The Billionaire's Trophy (12 page)

‘I’ll stay here tonight. We’ll leave in the morning,’ Bastian told her forcefully.

‘You can’t just bully me into travelling to Greece with you!’ Emmie exclaimed, not knowing whether to laugh or cry at his attitude.

‘I’m not trying to bully you. I’m asking you to put the needs of our children first. At the very least we need to establish a more civilised connection.’

There was a lot of truth in that statement, Emmie acknowledged uneasily. Having a contentious relationship with the father of her children was a very bad idea but she did not know if she could change the way she felt about Bastian or forgive him for not feeling the same way about her. She wanted too much and he wanted too little, she conceded unhappily.

‘All right, I’ll think about Greece,’ Emmie muttered tightly.

‘I’ll make the arrangements—’

‘Look, when the heck did “I’ll think about it” turn into agreement?’ Emmie stormed back at him, out of all patience with his arrogance.

Bastian stared broodingly back at her, the full intensity of his aggressive temperament in that charged appraisal. Electric heat sizzled through Emmie and she flushed, mortified by the way he affected her even when he was demonstrating his least attractive traits. On the other hand maybe if she gave a little, he would as well, because she didn’t think that with the twins on the way it was wise to be at odds with him. After all, mightn’t her attitude have a bad effect on his future relationship with her children? That, she acknowledged hollowly, was a major responsibility to carry, particularly when she was all too well aware how wounding she had found her own father’s indifference to her existence. She definitely didn’t want her children to undergo the same paternal rejection because she had created a problematic relationship with Bastian. Hadn’t her mother done that with her father? Her parents had had a very bitter breakup and divorce and that reality had poisoned her father’s attitude to his daughters as well. He had found it easier to walk away from
all
of them, not only his ex-wife.

‘OK, I’ll go to Greece,’ Emmie agreed abruptly on the back of that final depressing thought. ‘I’ll show you up to your room.’

His room,
not
hers. Bastian watched the ripe curve of Emmie’s hips going up the stairs, unwillingly allowing that his hopes of an immediate dropping of all barriers had been rather too optimistic. She wanted him to work at things, relationship things, and Bastian had never worked at anything like that in his whole life. Women had always worked to please him, to fit
his
expectations, not the other way round. He gritted his even white teeth at what seemed like a memory from the far distant past for he could see that pleasing him was not even on Emmie’s agenda. It bothered him that he didn’t even know what she wanted from him. He was doing his best but so far he had not got any points for trying, he reflected angrily. She hadn’t noticed one blasted positive thing he had done so far, so why was he bothering? The answer to that question came fast: he didn’t
know
, he just knew he couldn’t leave her alone.

Emmie showed Bastian into one of the guest rooms her sister Kat had always kept prepared for guests. She studied his bold bronzed profile from below her lashes, reckoning there was no escape from feeding him as well while wondering why he brought out such a mean streak in her. Did she want him to go hungry? After all, it wasn’t his fault that he hadn’t fallen madly in love with her, was it? That was something that either happened or didn’t happen. And unlike her estranged father, Bastian was already determined to make a major effort to be a parent from the start, well, before the twins were even born.

‘There’s hot water if you want a shower,’ Emmie told him, belatedly wondering if she was trying to be hostess of the year a little too late. ‘You can join me for dinner in an hour. It’ll be a change to have company. My younger sister is only here for school holidays. She stays with Kat and Mikhail in London now if she leaves school to come home for the weekend.’

Bastian supposed she was offering him an olive branch of sorts and had a sudden recollection of that written apology on her hand way back at the start of their acquaintance. He almost smiled but the strained look in her bright blue eyes made him tense up instead.

* * *

‘What did you say?’ Emmie prompted Bastian in a nervous whisper, her cheeks burning after he had finished addressing his household staff, who had assembled in the big hall to greet their arrival. The official line-up struck her as incredibly Edwardian in style and thoroughly intimidated her. To be fair, she thought unhappily, it was embarrassing enough to reappear on the island on Bastian’s arm while toting an enormous pregnant stomach, but it was even worse when absolutely everyone else was pointedly avoiding looking in that direction.

