Tycoon's Ring of Convenience

by Julia James

  ‘And how can you not see that?’ she cried in response. ‘It’s not what our marriage is about! It never was—it was never anything more than...than convenience! A marriage that would suit us both, provide us both with something that was important to each of us—restoring Greymont for me, an entrée into my world for you! And then we’d go our separate ways! You said that, Nikos—you said it yourself to me. It was what you proposed!’

  She took another ragged breath.

  ‘And that’s what I agreed to. All I agreed to.’

  He was staring at her. Every line in his face frozen. Disbelieving.

  ‘Are you telling me,’ he said slowly, ‘that you actually believe our marriage should be celibate?’

  Now it was Diana looking at him as if he were insane. Her eyes flared. ‘Of course!’ she said. ‘That’s what we signed up to. Right from the start.’

  An oath sprang from him. ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this!’ he said.

  His voice was still hollow, but there was an edge to it that made her blench.

  He took a heaving breath. Lifted his hands. ‘Diana, how can you possibly have thought our marriage should be celibate? When did I ever give you cause to think so?’

  Consternation filled her features. ‘Well, of course I thought you thought that! You gave me every reason to believe so. Nikos, you never laid a finger on me in all the time of our engagement. Nor when we first arrived here!’

  He ran his hand agitatedly through his hair. He still could not believe what he was hearing. It was impossible—just impossible—that she should have thought what she said she’d thought. Impossible!

  ‘I was giving you time, Diana. Time to get to know me, to get used to me. Of course I wasn’t going to be crass enough to pounce on you the moment we’d signed the marriage register. I wanted the time to be right for us.’

  He made no reference to ice maidens—what help would that have been? She probably hadn’t even been aware that she was one—that she’d radiated Look but don’t touch as if it had beamed from her in high frequency.

  The very fact that she was talking now, in this insane way, of celibacy—dear God, when they were married, when they’d just returned from that burning consummation under the desert stars—was proof of how totally unaware she was of how unaroused, how frozen she had been. It was a state she’d thought was normal.

  His mind worked rapidly. Was that why she was being like this now? Was this just panic—a kind of delayed ‘morning after the night before’ reaction as she surfaced back in the real world, away from the desert idyll that had so beguiled her—beguiled them both? That must be it—it was the only explanation.

  His mood steadied and he forced himself to stay calm. Reasonable. He took a breath, lowering his voice, making it sound as it needed to now. Reassuring.

  ‘And we have come to know each other, haven’t we, Diana?’ he went on now, in that reassuring tone. ‘We’ve got used to one another now that we’ve finally had time to be with each other, now we’re married—and we’ve found each other agreeable, haven’t we? We get on well.’

  His expression changed without him being aware of it. It was vital that she understood what he was saying now.

  ‘Maybe if we hadn’t had that invitation from the Sheikh to stay at his desert palace it might have taken longer for our relationship to deepen. To reach the conclusion that it has. A conclusion, Diana, that has always been inevitable.’

  He took a step towards her, unconscious of his action, only of his need to close the distance between them. To make everything all right between them again. The way it had been in the desert.

  His voice was husky. He had to tell her. He had to make things clear to her, cut through the confusion that must be in her, the panic, even, which was the only way he could account for what she was saying.

  ‘It’s always been there, Diana, right from the start. That flame between us. Oh, it was hardly visible at first—I know that—but I know, too, that you were not indifferent to me, however much you might have been unaware of it at a conscious level. And, Diana...’ his voice dropped ‘...believe me, I was the very opposite of indifferent to you from the very moment I first saw you. But it took the desert, Diana, to let that invisible flame that has always run between us flare into the incandescent fire that took us both.’

  He strode around the table. Clasped his hands around her shoulders. Gazed down into her face. Her taut and stricken face. He ached to kiss her, to sweep her up into his arms and soothe the panic from her, to melt it away in the fire of his desire—of her desire.

  ‘We can’t deny what’s happened, and nor should we. Why should we? We’re man and wife—what better way to seal that than by yielding to our passion for each other? The passion you feel as strongly as I do. As powerfully. As irresistibly.’

  His voice was low, his mouth descending to hers. He saw her eyelids flutter, saw a look almost of despair in them, but he made himself oblivious to it. Oblivious to everything except the soft exquisite velvet of her lips.

  He drew her to him, sliding his hand around her nape, cradling the shape of her head, holding her for his kiss—a kiss that was long and languorous, sensual and seductive. He felt the relief of having her in his arms again, of making everything all right. It was a kiss to melt away her panic, her fears. To soothe her back into his embrace.

  He heard the low moan in her throat that betokened, as he now knew, the onset of her own arousal—an arousal he knew well how to draw from her, to enhance with every skilled and silken touch. His hand slid from her shoulder to close his over her breast, which ripened at his touch, the coral peak straining beneath his gentle, sensuous kneading. He groaned low in his chest, feeling his own arousal surge. Desire soared in him—and victory. Victory over her fears, her anxieties. He was melting the ice that was seeking to freeze her again, to take her from him. To lock her back into a snow-cold body, unfeeling, insensate.

