by Penny Jordan
Her heart went out to him, but there was something she had to say, ‘But I…slept with your grandfather, and yet you say you love me?’
He shook his head, his frown deepening, his voice harsh, ‘God, do you think I haven’t tormented myself with that over and over again? After Nat was killed, I told myself I’d only marry if I could find a woman who was marrying me for myself; that I’d never let myself be put in the position that he was put in, running after a woman who didn’t give a single damn about him, humiliated and finally killed for loving a woman who couldn’t care less. But right from the start there was something about you—I don’t know what, call it what you will—that made it impossible for me to shut you out no matter how much I tried.
‘I’m not going to say it’s going to be easy. There’ll be times when I’ll hurt like hell because of your past, and when I’ll probably put you through hell for it too, but I can’t stop thinking about last night…about how you felt in my arms…about the way you responded to me… I can’t believe all that was faked, Natasha,’ he finished huskily. ‘I can’t believe that the way you responded to me was anything but real.’
‘But last night you said—’
‘Forget what I said last night,’ he demanded huskily, groaning suddenly as he caught her up in his arms. ‘I don’t know what you’ve done to me, woman. I think you must have bewitched me… Right here and now I don’t give a damn how many other men there have been.’
But he did care, Natasha realised, caught up on a wave of love and compassion, no longer doubting his love for her, wanting only to reach out to him and wipe out all the misunderstandings that had dogged their relationship.
‘And…and if there haven’t been any at all…will you still love me? Will you still want me, Jay?’
He was looking at her broodingly.
‘Tip lied to you, Jay,’ she told him softly. ‘I don’t know why… I know he liked to exaggerate a little. He and I were nothing more than friends—that’s all. There haven’t been any men in my life at all, Jay.’ She gave a shaky laugh and took a step toward him. ‘In fact, I’m afraid you’re going to find me appallingly inexperienced. I…I hope you won’t mind. I…’
She heard him give a shuddering sigh, and then she was in his arms as he carried her into the cabin, kicking the door closed behind him.
A bed with a patchwork quilt filled one wall, and he put her down on it, quickly stripping off his clothes, his eyes on her face the whole time, a smile curling his mouth when he registered her soft flush.
‘It’s all right. You’ll soon get used to me.’
She was glad that he hadn’t questioned her; that he had simply accepted her statement at face value. Explanations could come later.
She shivered slightly as the bed dipped under his weight. He didn’t linger over removing her clothes, and at first she felt embarrassed at being with him like this, with full daylight pouring in through the cabin’s windows and playing on their bodies, emphasising all their contrasts. But when his hands started to move over her, caressing her, she forgot her embarrassment in the wave of pleasure that engulfed her.
She clung to him unashamedly, delighting in the maleness of him against her body. Her breasts swelled into his hands, her nipples tight and eager for the moist heat of his mouth. He sucked them gently, lingering over the delicate caress until she was mindless with pleasure, opening to the touch of his hand between her thighs as though it was a ritual they had perfected over a lifetime of intimacies.
‘Love me, Natasha… Love me.’
He groaned the words against her lips, kissing her with a fierce passion that made her body surge achingly against the heat of his hand.
She wanted him. She wanted him so much that it hurt. She told him as much, barely aware of what she was saying or doing as she moved frantically against him, responding to an age-old instinct that burned through her tormented flesh.
He moved, positioning himself between her thighs, his mouth hot against her skin as his body surged against hers.
Fear quickened momentarily inside her, dying beneath the swift upsurge of pleasure her body felt in its physical contact with his.
She felt him inside her and her body shook with joy. He moved powerfully and strongly, and her senses quickened.
The sudden sharp spear of pain that caught her just when she abandoned the last of her original fear made her cry out and tense, but Jay soothed her, smoothing her hair back off her hot face, kissing the soft skin of her throat and shoulder, letting her body accustom itself to him before covering her mouth with his and kissing her so deeply and intensely that her body eagerly met the rhythmic force of his, as its movements matched the deliberate penetration of her mouth by the honeyed thrust of his tongue.
