A Bride at His Bidding

by Michelle Smart

  Thank goodness she and Andreas were marrying in a Chelsea registry office. It would be just them and a couple of witnesses.

  She was terrified of meeting his parents but even more scared of seeing Natalia again. It scared her even more than having to pretend to everyone that she and Andreas were in the throes of a whirlwind love affair.

  A whirlwind lust affair she could easily fake, mainly because that wouldn’t involve any fakery.

  She could hardly keep her hands off him.

  She didn’t know exactly when the shift in her thinking had occurred, just knew that as she’d changed for dinner after their shopping trip, she’d looked in her mirror and asked herself what she was so afraid of. Why fight something so pleasurable? Why deny them both? She’d slipped her dress on and closed her eyes, remembering his touch on her skin.

  Carrie had discovered the joys of sex. Twenty-six years of a dormant libido had been unleashed and now her body was making up for lost time on all it had missed out on.

  She told herself that on an hourly basis.

  The good news was that she had a full six months to get all this making up out of her system because she couldn’t quite quell the fear that her body only reacted this way because of Andreas. For Andreas.

  But as she also continually told herself, if it was only him she reacted this way to, then so what? It was still only sex, glorious, blissful sex.

  Ta da. Her make-up was done. Third time lucky.

  Her phone rang.

  She grinned to remember how Andreas had deliberately kept her incommunicado when she had first infiltrated his life. It was one of the reasons he’d chosen to take her to the Seychelles, because the signal on his peninsular was so dire.

  Her grin dropped when she saw her sister’s name flash up.

  Carrie had left three messages for her in the past week. She’d bitten back the hurt to find herself being ignored again. Violet had always been good at ignoring her if she didn’t want to speak.

  Taking a deep breath, she answered it. ‘Hi, Vee. How are you?’

  Silence.

  ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Is it true?’

  Carrie’s heart sank. ‘Is what true?’

  ‘That you’re seeing Andreas Samaras.’

  She took another deep breath. ‘Yes. It’s true.’

  And it’s all because of you and the lies you told.

  ‘You know what he did to me, right?’ After only three months in California her sister had picked up an American twang.

  ‘Violet... Are you still seeing the counsellor?’

  ‘Answer my question.’

  ‘I will when you answer mine. Please, tell me you’re still seeing him.’

  ‘Her. My counsellor’s a her.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I thought you were seeing a man.’

  ‘I was.’ The stiff angry tone suddenly changed. Became softer. ‘We decided I would find it easier to talk to a woman.’

  ‘And are you finding it easier?’

  ‘Yes.’ She sounded surprised. ‘I am. She’s really nice and non-judgemental.’

  Carrie tried not to take that as a dig against herself. ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘Now you answer my question. You know what that man did to me?’

  ‘He didn’t do anything to you, did he, Vee?’ she said gently, her heart thumping, mouth dry. ‘He didn’t do what you accused him of. He didn’t set you up. The drugs were yours. Vee, it doesn’t change how I feel about you. I still love you.’

  All that played in her ear was silence but she knew her sister was still there.

  ‘I’m sorry you felt you couldn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth but please, I beg you, admit the truth to yourself. Talk it through with your counsellor. You were treated terribly by James but Andreas isn’t James. He is nothing like him.

  ‘Violet... I love you. I forgive you. Now, please, find a way to forgive yourself.’

  This time the silence on the other end was the silence of a disconnected line.

  Violet had hung up on her.

  ‘Was that your sister?’

  Carrie jumped and spun around.

  She hadn’t heard Andreas come in. Normally she was very attuned to his movements around the villa but she had been so engrossed with her one-sided conversation with Violet that she hadn’t heard him return.

  He was standing in the doorway, his black tuxedo on minus the jacket, a sombre expression on his handsome face.

  She nodded.

  ‘What you said...you believe me.’

  She nodded again.

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since you told me,’ she whispered before hanging her head in shame. ‘I just couldn’t admit it. Violet is my Achilles heel. She always has been.’

  He paused before asking, ‘Why is she seeing a counsellor?’

  ‘Because she’s a drug addict.’

  Suddenly she could hold it in no longer. She slumped onto her dressing room chair and burst into tears.

  The tightness Andreas had experienced when he’d listened to Carrie say she believed him, to hear her defending him, became a tight ball to see her dissolve before his eyes.

  These weren’t tears, these were racking sobs, each one tearing his soul.

  In three strides he was before her, crouching on his haunches to cradle her head on his shoulder, stroking her back, her tears soaking through his shirt.

  It was a long time before the sobs lessened and she removed her face from his shoulder and wiped it with her hands.

  Red-rimmed hazel eyes fixed on him and she inhaled deeply. ‘My sister is a drug addict. She is in recovery in America, living with her father because one of her drug dealers beat her into a coma when she couldn’t pay her tab.’ The tears filled her eyes again, spilling over to race down her cheeks, shoulders shaking. ‘She nearly died. My baby sister nearly died.’

  Stunned at this revelation, Andreas took a moment to process it.

