Bridal Bargains

The child didn’t move. She was still too heavily sedated to be aware of anything that was going on around her. But that didn’t stop Mia talking gently to her, murmuring the kind of reassuring phrases a mother seemed to find instinctively.

Maybe the child did hear within the fluffy clouds of her own subconscious because something seemed to alter about her. Her slender limbs lost a tension that hadn’t been apparent until it had eased away and her pale, rather thin face seemed to gain some colour.

As silently as he had observed everything, Alex observed the change in the child also, and just as silently he walked out of the little room and left them to it, sensitive enough—no matter how Mia believed the opposite about him—to

know he was intruding on something private.

He came back an hour later and, after pausing in the doorway to frown at the look of exhaustion straining Mia’s features, he stepped forward and touched her shoulder. He waited for and received the expected start that confirmed to him that she had forgotten his presence.

‘It’s time to go,’ he said quietly. ‘We will return tomorrow, but you need to rest now if you don’t want to end up too tired to be of any use to her.’

A protest leapt to her lips—then hovered for a moment before it was left unsaid. He was right, she conceded. She was so utterly weary she could barely function. So, without a word, she stood up, bent to the child’s cheek then straightened, and without so much as a glance at him she turned and walked out of the room.

As soon as she was settled in the car again her head went back against the leather headrest and her tired eyes closed.

‘You are very alike,’ Alex remarked quietly. ‘Does she have your colour eyes, too?’

‘Mmm.’ Mia didn’t want to talk—didn’t even want to think very much. Relief was, at this moment, playing the biggest role in making her feel so exhausted. She had travelled from Greece to the hospital in a state of high nervous tension, not knowing what she was going to find when she got there. Now she had reassured herself that Suzanna was going to be all right it seemed to make everything else deflate inside her.

‘Has no one ever made the natural connection between the two of you?’ Alex persisted. ‘It seems impossible to me not to consider a stronger bond than sisterhood when the likeness is so strikingly obvious.’

‘My brother had the same colouring,’ she explained. ‘People suspected Suzanna was my brother’s child but not mine because I was so young when I had her.’

‘I thought you told me your father did not believe you were his daughter.’ He frowned. ‘But if you and your brother have the same colouring, surely he has to accept the blood connection somewhere?’

‘We have the same mother,’ she said. ‘Exactly who it was that fathered us was a different thing entirely.’

‘And a son was easier for your father to accept as his own than a mere daughter,’ he concluded grimly, ‘because it suited him to accept a son where, because of his bigotry, he didn’t need to accept the daughter.’

‘Now you’re catching on,’ Mia said very drily. ‘If you want the full truth of it, I don’t think my father is capable of fathering children,’ she announced quite detachedly. ‘More to the point, I think he knows it, which is why he set you and me up for this kind of deal when he could, at his age and with his money, have quite easily got himself another wife and produced a dozen more sons of his own. What’s more,’ she added, ‘I think my mother was unfaithful to him from the day she married him.’

It was another confession that managed to shock her simply because she was actually telling it to Alex of all men.

‘She came from a very socially acceptable family that had lost most of its money to inheritance tax. My father wanted to be accepted by that society so he bought himself into it, by marrying my mother. He wanted very socially acceptable sons to carry on his name for him, but when she didn’t produce them he began to get nasty, calling her all those unpleasant names people can call women who don’t have children easily. So she went out and got herself a lover. Conceived a child—though she was never absolutely sure whether either of her children belonged to her husband or her lover because she continued to sleep with both of them right up until the moment she managed to kill herself.’

‘And the lover?’

‘He died of cancer a couple of years ago,’ Mia said, then added reluctantly. ‘He was Karl Dansing, the electronics magnate.’

There was a stifled gasp of shock from the man beside her. ‘Are you trying to tell me,’ he murmured gruffly, ‘that you could be Karl Dansing’s daughter?’

‘Does that impress you?’ Mia drawled. ‘Well, don’t go off the deep end about it,’ she said mockingly before he could say anything further. ‘As father figures go, neither impress me much. Karl Dansing must have known that Tony and I could have been his children but he never once owned up to it while he was alive, and didn’t even give us a mention in his will.’

‘But—.’

‘Look—’ She sighed wearily. ‘Can we stop the inquisition, please? I’m too tired to deal with it and just too indifferent to want to talk about it! If you want to know anything else, put your investigators to work,’ she suggested grimly. ‘I’m sure they will come up with something juicy for you if you pay them well enough!’

With that, she closed her eyes firmly again, aware that she sounded embittered by her own sordid history. After all, who wanted to claim as parents the kind of people she had just described? She certainly didn’t. Even spoiled, selfish, supremely avaricious Tony hadn’t. ‘I’ll make do with what I’ve got,’ he’d said to her once when Karl Dansing’s name had come up. ‘He may be worth a hell of a lot more than Jack but he has four other kids to share his money, whereas I’ll be getting the whole lot from Jack one day.’

Only he hadn’t got anything in the end, had he? Because Tony had died very much the same way their mother had died—in a car accident, while driving too fast with a skinful of booze and heaven alone knew what else.

She still missed him. Oddly and surprisingly, considering his selfish view of life. But they had shared a kind of affection for each other. And Tony had been good to Suzanna. In his own way she suspected he had even loved the child, which was enough for Mia to forgive him his other faults.

Suzanna …

Her mind drifted back to that poor, defenceless child she had left sleeping in her hospital bed. All at once depression swept over her. What was she going to do? she wondered fretfully. How was she going to bring herself to leave Suzanna again when Alex decided it was time to go back to Greece?

A more urgent question was how long he was going to let her stay here. A couple of days? A week? Maybe two, if she was lucky?