by Lynne Graham
‘Grace...’ he said and his dark deep drawl shimmied down her spine with the potent sexual charisma that was so much a part of him.
Leo felt a hard-on kick in as he focused momentarily on the swell of Grace’s high, full breasts below the thin top and the slender perfection of the thighs he hadn’t had a good look at since they first met. Diavelos, he loved her body, he really, really loved her body. It just did it for him every time the way no other woman’s ever had. He looked and he simply wanted to touch, taste, take.
‘I wanted to see you to discuss something...probably something you’ll consider quite silly,’ Grace warned him uncomfortably, striving to not quite focus on his lean, darkly handsome features with a mouth running dry and a tummy turning somersaults. But there he was, gorgeous, no denying that, she conceded helplessly while she fought to concentrate on what she had to say.
Leo had the celebratory champagne standing by on ice. He knew she was pregnant but was convinced that one little sip would do no harm simply to mark the occasion, because of course she wanted to see him to tell him that she was ready to marry him. The true celebration would be taking her back to bed again, knowing she was his...finally. When it dawned on him that Grace was burbling on for some strange reason about her uncle’s job and her aunt’s legal firm, he was perplexed, until the proverbial penny dropped and he made the necessary leap of understanding. Of course, what else would a lying, cheating scumbag do but throw his weight around through threats and intimidation?
‘And you’re afraid that I took offence?’ Leo prompted, taking very much more offence from what she was saying than from anything her shrewish aunt had thrown at him.
‘Yes, of course, I know you’re not really like that...’ Grace assured him.
No, you don’t know. They wouldn’t be having this conversation if she knew him and without warning a scorching tide of rage was washing over Leo like a dangerous floodtide.
Grace stared at Leo, noticing that his big powerful body had gone very, very still. His dark eyes shone as bright as gold ingots below his lush black lashes.
‘They’re my family...I do care about what happens to them,’ Grace framed in uncertain continuation. ‘They really don’t deserve to be dragged into this mess between us.’
‘I won’t adversely affect their lives in any way if you agree to marry me,’ Leo delivered in a tone that brought gooseflesh to her bare arms.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I think you heard me, Grace. If you do what I want and marry me, I will promise not to interfere with your uncle and aunt’s continuing employment.’
Before his shrewd, hard gaze, Grace turned white. ‘You can’t mean that, not that you would seriously threaten their livelihoods just because I’m not doing what you want?’
‘I mean it,’ Leo asserted with fierce emphasis. ‘I’ve run out of patience. I want to marry you and I want that child you’re carrying. So, think very carefully about what you decide to do next.’
‘But that’s complete blackmail!’ Grace shot back at him, trembling like a leaf in shock and barely able to credit what he was telling her.
‘I never pretended to be a knight on a white horse, Grace. You and that baby are mine and the sooner you acknowledge that, the happier we will all be.’
‘I don’t belong to anyone. I belong to myself,’ Grace argued through gritted teeth, battling a terrifying sense of panic as hard as she could because Leo had just trashed the faith she hadn’t known she still cherished in him.
Leo stalked closer, well over six feet of powerfully built and determined masculinity. ‘That was before you met me, meli mou. Everything’s changed now. We’ll get married on Friday.’
‘Fri-Friday is only three days away,’ Grace stammered, utterly thrown by Leo’s controlling behaviour.
‘I know and I can’t wait to sign on that official dotted line,’ Leo grated impatiently. ‘Then I’ll know where you are and how you are.’
‘You’re out of your mind,’ Grace breathed in a daze. ‘We can’t just get married. You were engaged to Marina!’
‘Marina’s the past, you’re the present,’ Leo cut in with ruthless bite. ‘And at this moment I’m only interested in the future and it starts here, now with your answer...’
