Bridal Bargains

by Michelle Reid

  So, what are you going to do about that? she asked herself. But even as the question was filtering through her brain she was going up on tiptoe to brush her mouth against his.

  His reply was a shaky sigh against the gentle pressure of her lips. ‘What was that for?’ he asked as she drew away again, trying to sound mocking and only managing to sound dreadfully needy.

  ‘It’s my wedding night,’ Claire reminded him softly. ‘And I want you. Will you make love to me, Andreas—please?’

  Had she said it to protect his pride so he didn’t have to lower it to ask her the same question? Claire wondered later. Or was it just that she was responding to her own needs?

  Whichever it was, at least he didn’t reject her—as she knew he was very capable of doing. Instead he released a muffled curse then was fiercely claiming her mouth.

  Standing there with the moonlight shining in on them, he caressed and stroked and kissed the nightdress from her body, then stood back a little to sombrely rid himself of his own clothes.

  He wasn’t happy with himself for wanting her like this, and Claire wished she had the experience to remove his clothes for him in a way that would make him lose touch with himself, never mind his reservations. But she was no femme fatale, and with one near-useless hand she knew she wouldn’t be able to pull it off with any grace. So she had to content herself with watching his moon-kissed, satiny flesh appear as his shirt was removed before he bent down to remove his shoes and socks.

  Yet he stopped right there. Claire frowned at him as he reached for her again. ‘You haven’t finished,’ she whispered.

  ‘I will,’ he promised. ‘But later …’

  Later turned out to be after he had carried her to the bed and laid her down on it. Later was when he had driven her into a mindless state of unbearable arousal that left not a single inch of her flesh untouched by his touch. Later was after she had driven him almost over the edge by trailing her mouth over his chest and had learned the intense pleasure in toying with a small, tight male nipple.

  Later was when she had grown bold enough to move on downwards, utilising the expertise with which he had aroused her to arouse him. But when her sensual journey was halted by the waistband of his trousers he stopped her from taking them from him by pulling her beneath him, and, ignoring her small cry of protest at his frustrating tactics, he began the whole wildly erotic process of arousing her all over again.

  So by the time his idea of later arrived she was so lost in the sensual haze he had created that she didn’t even notice him ridding himself of the wretched trousers until he came over her and she felt the power of his naked arousal just before he pushed urgently inside her …

  This time, it really should not have happened.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ she warned him.

  She was sitting at Lefka’s huge scrubbed kitchen table, hugging a mug of hot coffee in her hands as if her life depended on it. There was no colour in her face whatsoever, and her hair was a tangled mess around her shoulders, her body cloaked in a towelling bathrobe that covered her from neck to feet.

  He, by contrast, was fully dressed in fresh trousers and a polo shirt. He looked neat, clean, perfectly presented. But then, he’d shot off into his bathroom so damned fast that he could have had ten showers before Claire had recovered enough to move!

  After he had lifted his weight from her, of course—quickly, like the last time. Body still shuddering—like the last time.

  ‘I—’

  ‘I said don’t!’ she choked out.

  The silence screamed. The tension, the bitterness. Like an action replay of last time.

  Then he sighed and moved away, walking wearily across the kitchen. Checking the coffee-pot with his hand, he poured himself out a cup then came to sit down at the table.

  Claire flicked him a glance. He was staring down at his drink and his shoulders were hunched over. The strain of the last twelve hours was so severe in his face now that he looked like a man who was having to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders.

  She looked away before she started feeling sorry for him again. He might look like Atlas, but he isn’t, she reminded herself brutally. He is just a man—an ordinary man with ordinary appetites. And an extraordinary way of dealing with the aftermath.

  ‘Do you have a mistress?’ she shot at him.

  His head came up, dark eyes very guarded. ‘What?’ he murmured warily.

  ‘Desmona did warn me that you had a mistress tucked away somewhere, but with everything else I forgot to ask. So I am asking you now.’

