Aristide's Convenient Wife

by Jaqeuline Baird

  ‘What a bitch.’

  ‘My sentiments exactly,’ Helen agreed. ‘But a perfect match for my lying bastard of a husband. He is obviously still seeing her. He told me he was going to New York, but according to that woman he saw her in Paris ten days ago.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’ Mary tried to comfort her. ‘You never heard Leon’s reply. He probably denied Louisa’s whole scenario. Why, only moments earlier Leon, who has never been given to overt displays of affection in his life, thanked you for marrying him and kissed you in front of everyone. That must mean something; you have to give him a chance.’

  Helen rose to her feet, her face white and her usually expressive eyes curiously blank. ‘I don’t think so,’ she responded bluntly.

  ‘Oh, come on, Helen, you can’t believe for a minute Leon would prefer a hard-faced, stick-thin glamour puss like her to you. You are beautiful and caring and kind. Whereas that one is so up herself I wouldn’t mind betting her Brazilian wax is striped red to match her hair.’

  ‘That is terrible.’ But the picture Mary painted did make Helen’s lips quirk at the corners.

  ‘But you almost smiled.’ Mary stood up and rested her hand on Helen’s arm. ‘Come on, let’s get back in there. You are not going to let a bitch like Louisa upset you. And if there is anything I can do…’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mary.’ Helen glanced at her friend, and, seeing the compassion in her gaze, almost gave in to the pain of the grief that she knew was waiting for her.

  But she had too much experience of life’s hard knocks to succumb. The loss of her parents, the loss of her eyesight for over a year, the loss of her ability to bear children, the loss of her grandfather and the loss of her best friend had taught her all the tears in the world did not help. ‘I will be fine and I won’t cause a scene. You’re right, it is time we rejoined the party.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Positive,’ Helen said, and opened the door. She felt curiously detached as she walked back into the ballroom. The sound of the crowd, the laughter, the music, could not penetrate the coldness that had settled around her like an invisible cloak. Nothing had really changed she told herself. She still had Nicholas. She had always known Leon was a womanising devil; his own sister had intimated as much. As for loving the man—not any more.

  Leon was right: love was an illusion, an illusion she had suffered from for a brief period of time, and could now forget. She had cried at the loss of her family and her friend. All worthy people who had cared for her, but her husband wasn’t worth a single tear.

  There was no sign of the French couple when they re-entered the ballroom. Chris and Leon were standing to one side of the dance floor, deep in conversation, but both male heads turned in unison as Mary with Helen behind her entered the ballroom.

  Leon’s dark gaze sought Helen’s and in the very next second he realised something was wrong. Her lips parted over her small white teeth, but the smile she gave him was brittle and never reached her eyes.

  He stepped towards her and looped an arm around her waist. ‘I missed you,’ he whispered softly and brushed her lips with his own. She did not respond, she simply stood still in his hold. ‘I have a strong desire to dance with you.’ He tried again, lowering his head to breathe against her small ear. ‘I simply want you in my arms.’

  ‘Sorry. Mary and I were talking.’

  He put both arms around her and drew her onto the dance floor, and she made no objection. She placed her small hand on his shoulder and let him guide her to the music, but something was different.

  ‘Are you all right?’ He nuzzled her ear, and she turned her head away.

  ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?’

  She kept her beautiful face averted, she wouldn’t look at him. He tightened his hold on her but her gorgeous body wasn’t softening against his as he had come to expect. She was physically in his arms, but mentally miles away.

  ‘Did Mary say something to upset you?’ he demanded.

  ‘No.’

  He stroked a hand up her naked back, his fingers trailing the indentation of her spine, but she stayed rigid in his arms, and for a moment an unknown emotion went through him—primarily anger, but incredibly laced with fear. No, he was imagining things. Helen was putty in his hands, but she was also quite shy in public. This glittering affair was probably a bit of an ordeal for her, he rationalised her odd behaviour. Of course she was tense as the object of all eyes.

  He folded her closer into him. ‘Relax, you are the most beautiful woman here and everyone adores you.’

  You certainly don’t, Helen wanted to scream. But instead she said curtly, ‘I doubt that.’

  She flicked a cold glance at his hard face and just as quickly away again. Did he really think she was such a wimp she needed reassurance from an arrogant, lying toad like him? Though in one respect Leon had been right all along; the fever in her blood when he touched her was as he had said, just sex. Thankfully she no longer felt anything in his arms. His betrayal had killed every finer emotion in her stone-dead.

  His hand curved around her nape, and tilted her head back so she was forced to look at him.

  ‘Are you sure you are okay? We don’t have to stay much longer if you don’t want to.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of leaving early. I intend to dance the night away.’ She sent him a glittering smile and linked her hands behind his neck. When what she really wanted to do was choke the faithless swine. Anger was the only emotion she had left.

  Helen slid into the limo and as far away from Leon as she could get and, leaning back, closed her eyes. She didn’t want to look at him, and she certainly didn’t want to speak to him. She had danced and laughed all night, and he had had the nerve to tell her she had been the belle of the ball. What a snake. He had the emotional sensitivity of a boa constrictor, but she was determined he was not going to squeeze the life out of her.

