood room, where she had learned to fear what she must always fear... Well, now she was starting to pay.
Tears welled in her eyes. Anguish rose in her heart.
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* * *
Nikos was back in London. He’d spent three weeks in Australia, returning to Europe via Shanghai, and then spent another week in Zurich. He had, he thought grimly, been putting off going to London. But he could not put it off for ever.