Penniless and Purchased (5 page)

Oh, not desire as he knew it, but a new, different kind of desire that had nothing in common with the emotion he usually associated with the term. No, this was a new kind of sensation. One that made him want to…want to…

He didn’t know what. And didn’t bother to try and find words. What for? He didn’t need them. Didn’t need anything right now except to smile at her and lead her forward into the opera house, thronged with arrivals, and murmur something appropriate about being glad that she’d wanted to come this evening.

Her eyes widened. ‘Glad? I can’t even believe you got tickets! They’re gold-dust for events like this!’

The corner of his mouth pulled. ‘Ah, so that’s why you accepted my invitation. And there I was, being a conceited idiot and hoping it was for my sake, not a gold-dust ticket to a gala!’

Her eyes flew to him. ‘How could you think that?’ she breathed.

He stilled. He seemed to do that all the time. She kept stopping him in his tracks. She’d done it over and over again the evening before, but now, like this, as she gazed at him he felt it again, like a trip hammer, slamming down on him.

What is she doing to me?

He became aware they were holding up others, and jolted forwards again, guiding her smoothly. But he didn’t touch her. His hand hovered behind her back, but somehow he felt that the kind of casual body contact he would take for granted with any other woman would be out of place.

When I touch her, it will be special…

And this evening would be special, he knew. Not just because
even for him it had taken considerable effort—not to say expense!—to get hold of tickets for the evening, but because—well,
because
, that was all.

He stopped analysing. Gave himself to the experience. The experience of feeling that something was happening to him that was new—quite, quite new.

She was walking gracefully forward, and he could see male eyes turning. And he could also see that she was gazing around her as they made their way through the throng, her eyes widening every now and then. In the crush bar, champagne was circulating, and Nikos took a glass for himself and for her. She took a sip, then leant forward, slightly towards him.

He was raising his glass. ‘To a memorable evening,’ he said.

She didn’t need to echo his words to know that they were true. Wonderfully, magically true!

And they stayed true all evening. She sat beside him in the plush seats, her face alight, as some of the greatest artists in the world sang on the famous stage below, wreathed in its crimson velvet curtains. All the time, every moment of the gala, she was overpoweringly conscious of Nikos sitting beside her—the lean strength of his body, the occasional breath-catching brush of his sleeve, even though she kept her hands clasped in her lap. By the time the gala ended her emotions were sky-high, swept up by the soaring music and artistry of the performers. In the final applause she turned to Nikos.

‘Thank you!
Thank you!
All my life I’ll remember this evening!’

Her eyes were like stars, dewed with emotion.

She saw his face still again, as it had done before. Then, slowly, he reached for her hand and raised it to his lips.

‘As will I,’ he said softly.

She could only sit, her heart soaring, face alight, lips parted,
gazing at him, feeling more than she had ever felt in her life before! More than she had ever thought it possible to feel.

The soft brush of his lips on her hand had made her breathless, and then he was lowering her hand, but not relinquishing it, instead drawing her to her feet as the audience started to get to theirs. She felt his fingers lace through hers, so strong, so warm, holding hers, and felt faint with the wonderfulness of it.

Nikos!
His name reverberated in her head.
Nikos! Nikos! Nikos!

She floated on air as she walked beside him, his fingers still laced with hers, as they made their slow procession from the opera house. Leaving took ages, because the narrow streets outside were thronged, but eventually Nikos was handing her into the limo, and she was sinking into its depths, he was coming in beside her, and the limo was moving slowly off.

‘I asked your father if I might take you for supper after the performance,’ Nikos said. His eyes glinted. ‘I’ve got you till midnight, but you must be home on the stroke of twelve!’

She gave a little gurgle of laughter. ‘He’s terribly Victorian.’

But Nikos did not laugh with her. ‘He is right to be careful of you,’ he said soberly. Then his tone altered. ‘Now, I hope my choice of restaurant will please you.’

He could have suggested fish and chips and she would have been enchanted, but where he took her was infinitely more salubrious. It was uncrowded and, best of all, their table was very private. What she ate she had no idea, nor did she have much more idea what they talked about. Sophie knew her whole attention was on Nikos—Nikos alone! Gazing at him, smiling at him, listening to him, knowing with every passing moment that he was the most wonderful, wonderful man she had ever met! And by the time, two hours later, he reluctantly
escorted her from the limo up to the front door of her father’s house, she knew something else, as well. Something even more precious.

