Bartered to the Sheikh & Rakanti's Indecent Proposition (Clare Connelly Pairs Book 8)

by Clare Connelly

  He swore in Greek. “Please just let me handle Xanthe so we can talk.”

  And now, because she knew she would be leaving imminently, she lifted her hand to his cheek. He breathed in her closeness as though his life depended on it.

  “No amount of talk can fix this.” She pressed a chaste kiss to his lips and moved backwards but he didn’t let her. He chased her lips, kissing her fiercely and possessively, as he had the first night they’d met. And though a sob escaped her mouth, finally she lost control of her self-protective shield.

  She kissed him back and she tangled her hands in his hair. She pressed her body to his and she groaned as she realised how impossible it would be for her to ever feel whole again.

  She broke the kiss and moved her body away. Her breath was ragged and her limbs were tingling.

  “I know you must hate me,” he said gently, slowly, like talking to a scared horse.

  But Elle cut him off. “That’s the thing. I don’t. I don’t hate you. But I know I’ll never love you again either. I have seen betrayal all my life. I have seen my mother love and lose men just like you and it turned her into the most bitter, pathetic woman you can imagine. That won’t be me. Not for you. Not for anyone.”

  In business, Christos had learned early on that timing was everything.

  Opportunities made fortunes depending on when they were seized. The hottest building in town could be a wasteland if opportunities were squandered.

  And he’d lost his opportunity with Elle.

  “Listen,” he said, following her up the next flight of stairs and into the bedroom they’d shared. “I want Filip to stay. I will do everything you say. I’ll back off on organising things. And I’ll ask Xanthe to give us some space. But he won’t stay now if you don’t.” And he judged himself harshly for the manipulations he was employing. “Stay for him.”

  “Screw you,” she said under her breath. But she turned to face him. And there was such weary dejection on her face that he knew he would spend the rest of his life trying to fix it. To fix everything.

  “Stay here,” he implored. “Let me go and talk to them both.”

  She nodded, numb and miserable.

  He spoke to Xanthe first, gently, kindly, but insistently. “It might only take days, mother, but we need some space to work this out first.” And he’d hugged her gently as he’d led her to her car.

  Filip was a harder sell.

  For the first time since meeting him, Christos could see the angry, hormonal teenager Elle had warned him about. But Christos had been one of those himself, and he still remembered that the feelings were volatile, controlling and dominant. He was careful not to give Filip the impression that he didn’t have a say in matters, but with several reassurances that Elle had been cleared of any wrongdoing, and strenuously apologised to, Filip agreed that he’d speak to Elle later; that if she was okay with staying, then so was he.

  Christos returned to Elle’s room, bracing for the most important conversation of his life, to find her gone.

  Chapter 10

  The music reached him only seconds later and he exhaled a long, slow sigh of relief before running down the stairs two at a time.

  She sat at the piano, one hand in her lap, the other working prodigiously along the keys. Even one-handed she played beautifully. He came to the stool and slid in beside her.

  He reached down and wrapped his fingers over hers; they were warm and strong. She didn’t look at him but he stared hungrily at her.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Her smile was wistful. “I know. But I think it’s more that you’re sorry you got it wrong than that you broke my heart.”

  “God, when I think of what I said to you. The way I reacted. I had no right …”

  “No,” she cut him off. “You didn’t.”

  “The whole time we were together I was telling myself I couldn’t feel for you what I did. That you were dishonest and manipulative; that you had no morals. But it didn’t make sense, because I fell so hard in love with you despite all that.” He reached over and gently guided her face towards his. “I fell in love with you despite everything I thought I knew about you. So when the story broke I was so quick to blame you. I was almost relieved when I had a reason not to love you. When I could go back to just thinking the worst of you.”

  She sobbed and stood up, wrapping her arms around herself. “That’s not love.”

  “I loved you.” He insisted, moving to stand in front of her. “I still love you.”

  “You can’t say the things you said when you’re in love. It doesn’t work like that. You wanted to hurt me. It’s like you aimed a gun right at me. Jesus. You have laid insult after insult at my feet. About me. About my mother. You have insulted where I live. You have interrogated me as though because we slept together you had every right to know everything about me …”

  “Not because we slept together,” he denied hotly. “Because I loved you. Because you loved me. Because you are a mystery and I want to understand you. Because you’re a book and I want to read every single page of you. Because I wanted to hear you speak and tell your stories, all of them.”

  She shoved at his chest. “No. Stop saying you loved me.” She lowered her voice. “If your mother hadn’t taken it into her head to meet Filip, you wouldn’t even have come to me.”

  “That is definitely not true,” he promised thickly. “And I wanted to meet Filip too.” He linked his fingers through hers and lifted them to his lips. His kiss carried his promises. “But I was rude to you. About you. About your mother. And yes, about your home. I’m not asking you to forgive me.”

  “Then what do you want?” She cried, pulling at her hands to wipe her tears.

  “I want a second chance.”

