Bridal Bargains (37 page)

‘No more nausea?’ he questioned when it became clear she wasn’t going to speak.

‘I’m fine,’ she managed, fingers fiddling with the slender white china cup she’d set out ready for her coffee. ‘Would you like a drink?’

‘Not if you’re planning to poison it,’ he said drily, then hissed out a weary sigh. ‘Nell, we need to—’

‘Your telephone’s ringing.’

And it was. They both listened to it for a few fraught seconds, Nell with her eyes squeezed tightly shut on a tense prayer that he would just go and answer the damn thing. Xander, she was sure because she could feel it, piercing the vulnerable tilt of her neck with grim intent in his gaze, wanted her to turn and look at him.

‘Easy on the belladonna,’ he instructed heavily after a moment
and went back to his office, leaving her wilting though she didn’t really know why.

A few minutes later she was bracing her shoulders and carrying two cups of freshly made coffee into his office. Xander was still on the phone with his dark head resting back against the chair’s leather upholstery, and his eyes were closed. He looked tired, she noticed, dragged down and fed up. As she walked across the expanse of floor towards the desk she saw his lashes give a flicker and quickly looked away.

‘Efharisto,’
he murmured as she put one of the cups of coffee down in front of him.

She managed a brief upward glance at his face before turning away again.

‘Stay,’ he husked, showering her in tingling tremors. ‘Sit down, relax, drink your coffee. I will be only a few more moments here.’

Sit down, relax, drink your coffee, Nell repeated silently and sank into the chair by his desk and wondered why she was still feeling so at odds with him when everything had been explained—hadn’t it?

He was talking in Greek, she noticed, sitting up now and swinging his chair slightly with his eyes lowered to where a set of long fingers hit intermittently at the computer keyboard lying on the desk. His deep voice was quiet, asking low key questions with no hint of sharp command evident, as if someone had switched off his normal incisiveness.

The phone went quietly back on its rest. Strumming silence followed. Nell felt it so deeply inside that she tensed.

He picked up his coffee cup and looked down into it. ‘How much belladonna?’

‘Two spoonfuls,’ she answered.

‘Still not forgiven, then.’ He grimaced a wry smile at her then lifted the cup to his lips and drank. The way that he did it was so much like a man willing to take his poison that she shot like a bullet to her feet.

‘Stop it,’ she stabbed at him.

‘Stop what?’ He looked at her.

‘Making a joke of it.’

‘Of what?’

‘All of that—stuff we’ve got through today.’

‘Are we through it?’

She frowned at the question, her tightening nerve-ends forcing her to discard her coffee-cup before she spilled it down herself. ‘Y-your mother is your mother.’

‘Is that supposed to make some sense to me?’

‘Sh-she is what she is and you have to accept that.’

‘I do—as much as I can do,’ he reminded her. ‘Next problem.’

The way he said it as if she was in a business meeting made her start to seethe. She jerked round to face the other way. ‘I don’t like you.’ That was a problem, she thought. ‘Sometimes …’ she then added grudgingly because it was crazy to deny that she liked him in bed—
loved
him in bed.

Loved him all the time, she extended unhappily, but loving didn’t have anything to do with liking, did it?

‘You hurt people and don’t seem to care when you’re doing it.’

‘Are we still discussing my mother?’

‘No—me,’ she said huskily.

Silence met that announcement. Nell folded her arms beneath her breasts and stared down at her feet.

‘You should have told me the truth about Vanessa.’

‘You should have told me the truth about Marcel.’

‘That was different.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he wasn’t an issue when you married me. Vanessa was and once you knew it you should have told me the truth straight away instead of letting me spend the next twelve months imagining you in her arms instead of mine!’

A sigh sounded behind her. The next sound was the creaking of his chair as he came to his feet. Her chin hit her chest when he came to stand right in front of her. Without saying a word he clamped his hands to her waist and lifted her up to sit on the desk. Next her thighs were summarily pushed apart and he
was wedging himself between them, then her arms were firmly unfolded and lifted round his neck.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Now that we are more comfortable I will explain … I fell in love with you within about two seconds of you walking through your father’s front door …’

Her chin shot up, green eyes wide with shock and disbelief.

