His Penniless Beauty Read online

  ‘Nikos—oh, Nikos!’ Her very voice enticed him, entreated him! ‘Don’t go—please, don’t go—please—’

  How could he resist? How? When she was pleading for the very thing he wanted more than anything else in the world?

  So he let insanity possess him.

  And then afterwards he paid the price. A price he had never thought he would have to pay.

  She was lying in his arms, her body curled against his, her hair like a silken scarf around him, her hectic heart rate slowing now, as was his, as he lay consumed by wonder, murmuring endearments to her, tender and loving, possessed by such emotion as he had not known existed. She was everything that he had dreamed of! He could not regret what had happened! How could he? It had been a voyage to a paradise he had never known before—a destination that he knew now, with absolute certainty, would be his home for ever.

  Her eyes were shining with joy, and emotion kicked through him again just to see it.

  ‘Oh, Nikos! Darling, darling Nikos! I’m so, so happy—so blissfully, blissfully happy! I can’t believe it really happened—I can’t believe that it’s all right. It’s just like a fairy tale!’

  She kissed him, her eyes like jewels.

  ‘We can be married now, can’t we? And everything’s going to be so wonderful! You and me together! For ever and ever! Bliss, bliss, bliss! And Daddy will be all right too, because I know you’ll save his company and everything will be fine again.’

  He stilled. He could feel it happening.

  ‘What did you just say?’

  She gazed at him, eyes veiling suddenly. ‘I’m sorry! Oh, I’m sorry, Nikos! I shouldn’t have said that, I know. But I’ve been worried about him, and now I’m just so relieved I don’t have to worry about him after all, and—’

  He did not let her finish. Sharply he pulled away. Out of her clinging embrace. He threw back the bedcovers and stood up. Looked down at her. Looked down at the beautiful, pale, slender body he had just possessed.

  And knew the price he was expected to pay for it.

  ‘Nikos?’ Her voice was uncertain again, and he could hear the note of anxiety in it. Well, she was right to be anxious. Her prey was about to escape her. Coolly, methodically, he started to get dressed. But inside he felt a hot, raging maelstrom of emotion boiling in him.

  ‘Nikos?’ Her tremulous query came. ‘Where—where are you going?’

  ‘Where?’ His riposte was cool. As cool as the manner in which he was swiftly doing up his dress shirt, fastening his cuffs. ‘Back to my hotel, of course.’ His eyes were veiled in the dim light, but he could see her body in all its beauty, all its lost innocence, in a soft pool of lamplight. Emotion boiled in him again, but he would not let it show. He reached for his dinner jacket, abandoned on a chair in their haste to undress each other only a short while ago, shrugging it on across his broad shoulders.

  ‘Did you really think I would bail out Granton on your account? That I would save your father’s company just for a taste of your body? That offering up your virginity would get me to marry you and I would then rescue your father and keep you a rich man’s daughter?’

  He stood looking down at her, and everything he felt about her—knew about her—was in the obliterating knifing of his eyes. His voice, when he spoke, cut like a whip. Harsh. Condemning. Contemptuous.

  ‘You had it all planned, didn’t you? All along.’ He paused. ‘What a contemptible little piece of work you are.’

  Then he turned and walked out of her bedroom. Every muscle in his body had to be forced.

  He had scarcely gained the top of the stairs when she came hurtling after him.

  ‘Nikos! No, please! Please!’ She was clinging to him, naked, her voice terrified, sobbing. He put her from him, hands clamping around her bare upper arms like vices.

  ‘Enough! The game is over, Sophie. Over.’ He let go of her, and went on down the stairs. Right on down to the ground floor. The last he heard of her was her broken, hysterical sobbing. The crying of his name.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE car drove on through the traffic, heading back into central London. Sophie had seemed to acquiesce, and was sitting on the far side of the seat still, but no longer protesting or vocal. Her eyes were closed, her face was shuttered, shutting him out. Tension and exhaustion were in every line of her body. Nikos let her be. This was not the place for what had to be done. Silently he resumed reading the document he’d been attempting to study while he’d waited for her to come out of the clinic. But the words were meaningless. Only one thing had meaning now, and that must wait until their journey’s end.

