His Penniless Beauty

What was Nikos intending to do with the place? she’d wondered. Turn it into another prestige country hotel? A conference centre or other business use? Or restore it and sell it as residence for a millionaire? Her eyes had worked around the elegant proportions of the rooms, mentally envisaging it restored as a private house once more.

How beautiful to live here!

Out of nowhere, like a poisoned dart, the thought had struck her.

We could have lived here—Nikos and I…

Instantly she’d scourged the words from her mind, but it had been too late. Imagination, vivid and painful, had flared through her.

Nikos and me—living here—in my dream of bliss and happy ever after…

For brief, piercing moments she had been able to see it, so real, so real!

What if my dream had come true? What if now, four years later, we were here, together?

She had felt the ache in her heart. Four years had not diminished one iota Nikos’s impact on her! He must be thirty-two now, and his blazing masculinity had only matured. In her mind’s eye she saw his imprint—the familiar twist of his beautiful mouth, the achingly lush sweep of his eyelashes, the drowning darkness of his eyes. Nothing had been lost from all that she had been so fascinated by! He was still the most devastating man she had ever set eyes on—could ever set eyes on—setting her pulse beating like a bird in flight….

Danger had flickered like a hot flame.

Making her start back.

No! To think of Nikos again was madness—and to let herself imagine herself here with him nothing less than insanity!

Furiously, she had roused herself from her memory and opened at random another pair of double doors, hating herself for having allowed such thoughts entrance to her head. But the moment she’d stepped into the next room she had wished she had not. Her eyes had gone instantly to the grand piano in the centre of the room. Without conscious volition, she had found herself walking towards it, lifting up the heavy, dusty folds of the cover. The dark, gleaming wood beneath had brought a stab to her chest. How long had it been since she had last played? Abruptly she had dropped the cover, stepped back and turned on her heel out of the room, refusing to look back at the instrument.

She didn’t like to see pianos any more. They only rammed home to her the total ruination of her life—a life she had once taken utterly for granted.

That was now gone for ever.

Angrily, she had marched back through the padded baize door into the servants’ quarters, which led, meanderingly, to the housekeeper’s wing. Her anger had been directed at herself, for having even for the briefest moment entertained such pointless, fatuous fantasy.

Her and Nikos, living happily ever after…

The sharpened blade had slid into her all over again, and she’d wrenched it out viciously. Oh, God, why, why had he walked back into her life? Hadn’t she enough to cope with without this fresh torment?

Blindly, she had plunged out into the little walled garden, and now, after four days, she had made it her sole focus.

Her refuge.

It had drawn her from the moment she’d arrived. An old-fashioned walled kitchen garden, long smothered by weeds.

What had made her so determined to clear away what she could she didn’t know—only that the mindless, repetitive work gave her occupation and brought her solace. Armed with some rusting tools she’d found in an outhouse, she’d set to, ripping out weeds and digging through the packed earth. Already she had found hidden treasures—a bed of ripening strawberries which, once cleared of choking weeks, was yielding ruby fruits day on day.

The hours passed soothingly. Hot and sunny in the sheltered domain, with the scents of summer all around her, the vegetation verdant and lush. The quietness was interrupted only by birdsong, the somnolent buzz of bees and insects, and the air wafted by the breeze soughing in the trees beyond the walls. Sophie considered that an aching back and broken fingernails were a small price to pay for what she was getting in return—a blessed break from the grinding, bleak drudgery of her existence. A blessed break, too, even if only short-lived, from the constant anxiety and dread that now consumed her life.

Only one thing flawed her peace—an image she could not expunge from her mind. An image that burned with fresh pain, fresh bitterness, and that was as vivid, as indelible as it had ever been throughout the last four punishing, nightmare years: Nikos Kazandros, who had once been her foolish, puerile fantasy of happy ever after, and who was now only her torment.

Vehemently, she attacked the obdurate, deep-rooted weeds running riot in the soil as if she were digging out a far, far more invasive intruder into her memory, her thoughts…her very being.