Bridal Bargains

by Michelle Reid

  And he was gone. Without a second look in Mia’s direction, he strode into the house and disappeared.

  ‘This way, madam …’ Surprising Mia with her nearly accent-free English, the housekeeper turned and led the way into the house.

  It was warmer inside, with sunlight seeping in through silk-draped windows onto apricot walls and lovingly polished wooden floors and doors. The furniture was old, undoubtedly antique, but solid, with a well used, well lived with look to it. Not what she would have expected of him somehow.

  A highly polished wooden staircase climbed up the wall to the left of her, then swept right around the upper landing.

  Elena led the way up and across the polished floor to a door directly opposite the stairs. She threw it open then stood back to allow Mia to move past her.

  Her feet were suddenly sinking into a deep-piled oatmeal carpet, and her eyes drifted around soft lemon walls and white woodwork. Oatmeal curtains were caught back from the windows with thick lemon ropes.

  ‘Your bathroom is to your right,’ Elena informed her coolly. ‘The master’s bedroom is through the door to your left.’

  Separate bedrooms, then, Mia was relieved to note. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured, and forced herself to step further into the room.

  Elena did not join her, instead remaining in the open doorway. ‘My daughter, Sofia, will come and unpack for you. If you need anything tell her and she will tell me.’

  In other words, don’t speak to me yourself unless it is absolutely necessary, Mia ruefully assumed from that cold tone.

  ‘Guido, my husband, will bring your luggage shortly,’ the housekeeper continued. ‘Dinner here is served at nine. Will you require some refreshment before then?’

  And doesn’t it just stick in your throat to offer it? Mia thought with a sudden blinding white smile that made the other woman’s face drop at the sheer unexpectedness of it.

  ‘Yes,’ she said lightly. ‘I require a large pot of coffee, milk—not cream—to go with it and a plate of sandwiches—salad, I think. Thank you, Elena. Now you may go.’

  The woman’s face turned beetroot red as she stepped back over the threshold, then pulled the door shut with a barely controlled click. Almost immediately Mia wilted, the stress of maintaining this level of indifference towards everyone taking the strength out of her legs so that she almost sank shakily into the nearest chair.

  Right in the very midst of that telling little weakness she sucked in a deep breath, straightening her shoulders and grimly defying it. She had many long months of this to put up with, and if she started turning into a quivering wreck at each new obstacle she wouldn’t stay the course.

  With that now aching chin held high again, she turned to view the room in general. It was large and light and airy, with two full-length windows standing open to a light breeze beyond. Appropriate furniture stood around the room—a couple of oatmeal upholstered bedside chairs and a small matching sofa scattered with pale lemon cushions. A large dark wood wardrobe stood against the wall opposite the windows, a dressing-table against another, and a tall chest of drawers. Her eyes kept moving, picking out occasional tables and table lamps sitting on lace doilies to protect the polished wood—all very old-fashioned and reminiscent of a different era when tender loving care was poured into furniture like this in the form of beeswax, which she could smell in the air.

  And then, of course, there was the bed.

  Gritting her teeth, Mia made herself turn and face her major fear. The bed was huge, standing in pride of place between the two open windows, its heavily carved head-and footboards suggesting that the bed was antique. The sheets were white and folded back neatly over a pale lemon bedspread, the headboard piled with snowy white pillows.

  Her heart stopped beating, her stomach muscles contracting with dread as she stood there staring at it. She made herself imprint the image of two heads on those snowy white pillows—one dark and contemptuous but grimly determined, the other red-gold and frightened but resolutely defiant.

  She shuddered suddenly, realising that contempt and defiance were not going to make good bed partners. Contempt and mute submission would be a far less volatile mixture, she told herself in an attempt at wry mockery.

  It didn’t work. In fact, there wasn’t even the merest hint of the usual mockery that she relied on so much to keep her going.

  Oh, hell, she thought heavily, and moved around the bed to go and went to open one of the windows, her lungs pulling in short tugs of clean fresh air in an effort to dispel the ever-present sense of dread—a dread that was drawing nearer with every passing hour.

