Penniless and Purchased (14 page)

The word shaped itself in his head and he brushed it aside, but it reformed again. From the corner of his eye he could see her sitting there beside him, feel her presence, her reality.

Sophie…

Everything about her seemed so vivid, so vital! Everything about her was imprinted on him. In every cell of his body. Emotion washed through him. Emotion that
she
aroused! Only
she
aroused. Only Sophie…

Only Sophie…

The car ate up the few miles as he closed the distance to Belledon. They did not talk—yet the silence spoke. His head was full—but not with words, not with thoughts.

As he wound down the long drive to the house, took the curve around to the back and drew up outside the entrance to her quarters, he could feel the emotion in him strengthening. What it was he did not know, could not name. Knew only that it was strong and growing stronger. More imperative. More powerful.

I should leave. Leave her and go. Get back to the inn and then, first thing, head back to London. The architect can wait. He’s not important. All that is important is for me to get back to London. Away.

Away from Sophie…

But even as the thought forced its way into his head he knew it for the lie it was.

He cut the engine and the silence pooled. With a jerky movement Nikos opened his door, strode out around the car to open the passenger seat door. She got out quickly, shutting the door herself. Nikos walked up to the back door, unlocking it with his own set of keys for the property. It took a moment to find the right key, but then it yielded, and he pushed the door back, holding it open for her.

He did not speak.

Dared not speak.

Dared not look at her.

She approached slowly. There was a sudden wariness in
her step. A sudden slow thump of her heart. All around was nothing but silence. Then the mournful cry of an owl pierced it momentarily.

‘Sophie—’

The sound of his voice penetrated. Her eyes went to him as he stood in the dimness by the open door, waiting for her to go inside. Waiting to leave. To drive away. She paused. The air was chill now, after the warmth of the car, but it was not the night that chilled her.

Knowledge came to her.

I will never see Nikos again now.

He would drive away and she would never see him again.

She knew it with an absolute certainty. There would be no more accidental encounters, no more crossing of paths. No more.

A terrible yearning swept through her. A yearning for what had never been, for what never would be. What never could be.

With aching pain, she moved past him.

‘Sophie—’

She paused minutely. She could not say goodnight, could not speak anodyne words. It was all beyond her.

‘Sophie, I—’

She tilted her head—the barest acknowledgement. ‘Goodbye, Nikos.’

Her voice was low, faint. She had meant to say goodnight, but a truer word had come. She started forwards again, into the interior.

‘Sophie—’

Her name came from him again, but it was different now, and his hand was on her shoulder. Halting her. She turned.

He was so close to her. Standing there in the doorway, his hand on her shoulder, pressing through the material of her
blouse. He said something in Greek. She did not know what. Knew only that in the darkness of the night his face was stark.

His eyes were burning suddenly, with a fire that came from deep within.

Weakness went through her, making her breath catch, her heart seize. The warmth of his hand on her shoulder made her weaker yet. Her eyes clung to his. Clung in desperation, beseeching. Yearning.

Oh, dear God—Nikos!

Emotion filled her that she should be so close to him, and then anguish that this was, could only be, her final moment with him. That nothing remained—only this final parting.

And then…

Slowly, infinitely slowly, as if a weight were dragging at him, his hands slid from her shoulders to fasten around her arms. She felt his muscles tense, felt him draw her towards him. Her heartbeat had slowed. Her breath stopped. Time stopped. The unbearable past that had taken him from her once, the unbearable future that would take him from her for ever, all vanished, and there was only this moment—now. This moment with him. The soft dark of the night, the dim points of the stars, the faint soughing of the wind in the distant trees, the haunting cry of the hunting owl—that was all there was.

And Nikos. So close to her. So close.

Holding her.

Words came from him again, in his own language, low and rasped. She did not understand. But she did not need words to know what was in his eyes, his face.

His lips.

In a slow, slow descent, his mouth covered hers.

Like silken velvet his mouth moved on hers, drawing from her a nectar sweeter than honey. The nectar he had tasted
before, as sweet as this. The nectar that had been in her very first kiss—and in her last.

And now in this.

She opened to him. She could not do otherwise. Giving herself, all of herself, to this moment of bliss. Nikos kissing her. Nikos’s mouth moving on hers softly, slowly.

As he had kissed her the very first time.

Past and present fused in her head, her heart. The past she had submerged beneath layer after layer of desperately imposed barriers was now as real and singing in her consciousness as the bliss of the present.

