Free The Konstantos Marriage Demand by Kate Walker Page A

my lover?’
    He wouldn’t put it past her, Nikos acknowledged to himself. Sadie Carteret had had a liking for the good things of life, always provided someone else was paying. The way she had discarded him so quickly when his family had been ruined and he had lost his personal fortune had been proof of that. And of course she had deliberately distracted him so that her father could work behind the scenes, planning hostile takeovers, finding ways to bring the Konstantos empire down. She had even been prepared to sacrifice her own virginity to ensure that the destructive plan succeeded.
    Beyond the windows, yet another distant rumble of thunder after what he assumed was the flash of lightning just seemed to underline the point of her corruption.
    ‘Nothing would surprise me.’
    ‘Well, for your information, I share the house with my mother and little brother.’
    That was so unexpected that it seemed to hit like a blow between his eyes, making his head go back in shock, eyes narrowing assessingly. This was information he had not been given.
    ‘You don’t have a brother.’
    The look Sadie turned on his was wide-eyed, innocent, sharply contrasting with the way that her chin came up and she faced him defiantly over the table.
    ‘Well, that just goes to show that your amazing spy network isn’t as good as you thought. For your information, I do have a brother—a little brother called George. He was born—He’s not quite five.’
    Five. Why did it seem that everything that had turned his life upside down had happened at the point not quite five years before? So her mother had been pregnant around the time when they had been together and planning to get married, or just after. And little George had been born into the maelstrom of action and reaction once her father’s plan to bring down the house of Konstantos had been put into motion.
    And of course in those months he had been focusing only on holding things together. On keeping the corporation from going under and taking his beleaguered father with it. At the time he had felt that if he thought about anything else, focussed on anything else, then the dark waves of total disaster would break over his head and he would definitely go down for the third time—and never come up again.
    But the fact that she had a brother put a different complexion on the fact that Sadie wanted to keep the house. This George was so young that there was no way he could have ever been involved in anything the adult Carterets had planned and implemented against his family.
    ‘I see,’ he said, the words loaded with dark meaning. ‘That explains why I never got to hear of it. So tell me…’
    ‘No.’
    Ridiculously buoyed up by the small triumph she’d had in putting him mentally onto the wrong foot for once, Sadie waved the hand that had picked up her fork to dig into her pasta to silence him.
    ‘My turn.’
    He might hold all the aces, but that didn’t mean that she was going to let him get away with monopolising the conversation and treating the meal as if it was a trial for fraud with him as the counsel for the prosecution.
    ‘I get to ask some questions too.’
    Was that a grudging respect in his eyes, the inclination of his head? Just the possibility gave her a little surge of confidence as she forked up a mouthful of her pasta.
    ‘What questions?’
    ‘Well, the obvious, for a starter. Like—you said you wanted to talk to me about a job. What sort of a job could I do for you? I mean—what need would you have of a wedding planner?’
    ‘That really is asking the obvious,’ Nikos commented. ‘To plan a wedding, of course.’
    The impact of his response hit home just in the moment that Sadie popped the forkful of pasta into her mouth and chewed. Too late she realised that she’d been in such a state of apprehension when she’d arrived at the restaurant that she’d blindly ordered her meal with an arrabiata sauce, instead of the one next to it on the menu. She loathed