by Kim Lawrence
‘Actually I don’t mind waiting here to catch a lift straight back to the mainland.’
Tatiana looked blank and then shocked. ‘You don’t think we’d let you go straight back, do you? Heavens, you’re here as our guest for as long as you like.’
‘I couldn’t possibly stay.’ Chloe tried to sound firm, but all she sounded was tired as she lifted a hand to her ticcing eyelid.
‘Perhaps Chloe has other places to be.’ And other people she’d rather be with, he thought sourly, and the silent addition caused the line between his dark brows to deepen.
‘You can’t fly straight back,’ Tatiana argued.
‘Not unless she sprouts wings,’ Nik inserted drily. ‘Marco is refuelling the jet and then heading straight off to Düsseldorf.’
He slid effortlessly into Greek as he added something to Tatiana, who nodded in agreement.
‘Well, that settles it, then, you’ll stay with us...at least for tonight...to let me say thank you...?’
‘But your grandmother is unwell...’ Chloe began searching desperately for a legitimate reason to refuse their hospitality, or at least a reason that wasn’t, I really can’t be around your brother because I don’t want to be reminded of something I want but can’t have, and shouldn’t even want to begin with!
It sounded convoluted even in her own head, but then so was her relationship with Nik. Except she didn’t have a relationship with Nik. She closed one eye as the eyelid tic started up again.
‘She’s a lot better.’
‘Yaya is a tough old bird,’ Nik said gruffly, the warmth in his voice when he spoke of his grandmother unmistakeable.
And I’m sure there are some serial killers who love their grannies too, Chloe reminded herself as she fought hard against any lowering of the levels of antagonism that she felt were essential to maintain. Bad enough that she lusted after him, liking him as well would be too, too much to take.
‘Well, that’s settled, you’ll follow us,’ Tatiana announced.
Chloe, who was pretty sure that she hadn’t agreed to anything, not that that seemed to bother anyone in the Latsis family, opened her mouth to protest but Tatiana was telling Eugenie to throw her bag in the back. ‘Or, better still, Nik can take the scenic route and show Chloe...oh, no!’ Her eyes slid past her brother and her enthusiasm morphed into dismay. ‘Get in the car,’ she said sharply to her daughter, then, after adding something urgent-sounding in Greek to Nik, she climbed in beside the girl and slipped back into English, saying hastily, ‘Sorry, Nik, but I don’t want Eugenie to get caught up in this.’
Nik, who had turned to follow the direction his sister was looking, nodded. ‘You get going. Chloe, get in the car.’
Tatiana was already starting up the engine and Chloe couldn’t help turning round to see what had caused her friend to rush off.
There was a woman approaching them, about fifty feet or so away now, who was by turns running then walking, or rather stumbling, towards them, her uncoordinated gait suggesting she’d been drinking.
Chloe didn’t have a clue what was happening, but she was the only one, it seemed. Even the driver, who had murmured something in Greek to Nik and got back behind the wheel after receiving a nod in response, seemed to be in the know, but she did recognise an order when she heard one. She told herself she wouldn’t have obeyed him on principle, even if she hadn’t been eaten up with curiosity to discover what was going on!
‘I said—’ Nik began, still not looking at her, but Chloe could feel the tension coming off him in waves. His taut profile looked grey and grim, and the muscles along his clenched jawline were set like iron.
‘I heard you, which isn’t the same as obeying you,’ she said calmly.
He turned his dark head then, flashing her a look of seething impatience, and ground out, ‘I really don’t have time for this now.’
The woman was close enough now for Chloe to see that she was correct in surmising that the woman was drunk; she could smell the alcohol from yards away. So, it seemed, could Nik, who set his shoulders and turned back with an air of forced resignation as he waited until she was within hearing distance.
‘Hello, Helena.’
The woman was probably pretty when she remembered to comb her hair and her eyes weren’t lost in black-smudged circles of mascara that had been washed by tears running in dark rivers down her face.