  ‘Desmona said that?’ He frowned. ‘When?’

  ‘At the betrothal thing.’ She refused to call it a party. ‘She pointed out a couple of candidates and suggested I choose.’ Her eyes flicked up again, catching him without his guard, and his expression was—

  She looked away again quickly, not wanting to acknowledge what that expression was telling her because it had the power to shatter the brand-new shell of protection she was hugging closely around her.

  ‘You haven’t answered the question,’ she prompted huskily.

  ‘There is no one,’ he said.

  Eyes fixed on her cup, she tried to decide if she could believe him when the man found it so easy to be economical with the truth.

  ‘There is no one, Claire,’ he repeated in the kind of tone that forced her to believe him. ‘I would not do that to you. Desmona was talking like a loser, that was all.’

  Which was what Claire had told herself when Desmona had fed her the poison, she remembered. ‘Good,’ she said, deciding to believe him. ‘That means I have one less guilty sin to carry around with me.’

  ‘What we did just now was not sinful,’ he denied.

  ‘No?’ she mocked. ‘Well, it certainly feels as if I’ve just done something dreadful.’

  ‘We made love!’ he husked.

  ‘No—we had sex!’ she burst out. ‘Just the same as we did a week ago. W-we had sex, then you walked away—just like you did a week ago. And I f-feel unclean,’ she added painfully. ‘Just like I did a week ago.’

  ‘I did not walk away from you just now,’ he asserted heavily. ‘I walked away from—’

  The words stopped.

  Sitting there with bated breath, Claire waited for him to continue. But he didn’t. Instead he ran a tired hand through his perfectly combed hair—and added nothing.

  ‘May you burn in hell,’ she murmured succinctly.

  To her surprise he laughed—albeit cynically. ‘I have been burning away in that place for years,’ he drawled with an irony that flew right by her. ‘You will have to come up with a better curse than that to hurt me.’

  And why do I get the impression that he knows exactly what that curse would be? she wondered, seeing a flash of something almost haunted pass across his eyes.

  ‘Whatever,’ she said, dismissing the look—because she had to do that if she was to remain strong. ‘Burn in hell or laugh at it. It doesn’t really matter to me. I don’t want you to come near me like that ever again—do you hear?’

  With that she got up with the intention of leaving him—but his next words stopped her. ‘I’m sorry if I let you down,’ he said very huskily. ‘I didn’t do it to hurt you, Claire. I just didn’t think.’

  ‘You mean—you always walk away from a woman directly after making love to her?’ she asked derisively.

  There was a distinct pause—more a guarded hesitation—before he sighed out, ‘Yes.’

  ‘The man on a mountain,’ she murmured softly, aware that the cryptic remark would mean nothing to him. She shivered inwardly. ‘I understand now. It’s yourself you feel the need to walk away from.’

  She had been throwing out words haphazardly with the specific need to hurt him, but as she stood there watching his face grow white beneath his olive skin before it closed up altogether Claire realised, with a small shock, that she had hit the nail right upon its head!

  ‘You know me so well,’ he drawled, offering her that
grim brief smile again in an effort to cover his reaction up.

  And she wanted to hit him—probably would have done if she hadn’t noticed the tremor in his fingers as he reached for his cup. He was more affected by all of this than he wanted her to believe.

  What was it with him, Claire wondered furiously, that he hated wanting her as a woman so much that he kept his wretched sexuality hidden inside his trousers until the very last moment? As if he had still been praying for deliverance right up until then, she realised with a shudder.

  And on a muffled sob she turned and ran from the kitchen—kept on running, across the hall and up the stairs, desperately needing to get to her room before she broke down and wept.

  Panting and sobbing together by the time she reached her bedroom, she barely had a chance to close the door before it was thrust open again.

  ‘Go away!’ she cried.

  ‘Don’t …’ he groaned, reaching out to pull her into his arms.

