Ruthless Magnate, Convenient Wife

bath. Hands up who was impressed to death by the gorgeous Russian billionaire who had swept her to the altar! She had sat in that bath with a diamond and emerald pendant worth thousands still clasped round her neck and she had eaten handmade chocolates while nourishing romantic ideas and feelings that could only make her shudder in retrospect. Of course she was not falling in love with Sergei Antonovich! Of course she did not admire him!

He might be her every fantasy come true in bed, but that did not excuse her for getting so carried away with her role that she had started acting like a real bride on her wedding night. Shame sat like a brick at the foot of her throat and strangled her appetite at source. At some stage, she dimly appreciated, all sense of reality had forsaken her and she had forgotten that she was virtually an employee hired to do a specific job.

And now she knew that it was a job she could never, ever fulfil. Sergei had been willing to pay a fortune for a discreet woman, willing to give him a child and then walk away without any hassle. What did that say about him? Her soft mouth trembled and she dug her fingers tightly into her palms. Not a guy who thought much of a woman’s maternal instincts or even of a child’s need for a mother. Not a guy who thought much of women as decent people full stop, she reckoned painfully. And all she had done was give him even more justification for his cynical attitude towards her sex!

Her eyes stung with tears and she blinked rapidly and sniffed, furious that her emotions were still out of her control. But she really did feel wretched and ashamed at what she had let herself get involved in. She was thinking about the man who had impassively admitted putting his alcoholic mother to bed every night as a child. Even his loving grandmother had not managed to alter Sergei’s bleak view of family life. He’d had dreadful parents. And one bad marriage had evidently ensured that he was not prepared to give any woman a second chance.

Certainly not one who had already been exposed as a liar and a cheat, Alissa told herself doggedly. She mopped her face and blew her nose and struggled to pull herself back together to deal with life as it was, not as she would have liked it to be.

The phone rang while she was getting dressed.

It was not her sister as she had hoped, but Sergei. ‘I’ll see you downstairs in twenty minutes,’ he informed her.

Alissa anchored her hair in a ponytail and stonily studied her reflection. She hadn’t bothered with make-up and had pulled on jeans and a sweater. Her own clothes, not the borrowed glamour of the designer garments that Sergei had purchased for her. The transformation was complete and she looked ordinary again. But what was the point of gilding the lily for his benefit? Surely that would only make her feel as if she were still trying to pretend to be her more fashionable twin? She checked her mobile phone. Alexa had still not responded to her text. Impatient to talk to her sister, Alissa rang her direct and had to leave a message when the call wasn’t answered.

‘Dobraye utra…good morning.’ Sergei surveyed his bride with sardonic cool when she appeared in the doorway of the elegant library he used as an office. ‘Are the jeans your equivalent of sackcloth and ashes? I’m not impressed.’

Stung by his acerbic mockery, Alissa folded her arms in a defensive movement. Her struggle to maintain her composure was not assisted by the truth that, while her troubled sleep had left her pale and drawn with heavy eyes, Sergei looked as breathtakingly handsome and vibrant as a man who had enjoyed a full eight hours of undiluted rest. The leap of attraction and erotic response that slivered through her treacherous body mortified her pride. ‘I hardly think that what I wear today makes any difference,’ she said flatly. ‘I don’t feel that those clothes you bought are rightfully mine and that I should wear them.’

‘Such a little puritan…’ Sergei released a derisive sound of amusement that grated against her nerves in the tense silence. ‘Let me see-you can marry me in a church in front of hundreds of people and allow me the freedom of your beautiful body, but your principles are too fine to allow you to wear the clothes I bought you?’

As he spoke a deep flush of humiliation slowly rose below Alissa’s pale skin and washed up over her face, highlighting the sea-blue shade of her beautiful eyes. She was squirming. ‘I didn’t mean it like that—’

‘Oh, I think you did but, as I have discovered, there’s often a wide gulf between your principles and your actual behaviour.’

‘Is this why you asked me to come down here? Just so that you can insult me some more?’

Sergei elevated an ebony brow. ‘I don’t do small talk. Or were you expecting praise for what you’ve done?’

Alissa drew in a sharp little breath and held it before shaking her head in grudging agreement on that point. Her gaze evaded his.

Satisfied to have put her out of countenance, Sergei lounged back against the edge of his desk to study her. Dressed like a teenager with her face bare of cosmetic enhancement, she looked outrageously youthful and innocent. He paid no heed to the aura of shame and worry that clung to her, for he was in no mood to trust such a show. He was no longer surprised that she had contrived to fool him. The greatest misogynist would have been challenged to pick her out as the calculating con artist she was, he conceded grimly. Hadn’t he been taken in? Hadn’t his lawyers been fooled by her sister? And hadn’t he wanted Alissa so much that he had stifled his misgivings and cancelled the background check that would certainly have revealed that she was one half of a matching pair?

‘What we both need to know now is-where do we go from here?’ Sergei spelt out.

‘I couldn’t possibly meet the terms of that contract!’ Alissa shot at him in a nervous rush. ‘I had no idea that conceiving a child was part of the agreement. I was willing to act as your wife—’

‘And share my bed with enthusiasm,’ Sergei inserted silkily. ‘Let’s not forget that angle.’

Alissa flung her head back, her golden ponytail bouncing, her eyes very bright and reproachful. ‘That just happened, for goodness’ sake!’

Sergei dealt her an unimpressed look as hard as polished steel. ‘In this scenario that is very difficult to believe. Sex oils so many wheels. When a man wants a woman he’s more careless about the little things that don’t add up.’

‘Look, stop trying to make everything worse than it already is. I didn’t use sex to do anything! I may have slept with you and I wish I hadn’t,’ she declared heatedly, ‘but let’s leave it at that. What are you going to do about all this?’

‘If I do what my lawyers want me to do, I will prosecute you and your sister for fraud. One word of complaint from me and Alexa will be arrested. It is a criminal offence to deliberately sign a contract to defraud anyone of their hard-earned cash.’

Alissa met his contemptuous dark golden eyes in a horror-stricken collision. ‘You can’t do that!’

‘I think you’ll find that as the wronged party in this set-up I can do whatever I like.’

Desperation assailing her, Alissa was thinking frantically hard. ‘But you wanted discretion and if you start prosecuting people it’ll get into the newspapers. Surely you can’t want that to happen?’

Sergei was impressed by the speed with which she had brandished her only possible weapon. ‘Why should I care? Yelena doesn’t read newspapers and it is very unlikely that anyone close to her would find out about a legal case taking place in the UK. I have done nothing wrong and nothing that I am ashamed of and publicity, bad or otherwise, isn’t a matter of concern to me. Throwing you and your sister to the wolves on the other hand would at least give me some satisfaction.’

Alissa was paralysed to the spot by that blunt speech. Stone cold fear chilled her tummy, for she knew he was capable of launching a prosecution. Hard enough, vengeful enough, ruthless enough to hit back hard and hurt. Her mind kept on dropping stupidly back to the candlelit bath and the chocolates and the change in him cut through her like a knife. The day before might never have been.

‘But nothing would satisfy me quite as much as the fulfilment of the original contract, milaya moya,’ Se