Bridal Bargains

by Michelle Reid

  So there she had been—seventeen, homeless, penniless and pregnant. By the time Suzanna was born she had hit an all-time low, but it was still a very last resort that had sent her begging to her father.

  ‘Drink some more.’

  She glanced up to find that Alex was sitting on the sofa opposite. Her eyes quickly dropped away again, but not before they had taken in the fact that he had changed his clothes somewhere along the line. The business suit he had arrived home in had been replaced by something more casual in a pale linen fabric and a plain white T-shirt.

  A sound outside brought her head up again. It was a car, drawing up at the front door. Alex stood up, came over to her and bent to remove her cup. ‘Sofia has packed for us,’ he murmured flatly. ‘All we need to do is go now. OK?’

  OK? Why was he asking her if it was OK to leave when he had never bothered to ask her opinion on anything before?

  It didn’t really matter now, she told herself hollowly as she nodded her head with its neatly styled hair, which should have drawn his anger but was a small detail that seemed to have passed by him unnoticed.

  He went to help her rise to her feet again, but she withdrew abruptly from his touch. He was the enemy, she grimly reminded herself. You do not lean weakly on the enemy.

  The journey to the airport was carried out in silence. The transfer to his private jet was achieved with the minimum of fuss, and it was only as she sat there, feeling the jet’s surge of power as it shot smoothly into the air, that it sank in that Alex was actually sitting beside her.

  ‘You didn’t need to come with me.’ She found her voice at last, frail and constricted though it was. ‘I will come back just as soon as Suzanna is feeling better.’

  He didn’t answer. His lean, dark face was a closed book as he sat there, gazing directly ahead. Not piloting the plane himself this time, she noted. Not doing anything but sitting here, lost deep within his own grim train of thought.

  Tears filled her eyes. She didn’t know why. They just did. Then almost directly out of the rubble in which her emotions lay, her chin rose in what had become a familiar habit to those who had been around her during the last few months. Her bloodless mouth straightened and her tear-washed eyes cleared.

  ‘I am not a whore.’

  Why she said that was just as big a surprise to her as the tears were that had preceded it.

  ‘You announce yourself in those terms,’ Alex quietly replied. ‘I have never used the term to you.’

  ‘You don’t need to. I can hear it screaming at me every time you look at me.’

  From the corner of her eye she saw his grim mouth twist. ‘You are your own salesman,’ he said. ‘Don’t blame others for believing what you place in front of them.’

  Was that true? she wondered, then sighed because she decided it was most probably very true and that she did present herself as the kind of cool-headed mercenary who would have sold her body for the proverbial pot of gold.

  ‘Well, just in case you’re worrying that I might have passed on some dreadful social disease with my whoring ways, I think I had better reassure you that there have only been two men in my life who have used my body—Suzanna’s father was one of them, and you the other.’

  ‘If I had been worried about such a prospect I would have insisted on the relevant test to reassure myself. As it is …’ his dark head turned to study her whitened profile ‘… I already knew most of what you have just told me. I had you thoroughly investigated, you see, before I agreed to any of this. The nun’s life you have been leading since your wild rebellion eight years ago was easily discovered, which made the way you responded to me all the more intriguing …’

  Her cheeks went red, and he lifted a finger to gently stroke that heated skin. ‘Only the fact that you have given birth to a child escaped my investigators. Now that,’ he added softly, ‘was a surprise.’

  ‘And one you are now going to use against me, I suppose.’

  ‘Will I need to?’

  It was a challenge. Mia shivered delicately and shifted her cheek so his finger had to drop away. ‘I want my baby,’ she murmured huskily, ‘but I will not keep him at Suzanna’s expense.’

  ‘He doesn’t warrant the same fierce feelings of love and protection your daughter ignites in you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted, one of her hands moving to rest on that firm mound where her new baby lay. ‘But Suzanna has paid long enough for the misfortune of having me as her mother. She deserves better and I am prepared to do anything to make sure I am in a position to give it to her.’

