Читать книгу Bought For The Billionaire's Revenge - Clare Connelly - Страница 10
ОглавлениеSHE’D NEVER UNDERSTOOD how silence could vibrate until that moment. The very air they breathed seemed as if it was alive, crackling and humming around them. His words were little daggers, floating through the atmosphere, jabbing at her heart, her soul, her brain, her mind.
‘Marry me and I will help him.’
Only the sound of her heavy breathing perforated the air. For support, she pressed back against the glass window. It was warmed by the sun.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said finally, squeezing her eyes shut. Every fibre of her being instantly rejected the idea.
Or did it?
Briefly, childish fantasies bubbled inside her, spreading the kind of pleasure she’d once revelled in freely.
When she blinked a moment later, Nikos was holding a glass of water just in front of her. She took it and drank gratefully, her throat parched.
‘It is not a difficult equation. Marriage to me in exchange for a sum of money that will answer your father’s debts.’
‘That makes no sense,’ she contradicted flatly.
‘No?’
‘No!’
It seemed like the right reaction. It was an absurd proposal, after all. Wasn’t it? She should have felt panicked by the very idea. And perhaps a part of her did. This was the man who had disappeared from her life but never fully from her heart.
But panic and wariness were only tiny components of her emotional tangle. Hope and an intense flare of passionate resonance also filled her.
‘Marriage...’ Her heart squeezed. Her words were a whisper. ‘Marriage...is for people in love. That’s not us. How can you be so cavalier about it?’
He took a step closer, curling his fingers around the glass. Instead of taking it from her he kept his hand over hers. Electricity sparked along the length of her arm, shooting blue fire through her body.
‘Call it...righting a wrong,’ he said darkly, his eyes scanning her face with hard emotion. ‘Or repaying a debt.’
Her stomach rolled.
‘Your father paid me a considerable sum to get out of your life six years ago.’
Her mouth formed a perfect ‘o’ and she gasped in surprise. He gathered she hadn’t known that little piece of information. It didn’t make him proud, but he enjoyed seeing her sense of betrayal and outrage before she schooled her features once more. Her mask was excellent, though the more tightly she held on to it the more he wanted to force her to drop it. To shock her, surprise her, make her feel so strongly that she could no longer remain impassive.
He put his thumb-pad over her lower lip, remembering how soft they were to kiss.
‘I didn’t know.’ Her eyes were earnest and it didn’t enter his mind to doubt her.
‘No.’ He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t necessary, in any event. He obviously didn’t realise that you had already conclusively ended things.’
Marnie’s heart squeezed. ‘I had no choice.’
‘Of course you had a damned choice.’ He controlled his temper with effort. ‘You could have told him that you’d fallen in love with me. That no amount of comment about the fact that I didn’t live up to his exalted expectations would change how you felt about me. You could have told him to shove his snobbery and his stupidity. You could have fought for what we were—as I would have.’
She sucked in a deep breath. The pain was as fresh in that instant as if it was six years ago. She ached all over. ‘You know what we’d been through.’ She squeezed her eyes shut. ‘What my family had lost. I couldn’t hurt him. I had to choose between him and...what I felt for you.’
‘And you chose him.’ His stare was filled with a startling wave of resentment. ‘You switched something in here—’ he lifted a finger to her chest, pointing at her heart ‘—and that was it. It was over.’
She swallowed convulsively. It had been nothing like that. He made it sound easy. As if she’d simply decided to forget Nikos and move on. But she hadn’t. She’d agonised over the decision.
She’d tried to explain to her parents that she didn’t care that Nikos didn’t have money or come from one of the established families they approved of. But arguments had led to the unsupportable—her mother in tears, her father furious and not speaking to Marnie, and the certainty that they just wanted Libby back—perfect Libby—to make good choices and be the daughter they were proud of.
‘In any event, the financial...compensation for leaving you helped to soften the blow. At first I swore I wouldn’t take it. But then...’
He spoke with gravelled inflection, sucking Marnie back to the present.
‘I was so angry with you, with him. I took it and I told myself I’d double it—just to prove him wrong. To prove a point.’
Marnie’s cheeks were flushed. His hand moved to cup her face. She could have pulled away, but she didn’t. ‘I think you did more than that.’
His smile was grim. ‘Yes.’
So Arthur had given her boyfriend money to get out of her life? A chill ran the length of her spine. It seemed like a step too far. Pressuring her to end it was one thing, but actually forcing Nikos out?
‘I’m sorry he got involved like that. It wasn’t his place to...to pay you off.’
‘Not when you’d already done his bidding,’ Nikos responded with a lift of his shoulders. ‘Your father forbade you from seeing me and, like a good little Lady Heiress, you jumped when he clicked his fingers.’
