Bridal Bargains

by Michelle Reid

  ‘Didn’t know you did Room Service,’ she quipped as a tray arrived across her lap.

  ‘Anything for you, my love,’ he responded in the same light vein as he sat down on the bed and removed the cover from a plate of fluffy scrambled eggs piled on a bed of hot toast.

  Nell glanced at the half-light seeping through the drawn curtains. ‘Is it morning already?’ she asked in surprise.

  Xander smiled. ‘Not quite.’ He handed her a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. ‘You’ve been asleep for hours while I’ve been chairing the meeting from hell. If the world were flat I would be taking great pleasure in pushing one half of a room of ten off the end of it. Is that OK?’ he added questioningly as she sipped at the juice.

  Nell nodded. ‘Lovely.’

  He sent her another smile then forked up some scrambled egg. ‘Here, try this and tell me what you think.’

  ‘It’s only scrambled eggs,’ she derided as she took the forkful into her mouth.

  ‘Yes, but very special scrambled eggs, since they were prepared by my own gifted hands.’

  ‘You?’ Nell almost choked. ‘I didn’t think you knew what an egg looked like in its shell.’

  ‘Shame on you.’ He forked up another heap. ‘I am very self-proficient when I have to be. Drink some more juice.’

  Nell frowned. ‘Why did you feel the need to be proficient at this particular moment?’

  ‘Because I decided to leave the ten squabbling in my boardroom and came in here to see you. You were out for the count. I noticed that you must not have woken up to get yourself something to eat and, since you haven’t had anything since you threw up on the motorway, I decided that it was time that you did. You can go back to sleep when you’ve eaten this …’

  Another forkful was offered to her. Nell looked at his smooth, lean, totally implacable, super-relaxed face, said nothing and took the fork from him so that she could feed herself. For several minutes neither spoke while Nell ate and he seemed content to watch.

  Then it came, the real reason he was sitting there looking at her like that. ‘Nell—what I said about your father—’

  ‘Is he still in Australia?’

  ‘Yes,’ he frowned. ‘You knew he’d committed himself to overseeing the whole project,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Yes.’ Her sigh was wistful and rather sad.

  ‘I want you to know that I gave you the wrong impression about your father’s involvement in our—’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ she said as she laid down the fork. ‘I think you made your point perfectly. You took me as assurance for your investment. We even have a contract that says so. You also saved me from a fate worse than death.’

  A frown pulled his eyebrows together across the bridge of his nose. ‘I’ll rip the contract up if it will make you feel better.’

  ‘It’s so sweet of you to offer,’ she mocked him. ‘But the gesture would only have some weight behind it if you’d offered to do that before I got pregnant.’

  ‘I did offer once before, if you recall.’

  ‘On my birthday?’ She looked up at him. ‘Before my father had managed to scoop the Australian deal and put his business back on track? Bad timing, Xander,’ she said. ‘Not what you’re renowned for. You could have been asking to renegotiate yourself right out of the whole deal for all I knew. Still know,’ she added when he opened his mouth to deny it.

  The fact that he was going to have to pull rabbits out of the proverbial hat to make her believe otherwise now held him silent while he took that on board.

  Nell hunted around for something trite to say to fill in the gap.

  But what came out was miles away from trite. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Plate cleaned. Baby adequately fed.’

  ‘I did it for you, not the baby!’ he snapped.

  That she didn’t believe him showed. He uttered a sigh, his indulgent manner disappearing without a trace. ‘Does it actually matter what motivated me?’ he posed curtly. ‘Am I not allowed to be concerned for you both?’

  He glanced at his watch then and stood up to remove the tray. ‘I have a meeting to return to. I’ll see you later.’

  With that punishing slice of ice, he left. Nell threw herself back against the pillows and wished she knew how she should feel about him, but she didn’t. Everything she had come to love and trust about him over the last three weeks had been shattered by a day-long series of hard knocks.

  The telephone call from Vanessa being the hardest knock.

