The Cozakis Bride

by Lynne Graham

  Exactly a week after she had stood in Nik's office, Olympia was on the way back from posting yet another pile of job applications when she saw Mrs Scott waving to attract her attention from the other side of the road.

  Olympia forced a smile onto her downcurved mouth and waited at the lights to cross. She had been thinking how easy it was to fall into the poverty trap and find it all but impos­sible to climb out again. Did prospective employers just take one look at her less than impressive address and bin her ap­plication, writing her off as a no-hoper? It had been ten months since she had even got as far as an interview for a permanent job.

  'That call came this morning,' Mrs Scott delivered with lively curiosity in her eyes as Olympia drew level with her.

  'What call? Oh...' Olympia just froze to the pavement.

  'He didn't leave his name. He just asked me to tell you that he'd see you at eight tonight at his office.'

  Olympia tried and failed to swallow, her mind rushing on from shock to register that she couldn't make any assumption on the basis of that brief a message. It was more than possible that Nik Cozakis simply wanted to watch her squirm while he turned her down flat. 'Thanks,' she said tautly, averting her eyes.

  'Job interview?' the older woman prompted doubtfully.

  'Something like that.'

  'Shameless as it is of me, I was really hoping it was an illicit assignation! You could do with a little excitement in your life, Olympia.'

  At that disconcerting statement of opinion, Olympia looked up in frank surprise.

  'I'll sit with your mother tonight. I know she doesn't like to be on her own after dark,' Mrs Scott completed ruefully.

  Excitement, Olympia later thought grimly as she teamed a long navy skirt with a loose, concealing cardigan jacket. Nik Cozakis had squashed her girlish dreams flat ten years back. Oh, it had been exciting to begin with, then agonising to sit by on the sidelines and appreciate that, never mind her lack of her looks, she was so colourless to someone like him that he simply forgot she existed.

  A fiancé’ who couldn't even be bothered making a pass at her! She studied herself in the wardrobe mirror. She looked sensible. She had always looked sensible. Once she had ex­perimented with make-up and clothes and she had been proud of her good skin and clear eyes. After all, who was perfect? Only after that disastrous trip to Greece had Olympia lost every ounce of her confidence...

  Every year her mother had sent a Christmas card to her father, Spyros, always enclosing a photograph of Olympia, who had been named for her late grandmother. Her grand­father had not responded but Irini's diligence had ensured that the older man always knew where they were living. Then out of the blue, when Olympia was sixteen, had come the first response—a terse three-line letter informing them of the death of her mother's only sibling, Andreas. The following spring an equally brief letter had arrived inviting Olympia out to Greece to meet her grandfather.

  'But he's not asking you...' Olympia had protested, deeply hurt on her mother's behalf.

  'Perhaps in time that may come.' Irini Manoulis had smiled with quiet reassurance at her angry teenage daughter, it is enough that my father should want to meet you. That makes me very happy.'

  Olympia really hadn't wanted to go, but she had known how much that invitation meant to her mother. And while Irini Manoulis had often talked about how prosperous a busi­nessman Olympia's grandfather was, Olympia had genuinely not appreciated the kind of lifestyle her mother had once enjoyed until a chauffeur-driven limousine had picked her up at the airport and wafted her out to a magnificent villa on the outskirts of Athens.

  On first meeting, Olympia had sensed her grandfather's disappointment with a granddaughter who had only a handful of Greek words in her vocabulary. And although Spyros spoke fluent English he had been a stranger to her, a stiff and disagreeable stranger too, who had sternly asked her not to mention her mother in his presence. Indeed, within hours of arriving at her grandfather's home Olympia had wanted to turn tail and run back home again.

  The very next day, Spyros had sent her out shopping with the wife of one of his business acquaintances.

  'What a lucky girl you are to have such a generous grand­father!' she had been told.

  Olympia had suppressed the sneaking suspicion that her grandfather was ashamed of her appearance. The acquisition of a large and expensive new wardrobe had been exciting, even if she hadn't been terribly fussed about the staid quality of those outfits. Nothing above the knee, nothing more than two inches below her throat. It hadn't occurred to Olympia that she was being carefully packaged to create the right im­pression.