‘Don’t call me that,’ she said distractedly, hating the tabloid press’s moniker for her.
It wasn’t that it was cruelly meant, only that they mistook her natural reserve for something far more grandiose: snobbery. Pretension. Airs and graces. The kind of aristocratic aspirations that Marnie had never fallen in line with despite the value her parents put on them. The values that had been at the root of their disapproval of Nikos.
‘So this is revenge?’ she murmured, her eyes clashing fiercely with his. Pain lanced through her.
‘Yes.’
‘A dish best served cold?’ She shook her head sadly, dislodging his hand. ‘You’ve waited six years for this.’
‘Yes.’ He brought his body closer, crushing her with his strong thighs, his broad chest. ‘But there will be nothing cold about our marriage.’
Desire lurched through her. The world began to spin wildly off its axis. ‘There won’t be a marriage,’ she said, with a confidence that was completely forged. Already the options were closing in around her. ‘And there certainly won’t be...what you’re...suggesting.’
‘What’s the matter, agape mou? Do you worry that we won’t still feel as we did then?’
He ground his hips against her and she groaned as sensations that had long since been relegated to the past flared in her belly. Of their own volition her fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt, the warmth from his chest a balm to her fraught nerves.
‘Do you remember how I respected your innocence?’ He brought his mouth close to hers, so that his words were a breath on her lips. ‘How I told you we should wait until we were married, or at least engaged?’
Shame, desire, misery and despair slid through her like a headless snake, twisting and writhing in her heart. She pulled her lower lip between her teeth and nodded once.
‘How, even though I had kissed your body all over, and you had begged me to take you, I insisted that I wanted to wait? Because I thought I loved you and that it mattered.’
He dropped his hands to her hips, holding her still as he pushed against her once more. She tilted her head back as far as she could, the window’s glass providing a hard barrier.
‘Do you remember how you laughed in my face and told me you’d never marry someone like me?’
Those words! How she’d hated saying them! She’d rehearsed them for days, and when the moment had come only the belief that she was doing the right thing for her family had spurred her on to say them. It was the most difficult thing she’d ever done. Even now, six years later, she wondered at the way she’d been led away from him despite the intensity of her feelings.
‘Do you?’ he demanded, scraping his lips against her neck, sending her pulse rioting out of control.
‘Yes!’ She groaned as desire and memory weakened her body.
‘I have met many people like you in my life—like your father. Snobs who value centuries-old fortune above all else.’
‘That isn’t me,’ she said with quiet determination.
‘Of course it is.’ He almost laughed. ‘You broke up with me because you knew your destiny was to marry someone like you. Somebody that your parents approved of.’
‘That’s what they wanted. I just wanted you.’
‘Not enough.’ He sobered, his mouth a grim slash.
Frustrated, she tried to appeal to the man he’d once been: the man who had known her better than anyone on earth. ‘God, Nikos. You know what my life was like then. We’d just buried Libby. We were all in mourning. I couldn’t upset them like you wanted me to. I couldn’t. Don’t you dare think for a moment it was because I thought you weren’t good enough.’
‘You thought as your parents wished you to,’ he said with coldness, shrugging as though it no longer mattered. ‘But they will shortly come to realise there is one thing that carries more sway than birth and breeding. And when you are as broke as your father that is money.’
His words fell like bricks against her chest.
‘Now you will marry me, and he will have to spend the rest of his life knowing it was me—the man he wouldn’t have in his house—who was his salvation.’
The sheer fury of his words whipped her like a rope. ‘Nikos,’ she said, surprised at how calm she could sound in the midst of his stormy declaration. ‘He should never have made you feel like that.’
‘Your father could have called me every name under the sun for all I cared, agape. It was you I expected more of.’
She swallowed. Expectations were not new to Marnie. Her parents’. Her sister’s. Her own.
‘And now you will marry me.’
Anticipation formed a cliff’s edge and she was tumbling over it, free-falling from a great height. She shook her head, but they both knew it was denial for the sake of it.
‘No more waiting,’ he intoned darkly, crushing his mouth to hers in a kiss that stole her breath and coloured her soul.
His tongue clashed with hers. It was a kiss of slavish possession, a kiss designed to challenge and disarm. He blew away every defence she had, reminding her that his body had always been able to manipulate hers. A single look had always been enough to make her break out in a cold sweat of need.
‘No more waiting.’
‘You can’t still want me,’ she said into his mouth, wrapping her hands around his back. ‘You’ve hardly lived the life of a monk. I would have thought I’d lost all appeal by now.’
‘Call it unfinished business,’ he responded, breaking the kiss to scrape his lips down her neck, nipping at her shoulder.
She pushed her hips forward, instinctively wanting more. Wanting everything.
