She’d noticed him then, lifting her eyes up from his black leather shoes on one of those slow, curious journeys he’d learned to recognise as a habit she had that set his libido on heat. By the time she’d reached his face her laughter had died to sweet, blushing shyness.
What a hook, he mocked now, recalling what happened to him every time she’d blushed like that for him—or even just looked at him.
Xander looked away and went back to his grim contemplation of the unremarkable view of the darkness outside the window, not wanting to remember what came after the blushing look.
He should have backed off while he still had a chance then—right off. If he had done they would not be in the mess they were now in. It was not his thing to mix business with pleasure, and the kind of business he’d had going with Julian Garrett had needed a cool, clear head.
Sexual desire was neither cool nor clear-headed. It liked to catch you out when you were not paying attention. He’d had a mistress, a beautiful, warm and passionately sensual woman who knew what he liked and did not expect too much back, so what did he need with a wild-haired, beautiful-eyed ingénue with a freakish kind of innocence written into her blushing face?
A sigh ripped from him. Nell was right and he should leave. He should get the hell away from here and begin the unpalatable task of some very urgent damage control, only he had a feeling it was already too late.
The tabloid Press would already be running, churning out their damning accusations cloaked in rumour and suggestion. The only part of it all that he had going for him was the Press did not know what Nell had been in the process of doing when she crashed her car on that quiet country lane.
His pager gave a beep. Turning away from the window, he went to collect his jacket from where he’d tossed it on a chair and dug the pager out of one of the pockets.
Hugo Vance was trying to reach him. His teeth came together with a snap.
And so to discover the truth about his wife’s new friend, he thought grimly, shrugged on his jacket, sent Nell one final, searing dark glance then quietly let himself out of the room.
CHAPTER TWO
FOR the next few days Nell felt as if she had been placed in purdah. The only people that came to visit her belonged to the medical staff, who seemed to take great pleasure in making her uncomfortable before they made her comfortable again.
The first time they allowed her to take a shower she was shocked by the extent of her bruising. If anyone had told her that with enough applied pressure you could achieve a perfect imprint of a car safety belt across your body she would not have believed them—until she saw it striking across her own slender frame in two ugly, deep bands of dark purple bruising. She had puncture holes and stitches from the keyhole surgery and her cracked ribs hurt like crazy every time she moved. She had bruises on her legs, bruises and scratches on her arms and her face due to ploughing through bushes in an open-top car—before it had slammed into the tree.
And the miserable knowledge that Xander had seen her looking like this did not make her feel any better. It was no wonder he hadn’t bothered to come and visit her again.
Her night things had been delivered, toiletries, that kind of thing. And she’d even received a dozen red roses—Xander’s way of keeping up appearances, she supposed cynically. He was probably already back in New York by now, playing the big Greek tycoon by day and the great Greek lover by night for the lovely Vanessa.
If she could she’d chuck his stupid roses through the window, but she didn’t have the strength. She’d found that she ached progressively more with each new day.
‘What do you expect? You’ve been in a car accident,’ a nurse said with a dulcet simplicity when she mentioned it to her. ‘Your body took a heck of a battering and you’re lucky that your injuries were not more serious. As it is it’s going to be weeks before you begin to feel more like your old self again.’
The shower made her feel marginally better though. And the nurse had shampooed her hair for her and taken gentle care as she blow-dried its long, silken length. By the time she’d hobbled out of the bathroom she was ready to take an interest in the outside world again.
A world in which she had some urgent things to deal with, she recalled worriedly. ‘I need a phone,’ she told the nurse as she inched her aching way across the room via any piece of furniture she could grab hold of to help support her feeble weight. ‘Isn’t it usual to have one plugged in by the bed?’
The nurse didn’t answer, her white-capped head averted as she waited for Nell to slip carefully back into the bed.
It was only then that she began to realise that not only was there no telephone in here, but the room didn’t even have a television set. What kind of private hospital was it Xander had dumped her in that it couldn’t provide even the most basic luxuries?
She demanded both. When she received neither, she changed tack and begged for a newspaper to read or a couple of magazines. It took another twenty-four hours for it to dawn on her that all forms of contact with the outside world were being deliberately withheld.
She began to fret, worrying as to what could have happened out there that they didn’t want her to know about.
Her father? Could something have happened to him? Stunned that she hadn’t thought about him before now, she sat up with a thoughtless jerk that locked her into an agonising spasm across her chest.
That was how Xander found her, sitting on the edge of the bed clutching her side and struggling to breathe in short, sharp, painful little gasps.
‘What the hell …?’ He strode forward.
‘Daddy,’ she gasped out. ‘S-something’s happened to him.’
‘When?’ He frowned. ‘I’ve heard nothing. Here, lie down again …’
His hands took control of her quivering shoulders and carefully eased her back against the high mound of pillows, the frown on his face turning to a scowl when he saw the bruising on her slender legs as he helped ease them carefully back onto the bed.
‘You look like a war zone,’ he muttered. ‘What did you think you were doing, trying to get up without help?’
