Tycoon's Ring of Convenience

She stared and saw his gaze leave her, sweep around the room.

She frowned—felt confusion in her mind, cutting through her tortured emotions at his accusation. Why was Nikos here, in the home of a half-brother she hadn’t known he possessed?

Her confusion deepened as she remembered how Nikos, when he’d proposed their stark marriage of convenience, had told her that he wanted to marry her for her social background, in order to give him an entrée into her upper-class world of landed estates and stately homes.

But he has that already, here with his brother the Comte. So why—?

His sweeping gaze came back to her. Unreadable. Masked. He moved suddenly, restlessly, breaking eye contact with her. Looking instead somewhere else. Into a place she knew nothing about.

His past.

She heard him start to speak. Slowly. As if the words were being dragged from him by pitiless steel-tipped hooks...

‘My mother, Comtesse du Plassis. Wife of Antoine’s father.’ He paused. His eyes were on her now. ‘Who was not my father.’

He shifted again restlessly, his hand moving on the mantel, lifting away from it now as if he had no right to rest it there.

‘The man who fathered me,’ he said, and Diana could hear a chill in his vioce that made her quail, ‘was a Greek shipping magnate—you would know his name if I told you. He was notorious for his affairs with married women. He liked them married, you see.’ Something moved in his eyes, something savage, and her chill increased. ‘Because it meant that if there were any unfortunate repercussions there would be a handy husband on the scene to sort them out.’ He paused again, then, ‘As Antoine’s father duly did.’

Restlessly he shifted his stance again, his eyes sliding past her.

‘I was farmed out when I was born. Handed over to foster parents. They were not unkind to me, merely...uninterested. I was sent to boarding school, and then university here in France. At twenty-one, after I’d graduated, I was summoned to a lawyer in Paris. He told me of my parentage.’

An edge came into his voice, like a blade.

‘He told me that my father would settle a substantial sum on me, providing I signed documents forbidding me from ever seeking him out or claiming his paternity.’ The blade in his voice swept like a knife through the air. ‘I tore up the cheque and stormed out, wanting nothing from such a man who would disown his own son. Then I drove out here to find my mother—’

He stopped abruptly. Once again his eyes swept the room, but this time Diana could sense in his gaze something that had not been there before. Something that made her feel again what she had felt so unwillingly when he had first started speaking. The shaft of pity.

His face was gaunt, his mouth twisted. ‘She sent me away. Saw me to the door. Told me never to come here again—never to contact her again. Then she went back inside. Shutting me out. Not wanting me. Not wanting the child she had cast aside.’ He paused. His voice dropped. ‘Rejecting me.’

That something moved again in his eyes, more powerfully now, and it hurt Diana to see it. It was that same look her father had had in his eyes when he’d remembered the wife who had not wanted him, who had rejected him.

‘I drove away,’ Nikos was saying now, piercing her own memories with his, ‘vowing never to contact her again, just as she wished, washing my hands of her just as I had my father, as both of them had washed their hands of me. I took a new name for myself—my own and no one else’s. Cursing both my parents. I was determined to show them I did not need them, that I could get everything they had on my own, without them.’

There was another emotion in his voice now.

‘I’ve proved myself my father’s son,’ he ground out, his eyes flaring with bitter anger. ‘Everything I touch turns to gold—just as it does for him! And, having made as much money as my father, I gained all the expensive baubles that he possesses, the lavish lifestyle that goes with such wealth—and, yes, the celebrity trophy mistress I had in Nadya! But it wasn’t enough. I wanted to get for myself what my mother had denied me in her rejection. My place in the world she came from—the world you come from, Diana.’

He paused, his eyes resting on her, dark and unreadable.

‘By marrying you I would take my place in that world—but I would also obtain something else. Something I wanted the very first moment I saw you.’

He shifted his position restlessly, and then his gaze lanced back to her. And in it now was an expression that was not unreadable at all. It blazed from him openly, nakedly. It made her reel with the force of it.

‘I could get you, Diana. The woman I’ve desired from my very first glimpse of you. The woman I thought I had finally made my own—the woman I transformed from frozen ice maiden to warm, passionate bride, melting in my arms, burning in her desire for me!’

His voice changed, expression wiped clean. There was harshness in his voice now—a harshness that had become all too familiar in these last hideous months while she had been chained to his side.

‘Only to discover that after all we had together in the desert it meant nothing to you. Nothing! That to you all I was good for was supplying the money that would save Greymont for you. That only your precious ancestral home was important to you, your privileged way of life. You did not want me disturbing that with my inconvenient desire for you.’

She stared at him. The bitterness in his voice was like gall.

He spoke again. ‘Just as my mother valued above all else her privileged way of life here at this elegant chateau, undisturbed by the inconvenient existence of an unwanted bastard son.’

Diana felt her face pale, wanted to cry out, but she couldn’t. He was speaking again, his words silencing her.

‘All these months, Diana, I have blamed you for being like her. For valuing only what she valued. For rejecting me.’ He paused. Drew breath. ‘It made me angry that you should turn out to be like her. Valuing only the privileged lifestyle you enjoy.’ His mouth twisted. ‘Nothing else. No one else.’