LYNNE GRAHAM - Bond Of Hatred

‘ Cristos ... On the day of the funeral,’ he growled at her from a distance of ten feet. He didn’t trust himself any closer. She understood that. ‘Have you no decent feelings?’

‘About as many as you had when you called my sister a cheap little scrubber to my face five months ago!’ Sarah shot back tight-mouthed.

‘I did not employ such offensive terminology—’

‘You said she was after his money and she slept around... Tell me the difference?’ Sarah invited with only the slightest tremor in her voice.

‘I did not believe she was pregnant,’ Alex breathed curtly through perfect white teeth. It was obvious that the admission was wrenched from him.

‘I want you to get out,’ Sarah told him shakily. ‘You have no business in this house.’

He sent her a glittering black glance of startling ferocity and strode over to the window. ‘My brother is too ashamed to face you...’ he gritted in a driven undertone.

In a weird way, Sarah was beginning to enjoy herself. If the previous admission of faulty judgement had been wrenched from him, the latter had been ripped screaming from Alex Terzakis. Little brother was a wimp. And that offended and humiliated big brother no end! Family honour and all that macho nonsense. Alex was being forced to deal with a woman he despised in a situation in which he had no defence, she registered with increasing confidence. He was here to buy silence.

To buy her silence. Maybe he was scared she would talk to the newspapers. He was a very private man, this Greek tycoon with his barbaric arrogance and pride. He detested publicity. And it wasn’t a nice story, was it? A teenager led up the garden path by a rich, spoilt young playboy and then dumped at spectacular speed once he had had what he had wanted from her. Then that same teenager had been threatened by powerful lawyers, offered hush-money and told to get lost and forget she had ever known anyone with the name of Terzakis!

Sarah’s stomach filled with nausea. It was a horrible story but it only became tragedy if you knew that Callie had loved him right to the bitter end. Tears burned her lowered eyelids and she fought them back bitterly.

‘If by any means within his power Damon could restore her to life, he would.’ She clashed with hard, dark eyes as treacherous as black ice and briefly felt as though she had gone into a skid. The speed with which he had damped down his fury and reasserted rigorous self-discipline sharply disconcerted her. ‘But he cannot. However, he can take charge of his son and give him the life to which he should have been born by right.’

Sarah froze. Her throat closed over. Her long lashes fluttered as she simply stared at Alex Terzakis in disbelief. ‘Give h-him the life...?’ she stammered in a daze, thrown wildly off balance by the statement. ‘What did you say?’

Reading her astonishment, he smiled—he actually smiled. The merest twist of that sensual, perfectly shaped mouth but no less than a smile. ‘Naturally, Damon wishes to raise his child in his own home where he belongs.’

SARAH took several shocked seconds to absorb her incredulity. The Terzakis clan wanted Nicky! They wanted Callie’s child! It was a staggering suggestion and she couldn’t credit that Alex Terzakis could be serious.

Alex took her silence as encouragement. He studied her as a cat studied a mouse, calculation written all over him. ‘Damon adores children. Nikos would be greatly loved.’

‘I really...I really don’t believe I’m hearing this,’ Sarah admitted tremulously. ‘You wouldn’t let your brother marry her and yet you think he has the right to take her child? He cut her off, ignored her letters, allowed you to humiliate her and let her go through a very difficult pregnancy without any support...and you come here and you tell me that he wants her baby ?’ As she spoke, her shaken voice strengthened with growing anger.

‘Whatever you feel for my brother, he is the father of your sister’s child,’ Alex delivered harshly, surprisingly silent and taut in receipt of her condemnation.

‘I can’t believe that you accept that—’

‘Damon inherited a rare blood group from my mother’s side of the family. I understand that Nikos also shares that blood group,’ he volunteered smoothly, seemingly unaware of the gross offence he was offering by admitting that he had taken up all the evidence available before conceding that Nicky was his brother’s child. ‘The chances of that occurring by coincidence are several million to one.’

‘And you’re probably still checking those out!’ Sarah slung at him in disgust.

‘I am not prepared to be drawn into argument with you, Miss Hartwell.’ He angled his gleaming dark head high and surveyed her with innate superiority and unhidden contempt. ‘I am only here for the child’s sake as negotiator on my brother’s behalf.’

‘Negotiator?’ Sarah echoed, trying and failing to swallow back her increasing distress.

‘Conciliator?’ he suggested with black velvet cool. ‘The past cannot be changed. We must consider my nephew’s future—’

‘Nicky’s f-future is with me!’ Sarah told him, but she was badly shaken by an offer she had never envisaged being made.

‘No doubt you think to drive the price up with this pretence of attachment to the child of a father you de-spise—’

‘The price?’ she whispered.

‘Any price...name it and it is yours,’ Alex Terzakis murmured softly, seductively, like a dope dealer dangling death before an addict.

Sarah was so appalled by his estimation of her character that she said nothing.

‘You hand over Nikos quietly, discreetly, keep your mouth shut and in return...in return,’ he repeated with golden eyes so intent on her that his gaze felt like a physical touch, ‘I will give you whatever you want. Think of that. You have had a hard life. What age are you? Thirty, thirty-one?’

Mesmerised, Sarah stared back at him, her trembling hands curving convulsively round a wooden chair-back. Thirty, thirty-one? Dear heaven, did she look that old?

‘You could do something with yourself,’ Alex Terzakis pointed out lazily. ‘It’s not too late. Money can buy beauty. With concentrated effort and professional advice, you could be quite attractive—’

‘You don’t say.’ Sarah could hardly get out the response. Although she had few illusions about her looks, any she might have had were being insensitively ripped to shreds.

‘The world could be your oyster. You could travel. You’re a clever woman. You could probably find yourself a husband.’

Sarah shuddered as she breathed in deep. Desperate for a man...embittered by her lack of one. Clearly that was how Alex Terzakis saw her. With rigorous determination she suppressed a squirming sense of utter humiliation. He was Greek to the backbone. What Callie called ‘unreconstructed man’, what Sarah called a Neanderthal primitive. He belonged in a cave, not a civilised society. Or in a museum alongside the dinosaur display.

Even in the depths of the mortification she was struggling to conceal from him she was conscious of a helpless current of grotesque fascination. On the surface, he was so sophisticated...but underneath as earthy and as simplistic in his beliefs about the needs of a woman as any uneducated peasant. He was telling her politely that what she really needed was a man in her bed... Dear lord, even the dinosaur display would be too advanced for him! It would never occur to him that celibacy was a perfectly natural choice for many people.

Then how could it occur to him? Alex Terzakis had not one but two mistresses. One in Athens, one in Paris. Sarah swallowed back her distaste, repelled by such rampant and unashamed promiscuity. Evidently his sexual appetite was voracious and uncontrolled. In today’s society, Alex Terzakis was a prehistoric savage, more to be pitied than anything else, she told herself, raising her chin. That she should have allowed such a barbarian to hurt and embarrass her was ridiculous!