The Cozakis Bride

Hands were clapping in time to the music. Olympia glanced up just as Nik was urged from his seat by their host. He shrugged out of his jacket, discarded his tie and loosened his collar before striding across the floor to join the other men.

Olympia watched the men begin to dance, the music ini­tially sombre, the tempo slow. Nik knew every step, every turn. He was as at home dancing shoulder to shoulder with fishermen in a taverna as he was talking business on board his fabulous yacht. A rare quality which inspired respect, but she was equally conscious of the appreciative female eyes fixed to him. Nik, with his vibrant dark looks and magnetism, the potent and inescapable sexuality of that lean, muscular body accentuated by the lithe, rhythmic grace with which he moved. And it was at that point, just as the music began almost imperceptibly to quicken, that the pain inside Olympia began to break through to the surface.

She did not believe that Nik loved Gisele Bonner. She did not even believe that Nik needed Gisele Bonner. But Nik had betrayed her all the same. Nik did not respect either his wife or his marriage. You have no right to resent anything. No, no respect there. What a fool she had been to think otherwise! She could have wept at her own eagerness to believe that something true and real might be made of a marriage which had only ever been a business deal! Nik had the Manoulis empire. Nik had a wife he believed he could treat like the dirt beneath his feet when it suited him.

He hadn't even thought to warn her about that tabloid newspaper article which Samantha had referred to with such naive dismissal. How could she love someone who treated her as if she was nothing'! How, knowing what he had done, could she have lain under him sobbing with pleasure? Her temples pounded as the music speeded up.

It was as if an explosion was taking place inside her. Sud­denly she was being bombarded by all the images that she had shut out in self-protection. Nik pawing that skinny blonde tart in some South of France love-nest. That skinny blonde tart pawing Nik with the sort of expertise he was used to and which his wife didn't have. She felt sick to the stom­ach, wrenched by such violent bitter jealousy she shuddered.

The music reached a soaring crescendo and came to a sud­den halt. In the outbreak of vociferous applause Olympia stood up and turned away from the table.

'Kyria Cozakis?' It was Damianos, clutching a mobile phone in one hand, who intercepted her on her passage to the cloakroom. 'Nik's luggage to go out to Aurora?' he que­ried uncertainly. 'The villa staff to go off duty in the middle of the evening? Have I got this right or has there been a mistake?'

All colour receded from Olympia's face. 'You've got it right.'

'But Nik has no plans—'

'I have other plans, Damianos.'

The older man gazed down at her, thunderstruck by the only possible construction he could put on that assurance.

'I suppose you're going to go and warn him now.'

'Not in a public place, kyria. Forgive me...' Damianos gathered steam, his appraisal of her set features betraying honest if incredulous concern. 'But can you have thought of what you are doing?'

Olympia nodded jerkily.

'He will go mad...'

Olympia breathed in deep and nodded. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Damianos walk away, shoulders and back still rigid with incredulity. He had been looking after Nik for twenty years and there was a strong paternal streak in the older man's make-up, but it had been foolish of her to worry that Damianos would interfere. He would play dumb sooner than add insult to mortal injury by revealing prior knowledge of Olympia's plans.

Markos and Samantha had already risen from the table. Working his way through the crowd, a rueful smile curving his lips, Nik reached for Olympia with a confident arm and pulled her close. 'I've been neglecting you,' he said with perfect truth, dropping a careless kiss down on the crown of her head.

A salutation of approval, she recognised with a squirming sensation that took her aback. She had not committed the heresy of trying to break in on the male bonding session. She hadn't pouted and sighed like Samantha had either. Nik was relieved and pleased. Nik, she registered as she climbed into the back of the Landcruiser with Samantha, had not a clue of what was coming his way.

Twenty minutes later, their guests seen off on their flight home, Olympia walked hurriedly back into the villa, her hand already digging into her handbag for the photos and the newspaper cutting. Nik was only a step in her wake...

CHAPTER NINE

After an instant of hesitation, Nik slung his jacket on a chair in the hall, ebony brows rising at the absence of the usual phalanx of servants who greeted his every arrival and departure. 'Where is everybody? This place feels like the Marie Celeste.'

Olympia snatched in a deep breath. 'I gave the staff the rest of the night off.'

Nik frowned. 'I hope you can cook...I'm hungry.'

Olympia's grip on the photos was threatening to crumple them. 'Nik—'

'Why don't you rustle-up something in the food depart­ment?' Nik qualified with a shift of a vague but expectant hand. ‘I could do with a shower.'