She was in love.

She knew it for a certainty—irrefutably, incontestably. She was in love with Nikos Kazandros!

Dreamily, she waltzed around her room, knowing she was happier than she had ever been in her life, and that the rest of her life was going to be the most wonderful in the world—because she was in love with Nikos Kazandros! In love! In love!
In love!

And nothing could stop it! Nothing!

‘S
OPHIE
.’

The sound of her name was like a rasp across wounded flesh. For a moment filled with agony Sophie felt the pain of it. Then, steeling herself, she turned expressionless eyes on Nikos.

‘What do you want?’ she responded stonily.

Something moved—flashed—in those dark eyes into whose depths she had once fallen and drowned.

‘Want?’ he echoed. The taunt was still there, the harshness. ‘Why should I want anything—anything that you have to offer now? Cosmo’s welcome to your well-displayed charms!’ The eyes lashed over her, the whip of contempt laying bare her skin.

But she would not feel it, would not feel the lash of his words, his taunting. What was it to her? What was
he
to her?

Nothing. Nothing at all, ever again!

‘Get lost, Nikos,’ she said, and turned away, plunging into the melee in the room. Even Cosmo Dimistris seemed like a haven from this unbearable encounter.

As he watched her walk away through the room, Nikos felt emotion sear through him. Then, abruptly, it was overridden. He suddenly realised he could no longer see Georgias. Cursing under his breath, he stared around, as if he could conjure him
up, and then, a grim look on his face, he headed down a wide corridor that clearly led towards the apartment’s bedrooms.

It took him a while to find his charge, throwing open one door after another and finding the rooms occupied. He carried on his furious search until he found Georgias, his tie loose, shirt undone, the girl he’d been dancing with even more undressed, the pair of them collapsed on a bed together.

Nikos wrested her off, ignoring her squeals of inebriated protest at being balked of her prey, then yanked Georgias up-right. He was almost completely out of it, his eyes glazed, hair tousled. Nikos hoped to God it was merely alcohol in his system.

It took a while to get Georgias out of the apartment, their way barred by the milling party throng and imprecations not to leave, and Georgias had a suddenly reanimated desire to dance again, but finally Nikos manhandled him out, and down in the lift.

Getting him across the lobby required some force, but once the night air hit, Georgias collapsed almost completely. Nikos glared angrily out across the roadway. Rain was sluicing down, cold and soaking, but at least a taxi driver had seen him sheltering under the portico of the luxury apartment block, and was diverting towards him. With effort, Nikos manhandled Georgias inside, and thrust him into the far corner of the cab, where he slumped in an ungainly fashion, his eyes closing in insensible stupor. Nikos gritted his teeth.

Brusquely, he gave the name of their hotel, and the cabbie nodded and moved off, tyres sluicing through the rain-filled gutter. Nikos threw himself back into his corner of the cab, his mind in turmoil. Only one image dominated it.

Sophie Granton.

He felt emotion surge inside him again—convulsing, turbid. Filled with anger, with more than anger.

Why the hell did I have to see her?

Why the hell had she had to rise up from the pit like that? Seeing her again, seeing what she’d come to—her dress half hanging off her, keeping company with the likes of jerks like Cosmo!

Memory slanted through his head, unwanted, unbidden—but vivid.

Her graceful body sheathed in a column of ivory, a chiffon stole around her pale shoulders, her face radiant with a beauty that had made his breath stop in his lungs, stepping towards him from the limo to where he waited for her outside the opera house, and her eyes, luminescent, glowing—fixed on him…

With brute force, he twisted his head away, banishing the memory. Now, instead, the last memory he would ever have of her would be draped on Cosmo Dimistris’s arm at a party for coke-heads and tarts…

His mouth thinned, tightened to a whiplash, a lash that flayed across his soul. If that was what she wanted now, that was what she could have.

And yet—

Abruptly, he leant forward, rapping on the glass behind the driver. The cab slowed and the cabbie twisted slightly, sliding open the partition.

‘Turn around,’ said Nikos.

Sophie was walking. It was raining, she was soaked, she was freezing, but she didn’t care. Not about that, but about how stupid she’d been.

No, not just stupid. That was far, far too weak a word. Anger raged inside her. At herself. Sickening, gut-churning. It was like acid inside her. Eating her up.

Will I never, ever learn? Will I go on being so insanely, criminally stupid—so pathetically, abjectly naïve?