  It seemed to take for ever until his car finally pulled in under the portico of his Park Lane hotel and his driver was opening the door on Sophie’s side. She got out, and Nikos was there instantly, lest she try and bolt. But she stood listless, immobile, as he cupped her elbow and steered her inside the hotel lobby. She remained silent until he had escorted her up in the elevator to his suite, and then, as he closed the door, she turned.

  ‘We have nothing to say to each other, Nikos. Nothing!’

  Her voice was neither hostile nor encouraging. It was indifferent. As if she had switched off somewhere along the journey.

  ‘Sit down,’ he instructed her, and with the same dumb acquiescence she lowered herself down onto the sofa.

  He followed suit, but sat himself at the far end. He could see her tensing, but ignored it. He had his own tension to cope with. He had to stay in control of this conversation, and he needed all his self-control to do so.

  ‘I want to know,’ he spelt out, ‘exactly what has happened since I walked out on you, Sophie, four years ago.’

  She eyed him blankly. Her face was closed. ‘Why?’ The indifference was there still, but there was hostility beneath the surface now. He could tell.

  He ignored the challenge. ‘Just tell me.’ He paused. ‘You’re going nowhere till we’ve had this conversation, so you’d better get on with it. What happened after I walked out on you four years ago?’

  Her face was blank. Jaw set. OK, he would start jabbing. ‘When did your father have his first heart attack?’

  He’d got to her, he could see. She hadn’t expected that. ‘Who told you he’d had one?’ she countered instantly, voice bristling.

  ‘The nurse at the clinic. He had two before his stroke. So when was the first one?’

  He could see the cords of her neck tauten. Then her head twisted back to him. ‘It’s not your damn business!’

  Nikos ignored her outburst. ‘When did he have his first heart attack, Sophie?’

  ‘You want to know? OK, I’ll tell you!’ Her eyes were full of venom. ‘He had his first heart attack the morning he flew back from Edinburgh, without a rescue package, when his PA told him you’d phoned to say there was no possibility of a Kazandros deal, either, and you’d flown back to Athens already.’

  Nikos stilled. ‘That morning?’

  ‘You want to see his hospital records?’ she jibed sarcastically.

  But Nikos’s mind was racing. Thee mou, the very next day after he’d thrown her from him like a soiled rag!

  ‘How—how bad was he?’

  ‘He pulled through,’ she said tightly. ‘The doctors warned me he might not, that he might have another attack, but he didn’t. He was in hospital for months, and had to have surgery. That’s why I dropped out of music college—to look after him. By then Granton had folded, and I was worried about university costing too much. The house in Holland Park had to go, too, and we moved to a much cheaper apartment.’

  ‘I’m—sorry,’ said Nikos. It seemed an inadequate thing to say.

  She gave a half-shrug. ‘Why? It wasn’t anything to do with you. Not really. You weren’t responsible—why should you have been?’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ he said stiffly. Emotion had started to slice inside him again, but he had to keep pushing. ‘And the second attack?’

  ‘A year later. That one was worse. He was a lot weaker. There was a lot m
ore stress.’

  ‘Stress?’ Nikos pounced on the word.

  She looked away again. ‘Money things. He’d tried to start up Granton again. It stressed him. And then…’ She paused a moment, then continued, in the same tight, terse manner. ‘It was a drain on him financially, losing him even more money, and he had to pull the plug. That’s what triggered the second heart attack.’

  He nodded slowly. There was another question he had to ask to make the ugly, bleak jigsaw come together. ‘You told me he’d got caught by a boiler-room scam. When did that happen?’

  Had Edward Granton been so weakened by illness that he’d actually been stupid enough to fall for such a well-known fraud?

  Sophie’s eyes flared with emotion. He could not tell which one, but he knew it was one that caused pain. ‘While he was back in hospital. I—I had power of attorney—he wasn’t expected to pull through a second time—and I…I wanted to give Dad some good news, because he’d been so worried about money. So I… So I…’

  Nikos felt icy cold go through him as realisation hollowed out in him.