Grace pinned tremulous lips together in the terrible stretching silence. Her heart seemed to be hammering in her eardrums. He was threatening her aunt and uncle’s comfortable life and she couldn’t just stand by and do nothing after all they had done for her, she thought wretchedly. They had brought her up, supported her at school, kept her safe. All right, it had been far from perfect but they were still the only family she had and she didn’t want them to suffer in any way by association with her. Leo held all the cards: her uncle’s employment, Della’s legal firm’s dependency on the business Leo sent their way. Della had worked long and hard for a partnership and if she had been rude to Leo—well, she was pretty rude to a lot of people, never having been the type to tolerate fools. Grace’s mind and her thoughts were in turmoil.
‘You could explain now about Marina,’ she proffered tersely.
‘No, that ship’s already sailed,’ Leo slammed back at her coolly. ‘Are you marrying me on Friday or not?’
Grace wanted to say not, to puncture his carapace of arrogant strength and challenge him, but her character was grounded very firmly in compassion and the risk of her relatives having to pay a high price for her mistake in getting pregnant by the wrong man was not one she could ignore. She snatched in a wavering breath and damned him with her pale green defiant gaze. ‘I’ll give you an answer in the morning.’
‘Why drag this out?’
‘Because it’s a very big decision,’ Grace countered quietly. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ve decided tomorrow.’
Impatience assailed Leo and he gritted his strong white teeth. Her eyes were luminous pools of pale green but he noticed the dark circles etched below them and her general pallor. ‘You look very tired.’
Grace coloured in receipt of that unflattering comment. ‘I’m going back downstairs to go straight to bed.’
‘Have you eaten?’ he shot at her as she reached the door.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I’ll meet you here for breakfast at eight in the morning,’ Leo decreed.
How could she marry a man who had been planning to marry another woman for three long years? How could she surrender to blackmail? Would Leo really damage her aunt’s and uncle’s livelihoods and careers? Or was he bluffing? And if bluffing was a possibility was she prepared to light the fuse and wait and see what actually happened if she said no?
Grace lay in bed mulling over those weighty questions. Although she had completely dismissed the idea, Leo had mentioned marriage the very first day he’d discovered she was pregnant, she recalled ruefully. It seemed that marrying the mother of his child was important to him, so important he had immediately recognised it as a necessity. Not that that excused him in any way for employing threats when persuasion had failed, she reasoned.
Grace had so many unanswered questions that she was now wishing that she had listened to what Leo had had to say for himself earlier that day at his apartment. Clearly, Leo’s relationship with Marina was unusual. When Marina had introduced herself to Grace, she had been fairly polite and remarkably composed for a female whose fiancé had just dumped her for another woman. Even so, Marina had repeatedly said that Grace having Leo’s child would wreck all their lives. It was possible that Marina was simply a good actress but even that didn’t explain the peculiarity of Marina visiting Grace to try and buy her off and then freely admitting that embarrassing fact to Leo.
Her head beginning to pound with the strain of her anxious reflections, Grace acknowledged that had Marina not existed she would’ve agreed to marry Leo. After all, it was best to be honest with herself: she did want Leo in sp
ite of the shocks he had dealt her. It wasn’t sensible, it wasn’t justifiable but she had pretty much been infatuated with Leo from the moment she’d met him. On those grounds and bearing in mind the reality that she would very much like her baby to grow up with a father, shouldn’t she give marriage a chance?
Only, how did she marry a male willing to blackmail her into agreement? That was wrong, that was so wrong. And the best of it was, she was convinced that Leo knew it was wrong but he had still put that pressure on her in an effort to get what he wanted. She did owe a debt of care to her uncle and aunt and if their lives were blighted because of something she had done she would be gutted, which didn’t give her much in the way of choice. On the other hand, Grace reflected as she swallowed another yawn, she could agree to marriage with certain provisos attached.
* * *
Leo studied Grace as she joined him for breakfast, her face blank, her eyes uninformative. He reckoned she would make a good poker player and the challenge of that talent in a potential wife amused him. ‘Well?’ he prompted grimly, still annoyed that she had forced him to wait for her answer.
