Lynne Graham - The Cozakis Bride

Striding over to the tall tinted windows like a leopard on the prowl for fresh meat, Nik stilled again. Spyros had sworn he would never forgive her. Spyros was a man of his word. And Nik still pitied the older man, whose deep shame over his erring granddaughter’s behaviour had been painful to witness. His only son had drowned in a yacht race and his daughter had become an unwed mother. Bad blood in that family, Nik’s own father had decided, implying that his headstrong son had had a narrow escape.

Yet still Nik simmered like a boiling cauldron when he recalled the humiliation of being publicly confronted with the fact that his fiancée, his doe-eyed supposedly virginal bride-to-be, had gone out to his car with a drunken friend and had sex with him. It was disgusting; it was filthy. In fact, just thinking about that degrading, utterly inexcusable episode still had the power to make Nik regret that he had never had the opportunity to punish Olympia Manoulis as she had so definitely deserved.

The atmosphere was so explosive that the silence was absolute. His staff exchanged uncertain glances. Gerry Marsden waited, and then slowly breathed in. ‘Sir…?’

Nik wheeled back. ‘Let her wait…’

His PA concealed his surprise with difficulty. ‘At what time will I tell your secretary that you will see her?’

‘No time.’ His eyes cold enough to light the way to Hades, Nik threw back his proud dark head. ‘Let her wait.’

As the hours crept past into the lunch hour, and then on into the late afternoon, Olympia was conscious that quite a few people seemed to pass suspiciously slowly through the impressive reception area and steal a covert glance in her direction.

She held her head high, neck aching from that determined show of indifference. She had her foot in the door, she told herself bracingly. Nik hadn’t had her escorted off the premises. Nik had not flatly refused to see her. And if he was very, very busy, that was only what she had expected, and she could not hope for any favours. Curiosity would eventually penetrate that arrogant, macho and bone-deep stubborn skull of his. Even Nik Cozakis had to be that human.

Despair was the mother of invention, she conceded. Nik Cozakis was literally her last hope. And why should her fierce pride hurt? No false pride had held her mother back from scrubbing other people’s floors so that she could feed and clothe her daughter.

Just before five o’clock, the receptionist rose from behind her desk. ‘Mr Cozakis has left the building, Miss Manoulis.’

Olympia paled to the colour of milk. Then she straightened her stiff shoulders and stood up. She stepped into the lift and let it carry her back down to the ground floor. She would be back tomorrow to keep the same vigil, she told herself doggedly. She would not be embarrassed into retreat by such tactics. But, even so, she was as badly shaken as if she had run into a hard brick wall.

As she stood on the bus that would eventually bring her within walking distance of home, she realised that she had read the situation wrong. Nik was no longer the teenager she had once been so pathetically infatuated with: impatient and hot-tempered, with not a lot in the way of self-control. The eldest son of two adoring parents, he had been the natural leader in his sophisticated social set of bored but gilded youth.

And so beautiful, so heartachingly, savagely beautiful that it must have seemed like a crime to his unlovely friends that he should be matched with an unattractive, plump and charmless bride-to-be…

But now Nik was a fully grown adult male. A Greek male, subtly different from others of his sex. Like her grandfather, he saw no need to justify his own behaviour. There had been no quiet announcement that he was unavailable. He had let her wait and cherish hope. That had been cruel, but she should have been better prepared for that tack.

The scent of cooking greeted Olympia’s return to the flat she shared with her mother. She hurried into the tiny kitchen and watched her mother gather her spare frame and turn with a determined smile to greet her. Her heart turned over sickly at the grey pallor of the older woman’s worn face.

“I thought we agreed that I do all the cooking, Mum.’

‘You’ve been out looking for a job all day. It’s the least that I can do,’ Irini Manoulis protested.

Later, as Olympia climbed into bed, she was consumed by guilt for the evasions she had utilised with her mother. But how could she have told the older woman what she had really been doing all day? Irini would have been upset by the knowledge that her daughter had secretly got in touch with her grandfather, but unsurprised by the outcome. However, an admission that Olympia had tried to see Nik Cozakis would have left her mother bereft of breath and a frank explanation of why her daughter had sought that meeting would have appalled her quiet and dignified parent.

But how much more shattered would her trusting mother have been had Olympia ever told her the whole dreadful truth of what had happened in Athens a decade earlier? Olympia had never told that story, and her awareness of that fact still disturbed her. Then, as now, Olympia had kept her own counsel to protect her mother from needless distress…

The next morning, Olympia took up position in the waiting area on the top floor of the Cozakis building three minutes after nine o’clock.

She made the same request to see Nik as she had made the day before. The receptionist avoided eye contact. Olympia wondered if this would be the day that Nik lost patience and had her thrown out of the building.

At ten minutes past nine, after a mutually mystified consultation with another senior member of staff, Gerry Marsden approached Nik, who had started work as usual at eight that morning. ‘Miss Manoulis is here again today, sir.’

Almost imperceptibly the Greek tycoon tensed and the silence thickened.

‘Have you the Tenco file?’ Nik then enquired, as if the younger man hadn’t spoken.

The day wore on, with Olympia praying that a pretence of quiet, uncomplaining humility would ultimately persuade Nik to spare her just five minutes of his time. By the end of that day, when the receptionist apologetically announced that Mr Cozakis had again left the building, Olympia experienced such a violent surge of bitter frustration that she could have screamed.

On the third day, Olympia felt hugely conspicuous as she stepped out of the lift on to the top floor.

Before leaving home she would have liked to have filled a vacuum flask and made herself some sandwiches, but to have done so would have roused her mother’s suspicions and her concern. Since Olympia had yet to admit to her mother that their slender resources were now stretched unbearably tight. Irini fondly imagined that her daughter bought lunch for herself while she was out supposedly seeking employment.

However, at noon, when Olympia returned from a visit to the enviably luxurious cloakroom on the top floor, she found a cup of tea and three biscuits awaiting her. Her strained face softened with her smile. The receptionist gave her a decidedly conspiratorial glance in return. By then, Olympia was convinced that just about every person of importance in the building had traversed the reception area to take a peek at her. Sympathy was now softening the discomfiture her initial vigil had inspired. Not that it was going to do her much good, she conceded heavily, when Nik obviously had an alternative exit from his office.

At three that afternoon, when the last of her patience had worn away, her desperation started to mount. Nik would soon be on his way back to Greece and even more out of her reach. Olympia reached a sudden decision and got up swiftly from her seat. Hurrying past the reception desk that she had previously respected as a barrier, she started down the wide corridor that had to lead to Nik’s inner sanctum.