Bridal Bargains (54 page)

She expected to find Alex’s chauffeur waiting for them, but she had not expected to see both Leon and Carol standing there also.

‘We’re coming with you,’ Carol explained. ‘Alex’s orders.’

Alex’s orders. She almost smiled at the phrase, only she couldn’t smile.

The journey to Bedfordshire was utterly harrowing. Suzanna sat between Mia and Carol in the back of the car while Leon took the front seat next to the driver.

One of the little girl’s hands was locked in Mia’s and, clicking into a sort of autopilot, Mia talked softly to the child as they swept out of London onto the motorway and kept on talking as the car ate up the miles far too quickly.

As they left the motorway Suzanna began to recognise her surroundings and grew tense, her hand clinging all the tighter to Mia’s. A couple of miles away from the school entrance the tears began to threaten. Carol muttered something very constricted, then reached out jerkily to grab at Suzanna’s other hand.

‘Hey,’ she said, with very forced lightness, ‘this is an adventure for me. I’ve never been this way before!’

‘I hate it,’ Suzanna whispered.

‘But look!’ Carol urged. ‘There’s a private airfield over there! I can see a beautiful white plane sitting on the tarmac.’

Airfield.

Mia shivered. It ran through her like a dousing from an ice-cold shower.

‘You know,’ Carol was saying brightly, ‘Alex has a plane just like that one! Do you think he may have come to—?’

‘What’s going on?’ Mia interrupted sharply as the car suddenly took a
sharp
right turn. She leaned forward, staring out of the car window. ‘Why have we turned here?’ she demanded.

To her confusion, Carol chuckled. ‘A magical mystery tour,’ she chanted excitedly.

The car stopped. Mia stared and her heart began to pound heavily in her chest for in front of them, just as Carol had indicated, stood a gleaming white Gulfstream jet, with its engines running.

‘No,’ she breathed. ‘No!’ she gasped more strongly as a horrified suspicion of what was actually happening here began to take a firm hold on her. ‘Carol, this is—!’

But Carol was already clambering out of the car—and taking Suzanna with her!

‘Leon!’ Mia entreated jerkily.

‘Trust us,’ he said, then climbed out of the car—and that was when panic suddenly erupted.

‘You can’t do this!’ she protested, scrambling out of the car in time to see Carol and Suzanna disappear onto the jet. ‘No!’ she shouted after them. ‘Oh, God!’ Leon’s arm came round her shoulders. ‘Leon, for the love of God, you don’t understand!’

‘Believe me,’ he said soothingly, ‘I do understand. It’s OK …’ He began urging her towards the plane. ‘Alex has fixed everything. You have no need to worry. Trust him, Mia. He has your best interests at heart …’

Best interests at heart? Her blood pressure began to rise in a swirling red mist that almost completely engulfed her. She stumbled up the steps, dangerously out of control and near collapse. With her eyes she frantically searched out and found Suzanna—then saw the man who was squatting next to the child, talking to her.

‘Alex,’ she gasped in confusion.

His dark head came up, his eyes giving her a look of such grim determination that any small threads of pretence she might have been clinging to that this was not what she feared it was snapped at that moment.

As if in rehearsed confirmation, Suzanna’s voice reached out towards her, shrill with rising excitement. ‘I’m coming to Greece to live with you, Mia! I don’t have to go back to that horrid school!’

‘No,’ she breathed in pulse-drumming horror. ‘Alex, you just can’t do this!’

‘Go and sit next to Carol and fasten yourself in, Suzanna,’ Alex urged the ecstatic child.

He straightened, lean and lithe and dauntingly real in a casually loose taupe linen jacket, black trousers and a black T-shirt that did nothing to disguise the tight contours of his body as he began striding towards her. Even in the midst of all this trauma Mia found herself in a tense state of suspended animation, her senses remembering the man’s sensual might and not the might of his ruthless intellect.

‘Be calm,’ he was murmuring soothingly. ‘There is no need to panic …’

No need to panic. The words rattled frantically around her. No need to panic? Of course there was a need to panic! This was wrong! This was crazy! It was going to ruin everything!

