His Contract Christmas Bride (Conveniently Wed!)

by Sharon Kendrick

  Lucy stared at him in dismay, and not just because he was making her sound like some kind of amateur hooker. Because this was the moment she’d dreaded. The moment she’d prayed would never come. But in the long run, mightn’t it all be for the best? Couldn’t admitting the bitter truth she’d nursed for so long provide some sort of catharsis for them all? Drakon had said he wanted a real family and she wanted that too. Couldn’t she show him that what they already had could be enough, if they were prepared to work at it? With an effort she composed herself, acutely aware of the fact that they were in a public place.

  ‘Perhaps we should order first,’ she said.

  He narrowed his eyes. ‘Some men might be offended by your preoccupation with dinner,’ he observed, with a flash of mockery. ‘Are you so hungry that you can’t wait a moment longer or do you just want to make me suffer by making me wait for your answer?’

  It was more the fact that she could see the waiter hovering in the background and Lucy didn’t want him coming over and disturbing them when she was in the middle of her story. The story she wished above all else she didn’t have to tell. Just as she wished that Drakon had worded his proposal with more affection and that he wanted more children for reasons which had to do with love, rather than expediency. But it was pointless wishing for the impossible. She knew that better than anyone. With cold dread, she cast her eye over the menu and chose something which would take ages to prepare and then attempted to speak as if she actually cared about it. ‘Why don’t we have the chateaubriand, to share?’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  If only he knew that the only thing she wanted could never be hers. Lucy spoke quickly to the waiter and, once the order had been given, clasped her hands together as if praying for a courage she wasn’t sure she possessed.

  ‘Drakon. There’s something...’ Her voice trembled. ‘Something I haven’t told you.’

  His body tensed—as if her tone was warning him that what she was about to say wasn’t just some undiscovered quirk of character. ‘Oh?’

  She sucked in a deep breath but the air which made its way to her lungs was scorching her airways. ‘I can’t give Xander the brothers and sisters you want for him,’ she husked, ‘because I’m...’

  Go on. Say it. Say those two painful words which you’ve never quite been able to get your head around.

  ‘I’m...infertile.’

  There was total silence as he sat back in his seat and Lucy searched his face for some kind of reaction. But there was none. His enigmatic features were as unreadable as they’d ever been, and somehow that felt much worse than open pain, or anger.

  ‘Have you known about this for long?’

  The conversational tone of his voice gave Lucy the hope she needed and she nodded. ‘I found out while I was nursing. It’s one of the reasons which made me leave midwifery. I found it...’ She swallowed as she tried to convey some of the pain she’d felt—not just the physical pain of endometriosis, but the emotional pain of knowing her womb was always going to be empty. ‘I found it increasingly hard to be around pregnant women and babies. Every day when I went into work, I was reminded of what I could never have.’ She searched his expression but still she could pick up nothing from his hard-featured stillness. ‘It’s one of the reasons I never really had any boyfriends before you, because most of the time I only felt like a shell of a woman.’

  And now the cold words which began to fall like stones from his lips gave her a clue as to what he was feeling.

  ‘But you didn’t think it was pertinent to tell me all this before we were married?’

  ‘I meant to. But we didn’t really know each other back then, did we? It’s not the kind of thing you just casually drop into the conversation with a virtual stranger.’ She licked her lips. ‘And it didn’t seem relevant, because you said you didn’t ever want children of your own.’

  ‘But things change, Lucy,’ he ground out. ‘We’re both intelligent enough to realise that. People change their minds all the time. I would like to have been given the choice instead of having it taken away from me, without my knowledge.’

  Lucy shook her head, but it didn’t change the fact that her throat felt as if someone were pressing their fingers against it, making it almost impossible to breathe. But she needed to breathe. To try to explain how it had been. How it had felt. ‘A couple of times I intended to tell you—but the right time never seemed to come up,’ she said. ‘The preparations for the wedding were so intense and all-consuming that I never found the opportunity to start a conversation about it.’

  ‘You could have made the time,’ he said repressively.

  Her head was hurting and so was her heart. She could sense that he didn’t understand and she wanted to make him understand. ‘Did you ever see that film about Queen Elizabeth I—the one which won all the awards?’ she questioned suddenly.

  ‘What?’ he demanded, his dark look of accusation momentarily morphing into one of perplexity.

  ‘The English Queen was almost completely bald, and she hid her baldness beneath a lot of elaborate wigs,’ she rushed on. ‘But they said that anybody who had seen her in her true state could never look at her in quite the same way again. That she remained permanently ugly and scarred in the mind’s eye of the beholder. And that’s how I felt, Drakon. I didn’t want you to look at me as less than a woman. As some barren creature only to be pitied. I wanted you to continue to desire me and want me.’

  He gave a short and bitter laugh. ‘So you lied to me?’

  ‘I did not lie!’ she protested. ‘The subject never came up.’

  ‘Oh, but you did. It was a lie by omission—and deep down you know that, Lucy.’

  She stared at him, unable to deny his bitter allegation.