  ‘Like sleeping with a man you hold in contempt?’ he suggested. ‘Like taking any flak he might wish to throw at you, without saying a thing in your own defence? Like allowing yourself to be sent into isolation while he punishes you for his own weaknesses?’

  ‘So you acknowledge you have weaknesses?’

  He smiled rather drily. ‘I know myself quite well,’ he answered flatly. ‘I know my weaknesses—and my strengths. I am thirty-six years old, after all,’ he added. ‘If I have not learned them by now then I truly am in danger of becoming a man like your father. That is how you see me, is it not—as a man no better than your father?’

  ‘You see a chunk of real estate as worth more than life itself so—yes,’ she admitted. ‘You are no better than him.’

  ‘And you?’ he challenged. ‘What does that make you?’

  Her green eyes flashed—the first sign of life they had shown since she’d walked away from him in that sunny bedroom back at the villa. ‘I sold myself to you, not another’s life.’ She made the distinction. ‘And you bought the use of me from my father, not from me. In return he gives you your precious island while he gets what he wants—a male heir to whom he can leave his filthy money. I get Suzanna and this child as payment. So the only thing I have sold to anyone is the use of my own body. You tell me what that makes me.’ She threw the challenge right back at him.

  His smile was cynical, to say the least. ‘You seem to have conveniently forgotten the five million pounds your father is paying you on delivery of his male heir,’ he drawled derisively.

  Mia’s heart-shaped upper lip clamped itself tightly to her much fuller bottom lip and she looked away from him out of the window at the clear blue stretch of sky through which they were flying.

  The new silence pulled at the tiny muscles in her throat and around her heart, lining the wall of her tensely held ribcage.

  ‘There is no money,’ he bit out suddenly. ‘You lied about the five million to throw me off the scent!’

  ‘I have money of my own,’ she countered defensively. ‘I don’t need money from my father.’

  ‘Your mother’s money.’ He nodded, surprising her with just how deeply his investigators had dug into her life. ‘She placed her money in a trust fund for you, which matured on your twenty-fifth birthday. A paltry two hundred thousand pounds,’ he added with biting contempt.

  Two hundred thousand was a small fortune to most people and more than Mia had ever had access to before. She could easily live off it with a bit of careful planning. She could bring her children up, know they would want for nothing materially.

  ‘You know,’ he muttered, ‘you are a whore in a lot of ways.’ With an angry movement he unfastened his seat belt and stood up. ‘You sell yourself cheap and you see yourself as cheap!’

  With that, he walked away, leaving her sitting there alone while she let the full thrust of his final angry words sink in.

  It was getting quite late when they eventually landed, the August evening cool after the evenings Mia had grown used to back in Greece.

  ‘Which hospital?’ Alex asked her as they settled in the back of a chauffeur-driven Mercedes.

  She told him, and he leaned forward to relay the information to their driver, who was separated from them by a tinted sheet of glass.

  It was a small relief that he wasn’t making a battle out of going directly to the hospital. She knew she was tired, and knew how that tiredness w
as showing on her pale, pinched face, along with the worry and strain she was experiencing for Suzanna’s sake.

  Suzanna. Her daughter. Her stomach flipped over, a frisson of anxiety shaking her system for that poor child she had never been able to claim as her own but who shared, none the less, the kind of bond with herself that really only a mother and child could share.

  Mia might have been forced by circumstances to hand over her daughter to her father but he had never managed to break that bond, though he had tried—many times. ‘She’s my daughter now,’ he had announced with grim satisfaction the day the adoption papers were signed. ‘Ever be tempted to tell her who you really are and it will be the last time you will ever see her.’

  Mia shivered as she sat there beside a silent Alex, remembering the choices she had been offered the day she went home to her father, frightened, desperate, destitute and carrying her new-born baby girl in her arms, to beg from the last man on earth she wanted to go crawling to.

