Had she actually agreed to marry him?
Yes.
She had.
And the marriage made complete sense.
What else could she do?
He was the father of this child, and they both had the means and the commitment to fight for this baby, to fight to have it in their lives.
But that’s not why she’d agreed. At least, that wasn’t the only reason. There was sense and common decency, and then there was the explosive, passionate lust that had threatened to rip her to shreds unless she indulged it. There was the way he looked at her and set fire to her bloodstream, the way his touch was enough to incinerate all her best intentions.
There was want, as well as obligation.
“No, I didn’t,” he drawled, his intense watchfulness thrilling and alarming all at once.
Bella knew people considered her beautiful. She’d dyed her hair brown after her first failed marriage. No, she’d dyed her hair brown in response to the guilt of what she’d done to Xavier’s life with her lie. She’d run from the woman she’d been, and she’d wondered if, with shorter brown hair, she’d somehow be less interesting to the opposite sex than when her long, white blonde mane had cascaded down her slender back in rolling waves.
It had made little difference.
And though she was used to the mostly unwanted attention of the male gender, nothing and no one had ever made her feel quite like this man.
Her ex-husband, Xavier Salbatore, was undeniably handsome as well, and now she thought about it, he bore a similar ruthless arrogance and charm. She’d loved Xave, she’d loved him like a brother and a best friend, but she’d never craved him like this. She’d never craved him at all – that wasn’t what their relationship had been about.
Desire, like this, was terrifying and addictive in equal measure.
“Are you going to?” She asked, swallowing, and now forcing her gaze to slip to his, then wishing she hadn’t when desire charged her nerve endings once more.
She turned away from him, looking at her fridge with an odd sense of disconnect. Her life – this life she’d made for herself in Scotland, so she could be near her aunt – seemed tenuous now, her connection to it weakening with each second that passed, dragging her closer to a future in which she was married to this man – a man she knew very little about and yet somehow felt completely confident to tie herself to.
“Does it matter?”
She bit down on her lip, and shrugged her slender shoulders. “I suppose I feel like we should ask each other questions like that.”
“Why?”
“I know nothing about you,” she murmured, still staring at her fridge.
He came to stand beside her, not touching her, not looking at her.
“You know I’m a confirmed bachelor with a billion notches on my bedposts,” he drawled, a cynical undertone to the words that had her lifting her gaze to his slowly.
“Yes, I know that,” she said, scanning his face, wondering then how she was going to survive their marriage. He was too much. The essence of her equilibrium felt like it might swallow her up if she wasn’t careful.
His lips twisted into a tight smile and then he lifted a hand to cup her cheek. “Does what I am, what I was, before we met matter?”
Her frown showed confusion. “I… don’t know.”
“My father married in his fifties. My mother was much younger. I was born just before his sixtieth birthday.”
Something locked in Bella’s mind – a memory, of a long time ago – but when she tried to grab it, to focus her mind on its translucent quality, it disappeared again, like a ribbon flying into the sky.
“I never gave much thought to marriage and children. Family. I suppose if I had, I would have seen myself doing what he did – waiting until much later in life. I didn’t hurt anyone by staying single. I don’t lie to women. I don’t cheat. I don’t have affairs. And I will treat our marriage with respect. I will treat you with respect.”
And, as ludicrous as it might seem, Bella fought a wave of emotion, a throbbing of tears that sparked inside of her at his simple statement.
“Besides,” he said, dropping his thumb to her lip and parting them, so she husked out a slow breath. “I am infinitely more interested in learning about you.”
“Me?” She asked huskily, her body already trembling with his proximity.
“A divorced virgin? There must be a story there…”
She swept her eyes shut, Xavier, Ellie, their mixed, sordid past was one she didn’t like to revisit. “Yes,” she said simply, swallowing. “But it’s not really something I’m at all proud of.”
She opened her eyes in time to see him blinking, showing his own confusion, and then he was Vitalo Katrakis once more – confident, powerful tycoon.
“Why not?”
Her smile was enigmatic – sadness frayed at its edges. “You told me a moment ago that your past doesn’t matter. I think the same can be said for mine.”
“Ah. But an ex-husband is more to contend with, I think. Is it over between the two of you?”
“Well and truly. He’s married.”
Vitalo’s eyes darkened. “You are still in love with him?”
Bella shook her head, and now her smile was genuine, if somewhat muted. “Yes. As much as I ever was.”
Sympathy crossed Vitalo’s features. He cupped her cheeks, holding her face still, his eyes locked to hers. “Then I will enjoy driving him from your mind, agape mou. I will make love to you until you are weak and his name is impossible for you to recall.”
Bella’s stomach churned and she didn’t add that she had never loved Xavier romantically; she didn’t add that she adored his new wife, and their children.
“This is crazy,” she said again.
He straightened, dropping his hands to his sides. “And yet it also makes all the sense in the world, no?”
“Yes,” she murmured, nodding her head. “It does.”
