Bridal Bargains

Those tormenting fingers stroked and incited her, his hungry tongue mimicking the action. One of her hands found his nape and clutched at it desperately, holding his mouth down on hers while her other hand went in agitated search of other parts of him.

He was so big, so hard and slick and potent—she wanted him back inside her. She wanted his mouth on her breasts but she wanted him to keep on kissing her mouth like this. In the end and on an impatient sigh her fingers clutched at a handful of his hair to tug his mouth from her so she could present him with her breast instead, and through it all her body was still rocketing through space on its own agenda.

He began to throb against her caressing hand. She felt it happen and released a sigh of satisfaction that came out closer to a salacious growl. She snaked her body beneath him and guided him into her, two hands clutching at his lean, tight buttocks.

Holding him like that, with his dark head buried between her breasts, she let go of everything, driving him onward with the thrust of her hips. Her cries of anguished pleasure echoed around the darkened bedroom as she felt his own pending climax build, felt the muscles bunch all over him, heard his soft curse as his self-control began to crack wide open, and this time they leapt together, high—so high Mia felt lost and disembodied.

The next morning when she awoke the only sign that Alex had ever been there was his scent on the sheets and on her body—in her mouth and in the soft subtle pulse of her body where he had so effectively stamped his presence.

It was a struggle to make herself get up. She almost stumbled her way into the bathroom, felt hardly any better by the time she came out again, and began to fumble round for something to wear.

It was sunny outside, the heat of the day surprisingly strong for this time of year, she discovered when she pushed open the window in an effort to drag some air into her lungs that did not smell of him.

It didn’t work. He was in her system, she knew. Knew the man and his scent were destined to be an innate part of her for ever now.

It was a wretched thought—the kind of thought that made her shiver, as if someone had just walked over her grave, because she knew that no matter how passionately she had affected him last night he would be despising her more for the way she’d responded than he would have done if she’d simply remained cold beneath him.

Oh, face it, Mia, she told herself grimly. You would be despising yourself less if you’d managed to stay aloof—and that’s what is really troubling you. You’re disgusted with yourself for being so sexually vulnerable to a man you hold so little respect for.

And, for all you know about him, he probably has the same effect on every woman he takes to his bed.

The great lover, she mocked acidly. The Don Juan of the nineteen-nineties!

Did that mean his mistress was well used to losing her head whenever he deigned to bed her?

Did it matter? she asked herself angrily as a nasty poison called jealousy began to creep through her blood. The point is, you respond like that and it’s shameful!

But it didn’t alter the fact that she fell apart in his arms like that every night for the next fortnight. During the day she didn’t see him. He was never lying beside her when she woke in the morning. She got used to hearing a helicopter arrive and take off again very early—taking him to his offices in Athens, she presumed, though she was never given the opportunity to ask. He came back by the same means, usually just as dusk was beginning to colour the sky.

Where he ate she did not know, but it was never with her. The only contact they ever had was in the hours of darkness when he would slide into bed beside her and drive them both out of their heads with the devastating power of their mutual sensuality. He never spoke unless it was to comment on what they were doing, and he showed no remorse in using her like the brood mare she had sold herself as to him.

When it was over he would lie on his back beside her and she would curl on her side as far away from him as she could get while she waited for the aftershocks to stop shaking her body. Aftershocks she knew he was keenly aware of, and she had a feeling that they were the reason he lingered in that bed with her afterwards—because he saw those tremors as part of his due. They fed his ego—an ego she knew had been badly damaged by him giving in to this deal in the first place.

Perhaps he even hated himself a little for giving in to it. Certainly, sometimes in the darkness she had glimpsed a look in his eyes that had suggested self-contempt as he’d watched her go wild beneath him and had known—just as she had—that he’d been about to join her.

Whatever he did to her, she did to him. If he did acquire that depth of pleasure with every woman he bedded, then he did not like it happening with her.

But, then, neither did Mia like it. In fact, towards the end of that first fortnight she began hoping—praying—that Mother Nature would be kind to her and make her pregnant. If the potency of their intercourse had anything to do with it, she should be very pregnant. Then at least he would leave her alone.

But it was not to be. The morning she woke with those familiar symptoms that warned her period had arrived she wept.

That day Mia roamed about the big empty house in a sluggish state of deep depression. It didn’t help that there was not a friendly face in the place from whom she could gain some light relief from her own sense of grim failure.

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Now she had to find a moment to break the unfortunate news to Alex that he had not succeeded in his quest to make her pregnant and, more to the point, that her body was not available to him for the next five days.

But how did she tell anything to a man who only came to her in the dead of night? Leave a note, pinned to the door between his bedroom and hers? she mused bitterly.

The temptation to do just that was so strong that she almost gave in to it. In the end she did the only thing she really could do, and waited up for him to come to her. When eventually she heard the connecting door open she was standing by the window, covered from neck to toe in soft white towelling.

She turned to face him. ‘I’m not pregnant,’ she announced boldly, and watched him stop dead in his tracks.

He didn’t move again for the space of thirty long seconds, his stance so taut that she gained the rather satisfying impression that she had disconcerted him so much that he just did not know what to do next.

It was wonderful, almost worth the disappointment to see him so utterly stumped like this. He was a big man, a man whose body she knew so well by now that she could even read the frustration in his beautiful muscle formation.

‘I suggest you use your mistress for the next few days,’ she added with icy relish. ‘I will, of course, let you know when I am available again.’