Bridal Bargains

by Michelle Reid

  ‘For what purpose?’ Xander asked. ‘I am not into salving other people’s egos.’ Losing all hint of his own smile, he sat forward again. ‘They would not want to meet with me at all if they had done their own jobs better so don’t ask me to feel sorry for them. What’s with the folder?’ he prompted. ‘Yet another set of impossible proposals from them?’

  ‘This has nothing to do with the takeover.’ Luke walked towards him, his grim expression more keenly in place. ‘I suppose I should add that you are not going to like this, so I suggest you take a deep breath before you take a look inside.’

  Curiosity piqued, Xander was about to accept the file when a quiet knock sounded at the door through to his private apartment. As he was about to flick his attention from the file to the door he saw Luke stiffen jerkily and his eyes narrowed and remained riveted where they were. He didn’t like that telling bit of body language. He didn’t like the way his assistant’s face had closed up tight. A sudden warning prickle shot across the back of his neck, the kind his instincts had taught him never to ignore.

  Then the door-handle began to turn and he was forced to shift his attention to Nell as she stepped into the room. He frowned when he saw that she was wearing the blue suit she had travelled in yesterday, and her hair had been contained in that braid he didn’t like. But it was her face that held him. She wasn’t smiling, her vulnerably kissable upper lip stuck in a downward curve to its fuller lush partner, and even the light layer of make-up she was wearing could not disguise her odd pallor beneath.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked instantly, springing to his feet. ‘Do you feel ill again?’

  He was already striding out from behind his desk as Nell fluttered an unhappy glance at Luke then quickly away again.

  ‘Y-yes—n-no,’ she replied in confusion, clearly disconcerted to find Luke Morrell standing there.

  ‘Well, which is it?’ Xander demanded, coming to a halt directly in front of her then frowning down at her when she hooked in an unsteady breath of air before focusing her eyes on a point between his tie knot and his chin. ‘Nell …?’ he prompted huskily when she still didn’t speak.

  ‘I’m—fine,’ she told him. Then her gaze made another sliding glide towards the very still Luke.

  Xander took the hint. With a twist of his long body sent an impatient glance at the other man. ‘Later, Luke,’ he dismissed him.

  Luke hovered, seeming undecided as to whether to walk out with the file or place it on the desk before he left.

  ‘Leave it.’ Xander made the decision for him. And after another moment’s hesitation, the file was relinquished and Luke was letting himself back out of the room.

  ‘OK.’ Xander swung back to Nell the moment they were alone again. ‘Now tell me.’

  He’d barely got the command out when one of those wretched telephones on his desk started to ring. On an impatient apology he spun away and strode back to the desk, leaving Nell standing there feeling dazed and dizzy, hating him so much yet hurting badly at the same time.

  ‘Xander—’

  He snatched the phone up, cutting short what she had been going to say as he snapped his name into the mouthpiece.

  It was like a replay of the day before, Nell thought as she stared at the long, lean length of his dark-suited figure standing in profile against a backcloth of an unrelieved grey English sky.

  Beautiful, she observed helplessly, and with an almost masochistic need to feed the ache throbbing inside her began absorbing every elegant inch of him from handmade shoes to the breadth of his wide, muscular shoulders dressed in the best silk tailoring money could buy.

  The man with everything, she thought, and had never felt so bitter than she did at that moment. The sensation crawled along her flesh like icy fingers and she knew suddenly that she had to get away—from him, from this raw feeling of utter betrayal, from the sound of his deep velvet voice that was twisting her up inside because she loved that sound even while she hated him.

  ‘I’m going out,’ she announced in a breath-shaking whisper and headed jerkily for the outer office door, not caring if he’d heard her, not caring if he would have the usual objections ready to voice at her going anywhere without his say-so.

  The telephone crashed with a slam. He moved so fast she’d barely taken two steps before he was catching hold of her wrist and swinging her round. The whole quick manoeuvre brought back memories of the way he’d done the same thing on the island only yesterday.

