Bridal Bargains (21 page)

‘And
this
doctor was Sofia’s family practitioner
before
she married you!’ Claire inserted. ‘He—he w-wants to talk to you—confidentially,’ she told him. ‘H-he says he has some information y-you may like to hear ab-about Sofia …’

Something happened, Claire wasn’t sure exactly what, but something most certainly cracked that death mask he was
wearing clamped over his face—before he turned and walked into his own room without a word.

She wilted like a dying swan, her long neck folding over her knees. Her heart was pounding heavily, her lungs almost completely locked inside the tension surrounding them. And her brain seemed to have closed itself down altogether, because she could not think of a single thing beyond that expression on his wretched face as he’d walked away.

Something landed on the bed beside her. Her head shot up, blue eyes despairingly vulnerable as they searched out his. But Andreas had shut off completely. ‘Ring him,’ he commanded.

‘Ring who?’ She frowned in confusion.

‘This—doctor.’ A long, taut finger pointed stabbingly at something beside her on the bed; glancing dazedly down, Claire saw it was a mobile telephone.

‘But it’s the middle of the night,’ she protested.

‘Then wake him up,’ he insisted.

When she still didn’t make a move to do his bidding, he bent to snatch the telephone back again. ‘What’s the bloody number?’ he grated.

‘I d-don’t know,’ she confessed. ‘All I did was ask Nikos to take me to see a doctor and he drove me there …’

‘His name, then,’ he flicked tightly at her. ‘You do at least know the name of this doctor you allowed to make an intimate examination of you?’

‘An appointment card,’ she suddenly remembered. ‘Over there on the dressing table.’

Grimly he went to find it with hard fingers scattering things anywhere they fell. In that kind of tight, staccato way, he read the Greek symbols printed on the card, and stabbed them into his mobile.

Claire couldn’t sit there and take any more. She climbed off the bed and escaped into her bathroom, where she sat on the toilet seat and shivered while she listened to his deep voice firing questions at the poor doctor in Greek.

Then the silence came back. She continued to sit there, not sure what to do, until her flesh grew so cold she had to get up and pull on her bathrobe. Shoving her hands into the cavernous pockets, she allowed herself a couple of deep breaths for courage, then let herself into the bedroom again.

Andreas was sitting on the end of her bed, slumped over with his face buried in his hands. In all her life she had never seen anything so wretched as this proud Greek man reduced to this.

Without a second thought, she went over there, climbed onto the bed behind him then simply wrapped her arms around him as tightly as she could.

‘She lied to me,’ he murmured hoarsely.

‘I know,’ Claire softly replied.

‘She knew even before she married me that she was not able to conceive, yet she put me through all of that—torment. Month after month.’ He laboured the point, dragging his hands away from his face so he could use them to help him. ‘She made me feel useless and helpless and …’

It all came pouring out then. While Claire knelt behind him and held onto him tightly, Andreas drew a vivid picture of what it had been like to live with a woman whose obsessive need to bear a child had turned both their lives into a living nightmare. Not once had Sofia suggested the fault could be hers. Loving him and living in fear of losing him, she had created a web of deceit that involved cruel tricks and lies which kept him balanced on a knife-edge of failure and despair. By the time he had been driven into taking a fertility test himself, the sheer stress of it all must have lowered his count.

‘She took a terrible risk, allowing you to take that test,’ Claire pointed out soberly.

‘Not really,’ Andreas contended. ‘Either way, the torment would have continued. With a strong count she would have merely increased her efforts to conceive. A low count gave her a similar excuse to—be lucky one day—as she loved to
say to me.’ A shudder ripped through him; Claire tightened her hold on him. ‘In the end I couldn’t bring myself to touch her, I felt such a pitiful failure,’ he admitted. ‘I think my withdrawal from her bed was what finally tipped her over the edge.’

And left him with yet another sense of failure he had to learn to live with, Claire realised sadly.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she murmured.

His shoulders flexed. ‘What have you got to be sorry for?’ he demanded. ‘It should be me apologising to you for the way I behaved before!’

‘I understood.’

‘You’re pregnant …’ he husked suddenly.

‘Mmm,’ she softly confirmed. ‘Are you pleased?’

He rubbed his hands over his face. ‘Shell-shocked, I think,’ he admitted, but some of the tension began to ease out of him.

‘I have something for you,’ she said, and, taking the pen-shaped tester out of her pocket, she gravely handed it to him over his shoulder. ‘Our baby,’ she confided. ‘What do you think—boy or girl?’

She tried to keep it light, but she could feel the emotion come roaring up inside him as he sat there staring down at that silly little indicator that had been such a source of pain to him before now.

When he moved, he did it with a throaty growl as he twisted around and tumbled her onto the bed. ‘From the moment you opened your lovely blue eyes on a dusty road back in London, I knew you were going to mean something special to me,’ he told her deeply. ‘But I never dared to so much as dream of anything
this
special.’

