The door began to open and she swung round as Diantha appeared looking neat in a mid-blue dress and wearing a thoroughly bland expression that somehow did not suit the occasion, bearing in mind that Isobel could be a jealous wife come here to tear her limb from limb.
Indeed Diantha looked her over as if she were the marriage breaker in this room. ‘We will have to make this brief.’ There was a distinct chill to her tone. ‘My father is on his way home and he will not like to find you here.’ Then she really took the wind out of Isobel’s sails when she added smoothly, ‘Now you have seen the truth about Leandros and myself, can we hope that you will get out of our lives for good?’
Isobel’s fingers tightened on the shoulder strap to her bag. ‘So it was you who sent the photographs?’ she breathed.
Diantha’s cool nod confirmed it. It seemed a bit of a letdown that she was admitting it so easily. ‘Though I must add that anything I say to you here I will deny to anyone else,’ she made clear. ‘But you are in the way, and I am sick of being messed around by Leandros. Two weeks ago he was promising me he would divorce you and marry me, then I am being sidelined—for business reasons, of course; isn’t it always?’
‘Business reasons?’ Isobel prompted curiously.
‘The lack of a pre-nuptial agreement between the two of you put Leandros in an impossible situation.’
It was like being in the presence of some deadly force, Isobel thought with a shiver. Diantha was calm, her voice was level and Isobel could already feel herself being manipulated by the gentle insertion of the word pre-nuptial. Before she knew it Lester Miles’ warnings about the power of her own position came back to haunt her. She was seeing Leandros’s sudden change from a man ready to sever a marriage to a man eager to hang on to that marriage.
‘I have to say that I am seriously displeased at being forced to lie about our relationship while he sorts out this mess,’ Diantha continued. ‘But a man with his wealth cannot allow himself to be ripped off by a greedy wife. Nor can he afford to risk our two family names being thrown into the public arena with a scandal you will cause if you wish to turn your divorce ugly. But you mark my words, Kyria Petronades, a contract will appear before very soon, mapping out the details of any settlements in the event of your marriage reaching a second impasse.’
‘But you couldn’t wait that long,’ Isobel inserted. ‘So you decided to cause the feared scandal and get it out of the way?’
‘I am sick of having to lie to everyone,’ she announced. ‘It is time that people knew the truth.’
‘About your affair in Spain with my husband,’ Isobel prompted.
‘A relationship that began long before you left him, if you must know the truth.’ Her chin came up. ‘He visited me in Washington, DC.’
Isobel remembered the Washington trips all too well.
‘Our two weeks spent in Spain were not the first stolen weeks we managed to share together. I have no wish to hurt your feelings with this, but he was with me only yesterday, during siesta. We have an apartment in Athens where we meet most days of the week.’
‘No photographic evidence of these meetings?’ Isobel challenged.
‘It can be arranged.’
‘Oh, I am sure that it can.’ And she removed the printouts from her handbag and placed them down on the table that stood between them. Believing she knew exactly what she was being presented with, Diantha didn’t even deign to look.
‘You are nothing but a lying, conniving bitch, Diantha,’ Isobel informed her. ‘You manipulate people and adore doing it. Chloe was manipulated to get you to Spain. My mother-in-law has been beautifully manipulated by your ever-so-gentle eagerness to please and offer her up an easier alternative to me as the daughter-in-law from hell.’
‘You said it,’ Diantha responded, revealing the first hint that a steel-trap mind functioned behind the bland front.
Isobel laughed. ‘Leandros extols you for your great organisational skills—not a very appetising compliment to the woman he loves, is it?’ she added when Diantha’s spine made a revealing shift. ‘Apparently you know how to put together a great party.’ She dug her claws in. ‘As for me, well, I struggle to organise anything, but he calls me a witch and a hellion and claims I have barbs for teeth. When we make love he falls apart in my arms and afterwards he sleeps wrapped around me. Not like this.’ She stabbed a finger at the photograph. ‘Not with him occupying one side of the bed while I occupy the other.’
