In Need of a Wife

‘Do I take it there’s been some intimacy between you two?’ Nathan slid in sweetly.

‘One of your women on the side, Tyler?’ Sasha asked.

Neither answered.

Tyler drove off, looking like an Olympic champion who had just received his gold medal.

‘What happens to me?’ Elizabeth wailed.

‘I’ll get Marion to call a taxi for you,’ Nathan said dismissively.

‘I can do that for myself,’ Elizabeth snapped. ‘I have a mobile phone.’

‘Fine. We’ll leave you to it.’

‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’

‘I think not,’ Nathan said, completely unruffled.

He hooked Sasha’s arm around his. They turned in unison and walked back up the steps. The last Sasha saw of Elizabeth was her isolated figure, surveying her wrecked Porsche and wringing her hands. She looked as if she could break into tears of frustration.

‘We make a great couple, don’t we?’ Nathan said with ringing satisfaction as he closed the front door behind them.

‘Do you still have to marry Urszula Budna?’ Sasha asked, uncertain of where they stood after the latest development with Elizabeth, and the revelation of her affair with Tyler.

Nathan sighed. ‘The contract survives, regardless of what Elizabeth did or did not do with Tyler.’

‘So the situation remains the same.’

‘No. We’ve got rid of Tyler for good now.’

Sasha frowned. ‘Why did you interfere? He was going anyway. What you got rid of, Nathan, was any financial support for Bonnie.’

There was not one flicker of guilt in his eyes. ‘If Bonnie is in need of anything, I’ll fix it. Until such time as she can support herself.’

He was certainly an expert at fixing things, Sasha thought with heavy irony. He had been doing it for her ever since they’d met. If only they’d met sooner. Or after all the complications in his life had been sorted out. Why did she have to get involved with men who wouldn’t or couldn’t commit themselves to a straight line relationship?

‘That’s my commitment to you, Sasha,’ Nathan said quietly, as though he had read her mind. ‘I’ll put it in writing if you like. Either way, I will look after you and Bonnie.’

The bittersweet assurance lifted some of the depression in her heart, but it didn’t remove the one reality that dimmed any pleasure in thinking of a future together. ‘In a few days, Urszula Budna will have more rights than she has now,’ Sasha stated flatly.

‘She has nothing to do with us, Sasha.’ Nathan drew her into his arms, stirring memories of last night’s soul-deep intimacy.

Sasha pressed her hands against his chest in protest at his power to swamp her with feeling. She lifted deeply vulnerable eyes to his. ‘But you have to sleep with her to make the marriage safe against legal threat.’

‘Nothing on this earth could make me do that after what we shared last night.’

‘You really mean that?’

He smiled, a slow sensual smile that lit his eyes with a wicked sparkle. ‘Let me show you,’ he said, and pulled her into the library with him.

‘Nathan, we can’t—’

‘We can.’

‘The children—’

‘Are being well looked after.’