  Her face paled, lips trembling as she released her breath. ‘Don’t manhandle me.’ She yanked her wrist from him.

  That he was totally taken aback by the venom in her voice showed in his shock-tautened face. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he bit out.

  ‘I am not some object you can push and tug around as your mood takes you,’ she hit back.

  He stiffened up. ‘I never meant—’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ she cut in. ‘You think you own me right down to my next thought. Well, you don’t.’

  ‘This is crazy,’ he breathed in total bewilderment. ‘I left a beautiful, warm and contented woman only an hour ago, now the shrew is back.’

  Nell deigned not to answer that. She had been warm and contented. She had been nicely, carefully, patiently seduced into being that pathetic creature again. She despised herself for that.

  ‘And why are you wearing the same clothes you had on yesterday?’

  The sudden flip in subject sent her vision oddly blank as she stared down at the summer-blue suit. It took a really agonised effort to make herself reply without flinging the why at him. But she didn’t want to tell him. She did not want him to start explaining and excusing his rights over her rights.

  ‘It’s all I’ve got to wear unless you want me to wander around in the turquoise dress,’ she said. ‘Whoever packed for me at the island packed for the Greek climate, not this one. So I am going out—to shop.’

  It was thrown down like a challenge. Xander’s dark head went back as he took that challenge right on his cleft chin. He knew what she was saying. He knew which particular gauntlet was being handed out this time. As the tension built and he fought to hold back the instinctive denial that was lodged in his throat, Nell stared fixedly at nothing in particular and hoped to goodness that the fine tremors attacking the inner layers of her skin were not showing on the outside.

  ‘Wait for me,’ he said, cleverly couching that denial in a husky dark plea that, in spite of everything, touched a tingling weak spot. ‘We will go together. Just give me a couple of hours to free myself up and we can—’

  The telephone began to ring. His dark head twisted to send the contraption a look of angry frustration but his fingers twitched by his sides and Nell almost managed a mocking laugh because she knew he was itching to answer that call. His priorities were at war. She twisted back to the door. Behind her she heard Xander hiss out a curse about irritating women.

  ‘Have you any money?’ he sighed out then, work winning over his marriage, though to be fair to him he didn’t know that—yet.

  ‘I have credit cards.’ A dozen of them linked to his accounts.

  ‘Nell …!’ he ground out as her hand caught the door-handle. She turned her head to find him already back at the desk with his hand covering the shrilling phone. ‘Don’t be long,’ he husked.

  She nodded, lips pressed together to stop them wobbling, then she let herself out of the room. As she braced herself for the walk down the long corridor towards the lift, she said a silent goodbye to him.

  Back in his office, Xander was ignoring the ringing phone and snatching up his mobile phone instead. He hit fast dial. ‘My wife is just leaving. See that she’s protected,’ he instructed.

  Then he was stepping to the window, hands dug into his pockets, fingers tightly clenched into fists while he grimly waited for Nell to appear on the street below while the telephone continued to ring off its rest.

  He did not understand any of that, he decided tightly. He’d thought last night that they’
d called a pretty effective truce. Suddenly she was back to sniping at him and evading eye contact. He missed the eye contact. He didn’t like the tingling feeling that was attacking the back of his neck.

  He saw her step out onto the busy pavement, continued to watch as she paused and looked around as if she had no idea where she wanted to go. His heart gave him a tug, yanking at his gut and contracting it because even from way up here she looked so—lost!

  As she seemed to come to a decision and struck out to the left Xander watched Jake Mather slip into step behind her. He remained where he was with his eyes fixed on the top of her shining head until she had disappeared out of sight with her bodyguard safely in tow. Then he turned away from the window and stood grim and tense, feeling unfathomably like a man who’d just made the biggest error of judgement he was ever likely to make.

  The phone had finally given up though, he noted, and, straightening his wide shoulders, he stepped up to the desk, hovered on another few seconds of inner restlessness, then the manila file Luke had brought in caught his eye.

  Recalling his PA’s grim words of warning did not ease the tension singing inside him as he sat down, picked up the file then drew in the advised deep breath.

