Bridal Bargains

by Michelle Reid

  The door closed behind him, leaving her standing there where she had faced up to him with her chin high and her stance proud, while the tears trickled unchecked down her pale cheeks.

  Why was she crying? She didn’t know. What had she expected, after all? For him to show disappointment, concern for her health, a bit of human compassion for her lonely plight?

  The man didn’t give a damn about her as a living, breathing human being, and went on to prove it by not coming back to the island for the next seven days.

  A week to the day later, she was just climbing out of the swimming pool when Sofia came out onto the terrace. ‘The master wishes to speak to you on the telephone,’ she informed her.

  The master. Mia mocked the title acidly. The man with everything—master of all he surveyed! Except an island he coveted and a child he hadn’t managed to conceive.

  ‘Thank you.’ She nodded coolly to Sofia, grabbed her beach robe and pulled it over her dripping body as she followed the maid into the house and to a telephone extension in the drawing room.

  ‘A helicopter is on its way to you,’ Alex announced. ‘It will arrive in about thirty minutes. It has no time to linger so be ready to board as soon as it lands.’

  ‘But—’

  That was as far as she got for the line went dead. Frowning slightly and wondering what this new development could mean because she had not been out of the confines of the estate since she’d arrived, she hurried upstairs, showered, dried her hair, then quickly knotted the still slightly damp mass at her nape. She threw on a pale blue cotton sundress, added a white linen jacket and gathered a few things together in a large white linen beach bag because she didn’t know if she was going to be away for an hour or two or for a week.

  She was waiting when the helicopter touched down on the purpose-built pad situated a little way off from one side of the house. The pilot didn’t stop the rotors while he waited for her to duck beneath them and climb on board.

  An hour later she was being transported by a chauffeur-driven limousine into the centre of Athens.

  The car drew to a stop outside a residential apartment block, the driver getting out to escort her inside. He led her to the lift, smiled politely but briefly as he pressed a button on the lift console then stepped back again, leaving her to travel upwards alone.

  Was this where he usually met with his mistress? she wondered, and felt her stomach turn over—felt the usual surge of bitter self-contempt begin to burn at how she let him get away with it.

  Was it the mistress’s turn to be unavailable?

  The doors slid open on a private foyer. Sucking in a deep breath of air, she forced her unwilling limbs to start moving. Chin up as usual and her eyes revealing no hint of what was eating away at her insides, she stepped out of the lift and heard the doors hiss as they closed behind her.

  But it was the man propping up a doorframe directly across from her who really held her attention. He was dressed casually in pale chinos and a white polo shirt that clung to the taut contours of his muscle-tight body. His big arms were folded across his wide chest, and one neat ankle crossed over the other. His lean, dark, frighteningly ruthless face was shuttered, his eyes hooded by long lush lashes as he looked her over.

  ‘The hair,’ he said.

  That was all. Just ‘the hair’. As she reached up in mute obedience to loosen the heavy flow of red-gold she saw the intensity with which he watched her fiery tresses tumble around her arms and shoulders.

  It was a look she knew well and could feel it touch deep, deep in the very essence of her womanhood.

  Desire, unhidden and unwanted.

  It was time to begin again.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT SET the pattern for the next two months. When commuting to and from the island to Athens, Alex came to Mia’s bed every night without fail except at weekends when, she presumed, he went to his mistress.

  Mia told herself stubbornly that she didn’t care, that the five days when he did come to her meant she deserved a brief respite on Saturday and Sunday from his insatiable demands on her.

  Anyway, she always rang Suzanna on a Saturday morning and spent long, precious minutes reassuring the poor child that she had not been forgotten.

  Those telephones calls hurt as much as they made each passing week bearable. The little girl was lonely. Mia knew what it felt like because she had been there herself during her own loveless childhood. She would usually spend the rest of the weekend sunk in the kind of heavy mood that made Alex’s absence a relief.

  During the day she had formed her own quiet routine where she swam twenty lengths of the pool before breakfast and the same again late in the afternoon. In between she read a lot, silently grateful that his home possessed such a comprehensive library.

  Over the next three weeks Alex had her transported out to him on two occasions when he was away on business—once to Milan and another time to Paris. Each time she found herself being taken to the penthouse suite of one of his own hotels for a night of wild and wanton bedding.

  She couldn’t call it loving—wouldn’t call it loving because what they shared was about as far away from that emotion as any two people could get.

  At least during those brief trips away from the island they ate together—they talked to each other, even if it was a rather wary and constrained kind of talking. And the sex was different because he would not wait until she was safely lying in the darkness before coming to join her. He would undress her himself, and had her undress him. And sometimes—just sometimes—it would seem as if he almost cared for her a little, the way he would stand there in the middle of a bedroom and caress her with hands that almost seemed to revere the smooth, silken flesh they were touching.

  And once during one of these much more intimate beddings that took place away from his private villa—times when he was warmer, kinder, much more attentive towards her, yet still managed to drive her into that mindless state of sensual fervour—he stopped when his body was lost deep inside her, pushed the wild strands of hair away from her face then lay there on top of her, his expression sombre.