The sound coming from her was half sob, half breathless pant as she walked straight past Chloe, her attention totally focused on Nik, her eyes burning with hatred.
Nik didn’t move an inch as the woman staggered up to him, glaring.
‘I wake up every morning wishing you were dead!’ she slurred. ‘I wish I was dead!’
The mixture of venom and despair in her voice sent an ice-cold chill down Chloe’s spine but Nik just stood there. What made it all the more bizarre was that he didn’t look angry, he looked...sad, compassionate and, most telling of all, guilty.
Chloe’s imagination went into overdrive. What had he done to this woman?
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said finally.
The woman’s face screwed up and an anguished high-pitched shriek left her open mouth as she pulled back her arm and aimed a closed-fisted blow that made contact with Nik’s cheek.
Chloe gasped in alarm, her hand going to her own cheek, but he just stood there and continued to do so as the woman started to pound his chest with her flailing fists, shrieking hysterically the whole time.
As the frenzied attack showed no sign of abating, although God knew where the woman got the strength from, the shock that had held Chloe immobile abated.
‘No!’ She wasn’t even aware that she’d voiced her protest or had moved forward until Nik looked at her and moved his head in a negative motion.
It was the total absence of anger in his austere, strong-boned face that hit her, that and the profound sadness. It added a deep ache of empathy to the already present confusion and horror—too many layers of emotion for Chloe to comprehend.
His headshake coincided with the woman running out of steam and she finally slumped her head against Nik’s chest, weeping in a way that hurt to listen to.
After a moment Nik lifted a tentative hand to her head, smoothing the tangles of hair down in a gentle stroking motion.
‘I’ll take her.’
Her focus totally on the tableau before her, Chloe hadn’t heard the approach of a man wearing a harassed expression. ‘Come on, honey, that’s it. I didn’t know where you’d got to.’ The woman lifted her head slightly at the sound of his voice.
‘The bastard should be dead!’
For all the reaction Nik showed to this venomous declaration he might as well have been, the skin drawn tight across the prominent bones on his face giving them the appearance of stone.
The stranger took the weeping woman, who reminded Chloe of a puppet whose strings had been severed, and pulled her against him, wrapping a supportive arm around her ribs as he half dragged, half lifted her away from Nik. ‘Sorry, you know she doesn’t mean it; she doesn’t know what she’s saying.’ The woman continued to weep uncontrollably as she slumped up against him.
The stranger looked from the woman he held to Nik with an expression that brought a lump to Chloe’s throat. ‘It’s not always this bad, but it’s particularly hard today...’
Nik nodded, his face still granite.
‘She’s been drinking all morning. I thought maybe being here with family would help.’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘Bad idea. I stopped for gas and she must have seen you... I had no idea that you’d be here.’
‘Neither did I. It was an unexpected visit. Is there anything I can do...?’
The woman’s head lifted at that. ‘Haven’t you done enough already?’ she slurred, before pressing her face back into the man’s shoulder as he turned and began to walk away down the road.
Nik watched for a few moments before he looked at Chloe. Some of the rigidity had gone from his tense posture, but not the lines
of tension bracketing his mouth or the shadow in his eyes. ‘Have you seen enough now?’
She flinched, but didn’t react to the unspoken accusation, which was both harsh and unjust, that she had taken some voyeuristic pleasure at the scene she had witnessed.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked, wincing inside at the crassness of her words, and she wasn’t surprised when he just flashed her a look.
The muscles along his taut jaw tensed as he turned away. He didn’t want or deserve Chloe’s sympathy.
Are you all right? she’d asked. Well, he was certainly more all right than the man who would have been thirty-five today if he’d lived. An image floated in his head, of Charlie grinning as he delivered the punchline of one of his terrible jokes, Charlie looking guilty when he explained this would be the last time they worked together because he was letting his lovely Helena finally make an honest man of him.