  There was a pretty view outside, she noted in a deliberate snub to those other grim thoughts. Carefully attended gardens rolled down towards a shallow rock face, but she couldn’t see a beach or any obvious way down the cliff to the sea below.

  But there was a glass-walled swimming pool glinting off to the left of her, which cheered her up a bit because at least the temperature was mild enough to allow her to take her usual exercise while she was stuck here. Further out, she could see the misted bulk of several other islands not very far away. It made her wish she’d had the foresight to ask where he was bringing her so she could have bought herself a map and acquainted herself with what she was seeing out there.

  Then another thought hit her, making a connection that she should have made ages ago. For this was Skiathos, and Skiathos belonged to the Sporades group of islands. The island her father owned was also in the Sporades group. She could actually be looking at her new husband’s dream, without actually knowing it.

  Suddenly she felt surrounded by reminders of what she was here for. The island. The bed. The isolation in which she was supposed to fulfil her part of the bargain.

  Her blood ran cold and she shivered, any pleasure she had experienced because of the beauty of her new surroundings spoiled for ever. She turned away from the window, from the islands, from the bed, and walked straight into the bathroom.

  She needed a shower, she decided grimly—needed to soak the tension out of her body with warmth. She had to keep herself together because this was the beginning, not the end, of it.

  Guido had arrived with her luggage while she was still in the bathroom and Sofia was there when Mia eventually came back to the bedroom, wrapped in a white terry bathrobe she had found hanging on the bathroom door and with her hair hidden beneath a turban-wrapped towel.

  Sofia’s glance was very guarded. ‘I bring food,’ she said in badly broken English, ‘and have unpacked for you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ No smile was offered so none was returned.

  The girl left and Mia moved over to the tray set on a low table beside the sofa. The coffee was too strong and the crusty bread sandwiching the salad too thickly cut for her to have any hope of swallowing it past that lump that was still constricting her throat. Luckily, someone had had the foresight to place a pitcher of iced water on the tray with the coffee so she contented her thirst with that and picked the salad off the bread.

  By the time she had finished she felt suddenly and utterly bone-weary. Despite her long shower, the strain of it all was still dragging at her muscles and she could now feel the dull throb of a tension headache coming on.

  With a heavy sigh, she at last did what her brain and her body had been pleading with her to do since she’d arrived here. She got up and walked over to that dreaded bed, threw herself face downwards across it and simply switched off.

  For the next few blissful hours Mia was aware of nothing, not the day slowly closing in around her or the towel turban slowly uncoiling itself from her head then sliding lazily to the carpet—trailing her hair along with it so the long silken strands spilled over the edge of the bed like a wall of fire lit by the glowing sunset.

  When she did eventually come awake she did so abruptly, not sure what had woken her but certain that something had. Her eyes flicked open, her senses coming to full alert and setting her flesh tingling.

  She continued to lie there for a f
ew more seconds, listening intently to the silence surrounding her, then something brushed against her cheek and on a strangled gasp she rolled over—and found herself wedged up against a hard male body that was reclining beside her. Alexander’s dark head was casually propped up on the heel of one hand.

  ‘I wondered how long your hair was,’ he remarked idly. ‘Now I know …’

  It was then she realised that he was gently fondling a silky skein of her hair. Her scalp was tingling, as well as her cheek, as if he’d teasingly brushed the lock of hair across it.

  It must have been his touch that had woken her. ‘W-what are you doing here?’ she demanded unsteadily.

  Stupid question, his mocking eyes said, and he grinned, all white teeth and predatorial amusement.

  With a flash of annoyance, meant to disguise the real shaft of alarm that went streaking through her, Mia made to roll away from him again but he stopped her, his arm snaking around her waist to keep her clamped against him.

  She met with rock-solid immovable muscle and soft white terry towelling. Her breath caught her eyes dropping to stare at the gap in his bath-robe where tight black curls of rough chest hair lay clustered against warm golden skin.