  To her horror she pressed her face into his chest and sobbed all the harder.

  It wasn’t fair! she told herself pitiably. He loved his grandmother. He could love Melanie. Why was it so terrible for him to try to love her?

  His first wife, she then remembered with a sudden chilling of her flesh. She must have been quite something to have locked his heart up as totally as this.

  Fighting for control of the tears now, she tried to push away from him.

  ‘No,’ he refused, his arms only tightening around her.

  Her face lifted away from his chest, blue eyes awash with so many painful things that it was impossible to pick which was hurting her the most. ‘Oh, please,’ she pleaded helplessly. ‘Please, Andreas, let me go.’

  For some unfathomable reason, hearing her use his name in that pained, wretched way unlocked something desperate inside him. His chest expanded on a tense draw of air, his eyes flashing with some awful emotion—then he lowered his head and crushed her mouth to his with a hunger so fierce that it caught her utterly blindsided.

  Once again Claire discovered that she didn’t stand a chance. Not with emotions running as rife inside her as they were doing right now. And his mouth was hot, the taste of her own tears mingling with the moistness of his tongue. It was a seductive combination. The passion ignited like a fork of lightning that exploded to smithereens all hope of control. She didn’t even notice when her robe fell apart, or hear his muffled curses as he struggled with the zip on his straining trousers.

  He entered her with a thrust that brought him to his knees with her straddled across him with his hands clamped to her hipbones.

  ‘Oh, dear God,’ she groaned against his devouring mouth as her body went wild for him.

  But he lost it first, shooting into her like a man experiencing his first release. He couldn’t control it, could not control the gasping pants that shot from his pulsing body. When she joined him his grip on her hips was locked tight. And as she went limp against him he crumbled sideways, his arms shifting upwards to control her fall as they landed in a tangle of trembling limbs on the bedroom floor.

  What now? Claire wondered as she reached rock-bottom of the slow slide back to wretched sanity. Another quick withdrawal followed by a walk-out? She even tensed herself in preparation for it.

  ‘I’m still here.’

  His voice sounded like gravel, vibrating against her cheek where he had her face pressed against him. He hadn’t let go of her, and she was still lying with her limbs locked around him.

  ‘I’m going nowhere.’

  ‘Why not?’ she whispered.

  ‘You were right about me,’ he said. ‘I do prefer to stand alone. I don’t find it easy to be open with my feelings. But—as God is my witness, Claire, I want you. I want this with you!’ His arms tightened round her. ‘And if that means I must change then I will damn well change!’ he vowed. ‘And I will start by holding you like this for as long as you want me to.’

  He meant it—he really meant it! The tears came back, but she wasn’t sure what they were for any more.

  ‘Say something,’ he prompted huskily, and she felt the tremor in his lips as they brushed her brow.

  Say something, she repeated to herself. But what dared she say? Could she take a chance on this actually meaning something? The trouble was, she loved this man—had known that for quite a while now—while he seemed to only lust after her. How long did lust last? Especially with a man as self-contained as Andreas?

  ‘I want to go to bed,’ she said.

  There was a short, sharp pause, then a heavy sigh as he went to get up.

  ‘Your bed,’ she added, lifting her face out of his shirt-front so she could look warily into his equally wary eyes. ‘I want to sleep in your bed, in your arms all night and wake up still there in the morning,’ she told him huskily.

  ‘Then what?’

  Claire gave a helpless little shrug. ‘I don’t know,’ she answered honestly. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You,’ he said gruffly, then repeated it. ‘I want you.’

  Her poor heart fluttered, attempting to reach out and grab those words because they were the closest thing she’d had to a declaration of caring from him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  DEATH was a strange thing. It brought some people closer together and pushed others wide apart. In Claire’s own experience, she had lost more than a father when he’d passed away; she’d also lost lifelong friends who could not deal with the tragedy of the situation.

