Bridal Bargains

by Michelle Reid

  The remark was to remind her of her cutting little quip at the cove. Nell gazed up at him, watched him return the gaze with a dark-eyed, warm-lipped, wryly knowing smile. Beautiful, she thought helplessly, so indolently masculine and sure of himself. Her heart gave a hopeless little squeeze to let her know how much she still loved him despite every attempt she’d made to shut the feeling out.

  Did he have any idea that the sex wasn’t enough for her?

  No, she was sure of it. He saw power in his undoubted physical prowess but wouldn’t think to look beyond it for something deeper than that.

  So what had she gained here?

  Nothing, the hollow answer came back. If, that was, she didn’t count intimacy wrapped around the kind of physical pleasure she never knew it was possible to experience.

  For that alone she reached up to kiss him on the mouth. ‘You didn’t disappoint.’ She was willing to grant him that much. ‘Now all we have to do is wait to see if I disappoint …’

  A frown grabbed his eyebrows, muscles flexing as he levered himself up on his forearms so he could narrow a questioning look into her face.

  ‘You did not disappoint.’ It was rough-toned declaration that vibrated across the walls of his cavernous chest and set her breasts tingling.

  He was about to recapture her mouth when she added, ‘I was talking about your other goal …’

  ‘Goal?’

  ‘To make me pregnant.’ She spelt it out gently.

  The comment acted like a cold douche on his lingering passions. He withdrew then rolled away from her. ‘That was not my intention,’ he denied.

  ‘No?’ Sitting up, Nell came gracefully to her feet then walked towards the bathroom on legs that felt too trembly and weak to carry her there, leaving that questioning little no hanging in the sultry air she left behind.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WATCHING her go, with her hair tumbling down her slender back helping to hide her nakedness from him, Xander wondered grimly how the hell she had walked him into that silken trap.

  His body responded to tell him how. He hadn’t used anything. He had not so much as glimpsed the distant idea of using anything to protect her from the risk of pregnancy—and not because of some fixed agenda he had been working towards, though he allowed Nell the right to believe that had been his ultimate motive. No, for the first time in his long sexual history he’d found himself too locked in the thrall of how she’d made him feel.

  And if anyone from now on ever dared tell him that a condom did not stunt the pleasure of sexual intercourse then he would know they had never experienced what he had just experienced.

  ‘Theos,’ he breathed, turning it into a sigh as he threw himself flat against the bed then glanced down at his body, where the length of his shaft lay tight and proud against the flat of his abdomen, impatiently demanding more of the same.

  It knew the difference. He knew the difference. He turned his head to glance at the closed bathroom door and wondered what Nell would say in response if he went in there and informed her that she had not been the only one enjoying a virgin experience in this bed.

  Not one of his better ideas, he thought ruefully as that highly active part of his body gave another impatient tug. A confession like that would still not alter the fact that his intoxicating wife might be a virgin no more but her cynical view of him was still very much in tact.

  And—hell, what could he say to make her believe that he’d harboured no deliberate intentions but had simply lost his head? The way his body was acting, it was not going to back him up. It wanted more—and more of what they’d just had. Prolific, rampantly free and potently unprotected sex shared with the beautiful, excitingly responsive woman who’d just left this bed.

  Not just any woman—his woman.

  His wife …

  Sensation flipped a running ripple down his body. Turning his head on the pillow, he stared up at the ceiling where the lines of sunlight reflected on it filtered in through the slatted shutters then released a deep sigh of satisfaction at how good those two words sounded and felt.

  His wife in fact and at last now in body. Why not enjoy sowing the seeds of that union? Why not tie the beautiful if cynical Helen to him so tightly she would never be free to attempt to leave him again?

  See her walk away from their child-to-be with her Frenchman, he challenged grimly and felt hot, grinding jealousy stir in his chest. Who the hell was the guy that he believed he could poach his wife from him in the first place? What the hell did he have that made Nell want to go away with him so badly that she planned her escape a whole week before she crashed her car?

