Bridal Bargains

‘Matinée-idol material.’ His hand left her back.

He really was jealous. Nell smiled into the now crumpled tissue. Then he uttered another one of those sighs and tried to pull her back down to him but Nell refused to go.

‘I want to go to Rosemere,’ she announced.

‘I want you here with me.’

Just like that, quietly spoken but deadly serious. Nell turned to look at him and found those jet-glossed eyes roaming over her with blatant messages.

It wasn’t fair. She looked away again as a whole gamut of weak sensations went sweeping through her. ‘I’ll stay married to you until the baby comes.’

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘But afterwards we get a divorce.’

‘You need another tissue, agape mou. That one is just about done.’

‘I’m being serious!’

‘So am I. You are about to start weeping again and that tissue has mopped up too many tears as it is.’

And those tears just returned all the harder. ‘I can’t seem to switch them off,’ she sobbed.

‘Come here.’ This time he refused to take no for an answer so she landed in the crook of his arm. ‘You are just in need of some tender loving care right now.’

‘Not from you.’

‘Yes, from me. Who else have you got?’

It was so brutally frank that she winced.

‘Tell me why the call you made to Marcel today was traced to Paris.’

‘He’s been staying with the French side of his family. I knew he was flying back to Banff today so I wanted to catch him and doubly reassure him that I was OK before he left.’

‘Was he reassured?’

Nell nodded but kept her mouth clamped tightly shut as to how she had given that reassurance.

‘I would like to have listened in on that call,’ Xander drawled with lazy amusement.

He knew, the beast. He knew she’d convinced Marcel that she was gloriously, happily in love with her husband.

‘I thought you had meetings to attend,’ she prompted.

‘I am attending to you.’

‘Well, I can—’

‘Remain right where you are.’ Tightening the hold he had on her, he rose up until he had her pinned to the bed. ‘I am the control freak,’ he murmured huskily. ‘Be controlled or watch me get upset.’

Green eyes searched gently mocking dark ones. He was gorgeous—irresistible. He kissed her—lightly on both corners of her vulnerable mouth, on the warm, soft, tear-swollen bottom lip then tracked a whole line of soft kisses along her jaw until he reached that sensitive spot by her ear. Things she did not want to happen started to happen. Nell quivered out a sigh of discontent. He caught it, tasted it with his tongue and she felt the blunt jut of his desire thicken against her thigh.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want—’

To do this, she was going to say but the moment she opened her mouth to speak the gentle dart of his tongue stole the rest away. With the arrival of his fingers across her cheekbones he deepened that kiss, making love to her mouth with a slow tenderness that had her shifting restlessly beneath his weight. Each time he paused he looked deep into the conflict taking place in her eyes, if she tried to say anything he returned to the kiss until eventually she forgot what it was she wanted to protest about. Her fingers shifted, relaxing out of the tense fists she had them clenched in to begin a slow foray across the leanness of his taut hips to his waist and eventually with a slow, shuddering sigh over warm flesh covered by cool white shirting to his shoulders, his neck and with a final convulsive move buried them in his hair.

She was lost, his for the taking. The duvet was pushed aside. The only time he allowed her to think was those few too brief seconds he required to remove the rest of her clothes and even then the moment she showed signs of protesting he was back again, smothering out everything but him and what he was doing and how he was making her feel.