Bridal Bargains

He had them both out of the door before Mia could react. The dire threat in his words filled her with such a dark sense of impending horror that her legs went from beneath her. She slumped down beside Suzanna and pulled the little girl close to her breast.

He couldn’t mean what she feared he’d meant, she told herself desperately. Alex wouldn’t break a confidence and tell her father that he knew about Suzanna, would he?

Oh, please, she prayed as she held the little girl even closer. Please don’t let him say anything stupid!

‘Daddy hates me,’ Suzanna whispered painfully.

‘No, he doesn’t, darling,’ Mia said soothingly. ‘He just doesn’t know how to love anyone, that’s all.’

It was the truth. Her father was incapable of loving anyone. The man was a single-minded egotist who measured his own strength in his ability to close his heart to others. He had done it with her mother, with his children and with all his competitors when he’d squeezed them dry without conscience. He saw himself as omnipotent, his only regret in life being the loss of his son to carry on his name even if he hadn’t been his blood heir. To Jack Frazier that hadn’t mattered so long as Tony bore his name.

Now he had to accept second best in a child who would bear the name of its father and not its grandfather, but it was written into the contract he had drawn up with Alex that the child Mia carried would be given the second name of Frazier. For Jack Frazier, that was going to be good enough for him to bequeath his millions.

He made her sick. The whole filthy situation made her sick! The sooner it was over the sooner she could begin to wash her life clean again.

Alex didn’t come back. Mia spent the rest of the afternoon worrying about what he’d said to her father. By the time Carol arrived, with Leon in tow, she felt so tired and wretched she was more than ready to leave.

But Suzanna was still feeling the effects of Jack Frazier’s visit, and at least Carol’s bright chatter helped to lift the child’s mood again. Leon was quiet but,

then, he always was. He glanced often at Mia who had removed herself to the window and stood there, gazing out with a bleakness that isolated her from the rest of those present.

While Carol was sitting on the bed, drawing a bold picture in Suzanna’s sketch book, Leon came over to stand beside Mia.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked quietly.

It surprised her enough to glance at him. ‘Tired, that’s all.’ She tried a smile and almost made it happen before she was turning to stare out of the window again.

‘Alex was coming back to get you himself, but something came up only he could deal with. He asked me to ask you if you would mind waiting until he gets in tonight before you retire because he has something important he wishes to discuss with you.’

Something to do with her father? Mia wondered fretfully, and gave a nod of acquiescence.

‘Thank you.’ Politely Leon moved away from her again. He didn’t like her, Mia knew. He resented the pressure her father had used on his brother. He resented her presence in his brother’s life.

Back at the house, Mia found enough energy from somewhere to help Carol prepare dinner, then sat and ate with them in the dining room, though she felt like an intruder. But it was either eat with them or go to her room and eat alone, which would have been rude in the extreme. By the time they had cleared away after the meal, and Alex still hadn’t put in an appearance, Mia couldn’t take the tension any longer and excused herself with an apology.

‘I just can’t keep awake any longer,’ she explained. ‘I’m so sorry.’

She had just climbed wearily into bed when the bedroom door opened. Alex looks less than his usually immaculate self was the first anxious thought to hit her. He needed a shave and his clothes looked decidedly the worse for wear. His hair was rumpled, as if he had been raking impatient fingers through it.

‘I’m sorry I’m so late,’ he said, when he saw she was awake, ‘but this could not wait until the morning.’

He closed the door and continued to stand there for a few moments, his tired face brooding as he studied the pensive way she was sitting in bed, banked by snowy white pillows, waiting for him to say what he had to say.

Then he sighed—heavily. ‘Look, do you mind if I take a quick shower before we talk?’ he asked tiredly.

‘N-no, of course not,’ she replied, but she would have preferred him just to get on and say what he had to because she didn’t like the grim mood he was in, and she needed to know what he had discussed with her father. But he had already walked off into the bathroom, leaving her sitting there trapped in an electric state of tension.

True to his word, though, he was back in minutes. He had showered and shaved and looked marginally less weary, though no less grim, wrapped in a blue towelling bathrobe that left too much naked golden flesh on show for her comfort because her imagination was suddenly conjuring up images that set her over-sensitive breasts tingling and made that place between her thighs begin to throb.

Her knees came up, her arms loosely wrapping around them in an instinctive act of defensive protection for those susceptible parts of her body. But her eyes never left him as he came over to the bed and sat down on it beside her, the tension seeming to sing loud in the quietness of the softly lit bedroom.

‘What’s wrong, Alex?’ Mia asked anxiously, unable to hold the question back any longer.

His dark eyes flicked up and clashed with hers, then he smiled a rather rueful smile at her that did nothing for her equilibrium. ‘Nothing,’ he assured her, then went silent, those deceptively languid eyes of his studying her worried face for a few moments before he eventually went on, ‘Nothing that you need worry about, anyway …’

He did a strange thing then. He reached up to touch her hair, gently combing it away from her cheek and one creamy shoulder. The electricity in the air sharpened, sprinkling that well-remembered static all around her. Her heart began to race, those two over-active parts of her body sending her another jolt that reminded her just how irresistible she found this man.

‘I have to return to Greece,’ he announced, making her blink and forcing her to come back from wherever she had flown off to—bringing reality tumbling back into perspective. ‘I expect to be gone for about three weeks.’