‘Here,’ Claire invited. ‘Feel for yourself just how special …’ And, taking hold of his hand, she fed it between their bodies so she could press his palm against her womb. There was nothing to show for the miracle taking place inside her, of course—it was much too soon—but the gesture itself was
enough to have her drowning in the intense darkness of his wonderful eyes.

‘I am going to love you until the day I die,’ he vowed. ‘And I am never going to let you go.’

‘I’ve been trying very hard not to get away, please note,’ she pointed out gently.

‘Stubborn,’ he accused her softly.

‘In love,’ she amended.

For that, he kissed her. Kissed her long and deep and with a heart-stirring tenderness that told her more than anything else could do just how much he loved to hear her say that.

Timo Markopoulou arrived in the world very early on a bright and hot summer morning.

His mother was exhausted, but she couldn’t allow herself to fall asleep. She was too busy observing the way Andreas was sitting in the chair by her bed, with Melanie seated on one half of his lap while his small son occupied the other.

He was introducing them to each other, his voice softly reassuring though both babies were too young to understand. Yet, sitting there on his lap, gazing solemnly at her new brother who looked remarkably like herself when she was born, Melanie seemed to understand something of what her papa was saying, because she reached out with a small hand and touched the baby’s cheek in just the same way Claire had always done to her.

The incredibly gentle act from one so young had a lump forming in Claire’s throat. It affected Andreas too; she saw the waves of love and pride go washing through him as he caught the little girl’s hand and carried it to his lips.

Lifting his head, he caught her watching them, and Claire sent him a soft, understanding smile, but he didn’t smile back. There was just too much emotion at work inside him for him to smile right now.

‘My cup runneth over,’ he murmured deeply.

That was all; his feelings at that moment required no further
explanation. Needing to make a physical link with those feelings, Claire reached out to rest a hand on one of his wide shoulders. He acknowledged it by brushing it with his cheek as his attention returned to his children.

And that was the image Claire took with her as she drifted into slumber. Her love. Her life, encapsulated in that one special moment. Her own cup of happiness was overflowing too.

G
ETTING
from flight arrivals to the airport’s main exit was like taking a long walk through hell. The whole route was lined with baying reporters, flashing light bulbs and a cacophony of questions aimed to provoke an impulsive response.

Xander kept his mouth clamped tightly shut and ignored provocations like, ‘Did you have anything to do with your wife’s accident, Mr Pascalis?’—’Did she know about your mistress?’—’Did she run her car off the road to kill herself?’—’Is there a good reason why you withdrew her bodyguard last week?’

With his eyes fixed directly ahead Xander just kept on going, six feet two inches of mean muscle power driving long legs towards the airport exit with no less than three personal-security men grouped around him like protective wolves guarding the king of the pack.

Through it all the questions kept on coming and the camera bulbs flashed, catching his severely handsome dark features locked in an expression of blistering contempt. Inside, his fury was simmering on the point of eruption. He was used to being the centre of media interest, speculation—scandal if they thought they could make it stick. But nothing—nothing they’d said about him before had been as bad or as potentially damaging as this.

He hit the outside and crossed the pavement to the waiting limousine where Rico, his chauffeur, stood with the rear door open at the ready. Dipping into the car, the door shut even before he’d folded his long frame into the seat, while outside his security people dispersed in a prowling circle that kept the reporters back until Rico had safely stashed himself back behind the wheel.

Ten seconds later the car moved away from the kerb and another car was pulling into its place to receive his men.

‘How is she?’ he lanced, rough toned, at the man sitting beside him.

‘Still in surgery,’ Luke Morrell replied.

The granite set of Xander’s jaw clenched violently on a sudden vision of the beautiful Helen stretched out on an operating table, the object of a surgeon’s knife. It was almost as bad as the vision he’d had of her slumped behind the wheel of her twisted wreck of a car with her Titian-bright hair and heart-shaped face smeared with blood.

His jaw unclenched. ‘Who is with her at the hospital?’

There was a short hesitation before, ‘No one,’ Luke Morell answered. ‘She refused to allow anyone to stay.’

Turning his dark head, Xander fixed his narrowed gaze on the very wary face of his UK-based personal assistant. ‘What the hell happened to Hugo Vance?’

‘Nell dismissed him a week ago.’

The simmering silence which followed that tasty piece of information began to burn up the oxygen inside the luxury car. ‘And you knew about this?’

Luke Morrell swallowed and nodded. ‘Hugo Vance rang to let me know what she’d done.’

‘Then why the hell was I not told—?’

‘You were busy.’

Busy. Xander’s lips snapped together. He was always busy. Busy was a damned bloody way of life! ‘Keep something like that from me again and you’re out,’ he seared at the other man with teeth-gritting intent.

