Looking at her, Nikhil wondered what was going through that beautiful head of hers. There was a remoteness there that had always managed to feed into his curiosity. No woman had ever been able to do that and it got on his nerves.

"Well, I'll fill in the gaps, shall I?" he said roughly. "Your father spent years stealing from the pension fund until there was nothing left to steal. I assume he had a drinking problem?"

Meeta nodded. At boarding school and then university she had not had much time to observe just how much of a drinking problem he had had but it had been enough, she knew, to have sent his car spinning off the motorway at three in the morning.

"The man was an alcoholic. A functioning alcoholic, bearing in mind he was crafty enough to get his greedy hands on other people's money, but the fact of the matter was that he nicked what didn't belong to him to the point that his entire company was destined to sink in the quicksand if I hadn't come along and rescued it."

"Why did you?" she asked curiously. She assumed that he must have come from a working class background, if what her father had implied was true, but certainly, by the time he had crash-landed into her life, he was a selfmade billionaire several times over. So why bother with her father's company?

Nikhil flushed darkly. Such a long and involved story and one he had no intention of telling her.

"It had potential," he drawled, his beautiful mouth curving into a smile that could still make her heart beat a little faster. "It had tentacles in all the right areas, and my intuition paid off. It's made me more money than I know what to do with. And then," he continued softly, "how many failing companies come with the added bonus of.........you? Have you looked in the mirror recently, my darling wife? What red-blooded male could have resisted you? And your father was also too happy to close the deal and throw you in for good measure. . . "

He saw the way her face reddened and the way her eyes suddenly looked as though they were tearing up. For a split second, he almost regretted saying what he had said. Almost.

"Except," he carried on in that same unhurried voice, "I didn't get you, did I? You went out with me; you smiled shyly as you hung onto my every word; you let me get so close, close enough for me to need a cold shower every time I returned to my house, because you had turned retreating with a girlish blush into an art form. . . And then, on our wedding night, you informed me that you weren't going to be a part of any deal that I had arranged. You let me on. . . "

"I....I... never meant to do that....." But she could see very clearly how the situation must have looked to a man like Nikhil.

"Now, I wonder why I find that so hard to believe?" he murmured, noticing with some surprise that he had finished his second drink. Regretfully, he decided against a third. "You and your father concocted a little plan to make sure I was hooked into playing ball."

"That's not true!" Bright patches of colour appeared on her cheeks.

"And then, once I had played ball, you were free to drop the act. So now you're talking about divorce. Your father's no longer in danger of the long arm of justice and you want out." He tilted his head to one side as another thought crept in. For the first time, he wondered what got up to in his many absences.

He could have put a trail on her but he had chosen not to. He had simply not been able to imagine his frozen ice maiden doing anything behind his back. Except she hadn't always been that ice maiden, had she? There was more to her than that cool detachment. He had seen that for himself before she had said "I do.. " So had she been getting up to anything behind his back?

Was it a simple case of her wanting to divorce him, having given a sufficiently adequate period of mourning for her dear old daddy? Or was there some other reason lurking in the background?

And, just like that, rage slammed into him with the force of a sledgehammer.

Had she been seeing some man behind his back? He couldn't credit it but, once the nasty thought took hold, he found he couldn't jettison it.

"I want out because we both deserve something better than what we have."

"How considerate of you to take my feelings into account." Nikhil raised his eyebrows in a phoney show of gravity that made her grit her teeth. "I never realised you had such thoughtful, pious streak in you."

First thing in the morning, he would have her followed, see for himself where this was all coming from. He certainly had no intension of asking her whether there was some guy in the background. In this sort of situation, nothing could beat the element of surprise.

"There's no need to be sarcastic, Nikhil."

"Who's being sarcastic? Here's what I'm thinking, though. . ." He allowed a few seconds, during which time he pretended to give what was coming next some careful thought. "You want out---- but you do realise that you will leave with nothing?"

"What are you talking about?"

"I had a very watertight pre-nup made up before we married, which you duly signed, although I'm not entirely sure whether you read it throughly or not. My guess is that you were so eager to get me on board that signing anything would have just been a formality. Am I right?"

