Yanking herself free of him, she rubbed a hand across her reddened lips as if to deny the taste of him. ‘You shouldn’t have done that!’
Prudence tottered into the lift on wobbling legs and let it carry her down to the ground floor. She felt emotionally battered, but her body was still alight with the passion Nik had awakened and the ache of desire made her despise herself even more. It was the stuff of nightmares for her to emerge from the building and find that she was the target of cameras and shouted questions from a crowd of journalists wielding microphones. For a split-second she was paralysed, as blind and helpless as a rabbit caught in car headlights.
‘Is it true you’re divorcing Nik, Mrs Angelis?’
‘Does Nik want to marry someone else?’
‘Any truth in the rumour that your grandfather begged him to stay married to you?’
CHAPTER FOUR
‘DON’T BE STUPID!’ Prudence heard herself say before she got wise and simply turned on her heels and ran for her life.
She did not stop until she had outrun the pack of journalists following her down the street. Gulping in fresh air, she took a careful look around her and slowed her pace; the paparazzi had gone. It had been an enervating episode for a woman who was not accustomed to media interest. Her face had only made it into the newspapers twice since her marriage-and only then at private events held to bring in funds for the sanctuary. It shook her to acknowledge that Nik lived with that kind of attention every day.
For the first time she allowed herself to mull over the astonishing fact that Nik had been willing to run the risk of getting her pregnant to keep her. At heart Nik could be very basic. Naïve as well, she thought ruefully. According to what she had read, it was quite common for couples to have to spend a year trying for a baby. The same gloomy book had informed her that even though she was only in her late twenties, her most fertile years already lay behind her. On that basis she thought there was virtually no chance that conception could have taken place on the strength of a single occasion.
When she met up with Leo again, he looked as grim as she felt.
‘What’s up?’ she asked.
‘I ran into a friend of Stella’s at the lecture. She let drop that Stella’s actually going out on a date tonight with some guy…she just didn’t know how to tell me and thought I would disapprove.’
Prudence winced and tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow. ‘Oh, dear. Mind you, she has been on her own for two years now.’
‘I know that.’ Leo settled frustrated brown eyes on her. ‘Give me the female viewpoint. Advise me on my next move…’
‘I can’t…I can’t! You have to make that decision.’
‘I’ve got too much to lose,’ Leo sighed. ‘Look, let’s have dinner before we drive back. It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.’
‘How did you get on with Nik this afternoon?’ he finally enquired while they were studying their menus in the restaurant.
Prudence tried to hoist her usual bright smile onto her mouth and failed. She thought of the fact that her relationship with Nik now lay in broken pieces. She thought of the fact that he was cruelly forcing her to continually reject the marriage that had once been her naïve and foolish dream. And to her horror and without the slightest warning, tears sprouted into her eyes and poured in a flood down her cheeks.
‘Prudence…’ Leo was horrified and palpably embarrassed and he gripped the hand she had rested on the table. ‘Shall we leave?’
‘No, I’ll be all right in a minute…sorry,’ she told him ruefully, fumbling for a tissue and smiling apologetically at him through her tears.
Somewhere very close a camera flashed. Leo blinked and released his hold on her to shoot upright. ‘That bloke just took a photo of us! What’s going on?’
‘I must have been followed from Nik’s apartment. I thought I’d shaken the reporters off, but obviously I was wrong,’ Prudence sighed, mopping her face dry.
Leo stayed upright, making it clear that he would still prefer to leave. ‘You should have warned me…I had no idea you attracted this kind of attention when you were in London.’
‘I don’t as a rule, but word seems to have leaked out about the divorce and evidently anything to do with Nik’s private life is news. The paparazzi adore him.’ It crossed Prudence’s mind that, put in the same position as Leo, Nik would have shrugged and stayed to eat. But then Nik had a magnificent disregard for incidents that embarrassed other people. She felt guilty for comparing him to Leo, who was more sensitive and not at all arrogant.
