The Cozakis Bride Read online

  'Save the act for someone who hasn't experienced your idea of friendship,' Olympia advised.

  Katerina darted a careful glance around herself, anxious that their conversation should not be overheard. Only then did she risk giving Olympia a mocking smile. 'I almost died of fright when I was invited to your wedding. I thought it might be a trap, but when Nik greeted me just the same as ever I knew I was safe!'

  'Safe?' Olympia queried.

  Katerina tossed her head and laughed. 'It's so obvious that Nik still doesn't know what really went on ten years ago.'

  'Is it really?' Although Olympia was struggling to look unconcerned, she was mortified by having that reality flung in her face.

  But Katerina was too clever to be fooled. If Nik had been aware of the appalling lies his cousin had once told, he would naturally have confronted her.

  'All hell would have broken loose if Nik had known that I fibbed about you and poor old Lukas!' Katerina gave a little mock shiver of apprehension, her dark eyes scornful as she sneered. 'So, if Nik's married you without knowing the truth, he can only have done it to get Manoulis Industries. You'd still take Nik at any price. Don't you have any pride?'

  The knowledge that her lies still stood unchallenged had not only filled Katerina with triumph but had also given her a humiliating insight into the nature of Olympia's marriage. Olympia was cut to the bone.

  'More pride than to stand here exchanging insults with you,' she answered tightly, starting to turn away.

  But Katerina hadn't finished yet, and she giggled, 'What a come-down for Nik...I expect he'll have to close his eyes and try to pretend you're Gisele Bonner tonight!'

  Olympia took refuge in the cloakroom. She felt sick. Her hands were trembling as she rinsed them in cooling water. Katerina hadn't changed one bit. Indeed, it was just a little scary to realise that the passage of ten years hadn't made any appreciable difference to the other woman. Katerina was sweet only when she had an audience she wanted to impress, and she still hated Olympia like poison.

  However, Olympia did not want a rumour that her mar­riage was simply a business merger reaching her mother's tender ears. Which it might well do, if Irini Manoulis moved back into her father's home outside Athens. And judging by the way her grandfather was hovering round her mother to- day, his anxiety for her fragile health writ large in his every , protective look and gesture, Olympia reckoned that her parent would not be living in London for much longer.

  As she headed in me direction of the top table she saw Nik on the other side of the dance floor. He was scanning the crowds with a frown. Across that distance, brilliant dark eyes suddenly found and held hers. Her heart jumped and her mouth ran dry and she faltered to an unplanned halt. The innate power of mat single look electrified her. Involuntarily, she relived the fierce hunger of his mouth on hers and felt the swift answering rise of heat surge at the centre of her trembling body. A wave of burning mortification sent hot colour flying into her cheeks.

  No, she hadn't allowed herself to think about that kiss, until just looking at Nik forced her to remember what she would have much rather forgotten. That when Nik touched her, she couldn't yet control her own sexuality. That ac­knowledgement shamed and embarrassed her. At seventeen she had been able to control and stifle her physical reaction to Nik only because her ability to resist him had never been pot to the test. But now the powerful responses she was ex­periencing frightened and confused Olympia. Nik made her feel like a wanton, and that terrified her. Only frozen indif­ference would hold Nik Cozakis at bay, and so far she was conscious that she wasn't doing very well in that department. Nik crossed the floor to her side, black eyes grim. 'It's time for us to leave.'

  Olympia tautened. 'But we've only been here a couple of hours—'

  'Quite long enough,' Nik cut in with flat finality. 'You put on a lousy bridal act.'

  'I don't know what you're talking about...' But even as she said it her memory was serving up taunting images: her silence throughout the meal, the way she had argued with him during that first dance and not once but twice broken free of him to walk away. 'Yes, you do.'

  A sensation akin to panic surged up inside Olympia and she dropped her head to study the floor. 'I'm sorry...I'll make a bigger effort.' .

  'Why tax yourself?' Nik murmured silkily. 'You think I care what people think?'

  'I just wasn't concentrating on how I should be behaving. Believe me, I can do better,' she asserted in haste, that pan­icky feeling increasing. All of a sudden the presence of a couple of hundred guests seemed like the best protection she had ever had, and she could not understand why she had been foolish enough to anger Nik by failing to behave like a normal bride.

