A Hint of Scandal

by Tara Pammi

  ‘A lot of it went on my...family.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Your family.’ He picked up his coffee and sipped it, wincing slightly at the weakness of the brew. Her background had added to her general unsuitability as a Kanellis wife. She came from the kind of dysfunctional family which had been completely outside his experience. Her mother had never been married and her three children had been fathered by unknown and absent men. The ramshackle, gypsy-like quality of Lexi’s home life had appalled him—but even that had not been strong enough to take the edge off his hunger for her. He had brushed aside suggestions that two people from such differing backgrounds might never find any mutual areas of compatibility and had married her anyway. ‘How are they?’

  Lexi’s eyes narrowed with suspicion because there was an odd note in his voice and it was alarming her. Xenon didn’t usually enquire solicitously about her family and he certainly didn’t drive nearly two hundred miles in order to do so. In the past she might have asked him why he wanted to know—when she was still in that honeymoon phase of believing that things like that mattered. When all their dreams had been intact and lying ahead of them. But she had moved beyond that phase a long time ago and his opinions were no longer relevant.

  ‘They’re okay,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  She met his eyes and gave a sigh of resignation. ‘Look, you’ve obviously got something on your mind—so why not just come out and say it?’

  There was a pause. ‘I’ve seen your brother.’

  ‘My brother?’ she echoed in alarm, because this could only mean trouble. Hiding her sudden sense of fear, she composed her features into an expression of mild interest. ‘Which one?’

  ‘I think you know very well which one. Jason.’

  Lexi’s heart was now going, thud, thud, thud. Jason. Of course. Jason who had been trouble from the moment he was born. Still she kept the tremble from her voice, trying to make her question sound as indulgent as the question of any caring sister. ‘What did he want?’

  Xenon put his cup down with a small sound of exasperation, watching as her heavy-lidded eyes suddenly became hooded. ‘Let’s dispense with the air of innocence, shall we? You’re not stupid, Lexi. What do you think he wanted?’

  The invisible hand which was clenched around her heart grew even tighter and Lexi knew that the time for pretence had passed. ‘Money, I’m guessing,’ she said numbly.

  ‘Money!’ he agreed. ‘That thing he can’t do without. The one thing he’s never bothered to earn himself throughout his useless, idle life.’

  ‘Please don’t insult him.’

  ‘Oh, come on—isn’t that taking sisterly loyalty a little too far? Since when did the truth become an insult—or have you spent so long avoiding it that you just don’t see it any more? And maybe here’s a truth you really should take on board.’ His body stilled and his eyes grew watchful. ‘Don’t you see that giving him everything he wants has helped make him the man he is today?’

  Furiously, she shook her head and glared at him. Because how would someone like Xenon ever understand? Xenon who had been born into a world of lavish wealth. He hadn’t known what it was like to come home from school to an empty fridge. To have to cut a hole at the top of your shoes because you’d outgrown them.

  In Xenon’s world there had been relatives—far too many of them in her opinion—and servants, who had all doted on him. He’d never had to go to the police station to bail out his drunken mother and then to lie about it to social services, terrified that the family would be split up if the truth ever emerged. He’d never had to hold a terrified and sobbing child who had woken up from yet another nightmare to discover that the real world could be infinitely worse.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I think I do,’ he said coldly. ‘Jason has found that the well of easy money you’ve always provided has run dry—so who better to turn to than his wealthy brother-in-law?’

  The thudding of her heart increased. ‘What does he want money for?’

  ‘Why do you think? To mop up the mess he’s made of his life with his gambling addiction.’

  Lexi closed her eyes as a terrible sense of inevitability crept over her. She’d tried everything to help Jason with his gambling habit. In the early days she had sat down and talked to him and he had lied through his teeth and told her he’d quit. She’d believed every word he’d said as she’d signed over yet another cheque supposed to help put him back on the straight and narrow. Or maybe she had just wanted to believe it. Later, she had paid for the first of many visits to the rehab clinic—until he was kicked out of the last one for starting up a poker school with his fellow patients.

  She opened her eyes to find Xenon studying her. ‘I expect that you told him no and sent him away,’ she said. ‘In fact, I’m rather hoping you did. The last counsellor I spoke to told me that I should “withdraw with love”.’ She saw the perplexed look on Xenon’s face as he heard the term and she remembered how disparaging he’d been about people who had sought professional help for their problems. ‘It means you have to stop giving him money and bailing him out. It’s supposed to make him take control of his own life.’