Her brain was wrapped in cotton wool, foggy and filled with questions softened by confusion. ‘It was six years ago.’
‘Yes. And still you’re the only woman I have ever believed myself in love with. The only woman I have ever wanted a future with. Once upon a time for love.’
‘And now?’
‘For...less noble reasons.’
He stepped away, breaking their kiss so easily it made her head spin.
‘Your father isn’t the only one I intend to prove wrong.’
She narrowed her eyes, her heart racing. ‘What does that mean?’
His laugh was without humour. ‘You said I didn’t mean anything to you. That I had been merely a distraction when you needed to escape grief.’
He brought his face closer to hers once more—so close that she could see the thousands of tiny prisms of light that danced in his eyes.
‘You told me you didn’t want me.’
‘I...’ She squeezed her eyes shut. ‘I don’t remember saying that,’ she lied.
‘You said it. And I will delight in showing you how wrong you were.’
He stepped away, leaving her cresting a wave of emotion. Striving to sound cool, she said, ‘So you’ve been...what? Pining for me for six years? Give me a break, Nikos. You moved on pretty damned fast, so it’s a little disingenuous to be playing the heartbroken ex-lover now.’
‘We were never lovers, agape.’
Her stomach churned; her cheeks were pink. ‘That’s not the point I’m making.’
‘Whatever point it is you are attempting to make it is irrelevant to me.’
She sucked in an indignant breath but he continued. ‘I have not been pining for you. But I am an opportunist.’ His smile was almost cruel—at least it looked it to Marnie. ‘Your father’s situation presented me with an opportunity I felt I couldn’t resist.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ she snapped, trying desperately to think of a way out. A way to make him realise how foolhardy this was!
‘You will spend every day of our marriage faced with the reality of just how wrong you were.’
Speechless, she fidgeted with her ring, her mind unable to grasp exactly what was going on.
Seemingly he took her silence as a form of agreement. ‘A licence can be arranged within fifteen days. I have engaged a wedding planner to oversee the details. Her card is on my desk; take it when you leave.’
She shook her head as the words he was saying tumbled over her. She needed to process what was going on. ‘Wait a second. It’s too sudden. Too soon.’
He arched a single thick brow. ‘Any delay will make it impossible for me to help your father in time.’
‘You’re saying we have to actually be married before you’ll help him?’
His lip twisted in a smile of cynical derision. ‘It would hardly make sense to prop him up before the pleasure of having you... As my wife.’
To Marnie, his slight pause implied that he meant something else altogether. That he wanted to sleep with her before money changed hands. It made her feel instantly dirty, and she shifted away from the window, crossing her arms in an attempt to stem the pain that was perforating her heart.
‘Do you think I’d renege on our deal?’ she asked, realising only after posing the question that it showed her acquiescence when she hadn’t actually intended to agree...yet.
‘I think you will do whatever pleases you—as you always have done.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Forgive me—what is the expression? Having been bitten, I am...?’
‘Once bitten, twice shy.’ She sucked in an unsteady breath, waiting for relief to calm her lungs. But still they burned painfully. She tried to salvage her pride. ‘If I agree to do this, I will go through with it.’
‘I’m not sure I can put much stock in your assurances,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I credit you and your father for my scepticism. Were it not for you, perhaps I would have continued to take promises at face value. Now I live and die by contracts.’
‘That’s fine in business. I’m sure it’s wise, in fact. But marriage is different, surely.’
‘A real marriage,’ he conceded, with a tight nod.
‘You’re saying you don’t want ours to be a real marriage?’
His laugh sent a shiver down her spine. ‘Oh, in the most important ways it will be.’
‘Meaning...?’ she challenged—though how could she not understand his intention?
‘Meaning, Marnie, that I have no interest in paying a hundred million pounds and tying myself to a woman purely for revenge.’
His smile curled her toes.
‘There will be other benefits to our marriage.’
Her heart slammed hard in her chest. ‘I...’ She clamped her mouth shut.
What had she been about to say? That she was still a virgin? That after being so madly in love with him and letting him go she’d found she couldn’t feel that same desire for another man? Especially not the men her parents approved of her dating.
‘I’m not going to sleep with you just because you appear out of the blue...’
‘That is not why you’ll sleep with me,’ he said.
He spoke with a confidence that infuriated her. But he was right! Despite the passage of time, and the insufferable situation she found herself in, she couldn’t deny that the same need was rioting through her now, just as it had in their past.
‘This is a deal-breaker,’ he said with a shrug. ‘These are my terms. Accept them or don’t.’
‘Wait.’ She shook her head and lifted a hand to make him pause for a moment. But she was drowning. Possibilities, questions, wants, needs, doubts were churning around inside her—it was background noise but it was going to suck her under. ‘There’s so much more to discuss.’
