‘Loving you too much,’ he corrected softly.
‘And aren’t you the lucky one that I loved you too much to drive away …?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ He frowned at her.
Nell gave a little idle shrug. ‘Only that Marcel was driving me back to Rosemere when we crashed. I thought your police report would have told you that.’
‘If it did, I never got to read that far,’ he murmured dazedly. ‘I just read the bit about you being in the passenger seat and went berserk.’
‘I noticed,’ she murmured feelingly.
‘Forgive me for what I said?’
Nell shook her head.
Xander uttered a sigh then changed tactics. He lifted her up until she straddled him then strode across the room.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked innocently.
‘Guess,’ he drawled. ‘If I am to pay a penance then I will do it in comfort.’
And he did.
The island was trapped in the sultry heat of the late afternoon when the helicopters began to arrive. From her place at the nursery window Nell watched as Marcel jumped down onto the ground then walked towards the glinting pool. He looked so absolutely gorgeous that Nell uttered a small sigh of sisterly pride. A sudden cry of delight went up, then a young boy in swimming shorts was racing to meet him. Marcel grinned lazily as he accepted this show of pure hero worship from the much younger Alex.
‘My hero status has been eclipsed by the matinée idol,’ Xander murmured with a regretful sigh.
‘Never mind, your real son worships you,’ Nell consoled. ‘And look at your mother and my father watching them together. They’re actually smiling. That has to be a first for both of them.’
‘It’s called bowing to fate,’ Xander said. ‘They either accept our family as a whole or they miss out.’
‘And who’d have thought Gabriela would be so besotted?’
‘Why should she not,’ Gabriela’s son defended loyally, ‘when my son looks exactly like me?’
‘Too like you,’ Nell complained, turning away from the window to go and lean over the cot, where Demitri Pascalis lay kicking contentedly. ‘Now, you know I love you,’ she informed the wide-eyed baby. ‘But I still don’t think it’s fair that you didn’t even elect to have my green eyes.’
The baby let out a shriek of delighted laughter. He didn’t care that he looked the absolute spit of his dark-eyed papa.
‘Cruel,’ she scolded. ‘But I will get my own back,’ she warned him.
‘And how do you intend to do that?’ Xander asked.
Straightening up to find herself slipping easily beneath his waiting arm, Nell smiled one of those wait-and-see threats at him as she let him lead her away.
‘I see,’ Xander murmured fatalistically. ‘The wicked witch is mixing spells again.’
As they left the baby’s room Thea Sophia slipped quietly into it, and took the comfortable chair placed by the cot. Out came her lacework and her gnarled fingers got busy while the baby chatted away to her. He would fall asleep in a few minutes, bailing out with a blink of an eye, but until that happened he had his ever-attentive thea to entertain.
Walking Nell into their sunny bedroom, Xander turned her to face him. He was dressed in one of his loose white shirts and casual trousers, but soon they would have to start getting dressed up for the party that was to take place tonight—which was a shame, in Nell’s opinion, because she preferred to keep him in clothes she could strip off quickly.
‘Mmm,’ she said as she pressed her lips to the triangle of hair-roughened flesh exposed by the open neck of his shirt. ‘You taste of sun and salt and sexy masculinity.’
‘And you have a one-track mind,’ he sighed.
‘It’s my birthday. I’m allowed a treat.’
‘Several treats.’
‘OK,’ she shrugged, not arguing the point because it was oh, so much more interesting to discover how smoothly the shirt fell open to her lightest touch. She ran her fingernails down his front and watched taut muscles flex.
‘You’re so gorgeous,’ she murmured helplessly—and received her reward with the hungry clamp of his mouth.
It didn’t take much longer for them to be lost. Xander’s muttered, ‘We don’t have time for this,’ was ruined by the urgency with which he stripped her blue T-shirt dress off her and tumbled her onto the bed. They made hot, frenzied love while the rest of the family chatted by the poolside.
