The Unfaithful Wife

‘It’s not impossible.’ Leah was becoming uncomfortable although she could understand Ponia’s curiosity. Her request for an explanation of what she had overheard at eleven had obviously been greeted with maternal dismay and distress and a brick wall of silence. She was a lively, intelligent girl, still clearly troubled by the response she had received.

Ponia shrugged. ‘The secrecy must have made it much harder for Nik.’

‘People are much more open about adoption now than they were thirty years ago.’ Leah took a deep breath. ‘But we shouldn’t be talking about this, Ponia. It’s too private and, before you ask me, no, I don’t know anything more than you do.’

Ponia went a fierce red and bent her head. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know why I brought it up—’

‘Because I’m family...and yet not family,’ Leah supplied gently. ‘But I think you have to accept that Nik has a right to privacy about something that personal and I may be wrong but I doubt that it would be a good idea to raise the subject with him.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’ Ponia was aghast at the idea.

Leah smoothly changed the subject and hoped she had firmly dissuaded the younger girl from further indiscreet probing. But long after Ponia had said goodnight Leah was bothered by what she had been told. In some ways she knew nothing about Nik and that hurt; no matter how unreasonable that was, it hurt. She wandered into the drawing-room where she had noticed the magnificent grand piano earlier in the day and sat down on the stool.

So Nik was an adopted Andreakis. And it was foolish to feel hurt that he had never even made a fleeting mention of the fact. After all, it was blatantly obvious that his family had gone to some lengths to conceal the adoption. His parents had had three daughters and must have badly wanted a son. And in a veil of secrecy they had adopted a baby boy. Over the years Leah had read several profiles on Nik in the newspapers and not one of them had referred to that. Ponia was right. Nobody outside the family circle knew.

What age had Nik been before he learnt the truth? Had his parents been more honest in private than they had been in public? If they hadn’t been, it must have been one hell of a shock, she reflected, her fingers moving nimbly over the gleaming keyboard, the rich virtuosity of a Chopin concerto flooding the room with the music she often employed to accompany her deepest thoughts.

She hoped Ponia had the sense to be discreet. Some secrets you just had to live with. Maybe Nik didn’t want anybody to know either. Or maybe he simply didn’t give a damn, considered it scarcely relevant to his adult life. He was very attached to the family she had yet to meet. He was capable of very strong emotions. Why had she never seen that before? A male capable of marrying a woman he didn’t love merely to protect his family was a male capable of putting other people’s needs ahead of his own. Although it was a little hard to appreciate his sacrifice when she had been part of the burnt offering.

Dear God, she thought, with a surge of sudden pain, how could she exist in a marriage where nothing was given or shared but a bed? It was too late for her to accept that. Maybe years ago, when she hadn’t known any better, hadn’t known Nik for the man that he was, she would have happily settled for what he was prepared to give her. But not now, when every sense craved more.

But she had no choice, and even if she did have a choice, did she really have the strength to walk away from him? Was half a loaf better than no bread? She lifted her hands from the keyboard in sudden bitter distress.

‘Don’t stop...’

Her spine rigid, Leah slowly swivelled round on the stool. Nik was standing in the shadows by the window. A shimmering tension emanated from the tautness of his stance; his black eyes glittered in his dark face. His hair was tousled, his shirt half unbuttoned, his jawline blue-shadowed.

‘Play for me,’ he said roughly, and it was not a request.

Leah spun back round to the piano. Her sapphire eyes flared. She lifted her slim hands and played ‘Chopsticks’, every deliberately discordant note expressing her mood of defiance.

A set of hard fingers closed round her narrow wrists and jerked them up. Sudden silence spread through the room, broken only by her own fractured breathing. She could feel the warmth of his powerful body, raw with tension, mere inches from her as he bent over her. A shiver ran through her.

‘Why?’ he grated, releasing her wrists.

‘I’m not your slave,’ she muttered shakily, but that wasn’t why. She remembered playing for him years ago, remembered that first night; she had never played for him since. Music had always been her mode of self-expression. It had become far too personal to share with Nik.

‘Play,’ he said again.

Her hands were trembling. The atmosphere was dangerously charged with every forceful element of Nik’s volatile temperament.

‘I have no music.’

‘You can play for hours without music,’ he reminded her harshly.

Enervated by his louring presence, she began to play, snatches of this, pieces of that, but her usually nimble fingers were reluctant to do her bidding smoothly and several jarring notes disturbed the performance. After the fourth mistake her fingers slid from the keyboard.

‘You’re very stubborn. I should have realised that,’ Nik breathed. ‘You may look as fragile as spun glass but you’re not.’

But right now Leah felt very fragile. Every nerve-ending was singing with the high-wire tension in the room. Slowly she stood up, reluctant to look anywhere near him.

‘So tell me about him,’ he invited dangerously quietly.

Her head spun round, silver hair flying back from her delicate cheekbones. He had cut off her intended exit route. ‘I don’t know what—’

‘Your lover...’ Eyes dark as an abyss rested on her expectantly.

A frisson of alarm snaked through her. ‘You can’t possibly want to hear about Paul.’

‘Can’t I?’ Nik challenged, treating her to a lethal smile that was pure unalloyed threat. ‘Where did you meet him?’

‘Harrods.’

‘Harrods?’

‘He knocked me over and insisted on buying me a coffee,’ she stated curtly.

‘You let yourself be picked up in Harrods?’ Nik murmured incredulously.

‘He did not pick me up!’

‘In Harrods,’ Nik said again as if he couldn’t believe it. ‘And where did it go from there?’

‘It didn’t go anywhere from there,’ Leah returned with spirit. ‘I ran into him again the next week—’

‘Let me guess...same day, same time, same place—’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘You were hoping to meet him again.’

Leah said nothing. She walked across to the window and stared out at the blackness studded by stars above the shimmering sea. Nik had no right to ask her such questions; no right, she told herself fiercely.

‘So this electrifying affair began in Harrods,’ Nik drawled. ‘Where in Harrods?’

Something snapped inside Leah. ‘What the heck does it matter where?’

He lowered himself down on to a sofa and stretched out his long, lean legs in an attitude of goading relaxation. ‘I’m trying to get a picture. Was it in Ladies’ Lingerie or the food hall?’

‘I refuse to dignify that with an answer.’

‘Much better to leave it to my imagination,’ Nik agreed silkily. ‘So tell me how he worked his way on to my territory.’

Leah’s teeth clenched. ‘Very easily.’

‘Temper, temper,’ Nik purred. ‘I wasn’t there. That’s the only reason he found it easy.’

And she knew then that she would not admit that her relationship with Paul was over, her much vaunted love nothing more than an infatuation. Nik’s arrogance inflamed her to the brink of spitting and clawing like an enraged cat. Paul was her one defence and she needed that defence. God forbid that Nik should guess that something more than sexual need had fired her in his arms. Life would absolutely not be worth living if he realised that she was in love with

him.

She recalled his slashing contempt in the car that day in Paris when he had believed that she still loved him and inwardly she shrank from the threat of ever giving him that weapon.