Behind her she heard the muffled thud of the plane’s outer door sealing into its housing and the jet engines give a threatening roar. Her whole body quivered in violent reaction, the clammy heat of horror suddenly racing through her blood, and on a whimpering groan of pained accusation aimed at those compelling dark eyes that were coming ever closer she pitched dizzyingly forward into total oblivion.

She came round to find herself stretched out across two soft leather chairs, with a pillow tucked beneath her head and Alex squatting beside her, his fingers impatiently dealing
with the tiny pearl buttons that held her blouse collar fastened at her throat.

He looked pale, grim-faced and extremely angry. ‘I swear to God, with everything I have in me,’ he railed at her the moment he saw her eyes flutter open, ‘that you will spend the rest of this pregnancy locked away in a bloody stress-free environment!’

The blouse button sprang free. He sat back on his heels, his eyes flashing with rage when he saw her catch in a greedy breath of air.

‘And the power dressing gets its walking orders as well!’

Still too dizzy to fight back, Mia lifted an arm to her face so she could cover her aching eyes with decidedly icy fingers. Almost instantly, the hand snapped away from her eyes again. They were already in the air! She could hear the aircraft’s engines as nothing more than a faint purr as they flew them ever further away from England!

Shakily she pushed herself into a weak-limbed sitting position, her green eyes flicking urgently around the plush cream interior of the cabin.

They were alone. ‘Where’s Suzanna?’ she demanded jerkily.

‘In the galley with Carol, having the time of her life,’ Alex said sardonically. ‘We told her you were sleeping. She didn’t see you swoon into my arms so she believed us.’

Is that what I did? Swooned right into the arms of the enemy?

So, what’s new? she grimly mocked herself. You’ve been swooning into those arms from the very beginning! Knowing he was the enemy has never made any difference.

‘Is anything else too tight on you?’ Alex asked. His hands were already pushing the grey jacket down her arms.

‘Will you stop doing that?’ she snapped, trying to slap his hands away.

But the jacket came off, and his grim face did not unclench from the tension locking it as he angrily tossed the
jacket away. Then he seemed to make a concerted effort to get a hold on his temper. A deep sigh ripped from him, his big shoulders flexed …

‘I’m sorry about the cloak and dagger stuff,’ he said heavily. ‘I did not intend to frighten you so badly with it. I was afraid that if I had told you what I was going to do you would have panicked and warned your father.’

Which she would have done—Mia freely acknowledged that. ‘But why, Alex?’ she cried. ‘Why are you doing this when you must know it will be Suzanna and me my father is going to punish for this bit of senseless defiance!’

‘No defiance,’ he said, shifting his long, lean frame into the chair directly opposite her own, where he leaned forward, placed his forearms on his spread knees and then, with the grimly controlled expression of a man who was about to drop a bombshell on the heads of the innocent, he announced impassively, ‘I am calling the deal off.’

Mia just sat there, her blank, staring eyes telling him that she had not taken in what he was saying. He remained silent, waiting, watchful, noting the way her lips parted to aid the very frail thread of her breathing and the way her pale skin went even paler, the green of her eyes beginning to darken as the full import of his words finally began to sink in.

Her reaction, when it came, was not what he was expecting. ‘Our deal?’ she whispered tragically.

‘No.’ He frowned and shook his head. ‘That is a completely separate issue, which I am not prepared to deal with right now. I am talking about my deal with your father. I am calling it off and, because I know that my decision is going to have a direct effect on you, I am placing both you and Suzanna under my protection. Which is why we are flying to Greece.’

‘Protection?’ she repeated. He was placing them under his protection when the very act of how he was doing it was effectively removing the only form of protection they
had! ‘How can you say that?’ she cried. ‘Legally, Suzanna is still his daughter! Legally, he can take her back whenever he wants to!’

‘You
wanted
to leave her behind?’ he challenged. ‘You
wanted
to dump her at that school and walk away?’

No. ‘But that’s not the point,’ she said with a sigh. ‘My father—’

‘Can do what the hell he likes,’ Alex cut in grimly, throwing himself back in his seat in an act of indifference. ‘But he will have to do it through legal channels because it is the only way he will get to see either of you again!’

Mia gasped, her mind burning up in horror at his cavalier attitude. ‘But, Alex—this is abduction!’ She pleaded with him to see the full import of what he was doing. ‘You could be arrested for it! You could go to prison!’