When they came downstairs two hours later you would be forgiven for thinking that Nell had spent the whole afternoon achieving that gloriously chic look she’d donned in a short half-hour. She was wearing aquamarine silk, smooth and slinky, a perfect set of blue diamonds sparkling at her creamy throat.
Her hair was up to show them off because Xander had given her them for her birthday. And if anyone wondered at the rueful grimace he offered when his mother congratulated his wife on how two hours’ pampering could put such a wonderful glow to her daughter-in-law, no one would have thought to question whether he knew something that they did not. He looked far too smooth and sophisticated to be recalling what they’d been doing in the shower only half an hour ago.
They separated, they danced and circulated amongst their fifty-strong guests as goods hosts did. They laughed and teased and flirted and came together on the terrace to snatch a private moment or two gazing at the moon.
‘Happy?’ Xander asked, holding her in front of him.
‘Mmm,’ Nell murmured uncertainly.
‘Something missing from your perfect day?’
‘Mmm,’ she nodded.
‘You would like me to toss you into the pool perhaps?’
‘Not tonight, thank you,’ she answered primly, then took hold of one of his hands and slid it over her abdomen. ‘I’m afraid it’s tender loving care time again,’ she softly confided.
Xander immediately stiffened like a man in shock. ‘I hope you are teasing me!’ he grated.
‘No,’ Nell sighed.
He swung her around, a dark glitter in his eyes. ‘You mean you really are pregnant? But our son is only ten months old!’
‘I want a red-haired, green-eyed girl child this time,’ she told him. ‘And you really are lousy at birth control.’
‘Ah, so I am to get the blame again.’
‘Of course,’ she said then wound her arms around his neck and leaned provocatively into him. ‘But then you never, ever disappoint …’
The Price of a Bride
Michelle Reid
CHAPTER ONE
JANUARY had arrived with an absolute vengeance. Standing in the window behind her father’s desk, Mia watched the way the wind was hurling the rain against the glass in fiercely gusting squalls—while behind her a different kind of storm was raging, one where two very powerful men pitched angry insults at each other.
Not that she was taking much notice of what they were actually fighting about. She knew it all already, so her presence here was really quite incidental.
Merely a silent prop to use as leverage.
‘Look, that’s the deal, Doumas!’ she heard her father state with a brittle grasp on what was left of his patience. ‘I’m not into haggling so either take what’s on offer or damn well leave it!’
‘But what you are proposing is positively barbaric!’ the other man hit back furiously. ‘I am a businessman, not a trader in white slavery! If you have difficulty finding a husband for your daughter try a marriage agency,’ he scathingly suggested, ‘for I am not for sale!’
No? Way beyond the point of being insulted by remarks like that one, Mia’s startlingly feminine mouth twitched in a cross between bitter appreciation for the clever answer Alexander Doumas had tossed back at her father and a grimace of scorn. Did he truly believe he would be standing here at all if Jack Frazier thought he couldn’t be bought?
Jack Frazier dealt only in absolute certainties. He was a rough, tough, self-made man who, having spent most of his life clawing his way up from nothing to
become the corporate giant he was today, had learned very early on that attention to fine detail before he went in for the kill was the key to success.
He left nothing whatsoever to chance.
Alexander Doumas, on the other hand, was the complete antithesis of Jack. He was smooth, sleek and beautifully polished by a top-drawer Greek pedigree which could be traced back so far into history it made the average mind boggle, only, while the Frazier fortunes had been rising like some brand new star in the galaxy during the last thirty odd years, the Doumas fortunes had been steadily sinking—until this man had come on the scene.
To be fair, Alexander Doumas had not only stopped the rot in his great family’s financial affairs but had spent the last ten years of his life repairing that rot, and so successfully that he had almost completely reversed the deterioration—except for one final goal.
And he was having the rank misfortune of coming up against Jack Frazier in his efforts to achieve that one goal.
