Bridal Bargains (19 page)

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Explain to me what this is about.’

‘I’m leaving,’ she said. Not, I’m leaving
you
, for she no longer acknowledged there was a
him
to leave. The man wasn’t human. He was cast from some hard, impenetrable metal that gave him the will to do unspeakable things just to get his own way.

She heard the bedroom door close as she was rummaging in the dressing-table drawers, picking out the bits that belonged to her and leaving behind the ones that no longer did.

‘Why?’ he asked quietly.

She didn’t answer—couldn’t. It was all stopped up inside her as if someone had ground a cork into a fizzing bottle. But what really bothered her was what would happen if that same person came along and shook the damned bottle.

‘Something happened in Rafina,’ he prompted when she didn’t say anything.

Naturally he would presume that because that was where she had been when she’d altered into a different person. Or went back to being the person she used to be, she corrected grimly.

‘You saw someone …’

She could feel his footsteps vibrate through the carpet as he came towards her. Her hands began to shake badly as she pulled open another drawer.

‘Desmona, perhaps. Has Desmona been stirring up trouble again, Claire?’ he demanded. ‘Is that what this is about?’

Try again, she thought bitterly. She picked up a framed photograph of her mother holding Melanie in her arms and made as if to edge round him.

His hand came out to touch her shoulder. ‘Claire …!’ he rasped out impatiently. ‘This is—’

The cork blew. In a fountain spout of bitter fury, she turned on him and let fly with her hand to the side of his wretched, deceiving face. ‘Don’t touch me ever again—do you hear?’ she spat at him.

His hand was already covering the side of his face where she’d stung him. He should have been angry—Claire would have preferred him to get angry so she could feed off it, build on what was bubbling up inside her.

But those black eyes of his just looked bewildered. And she couldn’t cope with that. ‘You lied to me,’ she accused him thickly. ‘Ever since the first day that we met you’ve lied and you’ve lied and you’ve lied …’

With that she managed to step around him. On trembling
legs she walked across to the bed and placed her mother’s photograph on the stack of things already assembled there.

‘You’ve seen your aunt Laura,’ he realised belatedly. ‘I did wonder if there was a risk of that when she turned up at my office today.’

Claire said nothing. She just stood tautly, with a white-knuckled grip on each side of the photo frame, and let the silence grow to suffocating proportions.

‘What did she tell you?’ he asked eventually, sounding flat and weary, like someone who knew he had been exposed without the ability to defend himself.

‘She doesn’t even work for you,’ she whispered. ‘She never did.’

‘You made that assumption, Claire,’ he murmured. ‘All I did was allow you to go on thinking it.’

That was his defence? Claire didn’t think much of it, then.

‘But why?’ she demanded, spinning around to lash the question at him, and so hurt by her own wretched gullibility that she couldn’t keep it out of her voice. ‘Why should you want to deceive me and trick me and manipulate me like this—when the truth would probably have given you the same results?’

He released a heavy sigh. His hand fell away from the side of his face and as it did so Claire felt a tiny pinch of remorse when she saw the imprint of her fingers showing white against his olive skin.

‘I could not afford to take the risk that you would not fall in with my—plan,’ he answered.

‘Your plan to take Melanie away from me.’ She spelled it out clearly.

‘That was the original idea, yes.’ He freely admitted it. Then his eyes flicked her a searching look. ‘Your aunt told you about my brother and your mother?’

For an answer, she wrapped her arms around her slender body, her eyes closing as her mind replayed her aunt’s wretched story of her mother’s brief affair in Madrid with
the hugely wealthy but very married fifty-year-old Greek merchant banker, Timo Markopoulou, which had resulted in Melanie.

‘I’m sorry,’ she heard him mutter.

What for? she wondered. For being responsible for making her feel like this, or was he apologising on behalf of his brother and her mother?

‘Did you know about their affair while it was happening?’ she whispered threadily.

‘I knew about an affair—yes,’ he confirmed, turning away from her to go and stare grimly out of the window. ‘But I did not know who the woman involved was,’ he went on. ‘Or the fact that she had borne him a child, until almost a year after Timo’s death and I was in London on business when your aunt came to see me.’