  Restless now, she got up, feeling an instant chill on her skin because of the difference between a hot Greek summer and a cooler English one. Rubbing at her bare arms, she wandered around the bedroom, aimlessly picking things up, putting them down again, and would have gone and done the same in the sitting room but she couldn’t be absolutely sure that someone might not come in from the office and catch her half-naked, and Xander seemed to have forgotten to have her suitcase brought up.

  In the end she escaped to the bathroom and decided to indulge in a long, hot soak in the invitingly huge bath. A few carefully placed candles would have been nice to help her relax, but she had to make do with selecting a couple of soft downlighters. She found no sign of any female soapy things hanging around, which mollified her restless mood somewhat.

  So Xander didn’t indulge his women here, she mused as she lay submerged in hot, steamy water liberally laced with Xander-scented bath oil. Maybe he did have a purple and red velvet-lined pad in Soho. With a mirrored bed and flying cupids embroidered on the velvet, she extended with a soft laugh.

  ‘Cheered up at last?’

  ‘Oh!’ She flicked her eyes open to find him casually propping up the doorframe. Sheer surprise had her slithering into a sitting position, causing a minor tidal wave to slosh around the bath. ‘You were quick,’ she said disconcertedly.

  ‘I didn’t like the company,’ he drawled, dark eyes glossed by silky eyelashes as he looked her over from loose topknot to water-slicked breasts being caressed by steam.

  It was stupid to feel shy after spending three weeks mostly naked around him, but telling herself that did not stop the blush from mounting her skin. Nell tried to make it look casual when she drew her knees up and looped her arms around them. The action did not change that look she knew so well on his lean, dark face.

  He’d lost his jacket and his tie, she noticed. His shirt collar was undone and the shirt cuffs too. And if ever a man knew how to lounge sexily in a doorway then Xander had the pose down to a finely tuned art. Long legs relaxed, hands loosely looped in his trouser pockets, silk dark hair finger-ruffled just enough to add that extra brooding appeal.

  Her body responded, breasts growing heavy, nipples peaking where she crushed them against her thighs. Even her lips felt as if they were filling and pulsing.

  ‘You forgot my suitcase.’ To Nell, it was an inspired stab at the prosaic.

  It didn’t alter his hungry look one iota. ‘Stashed in the sitting room five minutes after we arrived,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you bother to look?’

  ‘No.’ She added a grimace. ‘Maybe you could get it for me?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So I can put something clean on?’ she suggested ever so sarcastically to what she thought a stupid question to ask.

  Xander clearly didn’t. He straightened up and began approaching the bath. ‘You can wear me instead,’ he murmured huskily and began to undo the rest of the buttons on his shirt.

  ‘Don’t you dare try to get in here!’ she cried, causing a floor-sloshing wave as she shifted up the bath. ‘I’m still angry with you! I don’t even like you any more! I will not be your sex slave just because you need—’

  ‘Watch it …’ His hand darted out, capturing her hair just before it tumbled out of the topknot into the bath.

  Shaken by panic, utter confusion and a rotten desire to finish the job with his shirt, she glared at his hair-roughened breastplate while he re-knotted her hair with an infuriating finesse.

  ‘There,’ h
e said. ‘Now you won’t have to spend half an hour drying it before we get to bed.’

  ‘I’m not sleeping with you ever again.’

  ‘Did I mention sleep?’

  Nell tried to calculate if she had enough room to make a run for it while he was busy stripping off his clothes.

  ‘Not a cat in hell’s chance,’ he teethed out, reading her like an open book.

  Stark, blinding, beautiful naked, he stepped into the bath.

  ‘We are not going to let this war continue,’ he informed her as he came down on his knees to straddle her. ‘You are my wife and you are having my baby.’ His hands took possession of her warm, wet, slippery breasts with their tightly distended, lush pink nipples. ‘As these beautiful things tell me you want me, agape, and as I am so majestically displaying I most certainly want you, why fight it?’

  Why indeed? Nell thought helplessly as she, like a captured rabbit, watched him lower his head. It was like being overwhelmed by Poseidon again she likened helplessly as he took charge of her mouth, her body and the rest.