Poor devil, Mia thought with a grim kind of sympathy, because, ruthless and unswerving though he was in his own way, Alexander Doumas didn’t stand a chance of getting what he wanted from her father, without paying the price Jack Frazier was demanding for it.
‘Is that your final answer?’ Jack Frazier grimly challenged, as if to confirm his daughter’s prediction. ‘If so, then you can get out for I have nothing left to say to you.’
‘But I am willing to pay double the market price here!’
‘The door, Mr Doumas, is over there …’
Mia’s spine began to tingle, the fine muscles lining its long, slender length tensing as she waited to discover what Alexander Doumas was going to do next.
He had a straight choice, the way she saw it. He could walk out of here with his arrogant head held high and his monumental pride still firmly intact, but put aside for ever the one special dream that had brought him to this point in the first place, or he could relinquish his pride, let his own principles sink to Jack Frazier’s appalling level and pay the price being asked for that dream.
‘There has to be some other way we can resolve this,’ he muttered.
No there isn’t, Mia countered silently. For the simple reason that her father did not need another way. The Greek had called Jack Frazier barbaric, but barbarism only half covered what her father really was. As she, of all people, should know.
Jack Frazier didn’t even bother to answer. He just sat there behind his desk and waited for the other man to give in to him or leave as suggested.
‘Damn you to hell for bringing me down to this,’ Alexander Doumas grated roughly. It was the driven sound of a grudging surrender.
The next sound Mia heard was the creak of old leather as her father came to his feet. It was a familiar sound, one she had grown to recognise with dread when she was younger, and even now, at the reasonably mature age of twenty-five, she was still able to experience the same stomach-clutching response as she had in childhood.
Jack Frazier was a brute and a bully. He always had been and always would be. Man or woman. Friend or foe. Adult or child. His need to dominate made no exceptions.
‘Then I’ll leave you to discuss the finer details with my daughter,’ he concluded. ‘Get in touch with my lawyer tomorrow. He will iron out any questions you may have, then get a contract drawn up.’
With that, and sounding insultingly perfunctory now that he had the answer he wanted from the other man, Jack Frazier, cold, cruel, ruthless man that he was, walked out of the room and left them to it.
And with the closing of the study door came quite a different silence. Bitter was the only word Mia could come up with to describe it—a silence so bitter it was attacking the back of her neck like acid.
I should have left my hair down, she mused in the same dry, mockingly fatalistic way she had dealt with all of this.
It was the only way, really. She couldn’t fight it so she mocked it. It was either that or weep, and she’d done enough weeping during her twenty-five years to know very well that tears did nothing but make you feel worse.
‘Drink?’
The sound of glass chinking against fine crystal had her turning to face the room for the first time since the interview had begun. Alexander Doumas was helping himself to some of her father’s best whisky.
‘No, thank you,’ she said, and stayed where she was, with her arms lightly folded beneath the gentle thrust of her breasts, while she watched him toss back a rather large measure.
Poor devil, she thought again. Men of his ilk just weren’t used to surrendering anything to anyone—never mind to a nasty piece of work like her father.
Alexander Doumas had arrived here this afternoon, looking supremely confident in his ability to strike a fair agreement with Jack Frazier. Now he was having to deal with the very unpalatable fact that he had been well and truly scuppered—caught hook, line and sinker by a man who always knew exactly what bait to use to catch his prey. And even the fine flavour of her father’s best malt whisky wasn’t masking the nasty taste that capture had placed in his mouth.
He glanced at her, his deep-set, dark brown Mediterranean eyes flicking her a whiplashing look of contempt from beneath the glowering dip of his frowning black eyebrows. ‘You had a lot to say for yourself,’ he commented in a clipped voice.
Mia gave an empty little shrug. ‘Better men than me have taken him on and failed,’ she countered.
She was referring to him, of course, and the way he grimaced into his glass acknowledged the point.
