Bridal Bargains (48 page)

Her eyes fluttered shut, her heart squeezing in her breast on a pang of agony that only she would ever understand. Give him one good reason, he had demanded.

One good reason.

Well, she had one. ‘Suzanna is not my sister,’ she informed him unsteadily. ‘She is my daughter …’

For the first time in seven years she had let herself say it, and it felt so strange that she shuddered.

‘Is that a good enough reason for you?’ she said into the bone-crunching silence that echoed around her.

N
O ANSWER
. Alex didn’t say a single word and, after that, neither did she. Mia was trembling too badly to speak, anyway. She didn’t know what kept Alex silent, and at that moment she didn’t really care.

She was too shocked, dazed by her own admission and paralysed by the burning knowledge that, by saying what she had said, she had just lost Suzanna on a broken promise to another man.

Her father had warned her. It had been part of their bargain, written into that other contract they had signed between them. She was to tell no one of her true relationship to Suzanna before he had his precious grandson.

Now what had she got left? she asked herself starkly. She was standing here, ready to forfeit her claim over her unborn child, and had now, in effect, forfeited her claim over the one she had given birth to seven long years ago!

What did that make her? What kind of mother was she?

The hand was gentle on her wrist when it caught hold of her this time, but it was a mark of how badly she had shaken herself that she didn’t even try to pull away from him.

‘Come on,’ he urged her huskily. ‘It will take about an hour to get my plane to the airport here. Come and sit down while I make arrangements …’

He was treating her like someone would a highly volatile substance. She didn’t really blame him. She felt very volatile, as though she might just explode with any more provocation.

It was a further mark of how weakened the ugly scene had left her that she allowed herself to lean against him a
little as he guided her across the hall and into the sunny sitting room. He saw her seated on one of the pale blue sofas then seemed to hover over her, as though he was preparing to say something.

Mia kept her eyes lowered and bit deep into her trembling bottom lip, waiting tensely for the questions to come.

Yet they didn’t come. In the end Alex let out a small sigh and moved away—right out of the room, in fact—leaving her sitting there, still tense, still locked in the appalling fall-out of her own shocking confession.

Later—she wasn’t sure how much later—Sofia arrived with a tray of tea-things, which she placed on a table in front of Mia, and then disappeared without a word.

More minutes ticked by. Alex came back and paused when he saw her sitting there just as he had left her. It was he who poured out a cup of tea for her and gently placed the cup and saucer in her hand.

‘Drink,’ he commanded.

She drank like an automaton. He stood over her, and once again she could sense the questions, rattling around his head. He wasn’t a fool. He would already have worked out that if Suzanna was seven years old and Mia twenty-five then Mia had to have been very young when she’d fallen pregnant.

Seventeen years old, in fact. A small grimace touched her bloodless mouth as she lifted the cup to it. Seventeen, and her mother barely cold in her grave after killing herself in a car accident that was her own fault because she had been drinking. Her husband had driven her to look for escape from his mental cruelty in an alcoholic haze—which was still no excuse for leaving Mia alone with a father who hated her and a brother who couldn’t care less about her.

So she’d rebelled.

And what a rebellion it had been, she mocked herself now and as bitterly as she had done ever since those wild six months after her seventeenth birthday.

She’d skipped boarding school. Run away. Had got in with a crowd of young groupies who’d followed the current rock group of the time around the country. It had taken the lead singer two months to notice her, a month to take her virginity and a another month to tire of her and throw her out of his life.

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 was 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.’