by Penny Jordan
‘Your love?’ Jenneth stood up shakily to face him. ‘You never gave me your love, Luke. You gave me your body…your desire…but not your love. I know you only married me because you wanted a mother for Angelica…’
‘You what?’ He caught hold of her, glaring disbelievingly at her. ‘What the hell are you saying? You know damned well why I married you—and it has nothing to do with Angelica,’ he added brutally. ‘I married you because I love you, and you know it. I asked you if you knew after we’d made love, and you said yes…’
Jenneth stared at him.
‘But I thought…’ She bit her lip and sat down shakily. ‘Luke, you can’t love me,’ she said uncertainly. ‘You rejected me. You gave another woman your child and married her…’
‘No!’ he said explosively, and then he reached for her, hauling her to her feet and pulling her into his arms, placing her hand against his fiercely pounding heart. ‘Does that feel as though I don’t love you?’ he ground out bitingly, and then, shockingly and even more urgently, he moved deliberately against her, watching the colour burn under her skin as she felt the hard pulse of his flesh. ‘Does that?’ he derided savagely. ‘Oh, Jenneth, you little fool. Of course I love you…I’ve always loved you. Why the hell do you think I lost control the way I did?’
She flushed wildly, totally unable to look at him, managing only to stammer. ‘I didn’t know… wasn’t sure…’
‘You mean you thought it was always like that?’ he mocked her. ‘Well, I suppose it is if you’ve been starving for one particular woman the way I’ve starved for you—and that one taste of you wasn’t enough. There hasn’t been a day when I haven’t woken up aching for you since.’
‘You broke our engagement,’ she accused. ‘You married someone else…’
‘I know. Come and sit down, and I’ll tell you all about it…’
Hesitantly she did so, torn between believing the sincerity with which he had declared his love for her and the inescapable truth of the past.
‘Angelica is my father’s child. During the summer you and I got engaged, my father was involved in an affair with one of his patients…’
He caught Jenneth’s indrawn gasp of shock and grimaced. ‘Yes, I know—my father was a very weak and self-indulgent man, Jenneth. I neither liked nor respected him, but my mother worshipped him. He was the foundation-stone of her whole world.
‘When my father came to me and told me that he’d got one of his patients pregnant—a young girl whose parents were threatening to denounce him publicly and professionally—all I could think of was what it would do to my mother…
‘There had been whispers in the past…discreet liaisons with other women, during which she’d somehow managed to cling on to her pride and her faith, but she’d been stronger then, her health better. I knew it would destroy her if the news of what my father had done broke.
‘He knew it as well, although it wasn’t her he wanted to protect, it was himself,’ he said with disgust. ‘Initially he’d wanted the girl to have an abortion, but she wouldn’t agree. Her parents were elderly, very religious and conformist. They wanted their daughter respectably married, their grandchild provided with a father—any father,’ he added bitterly. ‘My father begged me to help. I told him that it was impossible, that I loved you…that we were engaged, and that anyway, even if I were free, there was no reason to suppose that Gwen would agree to marry me. But it seemed I was wrong. Gwen was very malleable…very young and naïve for her age. She had stood out against my father’s urgings that she had an abortion, and that had taken all her courage and her strength. When I met her for the first time, she was a very frightened, very defeated girl. Her parents were threatening to expose my father, my mother was dying slowly in front of my eyes and had perhaps at most twelve months to live…twelve months, when surely she deserved not to have to go through the trauma that would inevitably occur if my father’s relationship with Gwen was made public? I was trapped and there was no way out …’
He looked at her, turning her hand palm over in his lap and studying it blindly, unable to meet her eyes.
‘It was the action of an idealistic, idiotic fool, and you don’t know how often and how bitterly I regretted it…Gwen was a burden I didn’t want to have to carry. Emotionally she was as totally dependent as my mother was physically dependent. I sacrificed my own happiness for the sake of my mother…that was my decision, my pain, but I also sacrificed your happiness, Jenneth, and that was something I had no right to do. I was young and too arrogant…I thought I knew what was best.
‘I married Gwen and went to the States full of noble intentions, telling myself that you would soon forget me, that you’d find someone else, wallowing in so much self-pity that I nearly drowned myself in it.
‘I made my father swear to stand by my mother…to make her last months happy and contented.
‘She seemed to accept my reason for marrying Gwen, although sometimes since I’ve wondered… I suspect she thought that Gwen was an aberration, a physical itch I scratched and, having scratched to some effect, had to stand by. I don’t think for a moment she guessed the real reason I married her, but I know she knew I loved you.
‘It was a crazy thing to do…now, with hindsight, I see I should have approached the Medical Board privately, explained the situation, got help from people far more qualified than I was myself. As it was…
‘As it was, once Gwen realised that I wasn’t going to be a rock for her to cling to…once she realised that the punishing hours I was working in the States, while I tried desperately to get you out of my mind, meant that we had no time together…once she realised that our marriage meant separate bedrooms and separate lives, she looked around for someone else to cling to…and found someone.
