The Cozakis Bride

Olympia sat there like a statue, not moving a muscle, knowing she couldn't afford to move in case she broke down. And if she broke down she might cry or scream or shout, and he would then know that he had really hurt her. Self- preservation kept her still, her face a very pale but smooth oval as she gazed back at him in frozen silence, unable to trust her voice enough to attempt speech.

Nik's penetrating dark scrutiny was one of ferocious in­tensity. She suspected that he was not getting the reaction he wanted from her and that gave her a bitter comfort. After all, she had sacrificed her pride only to be rewarded with a humiliation that smarted and stung even as her body ached from his intimate possession.

'You look just like you looked the morning after you were caught with Lukas. Cold as bloody charity,' Nik con­demned with steadily fracturing cool, a flash of gold now illuminating his stunning eyes. 'You have no loyalty and even fewer principles...that lack in you turns me off most.'

It took every ounce of what little courage she had left, but Olympia lifted her chin and murmured glacially, 'I hope I conceive this month. I find this kind of scene a complete bore, but interesting for all that. Here you are, twenty-nine years old, and you're still stuck in the past which I left behind years ago, along with other childish things.'

A dark line of blood ran up over Nik's spectacular cheek­bones. He sent her a look of chilling dark fury and she jerked as if she had been struck. 'Be careful how you fight back, pethi mou. Too many people have already suffered at your hands. I don't intend to give you a second bite at the same cherry.'

He strode out. She leapt out of bed, raced about gathering up every item of clothing he had left behind and then, yank­ing open the door, she threw it all out in a heap in the corridor. Then she stood in the centre of the room, naked and shaking like a leaf. Pulling the sheet from the tumbled bed, she hauled it round herself. Next she poured herself a glass of champagne, hoping it would steady her ragged nerves.

But, try as she might, she could not prevent her memo­ries from taking her back to the night which lay at the very heart of Nik's hatred for her. Hatred. She shivered and sank back on the bed to recall what had happened earlier that same day ten years earlier...

Katerina had asked Olympia to go shopping with her that morning.

'I just can't believe the way you let Nik boss you around,' Katerina had remarked over coffee in a cafe’. 'Take his plans for his own entertainment tonight. If I was en­gaged to a guy as good-looking and volatile as Nik Cozakis, I wouldn't let him go out to a nightclub without me!'

'I don't want Nik to feel that being engaged means he has to take me everywhere with him—'

'Everywhere?' Katerina rolled her eyes in cynical dis­belief. 'You already get left behind when he goes sailing. You also got left behind when he flew over to Paris to take care of some business for his father. Why don't we spring a surprise on the guys tonight? We could go to the same club and see what they get up to without us.'

Olympia didn't fall for that idea at first. When Nik called in that afternoon, she just asked him up front to let her accompany him that evening. He told her no, she was too young. So she threatened to go out clubbing with Katerina instead.

'No way,' Nik countered. 'Her family wouldn't like it either. We go out in a crowd to clubs. That way we all look after each other.'

'But you've just said that I can't come with you to­night—'

'It's a boys' night...OK?'

And they argued and parted for the first time still angry at each other. Olympia immediately phoned Katerina to take her up on her suggestion that they gatecrash the eve­ning. Katerina made it sound like a really fun thing to do, but by the time the taxi dropped them off at the club Olympia's strongest need was to smooth over the row she had had with Nik.

They found Lukas sitting alone at a table with Nik's car keys lying in front of him. When Olympia asked him in surprise where the other boys were, he muttered something about them having gone on to a party somewhere else.

Olympia had barely sat down when Katerina suddenly gasped, 'Oh, no!'

Olympia looked in the same direction and saw Nik. Lounging back against a pillar, her fianc6 was in the act of hauling a beautiful giggling blonde into his arms. Crushing her to his lean, powerful frame, he then fell on her like a sex-starved animal, demonstrating an enthusiasm which he had never let loose in Olympia's radius. It was a process which the luscious blonde openly revelled in.

'Who...wh-what?' Olympia stammered in sick disbelief.

'Ramona. She's an ex-girlfriend, an Italian model...let's get out of here before they see us,' Katerina urged, snatch­ing up Nik's car keys and thrusting them into Olympia's nerveless hands. 'We can talk outside about what to do. You can't make a scene in here!'

Hustled away at speed, Olympia was too distraught to protest. But a few feet from the exit Katerina stopped dead. 'Tell me, did you enjoy seeing Nik having a good time for a change?'

Olympia met her friend's glinting dark eyes and blinked, convinced she must have misheard her. 'Sorry?'

