by Lynne Graham
‘Shush,’ Sarah urged, her head downbent as the service opened with a short prayer.
Alex and Damon Terzakis. The combined view of them hit her like a punch in the stomach at the graveside. She went white with outrage, considering their presence a desecration of Callie’s memory. How dared they come here and mourn her sister when between them they had made her sister’s last months a living hell? How dared they! Damon was studying the ground. He was thinner, older than she remembered, both hands clasped tightly before him.
‘Decent of them to come...the way you feel,’ Gina muttered out of the corner of her mouth. She was a large woman in her late forties and an inveterate talker, no matter what the occasion.
People began to leave, shaking her hand. Mostly very young people, Callie’s friends from her schooldays. Nobody from the university, but then Callie had abandoned her studies many months previously and broken all contact with the friends she had made there. Without warning, Gina darted from her side and approached the Terzakis males. Infuriated by her defection, Sarah walked on with the minister and parted from him beside Gina’s car.
Sickened, she stared at the black limousine with its tinted windows and chauffeur standing by on the other side of the churchyard. She hadn’t been able to afford even one funeral car. But then things like that weren’t important, she reminded herself painfully, and she had to conserve what little money she had for her nephew.
‘I’m going to call him Nikos, after Damon’s father,’ Callie had announced months ago, after a scan had revealed the sex of her unborn child. She had wanted to know whether she was carrying a boy or a girl and she had been over the moon when she’d learnt that it was a boy.
‘Damon won’t be able to stay away,’ Callie had forecast almost smugly, patting her swollen stomach. ‘Not from his son.’
Sarah had been amazed at the strength of her sister’s naïve faith in the man who had abandoned her to single parenthood. After all that had happened, she had been unable to comprehend how Callie could still hope, but during her sister’s pregnancy she had been reluctant to deprive her of any belief that bolstered her spirits. She had been dreading the aftermath of the birth when poor Callie would have been faced with reality. She would have waited in vain for a proud father to show up. Damon was a wimp, utterly under big brother’s thumb, and the threat of disinheritance and exile from his beloved family had completely overpowered his much vaunted great love for Callie!
Gina swam back to her, beaming all over her round face, and unlocked the car.
‘Why did you speak to them?’ Sarah whispered painfully.
‘Because you’re being absolutely stupid!’ Gina said bluntly. ‘If you want to keep that baby, be practical. Bite your lip and let them keep you both—’
‘I’d sooner be dead!’ Sarah exclaimed.
‘He’s little Nicky’s dad, isn’t he? Why shouldn’t he pay up?’ Gina demanded. ‘You can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll pay a packet to keep all this out of the newspapers.’
‘Gina—’ Sarah muttered, dismayed but not particularly surprised by the older woman’s calculation.
‘You’ve got to be realistic, love,’ Gina continued, not unkindly. ‘You want little Nicky and I think you’re crazy, but then you always were the maternal type, even as a kid. So keep him and raise him and make them pay through the nose for it!’
‘I don’t want anything from them!’
‘If you don’t take their money, you’ll have to live on benefit,’ Gina pointed out drily. ‘And the social services will pursue Damon.’
‘To Greece?’ A hysterical laugh was lodged like a sob in Sarah’s constricted throat.
‘Well, they wouldn’t have much trouble tracking him down, would they?’
‘I won’t take anything from them,’ Sarah stated tightly. ‘Ever!’
‘Callie would have wanted the very best for her son,’ the older woman said shortly. ‘And I think it’s time you faced the fact that Callie knew damned fine what she was doing when she got pregnant.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Sarah looked at her father’s cousin in shock and reproach.
‘It was no accident in my opinion. Callie wasn’t that careless. She wanted that boy and when things weren’t going as she wanted them to she let herself fall pregnant,’ Gina opined wryly. ‘Women have been using pregnancy to trap men into marriage for centuries, love. Teenage girls are particularly fond of the method. Unfortunately your sister miscalculated.’