Holland Park, after the open-air opera, walking along, hand in hand, his fingers laced with hers. Nikos pausing in the shadowed pathway to turn her slowly towards him, to murmur her name, and then, as her eyes fluttered shut, to do what she had been longing, aching for him to do—kiss her…

It was as if that moment had come again—as if this was the first time all over again. As if her heart were singing, soaring as it had then, her body and soul filling with the sweetest bliss.

Then, in that distant, long-ago past, he had drawn back regretfully, reluctantly, and she had gone on standing there, dazed and dizzy with delight, gazing up at him, lips parted, her heart soaring heavenward on wings of wonder.

‘I must take you home,’
he’d murmured then, and had walked with her, slowly, his arm around her shoulders, their bodies touching. They had meandered homewards, slowly, back towards her father’s house. His car had been parked there, and though she had invited him in for coffee—daringly, hopefully—he had ruefully shaken his head.

‘I can’t,’ he’d said. ‘Or I will want to stay…’

All he’d done was tilt up her chin and drop the lightest,
slightest kiss upon her lips. Then he’d let her go and turned away, walked back to the car, pausing only to lift his hand in a final goodnight and call softly, ‘Go in, Sophie.’

And she had, though it had been like tearing herself away, and when she had shut the front door she had leant back against it until she’d heard his car drive away, and then she had drifted upstairs, floating on air to her bedroom, aching with all her being for him.

As she ached now. Now that she was in his arms again—now that the bliss of his kiss was soaring in her veins—now that the low, hectic beat of her heart, the pulse of her blood, were binding her to him—now that the warm, sensuous pressure of his mouth was drowning her senses.

She gave herself to it absolutely, completely. Not even trying to fight, trying to resist. The past flowed into the present, becoming one.

He guided her to the staircase and up the narrow stairs, into the dim, encompassing darkness that awaited there. To take her into his arms again. The darkness enveloped them, but he did not need light to tell him what he knew—that her soft, slender body folded to his, that her tender, rounded breasts pressed against him, that her sweet, generous mouth was like honey beneath his. Nectar.

Did he speak? He did not know. Nor if he spoke Greek or English. Knew only that his hand had slipped around the nape of her neck, cradling her head to his as his other hand slid down the long wand-curve of her spine. He was kissing her still, deeper, and yet each kiss only engendered a greater hunger, a wilder desire for her. His fingers were at her blouse—that cheap, unlovely blouse that should never have sullied her honeyed-body—peeling the material away from her, careless of buttons just as he was careless of zips or fasteners,
only to ease her skirt from her, let it slide and cascade to the floor, where he could lift her out of it and lower her gently, carefully, down upon the waiting bed.

He followed her in a daze, his own garments and her remaining ones shed somehow, anyhow. Irrelevant how they fell, or where. All that was essential was to lower his bared body onto hers, gleaming like pearl in the velvet dark, to graze his lips along that opalescent skin, the delicate bones below her throat, the hollow at its base. Then, with the lightest, most feathered touch, he skimmed the swell of her tender breasts, heard her murmurous cries, felt her breasts swelling to his touch of lips and fingertips, felt their peaks cresting beneath his sensuous suckling, heard those cries again, husky from her throat.

Her fingers wound in his hair, splaying out over the contours of his back, and his body hardened against hers, filling him with a desire so steep, so absolute, that he moved on her, seeking, questing, parting her thighs with his and lifting himself to her arching hips. Her throat was extended, her head thrown back, the pale tresses of her loosened hair flowing like a banner as he kissed her again, deeper and yet deeper still, as she opened to him with tiny, breathy cries, pleading for him as he slowly, carefully, sheathed himself within her yielding body.

She could not move. Dared not. Because if she did something impossible would happen. She would feel a bliss more than it was possible to feel. So she could only lie there, his body filling hers, hers enwrapping his, their muscles quivering. Her hands were caught at the wrists, lifted either side of her head. Her whole being was poised, balanced so finely that it was as if the very edge of a tsunami had welled out of the ocean deeps. For a timeless, exquisite moment she was held so still
it was as if she were a statue of marble or ivory, hung in a moment of time that seemed eternal. She gazed upwards, her eyes wide, her lips parted—up into the face above her, whose dark, dark eyes held a question that was impossible to deny.

Then, with a susurration of her name, he moved.

And her body answered him.

