His lush black lashes were low over his stunning dark golden eyes. ‘I’m an old-fashioned guy,’ he murmured with insolent cool. ‘I’d have had you there a lot sooner, had I known that the wedding night was a non-event.’
‘It was too late even then-’
‘I don’t think so. I’m told I have remarkable powers of persuasion. Had I not been haunted by the fear that I had put myself beyond the pale, you wouldn’t have been calling the independent shots all these years,’ Nik delivered, lean, powerful features stamped with forbidding strength. ‘You’re my wife and I have never thought of you as anything else-’
‘A poor thing…but my own?’ she misquoted hotly.
‘Mine…that’s the one part you got right. What is mine stays mine-’
‘I will not be your wife…ever!’
‘Your decision.’ Nik strolled out of the room and it was a split-second before Prudence unfroze and chased after him.
‘You can’t leave me like this!’ she wailed.
Nik tilted his arrogant dark head back, brilliant eyes gleaming. ‘I can do whatever I want to do.’
‘If you don’t take back what you’ve suggested, I’ll never forgive you for it…’
‘That’s a risk I’m prepared to take.’
‘I could take you to court and claim alimony from you, and you would be forced to give me some financial help,’ she protested.
‘But the legal process would move very, very slowly and you don’t have the time to wait,’ Nik countered with cool clarity.
Her shoulders slumped. ‘So you think it’s OK to kick me when I’m already down?’
Ice in his hard gaze, Nik studied her, his beautifully sculpted mouth grim. ‘You’re the only woman I’ve ever asked to marry me. To listen to you speak of our marriage as though it is some form of abuse is intolerable. I treated you with honour-’
‘This is not honour I’m dealing with!’
Nik reached into his pocket and withdrew a piece of paper. He tossed it down on the hall table. ‘If you want to be treated with honour, behave like a wife!’ he launched at her lethally.
Prudence stared down, transfixed, at the newspaper photo of her with Leo in the London restaurant. That snatched picture had actually appeared in print? Leo would be equally appalled by that development. She was astonished, too, at how misleading an impression a photo could give. There she was, seemingly holding hands with Leo, and her tears were not visible. She simply appeared to be looking at her companion with intense interest. Her lips parted on the hail of words that would have assured Nik that Leo was truly only a friend. Then she remembered the scrapbooks of Nik’s love affairs and her heart hardened to the consistency of a granite rock. Folding her lush mouth firmly shut, she said nothing. So Nik didn’t like it when the tables were turned? Tough!
Nik waited for her to utter a denial and an explanation. He knew she would not lie to him. When the rushing silence continued, he felt strangely light-headed and hollow and thinking was suddenly a challenge. And then bang, those weird sensations were gone, and in their place was a primitive corrosive anger that made it impossible for him even to look at her.
‘You have twenty-four hours to make a decision-’
‘Twenty-four hours?’ she echoed in consternation.
‘You don’t understand, do you?’ Nik swung lithely back to face her again, lean, strong face hard with resolve, dark eyes chilling. ‘Even if I come to the rescue, Craighill Farm will no longer be your home. You can’t stay here.’
Prudence frowned uncertainly. ‘Even if you come to the rescue? But you said-’
‘Think it through.’ His dark drawl was abrasive. ‘Theo will not let me buy this place for you. He’ll be waiting for me to try. He won’t sell to me and he’s too devious to fall for a fake buyer. I have to find you and your dependants somewhere else to live.’
Prudence was struggling to get her head around the extremely unpalatable facts he was spelling out. ‘Somewhere else? For all of us?’ she exclaimed. ‘But that would be impossible-’
‘A tall order in this time-frame, but not impossible. If I throw enough money and personnel at the problem, I can do it. I will do it for you.’
Disturbingly conscious of his sheer height and breadth, Prudence was very tense. He was so close she could have touched him and she was appalled by the strength of her craving to do exactly that. She had suffered too many shocks recently, and at the back of her mind had still dwelt the comforting conviction that Nik would pull off a miracle and make everything perfect again. Now he was telling her that no, that wasn’t possible and the situation was even worse than she appreciated. Even with his support she would still have to move out of Craighill Farm. Her head was starting to ache, pointless thoughts whirling round in ever-decreasing circles. But one thought remained crystal-clear.
‘If you force me to be your wife on those terms, you’ll lose my trust forever,’ she warned him fiercely.
