by Kim Lawrence
‘Oh, don’t look at those. I was having a bad day,’ Tatiana exclaimed, walking into the room. In one of her own designs, the petite brunette projected an air of effortless elegance. ‘Down, Ulysses!’ She gave a little sigh when the dog responded by wagging his tail and staying put. ‘Nik says a dog needs to know who’s master, but that’s the trouble—you already do, don’t you, you bad boy?’ she crooned.
Chloe gave a smile that she hoped hid the fact that her first thought whenever she heard the name of Tatiana’s younger brother was, Oh, God, not brother Nik again!
Nothing Tatiana said about her brother challenged Chloe’s growing conviction that the man thought he was an expert on everything—and was not shy about sharing his expert opinion.
But then, being reticent and self-effacing were probably not the most obvious characteristics for someone who was the head of a Greek shipping line, and though Chloe knew that Nik Latsis had only stepped into his father’s shoes relatively recently, it sounded to her as though they fitted him very well indeed!
Tatiana didn’t seem to question or resent the fact that her younger brother had inherited the company simply because he was male, so why should Chloe?
Maybe because she wasn’t Greek.
And there was no doubt the Latsis family considered themselves Greek even though they had been London based for thirty years. They were part of a large, well-heeled Greek community that had settled in the British capital. Rich or nouveau riche, they all had the rich part in common, that and being Greek, which seemed to be enough to make them a very tight-knit community where everyone knew everyone and traditions were important.
As she gave the dog one last pat she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror that made the generously sized room appear even larger, and made a conscious effort to iron out the frown lines that the thought of Tatiana’s invisible brother had etched in her forehead.
The invisible part was no accident. It was eighteen months since his father’s stroke had brought forward the younger brother’s ascension to the ‘throne’ of Latsis Shipping and he had kept a very low profile, something you couldn’t do unless you had loyal family and friends, limitless resources and, she supposed, an inside working knowledge of how the media worked that being an ex-journalist would bring.
The point being, Chloe, she told herself sternly, is that he is invisible. You’ve never met the guy, and yet here you are making all these judgements on the basis of a few comments and gut instinct. Something that she’d have been the very first to condemn in anyone else.
‘You’re being a hypocrite, Chloe.’
The softly voiced self-condemnation caused Tatiana, whose eyes had drifted with a distracted expression to the fabrics pinned on one of the boards, to look up. She directed an enquiring look at Chloe, who shook her head.
‘Those colours are beautiful,’ Chloe said, nodding to the fabrics, and lifted a finger to touch one piece of silk that was a shade or two deeper than the blue wide-legged jumpsuit she was wearing.
‘It would suit you, but I’m not sure...’ Tatiana stopped and shook her head. ‘Sorry, I just struggle to switch off sometimes.’
She smiled ruefully as she moved to kiss Chloe warmly on her cheek.
‘The trials of being artistic,’ Chloe teased.
‘I don’t know about that, but I do know that I am a bit of a workaholic...the work-life, home-life balance always did elude me.’ A wistful expression crossed her face. ‘Maybe that’s why I got divorced...’ She shook her dark sleek head slightly and smiled. ‘But never mind about that tonight...just look at you!’
Hands resting lightly on Chloe’s slim upper arms, she pushed the taller woman back a little. The sombreness of earlier drifted across her face when her glance stilled momentarily on Chloe’s legs covered in loose folds of sky-blue silk, but it was gone by the time her eyes reached Chloe’s face.
‘You look stunning, as usual. I’m not saying it’s all about a pretty face, but it definitely helps when you’re trying to get men to open their wallets for a good cause...and before you ask you have my permission to put the hard sell on everyone here tonight.’
‘People are usually very kind,’ Chloe said.
‘Especially when they are being guilted into it by the sister of a future queen. But why not use your connections? That’s what I always say, and, while I might not have the right sort, your sister certainly does.’ She sketched a curtsy and Chloe laughed. Her sister might be a princess and one day destined to be the Queen of Vela Main, but Chloe could not imagine anyone less royal. Both sisters had been brought up to believe that what a person did was more important than their title.