  He would never let her be imprisoned in that icy fastness again! In his arms he would melt away the last of her fears. The ice maiden was never to return.

  He heard again that low moan in her throat and he deepened his kiss, drawing her hips against him, letting her know how much he desired her and how much she desired him.

  The low moan came again—and then, as her head suddenly rolled back, it became a cry. Her face was convulsing.

  ‘Nikos! No!’

  He let her go instantly. How could he hold her when she had denied him?

  She was backing away, stumbling against the edge of the mahogany table, warding him off with her hand. Her face was working...she was trying to get control of her emotions. Emotions that were searing through her like sheet metal, glowing white-hot. Emotions she had to quench now—right now.

  He talks of a flame between us as if that makes it better—it doesn’t! It makes it worse—much, much worse! It makes it terrifyingly dangerous! Just as I’ve feared all my life!

  So whatever it took, however much strength she had to find—desperately, urgently—she had to keep him at bay. Had to!

  ‘I don’t want this,’ she said. Her voice was thin, almost breaking, but she must not let it break. ‘I don’t want this,’ she said again. ‘What happened in the desert was a...a mistake. A mistake,’ she said bleakly.

  There was silence—complete silence. She took another razoring breath, then spoke again, her voice hollow. Forcing herself to say what she had to say.

  ‘Nikos, if I had thought...realised for one moment that you intended our marriage to be anything but a marriage in name only, that you intended it to be consummated, I would never have agreed to marry you.’

  Her jaw was aching, the tension in her body unbearable, but speak she must. She had to make it crystal-clear to him.

  ‘It wasn’t why I married you.’

  She forced herself to hold his gaze. There was something wrong with his face, but she could not say what. Could do nothing but feel the emotions within her twisting and tightening into vicious coils, crushing
the breath from her.

  The silence stretched, pushing them apart, repelling them from each other.

  As they must be.

  There was incomprehension in his eyes. More than that. Something dark she did not want to see there that chilled her to the bone.

  Then he was speaking. The thing that was wrong in his face, in his eyes, was wrong in his voice, too. It had taken on a vicious edge of sarcasm that cut into her with a whip-like lash.

  ‘I thank you for your enlightening clarification about our marriage,’ he said, and coldness iced inside him. ‘In light of which it would therefore be best if you returned to the UK immediately. Tonight. I will make the arrangements straight away.’

  He turned, and with a smothered cry she made to step after him.

  ‘Nikos! Please—don’t be like that. There’s no need for me to leave. We can just be as we were before...’

  Her voice trailed off. The words mocked her with the impossibility of what she was saying.

  We can never be as we were before.

  His face had closed. Shutting her out as if an iron gate had slammed down across it.

  ‘There is no purpose in further exchange. Go and pack.’

  He was walking away, picking up the house phone on the sideboard, uttering the brief words necessary to set in motion her departure.

  ‘I have work to do,’ he said.

  His voice was as curt as it had been to the person at the front desk. He walked over to where he’d tossed his briefcase, picked it up. Walked into the spare bedroom.

  She heard the door snap shut.

  Then there was silence.

  Silence all around her.

  CHAPTER NINE

  BLACK, COLD ANGER filled Nikos. Like dark ink, it filled his veins, his vision. His gaze, just as dark, was fixed on the blackening cloudscape beyond the unscreened porthole of the first-class cabin of the jet, speeding into the night as far and as fast as it could take him.

  Australia would do—the other side of the world from Diana.

  Diana whom he had made his wife in good faith. Concealing nothing from her, having no hidden agenda.

  Unlike his bride. His oh-so-beautiful ice maiden, his look-but-don’t-touch bride, who’d never intended, even from the start, to make their marriage work.

  Over and over in his head, like a rat in a trap, he heard that last exchange with her. Telling him what she thought of him. What she wanted of him.

  What she did not want.

  Not him—no, never that.

  ‘It wasn’t why I married you.’

  Her words—so stark, so brutally revealing—had told him all. All that she wanted.

  Only my money, in order to give her what she wants most in all the world.

  His eyes hardened like steel, like obsidian—black and merciless. Merciless against him. Against her.

  And what she wants most in all the world is not me.

  It was her house—her grand, ancestral home—and the lifestyle that went with it. That was all that was important to her. Not him. Never him.

  Memory, bitter and acid, washed in his veins, burning and searing his flesh. A memory he could not exorcise from his mind. Driving up to that gracious Normandy chateau bathed in sunlight, so full of hope! Hope that now he was no longer a child, and now he had been told who his parents were by the lawyer who had summoned him to his offices on his eighteenth birthday, he had found the mother who had given him away at birth.

  He had been hoping he would discover that there was some explanation for why she had disowned him—something that would unite them, finally, that would see her opening her arms to him in joy and welcome.

  His mouth twisted, his face contorting. There had been no joy, no welcome. Only cold refusal, cold rejection. He’d been sent packing.

  All I was to her was a threat—a threat to her aristocratic lifestyle. To the lifestyle that came with her title, her grand ancestral home. That was all she wanted. All that was important to her.

  The revelation had been brutal.

