His Penniless Beauty
I never lay in his arms, I never woke in his arms.
But this time—this time that had been granted to her!
This is how it should have been—
Her mind tried to sheer away, to block out the terrible memories that suddenly, instantly, were there inside her head, vivid and anguished. Humiliating and poisonous.
Shaming.
Cold iced through her. The warmth of Nikos’s arms was gone. Blindly she stared out into the room.
And slowly, very, very slowly, as if a terrible, unbearable weight was crushing down on her, she knew what she must do.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘YOU do realise there’s a recession, don’t you?’
The voice of the woman in the Job Centre was sharp, impatient. Sophie knew why. She’d walked out of a perfectly good job, for no reason the woman could see—a jaunt to the countryside hardly counted—and now she was back again, wanting another job just like that.
‘I’m willing to take anything,’ Sophie said, her voice low.
Anxiety pressed at her. Although the cheque from Nikos was buying her blessed time, she had to start earning again as soon as she possibly could.
But she should not have thought of that cheque.
Nor of Nikos.
Like a guillotine, her mind slammed shut. A steel door rammed down across her memory. It took every ounce of her strength to hold it in place.
Focus—that’s all you have to do! Focus on the only thing that matters now: getting another job. Any job.
The woman at the Job Centre was scrolling down her computer screen. ‘There really is very little,’ she said, disapproval still emanating from her. ‘If you could type it might be different, but as it is you have no marketable skills.’
Sophie knew. Had known it for four bitter years. No marketable skills, and no time to acquire any. No time to do anything other than work all the hours she could, for whatever wages she could.
The woman sat back, defeated. ‘You’ll have to come in tomorrow. There may be more then. All that’s on the database is casual bar work, and you said you didn’t want that.’
No, Sophie didn’t want that. She’d tried it once and found the inevitable sexual harassment repellent. Since then she’d stuck to shop work, which could run on into the evenings. But now she knew she had no leg to stand on in being picky about bar work. Not after she’d been prepared to work as an escort…
Even if she had denied the true nature of the work Nikos had been right.
But she couldn’t think of Nikos. Absolutely, totally must not think of him. She looked across at the woman. Her expression was bleak.
‘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.