Bridal Bargains

Over the next three weeks Alex had her transported out to him on two occasions when he was away on business—once to Milan and another time to Paris. Each time she found herself being taken to the penthouse suite of one of his own hotels for a night of wild and wanton bedding.

She couldn’t call it loving—wouldn’t call it loving because what they shared was about as far away from that emotion as any two people could get.

At least during those brief trips away from the island they ate together—they talked to each other, even if it was a rather wary and constrained kind of talking. And the sex was different because he would not wait until she was safely lying in the darkness before coming to join her. He would undress her himself, and had her undress him. And sometimes—just sometimes—it would seem as if he almost cared for her a little, the way he would stand there in the middle of a bedroom and caress her with hands that almost seemed to revere the smooth, silken flesh they were touching.

And once during one of these much more intimate beddings that took place away from his private villa—times when he was warmer, kinder, much more attentive towards her, yet still managed to drive her into that mindless state of sensual fervour—he stopped when his body was lost deep inside her, pushed the wild strands of hair away from her face then lay there on top of her, his expression sombre.

‘Why do you let me do this to you?’ he asked.

Why? The answer almost escaped her kiss-warmed lips but she managed to bite it back. After all, how much mocking mileage would he make out of her admitting that she couldn’t help herself?

‘I don’t know,’ she replied honestly enough because she really did not know or understand why this man of all men should be able to move her so dramatically. ‘What’s your excuse?’

He sighed, something like that old self-contempt, which she had not seen in his face for a week now, clouding his lean, taut features. ‘Like you, I don’t know,’ he answered heavily. For a moment, for a horrible gut-twisting moment, she thought he was going to withdraw from her and leave her in this high state of sexual need, the conscious acknowledgement of what they were doing here enough to cool his ardour.

But, far from withdrawing, what he actually did was bury himself all the deeper inside her, his mouth trembling slightly as it came down to her own mouth. ‘Whatever it is,’ he muttered huskily, ‘we may as well enjoy because once you are pregnant it will be over.’

It was a statement of intent. A re-statement of that intent issued to her, it seemed, so long ago now that she could barely recall the moment in her father’s study when he had first made it.

It made their loving all the more urgent that night, made him come back to her time after time after time. The next morning, when she awoke to find him gone from her as usual, she was grateful for his absence, the pride-lowering fact that he never so much as acknowledged her during daylight hours for once a relief because she felt so utterly bereft, though she did not understand why that particular morning should be any different from all the others when she had woken alone like this.

Then the inevitable happened. Three and a half months into this marriage that wasn’t really a marriage she missed her period.

Oddly, she said nothing. Oddly, she

let him go on making love to her throughout the next four weeks until her second period failed to show itself. Oddly, she felt so terribly depressed by this second missed period that she was glad Alex was in the States again and therefore too far away to send for her for his habitual single night of passion to break up a business trip. Instead, she could use the time to come to terms with her own odd reaction to the one thing this had been all about.

A baby. They had managed to make a baby. A baby that was to make all her most secret dreams come true and would give Alex what he coveted most.

His island, his special piece of rock that lay out there somewhere among that cluster of tiny islands she could see from her bedroom window.

Will it all have been worth it? Mia wondered dully. All this isolation she had endured, all the nights of loveless passion?

Oh, yes, she told herself flatly, it will have been worth it, and she grimly dismissed the way her heart coiled up tightly then throbbed as if it were hurting for something it had never been given the right to hurt for.

He arrived back at the villa late one afternoon while she was taking her usual exercise in the pool. She watched the helicopter fly over then disappear behind a bank of trees that acted as a wind-break to the pool area. As its rotor blades slowed in the warm still air she grimly returned to her exercise, pounding steadily up and down the pool with a stubborn resolve, refusing point blank to acknowledge any of the fluttering sinking sensations that were crawling around her insides.

She was just pulling herself out of the water when she glanced up to find him standing there.

It was a break from habit, and the irony of that break, coming now, did not escape her. He was still dressed for business in iron-grey trousers and a crisp white shirt, though his jacket was missing and his tie had been tugged loose. He looked tired, she saw. His eyes were hooded as usual as he ran them over her slender figure, encased in white clinging wet Lycra.

Already she was aware of the changes in her body, the extra heaviness in her breasts and their new excruciating sensitivity. She knew her waist was slightly thicker simply because her clothes felt tighter, and she was aware of a swelling around her abdomen that must show under the clinging swimwear.

It was therefore a purely defensive action that made her reach for a towel to cover herself, her eyes dropping away from his with guilt, embarrassment and a multitude of other things that didn’t bear thinking about.

One of them was causing disturbance in the deepest parts of her body. It was desire, pure and simple. No matter who he was or what he was—or even why he was—she had grown to need him. She needed what he could do to her to make her lose her grip on the fierce self-control she had spent the best part of her life maintaining for one wretched reason or another.

Alexander Doumas, with his dynamic sensuality, had somehow managed to find a chink in her otherwise impenetrable armour, and in doing so had unwittingly made himself so indispensable to her new need to break free from her own constraints that she did not know how she was going to go on without him now it was, in effect, over.

And the worst thing of all, she acknowledged as she carefully wrapped the towel around her, was that knowing she felt like this about him had to be the most pride-lowering effect of the whole rotten bargain.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she announced, just like that without any preamble. It came blurting out because it had to be said before he had a chance to say the words she knew were about to come from him. She had seen the look in his eyes and had recognised it. He had been away for longer than a week, and if he had not been able to use the services of his mistress in that time then he had come to search her out like this because he needed her sexually.

If she’d hoped to jolt some kind of response from him by boldly announcing it like that, she failed miserably. Neither by stance nor expression did he hint at anything.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked quietly.

Her small chin lifted, her green eyes steady as they gazed into his. ‘Yes.’