‘Where’s my father?’ she cut across him anxiously. ‘Why haven’t I heard from him?’
‘But you did.’ Xander straightened up, flicking the covers over her in an act she read as contempt. ‘He’s stuck in Sydney. Did you not receive his flowers and note?’
The only flowers she’d received were the …
Turning her head, Nell looked at the vase of budding red roses and suddenly wished she were dead. ‘I thought they were from you,’ she whispered unsteadily.
He looked so thoroughly disconcerted by the idea that he would send her flowers that being dead no longer seemed bad enough. Curling away from him as much as she dared without hurting herself, Nell clutched her fingers round the covers and tugged them up to her pale cheek.
‘You thought they were from me.’ He had to repeat it, she thought as she cringed beneath the sheet. ‘And because you thought the flowers were from me you did not even bother to read the note that came with them.’
Striding round the bed, he plucked a tiny card from the middle of the roses then came back to the bed.
‘Shame on you, Nell.’ The card dropped against the pillow by her face. It was still sealed inside its envelope.
And shame on you too, she thought as she picked it up and broke the seal. Even a man that cannot stand the sight of his wife sends her flowers when she’s sick.
Her father’s message—brief and to the point as always with him—read: ‘Sorry to hear about your accident. Couldn’t get back to see you. Take care of yourself. Get well soon. Love Pops.’
Saying not a word, she slid the little card back into its envelope then pushed it beneath her pillow, but telling tears were welling in her eyes.
‘He wanted to come back,’ Xander dropped into the ensuing thick silence. ‘But he is locked in some important negotiations with the Australian government and I … assured him that you would understand if h
e remained where he was.’
So he’d stayed. That was her father. Loving in many ways but single-minded in most. Money was what really mattered, the great, grinding juggernaut of corporate business. It was no wonder her mother had left him to go back to her native Canada. When she was little, Nell had used to wonder if he even noticed that she’d gone. She was a teenager before she’d found out that her mother had begun an affair with a childhood sweetheart and had returned to Canada to be with him.
Like mother like daughter, she mused hollowly. They had a penchant for picking out the wrong men. The duration of her mother’s affair had been shorter than her marriage had been, which said so much about leaving her five-year-old daughter behind for what was supposed to have been the real love of her life.
‘You’ve washed your hair …’
‘I want a telephone,’ she demanded.
‘And the bruises on your face are beginning to fade …’ He spoke right over her as if she hadn’t spoken at all. ‘You look much better, Nell.’
What did he care? ‘I want a telephone,’ she repeated. ‘And you left me with no money. I can’t find my purse or my clothes or my mobile telephone.’
‘You don’t need them while you’re lying there.’
She turned her head to flash him a bitter look. He was standing by the bed, big and lean, taking up more space than he deserved. All six feet two inches of him honed to perfection like a piece of art. His suit was grey today, she noticed. A smooth-as-silk gunmetal grey that did not dare to show a single crease, like his white shirt and his silk-black hair and his—
‘They won’t let me have a newspaper or a magazine.’ She cut that line of thinking off before it went any further. ‘I have no TV and no telephone.’ She gave a full list of her grievances. ‘If it isn’t my father, then what is it that you are trying to hide from me, Xander?’ she demanded, knowing now that her isolation had to be down to him. Xander was the only person with enough weight to throw about. In fact she was amazed that it hadn’t occurred to her to blame him before now.
He made no answer, just stood there looking down at her through unfathomable dark eyes set in his hard, handsome face—then he turned and strode out of the room without even saying goodbye!
Nell stared after him with her eyes shot through with pained dismay. Had their disastrous marriage come down to the point where he couldn’t even be bothered to apply those strictly polite manners he usually used to such devastating effect?
It hurt—which was stupid, but it did and in places that had nothing whatsoever to do with her injuries. Five days without so much as a word from him then he strode in there looking every inch the handsome, dynamic power force he was, looked at her as if he couldn’t stand the sight of her then walked out again.
She wouldn’t cry, she told the sting at the backs of her eyes. Too fed up and too weak to do more than bite hard on her bottom lip to stop it from quivering, she stared at the roses sent by that other man in her life who strode in and out of it at his own arrogant behest.
She hated Alexander Pascalis. He’d broken her heart and she should have left him when she’d had the chance, driven off into the sunset without stopping to look back and think about what she was leaving behind, then she would not be lying here feeling so bruised and broken—and that was on the inside! If he’d cared anything for her at all he should not have married her. He should have stuck to his—
The door swung open and Xander strode back in again, catching her lying on her side staring at the roses through a glaze of tears.
‘If you miss him that much I will bring him home,’ he announced curtly.
‘Don’t put yourself out,’ she responded with acid bite. ‘What brought you back here so quickly?’
He didn’t seem to understand the question, a frown darkening his smooth brow as he moved across the room to collect a chair, which he placed by the bed at an angle so that when he sat himself down on it he was looking her directly in the face.
