by Lynne Graham
‘And I asked…perfectly reasonably…why?’
Her chin came up, her blue eyes bright with defiance. ‘That’s none of your business.’
Nik could not credit what he was hearing. ‘I insist…’
A little scarlet devil literally leapt up in the invigorating surge of Prudence’s anger. If he wanted the whole truth and nothing but the truth she would give it to him. ‘All right…’
‘Let’s eat while we talk.’ Nik urged her back indoors to where the first course awaited them.
Prudence sat down. Even in that short space of time her temper was fading and she was shaken by the hostility in the air, not to mention her own unfamiliar desire to fight with him. For goodness’ sake, she was hugely fond of Nik. There was no sense in destroying their friendship by trying to score points. An apologetic light in her soft blue eyes, she forced a smile back on her tense mouth and speared a juicy cube of melon. ‘I can’t believe we’re arguing.’
‘Believe it.’ Bereft of an appetite for food, Nik rested back in his seat in an attitude of highly deceptive indolence. His cutting-edge logic had already led him to draw a conclusion that shook him to his core. There was another man in her life; there had to be. For what other reason would she suddenly demand a divorce?
Prudence stole a glance at him from below her eyelashes. His remarkable eyes were smouldering like the stormy heart of a fire, eyes the colour of amber and precious gold that had haunted her thoughts for far too long, she conceded guiltily. Breaking free, breaking the final bond was the healthy thing to do. Lingering on the edge of his life was pitiful, she reminded herself.
‘But there’s no need whatsoever for this bad feeling,’ she murmured quietly. ‘I’m so fond of you…’
‘You’re also fond of cats, dogs, foxes, badgers, donkeys, horses…in fact, all the members of the animal kingdom…and of most of the people you meet.’
The vein of derisive dismissal in that response made Prudence redden. ‘I thought you’d want a divorce, too. I don’t see the problem unless it’s because I came up with the idea first. It’s not as if we’ve ever been married like other people-’
Nikolos levelled brooding eyes on her. ‘Whose choice was that?’
Her smooth brow furrowed. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I asked you whose choice it was that we ended up with a marriage that never got off the starting blocks.’
Her sense of perplexity deepened. ‘I always thought it was a mutual thing-’
‘Did you really?’ His rich, dark drawl was so quiet she actually leant forward to hear him, her whole attention welded to his lean, strong face. ‘Yet you’re the one who moved out of my bedroom. You’re the one who had hysterics when I tried to kiss you. You’re the one who took the first excuse available to leave Greece and stay away.’
It was Prudence’s turn to disbelieve the evidence of her own ears. Her eyes had opened very wide. ‘Er-you’re complaining?’
‘I was in no position to complain, was I?’ Nik breathed, tight-mouthed.
Prudence had no idea what he was driving at and she lacked the ability to listen and learn, for she did not want to relive the painful period of unhappiness she had endured before she bit the bullet and left Greece. Her face felt all tight and her tummy muscles were taut with stress. ‘Well, I hardly think you were likely to complain, Nik. In fact, I think it’s very hypocritical of you to make comments of that nature-’
‘Is that a fact?’
‘Yes, it is a fact. Honestly, I don’t understand why you’re acting like this,’ Prudence condemned shakily, pushing her chair back from the table in a sudden movement. ‘After all, I know you must have been hugely relieved when Trixie’s illness gave me a very solid reason to get back out of your life again!’
‘That is not true,’ Nik shot back.
Prudence was flushed and trembling. When it came to talking about anything that touched on the hurt and humiliation of their marriage, she reached the edge of her control very fast. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said fiercely. ‘But that’s not a very convincing protest from a guy who got himself blind drunk so that he could successfully avoid having to consummate our marriage!’
For an instant, Nik sat as though he had been turned to stone. Then with equal rapidity he sprang upright, took a pace forward and stood over her, six feet three inches of uncompromising, aggressive masculinity. His darkly handsome features were forbidding. ‘Say that again…’ he urged thickly.