  ‘They targeted you, not your father.’

  His mind reeled at the very thought of it. Sophie—sheltered by her father from every financial reality in life, insulated from all necessity, focussing only on her music, her studies, her carefree, happy life—lured into the bloodsucking grip of leeches in a boiler room. It would have been like throwing a puppy to wolves.

  To be torn to pieces.

  Rage speared in him. Rage that anyone should have done that to her!

  She was sitting very still, her hands knotted together in her lap. She looked at Nikos. Her skin was stretched across her cheekbones. Her eyes empty now.

  ‘I invested nearly everything he had left. It wasn’t much by then—only a couple of hundred thousand out of everything he’d once had. I was desperate to recoup his losses, so I could go to him and tell him everything was all right again! Instead—’ She fell silent again, but guilt and self-condemnation lacerated her face. ‘I lost him everything—everything he’d managed to salvage when his company went bust,’ she whispered. ‘Everything. I was so incredibly, incredibly stupid. Gullible. I tried to hide it from Dad, but when he finally came out of hospital he found out and…and…’ She took a razored breath. ‘That’s when he had his stroke.’

  She started to lace and unlace her fingers. ‘He was lucky. Not just that he survived, but that he was able to go to that clinic. It’s one of the best in the country. And even luckier that his health insurance was still running.’ She swallowed, and then went on, staring blindly down at the carpet, the skin stretched across her cheekbones. ‘But it’s run out now. He’s used up all his allowance, what with all the hospitalisation and surgery and so on, as well as the stroke clinic. I was putting aside all the money I could, spending as little as possible on anything else, but I couldn’t keep up with the payments. So…so…when they said he would have to leave I knew I had to do whatever it took to earn enough money.’

  She lifted her head suddenly, staring right at Nikos. Her expression was hard, and he saw the same look in her eyes as she’d had in the taxi, when he’d hauled her out of the gutter.

  ‘And if that meant working as an escort, then so what? I had to have the money! I had to! Keeping Dad in the clinic is all that matters! And after all—’ her voice twisted ‘—it’s not as if he’d know how I was earning the money!’ Her eyes were like knives, slicing into Nikos. ‘So that’s why I did it! And that’s why I grabbed your money, too! So now you know! And why the hell you want to I haven’t the faintest idea! It’s nothing to you, Nikos—nothing!’

  For a moment, as she fell silent, her chest heaving with emotion, he said nothing. But then he spoke.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ he said, and his voice was different but he didn’t know how. ‘It’s everything to me.’

  His eyes held hers—held them as if he were reaching for them from a very, very long way away. Across a divide that engulfed them like a bottomless chasm.

  Emotion was huge inside him, overwhelming him in its enormity. But there were questions still to ask. Questions upon which his whole being depended.

  ‘Why did you make love with me, Sophie? At Belledon?’ His voice was low.

  Her eyes flickered, as if she were seeking refuge.

  ‘Why, Sophie?’ he asked again, in the same low, intense voice.

  Her face worked, but she would not answer. Her eyes slid away, unable to meet his.

  ‘We found ecstasy together.’ His voice was lower still. ‘You cannot deny it—nor I. Ecstasy, Sophie, that night at Belledon.’ He paused, and a world was in that pause. ‘Then you left. Why, Sophie?’

  Slowly, as if every word were dragged from her, as if she was forcing herself to speak, she answered him.

  ‘I had to. I couldn’t…I couldn’t endure it all over again. Having you despise me.’ Her face contorted. ‘Hate me, just as you did four years ago! I couldn’t face it—not again!’ She shuddered. ‘Not when this time I was innocent!’ She looked at him, eyes stricken. ‘But you wouldn’t have believed me—and why should you have, after what I’d done to you? I swear to you, Nikos, I was innocent! But you already knew I was desperate for money, and if you’d found out about what had happened to my father you would simply have thought that I was as guilty now as I was four years ago!’