Virulent self-hatred snaked through her.

I thought I’d finally learnt my lessons! All of them! I thought I could finally say that I’d wised up!

Like hell she had! The needles of freezing rain pounded down on her and she welcomed them as the punishment she deserved. She walked on blindly, writhing in self-loathing and bleak rage.

In the roadway, a car turned. A cab, she realised too late, as it arced through the wash of water in the gutter, sending a plume of cold, dirty water over her legs.

‘Get in.’

The voice was terse. It sounded angry. She stared. The passenger door of the taxi had opened just in front of her, and holding it open was Nikos Kazandros.

‘I said get in!’

She froze. And in that moment Nikos reached out and grabbed at her. For an instant she resisted, but he was far too strong for her, and he pulled her into the cab, thrusting her down on to the jump seat opposite him, yanking the cab door shut.

‘OK, drive,’ he said to the cabbie. The cabbie glanced briefly at his latest passenger, but she was just sitting there, making no move to get out, so he let out the throttle and moved off in to the traffic again.

On her seat, Sophie felt her brain start to work again. And her muscles. She started to shiver, violently. Water was running down from the hair plastered wetly to her head.

‘Are you mad?’ Nikos heard himself grind out to Sophie. ‘Walking along looking like that?’

She stared at him through rain-wet eyelashes. Her mascara was starting to run. It looked like black tears.

‘I didn’t have a coat with me,’ she said. Her teeth were starting to chatter, and she had to clench her jaw to stop them.

‘And you didn’t think to take a taxi?’ Nikos retorted witheringly. In the shifting light of the interior of the cab he could see the soaked satin of her dress outline every contour of her body. Her evening gown was clinging to her like a second skin, and twice as revealing. She looked half naked…

Involuntarily, he felt, to his own anger and self-disgust, an awareness of her body beneath the semi-transparent material. Of the twin swell of her breasts, their nipples standing out from the cold. He dragged his eyes back to her face.

She made no answer to his jibe, only closed her mouth tightly, jaw clamped. She was shivering, Nikos could see, and clutching a tiny bag on her lap. He pulled his gaze away, deliberately glancing at Georgias. But Georgias was slumped into stertorous sleep in the corner of the cab.

‘There’s a tube station! Let me out!’

Nikos’s attention was whipped back again. Sophie was rapping on the glass behind the cabbie’s seat, and he started to slow down as they approached the station. Nikos’s anger mounted.

‘Are you insane? You can’t go on the tube like that! You’re half naked!’ His eyes flashed darkly. ‘What the hell are you doing, anyway? You were with Cosmo.’

She didn’t answer him, just started to fumble with the door catch as the taxi pulled over beside the entrance to the tube station. Nikos’s hand laced out and imprisoned her wrist.

‘I asked you a question—’

‘Get lost.’ Her voice was a low snarl. ‘I’m getting out here.’

‘The hell you are!’ He rapped on the cabbie’s glass. ‘Keep going!’

The cabbie shrugged and set off again, but Nikos could see him glancing in his rearview mirror. He slid the glass partition open.

‘I’m giving her a lift, that’s all. You can drop me off at my
hotel, and I’ll pay the fare for wherever she wants to go. That OK with you?’ he finished witheringly.

The cabbie eyed him, then nodded. ‘Whatever you say, guv. If the lady don’t object.’

Nikos’s gaze ripped back to Sophie. She was sitting there, hunched, arms half crossed across her torso now, as if to veil her body from him. She was still shivering, staring expressionlessly at the floor. Her face was blank. Quite blank. Water from her sodden hair still dripped down the line of her jaw. Mascara ran down her cheeks. She looked a mess.

Why wasn’t she with Cosmo? Nikos lurched back into his seat, eyes on her. ‘So, did Cosmo give you the push?’

She didn’t answer, only gave him a brief, knifing glance before closing in on herself again. Her blankness angered Nikos. Everything about her angered him. Everything. He could feel his anger rising—biting. Wanting to find an out.

‘Or did you change your mind about putting out for him? Is that it?’

That got a reaction. Eyes like daggers flashed up at him, fury in them.

‘That wasn’t ever on the table! Nor, for your information, did I
choose
his company!’

‘So how come you ended up with him?’ Nikos pushed back.

The flash in the eyes came again. ‘He hired me for the evening! As an escort.’