‘Angelica was eighteen months old when she told me she was leaving me… My mother was dead and, God forgive me, the first thing I felt was relief…relief and the realisation that I could come back and tell you…but then Gwen was killed in a car accident, and when I did come back it was to find that you were indifferent towards me…that your life was full of other things…other men…’ His mouth twisted, and Jenneth felt pity and regret touch her heart as she remembered that Christmas when he had appeared so unexpectedly to taunt her with the evidence of his love for another woman in the shape of his child. ‘I was jealous,’ she said simply, ‘I wanted to hate you and to hate Angelica, but I couldn’t.’
She couldn’t find the words to say what was in her heart, to tell him how she felt. The events he had just described were so typical of him; had she been older, more knowledgeable, surely she might have guessed at the truth?
‘You could have told me,’ she said without reproach, but her eyes were shadowed with the pain she had known.
He shook his head. ‘Not without begging you to wait for me, asking you for promises I had no right to. I wanted to set you free properly, Jenneth… Or at least I told myself I did. I was too selfishly wrapped up in my own self-pity. We both have our wounds, and I can never forget that I’ve caused yours, while my own were self-inflicted. I thought you’d forget me and find someone else.’
‘I couldn’t,’ she told him softly, trembling at the look she could see in his eyes.
‘Was it because of me that you wouldn’t let any other man make love to you?’ he whispered against her mouth, and beneath the apparent arrogance of the demand she sensed his deep need and pain, and whispered back,
‘Yes.’ She felt him shudder in reaction to the movement of her mouth and to her admission. ‘I wanted you to be my lover, Luke, only you.’
He shuddered again and said rawly, ‘That Christmas I came home hoping against hope that I’d be able to find a way of winning you back. Instead I discovered that you had no interest in me whatsoever…that there were apparently other men in your life. I felt I’d been given a death blow. I told myself that I had no right to feel jealous, to reproach you, but my reactions to the discovery that I’d lost you showed me just how much I’d deceived
myself with my supposed nobility. I hated losing you like hell. It was torment…agony…and even then I couldn’t stop myself from getting every scrap of information about you that I could from Louise and her parents.
‘Everything seemed to have gone wrong for me; my career was prospering, but I had lost the woman I loved, and I had to carry the burden of feeling responsible for my wife’s death. If she hadn’t married me…’
Jenneth was unable to stop herself from reaching out and touching him compassionately. ‘We all have free will,’ she reminded him tenderly.
He caught hold of her hand and pressed it to his lips, his mouth burning hot against her skin.
‘Yes,’ he agreed thickly. ‘But I took away your right to use yours when I broke our engagement without telling you the truth. Even when I thought I’d lost you, I still couldn’t prevent myself from giving in to the temptation of taking this job in York, a final, last-ditch attempt to get back into your life—and then I stood beneath Louise’s bedroom window and miraculously, unbelievably I heard you saying that you still loved me. But saying it in such a way, with such pain and bitterness, that I knew that I couldn’t simply rush upstairs, take you in my arms and tell you that I loved you too. You’d erected so many barriers against me, and with good reason.
‘I had to plan a campaign…a campaign to make myself a part of your life, and then to tell you the truth once I had a fair chance of being heard. What happened the night before I announced our engagement was not part of that plan,’he assured her huskily. ‘The trouble was that I’d tried so hard to resist the temptation of holding you, or loving you, that when I was tempted to use the advantage fate was giving me when Angelica walked in and saw us, I had no resistance left.
‘I know now that you love me,’ he said unsteadily. ‘But can you forgive me, Jenneth; can you admit me back into your life?’
She took a deep breath and then said shakily, ‘Yes! I do understand why you did it, Luke, and what you did was right,’ she admitted with painful honesty. ‘Your poor mother…’ She gave a tiny shudder.
‘Can we put the past behind us, Jen?’ he asked her quietly. ‘Can we start again, building on the foundations of our love…building a relationship strong in trust and truth?’
‘Yes!’ she whispered, above the fierce pounding of her heart.
‘Oh, Jenneth.’ He gave a groan as he took her in his arms. ‘I’ve needed you so much.’
Against his ear she whispered softly, ‘Love me, Luke. Love me now for all the times you haven’t been here for me through the years.’
And, as he obeyed her whispered demands, she heard him telling her over and over again that he loved her, until the words ran through her blood like the pulse of life itself, and she gave herself up joyously and trustingly into the mutual bondage of their love.
* * * * *
Now, read on for a tantalizing excerpt of
Clare Connelly’s debut for Harlequin Presents,
BOUGHT FOR THE BILLIONAIRE’S REVENGE
Being forced to spurn Nikos Kyriazis devastated Marnie Kenington. Years later, he offers to absolve her family’s bankruptcy—if she marries him! Nikos wants revenge—and he knows that in the bedroom he can take Marnie apart…piece by sensual piece…
Keep reading to get a glimpse of
BOUGHT FOR THE BILLIONAIRE’S REVENGE
PROLOGUE
HIS CAR CHEWED up the miles easily, almost as though the Ferrari sensed his impatience.
He exited the M25, the call he’d received that morning heavy on his mind.
‘He’s broke, Nik. Not just personally, but his business too. No more assets to mortgage. Banks are too cautious anyway. The whole family fortune is going to go down the drain. He’s about to lose it all.’
