Bought for the Billionaire's Revenge

by Clare Connelly

  ‘Your father was asking for you,’ Nikos said to his friend.

  ‘Bertram is here?’ Marnie asked, a smile shifting her lips as she thought of the elder statesman. It transformed her face in an expression of such delicate beauty that Nikos had to stifle a sharp intake of breath.

  ‘Yeah.’ Anderson extended a hand and shook Nikos’s. ‘But I suspect your groom just doesn’t want me monopolising you any longer.’

  He winked at Marnie, obviously intending to make a swift departure.

  She put a hand on his forearm to forestall him. ‘Are you in Greece much longer? Will you come for dinner?’

  ‘I’d love that,’ Anderson said honestly. ‘But we fly out tomorrow.’

  Marnie’s smile was wistful. ‘Another time?’

  ‘Sure.’ He leaned forward and kissed her cheek, then winked at Nikos.

  Alone with her husband, and the hundreds of other partygoers, Marnie felt her air of relaxation disappear. She reached for the railing, gripping it until her knuckles turned white. ‘Are you having a good time?’ she asked stiffly, her eyes seeking a fixed point on which to focus.

  ‘It is good business for me to be here,’ he said, lifting his broad shoulders carelessly.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought your business required this sort of schmoozing.’

  ‘That is true,’ he said simply. ‘But I do not intend to grow complacent in light of my success.’

  She nodded, adding that little soundbite to the dossier of information she’d been building on him: Nikos: V 2.0.

  This Nikos was determined to prove himself to the world—or was Anderson right? Was it that he wanted to prove himself to her? To prove that he deserved her?

  No, that couldn’t be it.

  Had it not been for Arthur’s financial ruin, Nikos would never have reappeared in her life.

  ‘He might have played the part of a bachelor to perfection...’ Anderson had said, and it had been an enormous understatement. Nikos had dedicated himself to the single life with aplomb. She’d lost count of the number of women he’d been reputed to be dating. And even ‘dating’ was over-egging it somewhat.

  The women never lasted long, but that didn’t matter. Each of those women had shared a part of Nikos that Marnie had been denied—a part that she’d denied herself.

  Her eyes narrowed as she turned to study her husband. He’d followed her gaze and his eyes were trained on the mainland, giving her a moment to drink in his autocratic profile, the swarthy complexion and beautiful cheekbones that might well have been slashed from stone.

  ‘Do you see that light over there?’

  She followed the direction he was pointing in, squinting into the distance. There was a small glow visible in the cliffs near the sea. ‘The hut?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. It is a hut.’ His sneer was not aimed at her; it showed agreement. He pinned her with his gaze; it was hard like gravel. ‘That is where I spent the first eight years of my life.’

  ‘Oh!’ She resettled her attention on him, curiosity swelling in her chest, for Nikos had never opened up about his childhood even when they’d been madly in love. ‘Is it?’ She strained to pick out any details, but it was too far away. ‘What’s it like? Is it part of a town?’

  ‘A town? No. There were four huts when I was growing up.’ He gripped the railing tight. ‘Two rooms only.’

  She didn’t want to say anything that might cause him to stop speaking. ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘Like it?’ He lifted his lips in a humourless smile. ‘It was a very free childhood.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘My father had a trawler. He came out here every day.’

  ‘Squid?’

  He nodded. ‘Scampi, too.’

  ‘You said you lived there until you were eight. What happened?’

  He tilted his head to face her, his expression derisive. ‘There was a storm. He died.’

  ‘Nikos!’ Sympathy softened her expression, but she saw immediately how unwelcome it was.

  He shifted a little, indicating his desire to end the conversation.

  ‘I should have told you he’d be here,’ Nikos said only a moment later, surprising her with the lightning-fast change in conversation.

  For a moment she didn’t comprehend who he was talking about.

  ‘It did not occur to me that Anderson would upset you.’

  She drew her brows together in confusion. ‘He didn’t.’

  ‘The tears in your eyes would suggest otherwise.’

  She opened her mouth in an expression of her bemusement. ‘This from the man who seems to live to insult me?’ The words escaped before she could catch them.

  Nikos nodded slowly, as if accepting her charge even as his words sought to contradict it. ‘Hurting you... That is not intentional. It is not what I want.’

  She blinked and spun away, turning her body to face the railing. ‘I can believe that.’ And that hurt so much more! Knowing he could inflict pain without even trying, without even being conscious of her feelings, simply demonstrated how little he thought of her feelings at all.

  ‘Do we have to stay long?’ she asked, doing her best to sound unconcerned when emotions were zipping through her.

  ‘No. Let’s go. Now.’

  He trapped her hand in his much bigger palm and led her from the party. Several times people moved to grab his attention, but Nikos apparently had a one-track mind, and it involved getting them off the boat.

  At his Ferrari, with the moon cresting high in the sky and the strains of the party muffled by distance, Nikos put his hands on her shoulders and spun her to face him. His eyes seemed to tunnel into the heart of her soul.

  ‘What is it I have done that’s insulted you?’

  She knew she couldn’t deny it; after all, she’d just laid the charge at his feet. She shook her head, yet the words wouldn’t climb to her tongue.