Nikos stilled, not believing what he’d just heard her say.

‘A
hooker?
’

‘I am
not
a hooker!’ The snarl came from her throat. ‘I took a job at an
escort
agency, as an
escort
! That’s
all
! I’m well aware that some girls do a hell of a lot more than just have dinner and drinks with their clients, but
not me
!’ Breath razored in her lungs as her eyes blazed. ‘So whatever else you
think, and whatever else that disgusting jerk thought, that was
all
I signed up for! And
he
knew it, and the
agency
knew it, and now
you
can know it too—and you can take it and
choke
on it!’

She was fumbling for the door catch again, dimly aware, in the fury and tumult in her head, that the taxi had stopped. She couldn’t find the catch, and then, as she fumbled desperately, she felt a hand close over hers, pulling it away. The cabbie was speaking, opening the partition slightly, his voice wary. ‘You OK there, luv?’

‘She’s fine!’ Nikos cut across roughly, closing the glass again. ‘Keep driving!’

For a moment longer the cabbie looked over his shoulder. But Sophie was sitting frozen again, as if all the fire had been doused with a pail of water. Oh, what the
hell
? she thought, a bitter weariness crushing down on her as the cold in her bones took over and she started to shiver again.

Why did I rise to it? What do I care what he thinks of me? What could I possibly, possibly care? He’s nothing to me—nothing, nothing, nothing.

Depression, weariness, and despair like a deadweight crushed her down. Her shivering intensified. Her mind seemed like a blur, a mush. Too much had happened, too much overload. She could not take any more…

‘Sophie—’

Nikos’s voice cut across her deadening mind, and she raised blurred eyes to him. Her make-up was running into them, stinging, and drops of rain were still oozing down her forehead, making her blink.

Nikos. I’m in a taxi with Nikos Kazandros, and I don’t know why, or how, or what the hell is going on, and I just can’t cope any more, I can’t…can’t cope…

‘Sophie!’ Nikos spoke again, louder this time. Demanding attention. She stared at him and realised he had taken off his jacket, was holding it out to her. She shrank back, as if it were poisoned.

‘I don’t want it,’ she bit out. ‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re soaking wet and freezing—even in here.’

‘I’m fine,’ she repeated doggedly.

Nikos’s dark eyes glinted balefully, but he shrugged himself back into his jacket. ‘You
really
believed Cosmo Dimistris just wanted a sexy female to have dinner with?’ The question was scathing.

She said nothing, only clenched her jaw.

‘Answer me!’

Her eyes flashed again. ‘What do you want to know for? What possible concern is it of yours?’

‘Just tell me,’ he gritted.

‘Yes,’ she enunciated, berating herself even as she did so, because she owed this man no explanation, no justification. But she wanted to wipe the sneer from his face—needed to. ‘I did. Because that is what I signed up to. When I went to the agency, I said I would only do dinner dates, nothing else. And the woman said fine, it was up to me, it was my choice, and the agency didn’t get involved with anything more than providing the introduction—’

His laugh, harsh and short, cut across her. ‘
Introduction
? Did you think you were working for a
dating
agency? No one can be that naïve!’

She twisted her head away. A rock was in her stomach. Yes, she’d been that naïve, all right. So naïve—right up to the moment when she’d gone to find Cosmo Dimistris and he had offered her some cocaine, having clearly just snorted some
himself, and said it would make the sex much, much better, whilst steering her into a bedroom.

The rock in her stomach hardened, and she felt again the lash of self-hatred that she’d flagellated herself with as she’d trudged down the rain-sluiced street. Cosmo had made it savagely clear to her, with a laugh so coarse that it had almost obliterated the hot groping of his hand, that if she wasn’t going to come up with the goods, she could stop wasting his time and get the hell out, because there were plenty of other girls here who would provide what he wanted.

The taxi was turning off the road, heading into the sweeping entrance of a hotel.

‘Your hotel, guv.’

The voice of the cabbie penetrated her self-castigation. Immediately she made for the door. She had to get out, and fast. Out and away. Away from Nikos Kazandros.

‘Stay where you are.’ His voice was harsh, and it was clearly an order.

She glowered at him.

‘The cab will take you wherever you want to go. I’ll settle the fare to cover it.’

He was turning his attention now to the other occupant of the cab. Sophie had no idea who he was, and cared less. She just wanted Nikos gone,
gone.
And then she could get the hell out of here.