Sensation after sensation arched through her, a pulsing need driving her on until she shook with the force of it, and Jay lost his grimly held control, taking her down with him into the fierce maelstrom of delight.
When the tiny ripples of pleasure started to explode through her body, she cried out in surprised delight, her eyes opening, her breath catching on a gasp as she saw the look of fierce pleasure in Jay’s.
‘You’re mine,’ he told her fiercely. ‘Mine! Mine, Natasha.’
His control splintered, his body cresting the final pinnacle of pleasure and taking hers with it. She felt his lips moving gently against her skin as she fell into an exhausted sleep.
When she woke up it was dark. She was lying beneath the quilt, and at first she couldn’t remember where she was. When she did, she looked anxiously for Jay.
He was crouching in front of the hearth in which he had just lit a fire. As though aware without speaking that she was awake, he looked over to her, a sombre look darkening his eyes.
He got up and came over to her, taking her hand in his.
‘Can you ever forgive me?’
Tears filled her eyes.
Many, many times she had wished to see this humility, but now that she was, she hated it…
‘I could have told you the truth, made you listen…’
‘If there is a God up there he must surely have been guiding my steps,’ Jay said sombrely. ‘I acted for all the wrong reasons. Marrying you out of anger and bitterness, hating and resenting you, and yet if I hadn’t married you…if I’d simply let you go… What on earth made Gramps do it?’ he demanded savagely. ‘Why, why did he leave you half the ranch? Why did he make that will? Was it because he didn’t trust me? Did he ever say anything to you about it?’
Natasha shook her head.
‘Nothing other than that he wanted you to marry and produce sons.’ She had her own thoughts on Tip’s will, but she plucked at the quilt before voicing them. ‘I don’t know your grandfather as well as you did, Jay, but he always struck me as a shrewd, purposeful man. Not a man who could ever be guided by sentimentality. I…I think he did it deliberately…a sort of matchmaking. You know, leaving me half the ranch, knowing that I’d have to come out here to see it. That stipulation about the twins and about staying for six months. He knew how desperately I wanted a family… I think he was throwing us together deliberately, and hoping that propinquity would do the rest. He’d probably forgotten all about pretending that he and I were lovers, because he knew it wasn’t true.’
Jay grimaced.
‘It’s a lovely thought, but without wanting to hurt your feelings, my darling, Gramps wanted me to marry right enough, and he was more than capable of pulling a trick like this to achieve it. But he had it in his mind that he wanted me to marry money…’ Jay made a gesture of disgust. ‘Someone with a similar background—he never forgot what had happened to Nat.’ He frowned as Natasha started laughing.
‘What is it?’
It took her several minutes to calm down long enough to explain to him about her own background and the money that had come to her on the sale of the farm.
Jay was so quiet that for a few minutes she feared that she had said something wrong, that she had made a mistake after a
ll, and that he didn’t love her.
‘I could kill Gramps for this,’ he said quietly at last. ‘When I think what I’ve put you through…’
‘I could have told you the truth, proved it even. I suppose I wanted you to see it for yourself…’
‘And I suspect I probably did. You appeared to be the absolute antithesis of everything I wanted in a woman, and yet I still went ahead and fell in love with you… I told myself it was just sex, but every time you looked at me you made me ache.’
‘And that’s not just sex?’ Natasha teased.
‘Lady,’ Jay told her forcefully, ‘the way it is with you and me could never be described as “just sex”. However, it’s plain to me that there just ain’t no way you’re going to believe me telling you that, so I reckon I’m just going to have to show you…’
She laughed at his exaggerated cattleman’s drawl, but her laughter stopped abruptly as he took her in his arms and kissed her with a raw hunger that shocked and excited her.
He moved so that his body leaned into hers, making her aware of the arousal quickening his body.
‘I hope you realise that I’m doing this for Gramps,’ Jay told her when he could bring himself to release her mouth long enough to speak to her.
