Bridal Bargains

‘And I am not giving you the choice to pull out,’ he coldly shot back as he began walking towards her.

And—surprise, surprise! Claire mocked herself caustically—the ice was back like the loyal little friend it had always been to him!

‘So listen to me, Claire, because I mean what I say …’ He arrived by the bed, his tone deep with warning.

She buried her face in her knees again because she just couldn’t bear to look him in the face this close to. He sighed harshly as if he knew exactly why she was hiding away like that.

‘Our arrangement still stands as formerly agreed,’ he grimly insisted, sounding insultingly as though he were chairing a business meeting. ‘And although I know this development has—complicated things between us slightly nothing has really changed.’

Nothing has changed? What about me? Claire wanted to yell at him. What about the wretched change you’ve brought about in me? ‘If you don’t stop talking to me like a damned computer, I am likely to start screaming,’ she breathed in seething fury.

He swung away from her—then back again, the action seeming to ignite his own fury. ‘For the love of God, Claire!’ he rasped. ‘I am trying my best to be sensible amongst all of this—’

‘Carnage,’ she supplied for him when he bit back whatever choice of word he had been going to offer.

‘Yes,’ he hissed, seeming to accept that this was indeed carnage—which only made her hurt all the harder. ‘But I can absolutely assure you this is not going to happen again. So we will go on as agreed. The marriage of convenience stands. I will take Melanie as my daughter. And you will still be free to get on with your own life unhindered by me just as soon as you are ready to. But if you think,’ he then added very seriously, ‘that I am going to let you break my grandmother’s heart in her final days, by walking away from our deal, then you are heading for trouble. For I don’t take defeat on the chin like a gentleman. I fight back and I fight dirty.’

He meant it, too. Claire could hear the ruthless ice of intent threading every single word. She shivered; he saw it happen and seemed to take that as a gesture of acquiescence because he stepped back from the bed.

‘Now I am going downstairs,’ he announced less harshly—trying, Claire assumed, to defuse the tension simmering between them now he had made his point. ‘Where I will make a very Greek joke about temperamental females with more spirit than any poor mortal male could possibly hope to deal with. And I will see you again in the morning.’

As he walked towards her door, Claire lifted her head to watch him leave with bitterness in her eyes. He turned unexpectedly, catching her looking at him, and she was trapped, caught by a pair of devil-black eyes that held knowledge of her no one else did. It hurt her, knowing that he now knew her so very intimately while she still felt she didn’t know him at all, even after what they had just done to each other here in this bed.

‘Will you be all right?’ he questioned huskily.

‘Yes,’ she nodded, and wished he would just hurry up and go so she could curl up and weep her heart out.

Yet still he lingered with those dark eyes flickering restlessly over her. ‘Shall I send Althea up to help you—do whatever it is you need her for?’ he then offered, wafting a descriptive finger at her plaster-cast.

‘I can manage.’ She quietly refused the offer.

He nodded and turned back to the door then opened it while Claire held her breath in suffocating anticipation of his finally getting out of here.

But almost immediately he changed his mind and closed the door, though he did not turn to face her again. Stiff, tense, almost pompous in his delivery, he then had the gall to murmur gruffly, ‘I would hate you to think that I do not appreciate the—honour you bestowed on me tonight. It was—’

‘Will you just go?’ Claire coldly interrupted, not wanting to know what it was.

He nodded, taking the hint. And this time when the door opened and closed again he was on the other side of it.

And at last Claire could do what she wanted to do, which was curl up in a tight ball on her side and sob her wretched heart out.

After the storm was over, she made herself get up, tape a plastic bag to her plaster-cast, then stood beneath the shower for long minutes, simply letting the heated sting of the water wash away the lingering pangs of emotion the tears hadn’t cried away.

After putting on one of her new silk nightdresses, she began picking up his clothes and folding them neatly before taking them through to his room, reasonably sure she was not going to walk in on him.

Like her own room, his was lit by only a single small lamp left burning on the bedside table. In fact, in almost every way the room was a match to hers, she noticed—except his bed didn’t look as if war had taken place in it, she thought with a small shudder as she laid the clothes down on the smooth pale grey counterpane then walked back into her own room to eye with distaste her tumbled bed.

An honour, he had called it. She called it a waste of something so very precious and she knew there was no way she could sleep in this bed again tonight.

Tears back and burning, with an angry jerk, she turned away from the wretched bed and walked across the room

to the soft-cushioned sofa, where she curled herself up, then closed her eyes tightly in a grimly determined effort to shut the last dreadful hour right out of her head.

Surprisingly she slept, though she hadn’t really expected to be able to switch her mind off as easily as that. Moreover, she slept long and heavily, and awoke the next morning vaguely aware of half surfacing only once during the night when she’d been dreaming that she was being carried.

It had been a disturbing sensation. Strangely painful though not in a physical way, she recalled as she lay there watching the morning sunlight draw patterns on the ceiling via the white voile drapes covering the windows.

‘Don’t cry,’ an unbelievably gentle voice echoed inside her head.