Nell stirred restlessly, not liking the way he’d done it, or the new look of hard intensity he was treating her to. She stared back warily, waiting to hear whatever it was he was going to hit her with. He was leaning back with his long legs stretched out in front of him and his jacket flipped open in one of those casually elegant attitudes this man pulled off with such panache. His shirt was startlingly white—he liked to wear white shirts, cool, crisp things that accentuated the width of his powerful chest and long, tightly muscled torso. Black handmade shoes, grey silk trousers, bright white shirt and a dark blue silk tie. His cleanly shaved chin had a cleft that warned all of his tough inner strength—like the well-shaped mouth that could do cynicism and sensuality at the same time and to such devastating effect. Then there was the nose that had a tendency to flare at the nostrils when he was angry. It wasn’t flaring now, but the black eyes were glinting with something not very nice, she saw.
And his eyes weren’t really all black, but a dark, dark brown colour, deeply set beneath thick black eyebrows and between long, dense, curling lashes that helped to shade the brown iris black.
Xander was Greek in everything he thought and did but he got his elegant carriage from his beautiful Italian mother. And Gabriela Pascalis could slay anyone with a look, just as her son could. She’d done it to Nell the first time they’d met and Gabriela had not tried to hide her shock. ‘What is Alexander playing at, wanting to marry a child? They will crucify you the moment he attempts to slot you into his sophisticated lifestyle.’
‘He loves me.’ She’d tried to stand up for herself.
‘Alexander does not do love, cara,’ his mother had drily mocked that. ‘In case you have not realised it as yet, he was hewn from rock chipped off Mount Olympus.’ She had actually meant it too. ‘No, this is more likely to be a business transaction,’ her future mother-in-law had decided without a single second’s thought to how a statement like that would make Nell feel. ‘I will have to find out what kind of business deal. Leave it to me, child. There is still time to save you from this …’
‘Finished checking me out?’ The mocking lilt to his voice brought her eyes back into focus on his face. She wished she knew what he was thinking behind that cool, smooth, sardonic mask. ‘I am still the same person you married, believe me.’
Oh, she believed. Nothing had changed. His mother had been right but Nell hadn’t listened. Not until Vanessa DeFriess had entered the frame.
‘Want do you want?’ She didn’t even attempt to sound pleasant.
He moved—not much but enough for Nell to be aware by the way her senses tightened on alert to remind her that Xander was a dangerously unpredictable beast. He might appear relaxed, but she had an itchy suspicion that he was no such thing.
‘We need to talk about your accident,’ he told her levelly. ‘The police have some questions.’
Nell dropped her eyes, concentrating her attention on her fingers where they scratched absently at the white sheet. ‘I told you, I don’t remember anything.’
‘Tell me what you do remember.’
‘We’ve been through this once.’ Her eyebrows snapped together. ‘I don’t see the use in going through it a—’
‘You would rather I allow the police to come here so that you can repeat it all to them?’
No, she wouldn’t. ‘What’s to repeat?’ Flicking him a guarded look, she looked quickly away again. ‘I remember driving down the driveway and through the gates then turning into the lane—’
‘Left or right?’
‘I don’t remember—’
‘Well, it might help if you said where it was you were going.’
‘I don’t remember that either.’
‘Try,’ he said.
‘What for?’ she flipped back. ‘What does it matter now where I was going? I obviously didn’t get there.’
‘True.’ He grimaced. ‘Instead of arriving—wherever it was—you left the road at speed on a notorious bend we all treat with respect. You then proceeded to plough through a ro
w of bushes and concluded the journey by piling head-on into a tree.’
‘Thanks for filling in the gaps,’ she derided.
‘The car boot sprang open on impact,’ he continued, unmoved by her tone. ‘Your possessions were strewn everywhere. Sweaters, skirts, dresses, underwear …’
‘Charity!’ she declared with a sudden burst of memory. ‘I remember now, I was taking some of my old things to the charity shop in the village.’
‘Charity,’ Xander repeated in a voice as thin as silk. ‘Well, that explains the need to drive like a maniac. Now explain to me why you dismissed Hugo Vance …’
Nell froze where she lay curled on her side, her moment of triumph at her own quick thinking fizzling out at the introduction of her ex-bodyguard’s name. She moved, ignoring the creases of pain in her ribs to drag herself into a sitting position so she could grab her knees in a loose but very defensive hug, her hair slithering across her slender shoulders to float all around her in a river of rippling Titian silk.
‘I don’t need a bodyguard,’ she muttered.
‘I have three,’ Xander replied. ‘What does that tell you about what you need?’
‘I’m not you.’ She sent him an acrid look. ‘I don’t stride around the world, playing God and throwing my weight around—’
His eyes gave a sudden glint. ‘So that is how you see me—as a god that throws his weight around?’ The silken tone gave her no clue as to what was about to come next. ‘Well, my beautiful Helen,’ he drawled in a thoroughly lazy attitude, ‘just watch this space—’
In a single snaking move he was off the chair and leaning over her. The next second and he was gathering her hair up and away from her face. A controlled tug sent her head back. A stifled gasp brought her startled eyes flicking up to clash with his.
Bridal Bargains Page 20