While he spoke, his thumb touched the swollen fullness of her lips, and she felt the fierce slam of his heart against his ribs as he saw her physical reaction to his touch.
‘Gramps?’ she managed to articulate tormentedly. What on earth had what he was doing to her to do with his grandfather?
‘That great-grandson he wanted,’ Jay murmured, his mouth just a whisper from hers. ‘Something tells me that it’s not going to be long before we provide him with one.’
* * *
IT WASN’T! Twelve months after they were married, Jay and Natasha stood side by side, watching as Rosalie and Cherry each proudly held a christening-robe-wrapped infant.
‘You never told me twins ran in your family,’ Jay commented to her, as Natasha kept a motherly eye on her new sons.
The fear she had once felt, the dread of revealing her feelings to him was long gone. With a grin she turned to look at him, and reminded him dulcetly, ‘As I remember it, you never gave me time.’
‘What are you two laughing at?’ Cherry demanded curiously, experimentally juggling her white-wrapped bundle on her arm. ‘Oh, I don’t suppose you’ll tell us. Grown-ups,’ she sighed with pre-teenage acceptance of adults’ strange ways, and went back to her contemplation of her new cousin.
When she and Rosalie had said they would like Natasha to marry their uncle and have a baby, they had only meant one! But still, the twins weren’t too bad, and it was nice to be part of a proper family again.
‘Rosalie, you are not to hold him like that!’ she scolded her ten-minutes-younger sister virtuously. ‘Look, you have to hold him like this!’
‘How about a little holiday, once we’ve got these two christened?’ Jay suggested, watching them.
They hadn’t had a break since their marriage, and Natasha looked at him expectantly. ‘Could you really get away? But where would we go?’
‘Somewhere where the weather doesn’t matter… You’ve shared my home, Natasha, but I don’t know anything about yours. I thought we’d take a trip to England. Call it a delayed wedding present if you…’
He broke off to gather his wife into his arms, shaking her gently as he saw the tears in her eyes.
She still looked a little frail from the twins’ birth, and his heart turned over with love for her. She meant the world to him, his quiet, beautiful wife, and he didn’t think he would ever forget how nearly he had lost her.
‘Well, what do you say?’ he asked, masking his emotions with a smile.
‘I say that I don’t care where we go, as long as I’m with you.’
‘Umm… Well in that case, I know this real nice secluded shack…’
They both laughed.
‘No, thanks. I don’t want another pair of those quite yet, thanks. I’m sure it had something to do with the water…’
‘Uh huh, that’s what caused it, is it?’
‘Oh, come on, Rosalie,’ Cherry told her sister, grimacing. ‘They’re going to get all soppy again.’
* * * * *
Now, read on for a tantalizing excerpt of USA Today bestselling author
Dani Collins’s new release,
XENAKIS’S CONVENIENT BRIDE
The second book in The Secret Billionaires trilogy!
Stavros Xenakis refuses to marry—until deliciously tempting Calli proves that a wife is exactly what he needs! Stavros’s proposal gives Calli the chance to find her stolen son. But she doesn’t expect life as Mrs. Xenakis to be quite so satisfying…
Read on to get a glimpse of
XENAKIS’S CONVENIENT BRIDE
PROLOGUE
STAVROS XENAKIS THREW his twenty-thousand-euro chips into the pot, less satisfied than he usually was postchallenge, but it had nothing to do with his fellow players or his lackluster hand.
His longtime friend Sebastien Atkinson had arranged his usual après-adrenaline festivities. It had wound down to the four of them, as it often did. Many turned out for these extreme sports events, but only Antonio Di Marcello and Alejandro Salazar had the same deep pockets Stavros and Sebastien did. Or the stones to bet at this level simply to stretch out a mellow evening.
Stavros wasn’t the snob his grandfather was, but he didn’t consider many his equal. These men were it and he enjoyed their company for that reason. Tonight was no exception. They were still high on today’s exercise of cheating death, sipping 1946 Macallan while trading good-natured insults.