Grace sipped at her tea, wishing that Leo didn’t look quite so amazing first thing in the morning when she felt washed out and weary. There he was with his dark golden eyes alive with potent leaping energy, his blue-black hair still damp from the shower and his hard jawline close shaven. He wore yet another one of those remarkably well-tailored suits that beautifully defined his lean, muscular build. ‘I’ll say yes because you really haven’t given me a choice.’
‘Choice is a very much overrated gift,’ Leo declared, pouring himself a cup of fragrant coffee with a steady hand, determined not to react in any way to her capitulation. ‘People don’t always make the right choice. Sometimes they need a little push in the relevant direction.’
‘This was more than a little push,’ Grace censured. ‘I don’t know why you’re doing it either. You can’t want me as a wife that much.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m just ordinary.’
‘I don’t see you that way, meli mou,’ Leo countered. ‘I see you as different, as special.’
‘Leo, you just blackmailed me into marrying you. Ditch the flattery!’ Grace said very drily. ‘And I may be saying yes but there would have to be certain conditions attached.’
Leo tensed again and flung back his arrogant head, shapely mouth flattening back into a tough line. ‘Such as?’
‘As the term hasn’t started yet, I’m considering taking a year out while all this is going on but I would want to return to my studies in London next year. You would have to support that.’
‘Naturally I would support that arrangement,’ Leo asserted, the tension locking his lean bronzed features into tautness evaporating.
Grace went pink and gathered her strength. ‘And it would have to be a platonic marriage.’
Leo went rigid again and studied her with incredulous dark eyes as if she were insane. ‘You can’t be serious?’
‘Of course, I’m serious. We don’t have to be intimate to be married and raise a child together.’
His dark golden gaze rested on her resolute face. ‘I’m afraid you do if you’re married to me. I refuse to look outside my marriage for sex. That would degrade both of us and I couldn’t live with it. I have strong views on fidelity,’ he completed with finality.
Grace groaned out loud, not having expected him to be quite so set against what would in effect have been a marriage only on paper. ‘I really did think that that would be the sensible option.’
‘No, it would be a recipe for disaster.’ Leo stared at her with his black-lashed dark eyes glittering like stars in a lean, angular face that was so handsome it made the breath trip in her tight throat. ‘And I speak from experience. My father was persistently unfaithful to my mother and their unhappiness poisoned life for both them and their children.’
‘My goodness...’ Taken aback by that unexpectedly frank admission, Grace regrouped as she finished eating. ‘But it wouldn’t be quite so personal with us. For a start, we’re not in love with each other or anything like that.’
‘But I still want you, Grace, as a man wants a woman,’ Leo delivered with savage candour. ‘I won’t pretend otherwise. I want a normal marriage with all that that entails, not some unnatural agreement that increases the odds of divorce. I also want to be there for our child as he or she grows up.’
‘You’ve made your point,’ Grace conceded grudgingly, willing to admit that she had not thought through the consequences of a platonic marriage. It had been naïve to assume that Leo might be willing to live without sex while the alternative of her having to turn a blind eye while Leo sought sexual consolation elsewhere was even less appealing to her. But how could he say that he had strong views on fidelity after what he had done to Marina?
As she pushed her plate away and stood up, her curiosity still fully engaged on the mystery of Leo’s thought processes, Leo stood up as well.
‘So, we’re getting married in forty-eight hours?’ Leo mused huskily, resting a hand on her arm.
‘I think that’s a yes.’ Still striving to keep her distance, Grace tried to gently detach her arm from his hold but she didn’t act fast enough because his other arm just closed round her spine to entrap her slim body against his lean, powerful frame. He was hard...everywhere. Hard-packed with muscle, tense and...fully erect. Her face burned in the split second before his mouth came crashing down on hers, nibbling, licking, tasting in a carnal assault on her senses that absolutely no other man could have contrived. Her head fell back and her mouth opened, treacherous excitement lighting her up like a shower of fireworks inside. It was so incredibly sexy. In a mindless moment she was convinced it was the sexiest kiss ever.
