The Married Mistress Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 linkthe 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 you for that. After all, you spared me a lot of humiliation and the adverse publicity that I might have had to put up with if people had found out that we were married. Now all I have to do is wait for the legalities to besorted out and we can be divorced as quietly as we were married. Excuse me.’
    She tried to sweep past him, only to have to come to an awkward halt as he blocked her way, coming between her and her path across the hall.
    ‘Where are you going?’
    ‘Upstairs.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Is it any business of yours?’
    ‘Humour me.’
    Seeing the stubborn, unmoving set of his face, the taut line of his hard jaw, she sighed her exasperation, knowing only too well that he had no