  ‘That bastard didn’t just seduce her. He fed her drugs. He gave an innocent girl a drug addiction.’ She covered her mouth then dropped her hand as she gave a long, ragged exhalation. ‘I must have been blind. I had no idea how bad her addiction was until a few months after her expulsion.’ Her lips made a little grimace of distaste. ‘I found her in bed with a much older man. There were drugs on the floor...she denied it but I knew she’d had sex with him in exchange for the drugs. She had no other money. Her father had cut her allowance off when she got expelled; she’d been able to afford her own until then. I was only a recent graduate and not earning very much. She had no money and absolutely refused to get a job.’

  He got to his feet and ran a hand through his hair, kneading his scalp. ‘Why wasn’t she at school?’

  ‘Because she’d been expelled,’ she reminded him.

  ‘I know but she could have gone to another school after she’d taken her exams.’

  ‘She wasn’t allowed to take them.’

  Anger coiled in his gut. ‘The headmistress promised me Violet could sit them.’ He had insisted on it.

  ‘Then she lied to you. Violet wasn’t allowed to set foot in that school again. I tried to arrange for her to sit the exams somewhere else but she refused. She gave up on life. She’d stay out all hours and never let me know where she was, then turn up steaming drunk and high as a kite, often cut or bruised from fights she’d got into and I’d patch her up and pray it was the last time I had to put ice on her face or sleep on her floor because I was terrified she’d choke on her own vomit, but it never was. She was arrested God knows how many times, hospitalised, had her stomach pumped... I honestly thought she was going to kill herself.’

  Andreas sat heavily on the bed facing her, his heart pounding.

  Carrie’s beautiful golden skin had paled as she’d relayed this tale of horror that no one should ever have to live through, and to think his beautiful Carrie had been the one to live it made his guts coil again in fresh anger and self-loathing at the part he had unwittingly played in it.<
br />
  After a few moments of silence, her eyes found his and she continued in a voice so low he strained to hear.

  ‘I watched her try and kill herself for three years and there was nothing I could do to save her, and I tried everything. I locked her in her room; she smashed the window and jumped out. I staged numerous interventions with professionals; she just laughed in our faces. I even flushed a bagful of her cocaine down the toilet and got a punch in the face for it.’ She gave a shaky laugh. ‘Natalia has my sympathy. I know what a mean right hook Violet has.’

  ‘Carrie...’

  ‘No, please, whatever you want to say, just let me say this first. I believed Violet’s lies that you set her up and I listened to her drunken ranting about you in the same way she would drunkenly rage about James and not once did I question them. As a journalist, you would think I would have had the sense to verify it all first, and I want you to know I am sorry for believing that about you and for all the lies I told in some stupid, futile, dangerous attempt at revenge. I could have caused your business and reputation untold damage and I am truly ashamed of myself. I think... I think I lost my mind.’

  It was all true, Carrie realised bleakly as she spoke her confession.

  She didn’t need to verify Andreas’s version of events. She knew the truth in her heart.

  ‘What you have had to deal with these last three years would cause anyone to lose their mind,’ he said quietly.

  ‘It wouldn’t cause you to lose yours,’ she said with certainty. ‘I don’t think anything would ever cause you to lose your mind.’

  ‘I came close when my sister and brother-in-law died,’ he admitted. ‘I couldn’t fix that. All the other stuff my family and I had had to deal with before then, it was all fixable, even my parents’ health issues. However bad things got, there was always hope. Tanya and Georgios’s death...what hope was to be found there? But then you know all about that with your own mother.’

  She nodded. ‘Death is the one thing that can’t be fixed, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s the finality,’ he agreed. ‘One minute they are there the next they are gone and all that’s left are the memories. But I had Natalia to care for just as you had Violet after your mother died and...

  ‘Why is Violet living with her father now?’ he interrupted himself. ‘Why wasn’t she living with him before? I always assumed she was an orphan.’

  ‘She might as well have been an orphan for the time he gave her. Raymond, Violet’s father, divorced our mum and moved to America years before Mum died. When she did die he didn’t want Violet—he had a nice new nubile wife and was living the childless dream. We agreed that he would continue paying for Violet’s education—did I tell you he was also rich?—and that she would become a weekly boarder so I could concentrate on my studies, but that she would live with me at weekends and holidays. He gave us both an allowance for it to work.’ Her smile was bitter. ‘When it came to money, his generosity was limitless.’

  ‘And that’s when you became Violet’s guardian?’

  ‘Yes. He handed his twelve-year-old daughter’s welfare into my nineteen-year-old hands and washed his own hands of the pair of us.’

  ‘Theos.’ He gave a low whistle. That was the same age Natalia was now. He’d been a grown man of thirty-one when he’d become Natalia’s guardian. ‘I didn’t realise you were so young when you became her guardian. And her father didn’t want her? No wonder she went off the rails.’ He shook his head, unable to comprehend how a man could turn his back on his own child. Natalia wasn’t even his and he knew he would lay down his life to protect her. ‘Why is she with him now when he didn’t want her before?’

  ‘I blackmailed him.’

  He found himself smiling. ‘Really?’