‘Why?’ Bastian asked shortly as he guided her up the main staircase with a firm hand at her back. Emmie wondered if he feared that she was so big upfront that she might over-balance and fall over backwards like a beached whale, and then scolded herself for being so self-critical.
You’re very pregnant with twins, get over it,
she told herself in exasperation.

‘I’m curious,’ Emmie admitted.

‘I told them that you’re in charge here now—’

‘You did...
what
?’ Emmie stopped dead to exclaim in astonishment.

Bastian frowned. ‘I didn’t want anyone wondering about what your status was here and I want you to receive the very best attention possible from my staff.’

‘But I’m not the mistress here...or wife or whatever!’ Emmie argued.

‘Do we need a label for you? To all intents and purposes you are the most important woman I’ve ever had in my life,’ Bastian countered. ‘You’re expecting my children.’

‘I can’t possibly be the
most
important woman...I mean, what about your mother?’

‘Apart from the fact that I’d have a problem if she was still the most important woman at my age,’ Bastian quipped, ‘what about her?’

‘Is she still alive?’

‘Yes. She lives in Italy and I only see her if she wants money.’

Emmie’s brow furrowed. ‘That’s sad, Bastian. Are you sure you’re not misjudging her?’

‘Remind yourself of what your mother was willing to do to you in the name of profit,’ Bastian commented with considerable cynicism. ‘As the son of a woman even more mercenary than Odette, I know what I’m talking about.’

That reminder about Odette’s greed struck home but Emmie gave him a troubled look, dismayed by his outlook. ‘Why do you think your mother’s like that?’

Bastian sighed as he threw wide the door of the room where Emmie had stayed on her previous visit to his home. ‘Why are you interested?’

Emmie thought fast and hard, desperate to come up with an unemotional angle to conceal her revealing hunger for every detail she could glean about Bastian and his background. ‘Your mother will be my children’s grandmother.’

‘But Cinzia will never visit your children. Even when I was a little boy she found the idea of being seen with a child as “too aging”,’ he retorted drily. ‘She’s very vain and will never accept being a grandparent. She was a film star when my father met her but her earning power was fading because she was getting older. She married him because she needed a meal ticket and when she got tired of him, she divorced him in a process that took half of everything he possessed.’

Emmie winced as a servant settled her cases down in the beautifully appointed bedroom and withdrew. ‘Nasty.’

‘His ego battered, my father found comfort in the arms of his secretary instead,’ Bastian continued even more drily. ‘The secretary got pregnant and he married her within weeks of his divorce from my mother being granted.’

‘Oh dear,’ Emmie remarked a good deal less securely as she wondered if he saw a dangerous parallel in that development between past and present: his father had married a woman because she fell pregnant by him and clearly it hadn’t worked out.

‘She was Nessa’s mother and the only decent woman my father ever married,’ Bastian explained wryly. ‘But because my father wasn’t in
love
with her...’ contempt edged his tone as he voiced that particular word ‘...he thought it was acceptable to start an affair with the woman who became his third wife.’

‘Then I gather that Nessa’s mother didn’t last long?’

‘Two years.’

Emmie recalled Nessa telling her that her mother had been the only stepmother who was kind to Bastian and, considering his own mother had not set a good example of maternal affection, she found it sad that his father’s marriage to Nessa’s mother had been so brief. ‘And wife number three?’

‘Had one affair after another. My father hit the bottle hard before he finally got shot of her.’

‘He sounds—’

‘Foolish?’ Bastian scorned.

‘I was going to say vulnerable. I mean, he kept on trying so hard to find a happy relationship.’

‘Only the grass on the other side of the fence was always greener and he couldn’t content himself,’ Bastian completed grimly. ‘Wife number four spent most of her time trying to get
me
into bed because younger men gave her a buzz.’

That revelation made Emmie turn pink. ‘That must have been ghastly.’

‘While that marriage went on, I spent a lot of time at my grandfather’s house—I was only eighteen,’ Bastian admitted flatly, staring out of the bedroom window, broad shoulders rigid. ‘Tragically my father’s fourth marriage literally killed him. He came home unexpectedly one day and overheard his wife trying to seduce me. He got back into his car and crashed it into a tree a few miles down the road. The happy widow got what was left of my father’s estate, which wasn’t much. His marriages had virtually bankrupted him.’