  She was her own woman, deserving of honour and respect, and without that they had nothing. She had been fooling herself for weeks, but no more.

  When the limo stopped she leapt straight out and into the house and upstairs without stopping. Once in the master suite she took the diamonds from her throat and dropped them where she stood along with the earrings and bracelet, and, turning, headed for the dressing room. She heard him enter the bedroom as she removed the pins from her hair, and shaking her head, she let it fall down to her shoulders. She opened a drawer and avoiding the more glamorous night-wear, she selected a nightshirt. Discarding the dress, she pulled it over her head and walked back into the bedroom.

  Leon was standing in the middle of the room, without his jacket and tie, his shirt unbuttoned to his waist and in his hand the jewels she had dropped on the floor. She glanced at his face but when he came towards her she backed away instinctively.

  He stopped, his chiselled features hardening with something like anger. ‘Rather careless, dropping these on the floor. Are you going to tell me what this is all about, Helen? I don’t appreciate a woman who blows hot and cold. I was beginning to think better of you, but obviously I was mistaken, unless you have some explanation for acting out of character all evening.’

  ‘And what would you know about my character? You think you know me so well simply because we share a bed and body fluids, but you don’t know me at all,’ she shot back with scathing bluntness. ‘If you did, you might have realised I spent the first fourteen years of my life in Switzerland. They speak four different languages there, and I am fluent in two of them: Italian and French. Need I say more?’ She saw a dark flush spread across his high cheekbones. He had a good right to look guilty, the no-good, cheating waster.

  ‘Ah.’ He shoved the jewels in his trouser pocket. ‘You heard Louisa.’ His dark, compelling eyes held hers as he lessened the space between them. ‘That was careless of me and bad mannered, but I switched to French thinking to spare you any embarrassment.’

  ‘You’re all heart,’ she jeered.

  His reply was to reach for
her and pull her against him. ‘You heard she was once my mistress and for that I am sorry.’ His lips curved in a hateful smile. ‘But you have no need to be jealous, Helen. I put an end to it before we married, and as long as I have you I don’t want any other woman, I swear.’

  His truly astounding, unbelievable conceit was too much for Helen and she exploded with rage. ‘You must think I am crazy if you expect me to believe a word you say. You are the most devious, manipulative, arrogant swine it has ever been my misfortune to meet. My God, you have been having an affair with that woman for years. What kind of fool do you take me for? The week before you married me you were in her bed. You actually told me you had a pressing engagement in Paris. You didn’t mention pressing the flesh, but I should have known. Delia told me what a faithless lot the men in her family were, and, by heaven, she was right. You even had the cheek to tell me you were going to New York and then visited that woman straight from my bed ten days ago, a bed where you had the gall to call mema petite, a French term, when we first had sex.’ She would not call it love.

  ‘Now I know why—force of habit,’ she jeered. ‘Then to cap it all I discover you have given your lover an apartment and Lord knows what else. And you wonder why the jewels you gave me ended up on the floor.’ She shook her head in utter rejection of him.

  ‘Are you quite finished assassinating my character?’ Leon demanded harshly, placing a steel-like arm around her waist and hauling her hard against him.

  She looked up at him with blazing violet eyes. ‘God help Nicholas with you as his father; you haven’t a moral bone in your body. As for me, I never want you to touch me again.’

  Her last crack was too much for Leon. He was no saint, and he was guilty of having sex with Louisa the week before his wedding. Mainly because when he had made it very clear their affair was finally over she had stripped naked and begged him to make love to her one last time. He had certainly not slept with her, and had left before midnight. Ungallant maybe, but true. Her appearance tonight at the party had been none of his doing, but that his wife should think so badly of him, to believe that he had lied when he’d said he was going to New York, was an insult too far.

  He hauled her closer and plunged his hand into her hair and jerked her head back to capture her angry mouth with his. He thrust into the hot, moist depths with an urgent, angry passion. He felt her resistance and fought down the primitive urge to bury himself deep inside her, and make her realise she was his in the most basic way.

  Instead with a terrific effort he gentled the fury of his kiss. But still she remained rigid in his arms. Fired by anger and frustration, he slipped a hand beneath her shirt, tracing the line of her leg and thigh while he lowered his head and caught her breast through the fine fabric of her shirt.

  Suddenly the cloak of detachment, the numbness that had helped Helen through the evening, shattered, leaving in its place a raw, aching pain. Her heart thundered in her breast and she lashed wildly out at him, but it was like hitting a brick wall. Though she fought like a wild woman, when his mouth and teeth fed on her breast the dampness of the fabric rubbing against her sensitive nipples made every sensual receptor in her body quiver and burn. The savage sensuality of his kiss as he captured her mouth again and the caressing stroke of his hand roaming over her hip and the apex of her thighs with a familiarity her body recognised ignited a burning need inside her, even as her mind rejected him.