On the drive back home, Leo told her that he had applied for a teaching position in London. A pang of dismay assailed her, for if he was successful he would be selling up and moving to the city and she would miss his company. Yet she also appreciated that such a move would make sense for him now that his father was no longer alive.
Only when Leo had finished telling Prudence about his plans was she free to ponder her own predicament. It seemed to her that she was in a no-win situation. If she continued with the divorce proceedings in the teeth of Nik’s opposition she would be wasting money she didn’t have on legal bills. She would have to find another way of changing Nik’s mind. Of course, a really bold woman would not allow Nik to come between her and her future plans, Prudence reflected ruefully. A really bold woman would head off to the sperm bank regardless, reflecting that she had asked for a divorce and that if her subsequent fertility caused her husband embarrassment and some denials, it would be entirely his own fault. But even though she was angry with both Nik and her grandfather, she did not wish to affront either man to that extent.
A strange car was parked in the yard at her home. Annoyed that the ‘For Sale’ board was still there at the foot of the lane, Prudence was hoping that the car belonged to the estate agent so that she could give him a piece of her mind. A small, pugnacious man in a suit got out of the car and approached her. ‘Mrs Prudence Angelis…?’
Prudence nodded confirmation. ‘Yes?’
He handed her a document and got straight back into his car to drive off again. She opened it up. It was an eviction notice drawn up by her grandfather’s legal firm in London.
Her solicitor, Mr Bullen, was able to see her first thing the next morning. He studied the notice she had been served with and sighed. ‘Yes, I’m afraid it’s in order. Your mother was warned that this could happen some day.’
‘My mother, Trixie…knew that there was a risk of this? She never mentioned it to me. I don’t understand,’ Prudence protested, her eyes shadowed by the horrible sleepless night of worry she had endured.
‘As you know, my colleague, who handled your late mother’s estate, retired last year. He may well have assumed that your mother had already explained the intricacies of your position and that you understood the problems.’
‘I thought I did, but I obviously didn’t. I knew that I would never own Craighill Farm. But I believed that it was mine to use for my lifetime.’
‘The farm belongs to your grandfather and he has always had the right to ask you to vacate the property so that it can be sold. The agreement by which your mother acquired the right to live at Craighill was extremely complex. In it, however, your grandfather, Theo Demakis, clearly reserved the right to put an end to the agreement at any time and he has now chosen to exercise that option.’ The solicitor surveyed his client with a curiosity he could not conceal. ‘Of course you could purchase Craighill Farm for your own use and that would soon settle the problem.’
Prudenc
e stretched her mouth into as good a semblance of an unconcerned smile as she could manage. She was fully conscious that while she carried the name Angelis a plea of poverty was unlikely to receive a sympathetic hearing. She walked slowly back out to her battered four-wheel-drive. She felt traumatised. She was to move out of the farm within the month. It was a bad moment to appreciate that, whenever trouble loomed on her horizon, she was accustomed to phoning Nik. He had always been her first port of call in a tight corner and his advice and guidance had proved invaluable a dozen times in the past. But she couldn’t phone Nik for support this time, could she?
There was certainly no point contacting her Greek grandfather, who had made his animosity clear with a speed and a ferocity that appalled her. Evidently, her decision to divorce Nik had been the last straw. In her ignorance she had believed that her father, Apollo, had funded the purchase of the farm and that it would be her home until the end of her days. The truth had come as a severe shock. Why should her grandfather let her continue to live in his property when as far as he was concerned she was a rubbish granddaughter? Theo Demakis owed her nothing, she conceded wretchedly.
In less than a month, every animal in the sanctuary would be homeless. It was as if a bomb had exploded under her tidy little world. With it went all her dreams. To think she had believed that she was financially secure enough to contemplate single-parenthood! Only now did she see that her freedom from having to pay either rent or a mortgage had been the foundation of her security and that without that advantage all her plans came apart at the seams.
But she was being horribly selfish when all she could think about were her own problems, she acknowledged guiltily. Dottie and Sam Trent lived at Craighill as well. Where would they move to? She had let the cottage to them and cheerfully assured them that they could live there for as long as they liked. She felt sick at that recollection.