Nik remembered feeling pleased that he’d managed to guilt Charlie into one last assignment, though he hadn’t succeeded in planting a seed of doubt in his friend’s mind when he’d predicted that Charlie wouldn’t be able to live without the adrenaline buzz.
You know when it’s time to quit, Charlie had said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHLOE WAS LEFT standing there when without a word Nik got into the front seat of the car beside the driver. She blew out a breath and for once in her life wished someone would tell her what to do or at least what to think.
A reel of the terrible scene still played in her head. She had only witnessed it and she felt shaken and physically sick; she couldn’t begin to imagine what Nik was feeling and she had the distinct impression he wouldn’t be telling her any time soon.
She gave her head a tiny shake and slid into the back seat. In the front Nik was speaking to the driver, issuing instructions, she assumed, but she didn’t know for sure because it was literally all Greek to her.
Apart from that, they drove in absolute stony silence. A couple of times Chloe cleared her throat to ask how long it would take to reach their destination or for that matter where they were heading but chickened out at the last moment. So silence reigned until about maybe ten minutes into the journey when Nik suddenly spoke in Greek once again.
The driver responded in the same language and pulled onto the side of the road. The car had barely stopped when Nik flung himself out, and, leaving the door open, he strode off into the scrub at the side of the deserted road up an incline, immediately disappearing from view as he went down the other side.
So what did she do now?
Did she sit here and wait, or did she follow him...? She caught the eyes of the driver in the rear-view mirror, and his expression was sympathetic but he just shrugged.
‘I think I’ll stretch my legs,’ she said, not sure he understood her or if he’d try and prevent her from leaving the car.
He didn’t.
Grateful her shoes only had moderate heels, she stumbled her way across the steep slope of the rough ground, waking up tiny little things in the undergrowth as she picked out a path between the rocks, following roughly—she hoped—the route she had seen Nik take. The linen trousers she wore were of a loose style that ended mid-calf, protecting most of her legs from the razor-sharp ends of the long tough grass that poked through the rocks. But her calves already ached; the incline was steeper than it looked.
She had lost track of time today but the sun overhead was still high in the sky that was a uniform blue. It was very hot and she became uncomfortably aware of rivulets of sweat trickling down her back. Pausing to rest, she turned her head to make sure that she had not lost sight of the car.
Getting lost really would add the finishing touch to this day. Nik had seemed to vanish from view after only moments, so either he was astonishingly fit or she had somehow gone off course and attacked the slope at a wider angle.
Probably both, she decided, pausing again, this time just below the top of the incline. She ran her tongue over her lips; they felt dry and she was thirsty. Without the crunch of her footsteps, she could make out a distant whooshing sound above the softer constant buzzing of the bees that smothered the sweet-smelling wild thyme that filled the air with a deep sweet fragrance.
She closed her eyes and inhaled.
What are you doing? she asked herself wearily. So you find him—what then? Does he strike you as a man who needs a shoulder to cry on? Like a wounded animal, he’d gone away to lick his wounds; he clearly wanted privacy and she was going to crash it. It had seemed like a good idea at the time—but why exactly?
She puffed out a gusty sigh. This was starting to feel like a very bad idea, but, torn between turning back and pushing on, she hesitated only momentarily before tackling the last few feet of slope.
As she crowned the hill her efforts were rewarded by a view that made her catch her breath. In contrast to the steep slope she had just climbed, the other side was a very gentle incline, the vegetation spare where it grew out of the sandy ground, but she barely noticed as her eyes went to the horseshoe curve of a bay ringed by rocks. Alternating stripes of pebbles and silvery sand ran down to the water. Beyond the gentle waves that frothed white as they broke on the beach, the blue of the sea deepened, interspersed with iridescent swirling areas of deep green and dark turquoise before it met the sky.