She cried out. She could not help it—could not stop herself. Cried out as the drowning sweetness flushed through her until every cell was honeyed, every pore dissolved, and her whole body was drenched. The sweetness went on and on and on. He was there too, his body surging into her, and she heard him cry out with her. And then it was ebbing—ebbing away. The sweetness drained from her until all that was left was the utter exhaustion of her limbs, only lassitude. His body was heavy on hers, and he rolled them sideways so that she was in his arms, and he in hers, their bodies still melded, still complete. Her eyelids were so very, very heavy, her body sweet and warm. She folded against him, clasped to him, her hair swathing him, her head against his shoulder. Her breathing slowed, her heartbeat slowed, her eyelids fluttered shut and soon she was still, sleeping in his embrace.

Dim light pressed with skimming fingertips against her eyelids, fluttering them open. For a moment she was alone, as she had been for so long, and then, as if in a mirage, she realised she was in Nikos’s arms.

And they had made love.

Happiness welled through her. How it had happened she did not care—nor why. It had happened, that was all, and she was here, and he was with her. Her hands could press against the warm, hard wall of his chest, feel the rise and fall of it, feel the soft rhythm of his breath. She could open her eyes
and see, in the dim dawn light, the beautiful contours of his face, his sable hair feathering on his brow, his long, long lashes swept down over his eyes.

And know, with a wonder that was like a piercing pain, that she was experiencing something that she had never, ever experienced in her life.

I never lay in his arms, I never woke in his arms.

But this time—this time that had been granted to her!

This is how it should have been—

Her mind tried to sheer away, to block out the terrible memories that suddenly, instantly, were there inside her head, vivid and anguished. Humiliating and poisonous.

Shaming.

Cold iced through her. The warmth of Nikos’s arms was gone. Blindly she stared out into the room.

And slowly, very, very slowly, as if a terrible, unbearable weight was crushing down on her, she knew what she must do.

‘Y
OU
do realise there’s a recession, don’t you?’

The voice of the woman in the Job Centre was sharp, impatient. Sophie knew why. She’d walked out of a perfectly good job, for no reason the woman could see—a jaunt to the countryside hardly counted—and now she was back again, wanting another job just like that.

‘I’m willing to take anything,’ Sophie said, her voice low.

Anxiety pressed at her. Although the cheque from Nikos was buying her blessed time, she had to start earning again as soon as she possibly could.

But she should not have thought of that cheque.

Nor of Nikos.

Like a guillotine, her mind slammed shut. A steel door rammed down across her memory. It took every ounce of her strength to hold it in place.

Focus—that’s all you have to do! Focus on the only thing that matters now: getting another job. Any job.

The woman at the Job Centre was scrolling down her computer screen. ‘There really is very little,’ she said, disapproval still emanating from her. ‘If you could type it might be different, but as it is you have no marketable skills.’

Sophie knew. Had known it for four bitter years. No marketable skills, and no time to acquire any. No time to do anything other than work all the hours she could, for whatever wages she could.

The woman sat back, defeated. ‘You’ll have to come in tomorrow. There may be more then. All that’s on the database is casual bar work, and you said you didn’t want that.’

No, Sophie didn’t want that. She’d tried it once and found the inevitable sexual harassment repellent. Since then she’d stuck to shop work, which could run on into the evenings. But now she knew she had no leg to stand on in being picky about bar work. Not after she’d been prepared to work as an escort…

Even if
she
had denied the true nature of the work
Nikos had been right.

But she couldn’t think of Nikos. Absolutely, totally must not think of him. She looked across at the woman. Her expression was bleak.

‘What’s going in bar work?’

Ten minutes later she walked out on to the street. The dust and fumes of London hit her, worse than ever now, after the respite she’d had in the countryside. But that was the least of her problems. The biggest one was what it always had been—money. Even if she got the job she’d been sent to start that evening the money would be lousy. The basic hourly rate was grim. She ran sums in her head and felt fear bite.

Bleakly she trudged along the pavement. Her muscles still ached from the miles she’d walked yesterday. Down the long drive of the house at five in the morning, then a good two miles along the main road until she’d finally come to a village, found someone up and about at that early hour, and asked where the nearest train station was. It had turned out to be a taxi-ride away—a fare she could scarcely afford, let alone the
price of a train ticket back to London. And she’d left her pitiful luggage behind her too. She had bolted with nothing more than her handbag, wearing the same clothes she had the night before because they’d been the only ones she could silently scrabble for as she edged from the bedroom, terrified Nikos would wake. Terrified her nerve would crack and she would be unable to do what she had to do…

But I did it, and that’s all that matters! Nothing else—nothing else…

Despair crowded into her mind. She tried to fight it off, but it settled like a grey, chill miasma over her.