‘Try having a little faith,’ he said.

Faith in what? she wondered deliriously. In him? In what he was doing? ‘Suzanna doesn’t even have a passport!’ she told him shrilly.

His expression didn’t alter by so much as a flicker as he reached into his jacket pocket and came out with something he tossed casually onto her lap.

Two passports. Two new British passports. Her stomach began to quiver, her icy fingers trembling as she made herself open both of them. She stared down at the two similar faces, which were staring right back at her.

One was an adult, the other a miniature version of that adult.

‘H-how did you get this?’ she whispered, picking up Suzanna’s very own passport.

‘With careful planning,’ he replied drily.

‘But …’ Her eyes flickered downwards again, looking at the photograph of her daughter which was a match to the several sets she had tucked away in her bag.

Carol.

The full duplicity of what had been going on around her
for the last weeks finally hit her. ‘You’ve all been very busy, it seems,’ she managed to say at last.

‘I am, by nature, very thorough,’ Alex casually attested.

‘Even to the point of getting my father’s written permission for this?’ she mocked,

‘You authorised it.’

‘What?’ She stared at him blankly—only her eyes didn’t remain blank because they were suddenly seeing that blur of forms Leon had got her to sign. ‘Copies,’ he’d called them, ‘in case I mess up.’

‘We will
all
end up in prison!’ she said wretchedly.

To her absolute fury, he started to grin at her! Mia wanted to hit him! He never smiled at her—
never!
Yet he chose to do it now, in this dire situation.

‘Oh, stop fretting,’ he told her, leaning forward to take the two passports back and replace them in his jacket pocket before she had a chance to stop him. ‘No one is going to question your connection with Suzanna when she looks so much like you!’

‘It’s still wrong, Alex!’ she flashed back at him. ‘And why go to all of this trouble, anyway?’ she cried. ‘It would all have been sorted out above board in a couple of months!’

To her utter confusion, his face closed up. ‘I am not prepared to deal with that question at this present moment,’ he said abruptly, and got up, his whole demeanour so grimly inflexible that she panicked.

‘But, Alex!’ she choked, jumping up to grab hold of his sleeve as he went to walk away from her. ‘I need you to deal with it right now!’

‘No,’ he said, shook his arm free from her grasp then grimly walked away.

The rest of the long flight was achieved in an atmosphere of severely suppressed tension—suppressed because Suzanna was so clearly delighted with the whole wretched business that it would have been cruel to spoil it for her.

But it wasn’t easy, and Mia retreated behind a cloak of cool repudiation where no one could reach her, except Suzanna.

They landed in Skiathos in the full heat of mid-afternoon, and Mia broke out in a cold sweat which didn’t leave her until they were safely off the airport confines and driving away.

At every turn she had been expecting to see a group of officials bearing down on them to detain them—by order of her father.

But—no. She found herself safely ensconced in the passenger seat of the silver Mercedes, with Alex behind the wheel and Leon and Carol crushed into the back seat, with an excited Suzanna sitting between them.

The child chatted and bounced and asked question after question that, thankfully, the others answered because Mia couldn’t lift her mood to fit the little girl’s.

She felt shut off, bricked in behind a wall of anger, stress and a terrible sense of betrayal. She had begun to let herself like these people—to trust them even, which was no mean feat for someone who had learned a long time ago that trusting anyone was a terrible weakness.

Suzanna trusted them—Mia’s eyes began to water. Suzanna was opening up like a blossoming flower to the warmth of their affection!

The car turned in through familiar gates and swept down the driveway to pull to a halt outside the front veranda.

Car doors opened, and they all climbed out. The sun was hot, the sea was blue and the white-painted walls of the house stood framed by the dense greens of the hillside behind.

‘Is this going to be my new home?’ Suzanna trilled in breathless wonder. ‘Is it truly—is it?’

Mia spun to face Alex across the gleaming bonnet of the Mercedes. ‘If you hurt her with this, I will never forgive you!’ she said thickly, then turned to run into the house.

A
LEX
caught Mia in the hall, one hand curling around her slender wrist while the other clamped itself to her waist.

‘Let go of me!’ she protested.

