Bridal Bargains (49 page)

Not a problem. In the dimness of that luxury car she grimaced. Well, it hadn’t been a problem in the end, had it? In fact, going to bed with Alex had turned out to be a pleasure! Which probably meant her father knew her better than she knew herself. Did he know she was already pregnant? Had Alex told him? She certainly hadn’t. She’d had no contact whatsoever with her father since she’d got married. But Alex would have been eager to announce their success to Jack Frazier, she was sure.

In four more months or so her father would get the boy to whom he wanted to leave all his money, Alex would get his island and Mia would get custody of Suzanna.

All pacts with the devil, with this small baby growing inside her the unwitting champion for the three of them.

‘Does she know you are her mother?’

The question made her jump, coming out of the blue as it did.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘I am not allowed to tell her until this child is safely delivered.’ Then her breasts heaved as she sucked in a tense breath of air and let it out again before she added huskily, ‘I was not allowed to tell you either. If my father finds out that you know, he will say I have broken the contract I have with him and keep Suzanna, just for the hell of hurting me.’

The hospital came into view, its brightly lit windows announcing that time here had no real meaning. Work here went on twenty-fours a day.

Alex came with her, travelling through the corridors with a tight-lipped silence that kept his presence remote from Mia, who had become barely aware of him as her anxiety grew the closer they got to the ward to which they had been directed.

They came upon a nursing station first, with a pretty young nurse standing behind it who glanced up then smiled the warmest smile Mia had been offered in months. ‘You must be Suzanna’s sister,’ she declared immediately. ‘You look so much like her.’

‘How is she?’ Mia asked worriedly.

‘Fine.’ The nurse came around the station to touch her gently on the hand. ‘The operation went off without a hitch. The appendix hadn’t burst so she should have no complications. She’s already out of Recovery and back on the ward here, though we do have her settled in a room off the main ward so we can keep a special eye on her.’

‘Can I see her?’ Mia’s eyes were already darting off in the direction the nurse’s hand had indicated.

‘Of course. She’s asleep,’ the nurse warned as she moved off, with them following, ‘but you can take a quick peek at her to reassure yourself. She has been asking for you constantly …’

The room was nothing more than a tiny annexe, with brightly painted pictures, done with childish hands, pinned all over the white-painted walls. But it was the little bed in the middle of the room that held Mia’s attention. Her eyes darkened, her face losing what bit of colour it possessed as one trembling hand went up to cover the sudden quiver of her mouth while she stared at her daughter lying so pale and still.

Without taking her eyes off that sleeping face, Mia walked over to the bed, then gently stroked the child’s pale cheek before she bent and replaced the hand with a kiss.

‘She looks so vulnerable,’ she whispered, worry-darkened eyes running over that little face with its shock of bright hair tied back to keep it tidy.

‘She’ll be sore for a few days,’ the nurse said quietly, ‘but she shouldn’t feel too much discomfort. Her worst worry was that you wouldn’t manage to come.’

Mia winced. Somewhere beyond the periphery of her own vision someone else winced also.

‘Apparently, you were not in the country when she became ill.’

‘I got here as soon as I could,’ Mia said huskily. ‘Has my father been in to see her?’

‘No.’ The nurse’s tone cooled perceptibly. ‘Only the lady who came in the ambulance with her. A Mrs Leyton—your father’s housekeeper, I believe? She stayed until Suzanna was safely back up here again before she left.’

‘Thank you,’ Mia murmured. ‘I’ll sit here with her for a little while, if you don’t mind.’

‘Of course not,’ the nurse said. ‘There is a chair just behind you,’ she added, and with a curious glance at the man who was standing in the far corner of the room, but who had contributed nothing to the conversation, she left them alone.

Mia didn’t even notice. Her whole attention was fixed on Suzanna as one of her hands searched blindly behind her to find the chair so she could sit down on it.

Then she reached for and gently closed her fingers around Suzanna’s small fingers, lifting them to her cheek and keeping them there. ‘I’m here now, darling,’ she murmured softly.