‘Got your full attention now?’ he mocked. ‘Ready to hang on my every word with bated breath?’

‘You never did love me then, or you would not have left me on our wedding night believing what I did.’

‘You are referring to that memorable time when you stood there in your bridal gown, shouting at me and looking so heartbreakingly beautiful, hurt and
young
?’ He uttered a sigh. ‘It was either leave you there or toss you on the bed and ravish you and—trust me,
agape
—you would not have survived the kind of ravishing I had in mind right then. I was mad with you for believing that trash—mad with myself for not seeing it coming. Do you think that Vanessa is the only skeleton a man like me has lurking in his closet? I’ve had women trying to foist their babies on to me and women trying to blackmail me. I’ve had them sneaking into my bed in the dead of night and crawling through windows in an effort to get to me.’

‘Oh, don’t be modest; do tell the rest,’ Nell drawled acidly.

‘You think I like being every greedy gold-digger’s dream catch? Why do you think my security is so tight? Would you like a ballpark figure on how much it has cost me to keep such stories out of the Press over the years? Give any one of those grasping women a glimpse at more money and they would be singing to the Press today. Vanessa was the exception. She was not my skeleton, which made those computer printouts you showered at me all the more annoying because I did not feel I had the right to break the promise of silence and protection I had made to my father on his death bed.’

‘Not even to me?’

‘Don’t look so hurt,’ he chided. ‘Do you think it didn’t hurt me to realise that you were not equipped with the necessary defences to live my life? I already knew I’d been unforgivably
selfish, crowding you into marriage so young. I saw in a single miserable flash of enlightenment as I watched you enact that little tragedy just how selfish I had been. I saw how every jealous woman out there was going to have a story to whisper in your ear. It would have been like leading a lamb into a slaughterhouse then standing back to watch it be skinned.’

‘So you walked away.’ Her soft mouth wobbled.

‘Yes.’ He kissed the wobble then sighed. ‘When I left you at Rosemere I did it determined to set you free—but I could not. I kept on putting it off. Kept coming to see you, couldn’t stay away! Kept trying to convince myself that while you seemed content with what you had then you were OK. The night I offered to renegotiate our contract was the one time I was ready to rip the damn thing up and let you go. I’ve never felt happier when you turned the offer down without even hearing me out. I was off the hook for another few months until my conscience got to me again. Then that second photo of me with Vanessa appeared and you crashed your car. I’ve never felt so bloody lousy in my entire life!’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘It’s nice to know that I wasn’t the only one feeling like that.’

‘Ah, but that was before I knew about the new man in your life.’ He smiled. ‘I switched from feeling lousy with remorse to a thirty-four-year-old lusty, cradle-snatching lecher in a single blink of an eye. You think you were jealous of Vanessa? You barely scratched the surface of jealousy,
agape mou
. But I did. I scratched it right down to its bloody, primitive raw.’

‘I love it when you’re primitive.’ She moved a little closer in an effort to capture his mouth.

His head went back. ‘I’m being serious!’

‘So what do you want me to say—get away from me, you uncivilised beast? Shall I get your pack of bodyguards to string you up to a tree and tar and feather you for wanting me too much to let me go?’

‘Loving you too much,’ he corrected softly.

‘And aren’t you the lucky one that I loved you too much to drive away …?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ He frowned at her.

Nell gave a little idle shrug. ‘Only that Marcel was driving me
back
to Rosemere when we crashed. I thought your police report would have told you that.’

‘If it did, I never got to read that far,’ he murmured dazedly. ‘I just read the bit about you being in the passenger seat and went berserk.’

‘I noticed,’ she murmured feelingly.

‘Forgive me for what I said?’

Nell shook her head.

Xander uttered a sigh then changed tactics. He lifted her up until she straddled him then strode across the room.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked innocently.

‘Guess,’ he drawled. ‘If I am to pay a penance then I will do it in comfort.’

And he did.

The island was trapped in the sultry heat of the late afternoon when the helicopters began to arrive. From her place at the nursery window Nell watched as Marcel jumped down onto the ground then walked towards the glinting pool. He looked so absolutely gorgeous that Nell uttered a small sigh of sisterly pride. A sudden cry of delight went up, then a young boy in swimming shorts was racing to meet him. Marcel grinned lazily as he accepted this show of pure hero worship from the much younger Alex.

