The Greek’s Chosen Wife

reject the marriage that had once been her naive and foolish dream. And to her horror and without the slightest warning, tears sprouted into her eyes and poured in a flood down her cheeks.

‘Prudence…’ Leo was horrified and palpably embarrassed and he gripped the hand she had rested on the table. ‘Shall we leave?’

‘No, I’ll be all right in a minute…sorry,’ she told him ruefully, fumbling for a tissue and smiling apologetically at him through her tears.

Somewhere very close a camera flashed. Leo blinked and released his hold on her to shoot upright. ‘That bloke just took a photo of us! What’s going on?’

‘I must have been followed from Nik’s apartment. I thought I’d shaken the reporters off, but obviously I was wrong,’ Prudence sighed, mopping her face dry.

Leo stayed upright, making it clear that he would still prefer to leave. ‘You should have warned me…I had no idea you attracted this kind of attention when you were in London.’

‘I don’t as a rule, but word seems to have leaked out about the divorce and evidently anything to do with Nik’s private life is news. The paparazzi adore him.’ It crossed Prudence’s mind that, put in the same position as Leo, Nik would have shrugged and stayed to eat. But then Nik had a magnificent disregard for incidents that embarrassed other people. She felt guilty for comparing him to Leo, who was more sensitive and not at all arrogant.

On the drive back home, Leo told her that he had applied for a teaching position in London. A pang of dismay assailed her, for if he was successful he would be selling up and moving to the city and she would miss his company. Yet she also appreciated that such a move would make sense for him now that his father was no longer alive.

Only when Leo had finished telling Prudence about his plans was she free to ponder her own predicament. It seemed to her that she was in a no-win situation. If she continued with the divorce proceedings in the teeth of Nik’s opposition she would be wasting money she didn’t have on legal bills. She would have to find another way of changing Nik’s mind. Of course, a really bold woman would not allow Nik to come between her and her future plans, Prudence reflected ruefully. A really bold woman would head off to the sperm bank regardless, reflecting that she had asked for a divorce and that if her subsequent fertility caused her husband embarrassment and some denials, it would be entirely his own fault. But even though she was angry with both Nik and her grandfather, she did not wish to affront either man to that extent.

A strange car was parked in the yard at her home. Annoyed that the ‘For Sale’ board was still there at the foot of the lane, Prudence was hoping that the car belonged to the estate agent so that she could give him a piece of her mind. A small, pugnacious man in a suit got out of the car and approached her. ‘Mrs Prudence Angelis…?’

Prudence nodded confirmation. ‘Yes?’

He handed her a document and got straight back into his car to drive off again. She opened it up. It was an eviction notice drawn up by her grandfather’s legal firm in London.

Her solicitor, Mr Bullen, was able to see her first thing the next morning. He studied the notice she had been served with and sighed. ‘Yes, I’m afraid it’s in order. Your mother was warned that this could happen some day.’

‘My mother, Trixie…knew that there was a risk of this? She never mentioned it to me. I don’t understand,’ Prudence protested, her eyes shadowed by the horrible sleepless night of worry she had endured.

‘As you know, my colleague, who handled your late mother’s estate, retired last year. He may well have assumed that your mother had already explained the intricacies of your position and that you understood the problems.’

‘I thought I did, but I obviously didn’t. I knew that I would never own Craighill Farm. But I believed that it was mine to use for my lifetime.’

‘The farm belongs to your grandfather and he has always had the right to ask you to vacate the property so that it can be sold. The agreement by which your mother acquired the right to live at Craighill was extremely complex. In it, however, your grandfather, Theo Demakis, clearly reserved the right to put an end to the agreement at any time and he has now chosen to exercise that option.’ The solicitor surveyed his client with a curiosity he could not conceal. ‘Of course you could purchase Craighill Farm for your own use and that would soon settle the problem.’

Prudence stretched her mouth into as good a semblance of an unconcerned smile as she could manage. She was fully conscious that while she carried the name Angelis a plea of poverty was unlikely to receive a sympathetic hearing. She walked slowly back out to her battered four-wheel-drive. She felt traumatised. She was to move out of the farm within the month. It was a bad moment to appreciate that, whenever trouble loomed on her horizon, she was accustomed to phoning Nik. He had always been her first port of call in a tight corner and his advice and guidance had proved invaluable a dozen times in the past. But she couldn’t phone Nik for support this time, could she?

There was certainly no point contacting her Greek grandfather, who had made his animosity clear with a speed and a ferocity that appalled her. Evidently, her decision to divorce Nik had been the last straw. In her ignorance she had believed that her father, Apollo, had funded the purchase of the farm and that it would be her home until the end of her days. The truth had come as a severe shock. Why should her grandfather let her continue to live in his property when as far as he was concerned she was a rubbish granddaughter? Theo Demakis owed her nothing, she conceded wretchedly.

In less than a month, every animal in the sanctuary would be homeless. It was as if a bomb had exploded under her tidy little world. With it went all her dreams. To think she had believed that she was financially secure enough to contemplate single-parenthood! Only now did she see that her freedom from having to pay either rent or a mortgage had been the foundation of her security and that without that advantage all her plans came apart at the seams.

But she was being horribly selfish when all she could think about were her own problems, she acknowledged guiltily. Dottie and Sam Trent lived at Craighill as well. Where would they move to? She had let the cottage to them and cheerfully assured them that they could live there for as long as they liked. She felt sick at that recollection.

Skilled at handling difficult patients, Dottie had come to nurse Trixie at a time when Prudence was struggling to cope. Within weeks, Dottie and her husband had become keen volunteers at the sanctuary. But soon after Trixie’s death, Sam had had a stroke and Dottie had been unable to work. The kindly couple had got into financial difficulty through no fault of their own and that was when Prudence had extended a helping hand. Her generosity had been repaid a hundred times over and Sam’s health had improved steadily but the older man would never recover full mobility. The Trents would be utterly devastated if they lost their home for a second time.

Prudence got back to the farm just in time for the estate agent’s visit. When he told her what he believed the property would fetch on the open market, she was appalled: it was an amount as far out of her reach as the stars. Even so, she made an appointment with her bank for the following day so that she could find out if there was any way she could borrow the money. She was informed that she had no assets to offer as security and that she did not earn enough to meet the payments. The loan officer at the building society she approached was equally deflating.

Her heart sank and her pride cringed as it slowly and painfully dawned on her that the only person she could turn to for help was Nik. Before she could lose her nerve, she rang him.

‘I need to see you…urgently!’ she confided in a rush.

His lean, strong face etched in forbidding lines, Nik surveyed the newspaper spread out on his desk and the grainy photo of his wife holding hands with her very good friend, Leo. ‘In relation to what?’

Prudence worried at her lower lip. ‘I’ve had a bit of a shock. I’m in a serious fix. Would you consider giving me a loan? You’d probably have to stretch the payments over about a hundred years,’ she warned him apprehensively.

‘Explain…’ Interest had sparked like a hot flame in his brooding dark gaze.

‘If I can’t buy Craighill, the sanctuary will have to close and I don’t know where the animals will go…You see, I don’t have the right to live there that I thought I had. Grandfather is selling the farm over my head,’ she told him unevenly.

Nik sprang upright and his smile was colder than ice. Thank you, Theo. Homeless animals-just what he needed as a lever; he was back on track again. He absorbed the remainder of her explanation