  ‘Actually, I didn’t send him away.’

  ‘You didn’t give him money?’ Her voice rose in alarm. ‘That’s what’s known in the business as “enabling”.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn what it’s known as!’ he bit out. ‘I’m more concerned with the consequences of his actions.’

  Her fear growing by the second, Lexi blinked at him from behind her glasses. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m talking about the fact that Jason has borrowed money. Lots of it. Against your name—and against mine as it happens, since we are still legally married and the Kanellis connection is like liquid gold.’ Resolutely, he ignored the horrified widening of her eyes. ‘He has built up the kind of debts which made even my eyes water—and I’m no stranger to large sums of money—’

  ‘How much?’ she butted in.

  He told her and Lexi blanched because she didn’t have that kind of money. Not any more.

  ‘And the kind of people he’s borrowed it from tend to get rather...angry if they don’t get their loans back,’ he continued.

  Lexi’s hand flew to her mouth. She could feel the hot rush of breath against her fingers as Xenon’s blue gaze iced into her. ‘What are we going to do?’

  Xenon nodded as a grim feeling of satisfaction washed over him, because that was the first sensible thing she’d said. We. ‘It looks like I’m going to have to pay off his debt for him—’

  ‘But—’

  ‘There’s no alternative, unless you happen to have the money sitting stashed away. That is, unless you want his pretty face altered out of all recognition?’ His eyelashes suddenly narrowed, so that his eyes looked like shards of blue ice. ‘These people can be dangerous, you know.’

  Lexi knew about danger. She’d grown up surrounded by it. And hadn’t that been one of the best things about her sudden fame—that she’d been able to escape from the dark and seedy side of life? The last thing she wanted was for Jason to be catapulted back to that place, where nothing seemed safe. She looked at Xenon’s hard features, realising that he was offering to help. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t thank me until you’ve heard what it entails,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay off his debt for him—but this time, he doesn’t go back to his old life and repeat the same old pattern. And neither does he go into some fancy clinic where he uses that abundance of Gibson charm to manipulate his counsellors.’

  ‘So what are you proposing he does?’ she questioned. ‘Apply for a personality transplant?’

  ‘Nothing quite so drastic. My solution is simple. He needs to change. To work his body like a man. To see the sun come up in the morning and put his head on the pillow at night, inste
ad of spending it in the casino, like a zombie.’ His eyes bored into her. ‘And maybe he wants to change because he has agreed to go to work for one my cousins in Greece.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘On one of the family’s vineyards,’ he continued. ‘Your darling brother has agreed to do some hard, physical labour for the first time in his life.’

  She stared at him in disbelief. ‘He’s agreed?’

  ‘I didn’t give him very much choice in the matter,’ he snapped. ‘It was my condition for bailing him out.’

  Lexi felt a worrying see-saw of emotions as she took in what he’d just told her. He could be so hard and indomitable that it was all too easy to forget his streak of kindness.

  But he hadn’t been kind when she’d most needed him to be, had he? He hadn’t been there for her at all when she’d reached out for him. He had pushed her away until there had been nothing but distance left between them any more.

  ‘So...why come here and tell me all this?’ she questioned.

  He gave a cold, hard smile. ‘No ideas, Lex? You think I should bail out your brother just out of the goodness of my heart?’

  She met the obdurate look in his eyes and a whisper of fear began to creep over her skin as she realised what lay behind his words. ‘You mean...there’s a price?’

  ‘There is always a price,’ he said softly. ‘I would have thought you’d have learned that by now. And the price is that I want you back as my wife.’

  Lexi’s lips opened as if in slow motion, though no words emerged. She could feel the sudden thunder of her heart and a great rush of unexpected excitement because hadn’t some rogue part of her always dreamt of just this moment? That Xenon would come back and tell her he was willing to forgive her for walking out. Willing perhaps to try again.

  But even as hope flared inside her with a bright, sharp heat, she forced herself to quash it. Because their marriage could never be saved. She knew that. The past held too much sorrow and there could be no future. They might go through the motions of reconciliation—but now a darkness lay at the heart of what they’d once had. And Xenon would never be able to tolerate it.

  ‘Your wife?’ she echoed.