‘So you are quite happy to agree to all of this, I must presume.’
Happy? Mia picked up the word and tasted it for a few moments, before deciding ruefully, that—yes—she was, she supposed, happy to do whatever it would take to fulfil her side of this filthy bargain.
‘Let me explain something to you,’ she offered in a tone gauged to soothe not aggravate. ‘My father never puts any plan into action unless he is absolutely sure that all participants are going to agree to whatever it is he wants from them. It’s the way he works. The way he has always worked,’ she tagged on pointedly. ‘So, if you are hoping to find your redemption through me, I’m sorry to disappoint you.’
‘In other words—’ His burning gaze was back on her again ‘—you are willing to sleep with anyone if Daddy commands it.’
‘Yes.’ Despite the deliberate insult, her coolly composed face showed absolutely nothing—no hint of offence, no distaste, not even anger.
His did, though, showing all of those things plus a few others all meant to label her nothing better than a trollop.
Maybe she was nothing better than a trollop, allowing her father to do this to her, Mia conceded. Certainly, past history had marked her as a trollop.
‘Did you do the choosing yourself?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Is that what this is really all about?’
Taken by surprise by the suggestion, her eyes widened. Then she laughed—a surprisingly pleasant sound amidst all the bitterness and tension. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘You said yourself that my father is a barbarian. It would go totally against his character to allow me to choose anything for myself. But how conceited of you to suggest it …’ she added softly.
‘It had to be asked,’ he said, stiffening slightly at the gentle censure.
‘Did it?’ Mia was not so sure about that. ‘It seems to me that you’re seeing yourself as the only victim here, Mr Doumas,’ she said more soberly. ‘And at this juncture it may well help if I remind you that there tend to be different kinds of victims in most disasters.’
‘And you are a victim of your own father’s tyranny—is that what you are trying to tell me?’
His scepticism was clear. Her green eyes darkened. If Alexander Doumas came to know her better he would take careful note of that. She was Jack Frazier’s daughter after all.
‘I am not trying to tell you anything,’ Mia coolly countered. ‘I don’t have to justify myself to you, you see.’
After all, she thought, why should she defend h
erself when his own reasons for agreeing to this were not that defensible?
Not that he was seeing it like that, she wryly acknowledged. Alexander Doumas was looking for a scapegoat on which to blame his own shortcomings.
‘No,’ he murmured cynically. ‘You merely have to go to bed with me.’
And she, Mia noted, was going to be his scapegoat.
‘Of course, I do understand that my lot is the much easier one,’ she conceded, with that same dangerously deceptive mildness. ‘Being a woman, all I need to do is lie down, close my eyes and mentally switch off, whereas you have to bring yourself to … er … perform. But God help us both,’ she added drily, ‘if you find me so repulsive that you can’t manage it because we will really have a problem then.’
She had managed to actually shock him, Mia was gratified to note—had managed to make him look at her and see her, instead of just concentrating on showing her his contempt.
With a wry smile of satisfaction she deserted her post by the window at last to come around her father’s desk and walk across the room towards the two high wing-backed leather armchairs that flanked the polished mahogany fireplace.
A log fire was burning in the grate, the leaping flames trying their best to add some warmth to a room that did not know the meaning of the word—not in Jack Frazier’s house, anyway.
But the flames did manage to highlight the rich, burnished copper of Mia’s hair as she walked towards them. Although she didn’t look at Alexander Doumas as she moved, she felt his narrowed gaze following her.
Eyeing up the merchandise, she thought, cynically mocking that scrutiny.
Well, let him, she thought defiantly as she felt his gaze sweep over the smooth lines of her face, which she had been told was beautiful although she did not see any beauty in it herself.
But, then, she didn’t like herself very much and they did say that beauty was in the eyes of the beholder.
Therefore, it followed that neither would this man be seeing any beauty in her right now, she supposed, as he was so actively despising her at this moment.
Bridal Bargains Page 37
