The Unfaithful Wife

Wrapping herself awkwardly in the sheet under Nik’s grimly amused gaze, Leah was conscious of her swimming head and for the first time acknowledged that she really wasn’t feeling well at all.

She went into the bathroom. This was her penance, that was what it was. Her punishment for stupidity. The knowledge that she had helplessly connived in her own downfall was a bitter pill to swallow. But Leah made herself swallow it, trailing out every thought, every feeling with masochistic candour.

She had believed she was in love with Paul. Had Paul been her escape route from her marriage? Deep down had she needed the belief that someone loved her to work up the courage to leave Nik? The idea that she was loved had given her strength, had restored her faith in herself. But yesterday she had been forced to face reality.

Paul hadn’t loved her...but had she loved him? For a while he had made her feel good about herself. But yesterday she had seen through his superficial charm so clearly that she had marvelled that she had ever been taken in. Yes, it had been very painful, having to accept that he had viewed her as a purely profitable enterprise. But did she still long for him? No, there had been a terrible finality to the sense of alienation she had felt. She never wanted to see Paul again. So had she ever loved him? Or had it been an infatuation born of her loneliness?

Lord, the bathroom was hot. Leah sank down dizzily on the side of the bath in the midst of trying to dress herself. She felt as weak as a kitten and light-headed. It was becoming an immense challenge to concentrate but still she forced herself to the task.

Last night had been a ghastly mistake. Did she now hang her head in shame and let Nik browbeat her into staying with him even though she felt that that was the very worst thing she could do? She lifted an unsteady hand to her pounding temples and knew she had to make herself strong, knew she had to stand up for herself.

Emerging from the bathroom, she leant back against the door-frame for support. Nik surveyed her with narrowed eyes. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I think I’ve got the flu...but that’s not important.’ Breathing in to sustain herself, she stared sickly back at him. ‘I’m staying here...not coming back to you—’

‘You’re not feeling well. You don’t know what you’re saying,’ Nik cut in. ‘I’ll take you down to the car.’

‘No!’ she gasped, tears of frustration and weakness gathering in her eyes as her wobbling lower limbs threatened to collapse under her. ‘Don’t you ever listen? You’re wrong for me!’

Nik swept her up in his arms in spite of her feeble attempt to evade him.

‘Please!’ Her failure to get through to him or persuade him to put her down again drove her crazy. ‘I don’t want to go with you. I want to stay here.’

‘Theos...you’re expecting him, aren’t you?’ he raked down at her with barely restrained anger. ‘If you weren’t sick I’d shake you!’

Her cases were already gone, she saw in horror as Nik thrust open the door of her room, holding her steady with one powerful arm.

‘Let me go!’ Her swimming head fell back against his shoulder as he strode down the corridor.

‘If I let you go you’ll fall in a heap at my feet.’ He muttered something guttural in Greek, his set, dark features as unyielding as stone as he hit the call button for the lift again with positive violence.

‘I want a divorce...I’m not going to Greece!’ she gasped strickenly.

‘You should have thought of that last night.’ He stepped into the lift.

‘It was a mistake!’ she protested, unable even to lift her pounding head. ‘Put me down...’

‘You don’t know what you’re doing or saying,’ Nik contended with tenacious determination, refusing even to meet her distressed gaze.

‘I know...’ She would have screamed the assurance had she had the strength. As it was, the amount of energy she had expended on frantic argument and the stress of her own emotional conflict had absolutely drained her. Nick’s strong, dark features blurred as her weighted eyelids lowered. ‘I hate you,’ she mumbled hoarsely.

She drifted in and out of awareness from that point, too utterly wretched to consider anything but her own physical misery. Nik carried her on to the jet, wrapped in a blanket, and a while later she surfaced to hear a vaguely familiar voice sigh, ‘The poor thing. I feel so sorry for her,’ with a kind of oozing insincerity that grated on her hearing.

She recognised the stewardess, sultry wine-tinted mouth to the fore as she passed Nik a glass. As Nik lifted Leah and tilted the contents of the glass to her mouth, she said, ‘She hopes it’s fatal.’

‘Drink; it’ll make you feel better,’ Nik urged.

Nothing would. Bitterness enveloped Leah. Nik had taken cruel advantage of her illness. Was nothing sacrosanct? As another shiver racked her aching body and she drank the noxious liquid because she knew that argument was futile, she looked up at him with condemning sapphire eyes. An act which ran little short of kidnapping was inexcusable.

‘I couldn’t leave you alone in a hotel in this condition,’ Nik murmured as if she had spoken out loud.

‘I’ll never forgive you,’ Leah mumbled. ‘I hope you catch it!’

Unexpectedly he laughed, the arm cradled round her shoulders curving her close in a blatant challenging of contagion which didn’t surprise her. Nik was never ill. The very idea amused him. He had a godlike faith in his own robust health.

Her impressions became increasingly more fleeting from that point on. She lost her sense of time, her ability to distinguish between waking and sleeping. Had she been sleeping? she wondered when her eyes took in the crowds milling around them. A fleeting exchange of Greek told her that they must have landed. It was the airport, she decided bitterly, and shut her eyes again, engulfed by a drowning sense of failure.

A sharp exchange of voices dragged her back to awareness. She was laid down on something, the blanket removed, a thermometer thrust into her dry mouth. Her heavy eyelids lifted on a white ceiling. Not an airport, a hospital, she decided. She could hear Nik talking. He sounded angry, upset, and the other voice, which had been equally angry, was suddenly soft, soothing...a richly expressive, very female voice. With an enormous effort, Leah turned her head to one side.

A woman in a white coat stood in the circle of Nik’s arms. With on

e slim hand she was smoothing his black hair, caressing his hard jawline, and even as Leah looked she was reaching up to kiss him. Her lashes dropped again in shock.

The thermometer was removed...soon afterwards, a long time afterwards? She was sliding in and out of awareness. The next time she opened her eyes the woman was giving something to Nik and she saw her properly—the superb oval of her classically beautiful face below her crown of glossy black hair, the creamy skin and the great dark eyes brimming with so much warmth as they rested on Nik. A dry cough jolted through Leah and both heads spun round.

Nik moved first. ‘I thought you were asleep. This is Dr Kiriakos—’

‘Eleni,’ his companion inserted with an air of rather forced informality as she regarded Leah with cool, professional distance. ‘I am afraid that you will feel worse before you feel better, Leah.’

Leah closed her eyes, shutting them out in self-defence. She already felt a hundred times worse. She could feel her crumpled clothes, shiny, perspiring face and limp, damp hair. Her very bones were hurting. She wanted to cry but she didn’t have the energy. Dear God, he brought me to his mistress for treatment; only Nik could be that cruel. Never in her life had Leah felt more savaged.

‘I was really scared,’ Nik muttered roughly as he carried her somewhere. ‘You looked so ill. I thought it might be pneumonia or something. And I didn’t know what to do and I panicked.’

Panicked? Nik? It was an unlikely image in Leah’s disorientated mind. Then he was talking to someone in Greek, yet another female, this one younger, warmer, less controlled. Leah was dimly aware of what sounded like a pretty heated argument and then she drifted off again, too wretched to care what was happening to her or around her.

* * *

There was a rushing sound somewhere in the background. Leah’s memory banks produced a jumbled mass of images and feelings. She had had a fever. She had gone from perspiring, shivering misery into the heat of what had felt like hell, with a whirling Catherine wheel of pain behind her temples. Day and night had merged indistinguishably.