Bridal Bargains

It was a further mark of how weakened the ugly scene had left her that she allowed herself to lean against him a little as he guided her across the hall and into the sunny sitting room. He saw

her seated on one of the pale blue sofas then seemed to hover over her, as though he was preparing to say something.

Mia kept her eyes lowered and bit deep into her trembling bottom lip, waiting tensely for the questions to come.

Yet they didn’t come. In the end Alex let out a small sigh and moved away—right out of the room, in fact—leaving her sitting there, still tense, still locked in the appalling fall-out of her own shocking confession.

Later—she wasn’t sure how much later—Sofia arrived with a tray of tea-things, which she placed on a table in front of Mia, and then disappeared without a word.

More minutes ticked by. Alex came back and paused when he saw her sitting there just as he had left her. It was he who poured out a cup of tea for her and gently placed the cup and saucer in her hand.

‘Drink,’ he commanded.

She drank like an automaton. He stood over her, and once again she could sense the questions, rattling around his head. He wasn’t a fool. He would already have worked out that if Suzanna was seven years old and Mia twenty-five then Mia had to have been very young when she’d fallen pregnant.

Seventeen years old, in fact. A small grimace touched her bloodless mouth as she lifted the cup to it. Seventeen, and her mother barely cold in her grave after killing herself in a car accident that was her own fault because she had been drinking. Her husband had driven her to look for escape from his mental cruelty in an alcoholic haze—which was still no excuse for leaving Mia alone with a father who hated her and a brother who couldn’t care less about her.

So she’d rebelled.

And what a rebellion it had been, she mocked herself now and as bitterly as she had done ever since those wild six months after her seventeenth birthday.

She’d skipped boarding school. Run away. Had got in with a crowd of young groupies who’d followed the current rock group of the time around the country. It had taken the lead singer two months to notice her, a month to take her virginity and a another month to tire of her and throw her out of his life.

So there she had been—seventeen, homeless, penniless and pregnant. By the time Suzanna was born she had hit an all-time low, but it was still a very last resort that had sent her begging to her father.

‘Drink some more.’

She glanced up to find that Alex was sitting on the sofa opposite. Her eyes quickly dropped away again, but not before they had taken in the fact that he had changed his clothes somewhere along the line. The business suit he had arrived home in had been replaced by something more casual in a pale linen fabric and a plain white T-shirt.

A sound outside brought her head up again. It was a car, drawing up at the front door. Alex stood up, came over to her and bent to remove her cup. ‘Sofia has packed for us,’ he murmured flatly. ‘All we need to do is go now. OK?’

OK? Why was he asking her if it was OK to leave when he had never bothered to ask her opinion on anything before?

It didn’t really matter now, she told herself hollowly as she nodded her head with its neatly styled hair, which should have drawn his anger but was a small detail that seemed to have passed by him unnoticed.

He went to help her rise to her feet again, but she withdrew abruptly from his touch. He was the enemy, she grimly reminded herself. You do not lean weakly on the enemy.

The journey to the airport was carried out in silence. The transfer to his private jet was achieved with the minimum of fuss, and it was only as she sat there, feeling the jet’s surge of power as it shot smoothly into the air, that it sank in that Alex was actually sitting beside her.

‘You didn’t need to come with me.’ She found her voice at last, frail and constricted though it was. ‘I will come back just as soon as Suzanna is feeling better.’

He didn’t answer. His lean, dark face was a closed book as he sat there, gazing directly ahead. Not piloting the plane himself this time, she noted. Not doing anything but sitting here, lost deep within his own grim train of thought.

Tears filled her eyes. She didn’t know why. They just did. Then almost directly out of the rubble in which her emotions lay, her chin rose in what had become a familiar habit to those who had been around her during the last few months. Her bloodless mouth straightened and her tear-washed eyes cleared.

‘I am not a whore.’

Why she said that was just as big a surprise to her as the tears were that had preceded it.

‘You announce yourself in those terms,’ Alex quietly replied. ‘I have never used the term to you.’

‘You don’t need to. I can hear it screaming at me every time you look at me.’

From the corner of her eye she saw his grim mouth twist. ‘You are your own salesman,’ he said. ‘Don’t blame others for believing what you place in front of them.’

Was that true? she wondered, then sighed because she decided it was most probably very true and that she did present herself as the kind of cool-headed mercenary who would have sold her body for the proverbial pot of gold.

‘Well, just in case you’re worrying that I might have passed on some dreadful social disease with my whoring ways, I think I had better reassure you that there have only been two men in my life who have used my body—Suzanna’s father was one of them, and you the other.’