  But when she stood beside Andreas as they buried his grandmother she found herself being drawn closer to the last person she would have expected, when Desmona suddenly broke down and began weeping so desperately that Claire didn’t think twice about going over and gently placing her arms around the other woman.

  ‘You were very kind to her, considering the circumstances,’ Andreas remarked much later as they were preparing for bed.

  They shared a room now. They shared a life. Claire was even daring to think that they were sharing a marriage.

  ‘She needed someone,’ she answered simply. ‘It had never occurred to me until Desmona broke down like that that she and your grandmother must have been close.’

  ‘Desmona has been a member of this family for many years,’ he reminded her. ‘We all—care for her, though sometimes she makes it difficult to do so,’ he added dryly.

  ‘Is that why the family wanted you to marry her?’ she asked curiously. ‘Because they care for her?’

  ‘No.’ He laughed, a softly mocking, sexily husky sound that curled up her toes. ‘Wanting me to marry Desmona was an act of expediency. She owns rather large blocks of shares in some of our most lucrative companies and they wanted to keep them in the family.’

  ‘But she is in love with you,’ Claire pointed out. ‘Or why would she agree to marry you?’

  ‘Desmona loves Desmona,’ he murmured sardonically. ‘But she loves money even more. Marrying me would have given her relatively free access to the Markopoulou fortune once again. A very worthy cause in her eyes, believe me.’

  ‘You’re so cynical sometimes,’ Claire sighed.

  ‘Then reform me,’ he invited, and covered her mouth, effectively ending the discussion when other, far more important things demanded her attention: mainly this man, who had become the centre of her universe so quickly that she didn’t dare let herself consider just how deeply she had let herself fall in love with him.

  So the next few weeks went drifting by without her giving a single thought to their original agreement. The plaster-cast came off her wrist, and with Andreas looking indulgently on, she celebrated by jumping fully clothed into the indoor swimming pool with a shriek of delight because she had been so looking forward to being able to do that. They visited London a couple of times to appear in front of an adoption panel who wanted to reassure themselves that they were, indeed, fit parents for Melanie.

  But there was no problem there. For they were lovers. They were husband and wife. They were a couple in every sense of the wo
rd, which showed in the way they responded to each other.

  Life was wonderful, life was great. Claire had never been so happy. And the only blot on her otherwise perfect existence was the way her aunt Laura still hadn’t bothered to get in touch with her.

  ‘I have to be in Paris for a few days from tomorrow,’ Andreas informed her one morning over the breakfast table. ‘Would you like to come with me?’

  ‘Yes!’ she agreed, thinking, Paris! The most romantic city in the world, and she was going to go there with the most wonderful man in the world. ‘Will my aunt be there?’ she questioned impulsively.

  It was so many weeks since she’d watched his face close up that seeing it happen now came as a bad shock. ‘We will not discuss your aunt,’ he said coldly.

  ‘But why?’ Claire demanded. ‘Why are you so determined to keep the two of us apart? It isn’t as though she can hurt me, you know. I understand her better than you think I do.’

  He got up from the table. ‘We will not discuss her,’ he repeated, and walked arrogantly away.

  ‘Then I’m not coming to Paris,’ she threw after him. Childish, she knew. Petty, she knew. But she felt childish and petty at that moment.

  And Andreas responded accordingly—by not even faltering a single step in his retreat. She sulked for the rest of the day and he retaliated by treating her as if nothing was the matter. But when he reached for her in bed that night it was Claire who surrendered to a power much greater than her will to stand aloof from him.

  The next morning she awoke to find him gone to Paris, and she felt so angry and hurt that he hadn’t once attempted to change her mind about going with him that she paid him back by telephoning her aunt’s London apartment. She got her answering service, which, Claire realised belatedly, she should have expected if Aunt Laura was in Paris with Andreas.

  So she left a message asking her aunt to call her, then spent the next few days missing Andreas so badly that when he did arrive home she fell on him like a puppy dog who thought it had been deserted by its adored master.