The Unfaithful Wife

She remembered being sponged down repeatedly and being so weak that even speaking was beyond her. And she remembered Nik, silhouetted against the lamplit darkness of an unfamiliar room, Nik, hunched in a seat, oddly grey-looking in the dawn light. There had been other people too but it felt like too much effort to remember them.

Her eyes opened. A maid was drawing curtains back on a spectacular wall of glass through which Leah could see a slice of cloudless, densely blue sky. Then the sunlight blinded her and she turned her head away, gratefully recognising that her throat didn’t hurt, her head didn’t ache and her muscles no longer protested against every movement. The door closed. A sudden pressing need for the bathroom assailed her.

She attempted to sit up. Her body was disobedient. With a moan of impatience she rolled her legs off the edge of the divan and slid down in an ungraceful heap on to the mercifully thick, deep pile of the carpet. It was a vast room. Lamplight had confusingly shrunk its contours.

Using the bed as a brace, she pushed herself upright and swayed like a drunk, registering that she was not quite as recovered as she had fondly imagined. But obstinacy got her to the en suite.

An accidental meeting with her own reflection in a mirror horrified her. Who was that white scarecrow with the lank hank of hair? Fighting her own weakness, she knelt beside the bath to turn on the taps. At least if she was clean she would feel better.

‘Cristo! What the hell do you think you are doing?’

Leah flinched and clutched the side of the bath. Nik towered over her, intimidatingly tall and dark. He looked tremendously elegant in a fabulously well-cut cream suit which merely accentuated his exotic colouring.

‘Are you crazy?’ he thundered, not content with having frightened her half out of her wits. ‘You should be in bed!’

‘I want a bath.’ Leah rested her cheek dully down on the cold ceramic edge, weak as a kitten. And then it came to her... Like a slow-motion replay from some distant dream, she saw him with Eleni Kiriakos again. Her heart seemed to stop beating. A chill like an icy winter wind enclosed her shrinking flesh.

‘A bath when you can’t even stand up?’ Nik derided as he bent down to lift her.

Leah burst into floods of tears, disconcerting him as much as herself. But she had had no warning, no chance to stem those tears. They simply gushed forth as though someone had thrown an overload switch and forced their release. And the effect on Nik was little short of staggering.

With a stifled imprecation in Greek, he scooped her up and cradled her while he apologised profusely for upsetting her and assured her that of course she could have a bath if she wanted one that badly. It was just that she had been so ill, he stressed, and he was naturally afraid that she would over-exert herself and suffer a relapse. It was Nik metaphorically on his knees, Nik as she had never known him.

Ten minutes later, Leah slid into her bath, and had not the image of the beautiful doctor still been lingering she might almost have been touched by the amount of concern Nik was displaying. As it was, she simply didn’t understand and was still too weak to devote her low energy resources to the vexing question of why Nik should have gone to such lengths to force her to come to Greece to put a front on a marriage that had never been anything other than a charade for both of them.

Washing her hair exhausted her. When she emerged from the bathroom, she made no objection to being carried back to bed by Nik, although she was amazed that he had waited with such patience for her.

‘I can hear the sea,’ she murmured, finally identifying that rushing sound as waves surging up on to a shore.

‘Do you remember anything of the trip here?’ Unreadable dark eyes rested on her.

‘Nothing,’ she sighed.

‘We’re not in Athens. When you were ill, there was little point in taking you to my mother’s home. So I brought you here instead.’

‘And where is here?’

‘Thrathos, a small island which my father purchased shortly before his death. The perfect place for you to recuperate,’ Nik said smoothly.

‘An island?’ Leah raised an uncertain hand to her damp brow, her physical weakness slowing up her ability to think, but the one thought that did cross her dazed mind was that she knew precious little about her husband of five years.

A smiling, dark-eyed maid provided an interruption by arriving with a breakfast tray. Leah’s empty stomach gave a tiny leap as she registered just how hungry she was. ‘How long have I been here?’ she asked.

‘Two days—’

‘Two?’

A flying knock sounded on the door and a teenager in cerise cycle shorts and a cropped top, her long hair a mass of glossy black ringlets, erupted into the room with a wide grin. ‘Great, you’re feeling better...’

‘Leah, this is my niece, Apollonia—’

‘Everyone calls me Ponia,’ the tiny brunette broke in cheerfully. ‘I came to meet you at the airport but you won’t remember me. You were practically unconscious.’

‘I remember your voice.’ Leah smiled. Ponia’s friendliness was infectious. Yet once again she suffered that feeling of almost embarrassing ignorance. Nik’s niece. He could have a dozen for all she knew.

‘Leah has to rest, not be talked into a relapse,’ Nik warned.

Ponia reddened, obviously sensitive to any reference to her chatterbox tendencies.

‘But I’d love to have some company.’ Leah shot Nik’s hard profile a speaking glance of reproach.

‘Terrif!’ Ponia plonked herself down casually on the foot of the bed. ‘You know, I thought you’d be older—but then maybe you’re older than you look! What age are you?’

‘Ponia...’ Nik breathed.

‘Twenty-two—’

‘You got married at seventeen?’ Ponia swivelled her eyes, whose expression was a combination of shock and fascination, across to her uncle. ‘And you agreed with my parents that you think that is far too young for me to be seriously dating?’ she demanded.

Registering the gathering storm in Nik’s discomfited features and holding back her own sudden desire to laugh, Leah found herself surging to the ebullient teenager’s rescue. ‘You speak marvellous English, Ponia.’

‘I go to school in England. I wish I’d known what age you were,’ she complained afresh. ‘I would have visited and got to know you years ago...in spite of what everybody else said!’

Nik released his breath in a sudden hiss and addressed his niece in Greek. Ponia stiffened, a mutinous expression tightening her pretty face as she bent her head. What had the Andreakis family said about Nik’s wife whom they had never met? Leah could not help being curious.

‘Don’t let her tire you out,’ Nik sighed, heading for the door.

‘Men are really thick sometimes,’ Ponia muttered and then threw a comically dismayed look at Leah.

‘Aren’t they just!’ Leah laughed, belatedly realising how very depressed she had been feeling before Ponia’s arrival. It was the flu which had done that to her, she told herself.

‘I had to twist his arm to get to come here with you,’ Ponia confided. ‘Nik always feels sorry for me because I have such a drag of a time when I’m home between terms.’

‘I suppose all your friends are in England,’ Leah said.

‘Oh, it’s not that, it’s the family being so old.’ Ponia grimaced. ‘They’re all living in the last century!’

‘Your parents?’ Leah was trying not to smile.

‘Well, they’re the youngest, I guess,’ the teenager conceded grudgingly. ‘Only early fifties—’

‘The youngest? Nik’s only thirty...your mother, his sister, is that much older?’

‘And her two sisters are older again. My grandmother is well into her seventies.’