‘With a family history like that I’m surprised you were even considering getting married,’ Emmie confided truthfully.

Bastian turned away from the window, tall, darkly handsome and intensely charismatic. His dark eyes glittered like gleaming gold ingots in sunlight. ‘But unlike my father I didn’t have any stupid ideas about love having anything to do with marriage...’

Emmie was relieved to think that Bastian had not been in love with Lilah, but his words and his attitude certainly didn’t offer
her
much room for hope that he might develop such feelings for her in the future. ‘Have you ever been in love?’ she asked baldly, reasoning that subtlety was wasted on Bastian.

‘In lust many times,’ Bastian quipped. ‘In love...never. I’m probably too practical.’

So, at the very least he must have been in lust with Lilah, Emmie assumed uneasily, and she certainly couldn’t blame him for that because his ex-fiancée was exquisitely easy on the eye. ‘I fell in love when I was at university,’ she heard herself admit.

Unaccustomed to such personal conversations with a woman, Bastian dealt her a disconcerted look.

Emmie compressed her lush mouth. ‘It turned out that Toby was only with me because he had a poster of my sister the supermodel on his bedroom wall—she was his fantasy and I was just the closest he could get to her,’ she related ruefully.

‘What a fool when you’re even more beautiful,’ Bastian breathed huskily.

‘I’m not more beautiful than Saffy,’ Emmie protested.

‘I think you are,’ Bastian admitted, his dark gaze roaming over her lovely face. ‘You’re more natural, not all made up and artificial like your sibling.’

Without warning and for the first time in her life, Emmie found herself laughing at a comparison being made that could not leave her feeling inadequate. ‘Well, I’m certainly not anywhere near as well groomed as my sister,’ she conceded with a smile. ‘She always looks perfect.’

Bastian rested lean brown hands on her slim shoulders, gazing down at her with smouldering heat in his heavily fringed dark golden eyes. ‘I don’t want or need perfect,
khriso mou.’

Emmie stiffened, suddenly unsure of what should happen next, wanting him with every skin cell in her treacherous body but conscious that intimacy would plunge her deeper into a relationship that had no safe boundaries to protect her from hurt. ‘Bastian...er—’

Long brown fingers brushed her cheekbone in a lazy caress and he kissed her with hungry driving urgency. Her heart hammered so fast she was scared it would burst out of her chest. The glorious swell of emotion and sensation that only he could give her was waiting in the wings like a terrible temptation, making nonsense of her firm conviction that she could take care of herself. For a split second she wanted Bastian so much it was terrifying, her body kindling like dry twigs touched by a flame, senses awakening with a surge of slumberous intensity. Her breasts stirred beneath her clothing, full and swollen and ripe for his touch, an ache biting deep in her pelvis to leave a sense of hollowness in its wake.

‘I should unpack,’ she said breathlessly, drawing back in a movement that demanded every atom of her self-discipline while her glance briefly skimmed over the door that led into Bastian’s bedroom, and she wondered how long she could possibly keep her distance from him.

In a rare act for a male in the grip of fierce arousal, Bastian backed off several steps, lean, strong face taut and flushed. Emmie was in Greece, on the island of Treikos, safely beneath his roof, and that was enough for one day, he reflected ruefully, apprehensive for the first time ever of making a wrong move with a woman.

Conscious of the tension in the air, Emmie coloured and turned aside to her luggage. Her legs were shaking, her rebellious body screaming with tight, strained nerve endings and she was ashamed of her weakness. Somehow it had not occurred to her that Bastian might still exert that much physical power over her even when she was several months pregnant. Where he was concerned, she badly needed an off switch.

Four days later, Nessa arrived for the weekend and mortified Emmie straight away by walking out to the terrace where Emmie and Bastian were having lunch and saying cheerfully, ‘So, when’s the wedding?’

Bastian frowned. ‘What wedding?’ he queried, standing up to pull out a chair for his sister.

Nessa simply laughed. ‘
Your
wedding, of course,’ she said teasingly, studying the pair of them with amused brown eyes.