IN ENGLAND, MARNIE was used to being recognised. She hated the sensation but she’d come to expect it, so she had long ago given up the idea of eating in glamorous high-profile restaurants without expecting to be photographed and approached by all and sundry.
In Athens it was Nikos who drew the long, speculative glances. Nikos whose name opened doors and inspired attention and curiosity.
Marnie was actually enjoying being an outsider to the sense of celebrity. She’d never craved it, and watching him being fawned over by waitresses and even the manager at the exclusive Athens hot spot from the moment they arrived brought a small smile to her lips now.
He saw it immediately. Of their own volition his eyes dropped to the curve of her pink mouth and fire warmed her belly.
‘Yes, Marnie?’ he prompted, leaning forward so that a hint of his masculine fragrance teased her nostrils, making her gut clench with unmistakable desire. She tried to ignore it.
She crossed her legs beneath the table and shrugged. ‘I was just thinking how nice it is that I’m unknown here.’
‘Not unknown,’ he said, with a small shake of his head.
‘Well, lesser known,’ she corrected. ‘Less relevant. And you’re...’
‘Yes?’ He broke off the query when a waitress appeared with a bottle of ice-cold champagne.
‘Compliments of the owner.’ She smiled at Nikos, her cleavage exposed as she leaned forward to pour some of the liquid into a long, tapered flute.
‘Thank you,’ he murmured dismissively. ‘You were saying...?’
Marnie waited for the waitress to finish pouring. ‘You’re who everyone wants to see.’ She grinned. ‘I’m anonymous and you’re hot property.’
His laugh surprised her. It was rich and warm, and reminded her of how long it had been since she’d heard the sound.
‘Hot property?’ He shook his head. ‘I’m glad to hear you think so.’
‘You know what I mean.’ Colour bloomed in her cheeks. She focussed on the menu. ‘What’s good here? What do you recommend?’
‘It is all excellent.’ He shrugged.
She scanned the menu but she was far from hungry. Butterflies had taken up residence in her stomach and their beating wings made it impossible for her to imagine accommodating food into their kaleidoscope.
‘What do you suggest?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘I can order for you, if you’d like?’
‘That won’t be necessary.’ She shut down his perfectly normal offer, knowing how dire it would be to keep conceding to him.
‘As you wish.’ He pushed the menu away, his mind apparently made up.
She continued to skim her eyes over the words on the page but they were puddles and blurs.
‘How long have you done this work?’
She started, despite the fact his suggestion of dinner had been hung on a desire to learn more about the trust. ‘About four years,’ she said, reaching for the stem of her champagne flute simply for something to do.
‘You didn’t go to university?’
She shook her head. ‘The timing wasn’t right.’
A frown smudged his handsome face. ‘In what way?’
Marnie pulled her lower lip between her teeth and Nikos surprised her by reaching over and abruptly swiping his thumb across her mouth, disturbing the gesture.
‘Don’t think.’ He spoke commandingly, his words gravelled. ‘You do this too often.’
Her expression was blank. ‘I wasn’t aware thinking was a crime.’
‘It is when you are selecting which words to use to your husband. Just answer my questions directly.’
Marnie gaped, her mouth parted on an exhalation of surprise. ‘That hardly seems fair.’
‘Why was the timing not right?’ He returned to his original question, impatient for an answer.
He was right. She had been prevaricating, unconsciously trying to select words that wouldn’t apportion blame or imply resentment.
‘I wasn’t ready to leave home,’ she said quietly.
But he understood what she hadn’t been willing to say. ‘You mean your parents didn’t want you to go?’ His disapproval was marked, despite the way he spoke quietly.
The waitress reappeared, her smile bright. Was it also inviting? Or was Marnie being paranoid?
She flicked her gaze back to the menu, intent on seeming not to notice the way the waitress lingered a little too close to Nikos as she spoke.
