And sleeping beauty she was then—too innocent to be real. That same innocence had been her only saviour on their miserable wedding night. Still was, did she but know it.
Because his marriage might have turned into a disaster even before he’d got around to consummating it but his desire to possess the beautiful Helen had remained a strong, nagging entity amongst the rubble of the rest.
‘I suppose you know why she dismissed Vance?’ he queried now, dragging his mind back to the present crisis.
There was a tense shift beside him. Xander turned his dark head again and a warning tingle shot across the back of his neck when he saw the new guarded expression on his employee’s face. Luke was wary—very wary. There was even a hint of red beginning to stain his pale English cheeks.
‘Spit it out,’ he raked at him.
Luke Morrell tugged in a breath. ‘Hugo tried to stop her,’ he claimed defensively, ‘but Nell took offence—’
‘Tried to stop her from doing what?’
Luke lifted up a hand in a helpless gesture. ‘Listen, Xander,’ he said in an advisory voice that sounded too damn soothing for Xander’s liking, ‘it was nothing serious enough to need to involve you but Hugo was concerned that it might … get out of hand, so he … advised Nell against it and she—’
‘Advised her against doing what?’ Xander sliced right through all of Luke’s uncharacteristic babbling, and by now every bone in his body was tensing up as his instincts shot on full alert. He was not going to like this. He was so damn certain of it that his clenched teeth began to sing.
‘A man,’ Luke admitted reluctantly. ‘A—a friend Nell’s been seeing recently …’
Nell felt as if she were floating. It was a really strange feeling, all fluffy and soft yet scary at the same time. And she couldn’t open her eyes. She had tried a couple of times but her eyelids felt as if they’d been glued down. Her throat hurt when she swallowed and her mouth was so dry the swallowing action was impossible anyway.
She knew where she was. Had a vague recollection of the car accident and being rushed by ambulance to hospital, but that pretty much was the sum total of her recollection. The last clear thing she remembered was gunning the engine of her little open-top sports car and driving at a pace down the long driveway at Rosemere towards the giant iron gates. She could remember the wild sense of elation she’d felt when the gates had swung open with precision timing to let her shoot right through them without her having to drop her speed. And she could still feel the same sense of bitter triumph with which she’d mocked the gates’ efficiency as she’d driven past them. Didn’t the stupid gates know they’d just let the trapped bird escape?
Escape. Nell frowned, puzzled as to why the word had jumped into her head. Then she was suddenly groaning when the frown caused a pain to shoot right across the front of her head.
Someone moved not far away. ‘Nell …?’ a deep, darkly rasping voice said.
Managing to open her eyes the small crack that was all they would allow her, she peered out at the shadowy outline of a man’s big, lean, dark-suited bulk standing stiffly at the end of her bed.
Xander, she recognised. Bitterness welled as her heart gave a tight, very painful pinch. What was he doing here? Had corporate earth stopped turning or something? Nothing less would give him the time to visit her sickbed.
Go away, she wanted to say but did not have enough energy, so she closed the slits in her eyes and blocked him out that way instead.
‘Nell, can you hear me?’
He sounded unusually gruff. Maybe he had a bad cold or a sore throat or something, she thought hazily. How would she know? She’d barely set eyes on him for months—not since he’d turned up like a bad penny on her birthday and dragged her out to have dinner with him.
The candlelit-table-for-two kind of dinner with good wine and the requisite bottle of champagne standing at the ready on ice. Her fuzzy head threw up a picture of his handsome dark image, the way the candlelight had played with his ebony hair and the golden sheen of his skin as he’d sat there across the table from her with his slumberous dark eyes fixed on her face. Sartorial elegance had oozed from every sleek skin pore. The smooth self-confidence, the indolent grace with which he’d occupied his seat that belied his height and lean muscle power. The lazy indifference with which he’d dismissed the kind of breathless looks he received from every other woman in the room because he was special and he knew he was special, and there was not a person in that restaurant that didn’t recognise it. Including Nell, though she was the only one there that refused to let it show.