  He picked her up and dropped her naked on the bed, when she had lost the nightshirt she had no idea. All she was aware of was the heat, the weight, the scent of him above her. A muscled leg parted hers, his hungry mouth clamping on her pouting breast, and finally her body arched convulsively and she was conscious of nothing except the thick length of him thrusting, filling her with ever-deeper strokes, until she was swept away in a maelstrom of shuddering ecstatic sensations that culminated in an explosion of the senses so heart stoppingly intense that for a moment she ceased to breathe.

  She felt Leon’s weight roll off her, and wondered if that was the little death she had read about as they lay beside each other in silence, the only sounds the heavy pounding of hearts and ragged breathing.

  Helen had nothing to say. Her body had made a liar of her.

  Leon rose up on one elbow and looked down into her shadowed eyes. ‘I think we can safely forget your, “I never want you to touch me again,”’ he taunted softly. ‘You can no more resist the passion, the desire, that flares between us than I can.’

  ‘That is your conceited opinion,’ she shot back.

  ‘Not an opinion, fact, and to prove my point I won’t touch you again, untilyou ask me,’ he stated, his lips curling in a derisive smile. ‘And I doubt I will have to wait long. Some women, once they get a taste for sex, can’t do without, and I have a feeling you fall into that category, Helen.’

  ‘In your dreams,’ she spat. Shamed at her own weakness and hating him all over again, she wanted to hit out at him, dent his massive ego. ‘I am here for Nicholas and nothing else, and, just to set the record straight, the scar on my belly is not from an appendectomy, but from an accident. So if you are nursing any illusion I might get pregnant one day, forget it. I can’t have children.’

  In her distress and anger she revealed her deepest secret, but his reaction was not what she expected.

  His dark gaze narrowed to rest on her face for a long moment and then his hand stroked gently down her body, one long finger tracing the scar, and when he lifted his head again the dark eyes that met hers held a strange light, and his mouth had an ironic twist to it for all that it was set in a straight line.

  ‘A biological child of my own really does not matter to me. We have Nicholas,’ he said coolly. ‘What happened tonight was unfortunate, and I don’t expect you to believe me unreservedly. But if you had listened a little longer you would have heard me reminding Louisa that our affair was definitely over, as she knew perfectly well, and she had been paid off quite handsomely for her friendship. You have nothing to worry about; forget it ever happened.’

  His easy dismissal of her confession infuriated Helen still further. Her inability to have a child was and would be a lifelong regret to Helen, but Leon was so cool, so unfazed by her announcement, he obviously didn’t give a jot for her feelings. She could almost feel sorry for the French woman, but not quite.

  ‘Is that what your first wife did when she found out about your lovers? Or did Tina never find out what a two-timing bastard you are? Did you simply lie to her as you lied to me when you said you were faithful to her?’ she asked bitterly.

  ‘I never lied to you, or Tina, not that she would have cared if I did,’ he stated with a slightly cynical smile. ‘Tina was a law unto herself. I was twenty-three when I met her and I married her because she would not let me into her bed until I did.’

  And for her father’s bank, according to Delia, Helen thought distastefully.

  ‘Before you ask,’ Leon continued, accurately reading her mind, ‘the merger with her father’s bank was of much greater benefit to him than it was to us. We were looking to expand into America, true, but there were much more viable options on the table than his, and I had to work like a slave to make the merger profitable.

  ‘As for the rest, I told you the truth when I said I was faithful to Tina as long as she was to me.’ His wry mocking glance seared through her as he continued. ‘What I didn’t tell you, as I do not like to malign the departed, was that although Tina was a lovely lady I was not her first lover and I certainly was not her last. The concept of monogamy was totally foreign to her nature.’

  Helen’s lips tightened.And his, she thought savagely.

  ‘I am not in the habit of explaining my past actions to anyone, but in this case I will make an exception, because I can tell by the expression on your face that like all females you are never going to let the matter drop until I do,’ he said cynically. ‘By the time you met Tina in Greece we had been married seven years and she had had at least three lovers that I knew of, Tak
is, her cousin the party animal, being one of them. Adultery is not the sole prerogative of the man in any marriage. We stayed married mainly for the sake of our fathers as they were great friends, and also as I had no intention of ever marrying again I saw no compelling need to divorce. If that offends your prim little mind, tough, but it is the truth.’

  Helen’s eyes widened incredulously on his face. Tina unfaithful to him? Why would any woman want another man once they had him? was the first thought that popped into her mind. Her second that for a man with a massive ego like Leon to freely admit his wife had cuckolded him and with her own cousin was unbelievable.

  She stared up at him contemplatively. His black hair was rumpled and falling over his forehead, his great body gleamed golden in the dim light and his dark gaze was curiously intent on her face. For a moment she had the fanciful idea he actually needed her to believe him.

  No. Leon didn’t need anyone. As for believing him, she didn’t know what to believe any more. Leon had turned her life upside down, and here she was lying beneath him sated from sex. When, if she had a grain of common sense, she would be packing her bags and leaving. So what did that make her?