  “Why? So you can make me feel something for you again and then drop me off the edge of a cliff?” She straightened her shoulders and lowered her voice, impersonating his rich, deep timbre. “You’re a stupid whore with nothing to offer beyond your body. I wish I’d never met you. At least I know you meant nothing to me. You were nice to sleep with when I was in the mood but otherwise you were boring, etcetera, etcetera.”

  Hearing her repeat the foul, ugly epithet back at him made him groan. “I was an asshole. Unforgivable. I understand why you’re scared. I’ve shown myself to be untrustworthy and unkind.” He cupped her face. “It’s not a defence. There is no defence. But I have never been in love before. I was terrified of how vulnerable it made me feel.”

  “Oh, that must have been horrifying,” she sympathised sarcastically.

  “Let me show you how sorry I am.”

  She shook her head. “I’m here for Filip. I don’t want to think about … I want you to …” she closed her eyes and tried to marshal her thoughts. “If you truly care about me, then leave me alone. If you want me to be happy, stay away.”

  But Christos couldn’t do that. For two days, he watched her from afar, hoping she would relax just enough to let her guard down. But every time he so much as entered the same room she was in, she flinched and switched into an automaton, going through the motions until she could escape to a different part of his house.

  When she left for New York, Christos was ready to admit that he was at the lowest ebb of his life, with no way to claw out of it. Loving a woman who didn’t remotely return those feelings was bad enough, but the realisation that he’d had her: that for one perfect week he’d had her and had stuffed it up: it filled him with the kind of self-loathing he wasn’t sure he could ever remove.

  The summer passed with Filip becoming more and more like a brother to him. By the time Christos accompanied him back to the States and drove him to his exclusive boarding school, there was genuine affection between the two men.

  And Christos would miss Filip, but there was a small part of him that was relieved. With Filip back at school, he could finally turn his attention to Elle.

  It was early in the afternoon and the sun was still warm. Though Autumn was around the corner, and El
le was looking forward to the cool break. The air-conditioner in her apartment was incredibly unreliable.

  She peeled her work clothes off bit by bit, tossing them into her hamper. She pulled a big loose tshirt on and then lay on the bed, fanning her cheeks with a magazine. The paint on the ceiling was getting worse. What had begun as some peeling had turned into long strips that were revealing a rather dubious yellow wallpaper that someone must have decided was a good idea at one point or another. She’d fix it. Perhaps she’d go back to that yellow paper.

  What did it matter, anyway? She was the only one who ever saw it. And just like that, her traitorous body clenched with remembered desires and rewards, heavenly touch and release.

  She thumped her hand into the pillow and pressed her head into it.

  That was over! She had to put Christos out of her mind once and for all.

  God knew leaving Athens hadn’t achieved that. The photos Filip had sent each night could almost have been hand-picked to make her fail. Pictures of Christos cooking a barbecue, selfies of the two of them in the pool, watching television, in a helicopter flying over the ocean.

  Christos’s smiling face in every single picture had converted into fodder for her dreams. That smile, those eyes, they’d haunted her and placated her, though ultimately the confusion had made the dreams unbearable. Waking to find that he wasn’t on the other side of the bed had just dipped her back into the vat of pain anew.

  Every. Single. Morning.

  She shut her eyes and conjured him up, as he’d been that last night in Athens. Before the story had been broken by the press.

  When she knew that she loved him. When they’d made love and he’d danced a hundred tiny kisses down her nose and body, tickling her and teasing her. And, as it turned out, adoring her. Had he really loved her? Her belly flopped as she remembered the way she’d slept that night, curled in his arms.

  It had been perfect.

  So perfect it just couldn’t last.

  Sleep was definitely not a good idea, even though the heat had enervated all of her energy. She crouched down beside the bed and pulled out the misshapen shoe box that rarely saw the light of day.

  With a wistful smile, she lifted the lid and peered inside. The photos were chaotic and made no sense, much like Bella Bradley. But they were beautiful. Picture after picture of Bella with different men. Women too – she’d had a wide circle of friends and had partied with an awe-inspiring commitment.

  “Is this how it was for you?” Elle whispered, running her finger over her mother’s face. “Did you feel this with every guy you met?”

  It certainly explained a lot. The perpetual highs, followed by the unbearable lows. The commitments she made on a whim that never panned out. Bella had been careless and every relationship had been a disaster, but she’d still picked herself up and run into the next one head-first.

  “We really do look alike,” she said, shaking her head. Her fingers pushed through the box and caught the image she’d been looking for. The photo of her and her mother. They could have been sisters – Bella at this age, and Elle as she was now. It was uncanny.

  She slipped the photo out of the box and carried it with her into the kitchen. Her kettle was noisy, and as she waited for it to boil she stuck the picture to the fridge.

  Bella had been a terrible mother. Not abusive, not violent, but self-conceited to the point of pain. Elle and Filip had been lucky they had one another. And Hannah and Chip, Elle thought, as her eyes drifted to another picture on the front of the fridge. This one had been taken at high school graduation. Before Filip’s accident. The four of them stood, like a big, happy, blended family; smiles shining, arms wrapped around each other. The sun was a beam that perforated the centre of the picture, casting angel halos over their faces.

  It could have been an advertisement for healthy, happy teenagers.