Luke Morrell shifted tensely, wishing to hell that the beautiful Helen had remained locked away behind the gates of their private country estate instead of deciding it was time to venture out and take a look at life.

‘It was an accident, Xander. She was driving too fast—’

A pair of wide shoulders shifted inside impeccable dark suiting. ‘The point is—
why
was she driving so fast?’

Luke didn’t answer. In truth he didn’t need to. Xander could
put two and two together and come up with four for himself. Yesterday his name had been splashed all over the tabloids alongside a photograph of him standing outside a supposedly discreet New York restaurant with the beautiful Vanessa DeFriess plastered to his front.

His skin contracted against tightly honed face muscles when he thought of the incident. Protecting Nell from embarrassing scenes like that was a duty from which he never shirked. But his bodyguard of the evening had been distracted by a drunk trying to muscle in on them, and by the time the drunk had been hustled away and the frightened Vanessa had been peeled off Xander’s front, a convenient reporter had already got his sleaze-grabbing photograph and slunk away.

Nell would have been upset, angry—who the hell knew what went on inside her beautiful head? He’d stopped trying to find out a year ago when she’d married him to a fanfare of ‘Romance of the New Century’ then promptly refused to share his bed. By the time she’d finished calling him filthy names ranging from
power-driven fiend
to
sex-obsessed moron
, he no longer wanted her anywhere near him.

Liar, jeered a voice inside his head. You just had no defence ready when you were hit with too many ugly truths, so you backed off to hide behind your pride and arrogance.

Photographs of his relationship with Vanessa had been the catalyst then, he remembered. Tasty snippets of truth printed in with the lies that had made it impossible for him to defend himself. He
had
been with Vanessa the week before his marriage. He
had
wined and dined her at a very fashionable restaurant then taken her back to her apartment and gone in with her. The fact that he’d been doing it on the other side of the Atlantic made him stupidly—
naively
believe he was safe.

But back here in the UK, his young, sweetly besotted future bride had been avidly following his every move as it was recorded in the New York gossip columns via the internet.

The sneaky little witch had told nobody. His mouth gave a grim, uncontrolled twitch. She’d come to him down the aisle of the church dressed like an angel in frothy silk tulle and
gossamer lace. She’d smiled at him, let him take her cool little hand, let him place his ring on her slender white finger, let him vow to love, honour and protect. She’d even allowed him that one traditional kiss as they became man and wife. She’d smiled for their wedding photographs, smiled throughout the long wedding breakfast that followed and even smiled when he’d taken her in his arms for their traditional bridal dance. If there had ever been a man more ready to be a willing slave to his lovely young bride then, by the time they reached the hotel suite where they were to spend their wedding night, he, Alexander Pascalis, was it.

She’d waited until then to turn on him like a viper. A cold, glassy-eyed English version of a viper, who’d spat words at him like ice picks that awoke this handsome prince up from his arrogant dream-world instead of the prince awakening his sleeping beauty with the kind of loving that should have made her his slave for life.

And sleeping beauty she was then—too innocent to be real. That same innocence had been her only saviour on their miserable wedding night. Still was, did she but know it.

Because his marriage might have turned into a disaster even before he’d got around to consummating it but his desire to possess the beautiful Helen had remained a strong, nagging entity amongst the rubble of the rest.

‘I suppose you know why she dismissed Vance?’ he queried now, dragging his mind back to the present crisis.

There was a tense shift beside him. Xander turned his dark head again and a warning tingle shot across the back of his neck when he saw the new guarded expression on his employee’s face. Luke was wary—very wary. There was even a hint of red beginning to stain his pale English cheeks.

‘Spit it out,’ he raked at him.

Luke Morrell tugged in a breath. ‘Hugo tried to stop her,’ he claimed defensively, ‘but Nell took offence—’

‘Tried to stop her from doing what?’

Luke lifted up a hand in a helpless gesture. ‘Listen, Xander,’ he said in an advisory voice that sounded too damn soothing
for Xander’s liking, ‘it was nothing serious enough to need to involve you but Hugo was concerned that it might … get out of hand, so he … advised Nell against it and she—’

‘Advised her against doing what?’ Xander sliced right through all of Luke’s uncharacteristic babbling, and by now every bone in his body was tensing up as his instincts shot on full alert. He was not going to like this. He was so damn certain of it that his clenched teeth began to sing.

‘A man,’ Luke admitted reluctantly. ‘A—a friend Nell’s been seeing recently …’

Nell felt as if she were floating. It was a really strange feeling, all fluffy and soft yet scary at the same time. And she couldn’t open her eyes. She had tried a couple of times but her eyelids felt as if they’d been glued down. Her throat hurt when she swallowed and her mouth was so dry the swallowing action was impossible anyway.