‘I don’t think so.’ Instinct made Prudence scramble up and go straight into retreat.
‘You said that I successfully avoided…consummating our marriage…’
Eggs could have fried on Prudence’s hot cheeks. She could not believe that, eight years after the event, she had got so upset that she had sunk to the level of actually throwing that humiliating fact at him.
Scorching dark golden eyes locked to her discomfited face. ‘Are you saying that nothing happened between us on our wedding night? Nothing…at all?’
‘I hardly think that can be news to you,’ Prudence muttered, ducking her head down, talking to her toes.
Rage roared through Nik’s lean, powerful frame like a flaming fireball. He felt light-headed with the force of it. In all his life he could never recall being so angry. Yet at the same time what he had just found out banished the dark spectre of guilt that had dogged him for so many years. He had not touched her in anger or in desire on their wedding night. He felt amazingly liberated by that knowledge. With a swift jerk of his head he dismissed the waiter entering with a laden trolley. Closing his hand over Prudence’s, he pulled her out of the room in his imperious wake. An unexpected emergency, he told the hotel manager. His bodyguards bringing up the rear and depriving them of privacy, he headed back out to the helicopter, still without offering Prudence a word of explanation.
What’s happening? Where are we going? What about lunch? Why are you acting like this? All those questions flashed through her head but caution kept her silent. Had he just flipped at the reminder that their wedding night had been the non-event of the decade? But it didn’t fit his character; the Nikolos Angelis she had always known was a lot cooler than that.
Back at the farmhouse, Nik thrust wide the front door and strode into the sitting room. His stunning eyes welded to her in a blaze of wrath. ‘Do you realise that for eight years I’ve been blaming myself for something that never happened?’
Prudence gazed back at him, her brow furrowed with confusion. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. What have you been blaming yourself for?’
Nik strode forward, dominating the room with the strength of his sheer presence and size. ‘When I woke up the morning after our wedding, I was naked-’
‘Your friends did that-’
‘The bed had been stripped and remade…’
‘You asked me for a drink of water and I spilt it all over the bed, so I changed it.’ Prudence was frowning. ‘Are you saying you were too drunk that night to remember anything the next day?’
‘It’s still a blank. I don’t remember the evening part of the reception or anything until late the next morning. I had a complete blackout…I told you that at the time.’
Prudence looked away, tension thrumming through her. The room felt suffocatingly warm and she pulled open the patio door to let cooler air flow in from the terrace outside. ‘I assumed that was just an excuse, something you were just saying to cover up-’
‘Why would I lie?’ Nik incised curtly.
She heaved a rueful sigh. ‘Because people do when they’ve taken too much alcohol-’
‘By all accounts your mother had a problem telling the truth sober or under the influence. So don’t compare us.’
‘You’re not being fair to her when you say that.’ But Prudence was painfully aware that Nik and her mother had mixed like oil and water. Trixie had bitterly resented her daughter’s refusal to profit from her marriage into the wealthy Angelis clan and accept an allowance from Nik. Her mother’s acid comments
when Nik visited had led Prudence to suggest that she see Nik in London instead.
Nik rested grim, dark golden eyes on her. ‘I wasn’t lying to you when I said I had a blackout-’
‘That may be the case,’ Prudence conceded reluctantly. ‘But I didn’t know you well enough then to be able to tell the difference.’
His burning anger undimmed, Nikolos stepped back from her and swung away, tension emanating from him in waves. ‘The day after our wedding you shrank away from me,’ he breathed thickly. ‘You wouldn’t meet my eyes. You couldn’t even bear me to touch your hand-’
‘I just don’t want to talk about this!’ Prudence exclaimed, emotion whipping up a storm inside her because she was already recalling her anguished sense of rejection that day. She had learned to live with it but she still despised herself for the love that had cost her so dear.
Nik swung back to her, astonishingly fast and light on his feet for all his size. ‘Tough,’ he pronounced. ‘You’re going to talk about it. I’m not tiptoeing round your strait-laced notions of sexual propriety this time around.’