‘I’ll do my very best for the charity,’ Tatiana continued in earnest now. ‘In my book, I owe you.’ She walked across to the mantel where the marble surface was covered with framed photos. She selected one and held it up in invitation for Chloe to see it. ‘For what you did for Mel,’ she finished, looking fondly at the photo she held.
Chloe shook her head, uncomfortable with the praise. As far as Chloe was concerned, the young Greek girl was her inspiration. ‘I didn’t do anything.’ She took the frame that Tatiana offered and looked at the photo it held. It was a snap taken the previous month in a pavement café on a girls’ trip to Barcelona. ‘She’s a brave girl.’
Chloe had known Tatiana by sight and reputation before the other woman had boosted Chloe’s career by mentioning her blog in an interview she’d given covering London fashion week, two years ago now, Chloe realised, though it seemed more like a lifetime. Back then the interview was pretty much responsible for her blog becoming a profitable overnight success.
Chloe had contacted Tatiana to thank her for the plug and they had exchanged the odd email but they had never met in person.
That had happened in a very different context a year ago, after the designer’s god-daughter was moved into the room next to Chloe’s own in the specialist burns unit. Chloe had already been in there for three months; she’d known every crack in the ceiling and had been living vicariously through the love lives of the young nurses designated to her care.
Though the burns Chloe herself had received in a road traffic accident had been severe and painful and the healing process long, her own scars were easy to hide from view under her clothes. But the young woman in the next room had not been able to hide the damage done to her face by the fire caused by a gas explosion. Then, as if life hadn’t already thrown enough rubbish at her, the day after she had arrived at the burns unit her boyfriend had dumped her, at which point Mel had turned her face to the wall and announced she didn’t want to live.
As she’d listened through the partition wall Chloe’s heart had ached for the other girl. Their first conversation later that night shouted through the wall had been a one-sided affair, but it had been the first of many.
‘You got her through it, Chloe,’ Tatiana choked. ‘I’ll never forget that day I arrived and heard her laugh—you did that.’
‘Mel helped me as much as I did her. Did you see the information sheet she put together for me on make-up techniques?’ she asked, placing the photo back on the shelf. In doing so she accidentally nudged the one next to it and straightened it, admiring the frame; it was an antique one, the ebony wood delicately carved and rather beautiful.
Chloe was admiring the craftsmanship, running her fingers across the smooth indentations, when her glance drifted across the photo it held. Her mouth tugged into a smile; with a white-knuckle ride in the background, a younger Eugenie smiled back at her, complete with braces, from under the peak of a baseball cap with the logo of an adventure park emblazoned on it.
The jeans-clad man crouched down beside her in the shot was wearing the same cap, and he was... Chloe’s smile vanished like smoke as brutal stinging reality hit her like a slap across the face. Pale as paper now, she stared at the male in the picture, wearing jeans, a tee shirt, and a teasing, carefree expression on his handsome face, a face that bore no signs of a tortured soul. There w
ere no shadows that she felt the need to banish; he was just a regular guy...well, only if the regular guy in question was more handsome than any man had a right to be with a body that an Olympic swimmer might dream of possessing.
She stood like a statue staring at the photo she held in a hand that quickly developed a visible tremor—the tremor penetrating past the skin level and moving deep inside her.
By sheer force of will she released the breath she was holding in her lungs, but not the avalanche of questions whirring in dizzying succession through her brain. She felt as though a dozen people were inside her shouting so loudly she couldn’t make out the individual questions.
Obviously it couldn’t be him but, equally obviously, it was! The man in the photos was the same man who she had spent a never-to-be-forgotten night of lust with. If all learning experiences were as brutal as that one had been, it would not be worth getting out of bed in the morning—happily they weren’t and she had moved on.