Nik rested dark golden eyes of challenge on her. ‘Sometimes there isn’t a choice. Just as this is the only way I have of ensuring that our marriage has a future. You now know that you’ll accept my offer, because it’s the only one on the table.’
Prudence studied the wall and trembled with temper and resentment. But she gritted her teeth together to bite back hasty words of defiance. As usual he was right on target. He was her only option and there was no time to waste.
‘All right, so for what it’s worth and even though it’s very hard to see what you could possibly get out of such an arrangement…I’ll…be…your…wife.’ Forced out, her gritty words of surrender ricocheted off her tongue like individual bullets.
His big, powerful frame tensing at the return of that strange light-headed sensation, Nik was startled into questioning if he had caught some virus. His eyes narrowing, he kept his entire attention pinned to her and breathed in slow and deep. ‘You will never regret it.’
‘I hate you now…is that really what you want?’
Nik cast a flashing glance through the open doorway behind her through which he could see the crisp white and pink linen on her bed. His taut body throbbed with sexual heat and hunger: he knew exactly what he wanted. She didn’t hate him, she couldn’t hate him; he refused to accept that. His smouldering dark golden gaze shimmied down over her mutinous face to rest on her luscious mouth, then travelled from there to the tantalising fullness of her pouting breasts, where he lingered before passing on with assurance to the highly feminine swell of her hips below her small waist.
‘Don’t you dare look me over like I’m something on a butcher’s block!’ Prudence launched at him in a tempest of fury and mortification.
‘You’re my wife…it’s allowed. I also now know what a fantastic body you work so hard to hide beneath those clothes. I want you and I’m not ashamed to admit it.’ Nik scored a lean forefinger along the ripe curve of her lower lip and watched her shiver as though she were standing up to storm-force winds. ‘How long are you planning to make me wait?’
Prudence reddened to the roots of her hair. On a level she was reluctant to explore she was sinfully willing to hear that she could be an ongoing object of desire for him. ‘Stop it,’ she told him primly.
‘I can’t.’
Prudence could feel her own weakness rising like a tide inside her. She wanted him, too, she acknowledged; she wanted him to an indecent degree. Rage and self-loathing tearing at her like vengeful claws, Prudence dragged her gaze from the earthy desire in his, forced her trembling legs to move in the direction of the door and then yanked it open. ‘I will start behaving as a wife when I am in my new home and not before then.’
‘You’re kidding me…’ Nik breathed in a raw undertone of rampant inc
redulity.
Prudence could feel something that felt uncommonly like a power current leaping through her. He really did lust after her, she conceded in astonishment. It was incomprehensible to her, but the high-voltage charge of his white-hot sexuality was focused on her like a blowtorch. He wasn’t used to anything other than instant gratification either. Waiting would indeed be a new and challenging experience for him.
Prudence drew herself up to her full insignificant height, feeling very much taller than she usually did. ‘No, I’m not kidding you.’
Nik surveyed her with smouldering disbelief. ‘We made a deal-’
‘When you’ve fulfilled your part of the bargain by finding us all somewhere else to live, I will fulfil mine,’ Prudence stated tautly.
His strong jaw line hardened. ‘Do you doubt my ability to keep my promise?’
Prudence jerked a stiff shoulder. ‘No, but I’m being forced into this and I won’t pretend otherwise. I won’t behave like your wife until I have to. I don’t even feel married-’
‘But you will, I assure you,’ Nik sliced in, soft and low and lethal, his Greek accent feathering over every syllable with purring exactitude. ‘Give me time.’
In shock at the agreement she had given, Prudence stared into space for a long time after he had gone. That was that, then. She was finally going to get to be Mrs Angelis years after she had stopped weaving dreams round the idea. This time around, however, she had few illusions. Even so, the discovery that Theo Demakis and Nik Angelis were brothers under the skin had shattered Prudence. Only now was it dawning on her that Nik must always have been tough and unemotional. Indeed, those very qualities might well have persuaded her grandfather that Nik Angelis would make the right kind of son-in-law. She had just learnt the hard way that, when it came to getting what he wanted, Nik was as ruthless and cold-blooded as his reputation implied.
But perhaps Nik needed to learn that a wife was not as easily controlled as an employee or an inanimate object, she reflected tautly. Perhaps he needed to learn that she could fight back and be every bit as strong and dispassionate as any man could be. In fact, if she played her cards right, Nik might even be glad to give her a divorce by the time she had finished with him…