Black eyelashes flickered downwards, her face kept firmly under control. Now she had drawn her attention to the photographs, Isobel slid out the other one, and its enlarged partners in crime. ‘Thankfully, Leandros still has all his fingers.’ She stabbed one of her own fingers on the missing one splayed across Diantha’s stomach. ‘If he stood behind you like this, the top of your head would reach no higher than his chest, not his chin. You are short in stature, Diantha—let’s call a spade a spade here, since you wish to talk bluntly. You are not quite this slim or this curvaceous. And when you cut, shave and paste with a computer mouse it is always advisable to make sure you fill in the gaps you make, like the yacht rail here, which seems to stop for no apparent reason. A good manipulator should always be sure of all her facts and you forgot to check one small detail. This is my job.’ She stabbed at the printouts. ‘I am a professional photographer. I dealt with computer photography almost every day of my working life. So I know without even bothering to enlarge the bedroom scene that the folds of the sheet don’t quite follow a natural line.
The slight shrug of Diantha’s shoulders and indifferent expression surprised Isobel because she should have been feeling the pinch of her own culpability by now. But she just smiled. ‘You are such a fool, Isobel,’ she told her. ‘I have always known what you do for a living, and these photographs were always meant to be exposed as fakes. Indeed it is essential that I did so to allay a scandal. I merely intended to expose them myself for what they are, then suggest that you probably did these yourself as a way of increasing your power in a divorce settlement. For who else is better qualified?’
She believes she has everyone tied up in knots, Isobel realised in gaping incredulity. She is so supremely confident of her own powers of manipulation that she has stopped seeing the wood for the trees!
‘There is only one small problem with your plan, Diantha,’ Isobel said narrowly. ‘These photographs may be fakes, but I have no reason to want a divorce.’
‘But does he want you or is Leandros merely protecting his business interests?’
‘Oh, yes, I want her,’ a smooth, deep voice replied.
The two women glanced up, saw Leandros standing there and looking as if he had been for quite a long time.
‘Every minute of every waking moment,’ he added smoothly. ‘Every minute of every moment I spend lost in my dreams. You have a serious problem with your dreams, Diantha,’ he told her sombrely, then without waiting for a reply he looked at Isobel. ‘Shall we go?’
She didn’t even hesitate, walking towards this man who was her life, with her eyes loving him and his loving her by return.
But Diantha was not about to give up so easily. ‘Just because these photographs are not real, it does not mean we did not sleep together,’ she threaded in stealthily. ‘Tell her, Leandros, how we spent the nights upon your yacht. Tell her how your mama thinks she is a tart and your sister Chloe despises every breath that she takes. Tell her,’ she persisted, ‘how your whole family knew she was having an affair with some man while she was here last, and how you tried to discover who he was and even believed the child she was carrying belonged to this other lover!’
Isobel’s feet came to a shuddering standstill. Her eyes clouded as she searched his. She was looking for sorrow, for a weary shake of the head to deny what Diantha was saying! For goodness’ sake, she begged him; give me anything to say that she’s still manipulating me here!
But he’d gone as pale as she’d ever seen him. His fingers trembled as he lifted them up to run through
his hair. Most damning of all, he lowered his eyes from her. ‘Come on,’ he said huskily. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Someone else was standing just behind him, and as Leandros moved Isobel saw Chloe looking white-faced. ‘Diantha, stop this,’ Chloe pleaded unsteadily. ‘I don’t understand why you—’
‘You don’t understand.’ Diantha turned on her scathingly. ‘What has it got to do with you? Your brothers used me and I will not be used!’
Brothers? Each one of them looked at her when she said this. She was no longer calm and collected, Isobel noticed. The veils of control had been ripped away and suddenly Diantha was showing her true cold and bitter self.
‘All my life I had to watch you, Chloe, being worshipped by your family of men. You have no idea what it is like to be unloved and rejected by anyone. My father rejected me because I was not a desired son. Your brother rejected me because I was not what he wanted any more.’