  ‘Tell me, agape...’

  ‘Nothing. It’s fine.’ Her eyes didn’t meet his.

  ‘Liar!’ He groaned, crushing his mouth to hers.

  His hands lifted, pulling at the pins that kept her hair in its chignon until they had all dropped to the ground in near-silent protest. He dragged his fingers through her hair, pulling at it and levering her face away.

  His eyes bored into hers. ‘I was angry with you tonight. I was rude.’

  A sob was filling her chest. She wouldn’t give in to it. ‘Why? What in the world could you have had to be angry about?’

  Was that really her voice? With the exception of a slight tremor, she sounded so cool and in command! How was that possible when her knees were shaking and her heart was pounding?

  ‘This. You.’ He stepped backwards, as if to shake himself out of the hurricane of feelings. He pulled the door open and stared at her.

  Marnie stared back. She wasn’t going to let this go just because he appeared to have decided the conversation was at an end.

  ‘What?’ she demanded, lifting a hand and splaying her fingers against his broad chest. ‘What about me? What did I do?’

  ‘Do?’ His head snapped back as if in silent revulsion. ‘You did nothing. You cannot help that this is who you are.’

  Her heart was pounding so hard now that it was paining her. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, with a soft determination that almost completely hid her wounds.

  ‘No? Allow me to clarify. You are Lady Marnie Kenington and you always will be. You are this dress. This party. This perfect face. You are cold and you are exquisitely untouchable. The girl I thought I loved all those years ago never existed, did she?’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  FOR THE FIRST time since her arrival in Greece the early morning was drenched by storm. The sky was leaden with weighty clouds, the ocean a turbulent, raging gradient
of steel. White caps frothed all the way to the horizon, and the trees that marked the shore arched in the distance, folded almost completely in half.

  Marnie, her knees bent under her chin, her eyes focussed on the ravaged horizon, took a measure of consolation from the destruction. Her mind, numb from the exhausting activity of trying to join the dots of what had happened the night before, looked for some kind of comparison in the wasted outlook.

  The storm was trashing everything, and yet in time—perhaps even later that day—the clouds would disperse, the sun would shine, and all would look as it once had. Better, perhaps, for the rain had a spectacular way of cleaning things up, didn’t it?

  Could the same be said for her and Nikos?

  Were they in the midst of a storm that would one day clear? Argument by argument, would they wash away their hurts?

  She shook her head sadly from side to side, the question that had plagued her at length tormenting her anew.

  Why had he married her?

  ‘You are Lady Marnie Kenington and you always will be. The girl I fell in love with all those years ago never existed, did she?’

  Had she?

  He was right. Marnie had changed so much since then. He seemed to attribute it to her upbringing, to her parents’ snobbery. Wasn’t it more likely that she’d simply grown up?

  She glanced down at her manicured fingernails and the enormous diamond that sparkled on her ring finger.

  They were husband and wife, but outside of that, they were strangers. A lump formed in her throat; futility hollowed out her core.

  He hadn’t come to bed last night. She’d showered and waited for him—hoping, knowing, that their being together would make sense of everything. That when they made love the truth of their hearts was most obvious.

  But she had no experience in the matter. Was it as he said? Just great sex? Or was it love? Or memories of love, like fragments of a dream, too hard to catch now in the bright light of reality and daytime?

  She scraped her chair back impatiently. The pool was dark today, too, reflecting the sorrow of the skies. Had it been a stormy day like this when Nikos had lost his father? When the ocean had swallowed him up, perhaps as retribution for the fish he’d stolen out of its belly?

  He had been silent and brooding on the car trip home, and Marnie had been too absorbed by his statement to try to break through that mood, to get to the heart of what he had meant.

  Perhaps this morning they could talk.

  She moved towards the kitchen, the thought of a cup of tea offering unparalleled temptation. And froze when she saw him.

  It was like a flashback to the morning after they’d first arrived. Impeccably dressed in a high-end business suit, he had his head bent over the newspaper and a cup to his left, which she knew would be filled with that thick coffee he loved.

  ‘Good morning,’ she murmured, her voice croaky from disuse.

  He flicked a gaze to her face, studying her for one heart-stopping moment before smiling tightly and returning his attention to the paper.

  So that was how it was going to be.

  Marnie squared her shoulders and tipped up her chin defiantly. ‘Did you sleep well?’ She walked to the bench, standing directly opposite him.

  Without looking up, he responded, ‘Fine. And you?’

  It was a lie. He hadn’t got more than ten minutes altogether.

  ‘Not really,’ she said honestly.

  He turned the page of the newspaper. Did she imagine that it was with force and irritation? The admission had cost her. It was an offer of peace—an acceptance of their relationship, faults and all.

  ‘Where did you sleep?’ she pushed, determined to crack through the facade he’d erected.

  ‘In a guest room.’ Still he read the damned newspaper.

  Marnie, trying her hardest to forge past the storm, reached down and put her hand over the article. ‘Nikos, we need to talk.’

  He expelled a sigh and glanced at his watch. ‘Do we?’