Claire’s eyes flicked open, the blue bright with a derision she speared at his profile. ‘You mean you went to see my aunt,’ she corrected him. ‘To get her to bargain with me for possession of Melanie!’

‘Is that what she said?’ His dark head turned. ‘Then she lied,’ he declared, holding her sceptical gaze with a grim demand that she believe him. ‘Your aunt Laura approached me, Claire,’ he insisted. ‘It was she who told me that my brother’s mistress had given birth to his daughter. It was she who wanted to bargain—not for Melanie,’ he made succinctly clear, ‘but for your silence about the affair.
Your
silence, Claire,’ he sombrely repeated. ‘Your aunt placed herself in the role of mere mediator between myself and her
niece
—the niece she swore had been my dead brother’s mistress!’

‘M-me?’ she stammered in shocked confusion. ‘My aunt told you that
I
was your brother’s mistress?’

Her sense of horror and dismay was obvious. Andreas acknowledged her right to feel like that with a tight-lipped grimace. ‘Apparently you were threatening to sell the story to the papers if I did not pay for your silence,’ he explained.

‘But how could you think such terrible things about me?’ Claire cried.

‘I had not met you then,’ he reminded her. ‘So I gained an impression of a grasping young woman who saw her child’s wealthy Greek relatives as a pushover for a bit of lucrative blackmail.’

It made a kind of sense. Claire felt sick suddenly. Sick with shame at her aunt’s mercenary cunning.

‘I could not afford to risk such a scandal breaking in the press when my grandmother was so frail,’ he continued, whilst, white as a sheet now, Claire stared blindly at the floor. ‘The one thing your aunt could not have known was my grandmother’s dream to hold her great-grandchild before she died. But it was only a dream,’ he sighed, turning back to the window. ‘Both she and I knew she didn’t have a chance of fulfilling it …’

He meant because his grandmother’s days had already been numbered, Claire realised sadly. ‘Learning about Melanie must have seemed like a heaven-sent opportunity, then.’

The dark head nodded. ‘I offered to take the child off your hands for a—certain amount of money,’ he told her. ‘Your aunt led me to believe that you would not be averse to the idea of giving up the burden of caring for Melanie—for the right price.’

Nice of her, Claire thought bitterly. The whole thing was a macabre circle of deceit, betrayal and greed, she acknowledged with a terrible shudder.

‘So you drove her over to my flat then sat outside it in your big limousine, and waited for her to buy your brother’s child for you,’ she concluded, beginning to feel more than a little sick now as the rest fell into place without needing to be dragged out and pawed over.

She’d come running out of her flat and got herself knocked over in front of him. He had then been given the opportunity to see where she lived and how she lived, and eventually
learned that not only was she innocent of any charge of extortion, but that he would have a hell of a job convincing her to give her sister up to him!

So then came the next round of lies, she continued while he remained silently staring out of the window, perhaps doing the same as she, and replaying the whole thing scene by miserable scene! The proposition, the coercion, the sob story gauged to tug at her tender heartstrings about a grandmother who wanted to hold her only great-grandchild before she passed away.

The only bit of truth in among all the lies, she noted cynically.

‘Did your grandmother know whose child Melanie is?’ she asked huskily.

He didn’t answer for a moment, and there was something very—odd about his hesitation. It smacked at another lie on the way, Claire judged, eyeing him suspiciously.

‘She—guessed,’ he said in the end.

Truth or lie? Claire wondered. ‘You devil,’ his grandmother had said to him, she recalled, and got to her feet as an icy chill went washing through her.

What a waste of all his efforts, she mused acidly. For by then the wedding had taken place, otherwise he could have saved himself a whole lot of inconvenience. Then she remembered that Andreas had still needed to acquire legal control of his brother’s illegitimate child. So—not such a waste of his time.

‘Did you pay my aunt to keep away from me?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘The reason why she started this was because she had lost her job, was in a terrible amount of debt, and she saw me as a quick way to get herself out of trouble. But she then proceeded to lose the money trying to double it by speculating on the markets.’

‘So she came to your office today wanting more.’

‘I kicked her out,’ he stated flatly. ‘She took her revenge.
I should have expected it—being a ruthless rat myself dealing with one of my kind.’

Which seemed to round it all off pretty well, Claire thought as the pain in her breast eased to a dull ache.