  Her heart stuttered. Her mouth went dry. Something clicked into motion deep inside her—the slowly turning gears of sexual awakening, she realized with dread.

  ‘You sleep like an innocent, do you know that?’ he informed her very softly. ‘I’ve been lying here for ages, just watching you, and you barely moved, barely breathed, and your lovely mouth looked so vulnerable it was a strain not to kiss it.’

  He did now, though, bending his dark head just enough to brush his lips against her own. Her own head jerked backwards in rejection. ‘L-let go of me,’ she stammered. ‘I n-need—’

  ‘Sex on demand,’ he reminded her, speaking right over her protest. ‘You agreed to it. Here I am to collect it.’

  Oh, God. Her eyes closed, her lips folding in on themselves in an effort to moisten what had gone way beyond being moistened. ‘Please,’ she whispered with the first hint of weakness she had let herself show him. ‘I’m not used to …’

  ‘Performing on demand?’ he suggested when her voice trailed off into silence. ‘That’s not the way I heard it …’

  Silence. Mia went perfectly still, a slither of horror sliding down her spine. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.

  ‘No?’ he murmured. ‘Then, please, correct me if I am wrong,’ he drawled. ‘You did have your first full-blown affair at the tender age of sixteen, did you not? With a struggling rock star, I believe. He died several years later of a cocktail of drink and drugs. But not before your wild whoring ways forced your father to place you in a closed institution while they dried you out, made you a half-fit human being then disgorged you back on society in the hope that you had learned your lesson. Did you learn your lesson?’

  Mia felt sick, but said nothing. Her father, she was thinking desolately, just couldn’t let her do anything with a modicum of dignity. He had to soil it—soil everything—for her.

  ‘Certainly,’ that cruel voice went on when she offered no defence, ‘you’ve kept a very low profile for the last seven years. Do you still indulge in drugs?’

  She shook her head. Her eyes were closed, and her face so white it looked brittle. It would be no use telling him that she had never—ever—abused her body with illegal drugs because she knew he wouldn’t believe her.

  ‘I don’t want any child of mine born a drug addict because his mother had no control over herself. What about sex?’ he pushed on remorselessly. ‘Should I have had you tested before we reached this point? Is there any chance I am likely to put my health at risk if I indulge myself with you?’

  Her heart heaved, her aching lungs along with it. ‘I have not had a sexual relationship with a man in years,’ she told him with as much pride as she could muster.

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’

  ‘It’s the truth,’ she retorted, her green eyes despising him so much that they actually sought glacial contact with his. ‘Believe it or not. I don’t care. I don’t care if you get a whole army of doctors in here to make sure I am clean enough for you to use. But just do it quickly, will you, so we can get the whole sordid conception over with?’

  With that, she managed to break free from him and rolled sideways across the bed. His hand shot out and caught her.

  ‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ he breathed, and began to pull her to him.

  He came to lean right over her, his face tight with anger, his eyes alive with it and his body tense with it. ‘Is it true?’ he demanded rawly. ‘Is everything I’ve just said the truth?’

  The truth? she repeated to herself with skin-blistering mockery. He would like the truth even less than he was liking her father’s lies!

  ‘I sold myself for five million pounds,’ she spat. ‘Does that answer your question?’

  It had been a reckless thing to say—foolish, when it was so obvious that he was angry. His dark eyes flashed contemptuously. ‘Then start paying your damned dues,’ he muttered, and his mouth crushed hers.

  It was an insult, an invasion. It promised nothing but punishment for believing she could answer him like that. Yet what actually happened to her then was perhaps more of a punishment than the fierceness of his kiss.

  Because she pushed and punched out at him—and then went up like an exploding volcano, her mouth drawing greedily on his like someone with a raging thirst. It was awful—she could feel herself shattering into a million fiery particles but couldn’t do a single thing to stop it from happening.

  ‘My God,’ he gasped, dragging his mouth free so he could stare down at her. He was shocked. She didn’t blame him—she was feeling utterly shattered by it herself!

  ‘You are now contaminated!’ she snarled at him in sheer seething reaction.

