Bridal Bargains

by Michelle Reid

  ‘Why do you always hide your hair?’ he murmured huskily into the dark chasm of sensation that her whirling mind had become. ‘I find it very exciting that the same colour nestles here between your thighs. I adore it that your skin is so pale against my own skin, that your breasts are so very sensitive to my slightest touch even though you fight me. And even the fact that you fight me excites me. It makes me wonder what I will feel when you decide to torment me in return …’

  ‘No.’ Out of her head with sensation as she was, she heard the silky invitation in his voice and breathlessly refused the offer. ‘I won’t touch you. You don’t need me to.’ The obvious fact that his manhood lay in such daunting erection against her thigh confirmed that fact.

  ‘I will drive you wild,’ he warned her, seeming even to enjoy this battle. As if any battle with her was an excitement for him. ‘I will make you beg …’

  Mia kept her hands clenched in tight fists by her sides as a stubborn answer.

  She heard his soft laugh at her stubbornness, then he took one pointed stinging nipple into his mouth and sucked hard at the same time as he slid a finger deep inside her.

  Wild, he’d called her. Well, she went wild. It flared up with no constraint. Her hands snaked up and caught at his hair, her fingernails raking into his scalp as she cried out in a wretchedly raw response to what he was doing to her.

  He muttered something—it sounded shaken. Then he was repeating the sequence of events so that she reacted in the same way. It was so utterly, mind-blowingly pleasurable that she didn’t even feel ashamed of herself, just elated—so exquisitely elated because she had truly believed that she did not have it in her to respond to any man as violently as this.

  ‘You will beg me or caress me,’ he warned.

  Her eyes flicked open, green fire lasering into burning black. ‘I never beg,’ she informed him with amazing coolness.

  ‘No?’

  With a sudden bright glow in his eyes he slid down the full length of her, landing on his knees beside the bed. ‘Beg?’ he offered silkily.

  ‘Go to hell, Mr Doumas,’ she bit out, using that formal title as an insult.

  What he did was bury his mouth between her thighs.

  Mia begged. She clutched at him in exquisite agony, and pleaded with him to stop. She wrapped her long legs around him and tried to pull him up and over her. She dug long anxious fingers into his sweat-slicked shoulders. She gasped and writhed and panted and hated him with a vengeance as he held her fast with hands at her hips and drove her to the very edge of sanity.

  ‘Oh—please,’ she sobbed, ‘please stop now!’

  ‘Say my name,’ he muttered against her flesh, his tongue making a snake-like flick at her with the cruel intention of ripping the breath from her body. ‘Beg me again and use my name.’

  ‘Alexander,’ she whispered helplessly.

  ‘Alex,’ he corrected. ‘My lovers call me Alex.’

  ‘Alex!’ she groaned. ‘Alex, please, please …’ she murmured deliriously.

  ‘Please—what?’ he demanded.

  ‘Please come inside me!’ she cried out in aching agony.

  It was so humiliating because he laughed as he slid his long, lean, hot body along the full length of her, then entered her with no more warning than that.

  ‘Like this?’ he taunted. ‘Is this what the five-million-pound wife requires?’

  But it was too late for Mia. The cruelty and the insult went sailing right past her because she had shot straight into an orgasm that went on and on and on, and made him go very still in stunned reaction.

  He could feel her—actually feel her beating all around him on wave after wave of pulsing ecstasy. It shook him, shook to the very roots his conviction that he’d often experienced what was best in a sexual climax. This woman was experiencing what had to be the best, and not one part of her missed out on the raging feast. Not her fingers where they flexed and clutched at his body, not her breasts as they heaved and arched and quivered, not her mouth as it gasped and groaned and panted.

  He caught her mouth. He needed to capture it, needed to join in that wild experience, and at last he began to move inside her, feeling that incredible orgasm go on and on and on while driving him towards his own mind-blowing finish.