  The following day, Spyros had informed her that he had invited some young people to his home for the afternoon, so that she could have the opportunity to make friends her own age. While Olympia had been agonising over what to wear, a light knock had sounded on her bedroom door. A very pretty brunette with enormous brown eyes and a friendly smile had strolled in to introduce herself.

  'I'm Katerina Pallas. My aunt took you shopping yester­day.'

  Her aunt had seemed a pleasant woman, and Olympia had soon come to think of the other girl as her closest friend. She had been grateful for the sophisticated Katerina's advice on what to wear and how to behave. Katerina had never once so much as hinted that full skirts and swimsuits with hori­zontal stripes might be less than kind to Olympia's somewhat bountiful curves. For all her seeming pleasantness, Katerina's aunt had contrived to buy Olympia a remarkably unflattering wardrobe to wear that summer.

  Looking back to those early days in Greece, and recalling how naive and trusting she had been, now chilled Olympia to the marrow. Wolves, who had worn smiles inside of snarls, had surrounded her. When friendship had been offered she had believed it was genuine, and she had accepted everything at face value. She hadn't known that Spyros was planning to make her his heir. She hadn't known that the possibility of her marrying Nik Cozakis had been discussed long before she'd even met him.. .or that others might find that possibility both a threat and a source of jealousy.

  A security man let Olympia into the Cozakis building just before eight that evening.

  She crossed the echoing empty foyer and entered the lift. After hours, with the lights dimmed, she found the massive office block kind of spooky. It felt strange to walk past the deserted reception desk on the top floor and head straight for Nik's office without any fuss or fanfare.

  Her heartbeat feeling as if it was thudding at the foot of her throat, she raised her hand and knocked on the door be­fore reaching for the handle with a not quite steady hand and entering.

  Only the desk lamp was burning. The tall windows beyond were filled with a magnificent view of the City skyline at night. A million lights seemed to twinkle and sparkle, diso­rientating her. Then Nik Cozakis moved out of the shadows and strolled forward into view. His superb silver-grey suit lent him formidable elegance.

  'Punctual and polite this evening, I note,' Nik remarked.

  A wash of colour stained Olympia's cheeks. The balance of power had changed. A week ago she had been strength­ened by the power of surprise and her own daring, suffi­ciently desperate not to care about anything but being heard. But all that was past now. She had come here tonight to hear Nik's answer and she had politely knocked on the door. He knew the difference as clearly as she now felt it . The whip-hand was his.

  'Would you like a drink?'

  Olympia nodded jerkily, suddenly keen for him to be oth­erwise occupied for a minute while she regained her com­posure.

  A faintly amused look tinged Nik's vibrantly handsome features. 'What would you like?'

  'Orange juice...anything.' She heard the tremulous note in her own response and almost winced, her full mouth tight­ening.

  He strolled over to a cabinet, his long stride lithe and graceful. She remembered how clumsy she had once felt around him. Had that been nerves or over-excitement? Right at that moment she was so nervous she could feel a faint tremor in her knees. As he bent his well-shaped
dark head over the cabinet the interior light gleamed over his blue-black hair and she relived how those springy strands had once felt beneath her palms. Flinching, she tried to drag her thoughts into order, but her attention only strayed to the bold line of his patrician nose, the taut slant of a clean-cut masculine cheekbone and the hard angle of his jaw.

  'You were always fond of watching me,' Nik mused lazily as he crossed the carpet to extend a crystal tumbler to her. 'Like a little brown owl. Every time I caught you looking, you would blush like mad and look away.'

  Embarrassed by that recollection, which was way too ac­curate for her to dare to question it, Olympia managed a jerky shrug. 'It was a long time ago.'

  Nik sank down on the edge of his desk, his attitude one of total relaxation. He saluted her with his glass. 'You were a class act. I was a hundred per cent positive you were a virgin.'

