Bond of Hatred

‘I didn’t know how to make the best of myself with clothes and that sort of stuff. Frankly, I never had the time or the interest before,’ she muttered defensively. ‘Or the money to do it.’

‘You spent a pittance.’

He couldn’t be serious. She had spent a fortune on her own terms. Admittedly, her new wardrobe didn’t include any designer labels but it did include classic separates and suits that would not date and a rainbow collecti

on of shoes, handbags and lingerie. And the consultant, whose advice had been indispensable, had cost an arm and a leg!

‘An absolute pittance,’ Alex repeated, continuing to scan her elegance with narrowed eyes.

He really meant it, she registered. Virtue one. Alex Terzakis was not stingy.

‘And I am flattered that you were moved to such effort upon my behalf.’

‘Your behalf?’ Sarah echoed blankly. Dear heaven, for flattered read smug and amused...the conceited swine! she thought. ‘I did this for Nicky. Why on earth would I do it for you?’

‘Nicky?’ he repeated very drily.

‘I don’t want to embarrass him—’

‘He’s six weeks old!’ Alex suddenly raked at her incredulously.

‘I don’t ever want to be a mother that he will be ashamed of,’ Sarah responded shortly.

‘And what about gracing me with a wife that I don’t have to be ashamed of?’

Sarah regarded him with blatant astonishment, without even trying making it painfully obvious that such an ambition would never have occurred to her in a million years.

A dark flush had highlighted Alex’s savagely high cheekbones. He was outraged, she realised. Dear heaven, were all male egos this fragile? This was a marriage of convenience and he loathed her not one whit less than she loathed him. Why would she want to make herself more attractive for his benefit?

‘I wish you would stop staring at me,’ she muttered tightly, accusingly.

‘What did you expect?’ he drawled flatly. ‘You have altered yourself out of all recognition...apart from the hair...’

His accented voice had dropped in pitch and disturbingly roughened. Involuntarily, Sarah felt her every muscle tighten. Like a mesmerised statue, she watched a lean brown hand reach out across the great divide that separated them and flick one long shining silver strand and then linger.

Her heart in her mouth, her shocked eyes helplessly glued to smouldering gold ones, Sarah jerked back like a bristling cat cornered by a pit bull terrier, plastering her slender body against the door behind her.

‘Stop that,’ Alex intoned in a growl of terrifying threat, a ferocious anger simmering in his intent gaze and hardened face.

‘Stop wh-what?’ Sarah stared down with horrified eyes at the beautifully shaped brown fingers winding, for some peculiar reason, into a whole hank of her tumbling mane of hair. He was imprisoning her. She absolutely couldn’t breathe and she was trembling, her body seeming to have found a movement of its own in response to the terrible tension that had come out of nowhere.

She didn’t know what he was doing! Was he a violent man? Was he planning to hit her or something? In a frantic attempt to distract him, she gasped, ‘I don’t want Nicky to have a nanny.’

Lush ebony lashes swept up. For a long and timeless instant, brilliant golden eyes probed hers in stark, incredulous frustration. ‘A nanny?’ he almost whispered, as though she had spoken in some strange foreign language.

Her taut mouth wobbled. ‘I’ll look after him.’

‘You will be far too busy looking after me,’ Alex countered in a black velvet purr.

‘You have servants to do that.’

‘No, I have a wife now to do that.’ Alex had shifted right across the back seat and she really was cornered now. His other hand came up and pushed up her chin, forcing the eye contact that she sought to avoid in her confusion.

Throwing him a look of infuriated bemusement, Sarah brought up both hands and planted them on his broad chest to hold him at bay. Suddenly he laughed with a raw spontaneity that shook her.

‘Get your hands off me...now!’ Sarah demanded imperiously, maddened by his inexplicable behaviour.

‘Make me,’ Alex Terzakis invited with devastating effect.