the contrast between the strength of the blunt, strong, tanned fingers and the fine, slippery material that seemed totally insubstantial in the firm grasp. But the thought of touching either made her shiver inside.
Slowly she reached out, took hold of the crimson silk, then gave in to her inclinations and, crushing the garment mercilessly, she crumpled it into a ball and flung it with all her strength as far away from her as she could manage.
‘I don’t want it! Not after she’s worn it! I couldn’t bear to touch it again.’
Damon’s dark eyes followed the bright sliver of material as it sailed through the air in a graceful arc and fell to the ground once more. Then his gaze swung back to Sarah’s face, looking deep into her eyes.
‘I’ll buy you another.’
‘No need—I…’
The words died away as she realised not just what he had said but the implications behind it. Clearly Damon planned to stay around, for a while at least. And that was not something she was comfortable with. Certainly not after the scene he had just witnessed, and the interpretation he had obviously put on it. And, even worse, after the discovery that she had made about herself.
‘I can get one myself. I earn a good salary at the art gallery; I can afford to buy myself a nightgown…’
She was speaking only to fill the silence, she knew. And to distract her own thoughts. There were too many things she didn’t want to think about—didn’t dare to think about—and for now it was so much easier to concentrate on the immediate present and what was happening in it.
After all, there was more than enough to face up to there. Sarah drew in her breath sharply and let it out again on a silent sigh. Jason might have gone—and Andrea. And quite frankly she was more than glad to see the back of both of them. But Damon was still here. And getting rid of him was a different prospect altogether.
Her shoulders, which had relaxed in the moments she had watched Jason and Andrea walk away, now tensed again. Her throat tightened so that she had to swallow hard to ease the dryness there, and her chin came up as defiance flared in the green depths of her eyes.
‘What are you doing here, Damon?’
‘I came to see you, of course, my darling…’
‘That’s not what I mean, and you know it!’ Sarah put in hastily and sharply, terrified of hearing that emotive word ‘wife’ on his lips.
Once she had been proud and happy—so happy—to be his wife, even if for his own reasons Damon had insisted that, for a while at least, they told no one the truth. But now their brief, painful façade of a marriage was something she desperately wanted to forget. To obliterate from her mind, if she couldn’t erase it from her past.
‘I want to know why you’re here—in London.’
‘I have business in town. Important meetings.’
It was not the truth, at least not the full truth, Damon admitted to himself. But the truth wasn’t something he was prepared to admit to. Not yet. Perhaps not ever at all.
He had had a meeting planned—one with Sarah to discuss their marriage, or what was left of it. The thoughts that had been in his mind as he’d arrived at the house such a short time before now came back to haunt him, mocking his gullible beliefs and the naïve hope that had been uppermost in his mind then.
He had given Sarah enough time to calm down, he had told himself. After six months of living on her own, stubbornly refusing to see him, returning every one of his letters unopened, surely she was now prepared to listen?
She would listen, he had told himself. No matter what he had to do to make her. He would talk—and she would listen. Somehow he would make her come back to Greece with him. To Mykonos. Where he would show her what he had done. And then…
He hadn’t got any further than that.
‘I see—business. Of course. What else?’
Sarah’s voice was cold and tight. If he didn’t know better, he’d have said she sounded disappointed. Which might have pleased him when he had first reached the house—when he’d still had hopes and illusions of a future. Before the appearance of Jason and his obvious familiarity with Sarah’s bedroom had shattered those illusions.
‘You know me, ghineka mou,’ he shot back. ‘Always busy, making deals, signing contracts.’
‘Acquiring land?’ Sarah returned with even more bite in her tone. Whatever disappointment she had been feeling a moment before, if disappointment was the right word, it was now totally submerged under the angry bitterness that blazed from her eyes. ‘Built any nice extensions to your hotels lately, Damon?’
‘Not since you left, my love,’ he returned, his tone dripping saccharine-sweetness. ‘And, as I recall, you never signed the papers agreeing to the one that I wanted.’
‘No, I didn’t, did I? That must have made things rather awkward for you.’
Damon’s smile in reply to the barbed comment was grim, tight, totally without any warmth.
‘No more awkward than they were already, agape mou. I told you then that your ownership of that land was not why I married you.’
‘I know what you told me, husband, dear, but I also know what I believe.’
Let him think that what had driven them apart was the piece of land that the Nicolaides Corporation coveted most on all the island of Mykonos. That was the reason she had given him for leaving in the letter she had left behind, the one she had clung to when he had come after her in a towering rage, demanding that she return at once. That and the fact that she had grown tired of their marriage, bored with life on the small Cyclades island. And it was one she would far rather have him believe than the actual, the hatefully painful truth.
‘Admit it, it was remarkably inconvenient for you that I discovered that the land my grandfather had left me was just the part of the island that you wanted. Especially when the old man had declared to your father’s face that he would rather die than sign the land over to anyone from your family.’
Her grandfather had been half Greek on his mother’s side. Through that line he had inherited the land on Mykonos. The land in question lay between two of the Nicolaides Corporation’s smaller hotels, and it had been a long-held ambition of both Damon and his father to link the hotels into one spectacular resort by building across the empty space. But Alexander Meyerson’s mother’s family had had a long-running feud with the Nicolaides clan, one that he had held fast to in spite of the increasingly huge amounts offered in exchange for the tiny portion of the island he owned, much to Aristotle Nicolaides’ increasing frustration.
So when Damon had learned that Sarah, as her grandfather’s only heir, would now own the land on Mykonos, he had come looking for her.
And she, poor blindly besotted fool that she was, had made matters so much easier for him by falling head over heels madly in love.
‘How you must have cursed those lawyers who wrote and let me know about my luck before you’d had time to get me to sign on any dotted lines.’
‘It was certainly, as you said—inconvenient,’ Damon growled, his stunning features setting into a dark frown. ‘But it was not necessarily fatal. Or it need not have been if you had only stayed to talk things over with me, or come back…’
‘Come back!’ Sarah couldn’t hold back the exclamation of shock and disgust that was pushed from her lips by his outrageous declaration. ‘Come back to a marriage that had never been a real one right from the start? That was built on nothing but lies and deceit? A marriage that you had been determined not to let anyone know about because you were ashamed of it?’
‘Not ashamed!’ Damon flung at her. ‘It just would have been…difficult to make our marriage public at that point.’
‘I’ll bet it would! Well, perhaps in the end I ought to thank