Penniless and Purchased
‘What’s going in bar work?’
Ten minutes later she walked out on to the street. The dust and fumes of London hit her, worse than ever now, after the respite she’d had in the countryside. But that was the least of her problems. The biggest one was what it always had been—money. Even if she got the job she’d been sent to start that evening the money would be lousy. The basic hourly rate was grim. She ran sums in her head and felt fear bite.
Bleakly she trudged along the pavement. Her muscles still ached from the miles she’d walked yesterday. Down the long drive of the house at five in the morning, then a good two miles along the main road until she’d finally come to a village, found someone up and about at that early hour, and asked where the nearest train station was. It had turned out to be a taxi-ride away—a fare she could scarcely afford, let alone the price of a train ticket back to London. And she’d left her pitiful luggage behind her too. She had bolted with nothing more than her handbag, wearing the same clothes she had the night before because they’d been the only ones she could silently scrabble for as she edged from the bedroom, terrified Nikos would wake. Terrified her nerve would crack and she would be unable to do what she had to do…
But I did it, and that’s all that matters! Nothing else—nothing else…
Despair crowded into her mind. She tried to fight it off, but it settled like a grey, chill miasma over her.
I have to keep going. That’s all I must think about. Keep going.
And above all I must not think about what happened with Nikos! Because if I do…if I do…
Dear God, if she let herself think, remember, feel anything about what had happened, she would collapse, sit down on the kerb and weep, until her body was wrung out and she was simply dust on the street to be blown away into oblivion.
It was an aberration, a dream—that’s all. That’s how I have to think of it. As if I’d dreamt it. Because that’s all it was. A dream. As unreal as if I had imagined it. As impossible as if I had imagined it.
But, try as she did to tell herself that, it seemed her body knew better. Her body was crying out to her that that extraordinary, miraculous night, that gift that had been given to her out of nowhere, had been real.
She could remember with every cell just how exquisite his every caress had been, every touch of his lips, every beautiful, incredible sensation he had aroused in her as he had made love to her slowly, sensuously, tenderly, passionately…
She stumbled on, forcing herself to do so. Finding words in her head that she did not want there—could not allow there. But they came all the same, just as the echoes of his caresses trembled in her limbs, set an aching in her breasts, her heart. Her stricken, broken heart.
How can a heart break twice?
Hadn’t it been agony enough to go through it the first time around, without having to endure it again now? Yet she knew that there was no escape—could be no escape. Nikos had come back into her life, and her heart had broken all over again.
It was that simple, that brutal.
If only he’d never seen me again!
And yet…
How could she wish never to have seen Nikos again? Never to have experienced that miraculous, magical night she had spent with him? It had been a blessing she could never regret! Emotion poured through her. Whatever the reason Nikos had taken her she must be glad—glad with all her heart—that he had! Because this time her abiding memory would not be burning humiliation and coruscating shame, tearing her to pieces, but instead something she could treasure all her life—a precious gift to hoard and protect, not reject with loathing and repulsion and anger.
That’s what I must hold on to! To give me the strength to go on.
For go on she must—there was no alternative. There never had been.
Head bowed, she went on walking the hard pavement.
‘Sir, we’ve got a sighting.’
Instantly Nikos tensed, fingers gripping his mobile. ‘Where?’ he barked.
His security operative gave him the location. Nikos scrawled it on a pad, then cleared the line, before punching through to his chauffeur to order his car to the forecourt and relaying the location for him to key into the car’s satnav. Then, striding from the office, pausing only to instruct his PA to cancel all appointments, he swung out into the corridor of the executive suite of Kazandros Corp’s London headquarters and headed for the lift. His expression was grim.
His mood grimmer.
Finally his quarry had been run to earth. Emotion scythed through him, but he cut it short. For twenty-four hours emotion had rampaged through him, all but stopping him from functioning. Consuming him to the exclusion of everything else. From the moment he had finally realised that Sophie had gone—disappeared—not just from his bed, but from Belledon itself.
It had taken him over an hour of increasingly frantic searching through the near-derelict main house to establish that she was not lying with a broken neck at the foot of collapsing stairs, or fallen through the rotten floorboards. Even longer to realise that, despite having left all her belongings behind, unpacked, she had nevertheless gone—left him.
Why? The question still burned at the base of his mind, though he had stopped trying to find an answer. There was none that he could think of. It was inexplicable—unforgivable.
What the hell was she playing at?
Anger bit in his throat and he thrust it away. As he climbed into the car, throwing himself back in his seat and ordering his chauffeur, ‘Just drive!’, his face took on a closed, brooding expression. He’d been a fool. A total fool.