The child didn’t move. She was still too heavily sedated to be aware of anything that was going on around her. But that didn’t stop Mia talking gently to her, murmuring the kind of reassuring phrases a mother seemed to find instinctively.

Maybe the child did hear within the fluffy clouds of her own subconscious because something seemed to alter about her. Her slender limbs lost a tension that hadn’t been apparent until it had eased away and her pale, rather thin face seemed to gain some colour.

As silently as he had observed everything, Alex observed the change in the child also, and just as silently he walked
out of the little room and left them to it, sensitive enough—no matter how Mia believed the opposite about him—to know he was intruding on something private.

He came back an hour later and, after pausing in the doorway to frown at the look of exhaustion straining Mia’s features, he stepped forward and touched her shoulder. He waited for and received the expected start that confirmed to him that she had forgotten his presence.

‘It’s time to go,’ he said quietly. ‘We will return tomorrow, but you need to rest now if you don’t want to end up too tired to be of any use to her.’

A protest leapt to her lips—then hovered for a moment before it was left unsaid. He was right, she conceded. She was so utterly weary she could barely function. So, without a word, she stood up, bent to the child’s cheek then straightened, and without so much as a glance at him she turned and walked out of the room.

As soon as she was settled in the car again her head went back against the leather headrest and her tired eyes closed.

‘You are very alike,’ Alex remarked quietly. ‘Does she have your colour eyes, too?’

‘Mmm.’ Mia didn’t want to talk—didn’t even want to think very much. Relief was, at this moment, playing the biggest role in making her feel so exhausted. She had travelled from Greece to the hospital in a state of high nervous tension, not knowing what she was going to find when she got there. Now she had reassured herself that Suzanna was going to be all right it seemed to make everything else deflate inside her.

‘Has no one ever made the natural connection between the two of you?’ Alex persisted. ‘It seems impossible to me not to consider a stronger bond than sisterhood when the likeness is so strikingly obvious.’

‘My brother had the same colouring,’ she explained. ‘People suspected Suzanna was my brother’s child but not mine because I was so young when I had her.’

‘I thought you told me your father did not believe you were his daughter.’ He frowned. ‘But if you and your brother have the same colouring, surely he has to accept the blood connection somewhere?’

‘We have the same mother,’ she said. ‘Exactly who it was that fathered us was a different thing entirely.’

‘And a son was easier for your father to accept as his own than a mere daughter,’ he concluded grimly, ‘because it suited him to accept a son where, because of his bigotry, he didn’t need to accept the daughter.’

‘Now you’re catching on,’ Mia said very drily. ‘If you want the full truth of it, I don’t think my father is capable of fathering children,’ she announced quite detachedly. ‘More to the point, I think he knows it, which is why he set you and me up for this kind of deal when he could, at his age and with his money, have quite easily got himself another wife and produced a dozen more sons of his own. What’s more,’ she added, ‘I think my mother was unfaithful to him from the day she married him.’

It was another confession that managed to shock her simply because she was actually telling it to Alex of all men.

‘She came from a very socially acceptable family that had lost most of its money to inheritance tax. My father wanted to be accepted by that society so he bought himself into it, by marrying my mother. He wanted very socially acceptable sons to carry on his name for him, but when she didn’t produce them he began to get nasty, calling her all those unpleasant names people can call women who don’t have children easily. So she went out and got herself a lover. Conceived a child—though she was never absolutely sure whether either of her children belonged to her husband or her lover because she continued to sleep with both of them right up until the moment she managed to kill herself.’

‘And the lover?’

‘He died of cancer a couple of years ago,’ Mia said, then
added reluctantly. ‘He was Karl Dansing, the electronics magnate.’

There was a stifled gasp of shock from the man beside her. ‘Are you trying to tell me,’ he murmured gruffly, ‘that you could be Karl Dansing’s daughter?’

‘Does that impress you?’ Mia drawled. ‘Well, don’t go off the deep end about it,’ she said mockingly before he could say anything further. ‘As father figures go, neither impress me much. Karl Dansing must have known that Tony and I could have been his children but he never once owned up to it while he was alive, and didn’t even give us a mention in his will.’

‘But—.’