I have to keep going. That’s all I must think about. Keep going.

And above all I must not think about what happened with Nikos! Because if I do…if I do…

Dear God, if she let herself think, remember, feel anything about what had happened, she would collapse, sit down on the kerb and weep, until her body was wrung out and she was simply dust on the street to be blown away into oblivion.

It was an aberration, a dream—that’s all. That’s how I have to think of it. As if I’d dreamt it. Because that’s all it was. A dream. As unreal as if I had imagined it. As impossible as if I had imagined it.

But, try as she did to tell herself that, it seemed her body knew better. Her body was crying out to her that that extraordinary, miraculous night, that gift that had been given to her out of nowhere,
had
been real.

She could remember with every cell just how exquisite his every caress had been, every touch of his lips, every beautiful, incredible sensation he had aroused in her as he had made love to her slowly, sensuously, tenderly, passionately…

She stumbled on, forcing herself to do so. Finding words
in her head that she did not want there—could not allow there. But they came all the same, just as the echoes of his caresses trembled in her limbs, set an aching in her breasts, her heart. Her stricken, broken heart.

How can a heart break twice?

Hadn’t it been agony enough to go through it the first time around, without having to endure it again now? Yet she knew that there was no escape—could be no escape. Nikos had come back into her life, and her heart had broken all over again.

It was that simple, that brutal.

If only he’d never seen me again!

And yet…

How could she wish never to have seen Nikos again? Never to have experienced that miraculous, magical night she had spent with him? It had been a blessing she could never regret! Emotion poured through her. Whatever the reason Nikos had taken her she must be glad—glad with all her heart—that he had! Because this time her abiding memory would not be burning humiliation and coruscating shame, tearing her to pieces, but instead something she could treasure all her life—a precious gift to hoard and protect, not reject with loathing and repulsion and anger.

That’s what I must hold on to! To give me the strength to go on.

For go on she must—there was no alternative. There never had been.

Head bowed, she went on walking the hard pavement.

‘Sir, we’ve got a sighting.’

Instantly Nikos tensed, fingers gripping his mobile. ‘Where?’ he barked.

His security operative gave him the location. Nikos
scrawled it on a pad, then cleared the line, before punching through to his chauffeur to order his car to the forecourt and relaying the location for him to key into the car’s satnav. Then, striding from the office, pausing only to instruct his PA to cancel all appointments, he swung out into the corridor of the executive suite of Kazandros Corp’s London headquarters and headed for the lift. His expression was grim.

His mood grimmer.

Finally his quarry had been run to earth. Emotion scythed through him, but he cut it short. For twenty-four hours emotion had rampaged through him, all but stopping him from functioning. Consuming him to the exclusion of everything else. From the moment he had finally realised that Sophie had gone—disappeared—not just from his bed, but from Belledon itself.

It had taken him over an hour of increasingly frantic searching through the near-derelict main house to establish that she was not lying with a broken neck at the foot of collapsing stairs, or fallen through the rotten floorboards. Even longer to realise that, despite having left all her belongings behind, unpacked, she had nevertheless gone—left him.

Why?
The question still burned at the base of his mind, though he had stopped trying to find an answer. There was none that he could think of. It was inexplicable—unforgivable.

What the hell was she playing at?

Anger bit in his throat and he thrust it away. As he climbed into the car, throwing himself back in his seat and ordering his chauffeur, ‘Just drive!’, his face took on a closed, brooding expression. He’d been a fool. A total fool.

Just like last time.

Sophie Granton had torn him to shreds all over again. The burning in the pit of his stomach intensified, and so did the
grim expression on his drawn features. He would find Sophie—find her, shake her like a rag, and get answers!

Damn her—damn her for doing this to me all over again! Taking me to heaven—then tossing me into hell. Damn her!

The drive to the location he’d been given took longer than he’d expected. From the plush Kazandros offices in the City the car wended its way north-west—but not to any of the prosperous areas of London that he would once have associated with Sophie Granton. But then these days Sophie Granton was no longer a Holland Park princess. As the car headed into more downmarket streets, Nikos glanced out through the smoked-glass windows, frowning. This area was not just downmarket, it was derelict!

His mobile sounded again, and he snapped it open.

‘Yes?’ His voice was curt.

‘The subject is now walking along the street designated as her home address,’ came the voice at the other end of the connection.

‘Just keep her under surveillance,’ said Nikos, before relaying the information to his driver.

