Bridal Bargains

by Michelle Reid

  ‘You’re careering from the point,’ Xander incised.

  ‘Feeling the vulnerability of your age difference to Helen’s, caro?’ Gabriela incised back. ‘When you hit your fifties she will still be in her thirties—the absolute prime of a woman’s life!’

  ‘Get to the point!’ The tension in him was close to snapping. Nell blinked at the sight of darkness scoring the rigid line of his cheeks.

  ‘At least you chose the child for your wife, not your mistress,’ his mother continued with the same cutting scorn. ‘I am the same age as your father. I felt it deeply when his interest began to stray. You are built in his image—a true Pascalis male who will not lose his good looks and his sex appeal as he grows older.’

  ‘So you jumped on the first man that showed you some admiration.’

  ‘I did not jump, I dived,’ his mother declared without conscience. ‘I lost myself completely in the glorious flood!’

  ‘You have no shame.’

  Nell stood up. ‘I think I should leave you two to finish this on your—’

  ‘Sit down again!’ Xander thundered.

  Her chin came up. ‘Don’t speak to me like that.’

  With a flare of rage he stepped up to her and forcibly made her sit. She’d never seen him like this, so controlled by his emotions that he was almost fizzing. She opened her mouth to protest. He covered it—hard. Yet even though it began as an angry way to subdue her, the kiss did not conclude that way and she could feel the effort it took for him to drag his mouth from hers.

  ‘Listen to what she has yet to say—please,’ he begged, and when she could only nod, he claimed her mouth again, soft with gratitude—then moved away.

  Having watched the little interplay with interest, oddly, Gabriela went quite pale. ‘My son loves you—’

  ‘The point, Madre,’ Xander curtly prompted.

  ‘He made me come here because he said you would not believe a word he says about this—thing with Vanessa DeFriess.’

  ‘Liars lose the right to be believed,’ Xander inserted.

  ‘I still don’t understand why you felt you needed to lie!’ his mother cried. ‘What man with a beautiful wife to love would want to lay claim to that—puttana? Unless, of course, you were … Ah,’ she said when he all but threw himself over to the window.

  ‘Stop trying to outguess me and spit it out,’ Xander gritted.

  ‘Well, he was lying.’ She turned back to Nell again, and then took in a deep breath. ‘It was my husband who had the affair with Vanessa,’ she spelled it out at last. ‘Demitri took that woman to his bed to get his revenge on me. When the madness was over for both of us and we decided we could not live without each other, we made a promise that neither affair would ever be spoken about again.’ She paused to take in a breath. ‘All was well for several months. Indeed, we enjoyed the bliss of a second honeymoon.’ Her beautiful dark eyes took on a wistful glaze. ‘Then Vanessa came to Demitri and told him she was pregnant with his child. Everything fell apart in that moment. After Alexander was born and I discovered I was unable have more children Demitri had assured me that it did not matter …’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Xander murmured gruffly.

  ‘No.’ His mother looked at him. ‘You believed I was a fashion plate with a thin figure to protect. And you are now thinking of your own lonely childhood when I was not a very good mother to the one child I did have,’ she tagged on to his hard expression. ‘Which I suppose does give you every right to look upon me with such cynicism. I admit that I am not the maternal kind.’

  It was like listening to some bizarre rehash of her and Marcel’s story, Nell thought as she listened, while her mind stung her with disbelief. Coincidences like this just didn’t happen. It was reality gone berserk. She looked up at Xander to find his fierce gaze was fixed on her.

  ‘I know,’ he said tensely, reading what she was thinking. ‘This is why I knew you would not believe me if I told you this myself.’

  His mother looked from one to the other. ‘What are you talking about?’ She frowned.

  ‘Nothing,’ Xander said. ‘Please continue.’

  ‘Continue.’ Gabriela laughed stiffly. ‘What is there left to say? There was your father, about to become a father again and he could not disguise his delight. I was going to lose him again and I was so terrified I—took an overdose and had to be flown to hospital. By the time I was out of danger Demitri was a different man. I begged him to never see Vanessa and her baby and, to his word, they were never mentioned again.’