So why was he twitching with edginess?
He mentally reviewed today’s paraski that had had him carving a steep line down a ski slope to a cliff’s edge before rocketing into thin air, lifted by his chute for a thousand feet, guiding his path above a ridge, then hitting the lower slope for another run of hard turns before taking to the air again.
It had been as physically demanding as any challenge that had come before and was probably their most daredevil yet. Throughout most of it, he’d been completely in the moment—his version of meditating.
He had expected today to erase the frustration that had been dogging him, but it hadn’t. He might have set it aside for a few hours, but this niggling irritation was back to grate at him.
Sebastien eyed him across the table, no doubt trying to determine if he was bluffing.
“How’s your wife?” Stavros asked, more as a deflection, but also trying to divine how Sebastien could be happily married.
“Better company than you. Why are you so surly tonight?”
Was it obvious? He grimaced. “I haven’t won yet.” He was among friends so he admitted the rest. “And my grandfather is threatening to disinherit me if I don’t marry soon. I’d tell him to go to hell, but…”
“Your mother,” Alejandro said.
“Exactly.” They all knew his situation. He played ball with his grandfather for the sake of his mother and sisters. He couldn’t walk away from his own inheritance when it would cost them theirs.
But “settle down?” His grandfather had been trying to fit Stavros into a box from the time he was twelve. Lately it had become a push toward picket fences. Demands he produce an heir and a spare.
Stavros couldn’t buy into any of that so, yet again, he was in a power struggle with the old man. He usually got around being whipped down a particular path, but he hadn’t yet found his alternate route. It chewed and chewed at him, especially when his grandfather was holding control of the family’s pharmaceutical conglomerate hostage.
Stavros might be a hell-raiser, but his rogue personality had produced some of the biggest gains for Dýnami. He was more than ready to steer the ship. A wife and children were cargo he didn’t need, but his grandfather seemed to think it would prove he was “mature” and “responsible.”
Where his grandfather got the idea he wasn’t either of
those things, Stavros couldn’t say. He upped his ante to a full hundred thousand, despite the fact his hand had not improved. He promptly lost it.
They played a little longer, then Sebastien asked, “Do you ever get the feeling we spend too much of our lives counting our money and chasing superficial thrills at the expense of something more meaningful?”
“You called it,” Antonio said to Alejandro, tossing over a handful of chips. “Four drinks and he’s philosophizing.”
Sebastien gave Stavros a look of disgust as he also pushed some chips toward Alejandro’s pile.
“I said three.” Stavros shrugged without apology. “My losing streak continues.”
“I’m serious.” Sebastien was the only self-made billionaire among them, raised by a single mother on the dole in a country where bloodlines and titles were still more valuable than a bank balance. His few extra years of age and experience gave him the right to act as mentor. He wasn’t afraid to offer his opinion and he was seldom wrong. They all listened when he spoke, but he did get flowery when he was in his cups. “At our level, it’s numbers on a page. Points on a scoreboard. What does it contribute to our lives? Money doesn’t buy happiness.”
“It buys some nice substitutes.” Antonio smirked.
Sebastien’s mouth twisted. “Like your cars?” he mused, then flicked his glance to Alejandro. “Your private island? You don’t even use that boat you’re so proud of,” he said, moving on to Stavros. “We buy expensive toys and play dangerous games, but does it enrich our lives? Feed our souls?”
“What are you suggesting?” Alejandro drawled, discarding a card and motioning for it to be replaced. “We go live with the Buddhists in the mountains? Learn the meaning of life? Renounce our worldly possessions to find inner clarity?”
Sebastien made a scoffing noise. “You three couldn’t go two weeks without your wealth and family names to support you. Your gilded existence makes you blind to reality.”
“Could you?” Stavros challenged, throwing away three cards. “Try telling us you would go back to when you were broke, before you made your fortune. Hungry isn’t happy. That’s why you’re such a rich bastard now.”