Bridal Bargains (23 page)

‘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.

What she saw glowing there set her trembling. ‘You’re hurting—’

‘No, I’m not,’ he denied through gritted teeth. ‘But I am teetering,
cara mia
, so watch out how many more lies you wish to spout at me!’

‘I’m not lying!’

‘No?’ With some more of that controlled strength he wound her hair around his fingers, urging her head back an extra vulnerable inch so as to expose the long, creamy length of her slender throat.

‘You were leaving me,’ he bit at her in hard accusation. ‘You were speeding like a crazy woman down that lane because you were leaving me for another man and you got rid of Vance to give yourself a nice clean getaway, only that damn tree got in the way!’

Caught out lying so thoroughly, she felt hot colour rush into her cheeks. His eyes flared as he watched it happen. Defiance rose in response.

‘So what if I was?’ she tossed back at him. ‘What possible difference was it going to make to the way you run your life? We don’t have a marriage, we have a business arrangement that I didn’t even get to have a say about!’ Tears were burning now—hot, angry tears. ‘And I dismissed Hugo a week ago, much that you noticed or cared! I have a right to live my own life any way I want—’

‘And let another man make love to you any time that you want?’

The raking insert closed Nell’s throat, strangling her breath and the denial she could have given in answer to that. Her angry lips followed suit, snapping shut because she didn’t want to say it. She did not want to give him anything that could feed his mammoth ego.

The silence between them began to spark like static, his lean face strapped by a fury that stretched his golden skin across the bones in his cheeks as their eyes made war across a gap of barely an inch. Then his other hand came up to cover her throat, light-fingered and gentle but oh, so menacing.

‘Say it,
yenika
,’ he encouraged thinly. ‘Live dangerously …’

He thought she was holding back from admitting she had taken a lover, Nell realised, and felt the triumph in that tingle all the way down to her feet. She moistened her lips—tempted, so desperately tempted that she did not know how she managed to keep the lie back. Their eyes continued to war across several taut, suffocating seconds. It was exciting, knowing that she had the power to shatter his precious ego with a single soft word like
yes
.

The tips of his long fingers moved on her throat, locating a wildly beating pulse. Nell needed to take a breath, her ribs were hurting under the pressure she was placing on them, and in the end she managed a short, tense tug of air into her lungs before improvising shakily, ‘If you want to strangle m-me then go ahead; I’m in no fit state to stop you.’

Surprise lit his face. He glanced down to where his fingers curved her throat, dark lashes curling over his eyes before lifting again to view the way his other fingers were knotted into her hair. There was yet another second of taut, breathtaking stillness in which the entire world seemed to grind to a halt. Then the fingers began to slide again, moving almost sensuously against stretched, smooth, creamy flesh as they began to make a slow retreat.

Relief quivered through her, parting her lips on a small, soft gasp. The fingers paused, she held her breath again, felt a different
kind of excitement erupt as she flicked a look into the deep, dark, swirling depths of his eyes and saw what she’d always seen there.

Xander had always desired her and Nell had always known it. Whatever else had motivated him into marrying her, the desire had always been the added incentive that made the deal worthwhile.

‘You remind me of a sleeping siren,’ he murmured. ‘It is the only thing that has kept you safe for the last year. Give me one small hint,
cara
, that you have given to someone else that which I have resisted and you will spend the rest of your days regretting it.’

It was just too tempting to resist this time. Defiance back in her eyes, she opened her mouth ‘I—’

His mouth arrived to stop whatever she had been about to utter. Shock hit her broadside, sheer surprise at the unexpectedness of it holding her utterly transfixed. He hadn’t kissed her once since their wedding night and then he’d been so angry—hard and punishing with frustrated desire. This was different, the anger was still there but the rest was warm, deep and sensually tantalising, the way he used his lips to prise hers apart then stroked the inner recesses of her mouth.

It was her very first tongue-to-tongue experience and the pleasurable sensations it fed into her tapped into one of her many restless, hopeless dreams about moments like this. The warm, clean, expensive scent of him, the smooth, knowing expertise with which he moulded her mouth to his, the slight rasping brush of his skin against her soft skin, the trailing, sensual drag she could feel on her senses that made her relax into him.

He drew back the moment he felt her first tentative response to him. Eyes too dark to read watched the soft quiver of her mouth before he looked deeply into the swirling green confusion mirrored in her eyes. Then he smiled.

‘There,’ he murmured with silken huskiness. ‘I have just saved you from yourself. Aren’t you fortunate to have a caring husband like me?’

As she frowned at the comment, he brushed a contemptuous kiss across her still parted mouth then drew right away, fingers trailing from her throat and untangling from her silken hair while she continued to puzzle—until she remembered what she had been about to say before the kiss.

She shivered, horrified at how easily she had let herself be diverted. Resentment poured into her bloodstream. ‘I still intend to leave you the moment I get out of here,’ she said.

‘You will not.’ He was already on his feet and replacing the chair back from where he’d got it. ‘And I will tell you why.’ He sent her a cold look down the length of his arrogant nose. ‘We still have a contract to fulfil.’

Nell lifted her chin to him, green eyes wishing him dead now. ‘I signed under duress.’

‘You mean you signed without reading it.’

Because she’d loved him so much she was blind! ‘How many women would expect to be duped by both their own father and their future husband?’ she defended her own piece of stupid folly.

Xander nodded in agreement. ‘I offered to renegotiate,’ he then reminded her. ‘You turned the offer down, so the contract stands as written and signed.’

‘And all for the love of money,’ she said bitterly.