  ‘I won’t have any gossip about my promiscuous daughter and her bastard child,’ he’d warned her brutally. ‘If you want my support, let me adopt her, though, God knows, I don’t need another damned female hanging around me. You can be a sister to her,’ he had decided, ‘but as far as anyone is concerned she is my child, not yours, and don’t you let yourself forget that.’

  So she’d placed her own life on hold and had stayed living with her father so she could be close to her daughter. It was she who had brought Suzanna up since she was a baby, she who had seen to her needs throughout her young years, and she who had visited the child every weekend since her father had placed Suzanna in that dreadful boarding school. ‘To toughen her up,’ he’d announced heartlessly. ‘The way you mollycoddle her, she will never learn to take care of herself if I don’t split you up.’

  But really he had sent Suzanna away to school because he knew how it would hurt the two of them to be separated like that. And because it placed Mia under yet more obligation to him. ‘You can have her to yourself during the vacations,’ he’d promised. ‘So long as you remain living here with me, that is.’

  Then Tony had been killed, and his whole attitude to both Mia and Suzanna had taken on a radical change. In Tony he had seen the continuance of himself. He hadn’t needed to look any further for a male heir to his fortune. That was when Mia had become a tool for him to use for a different purpose—and Suzanna was the bait he had used to make Mia agree to everything he’d demanded.

  ‘You get me a grandson and I’ll let you have full custody of Suzanna. I’ll choose the man. I’ll discover the weak link that’ll make him marry you. All you have to do is go to bed with him—not a problem for a whore like you.’

  Not a problem. In the dimness of that luxury car she grimaced. Well, it hadn’t been a problem in the end, had it? In fact, going to bed with Alex had turned out to be a pleasure! Which probably meant her father knew her better than she knew herself. Did he know she was already pregnant? Had Alex told him? She certainly hadn’t. She’d had no contact whatsoever with her father since she’d got married. But Alex would have been eager to announce their success to Jack Frazier, she was sure.

  In four more months or so her father would get the boy to whom he wanted to leave all his money, Alex would get his island and Mia would get custody of Suzanna.

  All pacts with the devil, with this small baby growing inside her the unwitting champion for the three of them.

  ‘Does she know you are her mother?’

  The question made her jump, coming out of the blue as it did.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I am not allowed to tell her until this child is safely delivered.’ Then her breasts heaved as she sucked in a tense breath of air and let it out again before she added huskily, ‘I was not allowed to tell you either. If my father finds out that you know, he will say I have broken the contract I have with him and keep Suzanna, just for the hell of hurting me.’

  The hospital came into view, its brightly lit windows announcing that time here had no real meaning. Work here went on twenty-fours a day.

  Alex came with her, travelling through the corridors with a tight-lipped silence that kept his presence remote from Mia, who had become barely aware of him as her anxiety grew the closer they got to the ward to which they had been directed.

  They came upon a nursing station first, with a pretty young nurse standing behind it who glanced up then smiled the warmest smile Mia had been offered in months. ‘You must be Suzanna’s sister,’ she declared immediately. ‘You look so much like her.’

  ‘How is she?’ Mia asked worriedly.

  ‘Fine.’ The nurse came around the station to touch her gently on the hand. ‘The operation went off without a hitch. The appendix hadn’t burst so she should have no complications. She’s already out of Recovery and back on the ward here, though we do have her settled in a room off the main ward so we can keep a special eye on her.’

  ‘Can I see her?’ Mia’s eyes were already darting off in the direction the nurse’s hand had indicated.

  ‘Of course. She’s asleep,’ the nurse warned as she moved off, with them following, ‘but you can take a quick peek at her to reassure yourself. She has been asking for you constantly …’

  The room was nothing more than a tiny annexe, with brightly painted pictures, done with childish hands, pinned all over the white-painted walls. But it was the little bed in the middle of the room that held Mia’s attention. Her eyes darkened, her face losing what bit of colour it possessed as one trembling hand went up to cover the sudden quiver of her mouth while she stared at her daughter lying so pale and still.