  When it came he lost touch with himself, with her, with everything. His mind shut down. He felt it happen—felt the flow of blood leave his brain as it surged down to that point of such unbelievable pleasure that it was almost agony to feel it eventually fade away.

  Mia thought she might have died a little afterwards. Certainly something deep inside her had been lost for ever. She didn’t know what, couldn’t begin to try and work out what. But as he lay there, heavy on her, his big body still attacked by the pulsing aftershocks of what they had just created between them, she knew that something vital had gone from her—had been passed, maybe, from her to him, she didn’t know.

  But it was most definitely gone.

  When he eventually moved, sliding sideways onto the mattress to bury his face in the pillow, Mia turned and curled up away from him. She was shocked, shocked by the uninhibited wildness of what had just taken place. Shocked by the power of his passion and her own ability to let go of every ounce of self-control.

  And now came the aftermath, she thought bleakly as they continued to lie there, together but separate, intimate but strangers.

  Silent, appalled strangers who had been caught in the tangled web of their own sexuality, only to find after it all that they were still very separate entities.

  He moved first, sending her muscles into wary tension as he moved to the edge of the bed and sat up with his feet on the floor. She heard him utter a heavy sigh, sensed him raking angry fingers through hair that had been disarrayed by her own restless fingers. She felt the mattress dip as he bent and she knew he was picking up his discarded robe. She felt him begin to cover himself as he pushed himself to his feet.

  Tears burned in her eyes as she lay there, facing away from him with her arms and hands clutched protectively across her curved and naked body. She sensed his eyes raking over her, sensed him considering what to say, and waited with baited breath and a hammering heart for the clever insult to hit her eardrums.

  But in the end he said nothing, and maybe that was just about the biggest insult he could have paid her as he walked out of her bedroom in total silence.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IT TOOK every ounce of determination Mia could muster to step out of that bedroom at precisely nine o’clock that evening, but she had to pause at the top of those highly polished stairs as a bout of cowardly tremors made a sudden last-minute attack.

  She was still suffering from shock, she knew. Her body was in shock at the unrestrained way it had behaved this afternoon. Her mind was in shock because it just could not believe it had allowed her to go so out of control with Alex, a man she supposedly felt nothing for. But, more to the point, she was finding it more difficult to come to terms with the knowledge that she had allowed all of it to happen with a man who felt so little for her.

  Where had her pride been? Her self-respect?

  She didn’t know, could not understand what had possessed her during that wild, hot frenzy that had taken place in the bedroom. But she certainly knew where her pride was at this moment. It was floundering around at her feet, along with her lost self-respect.

  And the urge to simply turn right around and lock herself in that bedroom rather than have to face him again tonight was so powerful at the moment that she almost gave in to it.

  Then the sound of a door opening downstairs caught her attention, and she suddenly discovered that her pride was not completely demolished because, with a bracing of her slender shoulders and a defiant lifting of her chin, she found herself walking down the stairs, instead of dashing for cover behind a locked door, because she knew she would rather die than let him see how utterly degraded she felt.

  A sound to her left as she reached the hallway set her feet moving in th
at direction. A door was standing slightly ajar, with golden light shining gently through the gap.

  She took a deep breath, ran trembling fingers down her equally trembling thighs then stepped forward, silently pushing the door open just enough to allow her to enter whatever room was on the other side of it.

  She saw Alex immediately. Her heart turned over, her throat locking on a fresh lump of tension. He was dressed very formally in a black silk dinner suit, white dress shirt and black bow tie—though what he was wearing barely registered with her at that moment because she was so busy coming to terms with the way she was seeing him now.

  Naked.

  She shuddered, horrified at herself—appalled by the sudden flare of sexual awareness that went sizzling through her as her eyes looked at him and saw firm golden flesh, covering a beautifully structured framework, instead of the reality of conventional black fabric.