Olympia absorbed that expressive gesture. He had the body language of a male who had never needed to enter a kitchen in his entire life and who had not the slightest con­ception as to what went on there. Why that should strike her as endearingly naive rather than fantastically spoilt escaped her. Why, indeed, it should make her eyes sting with tears was even more of a challenge to work out. Unless it was his descent to the prosaic when she herself was wired to the skies with an impending sense of doom and drama.

One lean hand already resting on the balustrade of the staircase, Nik glanced back at Olympia, where she stood still and graven as a status. 'Olympia?'

‘There's no point in you going upstairs!' Olympia exclaimed abruptly. 'I've had all your clothes packed up and sent out to Aurora!'

'Have you gone crazy?' Nik enquired slowly, his bemusement patent.'

No, I haven't gone crazy,' Olympia said tautly. 'I got these this morning...'

Nik studied her outstretched hand with puzzled brows.

'And if you still think that my reserved manner was sufficient to embarrass you in front of your friends, you should be feeling like a very lucky guy right now,' Olympia informed him tremulously.

Nik gave her a withering look and still made no attempt to move forward and investigate what she was holding in her hand. In fact he was making a decided point of not even looking in that direction. 'But I sense I'm not going to be a lucky guy as we speak,' he derided with lashings of cutting cool, I also see that you were being less than honest earlier when you refused to admit that there was something wrong. But I still intend to have a shower, Olympia.'

'A shower?' Olympia echoed in a strangled undertone.

'And that gives you fifteen minutes max to get my clothes back off Aurora, because I want to change,' Nik extended gently. 'Or there's going to be a hell of a row.'

In sheer disbelief, Olympia watched Nik mount the stairs. Then frustration galvanised her frozen muscles into action and she sped upstairs as well, hurrying past him to reach the landing first.

'I am sure there's a very good reason why you're acting like a child desperate to throw a tantrum in my face—'

'Don't you send me up!' Olympia seethed as rage came to her rescue. She slung the crumpled photos and the news­paper cutting at his feet. 'There! You and your bunny-boiler! Now do you get the picture?'

'Bunny-boiler?' Nik repeated, deigning to glance down in the direction of the photos, only one of which had landed the right way up on the carpet, but not deigning to stoop to pick them up. 'What are you talking about?'

And Olympia hit him. She didn't plan to; she didn't think about it. Consumed by a head-spinning surge of rage, she clenched her fists and struck out wildly at him, connecting with his shoulder and his chest. So unprepared was Nik for that sudden attack that he almost over-balanced, and had to make a frantic grab for the banister to steady himself. Then he strode up on to the landing, snapped strong hands over her wrists a

nd held her back from him, outrage blazing in his eyes.

'Christos! Are you out of your mind?' he launched at her rawly. 'What does who I slept with before our marriage have to do with you?'

Shaking like a leaf in that firm hold, Olympia gritted her teeth, shocked at herself, shocked at the fact that she wasn't getting the reaction she had expected to get. He was acting as if she was nuts and he was innocent. 'You were with her the week after our wedding!'

Without making any response, Nik released her and crouched down to gather up the photos and the cutting, treat­ing only the second photo, which had not appeared in print, to a proper appraisal. He sprang back up again. 'Where the hell did you get these photos from?'

‘The bunny-boiler.'

'The only female acting like a bunny-boiler is you,' Nik delineated with chilling cool. 'Now, take a big, deep calming breath and tell me how you got hold of these photos.'

'You're not going to talk your way out of this, Nik,' Olym­pia swore with quivering vehemence, and she went on to describe the message on the mirror and the magazine article which had been awaiting her in her state room on Aurora on their wedding day.

'And the photos?' Nik prompted, steady as a rock, but the line of his well-shaped mouth was forbidding and hard, his strong bone structure fiercely delineated beneath his bronzed skin, his increasing anger tangible.

'Planted in my handbag.'

Nik crunched the photos in a gesture of pure contemptuous dismissal and let them fall to the carpet again. Swinging on his heel, he strode downstairs with the speed and determi­nation of a man who now had a purpose.

Both white-knuckled hands grasping the landing banister, Olympia watched him snatch his mobile phone from the pocket of his jacket, stab out a number and then start talking in Greek.

'What were you doing on the phone?' she demanded, when he finally slung the mobile aside again.