Penniless and Purchased

Cosmo’s wealth telling him exactly why she was there.

So she was still playing the same game…still hanging out with rich men.

Emotion lashed through him, whipping up from deep inside—from a place he had long, long since buried. Shock was still uppermost in him, but he was controlling it now. Channelling it. Focussing it. Targeting it.

Targeting it on the one person who had been his sole lapse of judgement. His one mistake.

Sophie Granton.

Sophie felt her face beneath the mask of her make-up freeze. No, she thought faintly through the numb miasma in her head, it couldn’t be! It just couldn’t! Not him—not here—not now.

But it was him. Nikos Kazandros. The name tolled in her brain. Tolling her fate. Her doom.

Her eyes could not tear themselves from him. Could not move from the hard, sculpted planes of his face, the sable hair, slashing cheekbones and the night-dark eyes. Could not move from the lean, packed muscle of his six-foot height, the lithe length of his leg, the panthered grace of his stride.

Nikos Kazandros—walking out of the past. Making her oblivious to everything—everything except him. Oblivious to the man she was with, whose company had been anathema to her all evening.

She had made it through drinks at the hotel bar, followed by dinner, over which he had regaled her with boasting about his wealth and possessions, while she had smiled fixedly and asked flattering questions as if she cared less. Then they had arrived at this nightmare party that they seemed to have been at for hours. A sick headache was pressing around her temples, and her stomach was still churning at what she was doing, and why. Sophie had tried desperately to cling to the numbness, just to see her through the remainder of this hideous evening.

And now that numbness had been blasted away as if by nuclear detonation, in one hideous, appalling moment. The moment of ghastly recognition of the man walking towards her.

Nikos Kazandros.

Somewhere, wildly, like a trapped, panicking bird, she could feel thoughts battering around inside her skull. How could it be him? How could it? At a place like this?

It hadn’t taken her more than thirty shocked seconds to stare around at the lavish penthouse apartment, with the pounding music and the alcohol and drugs circulating freely, and the men cut from the same cloth as the one at her side, and the women—the women looking just the way she did…

To see Nikos Kazandros here, at a party like this…

Memory stabbed through her head.

Covent Garden, a gala night, the men in black tie, the women glittering in jewellery and designer gowns, with the world’s greatest tenor and soprano pouring out their voices on stage. Nikos in evening dress, immaculate, devastating, and herself, sitting beside him in their dress circle seats, so quiveringly, shiveringly aware of him…

Nikos glancing towards her, with eyes that held in them an expression that made her heart turn over…

The guillotine sliced down. The one that had been slicing down through her brain for four long, endless, punishing years. Cutting out Nikos Kazandros.

As he made his way towards her, Nikos could take in the full impact of her appearance. Kohled eyes, slicked hair, scarlet mouth, trashy dress. Revulsion curled in him. So this was Sophie Granton now. Four years on. In a place like this. For a brief, knifing moment he felt a different revulsion.

That she should have come to this!

Memory skidded through his head, but he banished it. She had never existed, the girl he’d thought her to be. She’d been someone he’d made up, created for himself out of his own delusions. Delusions that had come crashing down when Sophie Granton had shown what she really wanted.

His mouth twisted. Not me. Just the Kazandros money. To save the family coffers.

He came up to her, stood looking down at her. The look of shock had gone from her face, wiped as if he’d never seen in it. Now her face was blank. Empty. There was no sign that she thought there was anything incongruous about her presence here. Or her appearance. Or who she was with and why. For a second, he just let his hard gaze flick over her. Then it was gone. He glanced at the man at her side, acknowledging his recognition of him.

‘Cosmo—’

‘Nik—’

There was a moment’s pause, then the other man said, his voice at once both oleaginous and mocking, speaking in their native language, ‘Well, well, this is a new departure for you, Nik. Finally decided to lighten up? Are you with anyone, or are you just going to help yourself to what’s on offer? I must say some of the girls here look even more tempting than the one I’ve brought along. If you’re on your own you can take your pick of them.’

His eyes went greedily out over the room, where the assembled female flesh for hire was displaying itself, but his hand had closed possessively over Sophie’s wrist all the same, Nikos saw. Stamping his ownership. Again, Nikos felt the thrust of revulsion ice through him.

As Cosmo’s hot, stubby fingers closed around her, Sophie swallowed. She’d been trying to avoid the slightest physical contact all evening, but now, with horror opening like a pit beneath her feet, as Nikos Kazandros walked out of the nightmare past into the nightmare present, she was almost grateful for it. Grateful, too, that she could not understand what was being said between the two men.

When she’d realised that the man she was to meet that evening had a Greek name, she’d felt as if the gods themselves were mocking her. Bitterness had risen in her throat, as well as revulsion, and revulsion had twisted through her again when she had walked up to him in the hotel bar some three hours earlier. Greek he might be, but Cosmo Dimistris was as physically different from the only Greek man she knew as a warthog from a leopard. Shorter than her in her high heels, overweight, face like putty, with hot, lascivious eyes, and hands with stumpy fingers and damp palms.

