Bridal Bargains

by Michelle Reid

  Her own body melted—melted on the inside, melted on the outside, a hot, honeyed meltdown that poured into her bloodstream, filling her breasts and that aching junction between her thighs so she moved wantonly against him. She couldn’t stop herself, couldn’t put a halt to what was beginning to happen all over again.

  She groaned—at least she thought it was her but it might have been him—and her thighs flexed and parted, searching out an even deeper intimacy against the grinding thrust of him. It was terrible. She didn’t know herself, couldn’t seem to control what was suddenly raging through her system.

  When he dragged his mouth free she whimpered and went in blind search of reconnection while his hands bit like twin vices into the flesh around her hips to keep her pressed tightly against him, though he denied her his mouth. Denied it ruthlessly. So much so that her eyes flickered open, glazed by need and a confusion that went so deep that it took several long agonising seconds for her to realise what he was doing.

  Watching her.

  Watching her with a bite in his eyes that told her exactly what he thought of her lack of control.

  Whore, that expression said. Whore.

  She almost fainted on the wave of self-loathing that went sweeping through her.

  He despised her for responding like this—as much as he despised her for being here at all.

  ‘Save it,’ he said insolently, ‘until later. I have a mistress to console before I can come back here and console you.’

  It was cruel but, then, he had meant to be. Anger was driving him—anger at himself for wanting her like this, anger at her for making him want her and anger at the whole situation which he could only relieve by venting it on her.

  With that final humiliation biting deep into her senses, he let go and stepped back from her. Two seconds after that he was pulling open the door and striding from the room. Not just from the room but from the villa. Standing there, trembling, aching and shamed, she listened to the front door slam in his wake, heard a car start up and drive away with a powerful roar.

  And through it all she barely breathed, barely blinked, barely functioned on any level.

  Why? Because it had finally sunk in just how much he hated her. It didn’t matter that he had already told her so as far back as in her father’s study—the point was that she hadn’t really taken the full thrust of his words on board.

  Words like, ‘I will hate and despise you and bed you with alacrity,’ were suddenly taking on their full true meaning. As did his most recent statement, ‘I have a mistress to console before I can come back here and console you …’

  She would come second. Second to that lucky lady who probably came fairly far down his list of priorities, which made second a very low status indeed.

  She was here for one purpose and one purpose only—to conceive his child so he could claim his prize.

  ‘Your dinner, madam …’ Sofia appeared from nowhere, her eyes lowered, her expression carefully guarded. ‘The dining room is this way,’ she prompted quietly.

  It took another few moments to pull herself together but Mia managed it, following Sofia into the long narrow grandeur of a formal dining room where only one place setting waited.

  He had always meant to leave her alone like this, she realised on a fresh wave of agony.

  Then, thankfully, right out of the centre of that very same agony emerged the other Mia—the pragmatic, invulnerable, very mocking Mia. The one who could smile wryly at herself for actually being hurt by Alex’s treatment of her.

  The one who could sit quite comfortably at a table and eat alone because eating alone was far more preferable to eating with cruel swines like Alexander Doumas—a man like her father.

  When the long silent meal was over she left alone, walking out of the dining room with her chin held high as she trod those polished stairs back to the relative sanctuary of her own room where she calmly prepared for bed—and felt the protective casing she had built around herself threaten to crack only once.

  That was when she glanced at the bed she had so carefully tidied, before leaving the room earlier. Someone had stripped it, changed the sheets and put on a clean lemon top cover, one which gave not a single hint of what had taken place on that bed earlier—no tell-tale creases, nothing. An act which told tales in itself.

  They knew.

  She shuddered. The whole damned staff must know what had been going on in this bed earlier.

  Did that mean they also knew why it had been going on? By their cold unwelcoming attitude she had to assume that they knew exactly why she was here and, worse, that their employer was accepting the situation only under the severest duress.

  That brought her swiftly on to the next soul-crushing point—did they therefore know just where he had gone tonight?

  The mistress.

  The other woman.

  Did they know that he had climbed out of her bed only to climb into another bed with his mistress?

  Humiliation poured into her blood, searing a path to a temper few knew she possessed. With a flash from her glinting green eyes, she reached down and grabbed hold of that lemon cover, yanking it clear away from the bed and tossing it in a heap on the ground at her feet.

  From now on, she vowed, every time she walked into this room she would mess up this rotten bed! If they wanted to bear witness to their employer’s bed duty, let them! Let them change this damned bed fifteen times a day and wonder at his incredible stamina!

  Keeping two women busy at the same time—the rotten, crass bastard!

  Not that she cared! she told herself tightly as she crawled between those pristine white sheets. She couldn’t give a damn what the man got up to so long as he was practising safe sex with the other woman. Other than that, she had no interest whatsoever in his sex life!

  That was the exact point at which she made her brain switch off because she had a horrible feeling that she might begin to care if she let herself dwell on the subject too much.

