She didn't get to finish. Savagely Lazar Vardakas interrupted her. `What charming manners you have,' he sneered, no resemblance in this snarling, dark-haired man opposite her to the wonderfully kind man she had last night asked to take her with him. 'Charming manners,' he repeated, his savage expression not lifting, 'for the sister of a seducer of virgins ! '
Clare just sat and stared at him. For several seconds her mind refused to believe what she had just heard. Then her eyes grew wide, incredulous, as the shock of what he had said penetrated; her face drained of colour, and she gripped the table in front of her hard.
'Wh-what are—y-you saying? Wh-what do you mean?' she gasped. Had he gone off his head? Did he have two personalities, one he used at night-time, one he used in the day?
`So innocent,' he scorned. 'Your seducer brother said you were. But he didn't know how you had tricked him and his brother so you could have your home to yourself in order to enjoy the freedom the not so innocent canenjoy when there is no one there to see what they are getting up to.'
What was he talking about? Desperately she tried to gather together her scattered wits, vaguely recalling she had told him she had tricked her brothers into going away and leaving her on her own.
`But—but that was only so they could have a holiday without me. They ...' She hesitated, not wanting to tell him too much, but finding she suddenly needed to defend herself. `They look after me too much as it is,' she added.
'Then it is a pity for you that neither of your brothers is in a position to look after you now, isn't it?' he snapped, his face cold now after the snarling countenance that had been about him before, but his look no less frightening.
Fear clutched at her, making her want to get to her feet and run. But her legs felt like jelly—she knew she wouldn't make it as far as the door.
'I ... You ...' she choked, having difficulty in finding words as the knowledge came that something was terribly wrong!
Lazar Vardakas surveyed her ashen face indifferently, letting his eyes drift over the concealing print of her dress before bringing them back to her face. His expression took on a speculative look.
'You appear innocent,' he summed up. 'It could even be that you are.' A long deliberate pause followed that had her every nerve end screaming in alarm, and she almost went under as he added slowly, 'We shall see.'
'Wh-what do you mean?' came hoarsely from her dry throat. Oh God, where was her courage? More than
ever she needed to find some spark of it now. She had to try and look brave even if she was almost dropping from the shock of finding that the man she had thought so wonderful such a short time ago was now showing he was a devil in- disguise.
He didn't answer, but seemed prepared to sit there all day letting his eyes bore through her. And it was at that moment that a small flicker of courage came to her aid. With it came the realisation too that her spark of courage would go again very quickly if she allowed him to carry on a conversation that looked to be growing more and more personal about her.
`What did you mean—about Kit being ...' She couldn't finish.
'A seducer of virgins?' He had no qualms about finishing it for her, and she half wished she hadn't asked him when that savage look came to his face again. `Unlike your country, in Greece the virtue of an unmarried woman is sacrosanct,' he told her, his expression grim. 'A Greek man,' he said proudly, `does not have to hope his bride will come to him untouched. He has every confidence she will be.'
'But ...' she went to interrupt him, and was silenced by the lift of his hand.
'Thanks to your brother, my sister's chances of making a suitable marriage have been taken away from her.'
'Oh!' she gasped. Kit was a normal man, she supposed, having never so much as having thought of such things before. But would he have done what Lazar Vardakas was suggesting? He definitely wouldn't unless the girl had been willing, she knew that for a fact. So it made nonsense of what he was telling her about Greek girls and their prized virtue.
Her courage rose again. `Kit would never have touched your sister without encouragement,' she said with conviction. She flinched back, her courage sent flying when Lazar looked so violently angry at the sugestion that he leaned forward and she thought he was going to strike her.
`How dare you!' he thundered, then seemed to gain some control. Though control he might have, his voice was still thundering as he told her, `Your brother took Sophronia to his flat where he plied her with drink so that she didn't know what she was doing. And there he educed her.'
'He wouldn't,' she denied, no thought of courage now as a fierce instinct had her defending Kit. `He's not like that. He's good. He's kind and gentle. I'll grant he m-may have had a—a—fling or two, but,' her voice rew stronger, her conviction evident, 'but never would he treat a girl in the way you suggest he treated your sister.'
Clare doubted the strength of her denial had got through to him, but he looked less angry when she had finished, though none the less dangerous.
`Your brother defends your virtue with equal intensity,' he said softly, his eyes once more going over her in a way that made her shrivel up inside. `Sophronia, when she had recovered sufficiently from her hysteria on realising she had given herself to a man outside wedlock, told my father that he had spoken of his sister Clare at quite some length.'
'He did?' she asked warily.
'Oh, he said nothing you need be ashamed of, I assure you,' he said, mistaking her wary look. 'He had nothing but good to say of you— how sweet and gentle you were. In fact the whole impression Sophronia had of you was that you were protected by your family with as much fierceness as any Greek girl could expect from her people. When Aeneas told me everything that had happened, repeated to me everything Sophronia had said of you, I instructed him to go and question your brother on the subject of this "Clare" and to telephone me again.'