‘My hero status has been eclipsed by the matinée idol,’ Xander murmured with a regretful sigh.

‘Never mind, your real son worships you,’ Nell consoled. ‘And look at your mother and my father watching them together. They’re actually smiling. That has to be a first for both of them.’

‘It’s called bowing to fate,’ Xander said. ‘They either accept our family as a whole or they miss out.’

‘And who’d have thought Gabriela would be so besotted?’

‘Why should she not,’ Gabriela’s son defended loyally, ‘when my son looks exactly like me?’

‘Too like you,’ Nell complained, turning away from the window to go and lean over the cot, where Demitri Pascalis lay kicking contentedly. ‘Now, you know I love you,’ she informed the wide-eyed baby. ‘But I still don’t think it’s fair that you didn’t even elect to have my green eyes.’

The baby let out a shriek of delighted laughter. He didn’t care that he looked the absolute spit of his dark-eyed
papa
.

‘Cruel,’ she scolded. ‘But I will get my own back,’ she warned him.

‘And how do you intend to do that?’ Xander asked.

Straightening up to find herself slipping easily beneath his waiting arm, Nell smiled one of those wait-and-see threats at him as she let him lead her away.

‘I see,’ Xander murmured fatalistically. ‘The wicked witch is mixing spells again.’

As they left the baby’s room Thea Sophia slipped quietly into it, and took the comfortable chair placed by the cot. Out came her lacework and her gnarled fingers got busy while the baby chatted away to her. He would fall asleep in a few minutes, bailing out with a blink of an eye, but until that happened he had his ever-attentive
thea
to entertain.

Walking Nell into their sunny bedroom, Xander turned her to face him. He was dressed in one of his loose white shirts and casual trousers, but soon they would have to start getting dressed up for the party that was to take place tonight—which was a shame, in Nell’s opinion, because she preferred to keep him in clothes she could strip off quickly.

‘Mmm,’ she said as she pressed her lips to the triangle of hair-roughened flesh exposed by the open neck of his shirt. ‘You taste of sun and salt and sexy masculinity.’

‘And you have a one-track mind,’ he sighed.

‘It’s my birthday. I’m allowed a treat.’

‘Several treats.’

‘OK,’ she shrugged, not arguing the point because it was oh, so much more interesting to discover how smoothly the shirt fell open to her lightest touch. She ran her fingernails down his front and watched taut muscles flex.

‘You’re so gorgeous,’ she murmured helplessly—and received her reward with the hungry clamp of his mouth.

It didn’t take much longer for them to be lost. Xander’s muttered, ‘We don’t have time for this,’ was ruined by the urgency with which he stripped her blue T-shirt dress off her and tumbled her onto the bed. They made hot, frenzied love while the rest of the family chatted by the poolside.

When they came downstairs two hours later you would be forgiven for thinking that Nell had spent the whole afternoon achieving that gloriously chic look she’d donned in a short half-hour. She was wearing aquamarine silk, smooth and slinky, a perfect set of blue diamonds sparkling at her creamy throat.

Her hair was up to show them off because Xander had given her them for her birthday. And if anyone wondered at the rueful grimace he offered when his mother congratulated his wife on how two hours’ pampering could put such a wonderful glow to her daughter-in-law, no one would have thought to question whether he knew something that they did not. He looked far too smooth and sophisticated to be recalling what they’d been doing in the shower only half an hour ago.

They separated, they danced and circulated amongst their fifty-strong guests as goods hosts did. They laughed and teased and flirted and came together on the terrace to snatch a private moment or two gazing at the moon.

‘Happy?’ Xander asked, holding her in front of him.

‘Mmm,’ Nell murmured uncertainly.

‘Something missing from your perfect day?’

‘Mmm,’ she nodded.

‘You would like me to toss you into the pool perhaps?’

‘Not tonight, thank you,’ she answered primly, then took hold of one of his hands and slid it over her abdomen. ‘I’m afraid it’s tender loving care time again,’ she softly confided.