Nikos didn’t appreciate the interruption, and his annoyance brought a childish kernel of pleasure to Marnie. She hesitated over ordering for far longer than was necessary, finally selecting scampi followed by chicken, having changed her mind several times.
Nikos glared at her and spoke in Greek, quickly dispensing with the waitress.
‘They forbade you from attending university?’
She started, shaking her head softly so that her hair flew around her cheeks. ‘Not at all.’
‘You wanted to study law. You were passionate about it.’
‘Not really.’
He ignored the rejoinder. After all, they’d spent a long time talking about their hopes and dreams. He had not misunderstood her desire to go into law. Nor did he doubt she would have achieved the requisite grades.
‘But instead you stayed at home, living with your parents, working for a charity that revolves around your sister’s illness,’ he murmured, with a directness she hadn’t expected.
‘Do you think there’s something wrong with that?’
‘Yes.’ He leaned forward and put his hand on hers. ‘You are a person, too, Marnie. You are not simply Libby’s sister. Nor your parents’ daughter. You have your own life to live.’
She compressed her lips and pulled her hand down to her lap. ‘You say that even after blackmailing me into this marriage?’
She sipped her champagne but it was too sweet. She didn’t want it. She was definitely not in the mood to celebrate. She ran her finger around the rim, staring at the hypnotic, frantic movement of the bubbles as her mind spun over the situation they found themselves in.
‘It’s not as if I can’t move on,’ she said quietly, her eyes refusing to meet his. ‘But without funds research into leukaemia is slow. It occurred to me that the people most likely to succeed at raising money are probably those who have every reason to passionately pursue it. In ten years—who knows? Maybe girls like Libby won’t get sick.’
Finally, she forced herself to lance him with her eyes; they were softened by sorrow.
‘It’s idealistic, but...’
He surprised her by murmuring, ‘Not at all. You are right. Progress does not always happen as you expect it to. Sometimes it is hard-fought, and other times it is overnight, as though a cascade of discoveries slides into place. But without funds neither is likely.’
She nodded, distracted enough by the subject matter to speak naturally. ‘I thought I’d do it for a year. As a way of giving back to the trust that was so supportive to us. But it turns out I sort of have a knack for it.’
‘I can imagine,’ he said. ‘Do you regret not studying law?’
It was on the tip of her tongue to deny it, but the truth came to her first. ‘Yeah. Sometimes. But that would have been about helping people, too. I’m just helping different people now.’
He let the words sink in and shied away from the intrinsic guilt they evoked. After all, her propensity to help others was what had made it impossible for her to walk away from his marriage proposal.
‘And staying at home instead of finding your own place...?’
Her smile was enigmatic. ‘You know... Kenington Hall is enormous. I have my own wing. It’s much like living on my own.’
‘And your parents are your neighbours?’ he murmured, his voice ringing with disbelief.
‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘But apparently I’m a pretty inattentive neighbour,’ she said with regret. ‘I had no idea about Dad’s troubles.’
His desire to comfort her displeased him. ‘I imagine he was adept at concealing the truth.’
‘Not really.’ She shook her head wistfully.
The waitress appeared with their starters, placing them on the table and then disappearing without a word. Marnie wondered if Nikos had commanded her to stop making conversation when he’d switched to speaking Greek earlier.
Nikos watched as Marnie lifted her fork and speared a single scampi. She put it down again almost instantly, and when she looked at him he felt a wave of guilt emanating from her.
‘I should have seen the signs.’
‘What signs?’ he prompted.
‘He’s been stressed. Angry. He’s just not himself.’
Nikos found it hard to find any genuine sympathy for the man, but he realised he didn’t like seeing Marnie suffer. At all. ‘Tell me something...’
She nodded, toying with her fork.
‘After your father paid me off, were you angry with him?’
Marnie’s eyes flashed with emotion. ‘I didn’t know about that, remember?’
He waved a hand dismissively through the air. ‘Fine. After I left, were you angry with him? With your mother?’
‘I...’ She shuttered her eyes closed, her dark lashes fanning over her translucent cheek.
