By Request Collection Part 2. Natalie Anderson
Sadie’s hands itched with the recollection of how it had felt to have the freedom to smooth through the black silky strands, curling them round her fingers.
‘Oh, she exists,’ he assured her. ‘She’s very definitely real.’
‘Then I want you to get in touch with her.’
Reaching for the phone, she snatched it up and held it out to him.
‘Get her on the phone—talk to her. You don’t even have to let me speak to her. I’ll just ask you the questions I need and you can get me her answers. At least that way I’ll know she’s been consulted—go on!’ she insisted, when Nikos simply stayed where he was, watching her without moving.
But now the relaxed sprawl of his long body had changed, much as his expression had changed only moments before. There was a new tension in the muscular limbs, a tautness like that of a wary hunting animal, waiting and watching before it pounced upon its prey.
Furiously, she waved the telephone receiver in his face, not caring that the wildness of the gesture gave away far too much of the turmoil raging inside her.
‘Talk to her!’
Another of those long silences, then at last Nikos shook his head, slowly and adamantly.
‘No,’ was all he said, making her stare at him in stupefied bewilderment.
‘What do you mean, no?’
‘I mean, I cannot call my prospective bride on the phone.’
‘Why not? Where is she?’
‘Right here.’
‘What?’
The answer was so totally unexpected that Sadie actually jumped, looking round in shock. She almost expected to see Nikos’s fiancée standing right behind her.
‘There’s no one—just me.’
A terrible, unbelievable thought dawned on her as she spoke, and slowly she turned back to face Nikos again.
‘There’s no one else here,’ she said again, but this time it was a challenge.
‘Exactly.’
Nikos removed his feet from the desk, stretched lazily and stood up, every moment slow and leisurely.
‘The woman I want is right here.’
‘But your fiancée…’
‘There is no fiancée.’
He couldn’t have said…Sadie found it impossible to believe that she had heard right. Desperately she shook her head, trying to clear her muddled thoughts.
‘You brought me here to plan your wedding,’ she protested, knowing she was grasping at straws. Nikos’s blank, emotionless face told her that he was not going to help her out in any way. ‘You told me you had a fiancée…’
‘If you remember rightly, I never said anything of the sort,’ Nikos put in, with the sort of cold reasonableness that made her head spin in disbelief. ‘I said that I wanted you to come here to arrange a wedding. But I never said who I planned to marry. And I never said that there was any other woman involved.’
The room seemed to be swirling round Sadie, blurring dangerously, setting off a terrible nausea in her stomach that she could barely control. Fearfully, she pressed her hands to her head, fingers tight against her temples, feeling worryingly as if her head might actually explode.
‘You can’t mean—You don’t…’
‘I can and I do.’
Nikos prowled closer, silent, deadly…And Sadie could only watch transfixed as his hand came out and touched her cheek, cupping her jaw softly as he lifted her face so that their gazes locked and held.
‘What you are saying,’ he said quietly, even gently, ‘or trying to say, is that you are here because the one woman I have ever planned on marrying is you.’
THE ONE WOMAN I have ever planned on marrying is you.
The words pounded against Sadie’s skull, making sense in a literal way, and yet stopping short of any possible sort of reality.
The one woman I have ever planned on marrying is you.
How could Nikos say that when it was so blatantly obviously not true? He had never really meant to marry her in the past, so why should anything be different now?
‘No.’
She shook her head violently, but that only seemed to make the spinning sensation so much worse. It didn’t even free her head from Nikos’s grasp. Instead it seemed to bring her into closer contact with the warmth and strength of that hand, those long, powerful fingers closing over her jaw, firmer but not harder, warm and strong and shocking sensual. Shockingly welcome.
In the middle of all the chaos of her thoughts, the only thing that she could grab hold of was the way she wanted that hand to be there. She wanted to turn her head, her cheek, into the warmth of his palm, and feel the heat of his skin, taste it against her mouth.
And that was the exact opposite of how she thought she should be feeling. The way that she wanted to be feeling. The way that, rationally, she felt it was safe to be feeling.
It wasn’t safe, it wasn’t wise, it wasn’t even damn well rational. But rational was so far from the way she was feeling that she frankly didn’t care.
She only knew that all the time they had been in this room, when he had been standing or sitting so far way from her, she had wanted, needed to bridge the gap between them. Had longed to come close and feel the heat of skin against skin, the pressure of hard bone under cushioning flesh. But it was only now, when he had made the move, that she actually realised that was what she had been feeling.
‘No…’ she tried again, but her voice had no more strength than the first time she had tried the word, less if anything, so that it croaked and broke in the middle as she spoke. ‘You can’t mean that.’
‘Can’t mean what, glikia mou?’ Nikos questioned softly, the words seeming to shiver over her skin.
You can’t have brought me here to—to…’
That word wouldn’t form, and she didn’t know whether it was because she didn’t dare to face it or because of the way his thumb began to move, stroking slowly, delicately, over the angled line of her cheekbone and down the line of her jaw. Her legs were trembling, turning to cotton wool beneath her, and she felt as if the heat from that one small touch was radiating through her body, firing her blood, melting her bones. With a raw, jolting effort, she wrenched her head up and away from it, green eyes blazing into cloudy gold.
‘You brought me here under false pretences!’ she accused him furiously. ‘You conned me—you’ve kidnapped me!’
‘Kidnapped?’
Those beautiful eyes were deliberately wide and deceptively clear, with the look of the devil’s innocence.
‘Kidnapped you, agapiti mou? So tell me—when did I force you, drag you on to my plane? When did I hold you hostage—lock you in your room, imprison you in the house?’
Strolling across the room to the door, he flung it open, gestured to indicate that she should walk past him if she wanted, out of the room, out of the villa…
And she very nearly took the option he offered. It was only as she made a single step forward that the rush of realisation came. He hadn’t forced her in any way except mentally. He had told her that if she came with him to Greece he would let her mother and little George stay in the house that meant so much to them.
‘You