  ‘Why do you let me do this to you?’ he asked.

  Why? The answer almost escaped her kiss-warmed lips but she managed to bite it back. After all, how much mocking mileage would he make out of her admitting that she couldn’t help herself?

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied honestly enough because she really did not know or understand why this man of all men should be able to move her so dramatically. ‘What’s your excuse?’

  He sighed, something like that old self-contempt, which she had not seen in his face for a week now, clouding his lean, taut features. ‘Like you, I don’t know,’ he answered heavily. For a moment, for a horrible gut-twisting moment, she thought he was going to withdraw from her and leave her in this high state of sexual need, the conscious acknowledgement of what they were doing here enough to cool his ardour.

  But, far from withdrawing, what he actually did was bury himself all the deeper inside her, his mouth trembling slightly as it came down to her own mouth. ‘Whatever it is,’ he muttered huskily, ‘we may as well enjoy because once you are pregnant it will be over.’

  It was a statement of intent. A re-statement of that intent issued to her, it seemed, so long ago now that she could barely recall the moment in her father’s study when he had first made it.

  It made their loving all the more urgent that night, made him come back to her time after time after time. The next morning, when she awoke to find him gone from her as usual, she was grateful for his absence, the pride-lowering fact that he never so much as acknowledged her during daylight hours for once a relief because she felt so utterly bereft, though she did not understand why that particular morning should be any different from all the others when she had woken alone like this.

  Then the inevitable happened. Three and a half months into this marriage that wasn’t really a marriage she missed her period.

  Oddly, she said nothing. Oddly, she
let him go on making love to her throughout the next four weeks until her second period failed to show itself. Oddly, she felt so terribly depressed by this second missed period that she was glad Alex was in the States again and therefore too far away to send for her for his habitual single night of passion to break up a business trip. Instead, she could use the time to come to terms with her own odd reaction to the one thing this had been all about.

  A baby. They had managed to make a baby. A baby that was to make all her most secret dreams come true and would give Alex what he coveted most.

  His island, his special piece of rock that lay out there somewhere among that cluster of tiny islands she could see from her bedroom window.

  Will it all have been worth it? Mia wondered dully. All this isolation she had endured, all the nights of loveless passion?

  Oh, yes, she told herself flatly, it will have been worth it, and she grimly dismissed the way her heart coiled up tightly then throbbed as if it were hurting for something it had never been given the right to hurt for.

  He arrived back at the villa late one afternoon while she was taking her usual exercise in the pool. She watched the helicopter fly over then disappear behind a bank of trees that acted as a wind-break to the pool area. As its rotor blades slowed in the warm still air she grimly returned to her exercise, pounding steadily up and down the pool with a stubborn resolve, refusing point blank to acknowledge any of the fluttering sinking sensations that were crawling around her insides.

  She was just pulling herself out of the water when she glanced up to find him standing there.

  It was a break from habit, and the irony of that break, coming now, did not escape her. He was still dressed for business in iron-grey trousers and a crisp white shirt, though his jacket was missing and his tie had been tugged loose. He looked tired, she saw. His eyes were hooded as usual as he ran them over her slender figure, encased in white clinging wet Lycra.

  Already she was aware of the changes in her body, the extra heaviness in her breasts and their new excruciating sensitivity. She knew her waist was slightly thicker simply because her clothes felt tighter, and she was aware of a swelling around her abdomen that must show under the clinging swimwear.

  It was therefore a purely defensive action that made her reach for a towel to cover herself, her eyes dropping away from his with guilt, embarrassment and a multitude of other things that didn’t bear thinking about.

  One of them was causing disturbance in the deepest parts of her body. It was desire, pure and simple. No matter who he was or what he was—or even why he was—she had grown to need him. She needed what he could do to her to make her lose her grip on the fierce self-control she had spent the best part of her life maintaining for one wretched reason or another.

  Alexander Doumas, with his dynamic sensuality, had somehow managed to find a chink in her otherwise impenetrable armour, and in doing so had unwittingly made himself so indispensable to her new need to break free from her own constraints that she did not know how she was going to go on without him now it was, in effect, over.

  And the worst thing of all, she acknowledged as she carefully wrapped the towel around her, was that knowing she felt like this about him had to be the most pride-lowering effect of the whole rotten bargain.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she announced, just like that without any preamble. It came blurting out because it had to be said before he had a chance to say the words she knew were about to come from him. She had seen the look in his eyes and had recognised it. He had been away for longer than a week, and if he had not been able to use the services of his mistress in that time then he had come to search her out like this because he needed her sexually.

  If she’d hoped to jolt some kind of response from him by boldly announcing it like that, she failed miserably. Neither by stance nor expression did he hint at anything.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked quietly.

  Her small chin lifted, her green eyes steady as they gazed into his. ‘Yes.’

  ‘How far?’