‘Happy birthday,’ he said and used long, tanned fingers to push a velvet box across the table towards her. Inside the box was a diamond-encrusted bracelet that must have cost him the absolute earth.
If she was supposed to be impressed, she wasn’t. If he’d presented her with the crown jewels she still would not be impressed. Did he think she didn’t know that a bracelet like that was the kind of thing a man like him presented to his mistress for services rendered?
Where was his sensitivity? Where it had always been, locked up inside his impossible arrogance, as he proved when he dared to announce then that he wanted to renegotiate their marriage contract as if some stupid trinket was all it would take to make her agree.
She pushed the box back across the table and said no—to both the bracelet and the request. Did it faze him? Not in the slightest. He took a few minutes to think about her cool little refusal then nodded his disgustingly handsome dark head in acceptance, and that was basically that. He’d driven her back to Rosemere then drove away again to go back to his exciting life as a high-profile, globe-trotting Greek tycoon and probably given the bracelet to some other woman—the more appreciative Vanessa, for instance.
‘I hate him,’ she thought, having no idea that the words had scraped across her dry lips.
The sound of furniture moving set her frowning again, a pale, limp hand lifting weakly to the pain that stabbed at her forehead. Another hand gently caught hold of her fingers to halt their progress.
‘Don’t touch, Nell. You won’t like it,’ his husky voice said.
She opened her eyes that small crack again to find Xander had moved from his stiff stance at the bottom of the bed and was now sitting on a chair beside it with his face level with hers. A pair of dark eyes looked steadily back at her from between unfairly long black silk fringes, a hint of strain tugging on the corners of his wide, sensual mouth.
‘How do you feel?’ he asked.
Pain attacked her from the oddest of places—her heart mainly, broken once and still not recovered.
She closed her eyes, blocking him out again. He shouldn’t even be here; he should be in New York, enjoying the lovely Vanessa with the long dark hair and voluptuous figure that could show off heavy diamond trinkets while she clung to someone else’s husband like a sex-charged limpet.
‘Do you know where you are?’ Xander persisted.
Nell quivered as his warm breath fanned her face.
‘You are in hospital,’ he seemed compelled to inform her. ‘You were involved in a car accident. Can you hear me, Helen?’
The Helen arrived with the rough edge of impatience. Xander did not like to be ignored. He wasn’t used to it. People shot to attention when he asked questions. He was Mr Important, the mighty empire-builder aptly named after Alexander the Great. When he said jump the whole world jumped. He was dynamic, magnetic, sensational to look at—
Her head began to ache. ‘Go away,’ she slurred out. ‘I don’t want you here.’
She could almost feel his tension slam into her. The gentle fingers still holding hers gave an involuntary twitch. Then he moved and she heard the sound of silk sliding against silk as he reached up with his other arm and another set of cool fingers gently stroked a stray lock of hair from her cheek.
‘You don’t mean that, agape mou,’ he murmured.
I do, Nell thought, and felt tears sting the backs of her eyelids because his
light touch evoked old dreams of a gentle giant stroking her all over like that.
But that was all they were—empty old dreams that came back to haunt her occasionally. The real Xander was hard and cold and usually wishing himself elsewhere when he was with her.
How had he got here so quickly anyway? What time was it? What day? She moved restlessly then cried out in an agonised, pathetically weak whimper as real physical pain shot everywhere.
‘Don’t move, you fool!’ The sudden harshness in his voice rasped across her flesh like the serrated edge of a knife—right here—and she pushed a hand up to cover the left side of her ribs as her screaming body tried to curl up in instinctive recoil. The bed tilted beside her, long fingers moving to her narrow shoulders to keep her still.
‘Listen to me …’ his voice rasped again and she arched in agony as pain ricocheted around her body. He tossed out a soft curse then a buzzer sounded. ‘You must try to remain still,’ he lashed down at her. ‘You are very badly bruised, and the pain in your side is due to several cracked ribs. You are also suffering from a slight concussion, and internal bleeding meant they had to operate. Nell, you—’
‘W-what kind of operation?’
