Bridal Bargains

by Michelle Reid

  It was the worst, most devastating rejection he had ever dealt her. For a horrible few seconds Nell thought she was going to faint. If she could she would be turning and swimming out to sea just to get away from the fresh burn of rejection she was feeling but he’d sapped her strength, taking it with him like some lethal, heartless virus, leaving her with this hot, sensual, dragging feeling that was so new to her she didn’t know what to do to ease herself out of its grip.

  She watched him rise out of the water, a beautiful, wide-shouldered, long-bodied, bronze-skinned male without a hint of shame in his own nakedness. Toned muscles that moved and flexed in lithe coordination were caught to perfection by the water clinging to his flesh and the loving glint of the sun. He did not look back, and Nell could feel his anger emanating towards her back across the calm ocean and she hated herself for responding to him. Her breasts felt heavy, their tips tingling and tight. Even as she trod water in an effort to keep herself afloat her thighs had clamped together as if to hold in their first experience of a fully aroused man thrusting against the hidden flesh.

  It took every bit of will-power she could drum up to make herself follow him, dipping beneath the water in an effort to cool the heat from her face and her body then angrily resettling her bikini top before she allowed herself to surface again then make deeply reluctant strikes for the shore.

  By the time she reached it he’d pulled on a pair of smooth-fitting trousers, muscles clenching tightly across his glistening back when he heard the splash of her feet as she waded through the shallows to the beach.

  Bending down, he scooped up her sarong, half turned and tossed it to her. It landed in a floaty drift of white on the damp sand at her feet, and he was already snatching up his shirt and dragging it on over his glinting wet skin.

  Xander thought about apologising but he’d played that hand before and too often to give the words any impact. Anyway, he was not sorry. He was angry and aroused and he could still feel her legs wrapped around him, could still taste her in his mouth. He had an ache between his legs that was threatening to envelop him.

  ‘You will not flaunt your body in get-ups like that excuse for a bikini,’ he clipped out, heard the words, realised he sounded like a disapproving father, hated that, uttered a driven sigh that spun him about.

  She was trying to knot the sarong with fumbling fingers. Her beautiful hair was slicked to her head. She had never looked more subdued or more tragic.

  ‘And when we get around to making love it will not be out in the open for anyone to watch us,’ he heard himself add.

  ‘Behind a locked bedroom door on a bed, maybe,’ she suggested. ‘How boringly conventional of you.’

  Subdued but not dead, Xander noted from that little piece of slicing derision. He could not help the smile that twitched at his mouth. It eased some of the passion-soaked aggression out of his voice.

  ‘More comfortable too,’ he agreed drily. ‘I was treading water out there. I don’t know how I kept us both floating. Add some of the really physical stuff and I would likely have drowned us in the process.’

  ‘I can swim.’

  ‘Not with me deep inside you, agape mou,’ he drawled lazily. ‘Trust me, you would have lost the will to live rather than let me go.’

  She managed the knot. He had a feeling it cut off the circulation, it appeared so tight. And her cheeks went a deep shade of pink. He liked that. However, the look she sent him should have shrivelled his ego like a prune. It didn’t though. The physical part of his ego remained very much erect and full.

  ‘Such confidence in your prowess,’ she mocked, stalking past him to scoop up the rest of her things. ‘Don’t they always say that those who boast about it always disappoint?’

  ‘I will not disappoint,’ he assured with husky confidence.

  ‘Well, if you wait until it’s dark to prove that, I can always pretend you are someone else, then maybe you won’t.’

  And with the pithy comment to cut him down to size where he stood she put the hat on her head and walked off towards the path.

  A lesser man would react to such an insult. A lesser man, Xander told himself as he watched her walk away, would go after her and drag her down in the sand and make her take such foolish words back.

  The better man picked up his socks and shoes and followed her at a leisurely pace, while he plotted his revenge by more—subtle methods.

  Then a frown creased his smooth brow when he remembered something and increased his pace, only becoming leisurely again once he’d caught up with her and tempered his longer stride to hers.