Well, she thought viciously, what did she expect? If a man had to pay for a woman’s company in the evening he would hardly be an Adonis, would he? Against her will, her eyes went to the man standing opposite now, and the contrast with the man at her side was cruel and stark. Oh, dear God, he hadn’t changed! Not in four agonisingly long years! He was still the most devastating man she had ever laid eyes on! Even now, with a look of killing contempt in his night-dark eyes, she could feel his power as his gaze razored over her. She knew what he saw, even though she had masked her own expression with a blankness that cost her all her strength to hold in place. For a terrible moment, she felt his contempt like a physical blow, shaming and searing her. Then the lasering glance was gone, and he was looking back at Cosmo Dimistris.

‘I’m minding Georgias Panotis—Anatole Panotis’s son,’ he said tersely. ‘The kid’s wet behind the ears.’ He nodded to where Georgias was still close, dancing with the girl with more hair than dress.

Cosmo gave a coarse laugh. ‘Going to spoil his fun?’

‘Like the fun you have?’ His voice was edged, and once more his eyes went to the woman who was going to provide Cosmo Dimistris’s ‘fun’ tonight.

Nikos felt emotion cresting through him like a dark, killing anger. Out of nowhere, like a black tide, he felt the urge to wrest Cosmo’s hand from her wrist, tell him to go and find his fun somewhere else! He clamped it down, quelling it by force, slamming down the lid on it as if it were glowing nuclear waste. Sophie Granton was not worth a microgram of emotion—not a moment more of his time. Not then, not now.

His eyes flicked over her one last time. She showed nothing in her eyes now. Nothing after the first shock of recognition. Or was it dismay? He felt the question sting. Yes, he thought with turbid anger, why not dismay? Four years ago she had nearly, so very nearly, succeeded in making a fool of him. Well, she would deceive no one now! He could look at her with impunity. With the only kind of look she deserved. His mouth twisted in contempt as his eyes flicked over her again. She was blanking him, he could see, and his eyes narrowed. There was something about her blankness, her closed, expressionless face, that sent a stab of anger through him. She hadn’t been like that when he’d peeled her off him.

Tears, sobbing, clinging to him, clutching at him.

Cosmo was speaking again, and Nikos made himself listen. ‘Speaking of fun…I need some of the powder kind.’ He dropped Sophie’s wrist and changed to English. ‘Stay right there, baby.’

To Sophie’s dismay, he headed off across the room, to be promptly pounced on by a trio of girls, none of whose attention seemed to bother him. She stared after him. Where was he going? Why? Panic broke through. Dear God, she couldn’t be left here like this—with Nikos Kazandros right in front of her. She made to lurch forward, but it was too late. A single word stayed her.

‘Sophie.’

Behind the frozen mask of her face, as if a searing flame had scorched the ice in her mind, dissolving the chains and padlocks, the bars and bolts she had put around the past, like a dam being breached, memory came drowning in. Unbearable, agonising memory.

The past, pouring through her head like molten lead…

CHAPTER TWO

THE spring sun was warm on her head, even in the early evening, as Sophie walked through Holland Park, up from Kensington High Street, where she’d hopped off the bus. She loved taking this walk, especially at this time of year. Was there ever a time of year more lovely? she thought. Bars of Schumann’s ‘Spring Symphony’ trilled euphonically through her head as she walked lightly through the park, where trees were unfurling their greenery, the air sweet, even for London.

She quickened her pace. She wanted to tell her father the wonderful news, that she’d been chosen as one of the soloists for the college concert next month. Her mind ran through the repertoire. The two Chopin nocturnes were easy enough, but the Liszt was fiendish! Well, practice would make perfect. It was a shame they weren’t going to get the new baby grand that her father had promised her for her birthday earlier in the year, but the existing one was perfectly good enough, and she mustn’t be greedy.

She frowned very slightly. It was unlike her father to stint on anything to do with her music. He’d been her biggest enthusiast, from the moment her primary school music teacher had said she really should have piano lessons. From then on her father had paid willingly for anything and everything that developing her talent, such as it was, required. Oh, she was no musical genius. She knew that, accepted that. So very few musicians were, and, considering how incredibly hard it was even for the exceptionally gifted to make a living, she didn’t envy them. No, she was perfectly content being talented, dedicated—and amateur. Besides, she made rueful the acknowledgement that she was in the highly privileged position of not having to earn a living. Even when she left college she could continue with her music without any thought of having to make it pay in any way. She would play for pleasure—and other people’s, too, she hoped.

Certainly her father loved to listen to her. Again, a rueful smile tugged at her lips. He might be her biggest fan, but his ear was not musical.

‘Oh, Daddy, that’s Handel, not Bach!’

She heard herself laugh affectionately in her memory.

‘Whatever you say, Sophie, pet, whatever you say,’ Edward Granton would reply indulgently.