  ‘How much more proof could he offer that he loved you?’ her son put in. ‘He handed responsibility for Vanessa and his unborn child to me with the instruction that I never speak of them because he would not have you distressed like that again.’

  ‘And you never forgave me for being so spineless.’

  ‘The child has rights,’ Xander said. ‘You gave him none. The mother had the right to be treated with respect if nothing else. You denied her that right. She was gagged so quickly by my father’s lawyers that she was left without a single leg to stand upon.’

  ‘For money,’ Gabriela pointed out. ‘Don’t forget the millions you take care of for her. Or the huge trust set up in the boy’s name.’

  ‘Or the hours of emotional support both Vanessa and her son required once Alex was born. I became a father without taking part in the act of conception and I do not recall you ever feeling sorry for my plight.’

  ‘You didn’t have to take duty to such extremes—’

  ‘He’s my half-brother!’ Xander expelled in hoarse-voiced fury. ‘Half my own flesh and blood!’

  ‘I know I am a very selfish woman,’ his mother said shakenly. ‘I know you see me as a spoiled, vain, useless waste of space. But it is happening again, isn’t it?’ She looked helpless suddenly. ‘You are willing to sacrifice me for them just as your father was willing to do the same thing.’

  ‘No,’ Xander uttered gruffly.

  ‘You already threatened it, Alexander,’ she wearily reminded him. ‘Your father did the same.’

  ‘Hence the dramatic overdose aimed to pull him back into line again?’ Xander said hardly. ‘If that isn’t extreme then I don’t know what is, Madre. Now I’ve made you talk about this, am I to wait with bated breath for you to use the same emotional blackmail on me?’

  His mother went white. On a gasp of horror at his cruelty Nell shot to her feet. ‘Xan—’

  But Gabriela got in first. ‘I have my regrets, Alexander,’ she told him stiffly. ‘And I can now feel the cutting pangs of remorse for denying your father the right to know his other son. But if you believe I have not been punished very adequately for my sins then you’re wrong. When Demitri died I lost a major part of myself. I still miss him so much …’

  ‘You know,’ Xander drawled, ‘I would respond kindly to that blatant attempt to play on my sympathies if it was not for the fact that only minutes before Nell came in you were still refusing to sacrifice your ego for the sake of our marriage.’

  Gabriela accepted this final indictment with a wry little smile. ‘Ah, that sin called ego,’ she drily mocked herself then turned to go.

  ‘No—don’t go,’ Nell begged huskily. ‘You both need to resolve this …’

  Gabriela looked into her daughter-in-law’s anxious face then at Xander’s rock-like stance and offered up a grimace. ‘You are a sweet person, Helen. You will make a good mother to my grandchild. Let us hope that my son will be a good father, for I think he forgets that I was not the only parent to leave him for another love.’

  Then she walked away, leaving Nell staring helplessly after her while Xander continued to stand there like a cold, hard, stubborn fool!

  ‘Go after her.’ She swung on him urgently. ‘She’s your mother, for goodness’ sake. You love her, you know you do—faults and sins alike!’ When he still didn’t move from his stiff stance, ‘If you let her go now you will never see her again because the both of you are too stuffed full of pride to give a sol
itary inch! I thought you were bigger than this! Xander, please …!’ she begged painfully.

  But she didn’t need to add the last part because with a tight, angry growl of blistering frustration he spun and strode after her, leaving Nell staring after him feeling very much as if she’d just been run over by a pair of trucks.

  She watched his hands reach out to grasp Gabriela’s narrow shoulders, watched through a deepening glaze of tears as he turned her into his chest. She caught the tones of thick, gruff, husky Italian, felt her heart quiver as the proud Gabriela broke her control on a muffled sob.

  Then she turned away and began to shake like a leaf, still too befuddled by what she had been told to even attempt to sort it out in her head.