He pulled away, striding to the edge of the kitchen, and for a moment he was still, staring at the door. “I will organize everything. Ordinarily licenses take a month or so to procure, but my assistant is liaising with the embassy. I believe special dispensation will be granted allowing us to marry early next week.”
“Next week?” She blinked, her eyes huge. “So soon?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I think it is better if we marry before anyone tries to talk us out of it,” he said, laughing.
“I don’t think you’re a man who could be talked out of anything.”
“It is not my resolve I am concerned about.”
Bella’s stomach churned. “You think I’m going to back out of this?”
“No.” His smile was like a bolt of lightning and the warm swell of the ocean, all at once. “But I shall not relax until you are officially my wife.”
She laughed now, shaking her head. “Why are we doing this?”
He didn’t laugh. “For our child.” His eyes roamed her face, and then her body, in a way that made a mockery of his claim that this was for the baby growing in her belly. He looked at her as though she were his only chance for survival, as though she were the antidote to every ill this world possessed.
“Yes, for our child.” She curved a hand over her still-flat stomach, and emotions clogged her throat.
“I will call you tomorrow,” he said, simply, and then he moved towards the door. She followed, simply because it felt like what she should do. “Bella?” He curved a hand over the knob but waited, looking at her intently. “Do not mention this to anyone. Let us marry, and get used to our new life together before we bring other people into the equation.”
She thought about her mother, whom she’d barely heard of since the wedding, and she shrugged – it would be no hardship not to tell Kat about this. Announcing her pregnancy had been hard enough!
But Sophia?
“My sister’s my best friend,” Bella said quietly. “I can’t imagine getting marri
ed without her at my side.”
His face shifted with something approaching tenderness, but it was gone almost instantly. “We will have a big christening,” he said, with a muted strength. “A double celebration. The last thing either of us needs is the pressure of family breathing down our necks while we… adapt to our new situation.”
And though she knew it would hurt Sophia, she also knew, deep down, that there was something infinitely appealing in what he was suggesting. She knew there was an element of rightness in an agreement between two people being made in complete privacy.
Her last wedding had been a circus – as befitted the daughter of an American senator and a man of Xavier’s standing. There’d been hundreds of guests, paparazzi stalking the gates, everything, and she’d hated it. She’d wanted, so badly, to run away – but she couldn’t. She couldn’t desert Xavier in his hour of need.
Her mother and Sophia, they’d both been with her then, when she’d agreed to spend the rest of her life with a man she didn’t love, and who didn’t love her. This wedding would be no different – except they both knew what they were getting.
Steel formed in the backbone of her resolve, and she nodded crisply, businesslike. “Fine,” she said with a lift of her chin. “Let’s marry in secret, but before we do, I’d like us to form a contract.”
“A contract?” He repeated, lifting his brows in something she suspected might have been amusement.
“To protect us both.”
“You mean a prenuptial agreement?”
“Sort of.” She waved a hand in the air. “Not about money – it makes sense that if we split, we’d both walk away with what we have now. I don’t need your wealth and you don’t need mine.”
His expression showed something like grudging respect. Though she was very wealthy, he was more so, and perhaps he’d always expected his marriage would, in some part, revolve around a woman’s desire for his fortune.
“I want to marry you because I think our baby deserves us to try our very best to make a family for him or her. But we don’t know we won’t end up hating each other. We don’t know we won’t be miserable, and I don’t want to spend my life worrying that you’re sleeping with someone else – and that our child will find out.”
Her skin paled without her knowledge, as she remembered her father’s deathbed ramblings, the discovery to twelve-year-old Bella that the marriage she’d always seen as perfect was, in fact, anything but.
“One of the reasons I’ve never considered marrying,” he said with such seriousness in his voice that she held her breath, “is because I respect the institution too deeply. Infidelity is abhorrent to me in every way. You need not fear I will stray from our bed.”
And his assurance filled her with something like gold dust, but still, she pushed: “You say that now, but a lifetime is a long time. I think it would be prudent to draw up an agreement, so that we both know what we’ll do in all eventualities.”
His smile took her breath away. “Fine, and so we shall.” He moved closer, drawing her into his arms. “Not because we will ever need it, asteri mou, but because I know we won’t.”
His certainty was contagious, and it fired in her blood. “Thank you.”
He kissed the tip of her nose.
“Write down what you want me to agree to, and I will sign it.”
She arched a brow with disbelief. “What if it’s manifestly unreasonable?”
“For example?”
“Well, for example,” she pondered thoughtfully, “If I ask you never to come to Scotland again, if I decide to leave you?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “You won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you are marrying me for the sake of our baby – and I know you don’t think keeping me out of our child’s life is a good idea.”
She swallowed, because he was right, and she wasn’t sure she liked that.