  ‘You know we do.’ She lifted her hand and moved it to his, lacing his fingers with her own. ‘This isn’t right.’

  He moved his hand so that he could lift his coffee cup and drink from it. ‘Talk quickly. I have a meeting.’

  Hurt lashed her as a whip. ‘That’s not fair,’ she said, with soft steel to her voice. ‘You can’t keep doing that.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Making yourself unavailable as soon as things get tough.’

  ‘I relish obstacles. I relish difficult opportunities. But I cannot see the point in discussing anything with you right now.’

  ‘So what you said last night isn’t important enough to talk about?’

  ‘What did I say?’ he asked softly, his eyes roaming her face.

  ‘Don’t be fatuous,’ she snapped. ‘You made it sound like we didn’t love each other. Like we didn’t know each other.’

  His look was one of confusion. ‘But we don’t.’

  Denial! The sharpness of it plunged into her heart.

  ‘I meant back then...’ She limped the conversation along even when she felt as if she was dying a little.

  ‘I said that the girl I thought I loved never existed,’ he said with a shrug. ‘That girl would have stood up for what we were. Would have fought to be with me. But you were never that. Seeing you last night, in that dress, you looked so perfect.’ Derision lined his face. ‘You’ve become exactly what your parents wanted.’

  ‘You keep doing that! You keep making me out to be some kind of construct of theirs.’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ she challenged. ‘You are a product of your life just as I am of mine. But if you hate me so much why the hell did you insist I marry you? It has to be more than revenge against my father’

  He closed the paper and drained his coffee cup before placing it neatly on the edge of the sink. The seconds ticked by loudly in the background.

  ‘Why do you think?’

  A thousand possibilities clouded her mind, some of them dangling hope and others promising despair. ‘I don’t know,’ she said finally, warily, shaking her head.

  ‘To prove that I could have you.’

  She had to brace her hands on the edge of the bench for support.

  Her face flashed with such a depth of hurt that Nikos instantly wanted to call the words back. To defuse the situation and make her smile again. To make her laugh in that beautiful, inimitable way she had.

  Laughter was a long way from Marnie’s mind, though. ‘You’re serious?’ She pressed her lips together, her mind reeling. ‘This was just ego? As a seventeen-year-old I rejected you, and you couldn’t handle that, could you? And now you’ve bullied me into this marriage so—what? So you can make me feel like this? So you can berate me and humiliate me...’

  He held up a hand to silence her. ‘I told you last night—I do not mean to hurt you. I never did.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ She swallowed, her throat moving convulsively as she attempted to breathe normally. ‘It didn’t occur to you that this whole idea would hurt me?’

  A muscle jerked in his cheek. ‘Are you having regrets?’

  ‘How can I not be? You put me in an impossible situation.’ She spun away from him, looking out at the storm. She was at a crossroads. She could tell him the truth—that it was impossible to be married to him knowing he would never love her. Or she could remember that she had married him. A thousand and one reasons had driven her to it, and they were all still there.

  Worse, Marnie stared down the barrel of her future and imagined it without Nikos and she was instantly bereft. Even this shell of a relationship, knowing he would share only a small part of himself with her, was better than nothing.

  She’d faced life without him and it had been
a sort of half-life. She’d poured all her energy into her work, and she’d dated men that she’d known her parents would approve of, but she hadn’t felt truly alive until she’d seen Nikos once more.

  Was it better to feel alive and permanently in pain or to be alone and feel nothing?

  She turned to face him slowly, her face unknowingly stoic. ‘I didn’t hope for much from you, Nikos, but I expected at least that you would respect me. And do you know why? Because of who you are. Last night you said that the girl you fell in love with never existed. Maybe you feel that—maybe you don’t. I don’t know. But I have no doubt that I knew you. Who you were then. I think I know who you are now, too. And the contempt you are meeting me with is completely unwarranted.’

  Her eyes sparked as she spoke the declaration.

  ‘You say you married me to prove that you could have me. Well, I only married you to save my father. Did you honestly expect me to do anything less?’

  ‘Not at all.’ His voice was gravelly. ‘You are excellent at taking direction.’

  She sucked in a breath at the cruel remark. ‘My parents were right to tell me to break it off with you. Not because you had no money or family prestige, but because you’re a jerk.’

  It wasn’t funny but he laughed—a short, sharp sound of disbelief.

  ‘I’m serious,’ she said stiffly. ‘I am Lady Marnie Kenington. I am the same woman I’ve always been. You forced me into this marriage and now you’re angry with me just for being who I am. You’re the one who’s trying to make me something I’m not.’

  Her words were little shards of glass, all the more potent for she was right. He couldn’t fault her behaviour as his wife. She’d done and been everything he’d required of her. She hadn’t shifted the goalposts—he had.

  The realisation only worsened his mood. How could he explain to her that he never enjoyed being at events like the party they’d attended the night before? That he hated most of the people in attendance, despised their grandiose displays of wealth and their desire to outdo one another. That he hated that entire scene and she was the very epitome of it? That seeing her amongst her own people—people who’d been born to wealth and prestige—made him realise that they’d never see the world the same way?