The view was so unexpected and so soul-soothingly beautiful that for a long moment all she did was stare, but the moment of spiritual peace shattered into a million shards as her eyes reached the figure standing at the farthest point of the beach before the rocks rose up out of the water.
Nik stood, his tall, remote figure a dark silhouette against the backdrop of bright blue. The strength of the empathetic sympathy that swelled in her chest took her by surprise, and, without pausing to examine it or the need to be with him right now, she began to jog towards him, the downward journey on the smooth, gentle slope far less taxing than the climb up it.
Once she reached the sand she slowed until finally pausing to remove her shoes. Swinging them from the fingers of one hand, she continued slowing as she picked her way across the bands of smooth stones that were sandwiched between the wider bands of powdery sand.
The closer she got to the water, the more she felt the breeze, warm but very welcome as it lifted the damp strands of hair from her neck. She stopped a few feet away from Nik, suddenly unsure what to do next, which seemed to suggest she’d ever known. The thought that she actually knew what she was doing or had any sort of plan when it came to Nik tugged her lips into an ironic, self-mocking smile.
Blind instinct had got her this far and if she had any sense, Chloe reflected, it would take her straight back the way she had come.
She never had had much sense.
‘It’s very beautiful.’
He didn’t react to her comment, so she assumed he already knew she was there. She took a few more steps towards him, in the shade cast by the rocks, which meant it was pleasantly cooler underfoot. But not as cool as standing ankle deep in the water, which Nik was doing in his beautiful handmade leather shoes, although he seemed utterly oblivious.
‘Don’t worry; I’m not going to ask you if you’re all right.’
‘Are you moving on to you probably deserve it?’ he tossed back, thinking grimly that if so, she was right. Digging his hands deep into the pockets of his tailored trousers, he stared sightlessly in front of him, eyes narrowed at the horizon, trying to remember what it felt like not to carry this constant weight of guilt around with him.
He swivelled around, his short hair catching the breeze as a sudden spurt of stronger wind made it stick up in sexy tufts.
As their eyes connected it struck Chloe with the force of a blow that his expression was exactly the same as the first time she had seen him, dark and tortured. The sight made her heart squeeze in her chest.
The expression he caught on her face stung his pride into painful life, but he didn’t want her concern, genuine or otherwise. He didn’t deserve concern, and certainly not
from her... Hell, life had been easier when she had been filed in his memory banks under the heading of a typical shallow, narcissistic socialite. He had used her once to distract himself from his past and he was doing the same thing now; why didn’t she seem able to recognise a lost cause when she saw one?
‘No, I don’t think you deserved it.’ Chloe’s first thought had been that she was seeing an ex-lover he’d done the dirty on seeking revenge, and to her shame she had been prepared to be the cheering squad, but the impression had only lasted for seconds as it had almost immediately become obvious that she was seeing something much more complicated.
An expression she couldn’t interpret flickered across his face. ‘Well, I do.’ He flung the words at her like a challenge.
‘You must have done something really bad, then,’ she said calmly.
A sense of deep self-loathing rushed through him with the force of a forest fire. His chest heaving, he heard a roar inside his skull before the feelings he’d kept locked inside for years finally exploded out. ‘I killed a man—my best friend.’
* * *
‘I’m sorry.’
His head came up with a snap.
‘Sorry!’ he echoed as he began to walk out of the water towards her with slow deliberate steps. Confession was supposed to be good for the soul but he didn’t feel good or cleansed; he felt furious with himself for losing control, especially in front of the last person he wanted to see...see what?
The question brought him to a halt when he was six inches away from her, so close that she had actually closed her eyes to shut out the awe-inspiring image he presented.
She could feel the heat of his body through the narrow gap between them but it was nothing compared to the anger and frustration that the air was practically coloured with that rippled off him in almost tangible waves.
He dragged a frustrated hand roughly across his forehead, but as he scanned her face for a clue to what she was thinking his own expression was cloaked. ‘Did you hear what I just said?’
