Bridal Bargains

‘Efharisto,’ he murmured as she put one of the cups of coffee down in front of him.

She managed a brief upward glance at his face before turning away again.

‘Stay,’ he husked, showering her in tingling tremors. ‘Sit down, relax, drink your coffee. I will be only a few more moments here.’

Sit down, relax, drink your coffee, Nell repeated silently and sank into the chair by his desk and wondered why she was still feeling so at odds with him when everything had been explained—hadn’t it?

He was talking in Greek, she noticed, sitting up now and swinging his chair slightly with his eyes lowered to where a set of long fingers hit intermittently at the computer keyboard lying on the desk. His deep voice was quiet, asking low key questions with no hint of sharp command evident, as if someone had switched off his normal incisiveness.

The phone went quietly back on its rest. Strumming silence followed. Nell felt it so deeply inside that she tensed.

He picked up his coffee cup and looked down into it. ‘How much belladonna?’

‘Two spoonfuls,’ she answered.

‘Still not forgiven, then.’ He grimaced a wry smile at her then lifted the cup to his lips and drank. The way that he did it was so much like a man willing to take his poison that she shot like a bullet to her feet.

‘Stop it,’ she stabbed at him.

‘Stop what?’ He looked at her.

‘Making a joke of it.’

‘Of what?’

‘All of that—stuff we’ve got through today.’

‘Are we through it?’

She frowned at the question, her tightening nerve-ends forcing her to discard her coffee-cup before she spilled it down herself. ‘Y-your mother is your mother.’

‘Is that supposed to make some sense to me?’

‘Sh-she is what she is and you have to accept that.’

‘I do—as much as I can do,’ he reminded her. ‘Next problem.’

The way he said it as if she was in a business meeting made her start to seethe. She jerked round to face the other way. ‘I don’t like you.’ That was a problem, she thought. ‘Sometimes …’ she then added grudgingly because it was crazy to deny that she liked him in bed—loved him in bed.

Loved him all the time, she extended unhappily, but loving didn’t have anything to do with liking, did it?

‘You hurt people and don’t seem to care when you’re doing it.’

‘Are we still discussing my mother?’

‘No—me,’ she said huskily.

Silence met that announcement. Nell folded her arms beneath her breasts and stared down at her feet.

‘You should have told me the truth about Vanessa.’

‘You should have told me the truth about Marcel.’

‘That was different.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he wasn’t an issue when you married me. Vanessa was and once you knew it you should have told me the truth straight away instead of letting me spend the next twelve months imagining you in her arms instead of mine!’