  She saw wide satin-smooth shoulders and rock-solid biceps, a hair-roughened chest that was so powerfully muscled it made her own breasts sting in memory of what it had felt like to be crushed against it. She saw a long lean torso with a tight waist, flat hips and strong thighs, supporting a pelvis that housed the full-blooded and dynamic essence of the man.

  An essence that made her inner thighs clench, made her go hot all over, made her lungs completely shut down as a whole gamut of sensation went racing right through her. She looked at his mouth and felt it crushing her own mouth, looked at his hands and felt them caressing her skin.

  She looked at the man in his entirety and saw a tall dark stranger—now an intimate stranger. But one who had suddenly become so physically real to her that she now realised just how successfully she had been blanking him out before as a flesh and blood person.

  Was he aware she had done that? she wondered as she stood there, staring at him in nerve-tightening tension. Did he know that to get herself this far in this dastardly deal they had struck she’d had to pretend he was nothing more than a shadow?

  Standing there by a drinks cabinet, seemingly lost in thought as he frowned into what looked like a crystal tumbler lightly splashed with whisky, the only thing she could be sure about concerning him now was that at this moment, while he believed himself alone, he was doing nothing to hide his own sense of loathing at what had erupted between them.

  And why not? she asked herself. He despised her as much as she despised him so it followed automatically that he felt the same revulsion for what they’d done to each other.

  Shame trickled through her, followed by a wave of pained helplessness. Because this was only the beginning, not the end.

  The beginning.

  She must have moved, though she hadn’t been aware of doing it, because something made his dark head turn. Then he became still, his brooding stare fixing on hers, knowledge making his dark brown irises glint and then burn, which sent a wild flush of hot embarrassment sweeping through her because their new intimacy, she realised, was catching him out, too.

  Then the flame changed to contempt, a hard, biting, cruel contempt, before he hooded the expression with long black lashes. Hooded it so he could let his gaze run over her carefully controlled hair and the dramatically plain deep turquoise silk shift dress she was wearing, which skimmed her slender figure without clinging anywhere—deliberately chosen for that reason.

  Yet he missed nothing—like herself, she suspected, seeing not the fully dressed woman standing here but the naked one, the wild one, the woman who had surprised him with the power of her own passions. He was seeing her spread out, fully exposed to him and ready.

  She felt sick suddenly. Stomach-churningly, head-swimmingly sick.

  ‘Take your hair out of that unflattering knot,’ he said in an oddly flattened tone. ‘And don’t wear it up in my company again.’

  It was a shock. The very last thing she had expected him to say, in fact. Her hair? An impulsive hand went to touch the simple knot held in place by a tortoiseshell clasp. Her cheeks warmed and her eyes dropped away from him because she didn’t know why he was suddenly attacking her and why he had used that strange tone to do it.

  ‘No,’ she said, grimly pulling herself together, the coolly indifferent Mia sliding back into place. ‘It’s more comfortable for me to wear it like this. It annoys me when it’s loose.’

  ‘Then suffer,’ he said unsympathetically. ‘I hate liars. And that prim hairstyle makes such a damned liar of you. At least when your hair is down …’ he took a tense gulp at the drink in his glass ‘… people are forewarned about what you really are.’

  ‘And what am I?’ she asked, the green eyes glinting with challenge—while every fine muscle in her body was held tensely, waiting for him to say the word her father had been throwing at her for so many years now that she couldn’t remember when he had not seen her as a whore.

  This man would be no different. This man and her father had so much in common it would shock and appal Alexander Doumas to know just how much.

  Or maybe he did know, she corrected herself when he didn’t say it but took another deep slug from his glass instead.

  ‘Do it,’ he commanded as he lowered the glass again. ‘Or I will make you do it.’

  ‘Dinner,’ a carefully neutral voice announced behind Mia.

  She turned abruptly and caught Elena’s frosty expression. She knew the other woman had overheard most of their telling little conversation, and looked right through the housekeeper as she strode proudly past her.