‘Diantha, I never—’
‘Not you,’ she flashed at Leandros. ‘Nikos! Nikos rejected me four years ago! He said we were too young to know what love was and he did not even want to know! But I knew love. I waited and waited in Washington for him to come for me. But he didn’t,’ she said bitterly. ‘You came instead, offering me those pleasant messages from home and not one from Nikos! So I came back here to Athens to make him love me! But when I arrived he was planning to marry Carlotta. I was out in the cold and there you were, Leandros, hiding in Spain with your broken heart! Well, why should we not mend together? You were thinking about it, I know you were. You can lie to her all you like, but I know that it was for me that you told Uncle Takis to begin divorce proceedings with her!’
His eyes narrowed. ‘So Takis has been talking out of line,’ he murmured silkily.
‘No!’ she denied that. ‘I have discussed this with no one.’
‘Then how did you know there was no pre-nuptial agreement?’ Isobel inserted sharply.
Diantha floundered, her mouth hovering on lies she could not find.
‘I think this has gone far enough,’ yet another voice intruded. It was Diantha’s father. ‘You have managed to stop the photographs being printed in the newspaper, Leandros?’ he enquired. At Leandros’s grim nod, he nodded also. ‘Then please leave my house and take your family with you.’
Mr Christophoros had clearly decided that his daughter had hurt enough people for one day.
The journey away was completed in near silence. Chloe sat sharing the passenger seat in Leandros’s Ferrari with Isobel, her face drawn with shock and dismay. Leandros took his sister home first, pulling up outside a house that was three times the size of his own. As she climbed out of the car, she turned back to Isobel.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered urgently. ‘I never meant—’
‘Later, Chloe,’ her brother interrupted. ‘We will all talk later but now Isobel and I have to go.’
‘But most of this is my fault!’ she cried out painfully. ‘I encouraged her to believe that she was meant for one of my brothers—’
‘Childhood stuff,’ Leandros said dismissively.
‘I let her know how much I disliked Isobel!’
Isobel’s chin went down on her chest. Chloe released a choking sob. ‘I confided everything to her and she took it all away and plotted with it. I can’t tell you how bad that makes me feel.’
Isobel could see it all. The two girls sighing over Leandros’s broken heart—as Diantha had called it. The two of them wishing that Isobel had never been born.
‘But I never knew a thing about her and Nikos,’ Chloe inserted in stifled disbelief.
‘It was nothing,’ her brother declared. ‘They dated a couple of times while you were away at college, but Nikos was made wary by her tendency towards possessiveness. He told her so and she took it badly. He was relieved when her family went to live in Washington—and I would prefer you not to mention this to him, Chloe,’ he then warned very seriously. ‘He will not appreciate the reminder at this time.’
He was talking about Nikos’s coming marriage. Chloe nodded then swallowed and tentatively touched Isobel’s arm. ‘Please,’ she murmured, ‘can you and I make a fresh start?’
A fresh start, Isobel repeated inwardly, and her eyes glazed over. Everyone wanted to make fresh starts, but how many more ugly skeletons were going to creep out of the dark cupboard before she felt safe enough to trust any one of them?
She lifted her face though, and smiled for Chloe. ‘Of course,’ she agreed. But the way her voice shook had Leandros slamming the car into gear and gunning the engine. His sister stepped back, her face pale and anxious. Isobel barely managed to get the car door shut before he was speeding away with a hissing spin of gravel-flecked tyres.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ she lashed out in reaction.
‘If you are going to cry, then you will do it where I can damn well get at you,’ he thrust back roughly.
‘I am not going to cry.’
‘Tell that to someone who cannot see beyond the tough outer layer.’ He lanced her a look that almost seared off her skin. ‘I did not sleep with her—ever!’ he rasped, turned his eyes back to the road and rammed the car through its gears with a hand that resembled a white-knuckled fist. ‘I liked her! But she has poison in her soul and now I can feel it poisoning me.’ His voice suddenly turned hoarse. ‘Did I give her reason to believe what she does about me? Did I offer encouragement without realising it?’