A knock sounded on the door and he pulled back from her. A waiter brought in champagne. Flustered by the power of that compellingly provocative kiss and shaken by the thought that she was actually going to marry Leo, Grace backed away to the window to practise breathing again.
Leo extended a champagne flute to her. ‘To our future.’
‘I shouldn’t drink.’
‘One sip for the sake of it,’ Leo suggested.
Grace touched the flute to her mouth, moistening her lips.
‘I’ll set up a shopping trip for you today. You need clothes.’ Unusually, Leo hesitated. ‘Marina has offered to help out.’
‘Marina?’ Grace exclaimed, wide-eyed.
‘We’re still good friends. She’s probably feeling a bit guilty that she approached you yesterday to buy you off because that sort of behaviour really isn’t her style,’ Leo remarked with a wry roll of his eyes. ‘What you see is what you get with Marina. But if you would feel uncomfortable with her, I’ll make a polite excuse...’
In the taut silence, Grace swallowed with difficulty, her mind functioning at top speed. Leo’s ex-fiancée was offering to assist her in preparing for their shotgun wedding out of a genuine desire to be helpful? Grace’s curiosity about the unconventional nature of Marina’s relationship with Leo literally shot into the stratosphere at that revelation. Evidently their ties of friendship had withstood the breaking off of the engagement and the bitterness that Marina had briefly revealed, and that more than anything else impressed Grace and made her want to know more.
‘No, don’t make an excuse. It’s an unusual situation but I think that Marina’s kind gesture should be met with equal generosity,’ Grace pronounced, hoping that she was making the right decision and not setting herself up as a target for the sort of spiteful comments of the type her cousin and her aunt had specialised in.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘FROM A PRACTICAL point of view, I’ve been up to my throat in wedding arrangements for the past few weeks, so I know exactly what I’m doing and who to contact,’ Marina proffered as she sat beside Grace in the back o
f Leo’s opulent limousine an hour later.
‘But there isn’t enough time to organise anything fancy.’
‘When a man is as rich as Leo is, there are always people willing to meet a challenge for a substantial bonus,’ the brunette told her drily.
‘But why should you help us?’ Grace asked baldly, no longer able to swallow back that burning and obvious question.
‘I have my pride. First and foremost, I would prefer our friends to believe that the break-up was amicable rather than inspire a pity party,’ Marina fielded wryly. ‘I’ve also since had a radical rethink about my own future. Yesterday when I went to meet you I was fighting to preserve the status quo but, having cooled down, I’m now more inclined to think that Leo and I were just treading water and never meant to be. My father is deeply disappointed that he’s not getting his dream whiz-kid son-in-law but I’m afraid I want to do what’s right for me.’
‘You’re being very understanding.’
Marina laughed. ‘Not as understanding as you probably think. To be frank, I have someone else in my life too and I believe that eventually Zack will make me happier than Leo ever would have done.’
Grace absorbed that unexpected admission without visible reaction. Yet it was undeniably a relief for her to learn that the svelte brunette was not the innocent and cruelly betrayed fiancée Grace had initially assumed she was. ‘Even so, you and Leo still seem to be very close.’
‘But there was always a flaw in our relationship.’ Marina turned to look at Grace with a self-mocking light in her lively dark eyes. ‘Although most men consider me attractive Leo never wanted me the way he wanted you.’
‘I can’t believe that,’ Grace said uncomfortably, her face burning with sudden heat.
Marina grimaced. ‘It’s true and his detachment was bad for my ego. However, because we were friends from a young age, Leo believed we were an ideal match.’
‘But you must’ve loved Leo as well,’ Grace incised, cutting through the brunette’s frustratingly guarded comments.