  Then worse came, shifting him restlessly on the bed. Had the lily-livered swine chickened out at the last minute and Nell had been driving so fast because she’d been nursing a broken heart?

  Did she love the guy?

  Had she only let him make love to her here because she was thinking, what did it matter now?

  It did not matter, he told himself. The Frenchman did not get her. He, Alexander Pascalis, did. Their marriage was consummated at last and whatever else came after this day, the one thing that would never change was that Nell now belonged to him right down to the last silken strand of hair on her beautiful head.

  He settled back against the pillows, a look of grim calculation glinting behind his slowly drooping eyelids. The agenda was real. His cynical wife would have to get used to it because he was going to keep her barefooted and pregnant and too damn busy making love with him to pine for some fickle Frenchman who’d dared to break her heart.

  That decision made, he relaxed his body, the sunlight glinting through the slats soothing in the soft, drowsy heat. In a second or two he would get up and join her in the shower he could hear running—consolidate his place with some very passionate seed-sowing and at the same time he would make Nell fall in love with him again. He could do it. She had loved him once. All it would take was some of his famous, single-minded ruthlessness to make her love him again …

  Wrapped in a bathrobe, Nell stepped back into the bedroom to find the man of her dreams lying spread out on the bed and fast asleep. Her tummy muscles quivered at the picture he presented of bronze-muscled abandonment with his quietened sex still very much a daunting sight.

  She’d half expected him to barge into the bathroom and demand she believe him that he had not deliberately set out to make her pregnant just now. Well, of course he hadn’t. Any fool—even this fool called Helen Pascalis—could tell when a man was being ruled by his desires and not his intelligence.

  Take note, darling Vanessa, she thought grimly. This man wanted me so badly that he couldn’t stop himself from having me without the protection he stops to apply with you in bed. Now he sleeps on my bed with my kisses still moist on his skin and wearing the scents of my body on his warm golden flesh.

  You’re out, Vanessa, and I am most definitely in and with no intention of ever letting go. What I have right here, this time I keep.

  It had taken her a whole year to recognise and understand that she had to fight for what she wanted instead of hiding away like some distant shadow waiting for Xander to remember that she lived.

  Well, now she had him and she had no intention of letting him go. A man who could tremble in her arms the way Xander had trembled was hooked and she knew it with every single fibre of her female being. And if she had to learn sensual wiles that were probably going to set her hair on end only to imagine them, then she was willing to use them to keep her man.

  Before too long, Xander was going to find himself chained so tightly to her that he wasn’t going to be able to take in a breath without her knowing about it. Instinctively her hand went to her cover her abdomen, inside which the seed of her lover was busily performing its potent magic—or if not yet it would be before too long.

  A baby. Their baby. The next Pascalis heir. Eat your heart out, Vanessa, because this is one thing you will never have, she thought with grim satisfaction.

  Ex-lover, she then corr
ected as she moved quietly towards the bed with a new deeply felt sensual pulse to her movements as she began to remove the bathrobe to begin her very first seduction of any man.

  A sound coming from beyond the shutters diverted her attention; dropping the bathrobe to the floor, she crossed to the window to press a gap between two wooden slats and glanced down to see that Yannis was carrying out one of his daily duties and cleaning the pool.

  Something else caught her attention. For a few short seconds she stood frowning, trying to decide what was different out there. Then her eyes alighted on Xander’s helicopter where it stood anchored to its concrete deck—and alone.

  A strangled gasp broke from her. She suddenly remembered the swirling, whipping noises as she’d lain in Xander’s arms. Those sounds were not the sounds of the whirring, pulsating heat of their loving—they had been the sounds of his mother’s helicopter leaving the island!

  ‘Oh!’ A blast of mortification at the way they’d left Gabriela kicking her heels downstairs while they made love up here had her whirling round to run to the bed.

  ‘Xander …’ It was necessary to put a knee on the mattress so she could reach his shoulder to give it an urgent shake. ‘Wake up!’ she insisted. ‘Your mother has gone! You have to call her up and bring her back here. You—’

  The snaking hook of a long, muscled arm toppled her onto him. ‘Mmm,’ he murmured sleepily. ‘I was dreaming about you.’