‘I disagree.’ Sarah had to struggle to hold her voice level and conceal the depth of her anger on her sister’s behalf. ‘Callie didn’t try to trap Damon. He had already asked her to marry him, bought her an engagement ring—’
‘Talk’s cheap, but where was he when the chips were down? Men!’ Gina said with rich cynicism. ‘He took off for Greece and she never saw him again. He never even answered her letters. Rat! I’d bury the two of them in the back garden with pleasure if it weren’t for little Nicky! Mind you, it would be a sinful waste to do away with rat’s big brother,’ she sighed reflectively. ‘Now, he really is gorgeous. Like Apollo the sun god...’
Unused to Gina making mythological references, Sarah stared at the other woman wide-eyed.
Gina flushed slightly as she drew up in front of her small terraced house. ‘I went on holiday to Greece once and I saw this statue... Forget it, I’m being silly!’
A neighbour had sat with Nicky while they were attending the funeral. Sarah rushed upstairs to see him. He was fast asleep, snug in his wicker basket. She had brought him home from hospital only yesterday. As she looked down at him, just itching to hold him again, her eyes moistened. In her darkest hours of grief, she had learned to thank God for the gift of Callie’s child. She felt needed again and that strengthened her.
Gina was out on the tiny landing. Her plump face was tight. ‘If you take that child on, you’ll never have any life of your own. Didn’t you sacrifice enough for Callie?’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘You’re only twenty-four and you’ve got lonely old maid written all over you!’ Gina looked her over in rueful despair, taking in the tightly restrained silver-blonde hair ruthlessly confined in a French pleat, the complete absence of cosmetics, the conservative navy suit that had seen better days and the sensible flat shoes. ‘Haven’t you ever wanted a man in your life?’
Sarah uttered an embarrassed laugh. She hated it when Gina started on about men as if they were the beginning, the middle and the end of a woman’s existence. She didn’t attract the opposite sex. As a teenager, she had been painfully shy and studious, the class swot. As an adult, she had had neither the time nor the opportunity. Sure there had been men who’d asked her out from time to time at work, and occasionally she had accepted, only to discover that they didn’t want her company, they wanted sex. And that was why they had approached her. She was plain and quiet and they had undoubtedly imagined that she would be so grateful for the attention that she would fall into their bed on the first date with the barest minimum of effort.
She made herself recall her painfully humiliating experience with the boy she had had a crush on at sixteen. He had invited her out to a disco one night and she had been electrified with delight...until she’d heard some of her classmates giggling about it in the ladies’ cloakroom. He had done it for a bet. Every giggle had been a knife in her heart, every cruel word engraved on her memory for life.
‘She looks like an albino.’
‘And she’s got no boobs at all.’
‘You don’t need boobs with an IQ like hers.’
‘Her IQ didn’t warn her that Ashley is setting her up for a bet... She’s too busy following him with those big moony eyes of hers...making a real idiot of herself... I wonder how far she’ll let him go when he gets her on her own?’
‘As if Ashley would fancy her! Can you even imagine it?’ And everybody had laughed themselves into hysterics at the mere idea.
‘Sarah...’
; Sarah blinked rapidly and sank back to the present, pale as a ghost. Gina put a hand on her arm and murmured, ‘I’ve asked Alexis and Damon Terzakis back to the house...’
‘You’ve what?’
‘Well, somebody had to do it!’ Gina muttered. ‘You acted as though they weren’t there.’
‘If you let them in, I walk out,’ Sarah swore vehemently.
Slowly Gina shook her head, her troubled gaze clinging dazedly to Sarah’s blazing eyes and rigid facial expression. ‘Sarah, what’s got into you these last months?’ she asked in genuine confusion. ‘I don’t know you like this. It’s as if a stranger has taken possession of you—’
Sarah walked on downstairs. ‘There’s nothing the matter with me, Gina.’
‘You used to be the kindest, most gentle girl. A soft touch, I often thought,’ the older woman admitted uncomfortably. ‘But you’ve been changing ever since Callie told you she was pregnant. I know how much you loved her. I can understand how you feel—’
‘You couldn’t,’ Sarah cut in, woodenly controlled.