‘Your appendix was damaged when you crashed your car; they had to remove it.’
Appendix? Was that all? She groaned in disbelief.
‘If you are worrying about a scar then don’t,’ Xander clipped. ‘They used keyhole surgery—barely a knick; you will be as perfect as ever in a few weeks.’
Did he really believe that she cared about some silly scarring? Down in A&E they’d been tossing about all kinds of scenarios from burst spleen to ovaries!
‘I hate you so much,’ she gasped out then burst into tears, the kind of loud, hot, choking tears that came with pure, agonising delayed shock and brought people running and had Xander letting go of her to shoot to his feet.
After that she lost sight of him when a whole army of care staff crowded in. But she could still hear his voice, cold with incision: ‘Can someone explain to me, please, why my wife shares a room with three other sick individuals? Does personal dignity have no meaning here …?’
The next time Nell woke up she was shrouded in darkness other than for a low night lamp burning somewhere up above her head. She could open her eyes without having to force them and she was feeling more comfortable, though she suspected the comfort had been drug-induced.
Moving her head on the pillow in a careful testing motion, she felt no pain attack her brow and allowed herself a sigh of relief. Then she began to take an interest in her surroundings. Something was different, though for the life of her she couldn’t say what.
‘You were moved this afternoon to a private hospital,’ a deep voice informed her.
Turning her head in the other direction, she saw Xander standing in the shadows by the window. Her heart gave a helpless little flutter then clenched.
Private hospital. Private room. ‘Why?’ she whispered in confusion.
He didn’t answer. But then why would he? A man like him did not leave his wife to the efficient care of the National Health Service when he could pay for the same service with added touches of luxury.
As she looked at him standing there in profile, staring out of the window, it didn’t take much work for her dulled senses to know his mood was grim. The jacket to his dark suit had gone and he’d loosened the tie around his throat. She could just pick out the warm sheen of his golden skin as it caught the edges of a soft lamplight.
For a moment she thought she saw a glimpse of the man she had fallen in love with a year ago.
The same man she’d seen on the evening she’d walked into her father’s study and found Xander there alone. He’d been standing like this by her father’s window, grimly contemplating what lay beyond the Georgian glass with its hand-beaten distortions that had a knack of distorting everything that was happening in the world beyond.
That was the night he had asked her to marry him; no fanfare, no romantic preliminaries. Oh, they’d been out to dinner a couple of times, and Xander tended to turn up at the same functions she would be attending and seem to make a beeline for her. People had watched curiously as he monopolised her attention and she blushed a lot because she wasn’t used to having such a man show a desire for her company.
Twenty-one years old and fresh back from spending three years high up in the Canadian Rockies with a mother who preferred getting up close and personal with pieces of driftwood she found on the shores of the Kananaskis River than she did with living people. Nell had gone to Canada for her annual two-week visit with the reclusive Kathleen Garrett and stayed to the end when her mother had coolly informed her that she didn’t have long to live.
Nell liked to think that her quiet company had given her mother a few extra years of normal living before it all got too much. Certainly they became a bit more like mother and daughter than they’d been throughout Nell’s life when previous visits to her mother had made her feel more like an unwanted distant relative.
Coming back to England and to her father’s busy social lifestyle had come as a bit of a culture shock. She’d gone to Canada a child who’d spent most of her life being shunted from one boarding-school to another with very little contact with the social side of her industrialist father’s busy life. Three years’ living quietly with her mother had been no preparation for a girl who’d become a woman without really knowing it until she met Alexander Pascalis.
An accident waiting to happen … Nell frowned as she tried to recall who it was that had said those words to her. Then she remembered and sighed because of course it had been this tall, dark, silent man looking out of the window who’d spoken those words to her. ‘A danger to yourself and to anyone near you,’ he’d rumbled out as he’d pulled her into his arms and kissed her before sombrely asking her to marry him.