  'Too late. You had your chance and you blew it. Any notion I had of playing the proud bridegroom is long gone,' Nik spelt out very dryly. 'So go and say goodbye to your mother.'

  'I wanted to spend some time with her—'

  Tough.'

  She began to turn away. 'I'll go and get changed first—'

  'You'll stay as you are. Your luggage is already on board the helicopter.'

  She frowned, taken aback. 'But I have a going-away out­fit... I gave my cases to the driver before I left your apartment this morning and told him.'

  'I countermanded your instructions,' Nik informed her with complete cool. 'I want to be the one to take you out of that wedding dress.'

  Her head flew up, sea-jade eyes sparking. 'But I told you—'

  'When are you going to learn to listen to what / tell you?' Eyes black as pitch raked over her and her tummy just flipped at the bleak coldness of that appraisal. 'And I'm not a happy camper right now.'

  'H-happy camper?' Olympia stammered weakly.

  'Just fifteen minutes ago I watched my cousin Katerina make a second, very generous attempt to reinstate a reason­ably civil bond with you,' Nik related with a grim twist of his hard mouth, watching further colour fly into her startled face. 'I also watched her take off again in tears at your rebuff and then pretend that she wasn't feeling well so that she could leave our reception early without causing undue com­ment!'

  Olympia was stunned by that revelation about Katerina. Katerina in tears at her rebuff and making an early departure from their reception? It finally dawned on Olympia that Katerina would still put her in the wrong whenever she got the chance. She was shaken. 'Nik...that's not true. I said nothing—'

  'You behaved like a real bitch and I'm ashamed of you. But don't worry about it. I won't be letting you loose socially again,' Nik enunciated with icy clarity.

  Olympia, who had never considered herself to be a fanciful woman, felt the most chilling sense of foreboding spread through her, but in angry discomfiture she tried to defend herself. 'Nik, you're not being fair. She—'

  'I have no interest in hearing your excuses. We're leaving in ten minutes.'

  'To go where?'

  Belatedly, she recalled the helicopter he had mentioned. 'We're joining my yacht at Southampton. So I suggest you spend those ten minutes with your mother,' Nik incised with ruthless implacability.

  Rigid-backed, Olympia approached her parent, who was sitting with her grandfather. Her mother's eyes were troubled. Spyros Manoulis stood up, his beetling brows set in a frown of censure.

  ‘Thankfully your behaviour is now your husband's responsibility, but allow me to tell you that no lady embarrasses her husband in public'

  Olympia's teeth gritted behind her compressed lips. She shot a pained look at her mother, who hurriedly scrambled up to give her daughter a soothing hug. 'Don't let your pride come between you and happiness,' she urged then, in an anxious whisper.

  For a dismaying moment Olympia registered that she was attracting censure from every conceivable source, and when that censure also came from the mother she adored, it really hurt. But an apologetic smile softened her mouth, for she was genuinely sorry that anything she had done should have worried the older woman. 'When first we practise to deceive...' she thought bitterly, for when honesty
was forbidden, self-defence was impossible.

  Indeed, more than anything else at that moment Olympia felt trapped. Her grandfather thought she was incredibly lucky to have got Nik to the altar, and he would always take Nik's side. Her mother was solely concerned with her daugh­ter's happiness, but Olympia was in no doubt that she had just received a firm scold. Meanwhile, Nik was simmering like a volcano about what he saw as her ungenerous reaction to what he had assumed to be an olive branch from his cousin, Katerina. And, no matter what Olympia did or said, all of them would keep on seeing her as being the one in the wrong.

  As Nik came to her side, depriving her of even the ten minutes he had promised, resentment currented through Olympia. Then a sharp and disturbing pang of fear assailed her as she appreciated that the very last thing she could face right now was being alone with her new husband.

  And wasn't that ironic? she found herself thinking help­lessly, as they took leave of all their guests. Ten years ago, the one thing she had most longed for was the chance to be alone with Nik, and the natural privacy offered to a newly married couple would have struck her as a heavenly blessing...