‘That boy must want to see little Nicky—’
‘If Damon wants to see Nicky, he’ll need a court order,’ Sarah asserted fiercely. ‘I’ll fight them every step of the way.’
‘But they’re coming to the house!’
‘Let them. I’ll deal with it.’
The bell went one minute later. Gina gave her a pleading glance and then took herself off into the kitchen. Straightening her slight shoulders, Sarah answered the door. Alex Terzakis stood alone on the doorstep. For the first time in her life, Sarah found herself wishing that she were wearing four-inch heels instead of flats. Alex Terzakis towered over her like an apartment block, casting a long, dark shadow.
She took a hasty step back. ‘I didn’t invite you here. You’re not welcome.’
A powerful hand suddenly slammed up against the front door, forcing it out of her loose grasp and flattening it with a crash back against the hall table. The violence of the gesture shook her and instinctively she backed away out of reach. He strode in and closed the door behind him.
‘Now we will talk,’ he announced, exuding perceptible vibrations of all-male satisfaction.
She had very nearly given him a black eye, she noted with grim amusement, scanning the faint bruise adorning one high cheekbone. Pity she hadn’t had sufficient height to do so! Her heart was thudding a frantic drumbeat behind her ribcage. She felt charged with a sensation disturbingly akin to excitement. The tension in the atmosphere was so thick she could taste it.
Since she was not physically capable of ejecting him from the house, she chose to walk into the lounge ahead of him. ‘Frankly, Mr. Terzakis, we have nothing to discuss. Where’s little rat?’
‘Little rat?’ He scrutinised her with narrowed eyes.
‘Baby brother, the wimp,’ Sarah specified with lancing contempt.
‘You are the most poisonous woman I have ever met. Would that I had the curbing of that spiteful tongue!’ Alex swore in a vicious hiss, one lean hand visibly coiling into a fist.
Sarah laughed for the first time in days, really laughed. Callie had told her a lot about Alexis Terzakis, relaying it in gossip style over the phone in the early days of her romance with Damon. And she was realising that Damon’s awed view of his big brother was fatally flawed. Alex was Mr Ice-cool himself in business and in his private life—according to Damon, that was. So why was it that around her he seethed like a volcano ready to erupt?
‘Cristos... On the day of the funeral,’ he growled at her from a distance of ten feet. He didn’t trust himself any closer. She understood that. ‘Have you no decent feelings?’
‘About as many as you had when you called my sister a cheap little scrubber to my face five months ago!’ Sarah shot back tight-mouthed.
‘I did not employ such offensive terminology—’
‘You said she was after his money and she slept around... Tell me the difference?’ Sarah invited with only the slightest tremor in her voice.
‘I did not believe she was pregnant,’ Alex breathed curtly through perfect white teeth. It was obvious that the admission was wrenched from him.
‘I want you to get out,’ Sarah told him shakily. ‘You have no business in this house.’
He sent her a glittering black glance of startling ferocity and strode over to the window. ‘My brother is too ashamed to face you...’ he gritted in a driven undertone.
In a weird way, Sarah was beginning to enjoy herself. If the previous admission of faulty judgement had been wrenched from him, the latter had been ripped screaming from Alex Terzakis. Little brother was a wimp. And that offended and humiliated big brother no end! Family honour and all that macho nonsense. Alex was being forced to deal with a woman he despised in a situation in which he had no defence, she registered with increasing confidence. He was here to buy silence.
To buy her silence. Maybe he was scared she would talk to the newspapers. He was a very private man, this Greek tycoon with his barbaric arrogance and pride. He detested publicity. And it wasn’t a nice story, was it? A teenager led up the garden path by a rich, spoilt young playboy and then dumped at spectacular speed once he had had what he had wanted from her. Then that same teenager had been threatened by powerful lawyers, offered hush-money and told to get lost and forget she had ever known anyone with the name of Terzakis!