  Without taking her eyes off that sleeping face, Mia walked over to the bed, then gently stroked the child’s pale cheek before she bent and replaced the hand with a kiss.

  ‘She looks so vulnerable,’ she whispered, worry-darkened eyes running over that little face with its shock of bright hair tied back to keep it tidy.

  ‘She’ll be sore for a few days,’ the nurse said quietly, ‘but she shouldn’t feel too much discomfort. Her worst worry was that you wouldn’t manage to come.’

  Mia winced. Somewhere beyond the periphery of her own vision someone else winced also.

  ‘Apparently, you were not in the country when she became ill.’

  ‘I got here as soon as I could,’ Mia said huskily. ‘Has my father been in to see her?’

  ‘No.’ The nurse’s tone cooled perceptibly. ‘Only the lady who came in the ambulance with her. A Mrs Leyton—your father’s housekeeper, I believe? She stayed until Suzanna was safely back up here again before she left.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Mia murmured. ‘I’ll sit here with her for a little while, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course not,’ the nurse said. ‘There is a chair just behind you,’ she added, and with a curious glance at the man who was standing in the far corner of the room, but who had contributed nothing to the conversation, she left them alone.

  Mia didn’t even notice. Her whole attention was fixed on Suzanna as one of her hands searched blindly behind her to find the chair so she could sit down on it.

  Then she reached for and gently closed her fingers around Suzanna’s small fingers, lifting them to her cheek and keeping them there. ‘I’m here now, darling,’ she murmured softly.

  The child didn’t move. She was still too heavily sedated to be aware of anything that was going on around her. But that didn’t stop Mia talking gently to her, murmuring the kind of reassuring phrases a mother seemed to find instinctively.

  Maybe the child did hear within the fluffy clouds of her own subconscious because something seemed to alter about her. Her slender limbs lost a tension that hadn’t been apparent until it had eased away and her pale, rather thin face seemed to gain some colour.

  As silently as he had observed everything, Alex observed the change in the child also, and just as silently he walked out of the little room and left them to it, sensitive enough—no matter how Mia believed the opposite about him—to
know he was intruding on something private.

  He came back an hour later and, after pausing in the doorway to frown at the look of exhaustion straining Mia’s features, he stepped forward and touched her shoulder. He waited for and received the expected start that confirmed to him that she had forgotten his presence.

  ‘It’s time to go,’ he said quietly. ‘We will return tomorrow, but you need to rest now if you don’t want to end up too tired to be of any use to her.’

  A protest leapt to her lips—then hovered for a moment before it was left unsaid. He was right, she conceded. She was so utterly weary she could barely function. So, without a word, she stood up, bent to the child’s cheek then straightened, and without so much as a glance at him she turned and walked out of the room.

  As soon as she was settled in the car again her head went back against the leather headrest and her tired eyes closed.

  ‘You are very alike,’ Alex remarked quietly. ‘Does she have your colour eyes, too?’

  ‘Mmm.’ Mia didn’t want to talk—didn’t even want to think very much. Relief was, at this moment, playing the biggest role in making her feel so exhausted. She had travelled from Greece to the hospital in a state of high nervous tension, not knowing what she was going to find when she got there. Now she had reassured herself that Suzanna was going to be all right it seemed to make everything else deflate inside her.

  ‘Has no one ever made the natural connection between the two of you?’ Alex persisted. ‘It seems impossible to me not to consider a stronger bond than sisterhood when the likeness is so strikingly obvious.’

  ‘My brother had the same colouring,’ she explained. ‘People suspected Suzanna was my brother’s child but not mine because I was so young when I had her.’

  ‘I thought you told me your father did not believe you were his daughter.’ He frowned. ‘But if you and your brother have the same colouring, surely he has to accept the blood connection somewhere?’

  ‘We have the same mother,’ she said. ‘Exactly who it was that fathered us was a different thing entirely.’