His grip only tightened as he guided her—almost frog-marched her—up the stairs and into her bedroom. The door shut with the aid of his foot. Then he was tugging her round until she was facing him, his arms anchoring her there while she glared through a mist of bright, angry tears into his set face.

‘I am
not
going to let anyone hurt Suzanna!’ he blasted at her furiously. ‘I am
not
doing this to hurt you!’

‘Then why are you doing it?’ she spat right back at him.

‘I told you!’ he rasped. ‘I am pulling out of my deal with your father!’

‘But
why?
’ she repeated. ‘Why, Alex, why?’

He let out a string of rasping profanities, frustration and anger blazing out of his eyes. ‘Because of this!’ he muttered, and caught her mouth with a kiss that knocked her senseless.

When he eventually let her up again for air she could barely stand up straight.

‘I want you, I want our child and I want Suzanna
more
than I want my island!’ he growled fiercely. ‘Does that answer your question?’

Answer it? It virtually consumed it! He wanted her, really wanted her that badly?

Her face went white, her eyelashes flickering as she started to tremble. Her deeply inbred sense of caution stopped her from believing what he was actually trying to tell her. What his eyes were telling her as they blazed passionately
down at her. What her own senses were pleading with her to believe!

‘Don’t faint on me!’ she heard him mutter, and suddenly she was being lifted into his arms. ‘Why is it,’ he rasped as he strode towards the bed, ‘that you either pass out or take my head off whenever I try to hold a meaningful conversation with you!’

He sat her down on the edge of the bed.

‘You are driving me out of my mind!’ he growled, coming down on his haunches in front of her. ‘I cannot get close to you unless I use sex as a damned weapon!’ he ranted. ‘I cannot talk to you without feeling as if I am walking through a minefield of mistrust! And if I actually do manage to get through to you, you do this!’

‘I’m not doing anything,’ she whispered.

‘You are trembling all over!’ He harshly discarded her assurance.

‘That’s because you’re shouting.’

‘I’m not—Damn,’ he grunted, as he caught himself shouting out a denial.

He sighed, lowered his head to run impatient fingers through his silky black hair, then sprang abruptly to his feet and moved right away from her over to one of the windows. He stood there with his hands thrust into his trouser pockets while he stared grimly outside, as if he needed time to recover his unexpected loss of composure.

‘I want you to understand,’ he muttered suddenly, ‘that I have done what I have done because I needed to be sure that you and Suzanna were safe before I made a move on your father.’

‘But why bother going to all this trouble at all?’ she asked, still none the wiser as to why this had all been necessary. ‘In a couple of months we could have had everything! You—your island, me—Suzanna, and my father his precious grandson!’

‘No.’ He refuted her words.

‘Yes!’ she insisted, coming to her feet on shaky legs that did not want to support her. ‘Deciding to renege on your side of the deal now is not going to change the fact that I am pregnant with your son, Alex—which is all my father ever wanted anyway!’

‘No, you’re not.’

Mia blinked. ‘I’m not what?’ she demanded, her bewildered eyes fixing on the bunched muscles of his back.

The big shoulders flexed, his expression when he slowly turned to face her so sombre that she was arming herself for a really bad shock even before she knew she was doing it.

‘You are not carrying my son.’ He spelled it out more clearly.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Mia choked, then released a shaky laugh. ‘What do you think this is, Alex?’ she said mockingly, indicating her swollen abdomen. ‘A mirage?’

‘It’s my daughter,’ he replied.

‘What?’

‘Sit down again!’ he barked at her when the colour drained out of her face, his long legs bringing him back to her side so he could push her back on the bed. ‘My God,’ he breathed harshly, ‘I never would have thought such a strong-willed and fiery woman could be this physically frail!’

‘I’m not frail,’ she said in a broken whisper. ‘I’m just shocked that you could say such a thing!’

‘It is the truth.’ He sighed. ‘The scan you had last week shows no male genitalia—’

‘But …’ She was frowning in utter bemusement. ‘Your family only makes male babies!’

‘Not this time, it seems.’ He grimaced.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I d-don’t believe you. You weren’t even there to see the scan!’

‘Your doctor faxed a photocopy to me.’