  She met his eye and matched the smile. There was no joy in either of their curved mouths. ‘I’d been begging him for years for help and he kept fobbing me off and fobbing me off. She almost died from that beating, Andreas. She was in a coma for three days. Something in me went ping. I didn’t even think about what I was going to say, I just phoned him and said if he didn’t fly over and see his daughter and finally take responsibility for her then I would publish a photo of Violet’s battered body on the Internet and tell the world he’d refused to help her.’

  ‘And that worked?’

  ‘He arrived the next day. A week later he flew her back to America with him. I don’t know why I hadn’t threatened it before but I’d spent so long just getting through each day, caring for Violet, plotting my revenge on you and James...’ She winced. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It is okay.’ He slid off the bed and knelt before her. Taking her hand in his, he kissed the palm. ‘No more apologies. I’m the one who is sorry. I should have told you, not the school...’

  ‘You did the right thing.’ Carrie squeezed the hand holding hers so tenderly. ‘You were protecting Natalia. Violet would have been expelled sooner or later. She was using drugs on school property. They would have noticed eventually.’ She shrugged then took a deep breath. ‘I should have noticed. I should have seen what was happening to her—I did see—but I didn’t know what I was seeing. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Carrie...’ He raised himself up and put a hand to her neck and pressed his forehead to hers. ‘You must not blame yourself. None of what happened to her is your fault. You have put your life on hold to raise her and to save her. She is nineteen now, yes? The same age you were when you became her guardian. You have given her all the support and help you can, you have avenged her against the monster who first steered her on this awful path. You can do no more. I heard you say to Violet that she has to forgive herself. You must do the same and forgive yourself too.’ Kissing her forehead, he moved back and rubbed his thumbs under her eyes.

  The motion made her remember the make-up she must have ruined with all her tears and she let out a cry. ‘Your cousin’s wedding!’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It does. We need to go.’

  His brow furrowed and he stared intently into her eyes. ‘Do you feel able to? I can make an excuse if you would rather stay.’

  ‘No. They are expecting us.’ She blew a long breath out and gave a wobbly smile. ‘We have a wedding announcement of our own to make. You would look very strange doing it without your fiancée by your side.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  How could she be anything but sure? She would do whatever was needed to kill the whispers against Andreas’s business and his reputation. That was a mess of her making, no one else’s.

  Andreas was a good man who had put his life on hold for his family, just as she had for her family. A good, generous man who didn’t deserve to have his reputation smeared by rumours and innuendoes. He deserved to spend the rest of his life living it with the freedom he’d had denied him for so long, and in six months he would be able to do just that. He could hop from country to country as he pleased, for work and pleasure, however he saw fit. He could drink Scotch in a palm-lined bar until the sun came up, he could bed all the women he wanted without worrying about being a bad influence on an impressionable teenager...

  A hot red pain pulsed in the centre of her brain at this thought and she slammed her palm to her forehead.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  She heard the concern in his voice and quickly forced a smile.

  Where had that pain come from?

  ‘Yes, I’m fine. Just imagining how badly my face needs repairing from all those ugly tears.’

  He stroked her cheek. ‘Your tears are not ugly and your face just needs a clean.’

  ‘Give me five minutes.’

  He nodded and got to his feet before helping her to her own. Then he took her head in his hands and kissed her. It was gentle and fleeting but with so much tenderness in it that for one awful moment she thought she might cry again.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ANDREAS’S DRIVER JOINED the procession of cars lining up to enter the church’s car park. There seemed to be some
issue with one of the cars—an engine failure if Andreas was to guess correctly—and nothing was moving.

  He could see his parents and niece standing at the front, chatting happily with the dozens of other guests. Both his parents had many siblings so family weddings were always large, noisy affairs.

  Carrie was looking out of the window at the exuberant greetings taking place too. ‘Why did you buy a holiday home in the Seychelles rather than closer to your family?’ she asked, turning to face him with a wrinkle in her forehead. ‘The way you speak of them—you clearly adore them.’

  He looked down at their entwined fingers then back to her face. She’d cleaned herself up and put on only a little make-up. Her eyes were still a little red but he doubted anyone else would notice. She still looked ravishing in her long, off-the-shoulder cream silk dress with subtle blue leaf prints.

  ‘I wanted a bolt-hole away from them all,’ he admitted. ‘My parents only like to travel short distances. The Seychelles is too far for them.’

  And he’d thought he was done with family.

  Not done done, just his time for some distance whenever he wanted to escape but...

  ‘I was preparing myself for my freedom. I have been planning it for two years now, since Natalia told me she was going to medical school and I could see my freedom from responsibility waving a flag at me.’

  His heart-rate began to accelerate, blood racing to his head, staring from Carrie to his family, his family to Carrie, Carrie to his family.

  His father had just whispered something in his mother’s ear, lovingly squeezing her seventy-four-year-old waist.

  Andreas thought of the longevity of their marriage, and all they had been through, all the ups and downs, all the highs and lows.

  Why had he thought having the freedom to see and do whatever he liked was better than having someone he loved to share all the experiences with?

  He had a sudden vision of him and Carrie, forty years from now, surrounded by their own grown-up children...

  Children?

  He had long stopped wanting children. He’d raised a teenager he loved as if she were his own and had been so certain, so damned adamant he didn’t want to go through it again...