  Hearing him coming, Nell pushed her sunglasses over her burning eyes and increased her pace. She received a glimpse of sun-dappled white shirting, black trousers and a pair of long brown bare feet as he came up beside her, but her mind saw the naked man and her tummy muscles fluttered. So did other parts.

  ‘I grew up on this island,’ he remarked casually. ‘As a small boy I used to walk this path each morning to swim in the cove before being shipped across to the mainland to attend school. Diving from the rocks is an exhilarating experience. The snorkelling is good out there, the fishing too—though I do not suppose the fishing part is of any interest to you.’

  ‘You, used to fish?’ Nell spoke the words without thinking then was angry because she’d been determined to say nothing at all.

  ‘You think I arrived on this earth all-powerful and arrogant?’ He mocked her lazily. ‘In the afternoons I used to fish,’ he explained. ‘Having been transported back here after my school day was finished, with my ever-present bodyguard as my only playmate.’

  Now he was playing on her sympathies by drawing heart-string-plucking pictures of a small, lonely boy protected and isolated from the world because of his father’s great power and wealth.

  ‘My parents were always off somewhere doing important things so I rarely saw them,’ he went on. ‘Thea Sophia brought me up, taught me good manners and the major values of life. The fishing taught me how to survive on my own if I had to. I used to worry constantly that something dreadful was going to happen to those who lived here on the island with me and I would be left alone here to fend for myself. I knew that my father had powerful enemies that might decide to use me in their quest for revenge. Before the age of six I had all my hiding places picked out for when they came for me …’

  ‘Is there a point to you telling me this?’ She would not feel sorry for that small, anxious boy, she wouldn’t.

  ‘Ne.’ He slipped into Greek, which didn’t happen often.

  Xander was a man of many languages. Greek and Italian both being natural to him, the rest because he was good at them, and in the cut-throat, high-risk world he moved in it paid to know what the people around you were saying and to be able to communicate that fact.

  ‘You think that you are the only one to have lived a strange, dysfunctional, sheltered life but you are not,’ he stated coolly. ‘I have lived it too so I can recognise the person you are inside because I am familiar with that person.’

  Nell clutched her book in tight fingers and tried hard not to ask the question he was prompting her to ask, but it came out anyway. ‘And what kind of person is that?’

  ‘One who hides her true self within a series of carefully constructed shells as a form of self-defence against the hurts, the fears, the rejections life has dealt her from being small and vulnerable—like myself.’

  Well, he certainly knows how to top up my feelings of rejection! Nell thought angrily. ‘What rubbish,’ she snapped out loud. ‘And spare me more of this psycho-babble, Xander. I have no idea where you’re going with it and I don’t want to know.’

  ‘Towards a deeper understanding of each other?’ he suggested.

  ‘For what purpose? So you can eventually get around to bedding me before you fly off to pastures new—or old,’ she tagged on with bite. ‘In case you didn’t notice, I was easy prey out there in the water.’ God, it stung to have to admit that. ‘That means you don’t need to achie
ve a greater understanding of me to get what you want.’

  ‘You have always been easy prey, cara,’ he hit back. ‘The point at issue here is that I have always managed to avoid taking what has always been there to take.’

  Nell pulled to a simmering stop. The hat and the sunglasses hid her expression from him but there were other ways to transmit body language. ‘I think you’re into humiliation.’

  ‘No,’ he denied that. ‘I was trying to …’

  She walked on again, faster, her breath singing tensely from between her clenched teeth as she pumped her legs up the final stretch of the hill.

  ‘Will you listen to me?’ He arrived at her side again.

  ‘Listen to you spelling it out for me that you married me because you saw your perfect soul mate? One you can pick up and drop at will and she won’t complain because she’s used to rejection, and all of this rotten isolation you prefer to surround her with?’

  ‘I married you,’ he gritted, ‘because it was either that or take you to bed without the damned ring!’