‘A loan of fifty million pounds to haul your father out of trouble is a lot of money, Nell. Have you got the resources to pay me back?’

He knew she hadn’t. The only money Nell had even a loose connection to was tied up in trusts left by her grandmother for any children Nell might have. And what her mother had left would not even pay back a tenth of what was owed to Xander.

‘But I was not referring to the money,’ he slid in smoothly. ‘I was referring to the other clause—the one which involves me protecting my investment by you providing me with my son and heir to inherit from your father.’

Effectively putting Nell right out of the inheritance loop! ‘Not with my permission.’

‘With your permission,’ he insisted. ‘And at my time of choosing …’

He came back to the bed to lean over her again, ignoring her defensive jerk as he began plumping up the pillows behind her back. ‘I have been very patient with you until now,
yenika mou
—’

‘Because you had more—interesting things to do.’

As a direct shot about Vanessa, it went wide of its mark.

‘Because,’ he corrected, ‘when we married you were nothing but a wounded babe in arms only a monster would have forced himself upon. The arrival of another man on the scene tells me I may well have been too patient with you.’ Taking her by the shoulders, he gently urged her to lie back. Then his eyes were pinning her there, relentless and hard. ‘Your growing time is up, Nell. I want a proper wife. Renege on the contract we made and I will take you, your father and your boyfriend to the cleaners and hang you all out to dry.’

‘And cause yourself a nasty scandal involving yourself, your mistress and your lousy unfaithfulness?’

‘Is that why you thought you could leave and get away with it?’ Black silk eyebrows made a mocking arch. ‘You think that because Vanessa has suddenly arrived back on the scene it gives you a tasty weapon to wield? I will let you into a little secret,’ he murmured, a taunting fingertip making a swipe of her full bottom lip before he replaced it with the casual brush of his mouth. ‘Vanessa has never been off the scene,’ he informed her smoothly. ‘I am just very discreet—usually.’

It was like being kicked while she was already down on the ground. It didn’t help that her lips had filled with soft, pulsing heat. ‘I hope you both rot in hell,’ she breathed thickly.

‘But you still want me, as that beautiful, quivering, hungry mouth is telling me.’ He smiled a very grim smile. ‘And if you were not so battered and bruised I would show you how much you want me.’

‘I—’

He saw the lie coming, the tight repudiation of his arrogant confidence, and he swooped, claiming her parted mouth and
pressing her back into the pillows. The long length of his torso followed, exerting a controlled power that stopped just short of crushing her beneath his weight. Nell felt taken over, overwhelmed, besieged. The scent of him, the heat, the way he used this kiss to demonstrate the difference between taunting and a full sexual onslaught. Hot tingles of sensation flared up from nowhere with the stabbing invasion of his tongue. Fierce heat rushed through her bloodstream, desire like she’d never known before set her groaning in protest and lifting up her hands to push at his chest.

But Xander was going nowhere, the unyielding contours of his body remaining firm as he deepened the kiss with an unhidden hunger that had Nell stretching beneath him in a wild sensual act that arched her slender shape from breasts to toes. He moved with her, a very male thigh finding a place for itself between her thighs. The bedcovers should have lessened the coiling spring of intimacy she was experiencing but did nothing of the kind.

She tried to drag in some air but found that she couldn’t. She tried to separate their mouths but he had control. His tongue slid across her tongue and set it quivering as it hungrily began to follow his lead. Nothing had prepared her for a kiss like this. A kiss that sparked senses alive in every intimate place she had. When his hand covered the arching thrust of one of her breasts she almost shattered into little pieces, writhing and gasping as the rosebud nipple stung as it tightened to push into his palm.

He muttered something, went to move away, her hands stopped pushing at his chest and slid up to bury themselves in his hair so she could hold this amazing, sensational mouth clamped to her own. She didn’t know she had the ability to behave like a wanton, but wanton she felt and wanton she acted, writhing beneath him, ignoring the many twinges of physical agony because everything else that was happening to her was oh, so much more important. When his thigh pressed into greater contact with the apex of her thighs she went up like tinder, a thick cry of pleasure coiling in her throat.

A knock sounded at the door. Xander drew back like a man bitten. Eyes like burning black coals scorched her a blistering look. Two hot streaks raked his high cheekbones; his mouth pulsed visibly even though it was suddenly stretched taut. She was panting and still clinging to his hair, the green of her eyes glazed by the stunning shock of her own loss of control.

‘This had better be your awakening,
cara
, or you’re dead,’ he blasted down at her, voice rusted by jealous desire.

Before she could construct any kind of answer he had moved away, landing on his feet beside the bed. He did not look at her again until he’d stridden to the door and grasped the handle. The pause he made then sang between them, stretched taut and raw by that final rasping threat.

He was angry—
still
angry. The kiss had been delivered in anger, the deliberate assault of angry passion that left her lying here hot and trembling, shaken to her core by her own response, her mouth, her body, her deserted breast with its stinging nipple feeling utterly, shamefully bereft.

‘Hypocrite,’ she heard herself whisper across a throat thickened by the bubble of tears to come.

The charge swung him round to lance her with a hard, glinting look. ‘And primitive with it,’ he extended grimly. ‘Forget the lover,’ he warned thinly. ‘You will not be laying eyes on him again.’

The note in his tone brought Nell upright. ‘Why—w-what have you done to him?’ she demanded in alarm.

‘As yet—nothing.’ His eyes blackened dangerously. ‘His fate rests in the future when I have more time to discover if he taught you more than just how to kiss.’