  Thankfully, sleep came to her rescue with a single lowering of her eyelids. Wearing a nightdress of cream satin and curled on her side with her long hair flowing across the white pillow, she didn’t know another thing for hours. Hours and hours of blessed oblivion from the bleak prospect of what her life was going to be like from now on.

  A hand grasped her shoulder. ‘Wake up,’ a deeply masculine voice insisted.

  Just as she had managed to push it all away with the single blink of an eye, it was suddenly all back again. ‘W-what?’ she mumbled in sleepy confusion. ‘What do you think you’re doing!’ she gasped as he rolled her onto her back and pinned her there with his weight. ‘No—!’

  ‘Not a word I recognise,’ he informed her with a grim kind of sardonicism.

  Her lashes flicked upwards, her eyes finding themselves trapped by glinting dark irises that confirmed exactly what his words and actions were stating.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she taunted. ‘Wasn’t she very consolable tonight?’

  He frowned, his eyes narrowing for the few moments it took him to grasp her meaning. Then his teeth were suddenly gleaming in the darkness, cruel and incisive like the next few words he lashed her with. ‘She was fine,’ he muttered, ‘but now I want you.’

  ‘You’re disgusting,’ she said, and tried to wriggle free, but he wasn’t about to let her.

  ‘Nevertheless, when I want I take and you deliver,’ he said harshly. ‘Don’t ever say no to me again.’

  Then he did take, passionately and ruthlessly, his hungry mouth covering hers, his tongue probing with a dark, knowing intimacy that appalled her even as her own desires leapt like the traitors they were to greet him eagerly.

  He still smelled of whisky. His lips were warm with it, his tongue tasted of it, transferring the evocative taste to her own tongue and filling her lungs with its heady fumes. His hands were trembling slightly as though his urgency was so great he was having difficulty controlling it. His long fingers ran over the smooth slide of satin, skimming her breasts
, her ribcage, her abdomen and eliciting sharp little stinging responses that made her gasp, her spine arch, her muscles tighten and her hands move upwards to clutch at his shoulders with the intention of pushing him away.

  Only her hands never pushed. They made contact with his hard, warm, naked flesh and clung to him, a wretched groan escaping her smothered mouth as his fingers slid upwards to find her breasts again. In seconds her nipples were erect and tingling, his palms rolling them with an erotic expertise that had them pushing against the confines of her nightdress while his thighs were insinuating themselves between her own.

  The throbbing contact of his own powerful erection moving against fine satin was so intensely arousing that her thighs widened even more in an effort to gain greater friction where she most needed it.

  His mouth left hers and he laughed. It was a sound far distant from humour but held angry triumph. ‘What a hot little thing you are when you let yourself go,’ he taunted. ‘No wonder you preferred me to that grotesque little man who was knocking sixty. He could not have given you half this much pleasure.’

  ‘Your mind is a sewer,’ she shot at him.

  ‘My mind is that low?’ he mocked, and grabbed hold of the edge of her nightdress, tugged it up around her hips and entered her. No foreplay, no compunction.

  To her utter horror, Mia went wild beneath him. Just like the last time, she was overtaken by an instant orgasm that set her body writhing and her insides throbbing, the tiny muscles inside rippling over him and around him as her head fell back and her throat began to pant out little gasps of riotous intensity while her heart raced out of control.

  It shocked him again, held him paralysed for the few stunning moments it took for him to accept just how spectacularly she responded to him. Then his mouth lowered to one tightly stinging nipple. Through the stretched tautness of her nightdress he sucked the pulsing tip deep into his mouth and began to move, thrusting his hips with short blunt stabs that kept her locked in that muscle-clenched storm of hectic climax, the strokes growing longer and deeper and harder as he drove her on and on with no letup, no chance to make a mad grab at sanity.

  She was out of her head and it dismayed her, but she couldn’t seem to do a single thing about it. When he withdrew she should really have come tumbling back down to earth with a crash—but she didn’t. She stayed up there, lost in that world of electric sensation.

  He muttered something, which she couldn’t make out. His body slid sideways, the nightgown coming off altogether before his mouth clamped on hers again and his fingers began to discover what his throbbing manhood already knew—what it was like to feel a woman in the throes of a multi-orgasm.

  Those tormenting fingers stroked and incited her, his hungry tongue mimicking the action. One of her hands found his nape and clutched at it desperately, holding his mouth down on hers while her other hand went in agitated search of other parts of him.

  He was so big, so hard and slick and potent—she wanted him back inside her. She wanted his mouth on her breasts but she wanted him to keep on kissing her mouth like this. In the end and on an impatient sigh her fingers clutched at a handful of his hair to tug his mouth from her so she could present him with her breast instead, and through it all her body was still rocketing through space on its own agenda.

  He began to throb against her caressing hand. She felt it happen and released a sigh of satisfaction that came out closer to a salacious growl. She snaked her body beneath him and guided him into her, two hands clutching at his lean, tight buttocks.

  Holding him like that, with his dark head buried between her breasts, she let go of everything, driving him onward with the thrust of her hips. Her cries of anguished pleasure echoed around the darkened bedroom as she felt his own pending climax build, felt the muscles bunch all over him, heard his soft curse as his self-control began to crack wide open, and this time they leapt together, high—so high Mia felt lost and disembodied.

