Bond of Hatred

She fed Nicky while Nanny glowered disapproval from the other end of the spacious cabin.

‘Are you trying to impress me at this late date?’ Alex enquired with crushing contempt.

Sarah blinked. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘All this

mock-maternal attention for Nikos?’ he derided. ‘Why do you think I engaged a nanny?’

‘There is nothing mock about my feelings for my nephew,’ Sarah countered with a disdain and a temper only controlled by the presence of the baby in her arms. She had no intention of fighting with Alex when Nicky was within hearing distance. A baby could be upset by raised, sharp voices and tension. ‘And I would sooner not comment on your acquisition of a nanny...although I could say that I’m not too impressed by what I’ve seen so far.’

‘She comes with the highest references.’

Sarah’s sultry mouth tautened. ‘I don’t want to be prematurely critical or unfair, but you did about as well as I would have expected, interfering in something about which you know nothing...something I imagine you do with monotonous regularity,’ she could not resist stabbing, ‘because you are one of those men who always think they know everything—’

His lower lip had briefly parted company with the upper. A splintering tension screamed from his stillness. He could not believe what he was hearing. A home truth or two and he was ready to explode. Certainly not a product of an upbringing by any Nanny Brown, she thought with sudden helpless amusement. This was a male so absolutely unaccustomed to even the smallest censure that his first response was anger and outrage. Probably spoilt rotten as a child. Born rich, clever, very good-looking. Ambitious, successful, workaholic and domineering, doubtless encouraged by an adoring family and grovelling employees and fawning, stupid women to believe himself the very zenith of perfection in every field. Medallion man with brains, no less.

‘Are you a lesbian?’

After a staggered pause, a rosy flush swept up the pale skin of her throat. Sarah stared back at him incredulously. And then abruptly, surprising herself, she laughed out loud. That ego of his... He just could not accept that she should be unimpressed and unattracted by him.

‘I thought not.’ Far from being ill at ease, Alex trained his night-dark gaze upon her with glittering intensity, a faint but definable smile of grim amusement curving his handsome mouth. ‘Then ask yourself why you feel such a powerful compulsion to try and put me down.’

Sarah opened her jewel-like eyes very wide with pretended naïveté. ‘Do I really? And you mean you actually noticed?’ she gasped.

In a silence of the utmost self-assurance, Alex surveyed her with the lazy indolence of a jungle predator, and, since she found that impregnable cool disturbing, she went on, ‘You see, I don’t like you, Alex—’

‘Liking isn’t required...but I will have respect.’

There was a sizzle in the atmosphere. Sarah revelled in it. ‘It’s good for a man to have a goal to work towards...even when the goal will remain eternally out of reach.’

‘You tread where even my most powerful enemies dare not tread.’

The assurance hung there and provoked an insidious chill down her rigid backbone. Under the drugging onslaught of icy dark eyes, she denied that weakness within her. ‘I am not afraid of you.’

Alex’s lushly framed gaze dropped to the slender hand unwittingly gripping the arm of her seat. ‘Your body language says otherwise. If I banished Nanny and the stewardess, you’d be out of here like a hare with the hounds on its trail.’

Paling, she breathed, ‘What an intriguing image that would be and it tells me so much about you. If you can’t reduce a woman to grovelling admiration, you’d settle for fear...in fact, you’d settle for just about anything sooner than deal with a woman on any other level—’

‘A woman like you...yes,’ Alex intoned with a low, vicious bite that slashed through her taught nerve-endings like a machete. ‘This is not how I foresaw my wedding-day.’

Sarah stiffened, an idea that had never before occurred to her occurring to her now. ‘How had you foreseen it?’

‘That I would share it with a bride worthy of my name.’

‘And you said you weren’t a snob...’

‘It is not your background which disturbs me but your lack of morality.’

‘My lack of morality?’

‘The woman whom I would have married has the very highest principles.’

And there it was, what she had never thought of, never dreamt of, never even considered for the smallest moment. ‘Are you saying that you were engaged to someone?’ she whispered tremulously, completely appalled by the idea.

‘I was contemplating matrimony.’

‘Did you love her?’ Sarah was trembling, plunged into genuine distress.