She knew where she was. Had a vague recollection of the car accident and being rushed by ambulance to hospital, but that pretty much was the sum total of her recollection. The last clear thing she remembered was gunning the engine of her little open-top sports car and driving at a pace down the long driveway at Rosemere towards the giant iron gates. She could remember the wild sense of elation she’d felt when the gates had swung open with precision timing to let her shoot right through them without her having to drop her speed. And she could still feel the same sense of bitter triumph with which she’d mocked the gates’ efficiency as she’d driven past them. Didn’t the stupid gates know they’d just let the trapped bird escape?

Escape. Nell frowned, puzzled as to why the word had jumped into her head. Then she was suddenly groaning when the frown caused a pain to shoot right across the front of her head.

Someone moved not far away. ‘Nell …?’ a deep, darkly rasping voice said.

Managing to open her eyes the small crack that was all they would allow her, she peered out at the shadowy outline of a
man’s big, lean, dark-suited bulk standing stiffly at the end of her bed.

Xander, she recognised. Bitterness welled as her heart gave a tight, very painful pinch. What was he doing here? Had corporate earth stopped turning or something? Nothing less would give him the time to visit her sickbed.

Go away, she wanted to say but did not have enough energy, so she closed the slits in her eyes and blocked him out that way instead.

‘Nell, can you hear me?’

He sounded unusually gruff. Maybe he had a bad cold or a sore throat or something, she thought hazily. How would she know? She’d barely set eyes on him for months—not since he’d turned up like a bad penny on her birthday and dragged her out to have dinner with him.

The candlelit-table-for-two kind of dinner with good wine and the requisite bottle of champagne standing at the ready on ice. Her fuzzy head threw up a picture of his handsome dark image, the way the candlelight had played with his ebony hair and the golden sheen of his skin as he’d sat there across the table from her with his slumberous dark eyes fixed on her face. Sartorial elegance had oozed from every sleek skin pore. The smooth self-confidence, the indolent grace with which he’d occupied his seat that belied his height and lean muscle power. The lazy indifference with which he’d dismissed the kind of breathless looks he received from every other woman in the room because he was special and he knew he was special, and there was not a person in that restaurant that didn’t recognise it. Including Nell, though she was the only one there that refused to let it show.

‘Happy birthday,’ he said and used long, tanned fingers to push a velvet box across the table towards her. Inside the box was a diamond-encrusted bracelet that must have cost him the absolute earth.

If she was supposed to be impressed, she wasn’t. If he’d presented her with the crown jewels she still would not be impressed. Did he think she didn’t know that a bracelet like
that was the kind of thing a man like him presented to his mistress for services rendered?

Where was his sensitivity? Where it had always been, locked up inside his impossible arrogance, as he proved when he dared to announce then that he wanted to renegotiate their marriage contract as if some stupid trinket was all it would take to make her agree.

She pushed the box back across the table and said no—to both the bracelet and the request. Did it faze him? Not in the slightest. He took a few minutes to think about her cool little refusal then nodded his disgustingly handsome dark head in acceptance, and that was basically that. He’d driven her back to Rosemere then drove away again to go back to his exciting life as a high-profile, globe-trotting Greek tycoon and probably given the bracelet to some other woman—the more appreciative Vanessa, for instance.

‘I hate him,’ she thought, having no idea that the words had scraped across her dry lips.

The sound of furniture moving set her frowning again, a pale, limp hand lifting weakly to the pain that stabbed at her forehead. Another hand gently caught hold of her fingers to halt their progress.

‘Don’t touch, Nell. You won’t like it,’ his husky voice said.

She opened her eyes that small crack again to find Xander had moved from his stiff stance at the bottom of the bed and was now sitting on a chair beside it with his face level with hers. A pair of dark eyes looked steadily back at her from between unfairly long black silk fringes, a hint of strain tugging on the corners of his wide, sensual mouth.

‘How do you feel?’ he asked.

Pain attacked her from the oddest of places—her heart mainly, broken once and still not recovered.

She closed her eyes, blocking him out again. He shouldn’t even be here; he should be in New York, enjoying the lovely Vanessa with the long dark hair and voluptuous figure that could show off heavy diamond trinkets while she clung to someone else’s husband like a sex-charged limpet.

‘Do you know where you are?’ Xander persisted.

Nell quivered as his warm breath fanned her face.

‘You are in hospital,’ he seemed compelled to inform her. ‘You were involved in a car accident. Can you hear me, Helen?’

The
Helen
arrived with the rough edge of impatience. Xander did not like to be ignored. He wasn’t used to it. People shot to attention when he asked questions. He was Mr Important, the mighty empire-builder aptly named after Alexander the Great. When he said jump the whole world jumped. He was dynamic, magnetic, sensational to look at—