  Her face contorted again, anguish and self-loathing in her eyes. ‘Because four years ago I was guilty! Guilty of every word you threw at me! I’d just found out that day about my father’s financial troubles—I saw an article in the business section of a newspaper someone was reading on the bus as I came back from college, headlined “Granton counts on Kazandros lifeline”! I was horrified! Appalled! Terrified for my father! And I felt so totally ashamed! I’d spent all that time tunnel-visioned on you. I’d never even realised what was going on for my father!’

  She gave a hollow, biting laugh, quickly cut off in her throat. ‘Until I read in that article that that was why my father had invited you in the first place! Because he wanted you to be his white knight, to save him from going under! I felt so guilty that my father was in such trouble and I hadn’t even noticed! But then I realized…’ She swallowed. ‘I realised that of course you must be intending to invest in Grantons, or merge, or whatever was going to be necessary, because you would never have been going out with me if you hadn’t! I knew you would never have had a relationship with me if you weren’t intending to save Granton. You would have thought it dishonourable, because your going out with me would have led my father to assume he could count on you. So, because you were still going out with me, I knew I didn’t have to worry about my father after all. And then that evening—’

  She stopped. Her chest was heaving, and suddenly she got to her feet.

  ‘And then,’ she went on, each word cutting the air, ‘that evening, at that charity ball, you told me you were going back to Athens the next morning.’

  She stopped again and swallowed. There was a stone in her throat, and she had to swallow it. Nikos was sitting immobile, looking at her. His face was a mask, and she knew why. She forced herself on, each word like broken glass in her throat.

  ‘I knew that could only mean one thing. You were finished with me. And that meant you were finished with my father, too. That you weren’t going to be his white knight. And you weren’t going to be my—’

  She took another razoring breath. The stone in her throat was still there, but she had to force herself to speak all the same. Why, she didn’t know. Nikos knew the truth. He had known it four years ago. He knew it now.

  ‘So it was to be our last evening together—ever. And I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear it. So I invited you in, knowing we’d be alone in the house, and I made myself as…as enticing as I could. It…it was like…like a test. Were you really going to finish with me? Were you really going to leave me?’ Her voice dropped. Her hands twisted in her lap, eyes sank.

  ‘I so, so desperately wanted you to st
ay.’

  Her words came haltingly, each one exacting a price from her in blood.

  ‘And you did stay.’ She lifted her eyes to him again. Forced herself to look at him. Face him. Confess to him. ‘You stayed. And you made love to me. I knew you would never have done that if you hadn’t been serious about me, about our relationship, because you knew I was a virgin, and I knew you would always respect that. So to me that night was proof that you hadn’t been going to finish with me after all, that you were serious about me and always had been, and that you would sort out everything about the business side of things just as you must have intended all along! We’d get married and live happily ever after, and all Daddy’s worries would be gone because you’d be his son-in-law, and you and your father would be investing in Granton, and Daddy would be happy, and you and I would be happy, and everything in the entire universe was going to be wonderful! Just wonderful! A fairy tale come true, with you as a white knight for my father and for me too!’

  Her voice was rank with bitterness, with self-mockery. Self-loathing.

  She looked at him. His face was still a motionless mask.

  ‘And then…’ She swallowed, and the stone was choking her now, suffocating her. ‘Then you told me the truth. About myself. Threw those ugly, brutal home truths at me—showing me just what I’d done.’

  Her eyes shut a moment, as if she did not have the strength to keep them open. Then she took another breath and spoke again.

  ‘And I realised it was true—every word of what you’d said. I realised I’d behaved shamefully, trying to manipulate you, luring you into bed with me. You called me a contemptible little piece of work—and I was. I hated you for it, Nikos, but it was true.’

  Her eyes burned in her face. ‘But not this time…’

  His face had shuttered, veiled as if by a mask. He sat back, leaning back against the sofa, spreading his arms along the cushions, crossing one leg over another. Elegant, devastating. In the pit of her churning stomach, Sophie felt a clench suddenly.