It had left her here, now, in this hollow shell of a marriage she should never have made, mocking her with bitter gall. Demanding a price from her that was anguish in every way. And she must go on paying, go on enduring...
* * *
Over the weeks that followed—weeks that were spent at Nikos’s side, at his direction, on his requirement, she played her part. Performing her social role as Mrs Nikos Tramontes, immaculately dressed whatever the occasion, behaving just as the situation demanded, whether it was luncheon parties at Thames-side mansions, cocktail parties in Mayfair, dinners in top restaurants in London or attending the theatre or opera at Niko
s’s side. Always she was there, always perfect, always smiling. The perfect wife.
Trapped in a marriage that had become a torment and an agony.
Nikos was angry. He was angry all the time now. With the same dark, cold anger that had possessed him when he’d sent Diana—his beautiful, enticing wife, his beautiful, untouchable wife—back to what she loved most of all in her privileged world. Her grand house and the gracious lifestyle that went with it, all that was important to her.
As the weeks passed a kind of pall settled over him. Outwardly he went through the motions of life, but it was only for show. Deadness was filling him. Numbing him. With part of his mind he knew he should let Diana go, that it was achieving nothing but torment keeping her in their impossible marriage, and yet letting her go seemed even worse.
He could not face it.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this!
His marriage should have given him everything that he wanted! Everything. Diana, his trophy wife, would grant him the place in the world his mother’s rejection of him had denied him. Diana, so elegantly beautiful, so perfect a wife, would show him off to the world.
And Diana, his ice maiden, would melt for him and him alone...
And now she had brutally, callously rejected him—refused him.
He felt that perpetual anger bite again. Oh, he had his trophy wife, all right, chained to his side, but it was like dust and ashes in his mouth.
She melted in my arms, burned in my embrace under the desert stars! I thought that it was me that she wanted! How could I not have thought that after what we were to each other those precious days? Those days that seemed to bring us so close together—in body and in even more than that.
Into his head came the memory of what he’d felt that day he’d rushed back to her from that disastrous meeting with the Minister for Development, and the question that had formed in his head of what Diana might be to him...more than he had ever envisaged. What she might yet be to him...
He had not answered the question. But now he knew the answer for the savage mockery that it was.
A silent snarl convulsed in his throat. Fool—arrant fool that he’d been! Fool to think he’d melted her. There was nothing in her to melt—not at the core of her. Nothing at all. At the core of her being was only one thing, the only thing she wanted and the only thing she valued.
And it was not him.
All she wanted was to preserve her precious lifestyle, her grand ancestral home—that was all that was important to her!
It’s all she values.
Just as it was all his mother had valued.
Not me.
And his wife—his glitteringly beautiful, icily cold, frozen-to-the-core trophy wife Diana—was the same. The same as the woman who had thrust him from her chateau, ordering him away. Rejecting him.
Just as Diana had.
That was the truth slamming into him day after punishing day. It burned in him like acid in his throat, in his guts. Eating him alive.
He could feel it now, biting invisibly as it always did, by day and by night, as he stood, an untouched glass of champagne in his hand, at this reception at the headquarters of a French investment bank in Paris by whom he was being wooed as a prospective client.
The valuable business he might potentially bring guaranteed that he had the full attention of one of the top directors, but as they talked about business opportunities his mind had scarcely been on the conversation.
He tore his thoughts away. Forced himself to focus on what the director was saying to him.
With a flicker in his eyeline he became aware of someone else coming up to them. A man older than himself by a few years, obviously French, and... Nikos felt his eyes narrow suddenly. He looked vaguely familiar. Did he know him?
The man came up to him, politely but pointedly waiting while the bank’s director finished speaking. Then he interjected.