  ‘It was a lie by omission,’ he repeated with quiet force, his face a blur of rage. ‘In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman who doesn’t lie. It seems to be stamped into their very DNA. I learnt it first from my own mother, almost as soon as I’d left the cradle, and I’ve been having it reinforced on a regular basis ever since.’

  Lucy heard a note of triumph which edged the cynicism in his voice as their meal was brought to the table, and she watched in excruciatingly tense silence as the meat was carved into neat slices and heaped onto their plates.

  ‘I guess in a way this has made you happy?’ she ventured, once the waiter had gone.

  ‘Happy?’ he echoed. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

  ‘Not at all. This must be a self-fulfilling prophecy for you,’ she said slowly. ‘You don’t like women and you don’t trust them—you never have. And I’ve just given you yet another reason to hate us as a sex.’ She sucked in a deep breath. ‘The only thing I can say to you, Drakon, is that I’m sorry. And if I could have the time back, I would do it differently.’ She could hear her voice starting to wobble. ‘Except that then you might never have wanted me and I would never have become your wife and learned to love you as I do.’

  ‘Love?’ he queried disdainfully. ‘You think I want your tainted love, Lucy? That I want to spend the rest of my life with a liar?’

  Lucy recognised that their marriage was hanging precariously in the balance. That a delicate line as fine as a spider’s web was all that lay between happiness and loneliness. One clumsy move and it would all be lost. Yet surely what they had discovered together was worth fighting for. Fighting with every single breath in her body. ‘But we’re all capable of lies by omission. Of fashioning reality to look like something quite different,’ she pointed out quietly. ‘Even you, Drakon.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m talking about your close friendship with Amy. So close that even your godfather told me he thought the two of you would get married and so did everyone else. And before you remind me that Amy’s gay—surely that’s all part of it. She hasn’t come out, for whatever reason—
so it probably suits her very well to have people speculate on the true nature of her relationship with her business partner.’ She took a sip of her cocktail and felt the champagne and peach juice foam against the dry interior of her mouth.

  ‘That’s different,’ he snapped.

  ‘Is it?’ she questioned quietly. ‘Oh, Drakon.’ Her voice was filled with a deep sadness which she couldn’t seem to hold back. ‘Can’t you ever forgive me? Can’t we just put all this behind us and start over—now that everything’s out in the open?’

  But she got her answer instantly as he rose to his feet, towering over her and the table, his muscular shadow seeming to swallow her whole.

  ‘I’ll tell you exactly what’s going to happen now,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m going to pay the bill and leave. And then I’m going outside to catch a cab. You can take the car.’

  ‘I don’t want your damned car!’

  ‘Really? Then how are you proposing to get back to Milton tonight?’

  ‘To Milton?’ she repeated blankly, blinking her eyes at him in sudden confusion. ‘You mean, back to my cottage?’

  ‘Of course that’s what I mean! Where else did you think you’d be spending the night, Lucy? Do you really think I want you in my home in the light of what I’ve just learned?’

  ‘Drakon...’ Lucy felt as if she had fallen down a deep well only to discover there were no footholds to allow her to get back up again. She had expected his censure, yes, and his condemnation, too. Deep down she’d felt as if she deserved both those things. But surely not such an instant and outright rejection, which felt so final and so permanent.

  ‘What did you think was going to happen after this astonishing revelation, Lucy?’ he demanded cruelly. ‘That we would just go back to Mayfair and pretend nothing had happened? That we would make love and carry on as normal?’

  She shook her head as a pair of dark eyes and a silky head swam into her mind. ‘But what about Xander? What’s going to happen to our son?’

  ‘Xander has a nanny—and a father,’ he said coldly. ‘We don’t need you, Lucy. Perhaps we never did. I will arrange to have your stuff sent to the cottage—’

  ‘Please don’t bother. Keep it!’ she said furiously. ‘I won’t be able to wear those kinds of clothes in Milton, anyway!’

  ‘That’s entirely your decision. Oh, and I don’t think I have any further use for this, do you?’ he added contemptuously. She saw him twist his gold wedding band from his finger before letting it fall with a tiny clatter onto an unused side plate and fixing her with a final withering look. ‘Obviously I will make sure your settlement is generous, provided you agree to a swift, no-claim divorce. I don’t think there’s anything else, do you? Other than to say goodbye.’

  He turned and made his way through the restaurant, oblivious to the curious eyes which followed him, and Lucy wondered if she would be able to manage that same degree of insouciance. But most of all she wondered just how long she would be able to keep the hot flood of tears at bay.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Don’t forget Xander’s check-up appointment at the clinic tomorrow. Sofia already knows but thought you might like to accompany them. L

  DRAKON STARED AT the text message from his estranged wife which had just appeared on his phone and his brow creased in a frown. It wasn’t the first he had received—all to do with the welfare of his son, he noted, and all signed off with Lucy’s initial and not a single endearment.