  As brutal as the revelation his wife, his bride, had just inflicted upon him.

  He tore his mind away as anger bit again, and beneath the anger he felt another emotion. One he would not name. Would not acknowledge. For to acknowledge it would infect his blood with a poison he would never be able to cleanse it from. Never be free of again.

  The jet flew on into the night sky.

  Out of the brightness of the day into the dark.

  * * *

  The taxi from the train station made its slow way along the rutted drive that led up to Greymont. The state of the drive was still on her ‘to-do’ list like a great deal else—including all the interior décor and furnishing work, conserving curtains and restoring ceilings. But the majority of the essential structural work was nearing completion, and work on the electrics and the plumbing were well underway.

  Yet the very thought of them burned like fire on Diana’s skin.

  How could I have got it so wrong? So disastrously, catastrophically wrong!

  The question went round and round in her tired, aching head as she walked into her bedroom, collapsed down upon her bed. It had been going round and round ever since she’d walked out of the hotel and into waiting car waiting to take her to the airport, her suitcase having been packed by the maids, her ticket all arranged.

  Nikos had stayed immured in his room, the door locked against her. Refusing to have anything more to do with her. Sending her away.

  She’d walked out of the hotel like a zombie, feeling nothing. Nothing until she’d taken her seat on the plane and faced up to what the reality of her marriage was.

  Completely and utterly different from what Nikos had thought it would be.

  That was what she could not bear. That all along Nikos had assumed their oh-so-mutually convenient marriage was going to include oh-so-mutually convenient sex...

  He’d assumed that from the start! Intended it from the start!

  And she’d blinded herself to it. Wilfully, deliberately, not wanting to admit that right from that very first moment she’d seen him looking at her it had been with desire.

  I told myself he was just assessing me, deciding whether I would fit the bill for his trophy wife, if had the right connections, the right background—the right ancestral home.

  Bitter anger at herself writhed within her. How could she have been such a fool not to have realised what Nikos had assumed would be included in their marriage deal? What he’d taken for granted would be included right from the start.

  But it was easy to see why. Because she’d wanted to believe that her only role in his life would be to give him an entrée into her upper-class world. Because that had meant she would be able to yield to the desperate temptation that he’d offered her—the means of saving Greymont.

  It meant I could take his money and get what I wanted. Easily and painlessly. Safely.

  Without any danger to herself.

  A smothered cry came from her and she forced her fist into her mouth to keep it from happening again.

  Danger? She had wanted to avoid danger—the danger she’d felt from that very first moment of realising that of all the men she had ever encountered it was Nikos Tramontes who possessed the power she had feared all her life.

  I walked right into the lion’s den. Blindly and wilfully.

  And now she was being eaten alive.

  The smothered cry came again.

  What have I done? Oh, what have I done?

  But she knew—had known it the moment she’d surfaced on that rooftop, in the arms of the man she should never have yielded to. She had committed the greatest and most dangerous folly of her life.

  Into her head that old saying came: Take what you want, says God. Take it and pay for it.

  Her eyes stared out bleakly across her familiar childhood room, where she had learned to fear what she must always fear... Well, now she was starting to pay.

  Tears welled in her eyes. Anguish rose in her heart. />
  * * *

  Nikos was back in London. He’d spent three weeks in Australia, returning to Europe via Shanghai, and then spent another week in Zurich. He had, he thought grimly, been putting off going to London. But he could not put it off for ever.

  When he arrived at his house in Knightsbridge his expression darkened. He’d imagined bringing Diana here after their honeymoon, carrying her over the threshold, taking her to bed...

  Well, that would not happen now. Would never happen. The black, dark anger that he was now so familiar with, that seemed always to be there now when he thought of her—which was all the time—swilled in his veins. His mouth set in a hard line.

  He reached for his phone. Dialled her number. It went to voicemail, and he was glad of it. He did not want to hear her voice.

  His message was brief. ‘I’m in London. I require you. Be here tomorrow. We have an evening party to go to.’

  He disconnected, his expression masked. Diana—his wife, his bride—might have made clear what she thought of him, what she thought of their marriage, but that was of no concern to him right now. She had duties to perform. Duties he was paying her to perform.

  However reluctant she might be to do so.

  * * *

  Diana arrived, as summoned, at the end of the following afternoon. The housekeeper admitted her. Nikos was still at his London offices, but he arrived shortly afterwards. She had installed herself in a bedroom that was very obviously not the master bedroom. She’d brought a suitcase with her and was hanging up her clothes—including several evening dresses.

  As he walked in she started, and paled.

  ‘Nikos—’

  There was constraint in her voice, in her face—in her very stance. Yet the moment her eyes had lit upon him she had felt the disastrous, betraying leap of her blood.

  He ignored her, walked up to the wardrobe she was filling with her gowns and leafed through them, extracting one and tossing it on the bed.

  ‘Wear this,’ he instructed. ‘Be ready to leave in an hour.’

  He walked out again.

  Behind him, Diana quailed. She had dreaded coming up to town, dreaded seeing him again, but knew she had to. Could not evade it. Could not hide at Greymont any longer.