Marriage at His Convenience

‘Amber, we have had some great times together, but now it is over, it has to be. I have reached the age—’ he walked away from her, pacing the length of the room ‘—when it is time for me to settle down. I want a wife, a family, a home, and Christina is going to give me all that.’ Then, spinning on his heel, he walked slowly back towards her.

‘You’re bright and ambitious, I know you have a brilliant future ahead of you. But, for me, Christina is the answer. You understand.’

The numbness that had protected her for the past few hours vanished. He was ripping her heart to shreds with every word he spoke. ‘No, no, I don’t.’ She raised her eyes to meet his. ‘I thought we were a couple, and that this was our home.’ Even as she said the words, she saw the gleam of cynical amusement in his dark eyes as he glanced around the room and back at Amber.

‘Oh, come on, Amber, don’t play the innocent, it does not suit you. This was never meant to be a home, a living area with an open-galleried bedroom and a sybaritic bathroom. Could you see me entertaining my family and friends in this place?’ One dark brow arched sardonically. ‘I think not…’

Amber exploded; her hand swung in a wide arc and smashed across his face. ‘I should have done that last night,’ she yelled. ‘You arrogant, conceited, two-timing

bastard.’

Lucas raised a hand to his cheek, and rubbed where she had hit him. ‘Perhaps I deserved that, so I’ll let you get away with it, Amber, but only once,’ he declared grimly. ‘Accept it is over between us and move on. I have.’

She watched the dark stain appear on his cheek where she had hit him, and immediately regretted her action. Involuntarily she raised her hand, intending to stroke the side of his face, but her wrist was caught in an iron grip. ‘No.’

She moved forward and lifted her other hand to rest on the soft wool sweater covering his broad chest. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. But the familiar feel of his hard muscles beneath her fingers sent shivers of delight arcing though her body. She loved this man with all her heart, and helplessly she tilted back her head and looked up into his darkly attractive face. ‘Please, Lucas.’ She felt him stiffen, and she moved even closer, and slid her hand up over his chest and around the nape of his neck.

‘We are so good together, Lucas, you know we are.’ It had been two long months since she had felt the warmth of his caress and she ached for him. Suddenly she was fighting for her man, and using every skill at her disposal. She saw his pupils dilate as her breasts brushed against his hard chest, and involuntarily her fingers trailed with tactile delight up through the hair at the back of his neck. ‘Kiss me, Lucas, you know you want to.’ Gently she urged his head down towards her eager lips.

‘No, Amber.’ His large hands gripped her shoulders to push her away just as she brushed her lips against his, the tip of her tongue darting out to gain access to his mouth. She heard the intake of his breath as his arms jerked her to him and their bodies met in searing contact, and she was lost in the dark, heady hunger of the kiss for an instant, before his hands caught her shoulders and he forced her back at arm’s length.

Lucas Karadines didn’t like the way she affected him. His dark eyes glittered dangerously. His own mother had been addicted to sex, one lover after another until she’d died. Her last lover had kicked a young boy of thirteen out on the street. So he fought the temptation and won. ‘You are a very sexy lady, Amber, but I am not such a bastard as to take what you’re offering. It’s over.’

‘But if you want a wife, why not me? I love you, Lucas, and I thought you loved me,’ Amber pleaded, raising an unsteady hand and tenderly brushing a few black silky strands of his hair from his brow. ‘I could give you children, anything you want.’ She was laying her heart, her life, on the line, begging him. She had lost all pride, all anger, and she didn’t care. She looked deep into his dark eyes, her own beseeching his. She thought she saw a flicker of uncertainty in the depths of his, but she was mistaken.

‘No, Amber.’ A grim smile twisted the corners of his sensual mouth. ‘I never lied to you—I never once mentioned love.’

His words lashed her like a whip flailing her alive; she closed her eyes for an instant, searching her mind. He was right, he had never said he loved her. How had she made such an enormous mistake? His hands fell from her shoulders and she opened her eyes. She could actually see him mentally withdrawing from her as he physically moved back a step.

‘You are a lovely girl, but you are not the wife and mother type.’ His breathing was heavy but his dark eyes held unmistakable, unyielding will-power. ‘You’re a career woman—you compete in a male-dominated industry, and you are as good as, if not better than, most of the men, by all accounts. You wouldn’t last six months as a stay-at-home wife. You would be bored out of your skull. So don’t fool yourself, Amber. You’re strictly lover material.’