Utterly off-balanced by his aggressive stance and his hostility, Prudence drew in a quivering breath. ‘I would suggest that the practice of propriety is not one of your skills-’
‘You throw it up like a barrier between us.’ Nik strolled almost lazily round her, brilliant dark eyes watching the way sunshine lit up the lighter streaks of gold and amber in her hair while he wondered when he had last seen hair that natural and abundant. ‘But I won’t tolerate that again-’
Oddly uneasy with the way he was watching her, Prudence was standing as straight and stiff as a board. ‘I don’t want to discuss-’
‘What about what I want and need?’ Nik shot back at her, hard as a diamond cutting through steel. ‘You still speak as if I chose to get drunk that night. My drink was spiked-’
‘So you said at the time.’ Prudence was keen to get the discussion over with, since it seemed there was no hope of silencing him.
Nik bit out an incredulous laugh. ‘You didn’t believe that either, did you?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘But it was the truth. Someone spiked my drink with a drug. I can only believe it was someone’s idea of a joke but it wasn’t very funny for either of us,’ Nik pronounced harshly. ‘It ruined our wedding, humiliated me and made trouble between us.’
Even though Prudence was now prepared to accept that he had been telling the truth, she turned her head away. She was very pale. All the wedding guests had known why Nik was marrying her and he had come in a good deal of sympathy. As the outsider and the grandchild of an unpopular man, she had been despised. But had drugging Nik into a state of unconsciousness on his wedding night been intended as a joke? Or as a favour to him? Certainly, Nik had been in no condition to act the bridegroom. Some might well have assumed that that would be a welcome escape from an unpleasant task when the bride was plain and unattractive. She was convinced that the stifled sniggers of amusement that she had heard that night would live with her to her dying day.
‘I was more humiliated than you were,’ she muttered in a rush, swallowing hard, but it was no use: she just could not keep the tears from hitting the backs of her eyes and threatening to overflow.
In a movement that took Nik by surprise she spun round and walked hurriedly out into the garden. She came to a halt below the apple trees and dragged in a great gulp of fresh air, fighting for her composure.
‘How do you make that out?’
Startled, Prudence whirled round. Nik was on the terrace. Raw pain sliced through her as she focused on his lean, devastatingly handsome features. ‘When you had to marry me, your family and your friends felt so sorry for you,’ she remembered jaggedly. ‘Nobody was that surprised when it looked like you’d got plastered at the prospect of having to sleep with me!’
A dull edge of colour seared a faint line along the angular slant of his proud, chiselled cheekbones. He had not known she thought so little of herself and it disturbed him. ‘You can’t have thought that… How could you make such a drama out of nothing?’
‘It wasn’t nothing.’ Bitterly regretting her candour, Prudence bent her head and went back indoors. She could not stay still. Time was threatening to take her back where she didn’t want to go and she saw no advantage to reliving her agonies as a lovelorn teenager whose dream wedding had descended into pure gothic tragedy.
‘Is the humiliation you believe you suffered the reason you refused to discuss what happened that night?’
‘You’re so persistent.’
‘And you’re surprised?’ Nik dealt her a scorching appraisal from his mesmerising eyes, his beautiful mouth a bleak line. ‘I didn’t know what had happened and you wouldn’t tell me, so I assumed the worst. I wasn’t in control after I took that drink…the way you behaved and reacted the next day, I thought I must have been rough-’
‘Rough?’
‘In bed…that I’d hurt you, offended you, forced you to do something you didn’t want to do, whatever!’ Nik ground out with raking impatience and distaste. ‘It never once occurred to me that we might not have made love at all.’
Prudence did not know where to look. Her face was hot and pink. ‘In the condition you were in, I wouldn’t have let you touch me-’
‘But I’m a whole lot bigger and stronger than you are,’ Nik said darkly. ‘You were a virgin and I was in no state to consider that. When you refused to look at me the following morning, I felt like a rapist!’