  Suddenly Olympia was feeling uncomfortably warm in her cardigan jacket, and although she wanted to meet his eyes with complete indifference, she was finding that her eyes were unwilling to go anywhere near him. She hadn't known what to expect from Nik tonight, but she definitely hadn't expected him to refer with such apparent calm to that long-ago summer.

  'So...' Nik trailed the word out in his darkly sensual drawl 'I have only one question to ask before we get down to business. It's like a trick question, Olympia—'

  Confusion was starting to grip her. 'I don't want to hear it, then—'

  'But you have to answer it with real honesty,' he contin­ued with the same unnerving cool. 'It would not be in your test interests to lie. So don't give me the answer you think I want to hear because you might well end up regretting it.'

  Her mouth was dry as a bone. She tipped her orange juice to her lips. Her hand was trembling and the rim of the glass rattled against her teeth. The tension was so thick she could taste it. But she couldn't think straight because Nik Cozakis now, tonight, was not behaving remotely as he had done a week earlier.

  ‘That night at the club, you may have seen me with another girl... Theos, I hope I'm not embarrassing you with this rather adolescent walk down memory lane,' Nik murmured in a voice dark and smooth as black velvet as Olympia percepti­bly jerked in shock at what he had thrown at her without warning.

  Why should you be embarrassing me?' she asked between gritted teeth.

  'Then let me plunge right to the heart of the matter that engages my curiosity even now,' Nik continued softly. 'Did you go out to my car with Lukas because you were drunk and distressed by what you may have seen, and did he then take advantage of you in that state? Or...'

  Olympia stared fixedly at the desk lamp, outraged resent­ment and sheer hatred clawing at her. She wanted to toss the remains of her drink in his arrogant face and then hit him so hard, he wouldn't pick himself up for a month. Ten years on, having been judged and found guilty for a sin she had not committed, why should she admit the agonies that he had put her through that night? Why should she further humiliate herself with that kind of honesty? Where did he get off asking her such questions? He darned well hadn't asked her them at the time! Nor had there been any reference to the possibility that she might have seen him carrying on with another girl!

  'Or...what?' she prompted in a hissing undertone.

  'Or...' Nik responded without the smallest audible hint of discomfiture. 'Did you go out to my car with him either be­cause you thought you could get away with not being seen or because—'

  'I went out to your car with him because I fancied him like mad!' Olympia suddenly erupted, provoked beyond bear­ing by his sardonic probing, her sea-jade eyes hot with de­fiance and loathing.

  Dark eyes with a single light of gold held to her flushed and furious face. His outrageously long, lush lashes lowered, leaving only the dark glimmer of his gaze visible.

  Her tummy clenched and she trembled, an odd coldness spreading inside her, as she met those dark, dark eyes. She spun away, shocked at the gross lie she had thrown at him, shocked that even ten years on her own desire for revenge could still burst back into being and send her off the edge into an insane response, for at the exact same moment she recalled exactly why she had come to Nik's office.

  'You're just toying with me for your own amusement! Olympia flung him an agitated glance of condemnation. 'You're going to say no, of course you're going to say no. ..I really don't know why I bothered coming here tonight!'

  'You were desperate,' Nik reminded her with dulcet cool

  'Well, why don't you just say no?' Olympia was beyond all pretence now, and she didn't care that she sounded child­ish. He was winding her up and making a fool of her. She couldn't wait to get away from him.

  Nik rose lithely upright. 'No need to get so rattled, Olympia,' he mocked. 'Why don't you take that baggy cardy off and sit down?'

  Her hot face got even hotter. She was boiling alive in her kef, but she folded her arms.

  Nik laughed with a sudden amusement that she found even more unnerving.

  'What's so funny?' she demanded sharply.

  'You always seemed so quiet. I awarded you all these qualities that you never actually possessed.' His expressive mouth twisted with derision. 'But now I'm seeing the real Olympia Manoulis. Hot-tempered, stubborn and reckless to the point of self-destruction.'

  ‘These are hardly normal circumstances. Don't presume to know anything about me...because you don't!' Olympia slung back at him defensively.