  His mouth hardened. ‘There’s no need to look so horrified,’ he said. ‘It’s purely a short-term measure.’

  Lexi only just stopped herself from shuddering at her own foolishness, terrified that he would know the crazy thoughts she’d been entertaining. Did she really think that Xenon would be willing to try again? That a man that proud and powerful would be willing to forget the fact that she’d ‘humiliated’ him with her desertion.

  Blankly, she stared at him. ‘But why? Why on earth would you want to resurrect our marriage?’

  Xenon watched the way she lifted her shoulders in confusion and the gesture made the fabric of her shirt ride over the generous curve of her breasts. The eyes behind her glasses were the silver-green colour of eucalyptus leaves—only right now they were dark with bewilderment. And suddenly he felt a stab of lust so powerful that he could have pressed her down onto the carpet and made her come alive in his arms.

  ‘My sister is having her baby daughter christened and I want you beside me.’

  The impact of his words was like a series of small, sharp knives aimed straight at her heart. It hurt to think of his sister managing to produce the first of the next generation. It shouldn’t have done, but it did. For her to have succeeded where she herself had failed so badly somehow seemed to bring it all back again. ‘I...I’d heard Kyra was married, of course,’ she stumbled. ‘And that she was pregnant. It just all seems to have happened so quickly.’

  He gave a short laugh. ‘It was a whirlwind romance, it’s true. But you’ve been gone two years now, Lex. Or did you imagine that the world would stop turning the moment you walked out of my door?’

  Lexi’s breath was coming in shallow and rapid little bursts. For a minute she actually felt faint. Concentrate on the facts, she told herself. Try to talk him out of this insanity. ‘Why would you want me there when we’re divorcing? When my attendance there would only excite gossip and comment?’ She fixed him with a look of appeal, as if from one reasonable person to another. ‘Surely you don’t want that, Xenon?’

  ‘It’s not just the christening,’ he said and now his voice took on a dark and sombre note. ‘My grandmother is ill. In fact, she’s very ill and they’ve brought forward the christening, even if she’s not actually well enough to attend.’

  Despite everything, Lexi’s heart turned over. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she said. ‘I know how much you love your grandmother. But your family won’t want me there, Xenon—especially not at such an emotional time. Your mother always thought I was the worst possible wife you could have chosen. You know that. And that kind of feeling could spoil the atmosphere and ruin the day for Kyra. What’s it going to be like if I suddenly waltz back to Rhodes on your arm?’

  ‘My family will do what I want them to do,’ he stated flatly. ‘And I want you there.’

  Lexi glared. How could she have forgotten his controlling nature? His desire to make everything in the world happen the way that he wanted it to? ‘You still haven’t answered my question, Xenon. Why me, after everything that’s happened? There must be hundreds of women who would make more suitable partners. Your little black book was certainly bursting at the seams before I came along.’

  ‘But you were the only woman I married. And my marriage is the only thing in my life which could be considered a failure.’ His eyes were steely now. They gleamed with a determination she recognised only too well. ‘I don’t like failure—perceived or otherwise—and it will make my grandmother happy to see us together again. She believes in marriage. At the end of her life it will please her to discover that her favourite grandson is back with his wife.’

  ‘But that’s...that’s dishonest.’

  ‘More dishonest than you promising to love and to cherish me, until death us do part? Were you remembering those vows when you walked out and broke them?’

  To Lexi, this was nothing but a cold-blooded manipulation of the truth, but she bit back her objections. What was the point of trying to reason with him when he would tie her up in knots with his clever, educated arguments? She wouldn’t go to pieces in front of him. She couldn’t afford to. She needed to be strong. ‘I won’t do it, Xenon,’ she said quietly.

  ‘But you don’t have a choice. Not if you want to save your brother’s skin. I suggest you think about it.’ His coffee barely touched, he rose to his feet. ‘I’ll give you until tomorrow lunchtime to make up your mind.’

  She watched him as he walked over to the door and Lexi felt like a person clinging to the edge of a cliff whose fingers were slowly slipping. Suddenly the once solid surface of her life was crumbling away and she was losing her grip.

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  His smile was as cold as steel. ‘Then I throw your brother to the wolves.’

  ISBN: 9781460319864

  A HINT OF SCANDAL

  Copyright © 2013 by Tara Pammi

  All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition
published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  ® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

  www.Harlequin.com