She looked away from his long, still frame, not wanting to go back to those days when she’d loved him so badly she would have crawled barefooted over broken glass if that was what it took to be with him. Those days were long gone, along with her pride, her self-respect and her starry-eyed infatuation.
Her mouth was still dry, the muzzy effects of whatever they’d given her to stem the pain making her limbs feel weighted down with lead. When she tried to lift her hand towards the glass of water she could see on the cupboard beside her, she could barely raise her fingers off the bed.
‘I need a drink,’ she whispered hoarsely.
He was there in a second, sitting down on the bed and sliding an arm beneath her shoulders to lift her enough to place the glass to her lips. She felt his warmth and his strength as she sipped the water, both alien sensations when she hadn’t been held even this close to him since the day of their marriage.
‘Thank you,’ she breathed as the glass was withdrawn again.
He controlled her gentle slide back onto the pillows then sat back a little but didn’t move away. Something was flickering in his dark eyes that she couldn’t decipher—but then he was not the kind of man who wanted other people to read his thoughts—too precious, too—
‘Your car was a write-off,’ he remarked unexpectedly.
Her slender shoulders tensed in sudden wariness. ‘W-was it?’
He nodded. His firmly held mouth gave a tense little twitch. ‘You had to have been driving very fast to impale it so thoroughly on that tree.’
Nell lowered her eyes on a wince. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘Nothing?’ he questioned.
‘Only driving through the gates at Rosemere then turning into the lane. After that—nothing,’ she lied huskily.
He was silent for a few seconds and she could feel him studying her. Her cheeks began to heat. Lying had never been her forte. But what the devil did not know could not hurt him, she thought with a stab at dry sarcasm that was supposed to make her feel brave but didn’t.
‘W-what time is it?’ She changed the subject.
Xander sprang back to his feet before glancing
at the gold watch circling his wrist. ‘Two-thirty in the morning.’
Nell lifted her eyes to watch the prowling grace of his long body as he took up his position by the window again.
‘I thought you were in New York.’
‘I came back—obviously.’
With or without Vanessa? she wondered. ‘Well, don’t feel like you have to hang around here for my benefit,’ she said tightly.
He didn’t usually hang around. He strode in and out of her life like a visiting patron, asked all the right polite questions about what she’d been doing since he’d seen her last and sometimes even lingered long enough to drag her out with him to some formal function—just to keep up appearances. He occupied the suite adjoining her bedroom suite but had never slept in it. Appearances, it seemed, only went as far as delivering her to her bedroom door before he turned and strode out of the house again.
‘It is expected.’
And that’s telling me, Nell thought with another wince. ‘Well, I hereby relieve you of your duty,’ she threw back, moved restlessly, which hurt, so she made herself go still again. And her eyelids were growing too heavy to hold up any longer. ‘Go away, Xander.’ Even her voice was beginning to sound slurry. ‘You make me nervous, hanging around like this …’
Not so you would notice, Xander thought darkly as he watched the little liar drop into a deep sleep almost before her dismissal of him was complete.
The night-light above her bed was highlighting her sickly pallor along with the swollen cuts and bruises that distorted her beautiful face. She would be shocked if she knew what she looked like.
Hell, the miserable state of her wounded body shocked him.
And her hair was a mess, lying in lank, long copper tangles across the pillow. Oddly, he liked it better when it was left to do its own thing like this. The first time he’d seen her she’d been stepping into her father’s house, having just arrived back from taking the dogs for a walk. It had been windy and cold outside and her face was shining, her incredible waist-length hair wild and rippling with life. Green eyes circled by a fascinating ring of turquoise had been alight with laughter because the smallest of the dogs, a golden Labrador puppy determined to get into the house first, had bounded past her, only to land on its rear and start to slither right across the slippery polished floor to come to a halt at his feet.
Bridal Bargains Page 19