She listened with growing horror. ‘Is that really what you think?’ she muttered sickly. ‘All this time you saw me as your lover, a sex object, nothing else.’

He shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘The term is not important. What we shared was a mutually agreeable relationship.’ His dark eyes skimmed over her shapely figure and he made no effort to hide his masculine appreciation. ‘And great sex.’

His deliberate sensual scrutiny made her breasts swell in instant awareness, and hot colour flooded her cheeks and he noticed. ‘Be honest, Amber, you’re no shy young maid, never were. You’re a born hedonist, you thrive on sensual pleasure, the pleasure I gave you. But you’re a sophisticated lady—admit it, if we have spent six months together since we met it would be a miracle, and that mostly in bed. Ours was a sexual relationship, nothing more.’

For him maybe, but for Amber it had been everything. She only had to look at him to remember the powerful strength of his all-male body when he possessed her, caressed her. ‘Nothing more,’ she parroted his words with horror.

‘Exactly.’ He sounded relieved, actually believing she had agreed with him. And blithely carried on adding insult to injury. ‘But Christina is different. She is sweet and innocent and has no desire to do anything other than be my wife, and bear my children.’

Her teeth had bitten into her bottom lip as she listened to him praise his Christina, and the salty tang of blood coated her tongue. ‘I was innocent until you seduced me,’ she reminded him, the hurt almost too much to bear. He knew she’d been a virgin when he’d first made love to her. She had given him the greatest gift a woman could give a man, her heart, body and soul, and he had the gall to label her a hedonist…

‘Ah, Amber…’ He shook his dark head in a mocking gesture. ‘You know as well as I do that it was no great moral conviction that kept you a virgin. It was probably the fact you had spent the last four years living with a couple of gay men and their friends and hadn’t much opportunity. You would have jumped into bed with me the first day you arrived at the villa.’ Lucas shot her a cynical smile. ‘With your minuscule bikinis, and designer clothes, you were no retiring violet. You were desperate for a man, and it was my restraint, my strict rule not to take on a new lover without first leaving the old that meant we waited until I had got back from New York. Seduction did not come into it.’

‘I see.’ And she did… She closed her eyes for a brief moment, blocking out the picture of his hard, cynical face, her hands clenching into fists at her sides. He thought of her as a sexy woman who had been easy to take, who could respond to any man’s caress with equal fervour, not just his. Eagerly she had followed where he’d led, plunging the erotic depths with a hunger that had known no bounds, confident that he’d loved her, and everything had been permissible between two lovers. Her own innate honesty forced her to admit it was not all his fault. She had deliberately set out to appear to be the sort of woman she’d imagined he wanted. ‘Hoist by her own petard’ was the phrase that sprang to mind… Lucas did not know her at all, never had, and, worse, did not want to.

‘Tell me, Lucas, if I had held out for a ring, would you have married me?’ Amber demanded, black anger filling her heart at his chauvinistic attitude, never mind his betrayal.

He stared at her, his hard mouth suddenly cruel. ‘With you the question would never arise. If you remember, I did ask you to give up work so we could spend more time together, and you could not even do that. So the answer is no. You’re a thoroughly modern woman, equal to a man, you work hard and play hard.’

‘And your Christina is not?’ She arched one delicate brow in a gesture of mocking disbelief. ‘A year in Switzerland, all those hunky ski instructors,’ she taunted him, the memory of the young girl’s conversation last night still clear in her mind.

That appeared to catch him on the raw, and for a moment he looked almost savage. ‘Leave Christina out of this,’ he ordered curtly. ‘You disappoint me, Amber, I did not think you could sink so low as to maliciously malign a young girl’s reputation, a girl you hardly know,’ he drawled contemptuously.

Amber stared at his hard, cold face, willing herself not to feel hurt by his immediate defence of the girl. Then it hit her. ‘You’ve never slept with Christina, and you think you love her. I’m right, aren’t I?’ she demanded, not sure whether to laugh or cry. Lucas Karadines, a powerful, dynamic businessman viewed with fear and awe by his competitors, was fooled by a pseudo-innocent eighteen-year-old going on eighty.

‘Yes, I love Christina, and I am going to marry her.’ He gave the only answer he could. He wasn’t sure he believed in love. His mother had fallen in love with depressing regularity, when basically it had been sex. He had no intention of making the same mistake. He had chosen carefully and made the commitment to Christina and both of their families in traditional Greek fashion, and he was determined to honour it and make his marriage a success.