Meeta vaguely remembered signing something extremely long and complicated and very boring. She decided that she wouldn't take issue with his accusation that she'd been eager to get him on board; with his accusation that she had been in cahoots with her father to lure him into buying the company with her in the starring role of sacrificial lamb. She wasn't going to get involved in any sort of argument with him because he would emerge the winner. He had the sharpest brain of any person she had even known in her life.

She would get out, never see him again. For a fleeting second, something wrenching and painful tugged inside her and she shoved the feeling away.

"As a rich man," he said, "I thought it best to protect myself. Here's what you signed up to. I got the company. Lock, stock and smocking barrel. Just recompense for rescuing it from imminent collapse and saving your father's frankly unworthy skin. I'm not sure if you know just how much he skimmed off the pension funds, how much I had to inject back in so that the employees didn't find themselves of pensionable age with nothing but a begging bowl for company? Enough for me to tell you that it was millions." He breathed an exaggerated sigh and looked at her from under sinfully thick lashes. It had always amazed him that such a stupendously pretty face, so stunningly guiless, could house someone so cunning. It took all sorts to make the world.

Meeta hung her head because shame was never far away when her father's name was mentioned. She looked at her perfectly manicured nails and thought how wonderful it would feel never to wear nail polish ever again. She might have a burning-of-nail-polish ceremony.

She distractedly half-smiled and Nikhil, looking at her, frowned. 'So....what was the joke?' He wondered.

More to the point, what was the little secret? Because that had been a secretive smile.

"As long as you are my wife," he informed her, banking down simmering rage bubbling up inside him, "you get whatever you want. There are no limits placed on the amount of money you can spend."

"You mean provided you approve of the purchases?"

"Have you ever heard me disapprove of anything you've ever bought?"

"All I buy are clothes, jewellery and accessories," Meeta returned. "And only because I need them to. . . play the part I have to play."

"Your choice." He shrugged. "You could have bought a fleet of cars as far as I was concerned."

She made a face and his frown deepened. He considered the possibility of giving her a divorce and dismissed the idea, although the reasons for that instant dismissal were a bit vague. Was he that possessive a man that he would hold on to a woman who wanted to escape? He had wanted revenge. And it might have come in a different shape from the one he had planned, but it had still come. He had still ended up with Mahesh Solanki's company, hadn't he? So what was the point of hanging on to Meeta and an empty marriage?

But then, she wasn't just any woman, was she? She just happened to be his wife. The wife who had promised a lot more than she had ended up delivering. What man like being short-changed?

"You leave me," he told her in a hard voice, "and you leave with the clothes on your back."

Meeta blanched. She loathedthe trappings of wealth but wasn't it a fact that that was all she had ever known? How would she live? What sort of job had years of being pampered prepared her for? She had never had the opportunity to do the teacher training course she had wanted to do. She had, instead, jumped into a marriage that had turned her into a clone of someone she didn't like very much.

"I don't care," she said in a low voice and Nikhil raised his eyebrows in a question.

"Of course you do," he told her. "You wouldn't know where to begin when it came to finding a job."

"You can't say that."

"Of course I can. You've grown up in the lap of luxury and, when most other girls would have branched out into the big, bad world, you married me and continued your life of luxury. Tell me, what has prepared you for that ugly, grim thing called reality?"

He would turf her out without a penny. She could see that in his eyes. He had never cared a jot about her and he didn't care about her now. He had wanted the company and she had been a useful tool to acquire along with the bricks and mortar.

She just recently might have dipped her toe in that grim thing he was talking about called reality, but he was right. A life of creature comforts hadn't prepared her for striking out with nothing. It would take ages for her to find her feet in the world of work, and how would she survive in the meantime? When he told her that she would leave with nothing but the clothes on her back, she was inclined to believe him. The clothes on her back wouldn't include the expensive jewellery in the various safes and vaults.

"I can see that you know where I'm coming from. . . ." He leaned forward, arms resting loosely on his thighs. "If you want out, then you have two options. You go with nothing, or. . . "

Meeta looked at him warily. "Or. . .what?"