‘Look—’ She sighed wearily. ‘Can we stop the inquisition, please? I’m too tired to deal with it and just too indifferent to want to talk about it! If you want to know anything else, put your investigators to work,’ she suggested grimly. ‘I’m sure they will come up with something juicy for you if you pay them well enough!’

With that, she closed her eyes firmly again, aware that she sounded embittered by her own sordid history. After all, who wanted to claim as parents the kind of people she had just described? She certainly didn’t. Even spoiled, selfish, supremely avaricious Tony hadn’t. ‘I’ll make do with what I’ve got,’ he’d said to her once when Karl Dansing’s name had come up. ‘He may be worth a hell of a lot more than Jack but he has four other kids to share his money, whereas I’ll be getting the whole lot from Jack one day.’

Only he hadn’t got anything in the end, had he? Because Tony had died very much the same way their mother had died—in a car accident, while driving too fast with a skinful of booze and heaven alone knew what else.

She still missed him. Oddly and surprisingly, considering his selfish view of life. But they had shared a kind of affection for each other. And Tony had been good to Suzanna. In his own way she suspected he had even loved
the child, which was enough for Mia to forgive him his other faults.

Suzanna …

Her mind drifted back to that poor, defenceless child she had left sleeping in her hospital bed. All at once depression swept over her. What was she going to do? she wondered fretfully. How was she going to bring herself to leave Suzanna again when Alex decided it was time to go back to Greece?

A more urgent question was how long he was going to let her stay here. A couple of days? A week? Maybe two, if she was lucky?

Whatever, it was not going to be long enough. Just seeing the little girl lying there had told Mia that Suzanna needed her to be closer to her!

It was the long vacation from school at the moment, which meant Suzanna would have to go back to her father’s house when she was eventually discharged from hospital. The child couldn’t cope with Jack Frazier on her own. She never had been able to. He only had to look at her to petrify her.

Cissy had told her during that hurried phone call today that her father had accused Suzanna of fabricating the pain in her side. He’d called it attention-seeking, and had told her that if she expected to get Mia back by playing on his sympathy then she was in for a disappointment because Mia was never coming back so she may as well get used to it.

Oh, God. How could one human being be so cruel to another? What had made Jack Frazier the cold hearted monster he was?

Her hand came up to rub at her eyes, where the ache behind them was beginning to drag at what was left of her severely depleted stamina.

Beside her, Alex moved. She went still, her nerve-ends beginning to sing beneath the surface of her skin because she had a horrible feeling he was going to reach out and
touch her. If he did touch her, she was going to fall apart completely.

Then the car stopped and, bringing her hand away from her wary eyes, she found that his attention was fixed outside the car and not on her at all.

Which was a levelling experience, she discovered as she watched him open his door and climb out, impatiently waving the chauffeur away so he could come around the car and open Mia’s door himself.

‘You are almost dead on your feet,’ he muttered, watching her sway slightly as she joined him on the pavement.

‘I just need a good night’s sleep,’ she replied.

‘What you need,’ he grunted, as he helped her up the steps of a very exclusive white-painted town-house she presumed must be his home when he was in London, ‘is to be yourself occasionally, and not all these other personalities you conjure up, depending on who it is you are having to deal with!’

‘Oh, very cryptic,’ she mocked.

‘Not cryptic—tragic,’ he corrected grimly. ‘A good psychoanalyst could make a life study out of you,’ he muttered, stabbing an angry finger at the front doorbell. ‘Today alone I have met the vixen, the ruthless negotiator, the loving mother and the cynic,’ he said, with tight-lipped sarcasm. ‘As the old saying goes, would the real woman please stand and reveal herself?’

‘Not for you she won’t,’ she tossed back frostily.

‘Oh, I’ve already met her,’ he insisted tightly. ‘In her bed, in the darkness. And she is quite the most fascinating one of all, I assure you.’

‘You’re mistaken,’ Mia replied. ‘That was the whore you met there—Why are you ringing this bell, instead of using a key to get in the house?’ she asked frowningly.

‘Because—obviously—the house does not belong to me,’ he replied sardonically.