  She made for the kitchen, leaving mother and son alone to mend their differences while she attempted to do something really normal like setting about making coffee but feeling so at odds with herself and with Xander that she didn’t hear him arrive at the door.

  ‘OK?’ The husky question came from behind her.

  Stiffening her spine, she pressed her lips together and nodded, not sure she wanted to look at him until she’d made up her mind if she hated him for putting his mother through that ordeal, or loved him for doing it for her.

  ‘No more nausea?’ he questioned when it became clear she wasn’t going to speak.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she managed, fingers fiddling with the slender white china cup she’d set out ready for her coffee. ‘Would you like a drink?’

  ‘Not if you’re planning to poison it,’ he said drily, then hissed out a weary sigh. ‘Nell, we need to—’

  ‘Your telephone’s ringing.’

  And it was. They both listened to it for a few fraught seconds, Nell with her eyes squeezed tightly shut on a tense prayer that he would just go and answer the damn thing. Xander, she was sure because she could feel it, piercing the vulnerable tilt of her neck with grim intent in his gaze, wanted her to turn and look at him.

  ‘Easy on the belladonna,’ he instructed heavily after a moment and went back to his office, leaving her wilting though she didn’t really know why.

  A few minutes later she was bracing her shoulders and carrying two cups of freshly made coffee into his office. Xander was still on the phone with his dark head resting back against the chair’s leather upholstery, and his eyes were closed. He looked tired, she noticed, dragged down and fed up. As she walked across the expanse of floor towards the desk she saw his lashes give a flicker and quickly looked away.

  ‘Efharisto,’ he murmured as she put one of the cups of coffee down in front of him.

  She managed a brief upward glance at his face before turning away again.

  ‘Stay,’ he husked, showering her in tingling tremors. ‘Sit down, relax, drink your coffee. I will be only a few more moments here.’

  Sit down, relax, drink your coffee, Nell repeated silently and sank into the chair by his desk and wondered why she was still feeling so at odds with him when everything had been explained—hadn’t it?

  He was talking in Greek, she noticed, sitting up now and swinging his chair slightly with his eyes lowered to where a set of long fingers hit intermittently at the computer keyboard lying on the desk. His deep voice was quiet, asking low key questions with no hint of sharp command evident, as if someone had switched off his normal incisiveness.

  The phone went quietly back on its rest. Strumming silence followed. Nell felt it so deeply inside that she tensed.

  He picked up his coffee cup and looked down into it. ‘How much belladonna?’

  ‘Two spoonfuls,’ she answered.

  ‘Still not forgiven, then.’ He grimaced a wry smile at her then lifted the cup to his lips and drank. The way that he did it was so much like a man willing to take his poison that she shot like a bullet to her feet.

  ‘Stop it,’ she stabbed at him.

  ‘Stop what?’ He looked at her.

  ‘Making a joke of it.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘All of that—stuff we’ve got through today.’

  ‘Are we through it?’

  She frowned at the question, her tightening nerve-ends forcing her to discard her coffee-cup before she spilled it down herself. ‘Y-your mother is your mother.’

  ‘Is that supposed to make some sense to me?’

  ‘Sh-she is what she is and you have to accept that.’

  ‘I do—as much as I can do,’ he reminded her. ‘Next problem.’

  The way he said it as if she was in a business meeting made her start to seethe. She jerked round to face the other way. ‘I don’t like you.’ That was a problem, she thought. ‘Sometimes …’ she then added grudgingly because it was crazy to deny that she liked him in bed—loved him in bed.

  Loved him all the time, she extended unhappily, but loving didn’t have anything to do with liking, did it?

  ‘You hurt people and don’t seem to care when you’re doing it.’

  ‘Are we still discussing my mother?’

  ‘No—me,’ she said huskily.

  Silence met that announcement. Nell folded her arms beneath her breasts and stared down at her feet.

  ‘You should have told me the truth about Vanessa.’