  A few minutes later and she was slithering beneath him into the water with her arms clinging to his neck. They’d made love in a bath many times but for some reason this hot and steamy, oil-slicked occasion that was permeated with his scent tapped into another dimension. Water sloshed as they touched and caressed each other, she was so receptive to everything about him that she found she didn’t care if her face sank beneath the surface and she drowned like this.

  His arms stopped it from happening. The way he was smoothing small, soft, tender kisses over her face kept her breathing slow and deep. His eyes kept capturing hers and filling her with dark liquid promise, when he slipped a hand between her thighs she arched her body in pleasure and captured his mouth.

  They kissed long and deep, they moved against each other slowly and sensuously. When with a lithe grace he changed his position, stretching out above her and murmured huskily, ‘Open your legs,’ she even made the move with a slow erotic invitation that set him trembling as she clasped his face in her hands so she could pull his mouth back to hers as he entered her with a long, smooth, silken thrust.

  And the whole thing continued to a slow, deep, pulsing rhythm. His supporting arms stopped her from drowning in the water, while inside she drowned in a different way. When she fell apart she even did this slowly and deeply and the pulses of pleasure just went on and on and on.

  When he lifted her out of the bath she clung to him weakly. Even when he dried them both she didn’t let go. She was lost, existing in a place without bones or muscles; the only solid thing was him and the thickly pumping beat of his heart beneath her resting cheek.

  ‘If you ever let another man see you like this you won’t live,’ he rasped out suddenly.

  Nell just smiled and pressed a silky kiss to his hair-roughened, satin-tight chest. ‘Take me to bed,’ she breathed.

  With a muffled groan Xander lifted her up and carried her into the bedroom, still clinging. She was still clinging when he settled them both in the bed. She fell asleep like that—clinging. Xander lay beside her wondering how long he should wait before he woke her up again.

  He used up the time recalling the looks on the faces of the ten men in his boardroom when only half an hour after battle recommenced he’d stood up and brought the whole thing to an abrupt end.

  ‘When you are ready to negotiate like adults let me know. Until then this meeting is over.’ He smiled as he saw himself making that announcement because—there he was, being the hard-hitting, cool-headed, totally focused, ruthless dictator. Wouldn’t they like to know that beneath the incisive veneer he’d brought that meeting to a close because he’d been aching so badly for this …

  His wife. This sensational woman with a silken thigh lying across his legs and her slender arms still looped around his neck. On a sigh because he knew he should not give in yet, he reached up to claim one of her hands then carried it down his body to close it gently around the steel-hard jut of his sex.

  ‘You’re insatiable,’ she murmured, letting him know that she was already awake.

  ‘For you,’ he agreed. She stroked him gently and the whole deep, drugging experience began all over again.

  Afterwards he went off to raid the fridge and came back with a bottle of champagne and two glasses, one of which he handed to Nell—already filled.

  ‘What’s this?’ she demanded, frowning into the glass when it became obvious it wasn’t champagne because he was only now easing the cork from the bottle.

  ‘Sparkling water,’ he supplied. ‘Pregnant women don’t drink alcohol.’

  ‘What would you know?’ she protested.

  About to take a sip at the water, since it was all that was on offer, she found her eyes pinned instead to the way he’d suddenly turned into a concrete block. The lean face, the black eyes—nothing moved.

  ‘What have I said?’ she gasped in surprise.

  ‘I just remembered something I needed to do.’ He seemed to need to give himself a mental shake before he could bring himself to pour out his champagne. ‘Here,’ stretching out beside her, he offered his glass up to her lips, ‘a sip can’t hurt, and a baby is something to celebrate …’

  The odd little moment slid by.

  Maybe she shouldn’t have let it. Maybe Nell should have listened to the little voice inside her head that told her he was hiding something. If she had done then what happened the next morning would not have come as such a crushing blow.