'Do you want to know what Nik really thinks of you?' Katerina enquired sweetly. 'I can tell you because he told me. He thinks you're fat and stupid and sexless, but worth your weight in gold!'

Olympia's stomach twisted. In deep shock, she stared back at the Greek girl.

'Your grandfather and Nik's father arranged your mar­riage before you even arrived in Athens. Everybody knows that.' Katerina gave her a contemptuous smile. 'Without your future inheritance you're nothing! If Nik needs to con­sole himself with more attractive women, who can blame him?'

Stricken by such malice from the friend she trusted, Olympia whirled away and fled out to the car park. Taking refuge in Nik's Ferrari, as she had been primed to do, she burst into tears. Katerina's words stabbed her to the heart while her memory replayed the agonising image of Nik in an explicit clinch with a female ten times more beautiful than she herself could ever hope to be.

Katerina's spiteful assurances might have been discarded had they not fitted like a horrible blueprint to the flaws Olympia had been afraid to confront in her relationship with Nik. His seemingly instant attraction to her, the speed of their engagement, his sexual restraint which could easily be explained by her own lack of sex appeal. Nik had not only never loved her but had also discussed her and laughed about her with his cousin, Katerina. She felt as if she was dying inside herself, destroyed by her own blind, trusting stupidity. She must have been sitting there a good twenty minutes before the driver's door opened without warning. She froze, assuming it was Nik, but it was Lukas who climbed in beside her. 'Didn't want to do this, but here I am anyway,' he groaned, every word slurred by the amount of alcohol he had evidently consumed. 'You're standing on every­body's toes, Olympia. Why did you ever come to Greece?'

'Mind your own business—'

Lukas vented a humourless laugh. 'But it is...don't you see? My father says our company will be put out of busi­ness if your grandfather and Nik's father merge their em­pires. We won't be able to compete any more. Together, they'll be too powerful.'

'It's not likely to happen now!’ Olympia whispered trem­ulously.

In silence, Lukas let his head loll back against the seat.

And then Katerina reappeared, and approached the car with a triumphant smile on her lips. 'All present and cor­rect, I see. Guess what I plan to tell Nik now...'

'Go away...both of you!' Olympia urged brokenly.

'I'm not finished yet. But you and Nik are...I can prom­ise you that. Just in case you were thinking of forgiving him for snogging the face off the blonde, I'm about to go I back inside and tell him that I've just caught you and Lukas having a high old time of it here in his car!'

'Sorry,' Lukas framed thickly. 'Filthy set-up, but you didn't leave us much choice.'

'Why would you tell a mad story like that?' Olympia stared at the other girl in total disbelief and got out of the Ferrari to look her straight in the face.

'You're so dumb, Olympia.

' Katerina dropped her voice to a level that Lukas could not hear. 'Nik and I were getting really close until you muscled in and pushed me out. Who do you think he'll turn to when you're gone?'

It was the last straw for Olympia. No longer in the mood to confront Nik, feeling as gutted as she did, she was des­perate just to get away from all of them—Nik and Lukas and Katerina—each of whom had betrayed her. Leaving Katerina and Lukas in possession of Nik's Ferrari, she took off across the car park. Unable to face returning to her grandfather's villa, she ended up walking into a park and spending what remained of the night on a bench.

And when she finally arrived home, at seven the next morning, Nik and her grandfather were waiting for her to­gether. All emotion drained from her by then, she clung to the defensive shell supplied by her battered pride and her seething bitterness. Indeed, that day she genuinely didn't care about Katerina's lies or what she herself stood con­demned for doing with Lukas if it enraged Nik and out­raged Spyros and got her back home to her mother and London more quickly.

Olympia emerged from her recollection of that ghastly evening of revelation to find that she had had two glasses of champagne and that all of a sudden she wasn't feeling very well. Idiot to drink on an empty stomach! she casti­gated herself. Why was it that when Nik came into her life she went haywire and made a total hash of everything?

Normally she was quiet, sensible and reasonably mature. She didn't fight with people. She didn't make waves. In the grip of emotional turmoil, Olympia's mind flailed about in a half a dozen different directions. Things from the past didn't fit together as neatly any more, she acknowledged, while wondering why the bed appeared to be lurching be­neath her. Was it the effect of the champagne? Standing up, she watched the carpet ripple with incredulous eyes and plotted a swerving path into the marble bathroom.

As she ran a bath for herself and got in, she struggled to concentrate on the shattering confession which Nik had made. His staggering claim that she, the plain Jane that she was, had given him sleepless nights of sexual frustration ten years back. That did not make sense—not when she looked back on their excruciatingly proper engagement, during which Nik had behaved as if she'd had a repelling force field surrounding her.