Bridal Bargains

‘If I had been worried about such a prospect I would have insisted on the relevant test to reassure myself. As it is …’ his dark head turned to study her whitened profile ‘… I already knew most of what you have just told me. I had you thoroughly investigated, you see, before I agreed to any of this. The nun’s life you have been leading since your wild rebellion eight years ago was easily discovered, which made the way you responded to me all the more intriguing …’

Her cheeks went red, and he lifted a finger to gently stroke that heated skin. ‘Only the fact that you have given birth to a child escaped my investigators. Now that,’ he added softly, ‘was a surprise.’

‘And one you are now going to use against me, I suppose.’

‘Will I need to?’

It was a challenge. Mia shivered delicately and shifted her cheek so his finger had to drop away. ‘I want my baby,’ she murmured huskily, ‘but I will not keep him at Suzanna’s expense.’

‘He doesn’t warrant the same fierce feelings of love and protection your daughter ignites in you?’

‘Yes,’ she admitted, one of her hands moving to rest on that firm mound where her new baby lay. ‘But Suzanna has paid long enough for the misfortune of having me as her mother. She deserves better and I am prepared to do anything to make sure I am in a position to give it to her.’

‘Like sleeping with a man you hold in contempt?’ he suggested. ‘Like taking any flak he might wish to throw at you, without saying a thing in your own defence? Like allowing yourself to be sent into isolation while he punishes you for his own weaknesses?’

‘So you acknowledge you have weaknesses?’

He smiled rather drily. ‘I know myself quite well,’ he answered flatly. ‘I know my weaknesses—and my strengths. I am thirty-six years old, after all,’ he added. ‘If I have not learned them by now then I truly am in danger of becoming a man like your father. That is how you see me, is it not—as a man no better than your father?’

‘You see a chunk of real estate as worth more than life itself so—yes,’ she admitted. ‘You are no better than him.’

‘And you?’ he challenged. ‘What does that make you?’

Her green eyes flashed—the first sign of life they had shown since she’d walked away from him in that sunny bedroom back at the villa. ‘I sold myself to you, not another’s life.’ She made the distinction. ‘And you bought the use of me from my father, not from me. In return he gives you your precious island while he gets what he wants—a male heir to whom he can leave his filthy money. I get Suzanna and this child as payment. So the only thing I have sold to anyone is the use of my own body. You tell me what that makes me.’ She threw the challenge right back at him.

His smile was cynical, to say the least. ‘You seem to have conveniently forgotten the five million pounds your father is paying you on delivery of his male heir,’ he drawled derisively.

Mia’s heart-shaped upper lip clamped itself tightly to her much fuller bottom lip and she looked away from him out of the window at the clear blue stretch of sky through which they were flying.

The new silence pulled at the tiny muscles in her throat and around her heart, lining the wall of her tensely held ribcage.

‘There is no money,’ he bit out suddenly. ‘You lied about the five million to throw me off the scent!’

‘I have money of my own,’ she countered defensively. ‘I don’t need money from my father.’

‘Your mother’s money.’ He nodded, surprising her with just how deeply his investigators had dug into her life. ‘She placed her money in a trust fund for you, which matured on your twenty-fifth birthday. A paltry two hundred thousand pounds,’ he added with biting contempt.

Two hundred thousand was a small fortune to most people and more than Mia had ever had access to before. She could easily live off it with a bit of careful planning. She could bring her children up, know they would want for nothing materially.

‘You know,’ he muttered, ‘you are a whore in a lot of ways.’ With an angry movement he unfastened his seat belt and stood up. ‘You sell yourself cheap and you see yourself as cheap!’

With that, he walked away, leaving her sitting there alone while she let the full thrust of his final angry words sink in.

It was getting quite late when they eventually landed, the August evening cool after the evenings Mia had grown used to back in Greece.

‘Which hospital?’ Alex asked her as they settled in the back of a chauffeur-driven Mercedes.

She told him, and he leaned forward to relay the information to their driver, who was separated from them by a tinted sheet of glass.

It was a small relief that he wasn’t making a battle out of going directly to the hospital. She knew she was tired, and knew how that tiredness w

as showing on her pale, pinched face, along with the worry and strain she was experiencing for Suzanna’s sake.

Suzanna. Her daughter. Her stomach flipped over, a frisson of anxiety shaking her system for that poor child she had never been able to claim as her own but who shared, none the less, the kind of bond with herself that really only a mother and child could share.

Mia might have been forced by circumstances to hand over her daughter to her father but he had never managed to break that bond, though he had tried—many times. ‘She’s my daughter now,’ he had announced with grim satisfaction the day the adoption papers were signed. ‘Ever be tempted to tell her who you really are and it will be the last time you will ever see her.’

Mia shivered as she sat there beside a silent Alex, remembering the choices she had been offered the day she went home to her father, frightened, desperate, destitute and carrying her new-born baby girl in her arms, to beg from the last man on earth she wanted to go crawling to.