Her outburst cut across his cogitations.

‘I don’t have a choice!’ she threw back at him, her voice bitter. ‘I refuse to have anything to do with a man who has said such vile, cruel things about my poor mother! Who knew he’d got her pregnant and then deserted her anyway, condemning her to a misery she endured for the rest of her tormented life without lifting a finger to help her—let alone the daughter he knew perfectly well he had! He can rot in hell for that! And for thinking he could buy me with his bloody money and that I’d crawl to him for it so I wouldn’t have to go back to the poverty he deliberately kept me in, hoping it would make me malleable and desperate!’

Xandros could see her face working again, could hear the rage in her voice mounting once more. The fire in her eyes was making them more luminous t

han ever... Her fury was animating her features...intensifying her beauty...

From somewhere deep in that part of his brain he’d had to silence before, the part that he had refused to pay any attention to, came a thought that was so outrageous he tried to stifle it at birth.

But it would not be stifled. Would not be silenced.

Because there was another way she could avoid being condemned to a life of grinding poverty. His mind raced. A way that would simultaneously do him some good as well. A considerable amount of good.

As his eyes rested on her agitated, stricken face, which for all the emotion working in it was still not diminished in its effect, on the emotion flashing in her eyes, lighting them into a blaze, he heard words rise up in his throat. Insane, surely, as it would be to say them...

And then he said them anyway.

‘What if there was a different alternative?’

His eyes held hers, holding them by the sheer power of the will that was welling up in him from that deep, impossible place in his brain.

She stared. Blankness was in her face.

‘What alternative?’

He held her eyes still—those beautiful, expressive eyes of hers—masking his own expression. But beneath the mask his thoughts were churning wildly. Was he really going to say what he was about to say? Could he mean it?

Then there was no more time for questioning himself, for he could hear himself speak. Saying the words.

‘You marry me after all.’

* * *

She was staring at him. The blankness on her face was gone. And her expression now was one of total rejection.

‘Hear me out,’ Xandros urged. He was marshalling his own thoughts, moving them rapidly across his consciousness as they formed. ‘You marry me—just as your father wants,’ he repeated. ‘But—’ and the emphasis was absolute ‘—you do so on your terms—not his.’

Her grey-green eyes were still stony with repudiation so he went on, hearing his own thoughts springing into being.

This will work! And it will work infinitely better than the marriage I was prepared to undertake with Ariadne! Because what made me so reluctant about Ariadne was the prospect of a permanent marriage! Of tying myself to her...having children! Losing my freedom.

But the marriage that was racing through his head now would be quite different! It would be win-win both for him and Stavros’s downtrodden English daughter!

He set it out rapidly and concisely—frankly—in a cool, clear, businesslike manner.

‘We marry—without delay—so your father will finally give the go-ahead I’m seeking and commit to the merger. Thereafter it will take about half a year for the merger to be completed. There are legal aspects, financial checks, due diligence, staffing issues, regulatory conditions that must be met.’ He reeled off the list. ‘As well as organisational conditions that I want to put in place. These things are seldom simple and never speedy. So we stay married for the duration and then—and only then—when the merger is irreversible, and I have what I want...’

His expression changed.

‘Then we simply divorce and go our separate ways. The payoff for me is that I get the merger I want—it’s ideal for my business—and you...’ He drew a breath. ‘You get a handsome divorce settlement from me by way of a thank-you for enabling me to get my business merger. You can pick up your life again—go back to England, do whatever you want.’

He took another breath, levelling his eyes intently on her, making her understand what he was promising her.

‘You will never know poverty again.’

His eyes didn’t let hers go. He was willing her to see what he was seeing. Willing her to agree. To say yes.

And even as he waited for her reaction he knew, with a searing awareness that he had been trying to silence ever since his car had glided to a halt beside her bowed figure, storming away from the Coustakis mansion with her hopeless dreams in tatters, that there was a whole other reason why he had proposed what he had.

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