  ‘Will you listen?’ she insisted, trying to fight him off and not to respond to the seeking warm brush of his mouth. ‘I said your mother has gone!’

  ‘I know.’ The arm curved her closer. ‘I heard her leave—didn’t you?’

  Nell flushed at what she’d believed the helicopter noise had been. ‘You have to go and invite her back,’ she said anxiously. ‘She must be terribly offended to just go off like that.’

  ‘You cannot offend my mother.’ He was kissing her shoulder, the tip of his tongue gliding a sensual pathway towards her throat. ‘Beneath the perfect gloss beats a heart of pure steel.’

  Like the son; Nell frowned at the cool way he’d said that. ‘Don’t be cruel …’

  ‘You taste of fresh water and soap.’

  ‘I showered,’ Nell mumbled distractedly.

  ‘And removed my scent from your skin. Now I will have to put it back again.’

  ‘But you need—’

  ‘You,’ he said. ‘Again,’ he added on a lusty growl as he leaned over to claim her mouth.

  ‘Mmm,’ Nell mumbled out a dizzy protest. ‘Don’t do that. Your mother. We have to—What are you doing?’ she choked as his hand made a shockingly intimate dive between her legs.

  ‘Making sure that you don’t disappoint,’ he returned smoothly, then laughed when her eyes widened in shock that he’d dared to actually admit it. ‘A deal is a deal,’ he said smoothly and flattened her to the bed.

  Nell was caught in her own trap and she knew it.

  When Xander had come back to the island to stake his claim on his bride, he did it by unleashing the full power of his sensual repertoire upon her that by far outstripped any ideas her naïve imagination she could have come up with.

  He was amazing.

  Any attempt to get him to talk about anything serious was thoroughly quashed by—sex. The kind of sex that could mercilessly slay her senses even when she was only thinking about it. He just had to look at her and she wanted him. He just had to say, ‘Come here’, in that rough-toned, desiring voice and she went like an eager lamb to the slaughter of her own common sense.

  They played together, in the pool or in the ocean. He showed her how to reach the top of the rock flanking the little cove so they could dive into crystal-clear water beneath. He taught her how to fish from the selfsame rock then laughed himself breathless as she screamed in horror when she actually caught a fish.

  And of course they made love—all the time, anywhere. Xander could not get enough of her and in truth Nell learned to use the newfound power over him with a feline ruthlessness that kept him forever and delightfully on his guard.

  ‘I knew you would be dangerous once you discovered how to do this to me,’ he complained late one afternoon after she’d spent the whole day taunting him with teases and half-promises and now rode him with slow and sinuous moves with her body that kept him pitched right on the edge, fighting not to give in because giving in before she did would fill her green eyes with so much triumph.

  His skin was bathed in sweat and his hands were clamped to her supple hipbones. When she leant down to capture his mouth a whole new set of sensual muscles joined the torment. She caressed his taut cheekbones, the rasping clench of his jaw. She brushed the hard tips of her breasts against him and rolled her tongue around the kiss-softened contours of his lips before whispering, ‘My lover,’ then drew in every sensitised, beautifully tutored muscle to send him toppling over the edge.

  As role reversals went, Nell knew she had cornered the market. She had him hanging on every flirtatious word and look and gesture like a besotted slave. On the occasions he grabbed back power just to remind her that he could do if he so desired to, she became the tormented one, the hopeless, helpless, besotted slave.

  One week floated in perfect harmony into two then a third. Thea watched them and smiled a lot, and began crocheting an intricately patterned gossamer-fine christening shawl with a serene complacency that made Nell blush.

  This was what she’d wanted, wasn’t it?

  Frowning as she bent to pick up a stray piece of driftwood off the shoreline, she sent experienced fingers gliding over its undulating ocean-smoothed contours the way her mother had taught her to do, while her mind drifted elsewhere.