`This was before Kit had his accident?' Clare asked, puzzled that if they thought Kit was as black as this Sophronia had painted him, why then had Aeneas offered him hospitality on the island?
`Your brother has not had an accident,' Lazar Vardakas stated slowly. But as Clare's heart lifted, he added cruelly, `Yet.'
`You mean ...' She couldn't believe what he was saying, that ... But he left her no time for comprehension, going on to let her know that he was completely in charge of the situation.
`To return to what I was saying. Aeneas rang me again, telling me your brother was of the opinion that your virtue was as pure as the colour of your hair. It was then that I thought it might be an idea to come and pay you a visit.'
`You didn't come to—to take my father to see Kit?' She wished he hadn't become personal again by mentioning the white colouring of her hair.
`I knew your parents were away,' he told her coolly, shocking her into silence for a moment while her numbed brain tried to register what he was saying.
`You—you didn't know Bruce wouldn't be there,' she choked.
`That was a stroke of luck. But provided you didn't have a face and shape that said it was unlikely you were marriageable material anyway, I was prepared to bring both you and your brother with me.' With a superior shrug, he added, It would have been no trouble to have shipped him out to Niakos to wait with your other brother.'
`Wait?' she echoed, thinking she would either faint from the horror of what was happening or go to pieces completely at any moment. `What ...' the word came out thin and reedy, but the question had to be asked. `What,' she said again, `have they to wait for?'
`Why,' he said, savouring the moment, his black eyes pinning her huge brown ones so that she couldn't look away, `so that I can avenge Sophronia uninterrupted.'
`Avenge?' she gasped, her brain refusing to take her any further.
`To see that you,' he began slowly, watching the way her eyes grew enormous, `you, who have been guarded by your family in the same way my sister has been guarded, shall suffer the same fate that she has suffered.'
Unable to speak, robbed of words, Clare jus
t sat open-mouthed and stared, all her senses so numbed she couldn't move a muscle. Then some part of her brain that hadn't frozen over recalled he had said something about marriage, though what it was escaped her.
`Are you ...' she asked, in a voice she didn't recognise but which must be hers since it was coming from her throat, `are you asking me to marry you?'
For answer, he tipped back his head and a roar of disparaging laughter burst from him, the shock of which was like a slap across the face to her and brought her out of her shocked state quicker than anything else could have done.
`You can take any idea that I might want to marry you out of your head,' he told her, his tone as derisory as his laughter had been. And then—shockingly,
'Though I do intend to have you in my bed ...'
That was as far as he got. Clare wasn't waiting to hear any more. Regardless that her legs didn't feel as though they would support her, she had sprung to her feet and was racing for the door, no thought in her head of where she was running to, her only idea that of escape.
He caught her with firm hands just as she reached the door, and all coherent thought left her at the feel of those strong immovable hands on her. Like a wild animal she lashed out at him, her mind too violated by what he had said for her to care where she struck him.
But her blows glanced' off him, were ineffectual as that firm grip proceeded to shake her into sensibility. She came to herself to find she was being held at arm's length, and felt relief on discovering he was making no move to touch her anywhere else. Her breathing ragged, she quietened, capable of only standing and staring at him.
He said something in Greek, a. swear word, she thought, then sourly, 'What the hell did you think I was going to do to you?'
A sickness invaded her as the one hushed word left her. 'Rape,' she breathed, and saw his face take on a tight look.
Without ceremony he marched her back to the chair she had so rapidly vacated and pushed her hard down into it, making sure she didn't look to have the strength to race away again before resuming his own seat.
'I said,' he reminded her tautly, 'that you should suffer the same fate as Sophronia. My sister was not raped.'
Not believing she was actually in Greece, was actually having this conversation when less than twenty-lour hours ago she had been safe in her own little world, nothing more important on her mind then than the curtain material she intended buying today, Clare heard the stranger within her doing the talking.
`You're saying you mean to—to seduce me?'
'That had been my intention,' he said, and her heart lifted fractionally to hear the past tense, only for it to plummet to the ground when he added, `I still intend to take your virtue.' He didn't look as though the prospect pleased him very much. 'But after that little display just now, I am prepared to let you come to me in your own time.'
'My own time?' she repeated, in no way understanding, if he didn't intend to seduce her, how he was going to set about taking her virtue. 'How ...'
'I will not raise a hand to get you into my bed,' he told her coolly. And then she almost crumpled into a heap as he went on, 'But unless you come to my bed voluntarily, unless you make all the overtures by ...' he shrugged as though the matter hardly concerned him, 'say, the end of the week, then the accident I spoke of your brother having will, make no mistake, be a certainty. Only then it will not be just concussion he will be suffering from. I will personally ensure that never again will he be able to seduce any woman.'