  ‘You should have told me the truth about Marcel.’

  ‘That was different.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he wasn’t an issue when you married me. Vanessa was and once you knew it you should have told me the truth straight away instead of letting me spend the next twelve months imagining you in her arms instead of mine!’

  A sigh sounded behind her. The next sound was the creaking of his chair as he came to his feet. Her chin hit her chest when he came to stand right in front of her. Without saying a word he clamped his hands to her waist and lifted her up to sit on the desk. Next her thighs were summarily pushed apart and he was wedging himself between them, then her arms were firmly unfolded and lifted round his neck.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Now that we are more comfortable I will explain … I fell in love with you within about two seconds of you walking through your father’s front door …’

  Her chin shot up, green eyes wide with shock and disbelief.

  ‘Got your full attention now?’ he mocked. ‘Ready to hang on my every word with bated breath?’

  ‘You never did love me then, or you would not have left me on our wedding night believing what I did.’

  ‘You are referring to that memorable time when you stood there in your bridal gown, shouting at me and looking so heartbreakingly beautiful, hurt and young?’ He uttered a sigh. ‘It was either leave you there or toss you on the bed and ravish you and—trust me, agape—you would not have survived the kind of ravishing I had in mind right then. I was mad with you for believing that trash—mad with myself for not seeing it coming. Do you think that Vanessa is the only skeleton a man like me has lurking in his closet? I’ve had women trying to foist their babies on to me and women trying to blackmail me. I’ve had them sneaking into my bed in the dead of night and crawling through windows in an effort to get to me.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be modest; do tell the rest,’ Nell drawled acidly.

  ‘You think I like being every greedy gold-digger’s dream catch? Why do you think my security is so tight? Would you like a ballpark figure on how much it has cost me to keep such stories out of the Press over the years? Give any one of those grasping women a glimpse at more money and they would be singing to the Press today. Vanessa was the exception. She was not my skeleton, which made those computer printouts you showered at me all the more annoying because I did not feel I had the right to break the promise of silence and protection I had made to my father on his death bed.’

  ‘Not even to me?’

  ‘Don’t look so hurt,’ he chided. ‘Do you think it didn’t hurt me to realise that you were not equipped with the necessary defences to live my life? I already knew I’d been unforgivably selfish, crowding you into marriage so young. I saw in a single miserable flash of en
lightenment as I watched you enact that little tragedy just how selfish I had been. I saw how every jealous woman out there was going to have a story to whisper in your ear. It would have been like leading a lamb into a slaughterhouse then standing back to watch it be skinned.’

  ‘So you walked away.’ Her soft mouth wobbled.

  ‘Yes.’ He kissed the wobble then sighed. ‘When I left you at Rosemere I did it determined to set you free—but I could not. I kept on putting it off. Kept coming to see you, couldn’t stay away! Kept trying to convince myself that while you seemed content with what you had then you were OK. The night I offered to renegotiate our contract was the one time I was ready to rip the damn thing up and let you go. I’ve never felt happier when you turned the offer down without even hearing me out. I was off the hook for another few months until my conscience got to me again. Then that second photo of me with Vanessa appeared and you crashed your car. I’ve never felt so bloody lousy in my entire life!’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘It’s nice to know that I wasn’t the only one feeling like that.’

  ‘Ah, but that was before I knew about the new man in your life.’ He smiled. ‘I switched from feeling lousy with remorse to a thirty-four-year-old lusty, cradle-snatching lecher in a single blink of an eye. You think you were jealous of Vanessa? You barely scratched the surface of jealousy, agape mou. But I did. I scratched it right down to its bloody, primitive raw.’

  ‘I love it when you’re primitive.’ She moved a little closer in an effort to capture his mouth.

  His head went back. ‘I’m being serious!’

  ‘So what do you want me to say—get away from me, you uncivilised beast? Shall I get your pack of bodyguards to string you up to a tree and tar and feather you for wanting me too much to let me go?’