  Initially, he’d been surprised that she’d bothered contacting him, given the unceremonious way in which he had dumped her at the Italian restaurant. But wasn’t that a mark of Lucy’s soft and caring nature—that she wouldn’t allow hurt pride to stand in the way of her concern for the baby she had mothered so beautifully? Another stab of the pain pierced relentlessly at his heart. The same damned pain which had been plaguing him since her departure. Fury and denial rose up inside him in a hot and potent mix. He kept telling himself it wasn’t her he missed—it was her presence as Xander’s mother which was making him feel so remorselessly uncomfortable.

  And an inner voice mocked him every time that thought came into his head, because deep down he suspected it wasn’t true. For a man so enamoured of the truth, wasn’t he falling short of his own high standards? Because hadn’t Lucy taught him how to relax around his son, so that now he felt completely confident whenever he cradled little Xander in his arms? Yet it hadn’t always been that way. A lump rose in his throat and his heart began to pound. Before Lucy had come into their lives, the realisation that he must adopt his orphaned nephew had lain heavy on his heart. It had been a task he had been prepared to undertake—but Drakon’s attitude had been reluctant. Not any more.

  He stared down at the sleeping infant and his heart clenched. These days he embraced fatherhood with a sense of immense satisfaction and with something else, too. Something he’d never thought he’d feel towards Niko’s baby—and that something was love.

  Restlessly, he left the nursery and moved aimlessly through the Mayfair apartment which had felt so vast and so empty since his wife had moved out. He missed her in his bed at night—and the hard, physical ache which greeted him each morning bore testimony to that.

  Just as he missed talking to her over breakfast and dinner and swimming with her in the Greek sea on a winter day when surely no sane person would have swum.

  He had the services of the best nanny in the world and the wherewithal to find another any time he wished. He had an address book practically overflowing with women who would be eager to provide him with whatever consolation he required.

  He drew himself up short, reminding himself that he didn’t need consolation—because that would imply that he was grieving for something and he wasn’t.

  Really, he wasn’t.

  * * *

  Of course she missed him. That was only to be expected. But it was Xander she missed, Lucy convinced herself fiercely. She certainly didn’t miss his pig-headed father. And of course it was weird being back in her tiny riverside cottage and waking up alone every morning, without the warm and muscular body of Drakon stirring beside her in more ways than one. But she would get over it. She had to. And all things passed eventually—some just took longer than others.

  At least she’d got her job back. She had telephoned Caroline and had a brief and uncomfortable conversation. Her mentor and employer had diplomatically agreed not to quiz her about the reasons for the end of her brief marriage and Lucy had gone back to work as a waitress. The jobs were busy and distracting—which was probably a good thing—and she tried her best to pin on her brightest smile, hoping it would conceal the pain of missing the family life she’d so nearly become a part of.

  One night she put on her pale green uniform and went to work at a large house outside the town, handing out canapés to the guests of a local landowner whose daughter had just got engaged. The whole affair seemed destined to mock Lucy, from the moment she was diverted to enter the house via the back door and told to tidy up her hair, to someone impatiently dismissing her and her tray, as if she were a large fly who had just landed on a piece of sushi and started laying eggs. She’d forgotten how patronising the rich could be, when you were in a position of domestic servitude. The newly engaged woman was flashing her massive and rather vulgar ring and, stupidly, Lucy found herself thinking about the discreet ink-spot sapphire which was tucked away at home with Drakon’s discarded wedding band, which she had snatched up before leaving the restaurant, and wondering whether she ought to send both back to her estranged husband.

  The moon was high in the sky by the time she left the party and, although transport home was included, Lucy had no desire to sit on a steamy and overcrowded minibus, especially as she was always the last one to be dropped off. Despite the ever-present drizzle, she set off to walk along the familiar roads and lanes, pausing briefly by a small footbridge, to watch the dark gleam of the water as it flowed ben
eath her. Because the river never changed, she thought gloomily. It had been the same all through her life and would be the same once she was dead and gone.

  An unfamiliar sense of melancholy washed over her as she brushed past a low-hanging branch of wet leaves on the final approach to her cottage and tiny droplets of water showered over her. And then she nearly jumped out of her skin as a large figure loomed out of the darkness, her instinctive fear quickly replaced by an intense feeling of longing as she identified the late-night intruder.

  Drakon.

  Drakon Konstantinou, in all his towering and muscular beauty. Her heart twisted with pain and regret, but indignation was a far healthier reaction and that was the one she clung onto. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, jumping out of the shadows like that?’ she demanded. ‘You gave me a fright.’

  ‘And what are you doing walking back alone at this time of night?’ he returned furiously. ‘Anything could have happened to you!’

  ‘I can’t think of any fate worse than my former husband turning up unannounced like this!’ she retorted. ‘What are you doing here, Drakon—have you come to gloat?’

  Despite the darkness of the night, Drakon could see the fury spitting from his wife’s eyes and his heart sank. Because this wasn’t what he had planned. He’d thought she’d be home and he’d be able to talk his way into the cosy comfort of her small cottage within minutes. But the place had been in darkness and he’d been walking up and down this damned riverbank for hours, his tortured mind conjuring up pictures of where she might be, especially since her phone had been switched to silent and she hadn’t bothered to return any of the calls he’d been making all evening.