Her breath caught as it was sucked in at the horror of what he was saying. She gave a choking cough as, her eyes wild, she fought to overcome her ,panic.
'Kit's all right? Y—you haven't ...'
'Aeneas assures me he is very healthy—at the moment. He is a prisoner on Niakos where he will stay until I make the telephone call that will release him.'
And, Clare thought, that would only be when she had done what this hard, unpitying man demanded of her. `You're saying,' she managed to get out, knowing She had to continue, had to calm down and ask the question that was half frightening her to death so she should know she hadn't misheard him, for all his English was faultless, `that in order to save Kit from—from probably being maimed for life,' she swallowed, 'I have to come to your b-bedroom and ... and ...' she couldn't think the words he had used, let alone say them, `and get into bed with you?'
`You know which bedroom is mine, I believe,' he said sardonically, making her want to hit out at his superior face. `I saw you taking a look at it just before you went to bed.'
Oh God! she groaned inwardly. And she had been unsuspectingly thinking how marvellously kind of him to think of putting her father and Bruce in adjoining rooms. But she mustn't think of the way he had been last night. That hadn't been the true Lazar Vardakas. This man in front of her was the real one, this devil of a man. She had to have something else very clear before she left him. Only as she opened her mouth, he seemed to read her thoughts.
`You have my word that I shall not be opening that communicating door to get into bed with you,' he told her, giving her a considering look. 'Though I should advise you—if you don't want your brother to end up feeling very sorry he so much as breathed the same air as a Vardakas—not to delay too long before you take the initiative.'
She saw pride in every part of him then, realised in that moment that once the honour of the Vardakas family had been tarnished, then it was God help the family of the poor unsuspecting person who had tarnished it.
`Mr Var—Vardakas,' she said, glad she had at last got it right, knowing it was no longer permissible to call him by his first name, but hoping somehow she would be able to get through to him. She had to make him see that Kit wouldn't have done what he had said, had to try and make him forget this idea he had for revenge. 'I ... Won't ...' It was no good, she admitted herself terrified at the fate that might befall her, and her courage spent, she just wasn't up to stringing one single sentence together.
He rose from his chair, a tall, towering man. `What is it you are trying to say, Miss Harper?' he queried. `That you want to get it over with now, perhaps? That you would like to come with me now; to undress me so you can use me as your brother used my sister?'
Ever afterwards, Clare found a tinge of self-respect to realise she wasn't totally the cringing, pathetic creature she had begun to think of herself as being. Temper that was a stranger to her soared into life for three glorious seconds.
`You can go to hell! ' she screamed at him, and knocked her chair flying as she hurled herself from it and towards the door, and out of his sight.
CHAPTER THREE
HER temper was short lived. She was a shivering mass of fear by the time she had gained her room, and she jumped in trepidation a few minutes later when, after a light tap on her door, it opened.
But it was not the vengeful Lazar Vardakas who stood there, but Phoebe, with a gentle smile, carrying a tray of food. Just the sight of food made Clare want to vomit, but it took her many minutes of sign language, which might have amused her had she not been so upset, to get through to the concerned-looking Phoebe that she didn't want anything to eat. Reluctantly Pheobe took the tray away, though as if she didn't fully understand she left Clare with a pot of coffee, a cup and saucer.
In agony with her thoughts, Clare ignored the coffee, her mind in a whirl, taking some minutes before she could isolate one terrifying thought from any other. As she tried a few deep breaths, fighting for calm and endeavouring to ignore the instinct that would have her tearing out of the villa, to run and keep on running, it came to her with mind-blowing dread that she couldn't run away. How could she? Kit's safety was in jeopardy. Lazar Vardakas had meant what he had said about an accident happening to him. Supposing she did get away, supposing she was lucky enough to make it to the main road, get someone to give her a lift to the nearest police station--always supposing she could make herself understood—the Vardakas family must be well known hereabouts. Wealthy and powerful, she suspected, and if all Greeks felt the sa
me as Lazar Vardakas about the honour of an unmarried sister, then could she expect any sympathy? They would have to do their job, she saw that, but wouldn't they first contact Lazar to see what he had to say?
A quivering groan left her and she collapsed on to the edge of the bed. Once he knew she had contacted the police, would he, before the police could get to Niakos, have telephoned his brother Aeneas and instructed him to maim Kit before the police arrived?
She put a hand to her mouth to check a dry sob. Kit whom she loved, Kit who had always been so good and gentle with her, was in terrible danger, a danger far more terrible than the dreadful danger she was in. She felt ill that his reprieve depended on her going through that door. She looked across at the communicating door through which she was supposed to go and offer herself, and felt so nauseated, the door itself seemed to loom so large and ominous that she just had to go outside where she could no longer see it.
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