He did? She blinked up at him, surprised to learn that
Alex had taken that much interest in her pregnancy. Then she remembered that she had her own copy of that scan, and she was as sure as she could be that it had not given any indication
what
sex their baby was!

She began glancing around her urgently, looking for her bag so she could check for herself what Alex was claiming.

He beat her to it, by gently placing his own small black and white print into her shaking fingers. After that she didn’t move—not a muscle or even an eyelash. This photocopy of her scan was different from her own copy. Her baby had moved—and was showing clearly that Alex was telling the truth.

‘Oh, heavens,’ she gasped. ‘How did that happen?’

It was a stupid question in anyone’s books, and he said sardonically, ‘By the usual methods, I should imagine.’ The comment was probably well deserved—except Mia was in no fit state to appreciate it.

It was all suddenly becoming so wretchedly clear to her. What he’d gambled and what he’d lost. What he’d ended up being saddled with when he hadn’t wanted any of it in the first place!

‘Oh, Alex,’ she breathed. ‘I’m so very sorry!’

‘Why should you apologise?’ he drawled. ‘We both know who takes responsibility for the sex of any child.’

‘But your precious island!’ She was barely listening to him.

Suddenly he was squatting in front of her again. ‘Do I look like a man in need of sympathy?’ he demanded. ‘Look at me, Mia,’ he insisted, when she kept her burning eyes lowered to that damning picture, then made her look at him by placing a gentle hand under her chin and lifting it.

His eyes weren’t smiling exactly, but they were not miserable either. And his mouth was relaxed—a bit rueful maybe, and incredibly—

She sucked in a sharp gulp of air, shocked as to where
her mind had suddenly shot off to—and at such a calamitous moment like this!

‘I have to confess to being rather pleased to be the first Doumas to father a daughter in over a hundred years,’ he admitted sheepishly. ‘I am also pleased,’ he added more soberly, ‘that this unexpected development has saved me from having to find another way of getting your father out of all our lives.’

‘He’s not out of mine and Suzanna’s yet,’ Mia shakily reminded him.

‘But he will be,’ Alex pledged.

‘He’s going to come after her, you know.’

‘I want him to.’ He nodded gravely, then raised his hands to her trembling shoulders. ‘Trust me,’ he urged. ‘Suzanna is safe here. He cannot touch her. I know this absolutely,’ he declared. ‘and by the time he arrives here I will be in a situation to make
him
know it also!’

Mia wished she could be so sure about that. She knew her father, knew how he responded to insubordination of any kind. She shuddered.

Outside, a sound drifted up from the garden. It was the laughter of a happy child.

A sob broke from her, and the hands on her shoulders tightened. ‘I make you this solemn pledge,’ Alex vowed fiercely. ‘No one—will ever—take that laughter away from her again!’

Tears slid into Mia’s eyes. Alex watched them come, watched her soft mouth begin to quiver, and something painful seemed to rip free inside him. He shuddered. ‘You are so damned vulnerable sometimes it makes my heart ache just to look at you!’

So was he, she realised with a shock that stopped her heart beating altogether. Alex was painfully vulnerable to her vulnerability!

‘Oh!’ she choked—why, she didn’t even know—but in the next moment her arms were sliding up and around his
neck, and just as she had done once before without any warning, she buried her face in his throat and clung to him as if her very life depended on it.

How they got from there to kissing feverishly she didn’t know either. Or how they ended up in a heated tangle of naked limbs on the bed. But she knew by the time she took him into her body that something very radical had changed in their relationship because there were no barriers, no resenting the way he made her lose control of herself.

‘I adore you,’ he murmured against her clinging mouth. ‘You crept into my heart, without my even knowing how you did it. Now I cannot seem to take a breath without being made aware that you are there, right inside me.’

‘I know,’ she whispered in soft understanding because he had done the very same thing to her. ‘I love you so much that it actually hurts me to think about it.’

He reacted like a man who had been shot in the chest. He stopped moving, stopped breathing. ‘Say that again,’ he commanded hoarsely.

His eyes were black, his skin pale, his beautiful bone structure taut under stress. Mia lifted gentle fingers to cover those taut cheeks and held those black eyes with her own earnest green ones. ‘I love you,’ she repeated.