  A breath that froze even as he opened the front flap. A breath that he did not release for the several long minutes it took him to scan the pages set in front of him. By the time he’d finished he felt as cold as death.

  She was away for three hours and in that time Xander was in touch with every step that she took. Grim, cold—face stretched taut by the burning pulse of anger he was keeping tamped down inside.

  Work had ceased. Life had ceased, he mused harshly. Beyond the four walls of his office a series of instructions was being carried out to the letter while he sat in grim isolation, telephones, people, everything shut out but for his mobile link to Jake Mather.

  If she bolted she would not get five paces before Jake would have her in his grasp. If she was foolishly letting herself believe that safety lay in the heaving crowds she was trying to lose herself in then she was in for a hard knock of truth. Jake had been joined by his other men, one of which was in the process of tracing the call she had just made from a public call box. Xander had not enquired as to how this could be done. He did not want to know. But behind the cold mask he was wearing on his face he knew that the name Marcel Dubois was about to be quoted at him.

  It was.

  ‘Where is she now?’ he scythed at Jake Mather.

  ‘To be truthful, boss, I think she’s on her way back to you.’

  To be truthful, Xander mimicked acidly, he knew that Nell must know by now that she did not have another choice.

  She thought he lived in a zoo? Well, now she knew what it felt like, having been swarmed all over by his security people since she’d stepped onto Oxford Street.

  Though he now had to accept that he was going to be disappointed that she did not require bundling into the back of the limo that was loitering in a side-street, ready and prepared to receive its protesting package.

  Satisfaction coiled around his tense chest muscles when Jake’s voice arrived in his ear with, ‘Turning into the street now …’

  He was out of the chair and swinging to the window before the final word left his security guard’s lips. Something hard hit him in the chest as he caught sight of her head with all of its glorious, bright Titian hair shimmering around her face and shoulders instead of being neatly contained in the braid she’d left with.

  Xander found himself gritting his teeth as he absorbed her purposeful stride. She was angry. Good, because so was he. If she wanted all-out war he was ready for it.

  She was carrying the distinctive yellow and black bags from her wild buying spree in Selfridges. She’d changed her clothes too. The summer-blue suit had gone and in its place tight designer jeans that moulded her long, sensational legs and a soft brown suede jacket that hung loose across a creamy coloured top.

  If she’d deliberately chosen the clothes to make him sit up and take notice then she could not have done a better job, because he was seeing her exactly as he had first seen her when she’d walked through her father’s front door, wild and windswept. As she turned to walk up the grey marble steps to his building she paused and looked up and, as if she knew he was watching her from up here, her green eyes suddenly sparked and tossed up bolts of burning fire.

  ‘Well, come on up, my fiery witch,’ he invited beneath his breath.

  Turning, he broke the connection with Jake Mather then reached out to flip a key on his computer keyboard to bring his glass and steel foyer up on to the screen. As he watched his wife stride purposefully across the foyer via the in-house CCTV system he was lifting his jacket from the back of the chair and smoothly shrugging it on. Her barely concealed patience as she rode alone inside the steel-cased lift held his attention while his fingers dealt with his shirt-collar button and straightened his tie. By the time she began the long walk down the corridor towards his office, his finger-ravaged hair had been neatly smoothed and he was ready for her.

  Nell pushed open the door and stepped into the room, green eyes flashing like emerald storms. The door slammed back into its housing and she dropped the bags then speared those eyes on Xander, who was casually swinging in his chair behind the desk, looking as crisp and as sharp as he’d looked when she left him—and of course he was holding a telephone to his ear.

  Her fury hit boiling point. ‘Would you like to explain to me where the heck you get the stone-cold arrogance to believe that you own my life?’ she shrilled.

  Without so much as a flicker in response from those long dark eyelashes, he murmured some very sexy Italian into the phone’s mouthpiece, then gently replaced it on its rest.

  ‘If you have a yen to argue the finer points of ownership then by all means do so,’ he invited. ‘But before you begin you will explain to me please why you needed to spend thirty minutes in the ladies’ room in Selfridges. Were you feeling ill again?’