‘Do not think!’ He repeated his earlier directive and she grimaced.
‘I was furious,’ she said, so quietly he had to lean forward to catch the words. ‘But they’re my parents, and they’d been through so much.’ She swallowed. ‘My father threatened...’ She closed her mouth on the threat she’d been about to repeat. ‘My father was devastated by losing Libby.’
‘And he threatened you?’ Nikos prompted, with a smoothness that spoke of determination.
She thought about lying. But wasn’t there so much water under the bridge now?
‘They made me choose.’
The anticlimax brought about in him an intense sense of disappointment. Right when he’d thought he might finally be going to understand just what had led to Marnie pushing him far, far away, she’d gone back to the old lines.
‘I mean they literally told me they’d disown me if I didn’t break it off with you,’ she added with a look of grief on her beautiful features.
She was back in the past, her mind far from him in that moment.
‘I didn’t care when they said they’d disinherit me.’ She looked at him—and through him. ‘Money meant nothing to me. But they were my link to Libby, and they said they wouldn’t have me in their lives so long as I was with you. That I would never be allowed to return to Kenington Hall.’ Marnie’s voice cracked. ‘The house was—is—all I have left of her...’
* * *
Marnie woke with a start as the plane pitched a little in one direction. She’d dozed off, despite the fact their flight had been a morning one. She stifled a yawn with the back of her hand, her groggy eyes drifting to her husband’s bent head.
He was working.
A smile flicked to her lips with ease, though her stomach churned with a mix of anxiety and an emotion that was so much more confusing.
She didn’t have time to attempt to understand it before the plane shuddered and Marnie’s panic overtook everything. She dug her fingernails into the armrests, her expression showing distress.
Nikos, attuned to her every move, looked up instantly. ‘There is thick cloud-cover over London, that’s all.’
She nodded, but her childhood fear of flying was ricocheting through her. Marnie stared out of the window, trying to distract herself with thoughts of her father’s birthday weekend—anything to curtail the clear picture she had in her mind of the aeroplane spearing nose-first towards the earth.
Their trip had come round quickly—for Marnie, almost too quickly.
After that one night in Athens when they’d shared dinner she felt as if a new understanding had settled between her and her husband and she wanted to hold on to that, to strengthen the understanding that was building between them. Would a trip back to her parents’ unsettle the bridge they’d been building?
They were not a normal couple.
There was no shared love between them—at least not on Nikos’s part. Perhaps not on Marnie’s part either.
She had spent a great deal of her energy trying to decipher and separate her feelings of lust from love; her feelings of past love from present infatuation. Some days she convinced herself that she’d fallen in love with only the idea of Nikos—an idea that bore only a passing resemblance to the ruthless, determined businessman he’d become.
But then he would do something sweet—like bringing her tea in bed when she’d slept late, or calling in the middle of the day to remind her of something small they’d discussed the night before—and her heart would flutter and her soul would know she loved him. Not in a sensible, rational way, but in the way that love sometimes bloomed even when it was not watered or fed.
They barely argued. By tacit agreement each tried to respect the other’s limitations. Marnie accepted the dark streak that ran through Nikos—the side of him that was so hell-bent on making her father see how wrong he was to have passed Nikos off as a failure that he’d blackmailed her into marriage. If she thought about it too much it made her queasy, so she pushed it to the recesses of her mind and clung to a sort of blind hope. Maybe one day he wouldn’t feel that aching resentment so forcefully?
Their truce was underpinned by a sex life that made her toes curl. He had been right about that. Even if it was all they had to go on it would make their marriage worth staying in. Wouldn’t it?
But uncertainty lurked just beyond her acceptance. For they had travelled stormy waters, and weren’t there always eyes in storms? The calm that gave a moment’s respite before the intensity of the cyclone returned with twice its strength?
Was she in the eye of a storm?
Or was this a lasting peace?
Only time would tell, and Marnie had a lifetime to wait and see.