He caught the words in his mouth, stole them, tasted them and made her repeat them over and over again until the whole thing carried them off into one of those wildly hot passionate interludes that had always managed to completely overpower them even when they’d thought they hated each other.

‘This is it,’ Alex murmured lazily when they were lying, limp-limbed and sated, in each other’s arms. ‘I will never let you go now.’

‘Do you see me trying to get away?’ She smiled.

‘No.’ He frowned. ‘But—’ A knock sounded at the closed bedroom door.

‘Alex!’ his brother’s voice called out. ‘Frazier is on the phone! You had better get down here!’

‘Well?’ Mia asked anxiously. She was hovering in the doorway of Alex’s study where he stood, leaning against the desk behind him, his dark face lost in brooding thought.

He was dressed in the same clothes she had taken off him earlier, whereas she had delayed long enough to drag on a lightweight dress of cool blue cotton, before hurrying downstairs.

He glanced up and smiled, but it was a brief smile. ‘He is on his way,’ he told her. ‘In flight as we speak.’

Mia shivered. ‘W-when will he get here?’

‘Tomorrow at the earliest.’ he replied, then grimaced. ‘The airport here does not accept incoming traffic after dark so he has no choice but to stop over in Thessalonika …’

‘W-what if he brings the police with him?’

‘He is not going to do that.’ He sounded so absolutely certain about it that she was almost reassured.

Except that she knew her father. ‘Alex …’

‘No,’ he cut in, and began to walk towards her, his lean face grimly set. ‘You are not to worry about this,’ he commanded. ‘I know what I am doing.’

In other words, he was asking her to trust him.

But it was no longer Alex she didn’t trust—it was her father. ‘I’m going to find Suzanna,’ she murmured, turning away.

He let her go—which only increased her anxiety. It took real effort to lift her mood to meet Suzanna’s bubbling effervescence as they explored together this wonderful paradise Suzanna was now calling home.

‘You’ve got to believe in him,’ Carol said quietly when she caught Mia in a moment’s white-faced introspection while Suzanna was enjoying her bath, before going to bed in the room she had picked out for herself. ‘Alex is amazingly efficient when he sets his mind on something.’

‘He lost his island.’ Mia smiled bleakly at that.

‘Ah, but that was because it came down to a straight choice between his old dream and his new one,’ Carol explained. ‘The new dream won, hand over fist. If it hadn’t he wouldn’t have given the island up, I can assure you,’ she said. ‘He has astonishing patience, you see. He would simply have kept you barefoot and pregnant until you produced the son he needed to stake his claim on the island.’

Suzanna interrupted them at that moment, dancing out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel and looking so blissfully happy that Mia firmly thrust her worries away so she could pretend that everything was as wonderful as the child seemed to think it was.

The call that Jack Frazier was on his way from Skiathos airport came very early the next morning while they were all sitting around the breakfast table, trying to look perfectly relaxed.

But, really, the waiting had got to everyone by then. No one ate, except Suzanna. No one spoke much, except Suzanna. In fact, it was all so very fraught that when Alex took the call on his mobile it was almost a relief to know the waiting would soon be over.

‘Right,’ he said briskly. ‘This is it.’ He sounded so invigorated that Mia suddenly wanted to hit him! ‘Carol, you were going to show Mia and Suzanna your upstairs studio, I believe,’ he prompted very smoothly.

‘Oh! Yes!’ Like a puppet pulled by its master’s string, Carol jumped to her feet and turned towards Suzanna. ‘Come on, poppet,’ she said over-brightly. ‘This is going to be fun! Wait until you see the size of the piece of paper we are going to paint a picture on!’

Eager to fall in with any plans, Suzanna scrambled down from her chair and was at Carol’s side in a second.

‘Mia?’ the other woman prompted.

‘I’ll be there in a minute,’ she said, turning anxiously
towards Alex as the other two walked away. ‘Tell me what you are going to do!’ she pleaded.

‘Later,’ he promised. ‘For now I want you out of sight until your father has been and gone.’

‘But—!’

It was as far as she got. ‘No!’ he exploded, turning angrily on her. ‘I will not have you exposed in any way to that man!’ he swore. ‘So do as you are told, Mia, or, so help me, I will make you do it!’