  CHAPTER FIVE

  At the age of seventeen Olympia had fallen for Nik Cozakis like a ton of bricks, and she had hardly believed her good luck at being accepted into the select group of his friends, for she had had nothing in common with them and she had been painfully shy.

  Indeed, that summer in Greece she had entered a disturbingly different world. A world peopled with terrifyingly sophisticated teenagers with flash cars and designer wardrobes. And sometimes, looking on, listening to them agonise about their often incredibly superficial concerns, it had seemed to her that though cocooned by so much parental affluence and indulgence, none of them had the slightest idea about what real life was like. But Nik had been the exception. He hadn't just been gorgeous. His stunning dark good looks had been matched by an infinitely greater maturity and intelligence.

  At the outset of their relationship it had not occurred to her that the regularity with which she'd ended up getting a lift in Nik's car meant anything more than kindness on his part. Then Katerina had told her that Spyros Manoulis had business connections with Nik's father and Olympia had cringed at the idea that her grandfather might have asked Nik to look after his English granddaughter.

  'You know, I could've copped a lift in someone else's car this time,' she said, on one occasion.

  'I don't want to be taking you so much out of your way,' she said on another, squirming with embarrassment when he stayed teetotal all evening at a party and then drove all the way across Athens to take her home. 'Couldn't I just jump on the bus?''

  Please don't feel you have to keep me company. I'm not lonely. I'm quite happy watching everything that's going on,' she said with determination at a swimming party Lukas Theotokas staged at his home when his parents were abroad.

  That night Nik flashed Olympia an incensed look and finally abandoned her to her own devices. Becoming tearful on the discovery that she was not at all happy watching Nik taking her advice and dancing with a very attractive girl, she fled indoors to find a quiet corner where she could break her jealous heart in private.

  Lukas found her in the kitchen. 'I see Nik's got another fish to fry tonight,' he remarked, cruelly amused by her red­dened eyes and pink nose. 'Someone should have warned you that he likes variety. But I've just had a really good idea...'

  Olympia had never warmed to Lukas Theotokas, but she didn't understand why until it was too late; he was one of Nik's closest friends but he was jealous of him. Nik was richer, better-looking and more popular. . 'A good idea?' she echoed.

  'Why don't you and me have some fun?'

  'What sort of fun?' she muttered, genuinely bewildered, for she was well aware that Lukas was crazy about Katerina. who flirted like mad with him but refused to go out with him.

  'Yeah...I'd be interested in hearing the answer to that too.' Nik drawled from the doorway several feet away.

  Stiffening in surprise, Lukas swung round. Nik said some-thing guttural in Greek and his friend reddened and turned on his heel, leaving Nik and Olympia alone.

  'What on earth did you say to him?' Olympia muttered uncomfortably.

  'That I'd rip his head off if he said anything like that to you again.' Nik closed one hand over her tightly clenched fingers and drew her to him with cool, controlled determination. And then he kissed her. Lightly, gently and without the passion she had dimly imagined would figure in her very first kiss, but still her tender heart stopped dead for a split second before flying off into orbit.

  You're mine,' Nik sighed, in anything but a lover-like way. 'Don't you know that yet?'

  'Yours?' she whispered shakily.

  'My girlfriend,' he extended, looking exasperated by her need for that explanatory extension.

  Struck dumb, she hovered, lips tingling, shyly studying their linked hands, still unable to meet his eyes. And then the joy hit her so hard she very nearly fell over with the force of it.

  'Why do you mink I've been running after you?' Nik de­manded.

  'I thought you were just being nice.'

  Nik laughed outright. 'I always have a reason for be­ing... nice.'

  When she told her grandfather that she was dating Nik, Spyros Manoulis gave her a huge approving smile, and at the time she thought nothing of his lack of surprise. Nor did she smell a rat in the fact that her relationship with Nik stayed low-key and that they were only ever together in a group. On some abstract level she noted her friend Katerina's grow­ing coolness, but she was too much in love and too wrapped up in Nik to pay proper heed.

  Since they had only been dating six weeks, she was frankly stunned when Nik asked her to marry him. 'I really care about you...' he confided flatly, not exactly pushing the boat out in the New Age man emotional stakes, staring through the windscreen of his Ferrari as if his life depended on the view. 'I think when we're older we could be great together. You're a really caring person. You like kids and stuff.'