  Her huff of scorn echoed high in the trees above them. ‘I was a business deal!’ She turned on him furiously, brought her foot down on a sharp piece of gravel and let out a painful, ‘Ouch!’

  ‘What have you done?’ he rasped.

  ‘Nothing.’ She rubbed at the base of her foot with a hand. ‘And we’ve never shared a bed!’ she flashed at him furiously. ‘We’ve never even shared a bedroom!’

  ‘Well, that’s about to change,’ he drawled.

  I’m not listening to any more, Nell decided and dropped her foot to the ground to turn and start walking again, her legs and her body trembling with fury and goodness knew what else while her eyes still saw a tall, dark, arrogant man with tousled wet hair and a sexy damp shirt, dangling his shoes from his long brown fingers.

  Topping the peak of the hill, she started down the other side of it. Below through the trees she could see the red-tiled roof of the house and the helicopter standing in its allotted spot by a glinting blue swimming pool.

  All looked idyllic, a perfect haven of peace—sanctuary.

  Sanctuary to hell! she thought. Her sanctuary had been in the isolation, not the place itself. Now Xander was back and the comfortable new world she’d created here was shattered.

  She hated him so much it was no wonder her blood was fizzing like crazy as it coursed through her veins.

  He did it again and took her by surprise, hands snaking around her waist to spin her round to face him. The shoes had landed with a clunk somewhere, her book went the same way. Next thing her hat came off, followed by her sunglasses, and were tossed aside. She caught a fleeting glimpse of a lean, dark, handsome face wearing the grim intent of what was to come, her breath caught on a gasp then that hard, hot mouth was claiming hers again and she was being kissed breathless while his hands roamed at will.

  Her thighs, her hips, the smooth, rounded curve of her naked bottom beneath the covering sarong. He staked his claim without conscience, her slender back, her flat stomach, the still thrusting, pouting shape of her nipple-tight breasts. She was dizzy, narcotic, clinging to him, fingers clawing inside the shirt to bury into the tightly curling matt of hair on his chest.

  It had all erupted without a warning gap now, as if one erotic encounter led straight into the next. He drew back from the kiss, face hardened by a burning desire that was no longer held in check.

  ‘You want that we do it right here and now, Nell—up against the nearest tree maybe?’ he gritted down at her. ‘Or shall we go back to the ocean and complete what we started there? Or would you have preferred it if we had done it two weeks ago in the bed down there where you lay injured and weak? Or we could have whiled away the hours doing it on the flight over here. Or let us take this back to our wedding night, when you were so shattered only a monster would have tried. No,’ he ground out. ‘You will not turn away from me.’

  His hands snaked her closer, cupping her behind to lift her into even closer contact. ‘Do you understand now what I am trying to say to you? Look at us, cara,’ he insisted. ‘We are not what you would call passive about this. You hide your true self. I hide my true self. But here they are out in the open, two people with more passion for each other than they can safely deal with.’

  ‘Only when you have the time to feel like it.’

  ‘Well, I feel like it now!’ he rasped. ‘And if you refuse to listen to reason then maybe I will take you up against a tree, with your knees trapped beneath my arms and your heels digging into my back!’

  Such a lurid, vivid picture made her push back from him, all big, shocked green eyes. ‘You’ve done it before like that!’

  Xander laughed—thickly, so thoroughly disconcerted by the attack that he discovered he had no defence.

  The whooshing sound of a helicopter’s rotor blades suddenly sounded overhead, saving him from having to defend himself. They both looked up then Xander uttered a thick curse.

  ‘We have a visitor,’ he muttered.

  ‘Who?’ Nell shot out as they watched the helicopter swoop down the side of the hill then come to a hovering stop beside the other one.

  There was a moment of nothing, a moment of hovering stillness in Xander that brought her eyes back to his face. He didn’t look happy. He even sent her a grimace.

  ‘My mother,’ he said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HIS mother …

  Nell’s heart sank to the soles of her bare feet. The beautiful, gorgeous, always exquisitely turned out Gabriela Pascalis was paying them a visit and Nell looked like this—wet, bedraggled, and more than half-ravished.