  'But if you don't take the ugly cardy off, I'm going to rip it off,' Nik spelt out softly.

  Olympia backed off a startled step. Only now was it dawn­ing on her that she had never really known Nik Cozakis ei­ther. Clashing with brilliant dark eyes, she watched him ex­tend a lean brown hand to receive the jacket, and suddenly it didn't seem worth arguing about any more. Tight-mouthed, she peeled it off and tossed it to him. 'You like throwing your weight around, don't you? I should've remembered mat'

  Ignoring that comment, Nik cast the jacket on a nearby chair. 'Now sit down, so that you can hear my terms for marriage.' Her eyes opened very wide and she froze.

  We...yes. What you want is within reach, but you may yet choose not to pay the price.'

  'The price...?' Thrown by that smooth acknowledgement that he was seriously considering her proposition, Olympia backed hurriedly down into the armchair closest.

  'All good things come at a price...haven't you learnt that yet?' Nik murmured in a voice as smooth and rich as honey.

  All of a sudden she couldn't concentrate. Having forgotten, to keep Nik out of focus, she collided head-on with amber-gold eyes. It was like being suddenly dropped from a height. Such beautiful lying eyes, she thought helplessly, curling her taut fingers into the fabric of her skirt. A quivering, insidious warmth snaked up between her thighs, making her tense, jerk her lashes down and freeze, no longer under any illusion about what was happening to her. As she felt her breasts stir and swell, their soft peaks pinch into straining sensitivity, she was aghast. A tidal wave of embarrassment surged up over her. Already her heart was banging as if she had run a race.

  'Olympia...?'

  She crossed her arms and lifted her head again with pronounced reluctance. Nik was over by the window at a com­fortable distance. He was planning to agree; he was going to marry her. She was home and dry, she reminded herself. What did it matter if her stupid body still reacted to him? He was really gorgeous, really, really gorgeous. It was a chem­ical response, nothing more. So she didn't like it, in fact she hated that out-of-control feeling, but it wasn't as if she would be seeing much of him in the future.

  'You're in shock...I'm surprised,' Nik admitted. 'You seemed so confident last week that you could win my agree­ment.'

  'You weren't very encouraging,' she pointed out unevenly, no longer looking anywhere near him. It might just be a chemical response but she didn't want to encourage it.

  'I thought your proposition over at length. I feel I should warn you that I tend to be ruthless when I negotiate...'

  'Tell me som
ething I didn't expect.'

  'I have certain conditions you would have to agree to. And there is no room for negotiation at all,' Nik imparted gently.

  'Just tell me what you want,' Olympia urged.

  'You sign a pre-nuptial contract—'

  'Of course.'

  'You sign over everything to me on our wedding day—'

  'Apart from a small—'

  'Everything,' Nik slotted in immovably. 'I'll give you an allowance.'

  She glanced up in surprise and dismay. 'But that's not—'

  'You'll just have to trust me.'

  'I want to buy a house for my mother.'

  'Naturally I will not see your mother suffer in any way. If you marry me, I promise you that she will live in comfort for the rest of her life,' Nik asserted, I will regard her as I would regard a member of my own family and I will treat her accordingly.'

  It was a more than generous offer, and she was impressed and pleased that there was no lack of respect in the manner in which he referred to her mother.

  'Your grandfather was born seventy-four years ago,' Nik pointed out, as if he could see what she was thinking. 'He's from a very different generation. Your birth outside die bonds of marriage was a source of enormous shame and grief to him.'

  Fierce loyalty to her mother stiffened Olympia. 'I know that, but—'

  'No, you don't know it, or even begin to understand it,' Nik incised with sudden grimness. 'Your mother brought you up to be British. She made no attempt to teach you what it was to be Greek. She stayed well away from the Greek com­munity here in London. I am not judging her for that, but don't tell me that you understand our culture because you do not.' Lips compressed, Olympia cloaked her unimpressed gaze.

  'Greek men have always set great value on a woman's virtue—'