Sarah’s stomach filled with nausea. It was a horrible story but it only became tragedy if you knew that Callie had loved him right to the bitter end. Tears burned her lowered eyelids and she fought them back bitterly.
‘If by any means within his power Damon could restore her to life, he would.’ She clashed with hard, dark eyes as treacherous as black ice and briefly felt as though she had gone into a skid. The speed with which he had damped down his fury and reasserted rigorous self-discipline sharply disconcerted her. ‘But he cannot. However, he can take charge of his son and give him the life to which he should have been born by right.’
Sarah froze. Her throat closed over. Her long lashes fluttered as she simply stared at Alex Terzakis in disbelief. ‘Give h-him the life...?’ she stammered in a daze, thrown wildly off balance by the statement. ‘What did you say?’
Reading her astonishment, he smiled—he actually smiled. The merest twist of that sensual, perfectly shaped mouth but no less than a smile. ‘Naturally, Damon wishes to raise his child in his own home where he belongs.’
CHAPTER TWO
SARAH took several shocked seconds to absorb her incredulity. The Terzakis clan wanted Nicky! They wanted Callie’s child! It was a staggering suggestion and she couldn’t credit that Alex Terzakis could be serious.
Alex took her silence as encouragement. He studied her as a cat studied a mouse, calculation written all over him. ‘Damon adores children. Nikos would be greatly loved.’
‘I really...I really don’t believe I’m hearing this,’ Sarah admitted tremulously. ‘You wouldn’t let your brother marry her and yet you think he has the right to take her child? He cut her off, ignored her letters, allowed you to humiliate her and let her go through a very difficult pregnancy without any support...and you come here and you tell me that he wants her baby?’ As she spoke, her shaken voice strengthened with growing anger.
‘Whatever you feel for my brother, he is the father of your sister’s child,’ Alex delivered harshly, surprisingly silent and taut in receipt of her condemnation.
‘I can’t believe that you accept that—’
‘Damon inherited a rare blood group from my mother’s side of the family. I understand that Nikos also shares that blood group,’ he volunteered smoothly, seemingly unaware of the gross offence he was offering by admitting that he had taken up all the evidence available before conceding that Nicky was his brother’s child. ‘The chances of that occurring by coincidence are several million to one.’
‘And you’re probably still checking those out!’ Sarah slung at him in disgust.
‘I am not prepared to be
drawn into argument with you, Miss Hartwell.’ He angled his gleaming dark head high and surveyed her with innate superiority and unhidden contempt. ‘I am only here for the child’s sake as negotiator on my brother’s behalf.’
‘Negotiator?’ Sarah echoed, trying and failing to swallow back her increasing distress.
‘Conciliator?’ he suggested with black velvet cool. ‘The past cannot be changed. We must consider my nephew’s future—’
‘Nicky’s f-future is with me!’ Sarah told him, but she was badly shaken by an offer she had never envisaged being made.
‘No doubt you think to drive the price up with this pretence of attachment to the child of a father you de-spise—’
‘The price?’ she whispered.
‘Any price...name it and it is yours,’ Alex Terzakis murmured softly, seductively, like a dope dealer dangling death before an addict.
Sarah was so appalled by his estimation of her character that she said nothing.
‘You hand over Nikos quietly, discreetly, keep your mouth shut and in return...in return,’ he repeated with golden eyes so intent on her that his gaze felt like a physical touch, ‘I will give you whatever you want. Think of that. You have had a hard life. What age are you? Thirty, thirty-one?’
Mesmerised, Sarah stared back at him, her trembling hands curving convulsively round a wooden chair-back. Thirty, thirty-one? Dear heaven, did she look that old?
‘You could do something with yourself,’ Alex Terzakis pointed out lazily. ‘It’s not too late. Money can buy beauty. With concentrated effort and professional advice, you could be quite attractive—’
‘You don’t say.’ Sarah could hardly get out the response. Although she had few illusions about her looks, any she might have had were being insensitively ripped to shreds.
‘The world could be your oyster. You could travel. You’re a clever woman. You could probably find yourself a husband.’