But that didn’t mean she’d forgotten any of it. Forgotten the feelings of emotional hurt and humiliation that had made her physically sick the next morning when she’d realised he’d slipped away during the night. And the worst part was, she had no one to blame but herself. Because she had been the one who had followed her instincts when she’d approached him in that bar, telling herself that what she was doing was somehow meant to be... If they had been handing out awards for naivety and general stupidity that night, she would have walked away with an armful of prizes!
She’d wondered if his name really was Nik. It seemed utterly incredible to her now that she’d ever thought it part of the romantic fantasy element of their night together that she hadn’t even known his full name! Time had stripped away the romantic gloss and revealed it for what it truly was—a cheap and tacky one-night stand, even if the sex had been utterly incredible.
Keeping her voice carefully casual, she half turned to Tatiana, as yet unable to tear her eyes from the snapshot. ‘How old was Eugenie in this one?’
Tatiana came across and looked at the photo of her daughter and she gave a nostalgic sigh. ‘Oh, that was taken on her tenth birthday, although just five minutes afterwards she was throwing up. Nik let her eat a bag of doughnuts then took her on some white-knuckle ride.’
Chloe’s own knuckles were bone white where her hand was pressed to her chest. Her poor heart was vibrating against her ribcage, her insides were quivering as she told herself sternly to get a grip, not to mention a sense of proportion. It was only a photo after all, and he was old history.
Note to self, she castigated herself, the next time you decide to make love, don’t do it with a complete stranger! No, Chloe, let’s be grown up and honest here—it wasn’t making love, it was having sex.
It hadn’t been until she’d accepted that particular fact and realised that what they had shared that night had had absolutely nothing to do with a spiritual connection but everything to do with blind lust that she had been able to move on.
Move on—really? So why was she shaking?
She put the photo down carefully and smoothed her hands down over the fabric of her jumpsuit. She would not let that man do this to her again; she was not that silly naive girl any longer.
It had been a painful learning experience, but once her pride had stopped stinging and she had stopped feeling basically stupid she’d understood that while empty sex with anonymous strangers could obviously be physically satisfying, it probably wasn’t for her. She wasn’t exactly holding out for the love of her life, but she did think maybe a bit of mutual respect might be nice.
‘So that’s your brother Nik,’ she said flatly. Sometimes it seemed as if fate had a very warped sense of humour.
Her eyes skimmed the mantel. The same man, she recognised now, was in several of the photos. It wasn’t just the time difference that made him look younger, it was the absence of the cynicism and dangerous darkness she had sensed in him that night they’d had sex. What had happened to the man in these photos to turn him into the one she’d met only a few years later?
She dug her teeth into her plump lower lip as she squared her shoulders. Nik Latsis, her Nik—it was so weird to finally be able to put a full name to the man who had introduced her to sex and the fact it really was the only thing that some men were interested in. Well, his name was actually pretty irrelevant and she couldn’t care less what had happened to turn him into such a cold bastard.
Not that she wasn’t totally prepared to take her fair share of the blame. After all, ‘naive closet romantic meets utter bastard’—it was never going to end well, was it? But she was not that person any more.
‘I forgot, you haven’t met Nik...have you?’ Tatiana asked.
The truth or a lie?
Chloe settled for somewhere in the middle. ‘He does look a little familiar...’
It’s the clothes that threw me.
She brought her lashes down in a concealing sooty curtain and fanned her hot cheeks with a hand, causing the bangles she wore around her wrist to jingle. ‘I think summer might finally have arrived,’ she commented, ignoring the house’s perfect air-conditioning system.
‘You might have seen him on the television, perhaps?’
‘Television?’ A puzzled frown drew Chloe’s brows together above her small straight nose. ‘I don’t think so...’ Then it clicked; Tatiana wasn’t talking about the present day but her brother’s previous life. ‘Oh, when you said he was a journalist I thought you meant he was in print...’