  Oh, so casually asked. Nell felt a sudden trickle of ice run right down her spine. ‘How many men did you have following me?’ she gasped.

  ‘Seven,’ he supplied. ‘Including Jake Mather, whom I presume you spotted quite quickly—mainly because he was not instructed to hide,’ he seemed compelled to add.

  ‘He tried to stop me using a public telephone,’ she said tightly.

  With the calmness of a coiled snake, he reached out and picked up the phone then offered it to her. ‘Try this one. All calls are free.’

  The green eyes sent him a withering look. ‘Don’t be so obnoxious,’ she condemned. ‘You have no right to have me tagged, tailed and guarded like some—’

  ‘Animal in a zoo?’ he suggested when words failed her. ‘Or, more appropriately in this case,’ he then added thinly, ‘like an untrustworthy wife!’

  ‘I can’t be trusted?’ Nell launched back at him. ‘That’s rich coming from the most twisted and devious—Machiavellian swine it was ever my misfortune to meet!’

  ‘Oh, you met a worse one, cara,’ Xander drawled.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Without any warning he lost his relaxed posture to shoot to his feet. ‘You were leaving me for him—again!’

  With the backcloth of grey Nell could not see his face but she could feel the anger bouncing off him.

  ‘On the first opportunity you were presented with you rang him!’ he all but snarled.

  ‘You traced that call?’ she gasped out in disbelief.

  ‘You make me sick,’ Xander announced, then gave a contemptuous flick of a long-fingered hand when Nell just gaped. ‘I don’t even want to look at you.’

  On that damning indictment he swung away to the window, leaving Nell standing there shaking and quivering—not with hurt but in disbelief!

  ‘How dare you speak like that to me?’ she shook out furiously.

  ‘Easily.’ Twisting back, he picked up a manila file from his desk, brandished it at her then dropped it
again. ‘The police report on your accident,’ he incised. ‘You may read it if you wish.’

  But Nell did not wish. Nell was already striding across the office and pushing open the doors to his apartment.

  ‘You were not driving that car!’ he flung after her. ‘The angle of your seat belt burns proves it! You were sitting in the left seat, not the right—and if I drove myself more frequently in England I would have realised that as soon as I clapped eyes on your bruises and you would have been dead!’

  Her face white, her lips clamped together in a flat line of disgust that was ripping her apart inside, without a pause in her stride she threw open the next set of doors, aware that Xander was tracking right behind her. Aware that in one small, satisfied way she had taken him by surprise by walking away.

  ‘You are so in love with the guy that you told nobody that salient fact!’ he rasped out from the bedroom doorway. ‘You have been protecting him from taking any blame even though the lily-livered coward slunk away from the scene, leaving you lying there badly injured and in need of help!’

  All the time he was tossing his accusations at her Nell was throwing the doors open wide on his wardrobe and dragging open his sweater drawer. The soft cashmere garments landed in a discarded scatter. If Xander had been in a more sensible state of mind he might have been forewarned as to what was about to hit him.

  As it was he strode forward, gripping the manila file as if it was some kind of weapon. Now she spun on him and it was so nice to watch his breathing still when he saw the expression of icy distaste on her face.

  ‘He did not slink away. I sent him away,’ she corrected. ‘As you say, I protected him from you and your lynch mob and what you might do to him.’

  ‘Because you love him.’ He sounded hoarse.

  Nell nodded. Why deny it? ‘In the same way you have been protecting your family—because you love them?’

  The sarcastic tilt in her questioning tone floated right by him. ‘You are my family,’ he ground out.

  ‘No—here is your family, Xander,’ Nell said quietly, and placed the framed photograph down on the bed. ‘Goodness knows why you didn’t marry Vanessa and give her and that—little boy who looks like he loves you very m-much the right to use your name.’ She sucked in a dreadful, choked breath. ‘But don’t ever dare refer to me as your family again because I’m not—they are. I think it’s time that you got your priorities right and owned up to that.’