  The next morning when she awoke the only sign that Alex had ever been there was his scent on the sheets and on her body—in her mouth and in the soft subtle pulse of her body where he had so effectively stamped his presence.

  It was a struggle to make herself get up. She almost stumbled her way into the bathroom, felt hardly any better by the time she came out again, and began to fumble round for something to wear.

  It was sunny outside, the heat of the day surprisingly strong for this time of year, she discovered when she pushed open the window in an effort to drag some air into her lungs that did not smell of him.

  It didn’t work. He was in her system, she knew. Knew the man and his scent were destined to be an innate part of her for ever now.

  It was a wretched thought—the kind of thought that made her shiver, as if someone had just walked over her grave, because she knew that no matter how passionately she had affected him last night he would be despising her more for the way she’d responded than he would have done if she’d simply remained cold beneath him.

  Oh, face it, Mia, she told herself grimly. You would be despising yourself less if you’d managed to stay aloof—and that’s what is really troubling you. You’re disgusted with yourself for being so sexually vulnerable to a man you hold so little respect for.

  And, for all you know about him, he probably has the same effect on every woman he takes to his bed.

  The great lover, she mocked acidly. The Don Juan of the nineteen-nineties!

  Did that mean his mistress was well used to losing her head whenever he deigned to bed her?

  Did it matter? she asked herself angrily as a nasty poison called jealousy began to creep through her blood. The point is, you respond like that and it’s shameful!

  But it didn’t alter the fact that she fell apart in his arms like that every night for the next fortnight. During the day she didn’t see him. He was never lying beside her when she woke in the morning. She got used to hearing a helicopter arrive and take off again very early—taking him to his offices in Athens, she presumed, though she was never given the opportunity to ask. He came back by the same means, usually just as dusk was beginning to colour the sky.

  Where he ate she did not know, but it was never with her. The only contact they ever had was in the hours of darkness when he would slide into bed beside her and drive them both out of their heads with the devastating power of their mutual sensuality. He never spoke unless it was to comment on what they were doing, and he showed no remorse in using her like the brood mare she had sold herself as to him.

  When it was over he would lie on his back beside her and she would curl on her side as far away from him as she could get while she waited for the aftershocks to stop shaking her body. Aftershocks she knew he was keenly aware of, and she had a feeling that they were the reason he lingered in that bed with her afterwards—because he saw those tremors as part of his due. They fed his ego—an ego she knew had been badly damaged by him giving in to this deal in the first place.

  Perhaps he even hated himself a little for giving in to it. Certainly, sometimes in the darkness she had glimpsed a look in his eyes that had suggested self-contempt as he’d watched her go wild beneath him and had known—just as she had—that he’d been about to join her.

  Whatever he did to her, she did to him. If he did acquire that depth of pleasure with every woman he bedded, then he did not like it happening with her.

  But, then, neither did Mia like it. In fact, towards the end of that first fortnight she began hoping—praying—that Mother Nature would be kind to her and make her pregnant. If the potency of their intercourse had anything to do with it, she should be very pregnant. Then at least he would leave her alone.

  But it was not to be. The morning she woke with those familiar symptoms that warned her period had arrived she wept.

  That day Mia roamed about the big empty house in a sluggish state of deep depression. It didn’t help that there was not a friendly face in the place from whom she could gain some light relief from her own sense of grim failure.
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  Now she had to find a moment to break the unfortunate news to Alex that he had not succeeded in his quest to make her pregnant and, more to the point, that her body was not available to him for the next five days.

  But how did she tell anything to a man who only came to her in the dead of night? Leave a note, pinned to the door between his bedroom and hers? she mused bitterly.

  The temptation to do just that was so strong that she almost gave in to it. In the end she did the only thing she really could do, and waited up for him to come to her. When eventually she heard the connecting door open she was standing by the window, covered from neck to toe in soft white towelling.

  She turned to face him. ‘I’m not pregnant,’ she announced boldly, and watched him stop dead in his tracks.

  He didn’t move again for the space of thirty long seconds, his stance so taut that she gained the rather satisfying impression that she had disconcerted him so much that he just did not know what to do next.

  It was wonderful, almost worth the disappointment to see him so utterly stumped like this. He was a big man, a man whose body she knew so well by now that she could even read the frustration in his beautiful muscle formation.

  ‘I suggest you use your mistress for the next few days,’ she added with icy relish. ‘I will, of course, let you know when I am available again.’

  Oh, she enjoyed saying that! He treated her like a whore and she was responding as a whore. His dark lashes fluttered, folding down over his eyes then back up again as the full brutal smack of her words hit him full in his arrogant face.

  Because he was no fool he recognised that she was not only acknowledging herself as a whore but that he was no better in his treatment of her.

  But he got his own back. Heavens, did he get his own back! ‘Fine,’ he agreed smoothly. ‘I will do that.’