Freezing in consternation, Prudence gave him an aghast glance. ‘Oh, no…surely not?’
Shimmering golden eyes lanced into hers. ‘What else was I to believe? Obviously I’d messed up badly. When I tried to kiss you, you began sobbing and you took off like a bullet out of a gun and locked yourself in the bedroom next door…’
Prudence sucked in a fracturing breath. She was beginning to see how misleading her behaviour must have been from his point of view and feel guilty. Unfortunately, she did not want the dialogue he was making it impossible for her to avoid. Yet if he did not remember that night, it was only right that she should fill in the blanks.
‘Before you passed out at the reception, you went missing and I made it my mission to find you. You were with Cassia Morikis,’ she framed in a flat tone that carried not a shade of human expression.
Nik frowned, ebony brows pleating. ‘That part of the evening is not a blank. I was OK at that point because I remember it well. Cassia was upset. I took her out of the function room because I didn’t want a scene that would have embarrassed a lot of people.’
Prudence chewed the soft underside of her lower lip. She felt that she should have known that he would manage to put an entirely different spin on that episode. When it came to self-defence he moved faster than the speed of light. ‘When I saw you, you were wrapped round each other like Romeo and Juliet and it didn’t look quite so innocent.’
‘Why wouldn’t you talk about this when it happened?’ Nik suddenly demanded angrily. ‘Take it from me, it was innocent-’
‘You were kissing her!’ Prudence yelled at him, ditching her façade of waspish composure with a vengeance.
Nik held her accusing gaze with level, challenging cool while thinking about what a very luscious, sexy mouth she had. ‘She was crying and she kissed me…I pushed her away-’
‘Of course, I was long gone by that stage…and I really don’t care now anyway,’ Prudence delivered between compressed lips, twin spots of high colour illuminating her cheekbones. ‘All I want from you now is a divorce.’
‘Forget it…you’re an Angelis; you’re my wife. This entire conversation is offensive-’
‘No, it’s not.’ Her blue eyes were dark with growing emotion. ‘Offensive is you thinking that you have the right to tell me I can’t have a divorce.’
Nik squared broad shoulders that were sheathed in the finest suiting available, breathed in deep and released a slow, measured hiss. ‘Don’t you think that we should gi
ve marriage a trial before we start talking about a divorce?’
CHAPTER TWO
A FALLING FEATHER would have sounded like a giant rock in the silence that followed that question.
Shattered, Prudence opened her mouth and shut it again, discovering that Nik’s gaze was welded to her full lips. She flushed, wondering why he was staring. She studied him with a frown because she didn’t trust her own hearing. He could surely not have said what she thought he had just said? And if he had spoken those words, no doubt she had somehow misunderstood his meaning.
Aware that his legendary skills as a negotiator had let him down badly, Nik attempted to recoup. ‘Think about this sensibly. Eight years ago, we were kids. So we did what we had to do and went through the motions and then we parted. We didn’t even try living together. But we’re older and wiser now.’
Prudence felt as if a rocket was about to fire off inside her; containing the shockwaves was almost more than she could handle. She shut her eyes tight. What was the matter with him? Eight years on, eight years after breaking her heart into a million pieces with his essential indifference, he was suggesting trying out marriage like a new pair of shoes. She wanted to scream-but not before she strangled him for daring to offer what she had once most craved, before she had finally got up the strength to break away. She thought of the contents of the wooden chest by the wall behind him and her fast-beating heart steadied and almost stilled as the old anguish tore at her. Not tall enough, not thin enough, not pretty enough for a guy so good-looking he turned male and female heads in the street.
‘No, thanks,’ Prudence said as if he had offered her a drink she didn’t want.
Shock slivered through Nikolos, his golden eyes darkening. He could not credit that instant refusal. She was winding him up, he thought forbiddingly. In the back of his mind he had always known that he would settle down with her. Eventually. He had never doubted it, never really even needed to think about it. He had known she would wait for him, wait with the steady, strong patience of the intelligent woman that she was until he was ready to make that commitment.