  She suspected she was pregnant. It was very early days yet to allow the suspicion to grow too large in her head, but her regular-as-clockwork period had let her down three days ago, and if Xander’s virility was as potent as the rest of him then she knew, deep down, what it meant.

  It changed everything. From believing she wanted to conceive his baby she now discovered that she didn’t. Not yet, not like this. Not while they still hid from the real world on this tiny island where she felt more like a very indulged mistress than she did a wife.

  A sigh broke from her, sending her chin tilting up so she could stare bleakly at the blue horizon. Xander could not remain hidden here for very much longer. As it was he needed to spend more and more time in his state-of-the-art study here dealing with business.

  And Nell had pressing things of her own she needed to do—if she could only get to a telephone that did not have every call made on it carefully monitored.

  Marcel. She was worried about him. She needed to know how he was and what he was doing. If he was cutting himself up with guilt and remorse or too angry with her to care that she was worrying about him.

  When Xander did find it necessary to leave here, did he intend to take her with him this time or was she, in effect, still his prisoner whether it be behind the gates of Rosemere or here in this beautiful place?

  He evaded the question each time she asked it. He evaded any discussion about life beyond here. Their honeymoon, he called it. A time to enjoy now, not what tomorrow had to bring.

  But even a honeymoon as idyllic as this one had to come to an end some time.

  She released another sigh. Xander watched it leave her as he stood in the window with the phone pressed to his ear. She was wearing a blue sarong today. Beneath the sarong would be a matching-coloured bikini, and her hair was up, looped into one of those casual knots she had a way of fashioning that always tempted him to tug it free.

  His fingers twitched, so did other parts as he saw himself unwrapping the beautiful package that was his sensational, warm and willing wife.

  Wife. His wife. As soon as he thought the words a blanket of seemingly unquenchable possessive desire bathed his flesh. He wanted to be out there with her, not standing here talking business on the telephone.

  ‘I know I have to attend,’ he snapped out, sud
den impatience sharpening his tongue. ‘I merely asked if there was any way it could be put back a week.’

  No chance. He’d known it even before he suggested it. Wishful thinking was a useless occupation out there in the real world. And that was his biggest problem. Nell and this incredible harmony they had come to share did not belong in the real world. Nell, he’d come to realise, never did. Not in his world anyway. For the last year he’d kept her safely locked up inside a pair of iron gates, waiting, he’d told himself, for her to grow up before he attempted to redress the mess their marriage had become. In his arrogant self-confidence, he had not seen that she’d done the growing seething inside with resentment at the way he treated her. If she had not crashed her car, she would have been long gone with her Frenchman before he’d known anything.

  And the way the guy had disappeared so completely turned his blood cold when he thought of Nell disappearing with him like that.

  ‘What of that other business?’ he clipped into the telephone.

  His frown deepened when an unsatisfactory reply came back.

  ‘A man cannot drop from the face of the earth without leaving some trace, Luke,’ he rasped out in frustration. ‘I need you to find him. I need you to interrogate him. I need to know what his true intentions had been towards my wife!’

  ‘And if it was a subtle form of kidnap?’ he lanced back at whatever Luke Morell said. ‘I will continue to think of her as in danger until I have answers … No, I will not leave her safety to the hands of bodyguards again. What use was Hugo Vance? Helen is my wife, my responsibility … Then let an empire crumble.’

  Grimly he slammed down the phone, knowing he was being unfair, unwise—irrational. But how the hell else could he behave around a woman as unpredictable as Nell?

  He’d spent three weeks in her constant company—had sunk himself into her more times than he cared to count! But did he know what made her tick? No more than he did a year ago when he’d wrongly believed he had her tagged and labelled—my beautiful, besotted wife.

  She’d turned the tables on him that time. Then she’d done it yet again when she’d tried to leave him for her elusive Frenchman. OK, so this time he had managed to breach the damn citadel of her physical defences, but with Nell he could not afford to let the sex count for anything. He did not trust her, or that strange, glinting look he’d glimpsed in her eyes now and then. The little witch still had her own agenda, he was damn sure of it. She might love what he could make her feel, but did she love him …?