Wedding Night with a Stranger Read Free

time.’
    The Nikosto family villa. Except it wasn’t the Nikosto family . It was one member of it. One angry, ice-cold member.
    Until she could talk to her uncle and aunt again, get a clearer idea of where she stood money-wise, perhaps her best option was to pretend to play along.
    She met Sebastian Nikosto’s dark eyes and crushed down her pride. ‘No. No, look.’ The words were as ashes on her tongue. ‘I’m—really very grateful for your kindness.’ Her voice cracked on the last one.
    His heavy black lashes lowered. The faintest flush tinged hischeek as he said brusquely, ‘All right, then. So—dinner this evening? I’ll pick you up here at seven.’ His eyes flickered to her mouth. ‘Might as well—make a start.

CHAPTER TWO
    A RIADNE walked fast, up and down the hotel suite’s sitting room until she’d nearly worn a furrow in the carpet. Then she strode furiously around straightening the pictures, shifting lamps to more pleasing positions, realigning the chairs.
    Her uncle’s scheme had placed her in an impossible situation with that icy, smouldering man. What had he been offered to marry her? No wonder he had such a low opinion of her, but why, oh, why had he agreed if it enraged him so much?
    Maybe, if she could have despised him more, she wouldn’t feel so ashamed. Ashamed of her uncle. Ashamed of herself and the mess she’d fallen into by thinking she was in love with that smooth-talking liar, Demetri Spiros.
    Imagine if Sebastian Nikosto heard about the wedding scandal. Her uncle’s words on the subject had rung in her ears all the way to Sydney. ‘There isn’t a man in Greece who would touch you now with a very long pole.’
    Surely her uncle must know that if she did ever marry someone, even someone ‘bought’—she flushed again in memory of Sebastian’s stinging words—the man would have to be told about the scandal.
    Other things Sebastian had said returned to her now with scathing significance. Some people choose to work, in case you haven’t heard. As if he’d assumed she had no professionalqualifications of her own. Did she look as if she’d spent her life as a useless ornament?
    She kept rephrasing the things she’d said to him and turning them into what she should have said. Next time she saw him…Tonight, if she could bear to face him tonight, she’d set him straight about what sort of woman she was. And if he thought for a second, for an instant, that she would ever be available to him…
    When the storm had calmed a little, she sat on the bed and forced herself to reason. In Athens it would be morning. Her uncle would be on his way to his office, her aunt engaged in either her beauty routine or instructing the housekeeper. Thea Leni was always affectionate and easy to deal with, though her compliance in the subterfuge to trick Ariadne onto the plane had been a painful shock. The hurt felt more savage every time she thought of it. Her loving aunt must have believed in her husband’s solution to the ‘Ariadne problem’, at least a bit.
    She put her head in her hands, still unable to believe all that had happened. Had they intended it as a punishment? She’d believed in their kindness absolutely, ever since, after the accident, they’d brought her as a seven-year-old to her uncle’s house on Naxos. Though quite a lot older than her parents, they’d done all they could to replace them. In their old-fashioned way they’d loved her, protected her, even to the point of making her feel quite suffocated by the time she reached eighteen.
    Why hadn’t she woken up sooner to this holiday idea? When had Thio Peri ever wanted her to leave Greece without them in the past? Everything she’d done, every step she’d taken from the time she was seven, had been done under his care and protection, as if she were the most precious individual on the planet.
    Even when they’d sent her to boarding school in England, either Thea Leni or Thio Pericles himself had come personally at