“Agape, either you think I am not a man of my word, or you believe I will not keep you happy and satisfied.” His expression one of fierce determination. “Neither is true. I am promising you now, Bella, that I will not walk away from you or our baby. And I will give you a thousand reasons to stay…”
* * *
Water glistened in the late afternoon sunshine, as sparkly and green as the eye could see, in all directions. Bella stared out at it, her mind exhausted by the whirlwind that had been the last twelve hours.
Marriage.
Again.
But so different to her first wedding.
Instead of all the fanfare, it had just been her and Vitalo, his personal assistant and a driver to witness the ceremony. The formalities themselves had been short and to the point – just the legal necessities, the recitation of vows she knew to be meaningless. This wasn’t about having and holding, loving and cherishing.
Theirs was a marriage based on mutual desire, and out of a need to do what would best serve their child.
Child!
Her hand curved over her stomach and a smile spread across her face. This was happening. And even though it had been unplanned, even though she’d thought she’d be single forever after her first failed marriage, she was instead looking down the barrel of married life – family life!
“The island was my father’s wedding gift to my mother,” he’d said, as his helicopter had flown in over the northern tip, showing pristine shoreline with white sand, turquoise water and verdant green vegetation scrambling up a sheer white cliff face.
As the chopper had continued its journey, she’d seen a golf course to one side – expansive and immaculately tended, several groves of fruit and what she thought might have been grape vines, a row of small houses and then, on the southern side, a sprawling mansion, terracotta in colour with rendered walls. Bright pink bougainvillea sprawled up one sun-drenched side, and a white gravel path crunched underfoot when she’d stepped out of the helicopter.
She’d worn a simple dress for the wedding – long sleeves in deference to the frigid weather in Edinburgh, but now, despite the lateness of the season, there was warmth in the Mediterranean air. Not enough to want to dip into that sublime ocean, but certainly enough to join the whisper of sunlight over her skin.
She sighed softly, spinning around and surveying the room she was in – a large sitting area with black leather armchairs that looked to be Scandinavian in design, timber floors and a huge brightly-coloured rug in the middle. Books lined one wall, but they were all in either French or Greek. She skimmed her eyes over them, regretting the fact she’d let her French skills go.
Spanish she could speak fluently, though.
She thought of Xavier and Ellie with something like guilt – guilt for not having told them she was pregnant, nor that she was getting married. Sophia would be even harder to explain things to.
Bella could just imagine what her younger sister would say: “You swore you’d never get married again, Bell!”
She had.
She’d sworn it until she was blue in the face, and yet… here she was. She glanced down at her wedding ring – a simple white gold band – and frowned.
“Having regrets?” His voice caught her by surprise. She startled, lifting her gaze towards the doorjamb, where all six and a half feet of Vitalo Katrakis were in repose, casually leaning against one side, one ankle crossed over the other, his expression impossible to interpret.
She hadn’t seen him since they’d landed. He’d introduced her to one of his domestics, Anna, and suggested Anna give Bella a guided tour – he’d had to work, he’d said.
And though their romance was hardly the stuff of fairytales and love, she’d still had to bury a wry response at how he’d chosen to spend his wedding day.
But it wasn’t a real wedding. Nor a real marriage.
She shook her head from side to side, her eyes latched to his.
“Good.” He looked at her as though he could see into her soul, as though he could unravel her piece by piece, if only he looked long and hard enough.
“Have you had lunch?”
She nodded. “Anna made me something.”
“Good. She showed you the kitchen?”
Bella nodded once more.
“This is your house now. I want you to feel completely at home here.”
Her smile was sardonic. “It’s more like a palace than a home.”
“You’re used to grand things, though, aren’t you?”
For a moment, her heart panged as she remembered the homestead she’d grown up on, it’s sprawling American colonial style, the landscaped gardens, the huge weeping elm with the old wooden swing seat her dad had restored for Sophia and Bella, and emotions logged in her chest.
She thought of the home she’d lived in with Xavier, in those brief, early days of their marriage, so modern and enormous, so luxurious, and her heart twisted with different pangs.
And now, she was here – a new home in the tapestry of her life – with any luck, this one would see better memories form within its walls.
“Yes.” Just a quick agreement. “Do you live here full time?”
“No.” He straightened, walking into the room with a panther-like grace. “It is too far from my offices. I have a place in Athens. I stay there through the week.”
“Oh.” Her forehead crinkled. “So you’ll be away that often?”
He came to stand in front of her, his eyes still roaming her face like she was a puzzle he wanted to comprehend. “No.”
“But you…just said…”
“I was not a married man before. Nor did I have a child on the way.” He looked at her as though he wanted to kiss her and she ached for that, suddenly. Of its own accord, her body swayed forward slightly, and she expelled a soft breath. “I am having my office here improved, making it easier for me to be on the island as much as possible. From time to time I will need to fly to Athens, but I won’t stay long while I’m there.”
“Oh.” In the back of her mind, she registered the fact he was making sweeping changes to his life, but she was finding it impossibly hard to concentrate with his closeness and the intensity of his watchfulness.
The Evermore Series II: Books 4, 5 and 6 Page 5