His frown darkened as he looked about him. Then he saw her. She was some way ahead of the car, trudging along the pavement. There was something about the way she was walking that stung in his memory. He’d seen her walking like that once before, her head bowed, only just managing to put one foot in front of another. It had been the night he’d set eyes on her trudging through the rain in her tawdry finery, escaping from Cosmo Dimistris.

Defeated. Exhausted. Broken.

For a split second emotion knifed in him like a blade in his heart, twisting it painfully. Then a more predominant emotion surged again.

‘Stop the car!’

The chauffeur did not need telling twice. He slowed to a halt and Nikos leapt from the car, striding along the pavement, past pedestrians, with a heavy, rapid tread. She was right ahead of him.

He clamped his hand on her shoulder and spun her round. She gave half a cry, her face suddenly shot with terror. Then she saw who it was.

She went white.

‘Nikos.’ Her voice was a breath, her skin taut over her cheekbones.

‘Yes,
Nikos
!’ he snarled. ‘And now you can tell me what the
hell
you think you’re playing at!’

Her expression blanked—completely blanked. For a second Nikos felt fury shoot through him, and then he realised that she was not deliberately blanking him, not deigning to shut him out. She was blank because she couldn’t answer him. It was the same beaten, broken look she had had when he’d scooped her up, soaking wet, off the street.

The pressure of his hand on her shoulder slackened. He had to talk to her, get answers. But not here—not on the street.

‘Where do you live, Sophie?’ His eyes glanced around—surely she didn’t live here? It might not be officially a slum, but the whole place was seedy and malodorous, with litter in the street, and graffiti, and clearly vandalised buildings.

She pointed vaguely to a building a few metres away. The lower storey was a boarded-up shop, and at the side was a door, inset with chipped and peeling paint.

‘You live
there
?’ The shock in Nikos’s voice was open.
What the hell is going on? Why is she reduced to this total dump?

Well, he would get answers to that, too. He would get all the answers he needed.

The car had drawn up alongside him now. It was drawing attention—it was not the kind of car that frequented an area like this. He crossed briefly to the driver and spoke to him, telling him to cruise around the block until he was called back. The car glided off, and Nikos turned his attention to Sophie. His hand was still on her shoulder.

He thought he could feel her trembling.

He walked her to the door she’d indicated, and waited while she fumblingly got out the keys and opened it. Inside, a smell of dirt, decay and stale urine hit him. There was no hallway, just a flight of stairs going straight up. At the top were several doors.

‘This one,’ said Sophie in a low voice, and opened it.

There was a single room beyond, and as he stepped inside Nikos realised that whatever had happened to Sophie Granton since he had severed all contact four years ago it had not been good. The room was some kind of bedsit, with half the space occupied by a narrow bed, and opposite, in an alcove flanked by a built-in cupboard, a sink, with a small fridge to one side, topped by a miniature cooker sporting a pair of cooking rings on which were stacked two saucepans. A small kettle was on the draining board, plugged into a loose socket on the wall. The floor covering was cracked vinyl, with a tiny rug beside the bed, and the curtains were faded around the window, which looked down into a cramped yard at the back of the house. The sole virtue of the room was that it was clean, tidy, and smelled of disinfectant.

‘You live here—’

It was neither a question nor a statement. It was a voicing of disbelief.

She had put her bag down on the bed. ‘Yes,’ she said.

She seemed very calm, but her face and eyes were still blank.
He looked at her a moment. She was not meeting his eyes; she didn’t seem to be able to. He paused a moment, then spoke.

‘What in God’s name is going on?’ He took a breath, sharp and scissored. ‘How can you live in this hole?’

She blinked, as if the question were a strange one. ‘It’s all I can afford.’

He said something in Greek, sibilant and angry.

‘
Why?
Sophie, your father was a millionaire several times over! Even losing his business can’t have reduced him to this! He will have put money aside, ring-fenced it. Even if it wasn’t a fortune, like he had before, he would hardly end up a pauper! So why the hell are you living like this?’

His eyes narrowed suddenly. ‘Have you fallen out with him?’ Speculation laced his expression. ‘Does he disapprove of your lifestyle? Is that it? Was that really the first time you’d worked as an escort, or were you feeding me a line?’ A new thought struck him, cold, and horrible. ‘Are you doing drugs, Sophie?’

He studied her. It had never crossed his mind that she might be, but now, looking at her, he wondered. When he’d held her in his arms he’d thought her wand-slim—was her slenderness the shedding of flesh that drugs could cause? Just as they could cause penury and desperation—enough to make her risk working as an escort?