  On that day, Elle had really believed she was only small steps from her dreams. From The Julliard, and hundreds of people just like her. People who understood that music was a life-force all of its own, sustaining and palpable.

  She swallowed and turned away.

  Far more important things had been lost in the accident than her own dreams. Filip had been a young man. A beautiful, strong boy with the world at his feet. He still is, she reminded herself. He would do whatever he wanted to. What she wouldn’t do for half of his strength and resilience.

  The knock on the door sounded just as she was splashing milk into her tea. She padded towards it, pulling the t-shirt down so it fell to mid-thigh.

  She looked through the keyhole, as any self-respecting New Yorker would know to do, and then took a sharp step backwards.

  “Your feet are casting shadows beneath the door.” Christos’s accented voice was amused, but it was also very, very sexy. The blood in her body began to pound hungrily. Her nipples were taut against the soft cotton of the clothes.

  “Hang on a second,” she said, pulling the shirt over her head and making a bee-line for her bedroom.

  “Open the door, Elle, or I will bang it in.”

  She shook her head. She was zipping easily from anger to desire to resentment. She reached for a pair of shorts and a singlet, and then moved quickly back through the apartment.

  He was standing, a brooding expression on his handsome face, dressed immaculately as though the heat of the day had barely registered with him. A pair of jeans and a collared shirt that was jet black. He looked dangerous. Her stomach thrilled with anticipation.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You have a singular talent for making me feel welcome,” he drawled, propping a shoulder against the wall.

  “It’s a gift.” She swallowed, keeping her hand propped on the edge of the door.

  “Is someone here?”

  She furrowed her brow. “I’m tempted to lie and say ‘yes’.”

  As always, she provoked a smile to his lips even when his mood was otherwise dark. “Don’t lie.”

  “I’m alone. Why does that matter?”

  “It doesn’t.” He arched a brow. “So, the normal protocol now would be for you to say: Would you like to come in?”

  “Sure. If I were crazy. Which I’m not. Stay out there, thank you.”

  He laughed softly and took a step towards her. “I could find less-polite ways to encourage you to let me in,” he murmured, dropping his mouth to within an inch of hers.

  Her breath was burning in her lungs as she stared into his beautiful, dark eyes. “I’m holding a boiling cup of tea,” she warned him with assumed sweetness.

  He grinned and dropped his lips lower, brushing them so lightly against hers that she doubted the contact had actually happened. She blinked with longing, hating the way her body jumped instantly.

  “That’s not a good advertisement for why I should let you in,” she said softly. “I don’t want you to touch me.”

  “Liar,” he lifted a hand to her waist and she made a noise of exasperation then spun on her heel. Her heart was pounding, her brain sluggish.

  “Why are you here?” She pointed towards the sofa, indicating that he should sit.

  “No, thanks. I prefer not to have springs sticking into my butt.”

  Her cheeks glowed. “Well done, Christos. You’ve been in my apartment twenty-seven seconds and already you’re back to insulting the way I live.”

  He’d hurt her pride with a stupid joke. He could have slapped himself. With a look of contrition he took a seat, ignoring the discomfort from the spiky cushions, his eyes pinned to her face.

  Mollified, she brought her tea to her lips and studied him. “So? What is it?”

  “We need to speak about Filip.”

  “Oh.” The disappointment was searing. “Yeah, of course.” Filip. Had she really thought he was there to see her? Despite what Christos had claimed in Athens, Elle doubted he’d sat around pining for her as she had for him.

  “Are you free tonight?”

  “No,” she lied. “But I am now.” />
  His eyes narrowed. “You are impossible.”

  She shrugged. “That’s not your problem, is it?”

  “Actually,” he stood and came to brace himself on the opposite side of the kitchen bench. “It is.”

  She swallowed, dropping her eyes to the tea. “It seems that Filip had a great time with you.”

  “We both did. I can’t believe I have a brother. It’s incredibly surreal.”

  “It would be,” she said softly, imagining the way his life had been knocked sideways.

  “I want to start making some changes in his life.”

  Elle’s face rang with alarm as she pulled her head upwards. “What changes?” She bit down on her lip and before he could answer said angrily, “I’m his legal guardian. I’m in charge. You can’t just come in here and steamroll everything.”

  He understood her fear, and the ruthless tycoon in him wanted to use it to his advantage. But there’d been too much of that already. Too much hurt. Too much blackmail. “I have no plan to do any such thing, agape mou.”

  “Don’t.” It was a whispered plea. “Please don’t call me that.”

  He nodded. “I want to make a plan with you. But things have to change now.”

  “What things?” She asked hoarsely.

  “For a start, you and he should never have had to worry about money. Your mother … she was entitled to so much more.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t let Xanthe hear you say that.”

  “Listen, Elle,” he came around to her side of the bench and put a hand on her arm. “You believe your mother to have been mercenary. And perhaps she was. But she could have got so much more from my father. He was very, very wealthy. The cost of Filip’s education was a drop to him. It’s small change.”

  Elle felt sickened. Those same school fees had kept her awake at night. “I know that.”

  “Your family should have been living comfortably. You should have been able to go to The Julliard …”