Nikos should have felt overjoyed. There was something about chickens coming home to roost that ought to have brought him amusement. But it hadn’t.
Seeing Arthur Kenington suffer had never been his goal.
Using the man’s plight to avenge the past, though… That idea held infinite appeal.
For six years he’d carried the other man’s actions in his chest. Oh, Arthur Kenington wasn’t the first elitist snob Nikos had come up against. Being the poorest kid at a prestigious school—‘the scholarship boy’—had led to an ever-present sense of being an outsider.
But it had been so much worse with Arthur. After all, the man had paid him to get out of Marnie’s life, declaring that Nikos would never be good enough for his precious daughter. Worse, Marnie had listened to her father. She’d dropped him like a hot potato.
Marnie.
Or ‘Lady Heiress’, as she was known: the beautiful, enigmatic, softly spoken society princess who had, a long time ago, held his heart in her elegant hands. Held it, pummelled it, stabbed it and finally, at her father’s behest, rejected it. Thrown it away as though it were an inconsequential item of extremely limited value.
It had hurt like hell at the time, but Nikos had long ago credited it as the fuel that had driven his meteoric rise to the top of the finance world.
A dark smile curved his lips as he navigated the car effortlessly through London’s southern boroughs.
The tables had turned; the power was his and he would wield it over Marnie until she realised what a fool she’d been.
He had the power to help her father, to prove his own worth, and finally to hold her heart in his hands and see if he felt like being gentle…or repaying her in kind.
CHAPTER ONE
SHE SHOULDN’T HAVE come.
The whole way into the city she’d told herself to turn around, go back. It wasn’t too late.
But of course it was.
The second Marnie had heard from him the die had been cast. It had fallen into the water of her life, changing stillness to storm within seconds.
Nikos.
Nikos was back.
And he wanted to see her.
The elevator ascended inside the glass building, but it might as well have been plunging her into the depths of hell. A fine bead of perspiration had broken out on her top lip. Marnie didn’t wipe it. She hardly even noticed it.
Every cell of her body was focussed on the next half-hour of her life and how she’d get through it.
‘I need to see you. It’s important.’
His voice hadn’t changed at all; his tone still resonated with assuredness. Even at twenty-one, with nothing behind him, Nikos Kyriazis had possessed the same confidence bordering on arrogance that was now his stock in trade. Sure, he had the billions to back it up these days, but even without the dollars in his bank he’d still borne that trademark ability to command.
For the briefest of moments she’d thought of refusing him. So long had passed; what good could come from rehashing ancient history? Especially when she knew, in the deepest corner of her heart, that she was still so vulnerable to him. So exposed to his appeal.
‘It’s about your father.’
And the tiny part of Marnie that had wanted to run a mile at the very thought of coming face to face with this man again had been silenced instantly.
Her father?
She frowned now, thinking of Arthur Kenington. He’d been different lately. Distracted. He’d lost a little weight too, and not through any admirable leap into a healthy lifestyle. She’d become worried, and Nikos’s call, completely out of the blue, had underscored those concerns.
The elevator paused, the doors sliding open to allow two men to enter, both dressed in suits. One of them stared at her for a moment too long, in that way people did when they weren’t sure exactly where they knew her from. Marnie cleared her throat and looked straight ahead, her wide-set eyes carefully blanked of any emotion. She tried to conceal the embarrassment that always curdled her blood when she realised she’d been recognised.
When the elevator doors swished open to the top floor of the glass and steel monolith at the heart of Canary Wharf, she saw an enormous sign on the wall opposite that pronounced: KYRIAZIS.
Her heart thumped angrily in her chest.
Kyriazis.
Nikos.
‘Oh, God,’ she whispered under her breath, pausing for a moment to settle her nerves.
The painstakingly developed skill she possessed of hiding her innermost thoughts and feelings from the outside world failed her spectacularly in that moment. Her skin, usually like honey all year round, was pale. Her fingers trembled in a way that wouldn’t be stopped.
‘Madam? May I help you?’
She blinked, her golden-brown eyes showing turmoil before she suppressed the unwanted emotion. With a smile that sat heavily on her lips, Marnie clicked across the tiled foyer.
More recognition.
‘Lady Kenington,’ the receptionist said with a small tilt of her head, observing the visitor with undisguised interest from the brown hair with its natural blonde highlights to the symmetrical features set in a dainty face down to the petite frame of this reclusive heiress.
Cold-hearted, the tabloids liked to claim, and to the receptionist there seemed indeed an air of aloofness in the beautiful woman’s eyes.
‘Yes, hello. I have an appointment with…’ There was the smallest hesitation as she steeled herself to say his name aloud to another soul. ‘Nikos Kyriazis.’
‘Of course.’ The receptionist flicked her long red hair over one shoulder and nodded to a banquette of chairs across the room. ‘He won’t be long. Please, take a seat.’
The anti-climax of the moment might have made Marnie laugh under different circumstances. All morning she’d counted down to this very moment, seeing it as a sort of emotional D-day, and now he was going to keep her waiting?