His hand left the wheel to run taut fingers through his hair. It was instinctive for Isobel to reach across and grab the wheel.
‘You don’t need to do that,’ he gritted. ‘I am not about to drive us into a wall.’
‘Then stop acting like it.’
The car stopped with a screech of brakes. Isobel had not put on her seat belt because Chloe had been sharing her seat and the momentum took her head dangerously close to the windscreen before an arm shot out and halted the imminent clash with a fierce clenching of male muscle.
Emotions were flying about in all directions. Stress—distress! Anger—frustration. He threw open his door, climbed out and walked away a few long strides, leaving Isobel sitting there in a state of blank bewilderment as to what it was that was the matter with him.
It was her place to be this upset, surely? She had been the one who’d had to place her trust on the line ever since she came back here! She got out of the car, turned and gave the beautiful, glossy red door a very expressive slam. He spun on his heel. She glared at him across the glossy red bonnet. They were within sight of their own driveway but neither seemed to care.
‘Just who the hell do you think you are, Leandros?’ she spat at him furiously. She was still responding to the shock of almost having her head smacked up against the windscreen; her insides were crawling with all kinds of throbs and flurries. He was pale—she was pale! The sun was beating down upon them and if she could have she would have reached up and grabbed it then thrown it at his bloody selfish head! ‘What do you think her poison is doing to me? You want a divorce then you don’t want a divorce. Rumour has it that you have your next wife already picked out and waiting in the wings. Pre-nuptial agreements are suddenly the all-important topic on everyone’s lips! And I am expected to trust your word! Then I am expected to trust your word again when those photographs turn up. I even face the bitch with her so-called lies!’
‘They are lies, you know that—’
‘All I know for certain at this precise moment is that you have been working me like a puppet on a string!’ she tossed at him furiously. ‘I’ve been insulted in your boardroom—stalked around Athens—which appears is not the first time! I’ve been seduced at every available opportunity, teased over family heirlooms, paraded out in front of Athens’ finest like a trophy that was not much of a prize!’
He laughed, but it was thick and tense. She almost climbed over the car bonnet to get her claws into him! ‘Then I am forced to stare at those wr-wretched ph-photographs.’ Her throat began to work; gri
mly she swallowed the threatening tears. ‘Do you think because I could prove them to be fakes that they lost the power to hurt?’
‘No.’ He took a step towards the bonnet.
‘I haven’t finished!’ she thrust at him thickly, and the glinting green bolts coming from her eyes pinned him still. ‘I faced the poison—while you went chasing off to the wrong place!’ she declared hotly. ‘I listened to her say all of those things about you and still believed in you. My God,’ she choked. ‘Why was that, do you think, when we only have to look back three years to see that we were heading right down the same road again?’
‘It is not the same!’ he blasted at her.
‘It has the same nasty taste!’ she cried. ‘Your mother is prepared to try and like me for your sake and now your sister is prepared to do the same. Do I care if they like me?’ Yes, I do, she thought painfully. ‘No, I don’t,’ she said out loud. ‘I don’t think I care for you any more,’ she whispered unsteadily.
‘You don’t mean that—’
She flicked his tight features a glance and wished to hell that she did mean it. ‘Tell me about the pre-nuptial thing,’ she challenged. ‘Then go on to explain about this other man I am supposed to have fathered my child to. And then,’ she continued when he opened his mouth to answer, ‘explain to me why I have just had to listen to you bemoaning the poison that wretched woman has fed into you!’
Silence reigned. He looked totally stunned by the final question. A silver Mercedes came down the road. It stopped beside Isobel. ‘Is something wrong?’ a voice said. ‘Can we be of assistance?’
Isobel turned to stare at Theron Herakleides. Beside him in the passenger seat, her mother was bending over to peer out curiously. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You can give me a lift.’ With that, she climbed into the back of the Mercedes.
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