The Billionaire's Trophy (A Bride for a Billionaire 3)

‘Then I gather that Nessa’s mother didn’t last long?’

‘Two years.’

Emmie recalled Nessa telling her that her mother had been the only stepmother who was kind to Bastian and, considering his own mother had not set a good example of maternal affection, she found it sad that his father’s marriage to Nessa’s mother had been so brief. ‘And wife number three?’

‘Had one affair after another. My father hit the bottle hard before he finally got shot of her.’

‘He sounds—’

‘Foolish?’ Bastian scorned.

‘I was going to say vulnerable. I mean, he kept on trying so hard to find a happy relationship.’

‘Only the grass on the other side of the fence was always greener and he couldn’t content himself,’ Bastian completed grimly. ‘Wife number four spent most of her time trying to get me into bed because younger men gave her a buzz.’

That revelation made Emmie turn pink. ‘That must have been ghastly.’

‘While that marriage went on, I spent a lot of time at my grandfather’s house—I was only eighteen,’ Bastian admitted flatly, staring out of the bedroom window, broad shoulders rigid. ‘Tragically my father’s fourth marriage literally killed him. He came home unexpectedly one day and overheard his wife trying to seduce me. He got back into his car and crashed it into a tree a few miles down the road. The happy widow got what was left of my father’s estate, which wasn’t much. His marriages had virtually bankrupted him.’

‘With a family history like that I’m surprised you were even considering getting married,’ Emmie confided truthfully.

Bastian turned away from the window, tall, darkly handsome and intensely charismatic. His dark eyes glittered like gleaming gold ingots in sunlight. ‘But unlike my father I didn’t have any stupid ideas about love having anything to do with marriage...’

Emmie was relieved to think that Bastian had not been in love with Lilah, but his words and his attitude certainly didn’t offer her much room for hope that he might develop such feelings for her in the future. ‘Have you ever been in love?’ she asked baldly, reasoning that subtlety was wasted on Bastian.

‘In lust many times,’ Bastian quipped. ‘In love...never. I’m probably too practical.’

So, at the very least he must have been in lust with Lilah, Emmie assumed uneasily, and she certainly couldn’t blame him for that because his ex-fiancée was exquisitely easy on the eye. ‘I fell in love when I was at university,’ she heard herself admit.

Unaccustomed to such personal conversations with a woman, Bastian dealt her a disconcerted look.

Emmie compressed her lush mouth. ‘It turned out that Toby was only with me because he had a poster of my sister the supermodel on his bedroom wall—she was his fantasy and I was just the closest he could get to her,’ she related ruefully.

‘What a fool when you’re even more beautiful,’ Bastian breathed huskily.

‘I’m not more beautiful than Saffy,’ Emmie protested.

‘I think you are,’ Bastian admitted, his dark gaze roaming over her lovely face. ‘You’re more natural, not all made up and artificial like your sibling.’

Without warning and for the first time in her life, Emmie found herself laughing at a comparison being made that could not leave her feeling inadequate. ‘Well, I’m certainly not anywhere near as well groomed as my sister,’ she conceded with a smile. ‘She always looks perfect.’

Bastian rested lean brown hands on her slim shoulders, gazing down at her with smouldering heat in his heavily fringed dark golden eyes. ‘I don’t want or need perfect, khriso mou.’

Emmie stiffened, suddenly unsure of what should happen next, wanting him with every skin cell in her treacherous body but conscious that intimacy would plunge her deeper into a relationship that had no safe boundaries to protect her from hurt. ‘Bastian...er—’

Long brown fingers brushed her cheekbone in a lazy caress and he kissed her with hungry driving urgency. Her heart hammered so fast she was scared it would burst out of her chest. The glorious swell of emotion and sensation that only he could give her was waiting in the wings like a terrible temptation, making nonsense of her firm conviction that she could take care of herself. For a split second she wanted Bastian so much it was terrifying, her body kindling like dry twigs touched by a flame, senses awakening with a surge of slumberous intensity. Her breasts stirred beneath her clothing, full and swollen and ripe for his touch, an ache biting deep in her pelvis to leave a sense of hollowness in its wake.

‘I should unpack,’ she said breathlessly, drawing back in a movement that demanded every atom of her self-discipline while her glance briefly skimmed over the door that led into Bastian’s bedroom, and she wondered how long she could possibly keep her distance from him.

In a rare act for a male in the grip of fierce arousal, Bastian backed off several steps, lean, strong face taut and flushed. Emmie was in Greece, on the island of Treikos, safely beneath his roof, and that was enough for one day, he reflected ruefully, apprehensive for the first time ever of making a wrong move with a woman.

Conscious of the tension in the air, Emmie coloured and turned aside to her luggage. Her legs were shaking, her rebellious body screaming with tight, strained nerve endings and she was ashamed of her weakness. Somehow it had not occurred to her that Bastian might still exert that much physical power over her even when she was several months pregnant. Where he was concerned, she badly needed an off switch.

Four days later, Nessa arrived for the weekend and mortified Emmie straight away by walking out to the terrace where Emmie and Bastian were having lunch and saying cheerfully, ‘So, when’s the wedding?’

Bastian frowned. ‘What wedding?’ he queried, standing up to pull out a chair for his sister.

Nessa simply laughed. ‘Your wedding, of course,’ she said teasingly, studying the pair of them with amused brown eyes.

‘We’re not getting married,’ Emmie declared with red cheeks hot enough to fry eggs on.

Nessa raised a brow as though that was an extraordinary statement and responded, ‘Grandpa is going to be very disappointed.’

Initially relieved by Nessa’s arrival because the presence of a third person would surely stifle the shocking level of sexual tension Bastian roused inside her, Emmie could now only feel appalled at the brunette’s lack of tact.

‘I don’t think so,’ Bastian countered smoothly, seemingly unembarrassed, Emmie noted with some relief.

‘Trust me.’ Nessa grinned. ‘Grandpa’s expecting to hear wedding bells and just waiting on you making the announcement. Don’t say you weren’t warned.’

‘Excuse me,’ Emmie breathed, rising to her feet.

‘Where are you going?’ Bastian demanded as if he was entitled to know her every move.

‘It’s hot and I’m a little tired...thought I’d lie down for a while,’ Emmie told him disjointedly, taking refuge in being pregnant in her eagerness to escape sitting in on a humiliating dialogue between brother and sister.

Upstairs she lay down on her bed, dully recalling what entertaining company Bastian had been since their arrival. They had picnicked on the beach, wandered through olive groves on lazy walks and eaten in the taverna down by the harbour where Emmie had suspected that all the other diners were staring at her. Even so, apart from that one kiss on the first day, Bastian hadn’t touched her again. She was never going to understand Bastian, she reflected in frustration. Why had he kissed her if he had no plans to follow up on it? And why, when she knew that intimacy would only fire them into dangerous territory again, was she even wondering?

Her cell phone pinged on a message and she snatched it up, surprised to see that it was from Saffy, who rarely made direct contact with her.

‘I’m in the pudding club too,’ Saffy texted jokily, and Emmie gasped and before she

could even consider what she was doing she was phoning her twin. It struck her as extraordinary that both of them should contrive to be pregnant at the same time.