  She gave a shrug of one sun-kissed, slender shoulder, and suddenly realised that she was going to have to admit that she’d let him go on taking her while she’d already suspected she could be pregnant. ‘I missed my second period last week,’ she told him with the usual defiant tilt to her chin. ‘I w-wanted to be sure before I told you.’

  It was a weak excuse but he made no comment. He just stood there and gazed at her in total silence, his eyes and his expression telling her absolutely nothing.

  Yet she sensed in him something—something that kept her very still in the warm sunshine, held in breathless waiting suspense for …

  For what? she asked herself confusedly.

  Then she knew exactly what because when his answer came it struck so deep that it actually felt as if it might have made her bleed somewhere.

  ‘That’s it, then,’ he said, and turned and walked away, leaving her standing there feeling cold, cast-down and rejected—feeling empty inside when, physically at least, she wasn’t.

  An hour later she was standing in her bedroom when she heard the helicopter take off again. With white face, clenched teeth, closed eyes and hands coiled into two tight fists at her sides, she stood there in the middle of the room and listened until the very last whirr of those rotor blades had fluttered into silence.

  ‘That’s it, then.’ Those cruelly flat words had not stopped lacerating her since he had spoken them. There had been no enquiry as to her health—nothing but those three words that showed his contempt for both herself and their baby. Showed that the man had feelings cast in steel—he wanted the family island and did not care what he was forfeiting to get it.

  She had expected nothing more from him but still the words had managed to cut her.

  Then, quite without warning, the connecting door to his bedroom swung open. Mia started in surprise, whirling jerkily on her heel to find him standing where he should not have been.

  The shock and confusion she experienced was so great that it sent her head spinning and the blood rushing from her brain to her tingling feet. Without really knowing why, since it had never happened to her in her life before, she quietly and silently sank into a faint.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ Alex’s voice was curt, gruff, grating at her eardrums as she came round again to find herself lying on the bed with him standing over her, his dark face a fascinating mix of anger and concern.

  ‘I thought you’d gone,’ she whispered frailly. ‘It w-was a shock when you walked in here.’

  ‘You thought I’d gone?’ He sounded so incredulous that she almost laughed. ‘I’ve only just arrived. Why the hell should I want to leave again so quickly?’

  ‘Why the hell should you want to walk into my bedroom during daylight hours?’ Mia countered waspishly.

  He shifted uncomfortably, his expression becoming closed as he dropped down to seat himself on the edge of her bed. ‘I may be ruthless,’ he muttered gruffly, ‘but I’m not that bloody ruthless.’

  It was such a small concession, such a very insignificant gesture on his part, that it really did not deserve the response it actually received yet …

  Her arm came up, and of its own volition seemed to hook itself over his shoulder and around his neck as her eyes filled with weak, burning tears. She raised herself up and buried her face in the back of his shoulder—and wept.

  Which of them was more shocked was difficult to determine. Mia was shocked at herself because, even in her darkest hours, she had never let herself do anything like this! She’d never cried in front of anyone—hardly ever let herself cry even in private—so she was shocked to find the flood-gates opening as abruptly as they did.

  Alex was so shocked that he went rigid. She felt his shoulders grow tense, and his neck. She felt his heart thud against his ribcage as though the shock had jolted it out of its usual steady beat.

  Then, with an odd, short, constrained sigh he was twisting around and putting his arms around her, holding her, saying
nothing but allowing her to do what she seemed to need to do—to weep in his arms as though her heart were broken.

  But, as with all impulsive gestures, this one had to come to an eventual end. When it did, when the sobs changed to snuffles and she became aware of just what she had done and with whom she had done it embarrassment washed over her in a wave. It coloured her damp cheeks and made her shudder in horror. She pulled away from him, scrambled off the bed and made her way to her bathroom, leaving him sitting there with his dark eyes following her.

  She didn’t look back, didn’t want to know what was going on in those eyes. She wanted privacy while she came to terms with what had just taken place in that sunny bedroom.

  For the first time in too many years to count Mia had reached out to another human being for comfort. She despised herself for her weakness. She hated him for making her this vulnerable to him. And she hated this whole horrible situation that should never have started, but which now had to continue on its set course.

  It was a course which settled her into the next stage of limbo. Surprisingly, Alex did not walk away and forget all about her now his part in the deal they had struck was done. If he was in Athens he came home to the villa every evening. He even began to eat his meals with her, talking, spending the evenings with her. He took her out—picnics to quiet bays in the afternoons, or into Skiathos town during the evenings to enjoy a stroll along the busy L-shaped quayside, now bustling with golden-skinned tourists.

  But, true to his word, he never came to her bed again. At night she would lie there, aware that he was lying in his own bed on the other side of that connecting door, and know that he would never cross that threshold again.

  Another month drifted by and then another, and a doctor was transported from Athens on a regular basis to check her over. Her weight gain was swift, so much so that she was certain that if she did not keep up her exercise, by swimming twice daily in the pool, she would blow up like a giant balloon.

  She didn’t see the bloom on her face that seemed to glow with a secret kind of vitality or the way the rich redness of her hair had deepened, having a glossy sheen that shimmered like living fire in the sunlight.