  But the hand landing on her shoulder brought her to a sudden standstill. How Alex had managed to move across the room so quickly Mia didn’t know, but it was certainly his hand, burning its already familiar brand as he detained her.

  ‘Leave us.’ He grimly dismissed the housekeeper.

  She turned and left as he propelled Mia back into the room then closed the door. A half-moment later and the tortoiseshell clasp that was holding up her hair was springing free, and the silken coil of hair was unfurling over his fingers in a heavy fall of fire that rippled its way to the base of her spine.

  The tortoiseshell clasp was discarded and she heard it land with a clunk on a nearby table. Then he turned her round to face him.

  ‘Don’t fight me,’ he warned her very grimly, ‘because you won’t like the consequences.’

  To prove his point, the hand still lost in her hair tightened, tugging her head backwards until she had no choice but to look at him. His eyes were still hooded, but she could see the anger simmering beneath those heavy eyelids as he began to rearrange her hair to his own satisfaction.

  It hurt her inside. For some reason Mia could not work out at all the way he was asserting his control over her like this hurt—when it shouldn’t. It was only what she had expected from him from the very beginning after all.

  ‘You don’t like who you are, do you?’ he murmured suddenly.

  ‘No,’ she replied. It was blunt and it was honest.

  ‘It is why you hide your true nature behind prim clothes and stark hairstyles. You are ashamed of what you are.’

  ‘Yes,’ she confirmed, again with the same cool bluntness.

  ‘But you could not keep the passion hidden in that bed upstairs, could you? It broke free and virtually consumed you.’

  ‘You weren’t so controlled yourself,’ she hit back.

  ‘I didn’t quite reach the point where I completely stopped breathing,’ he countered grimly.

  Her cheeks went pale, her lowered eyes squeezing together on a fresh bout of self-revulsion.

  ‘Was it like that with the rock star?’ he questioned. ‘Did you fall apart as spectacularly for him as you did for me?’

  She didn’t answer that one—refused to answer. Whatever had gone on in her life before this man was none of his business, and she was damned if she was going to feed his ego by telling him she had never lost control of herself like that before—ever.

  His hand came to her chin, closed around it then tightened, demanding an answer, but her eyes showed him nothing except cold,
green defiance. Her mouth, so red and full and still clearly swollen from his kisses, remaining resolutely shut.

  ‘Well, I tell you this much, yineka mou,’ he murmured very softly. ‘You have set your own boundaries with what took place up there. You will not move from this estate without my say-so. You will not be left alone—either in this house of out of it—with another man. You are now, in effect, my personal prisoner.’

  ‘Points you had written into my contract,’ she reminded him. ‘Did you see me arguing with you about them then?’

  ‘Ah, but I have a … worrying suspicion that you were not so aware of your own passions when you agreed to that contract. Now you do know, and I am going to take no chances with you falling apart like that for any other man—understand me?’

  ‘Yes.’ Once more she refused to give him the satisfaction of arguing the point with him because, whatever lessons he thought he had learned about her in that blasted bedroom, she, too, had learned her own lessons about him. This man thrived on argument. His sexual drive fed off it, but he would not be fed by her again.

  He knew exactly what she was doing, of course. He was not an idiot. He could read silent messages just as well as she could. But to her surprise, he laughed, a warm, dark, sexily amused sound that curled up her toes inside her shoes as his mouth came down to cover her own.

  Their bodies fused, that quickly and that easily, from mouth to breast to hips. They came together as though someone or something had simply thrown a switch to let the whole wretched current of electric pleasure wrap itself around them.

  His tongue blended with hers, and her hands jerked up to clutch at his warm, tightly muscled neck where her fingers spread along his jawbone, his cheeks and the smooth line of his chin. She felt his body respond by tensing, felt his hands drag their way downwards until they were clasping her low on the hips, drawing her even closer to the pulsing throb where his manhood was thickening, tightening.