  Xander was already in his office and working at his desk by the time Nell sauntered out of the bathroom wrapped in a fluffy white towel. She was aching a little because Xander had been so unquenchable last night. Gentle though, she recalled with a soft smile, unbelievably gentle, as if his knowing about the baby had brought out in him a whole new level of tenderness.

  Her inner muscles quivered, her expression taking on a far-away look as she allowed herself the luxury of reliving some of those long, deep, drugging kisses they’d shared, the fine tremor of his body and the look in his dark eyes just before he’d allowed her to take him inside.

  If that look didn’t speak of love then she’d been dreaming it, she thought as she went over to her suitcase, which Xander had thoughtfully placed open on a low cabinet by the window.

  There again it could be just that, having forced herself to accept that since she did not have the power to resist him she might as well stop trying to fight him, maybe she was justifying that by misreading the look.

  Oh, shut up, she told that cynical side of her nature. Do you want to spoil it? They were man and wife in every which way you wanted to look at it now that they’d conceived a baby between them, which in turn meant that they were now so deeply committed to this marriage that the Vanessas of this world could take a hike, because no other woman would ever have what Nell now had of Xander.

  His first child growing inside her. A child that Xander had spent the rest of the night protecting with the gentle spread of his hand. Did it matter if this had all started out three weeks ago with him determined to achieve that goal?

  At least she did not disappoint, she mocked with a grimace. And turned her attention to sifting through the clothes one of the maids on the island had packed for her. One day, she thought ruefully, she might get to pack her own suitcase; then she might find something she wanted to wear.

  They’d awoken to a cold, grey day this morning. Even with the temperature in here maintained by an air-conditioning system with climate control, her skin was wearing a distinct chill. The suitcase contained a choice of lightweight short white cotton skirts and a couple of white strapless tops or the turquoise dress.

  On a sigh she selected some underwear, dropped the towel and slipped into bra and panties followed by the turquoise dress, then looked around her for something to cover her chilly shoulders and goose-pimpled arms. The suit she had travelled here in lay across the back of a bedside chair but the thought of putting on the travel-limp jacket did not appeal.

>   On impulse she walked over to the wide walnut-faced wardrobe and opened the doors. Xander’s clothes hung in clear plastic from their hangers. Business suits, dinner suits, shirts, ties. Nothing there she could borrow that would keep her warm, she thought ruefully and flipped her search towards the column of deep drawers built into the wardrobe. She found socks, men’s undershorts, even a neatly stacked drawer of plain white T-shirts. A foray into the final drawer offered up a better prospect of neatly folded sweaters made out of the finest cashmere. It was probably going to drown her but as she dipped down to near the bottom of the pile to remove a black one she’d spied there, she decided that beggars couldn’t be choosers and at least she would be adequately covered.

  Then her fingertips came up against the sharp corners of something. On a softly yelped, ‘Ouch!’ she withdrew her fingers, checked she hadn’t managed to draw blood, then frowningly began carefully lifting out the sweaters layer by layer until she’d uncovered the guilty object.

  After that she seemed to lose touch with reality. The stack of soft sweaters she held in the crook of her arm fell unnoticed to the floor. She didn’t even attempt to pick up the silver-framed photograph she’d uncovered but just stared into Vanessa’s beautiful smiling face then at the miniature-sized version of Xander standing laughing in front of her then finally—most painfully—she read the hand-scrawled inscription. ‘To Papa Xander,’ it said. ‘Love from your Alex.’

  His son even had his name …

  CHAPTER TEN

  GLANCING up as Luke Morell stepped into the office carrying a manila file, Xander took one look at his PA’s sober expression and sat back in his seat with a smile.

  ‘Did you have to mop blood up off the floor last night after I left?’ he quizzed drily.

  ‘You know as well as I do that your shock tactic sent all ten into freefall.’

  ‘Good. Let us hope they learned what it feels like to lose their only parachute.’

  Managing a small grimace at the quickness of his employer’s wit, ‘They want another meeting today,’ Luke informed him. ‘Perhaps you could try to be a little more—tolerant?’