His sister nodded. ‘He started out in print journalism but Nik was a war correspondent, and he was on the telly quite a lot actually. He won awards.’ Tatiana’s pride in her brother’s achievements was as obvious as her distress as she enlarged. ‘He spent the last two years of his journalistic career embedded with the military, in the worst war zones you can imagine. Nik has always been the sort of person who doesn’t do half measures.’
He had certainly been no half-measure lover or, for that matter, halfway callous!
‘On his last assignment his cameraman, his best friend, was shot.’
Chloe blanched in shock. ‘Did he...?’
Tatiana nodded. ‘He died in Nik’s arms, but the worst part—at least for the families—was that for three days we knew that there had been a fatality. There were about ten journalists, all from different media outlets pinned down, but we didn’t know their identities or who had died.’
Chloe gave an empathetic murmur of sympathy and touched her friend’s hand as the older woman closed her eyes and shuddered. ‘We all loved Charlie, he had just got engaged...but at the same time we were all so incredibly relieved that it wasn’t Nik. It made everyone feel so guilty.’
‘Survivor’s guilt,’ Chloe said, thinking of her sister who, after the accident from which she had escaped unscathed while Chloe had not, had been helped by a therapist. Well, Nik Latsis could afford the best help money could buy.
‘You’ve probably seen him, although professionally he used Mum’s maiden name, because he didn’t want to be accused of using the family name. Does Kyriakis ring a bell...? Nik Kyriakis?’
Chloe shook her head. ‘I’ve never watched much TV. There was a rule when we were growing up, half an hour’s television a day, and then when I could decide for myself I suppose it had become a habit I never really broke. Even now I listen to the radio rather than switch on the box. It must have been hard for your brother going back to work after what had happened...?’
She had gone back to the spot where the accident had happened—had it been therapeutic? Only in the sense that she had proved to herself that she could do it?
That had been how she had privately charted her recovery: the things she was able to do, the things she could move past—looking at her scars, showing them to her family, getting into a car, driving a car...going back to the winding mountain road where the accident had happened.
‘He didn’t go back. A day after he returned, our dad had his stroke and couldn’t run the company any mo
re; the plan had always been for Nik to step up when the time came.’ She stopped, an expression of consternation crossing her face. ‘Nik doesn’t ever talk about what happened to Charlie, so don’t mention it tonight, will you?’ she finished anxiously.
If he wanted to bottle things up in a stupid manly way, that was fine by her; she definitely wouldn’t be getting him to unburden himself to her. In fact, the idea of seeing him, let alone passing the time of day with him, made the panic gathered like a tight icy ball in her stomach expand uncomfortably.
Ironically there had been a time when she would have paid good money to confront her runaway lover, but that time was long gone; she had no intention of having any sort of conversation with Nik Latsis.
He was history, a mistake, but not one she was going to beat herself up over any more, and one she really didn’t want to come face to face with, but, if she absolutely had to, she was going to do it with pride and dignity.
Well, that was the plan anyway.
‘I won’t,’ she promised as the voice in her head reminded her once again that her plans often had a habit of going wrong...
CHAPTER TWO
‘YOU’RE LATE.’ TATIANA kissed her brother’s lean cheek, grimacing a little as the sprinkling of designer stubble grazed her smooth cheek before one eyebrow rose. She struggled to hide her surprise as she shifted her gaze from her impeccably turned-out brother to the woman who stood with one hand possessively on his dark-suited arm.
‘You know Lucy Cavendish?’ Placing a hand across her shoulders, he drew the model, her famous dazzling smile firmly in place, close into his side. The redhead tilted her head. Unusually for a woman, in her heels she topped his shoulder.
‘I did Tatiana’s last catwalk show in Paris. What a lovely home you have.’ Lucy’s expertly made-up green eyes moved admiringly around the entrance hall with its chandeliers and dramatic staircase.
Tatiana inclined her dark head and delivered an air kiss. ‘Thank you. You’re looking well, Lucy...’ Tatiana looked up at her brother. ‘You growing a beard, Nik?’