  He just laughed, but it was a rather shocked sound with nothing amused about it. Then he caught her mouth again, sending her spinning back to where she’d gone off to with no apparent effort. It was different now. There was no anger feeding the flames, just a white-hot passion that sang through her blood and sizzled across her skin.

  His hands were all over her, his long fingers knotting in her hair, trailing the arching length of her throat, urgently searching for and finding the thrusting tightness of her breast. Then, frustratingly, his hands moving on downwards, finding the knot holding her robe together and impatiently freeing it.

  Cool fresh air touched her burning skin and she cried out when it actually hurt. His mouth had left hers and she hadn’t even noticed, his body sliding sideways so he could completely unwrap her.

  Her eyes were closed, her body trembling with an overload of sensation. He knelt there beside her and watched it all happen while he rid himself of his own robe, his dark face taut and muscles bunched, his own sensual urgency no less controlled than hers was.

  When he came back to her, her arms wrapped round him, her fingers clawing into his hair. Their mouths fused hungrily again, and she felt the stinging pleasure of his hair-roughened chest grazing the sensitised tips of her breasts. She felt the power of his arousal pressing against her thighs and instinctively opened them so she could accept him into the cradle of her slender hips.

  He groaned something, she didn’t know what. She didn’t even care. But her eyes snapped open in protest when he denied her his mouth again.

  He was glaring hotly down at her. ‘Wild,’ he muttered. ‘I knew you would be wild. No one with this glorious colour of hair and the amount of self-control you exhibit could be anything but wild once you let go.’

  ‘I haven’t let go!’ she denied, wishing it was the truth! ‘I hate you!’ she added helplessly

  ‘I hate you too.’ He laughed. ‘Interesting, isn’t it? How two people who can hate each other this much can also feel this naked kind of passion.’

  ‘The passion is all yours,’ she said, tight-lipped, then gasped when he suddenly lifted himself away from
her to kneel between her parted thighs.

  Eyes like black lasers skimmed over her body from firm proud, thrusting breasts to the cluster of tight golden curls protecting her sex.

  ‘Oh …’ she choked in appalled embarrassment. No man had ever looked on her quite like this!

  But what was a worse humiliation was the way her senses were responding to the way he was looking at her—throbbing and pulsing with an excitement that threatened to completely engulf her.

  ‘I can see you are dying for me to touch you.’

  ‘Please,’ she groaned in pained mortification. ‘Don’t do this to me!’

  ‘You will be wishing me inside you before this hour is through,’ he promised darkly.

  Then he touched her, sliding a long and silkenly practised finger along the hot moist crevice he had exposed with such a bold disregard to her modesty, and claimed possession by delving deep inside.

  It shook her, shook her right through to the very centre of everything she had ever imagined to do with this kind of intimacy. At sixteen she had been too young and too inexperienced to know that she was supposed to have been enjoying this as much as the man who had eventually taken her virginity.

  But this—this wild hot surge of stinging pleasure which was taking her over was completely new territory to her. And the fact that it was caused by a man she so utterly despised was enough to send her reeling into shock—the kind of shock that held her helpless as he arched his body over her, capturing her mouth with a hunger that devoured while his fingers began to work a magic on her flesh she had never experienced in her life before.

  Oh, help me, she thought on a wave of helpless despair. She couldn’t believe this was happening to her, couldn’t believe she could lose control like this!

  He knew it too, and played with her, like a cat with a mesmerised mouse. An arm slid beneath her shoulders, his body shifting sideways so he was no longer completely covering her, then the real torture began, with slow, light, lazy caresses that told him everything he needed to know about the woman he was exploring.

  He touched her face, her nose, her lips, and ran those same fingers down her neck and between the throbbing up-thrust of her breasts. He followed the flat line of her ribcage to her tightly muscled stomach, traced the line of her hips, then delved once again into the very core of her, but only fleetingly—too fleetingly—before he was exploring her silken thighs, watching with a dark intensity, which really frightened her, each quiver and jolt of her flesh as he learned what gave her pleasure and what did not.