  But then what choice had Nik had in that timing? By then she'd been within days of her scheduled return to London. He hadn't said that he loved her, but his marriage proposal had encouraged Olympia to take that belief for granted, and it had also freed her from all reserve. She'd been far too busy burbling about how passionately and devotedly she adored and loved him to notice his silence on that point.

  Nik had liked that too. In fact, she could still recall him turning his bronzed classic profile towards her, a scorching smile slowly forming on his beautiful mouth, all his earlier tension put to flight. Nik had been relieved that he didn't have to be more verbal, demonstrative or persuasive. But Olympia had only been disconcerted when Nik had taken her home that evening and it had become obvious that Spyros had known Nik was planning to propose before she had.

  'Of course I spoke to your grandfather first. He thought that perhaps you were too young, but I said we'd wait until I finished university before we got married,' Nik explained when she taxed him about that.

  Indeed the serpent entered Olympia's private Eden only at the huge fancy party which Spyros Manoulis threw to announce his granddaughter's engagement.

  'I'm just so relieved that Nik's parents like and accept it; Olympia admitted to Katerina Pallas.

  'And why wouldn't they?' Katerina vented a deris laugh. 'I can't think of a single family in this room who would have said no to an alliance with the Manoulis heiress:

  'What do you mean?'

  'Don't you ever get tired of acting like you're the p little orphan girl without a blessing to your name? It's getting painful, Olympia,' Katerina said cuttingly. 'Everybody knows Spyros will be leaving his empire to you!'

  The next morning Olympia uneasily broached the astonishing concept of her being an heiress with her grandfather.

  'Yes, it's true. Who else do I have?' Spyros was amused by her unconcealed shock. 'You think I would let you join the Cozakis family with nothing but the clothes on your back? You think Nik's fa
ther would have been content to see his oldest son tie himself up this young without a little sweetener to the deal?'

  'But... but—'

  'I'm a self-made man, Olympia. I don't have any illustrious ancestors. The Cozakis family may be top-drawer high-society, but I can match them for every drachma and every tanker they've got!' her grandfather asserted with consider­able satisfaction.

  'I'm sure you can,' she muttered, thoroughly taken aback by what he was telling her. Suddenly her engagement was acquiring an extra dimension which she had never dreamt existed. A financial dimension...a deal?

  'I'm proud that I can give you a dowry that puts you on their level. It's a good marriage for both families. I need someone to take over Manoulis Industries when I retire, and I can think of no young man who has already shown more promise than Nikos Cozakis. And now, instead of stealing profit from each other by staying in competition,' Spyros continued with positive triumph, 'Nik's father and I will work together.'

  That same morning Katerina called in to apologise for her sharpness the night before. She found Olympia in a pensive, troubled mood.

  'A dowry, for goodness' sake;' Olympia groaned. 'It's worse than the medieval barter system! Why did nobody mention it to me before now?'

  'Women don't tend to get involved in that side of things. But money marries money in our world.' Katerina shrugged her own acceptance of that reality. 'Don't you appreciate how lucky you are? You're not exactly Helen of Troy, but you've still got Nik!'

  But would she have got Nik if she had not been the Man­oulis heiress? That fear powered Olympia's new insecurity. Her trusting assumption that Nik truly cared about her started seeming naive. She began looking to Nik for greater reas­surance, but she did not open the subject of her massive dowry with him. She was afraid to confront the possibility of an awful truth. However, day by day that awful truth seeped in on her like a remorseless drowning tide...

  Nik did not mention love. Nik did not seem to want to be on his own with her. When she said she'd like to go shop­ping, he just dumped her on his mother. When Spyros was away overnight on business she asked Nik over for dinner, but he took her out instead, totally ignoring the kind of in­vitation that most teenage boys could be depended on to take instant advantage of. She remembered all the teasing that had once gone on around Nik, all the earthy references to all the girls he'd supposedly slept with which had once embarrassed her. At one point, becoming desperate to justify his reluc­tance to so much as put a hand on her breast, she wondered if all that talk had just been fuelled by macho fantasy on his part for his friends' benefit, and if Nik was really still a virgin just like she was!