  Her voice developed a shake. ‘Did you know she was coming here?’

  There was a sighed-out, ‘No,’ before he changed it to a heavy, ‘Yes … She said she was coming. I told her not to bother. I knew she would ignore me—all right?’

  Nell flashed him a killing look. ‘You didn’t think to warn me about that?’

  ‘We were busy talking about other things—I forgot.’

  He forgot …

  ‘And I suppose I was hoping she would listen to me for once …’

  Nell didn’t even grace that with the spitting answer sitting on her tongue. Turning, she began striding down the hillside, leaving Xander cursing colourfully as he gathered up their scattered things.

  She knew that mother and son did not enjoy a warm relationship, in fact the best she could describe it as was cool. They met, they embraced, they threw veiled but heavily barbed comments at each other; they embraced then parted again until the next time. It was like standing in the middle of a minefield when they were together. One step out of line and Nell had a feeling that they would both ignite and explode all over her, so she’d tended to keep very quiet and still in their company.

  Not that it happened often. It wasn’t as if with a relationship like that mother and son lived in each other’s pockets. Xander had his life and Gabriela had hers—par for the course with Xander’s relationships, she tagged on acidly. The very few times that Nell had come into contact with both of them together was usually at one of those formal functions Xander would drag her to occasionally—to keep up appearances while Vanessa hovered around somewhere in the murky background, awaiting her lover’s return.

  Her skin turned cold as she thought that.

  A shriek of delight suddenly filled the hillside, dragging her attention down the hill towards the house. She saw that the helicopter had settled next to the other one and Gabriela was now standing by the pool with her arms thrown wide open while Thea Sophia hurried towards her clapping her hands with delight.

  To witness the dauntingly sophisticated Gabriela dressed in immaculate lavender silk fold the little black-clad bundle that was Thea Sophia to her in a noisily loving hug came as almost as big a surprise as the way Nell had just behaved with Xander up on the hill.

  Where had all the warmth and affection come from? She would never have believed Gabriela capable of it if she was not seeing it with h
er own eyes.

  The two faces of the Pascalis family, she thought grimly as she maintained a brisk pace downwards. Behind her was a man who had been as cold as ice for ninety-nine per cent of their marriage, suddenly showing her he had passion hot enough to singe layers from her skin! Now here was the drop-dead sophisticated mother putting on a demonstration of childlike adoration that would shock her peers—though anyone would love Thea Sophia, she then had to add with a brief softening inside. The sweet old lady would make the devil want to give her a loving hug.

  As the two embracing women dropped out of sight behind the red-tiled roof of the house, Nell felt the silly burn of tears sting her eyes. It was stupid to feel hurt by such an open display of affection from Xander’s mother for his aunt, but that was exactly what she did feel. Gabriela had never greeted her like that, never welcomed her with open arms and shrieks of delight. On those few tension-charged occasions they had met just the brief air-kissing of Gabriela’s perfumed cheeks had always made Nell feel as if she were desecrating holy ground.

  Or was it the other way around and she was the one who repelled deeper displays of affection? Had those defensive shells Xander talked about kept her mother-in-law at arm’s length? She didn’t know. She didn’t even know if Gabriela knew the full truth about the true disaster that her son’s marriage was.

  The two women had gone from the pool area by the time Nell reached it. Making directly for the rinse shower that occupied a corner of the patio area, she switched it on and began washing the dust from her feet. The bottom of her foot still stung from its contact with the sharp stone, but as she was about to lift up the foot to inspect it she saw Xander arrive a few paces behind her and her full attention became fixed on him.

  He had gathered up their things and was now placing them on one of the tables, tall, dark, uncomfortably alluring with his shiny wet hair, loose clothes and bare feet. Nothing like the man she was used to seeing—nothing. The other Xander was all skin-tingling, sophisticated charisma; this one was all—sex.