LYNNE GRAHAM - Bond Of Hatred

Sarah burst out laughing, hysteria clawing like insanity at her cracking composure. Abruptly she covered her working face again, stricken that he of all people should see her in such a state. Dear lord, what did this barbarian want from her now. Couldn’t he even leave her to grieve in peace?

Only a couple of hours had passed since she had been bundled unceremoniously from her sister’s bedside and the crash team had attempted to get her sister breathing again. It had happened so fast and they had tried so hard. But Callie, once the leading light of her school athletics team, had died of a massive coronary, just days off her nineteenth birthday. Sarah had been shattered but she had been totally devastated by what she’d learnt from the consultant gynaecologist afterwards.

Early in her pregnancy, Callie had been warned that she had a weak heart. Routine testing had revealed what nobody had ever had any cause to suspect. She had been advised to have a termination and she had refused. She had not shared any of that with her sister. Sarah had been surprised by the sheer frequency of Callie’s ante-natal appointments but she had had no idea that there was anything wrong.

‘Callie was one hundred per cent determined to have her baby,’ the consultant had told her wryly. ‘That was her choice. Possibly she didn’t tell you because she was afraid that you might try to change her mind.’

‘Miss Hartwell?’ Alex Terzakis persisted grimly, impatiently.

Please God, make him leave me alone, she prayed feverishly, curving her arms round her churning stomach and involuntarily rocking back and forth on the edge of the bench.

‘I cannot leave you here in this condition,’ he continued, his accent growing more pronounced with every unanswered intervention. ‘I wish to see you safely to your home. I also wish to assume responsibility for the funeral arrangements—’

‘You bloody savage!’ Sarah, who never ever swore, found the word flying off her tongue. A stricken sense of horror had attacked her as he’d spoken. ‘You wouldn’t let her marry into your family but you can’t wait to bury her!’

‘I do not intend to stand here being insulted in a public place,’ he gritted through clenched teeth, and she could feel the force of his suppressed rage licking out at her like hungry flames, desperate for fuel to feed on. It was a curiously satisfying experience, warming her chilled bones.

‘Then you know what to do about it, don’t you?’ Sarah collided with blazing golden eyes set between incredibly luxuriant ebony lashes and felt oddly dizzy for a split-second. She tilted her chin. ‘Get lost.’

‘If you were not a woman...’ he launched at her with raw, splintering aggression. He was white beneath his bronzed skin, his classic bone-structure starkly prominent. He was rigid with fury and frustration.

‘You’d be dead,’ Sarah murmured shakily. ‘If I were a man, I’d have killed you for what you did to Callie in your fancy big office five months ago!’

His brilliant gaze had narrowed to piercing pin-points of light, arrowing over her very small, very slight figure and the huge green eyes dominating her triangular face. ‘On this occasion, I desired only to offer you my assistance at a time of severe trial to us all .’

He strode off. Incredibly good carriage, she noted abstractedly, and then it hit her finally. Callie gone... Callie gone forever. She had not cried a single tear. Her eyes had burned and scorched but remained dry through-out. And now the tears came in a silent tidal wave, streaming down her quivering cheeks in agonised relief. She was so terribly grateful that it hadn’t happened in front of him.

* * *

‘You’ll never guess who just walked in.’ Gina nudged Sarah in the ribs seconds after the short funeral service began, her plump over-made-up face suddenly wreathed with rampant curiosity. ‘It’s them ...got to be, hasn’t it? Who else could it be?’

‘Shush,’ Sarah urged, her head downbent as the service opened with a short prayer.

Alex and Damon Terzakis. The combined view of them hit her like a punch in the stomach at the graveside. She went white with outrage, considering their presence a desecration of Callie’s memory. How dared they come here and mourn her sister when between them they had made her sister’s last months a living hell? How dared they! Damon was studying the ground. He was thinner, older than she remembered, both hands clasped tightly before him.

‘Decent of them to come...the way you feel,’ Gina muttered out of the corner of her mouth. She was a large woman in her late forties and an inveterate talker, no matter what the occasion.

People began to leave, shaking her hand. Mostly very young people, Callie’s friends from her schooldays. Nobody from the university, but then Callie had abandoned her studies many months previously and broken all contact with the friends she had made there. Without warning, Gina darted from her side and approached the Terzakis males. Infuriated by her defection, Sarah walked on with the minister and parted from him beside Gina’s car.

Sickened, she stared at the black limousine with its tinted windows and chauffeur standing by on the other side of the churchyard. She hadn’t been able to afford even one funeral car. But then things like that weren’t important, she reminded herself painfully, and she had to conserve what little money she had for her nephew.

‘I’m going to call him Nikos, after Damon’s father,’ Callie had announced months ago, after a scan had revealed the sex of her unborn child. She had wanted to know whether she was carrying a boy or a girl and she had been over the moon when she’d learnt that it was a boy.

‘Damon won’t be able to stay away,’ Callie had forecast almost smugly, patting her swollen stomach. ‘Not from his son.’

Sarah had been amazed at the strength of her sister’s naïve faith in the man who had abandoned her to single parenthood. After all that had happened, she had been unable to comprehend how Callie could still hope, but during her sister’s pregnancy she had been reluctant to deprive her of any belief that bolstered her spirits. She had been dreading the aftermath of the birth when poor Callie would have been faced with reality. She would have waited in vain for a proud father to show up. Damon was a wimp, utterly under big brother’s thumb, and the threat of disinheritance and exile from his beloved family had completely overpowered his much vaunted great love for Callie!

Gina swam back to her, beaming all over her round face, and unlocked the car.

‘Why did you speak to them?’ Sarah whispered painfully.

‘Because you’re being absolutely stupid!’ Gina said bluntly. ‘If you want to keep that baby, be practical. Bite your lip and let them keep you both—’

‘I’d sooner be dead!’ Sarah exclaimed.

‘He’s little Nicky’s dad, isn’t he? Why shouldn’t he pay up?’ Gina demanded. ‘You can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll pay a packet to keep all this out of the newspapers.’

‘Gina—’ Sarah muttered, dismayed but not particularly surprised by the older woman’s calculation.

‘You’ve got to be realistic, love,’ Gina continued, not unkindly. ‘You want little Nicky and I think you’re crazy, but then you always were the maternal type, even as a kid. So keep him and raise him and make them pay through the nose for it!’

‘I don’t want anything from them!’

‘If you don’t take their money, you’ll have to live on benefit,’ Gina pointed out drily. ‘And the social services will pursue Damon.’

‘To Greece?’ A hysterical laugh was lodged like a sob in Sarah’s constricted throat.

‘Well, they wouldn’t have much trouble tracking him down, would they?’