‘I never did any of this to hurt you, Claire,’ he murmured, as if he could sense what she was feeling. ‘Though you probably find it impossible to believe right now, I acted with your interests at heart also.’

It was impossible, she agreed. People who had your interests at heart did not lie, cheat and plot to steal from you.

‘Your aunt intended to give me Melanie, take the money and run,’ he told her. ‘I could not have done that to you,’ he added huskily. ‘I only had to know you for half an hour to realise I could not have done it. So I lied,’ he admitted. ‘I gave you what you seemed to need then, which was a reason worthy of you staying within my protection. Think about it,’ he urged. ‘When has anything I’ve done—lies or truth—actually been done to deliberately hurt you?’

Silence met that. The kind of silence that throbbed and pulled and prodded at the self-control she was having to exert over herself not to break down and cry all over him.

‘Stay,’ he fed gently into that silence. ‘Don’t let yourself be manoeuvred by a cold and embittered woman who has never done anything but hurt you …’

‘I can’t think straight,’ she whispered, pushing a hand up to her aching eyes. ‘I need time to come to terms with all of this before I make a decision as to whether I stay or go.’

Andreas seemed to draw himself up. ‘Fair enough,’ he agreed, and his tone altered, cooled, and became businesslike. ‘Take your time,’ he invited. ‘There is no rush.’

With that he began to walk away. Making the tactical retreat, Claire recognised as she watched him with the tears already splitting her vision into a million fragmented parts.

Halfway to the door the toe of his shoe caught something that lay on the floor amongst the debris of her recently discarded clothes. Through the blur of tears she watched him
pause and glance down, watched him go still for a moment before be bent to pick something up. It never occurred to her what that something was—until she heard the tearing of flimsy paper.

And, on a lightning shot of panic, she was galvanised into action, darting across the room in an effort to snatch the pregnancy testing kit out of his hands before he realised what it was he was looking at!

Too late. He spun to stare at her. Her heart sank to the soles of her feet. He’d gone white—perfectly, sickeningly white. ‘Why have you bought this?’ he demanded hoarsely.

He might be white, but Claire wasn’t; she was blushing like a schoolgirl. ‘Please give it to me,’ she insisted, holding out a badly trembling hand.

‘Why?’
he barked.

The sheer ferocity of it thoroughly shocked her. Her blue eyes widened in surprise, and she began backing away, cautiously—bewilderedly. Not understanding the need for this depth of anger.

‘Answer me,’ he commanded forcefully. ‘Answer me, Claire!’

‘I w-would have told you,’ she stammered shakily. ‘If—if it w-was positive.’ Was that why he was so angry—because he believed she’d intended to hide it from him? ‘I would have told you, Andreas!’ she repeated shrilly when he actually took a step towards her.

‘I want you out of this house,’ he hissed furiously at her. ‘Within the hour, do you hear me? I want you gone from my sight and I never want to see you again!’

‘But—why are you so angry?’ Claire shrilled, still backing while he paced towards her like a wild animal needing to taste fresh blood. ‘We haven’t used protection once in all the weeks we’ve been making love! Surely you must have considered this a strong possibility?’

‘And I used to get these damned things shoved in my face once a month by my first wife!’ he rasped. ‘For five hellish
years, I used to listen to her sob her heart out once a month when the damn things told her what we both already knew! I am infertile, Claire!’ he raked rawly at her—watched her face blanch in shock, and tossed the packet aside in disgust.

The dreadful words held her still and shaking, confusion and horror warring for dominance on her face. ‘I know you said you never wanted children of your own,’ she whispered. ‘But … I
feel
pregnant, Andreas!’ she cried out pleadingly.

‘So did Sofia,’ he growled. ‘Every single wretched month.’

‘No …’ she breathed, refusing to take on board what he was saying here. ‘I’m not like her—I’m not!’ she insisted as those hard black eyes flicked her a contemptuous look. ‘I love you!’ she cried, saying the words out loud for the very first time in her desperation. ‘I couldn’t hurt you by playing on your feelings like that!’

‘Sofia loved me,’ he replied. ‘She worshipped the ground that I walked upon! She leaned on me—lived for me!’ A harshly grating sound of scornful laughter escaped him. ‘And in the end she even decided to put me out of my misery by killing herself in the name of
love
!’