‘Such as?’ he prompted, crossing his arms over his broad chest.
She tried not to notice the way the fabric strained to reveal his impressive pectoral definition.
‘Well, such as...’ She darted her tongue out and licked her lower lip. ‘Say I went along with this absolutely crazy idea—and I’m not saying I will, because clearly it’s madness—where would you see us living?’
‘That is also non-negotiable. Greece.’
‘Greece?’ She was in free fall again. ‘Greece, as in... You mean Greece?’
He stared at her for a long moment, his eyes mocking her. ‘Athens. My home.’
‘But I’ve always lived here. I can’t move.’
Their eyes locked; it was a battle of wills and yet when he spoke it was with an easy nonchalance she admired.
‘I will be spending a considerable fortune to save your father’s reputation. You do not think it’s fair that you should make some concessions?’
‘Marrying you is not a c-concession,’ she stammered in disbelief. ‘It’s so much more than that. And the same can be said of moving to a different country.’
‘You are so sheltered,’ he murmured. ‘What would you suggest? That we live in London? Within arm’s reach of your father? A man I will always despise? No.’
‘How can I marry you knowing you feel that way about him?’
His expression was rock-hard. ‘You will find a way.’ He shrugged. ‘While it might be difficult for you, it is the only way to spare him—and your mother—from a considerable fall from grace.’
‘So this is how it would be? You’d dictate terms and I’d be expected to fall in with them?’
The air was thick between them. He studied her for a long moment and she wondered if he wasn’t going to answer. Finally, though, he sighed.
‘I have no intention of being unreasonable. When you make a fair request I will hear you out. But this is not one of those instances. I live in Greece. My business is primarily controlled from Athens. You still live with your parents, who hate me as much as I do them. You have no business to speak of. It is obvious that we should move.’
‘Just like that?’ she murmured, shaking her head at his high-handed dictatorial manner even when a small part of her brain could see that he was raising a decent rationale for the suggestion.
‘These are my terms,’ he said again.
‘You’re unbelievable,’ she replied softly, worrying at her fingers.
She spun her ring some more, trying to think of a way to appease him that didn’t involve anything so drastic as this ridiculous marriage. But there was nothing. He had the money. And there was no way he’d help unless she made it worth his while.
‘Yes.’ He shrugged. ‘So?’
‘I wouldn’t want a big wedding.’ She was thinking aloud, really, though to her ears it sounded as though she was going along with his proposal. ‘If I had my way it would just be us. No fanfare. No fuss.’
‘Hmm...’ he murmured with a shake of his head. ‘And no one need ever know? No. I want the world to see that you are my wife. You—a woman who once felt I was far beneath her. A woman who declared she’d never marry someone like me. I want your father to have to stand beside us, smiling as though I am all his dreams come true, when we three will know that I am the last man on earth he wants his daughter to marry.’
The way he’d been treated by her and her parents was a nauseating truth. She wished—not for the first time—that she’d been able to stand up to them. That she’d been wise enough to fight for the relationship that had mattered so much to her.
‘Nikos...’ She furrowed her brows, searching for words. ‘You have to understand why I...why I couldn’t be with you. You know how my parents were after Libby...after...’
He studied her face, torn between listening and shutting down this hollow explanation.
‘I know I never explained it properly at the time. The way I was always in her shadow. The certainty that I was a poor comparison to her. The absolute blinding fact that they wished again and again that I could be more like her.’ She swallowed, an image of her sister clouding her eyes and making her heart ring with nostalgic affection. ‘They wanted me to marry someone like Anderson—her fiancé. And I wanted their approval so badly I would have done anything they asked.’
He compressed his lips. ‘Yes. I presumed as much at the time.’
He brought his face closer to hers, so she could feel the waves of his resentment.
‘You walked away from me and what we were to each other as though I was nothing to you. You can blame your sister, or you can blame your parents, but the only one who made the decision was you.’
‘I’m trying to explain why...’
‘And I’m telling you that it does not matter to me.’ His eyes flared. ‘You were wrong.’
She had been. In the six years since she’d watched Nikos leave for the last time, his shoulders set, his head held high, she’d never met anyone who excited in her even a tenth of the emotions he had. He alone had been her true love. And she’d burned him in a way that he’d apparently never forgive.
He brought the conversation back to the wedding. ‘The guest list will be extensive and the press coverage—’
‘Nikos!’ Marnie interrupted, her voice strained.
Something in the pale set of her features communicated her distress and he was quiet, watchful.
‘Please.’ Her throat worked overtime as she tried to relieve her aching mouth. ‘I can’t do that.’
‘You do agree to marry me?’
She nodded. ‘But not like that. I... You know how I feel about the media. And, more to the point, how they feel about me.’ She flashed a look at him from beneath thick dark lashes. ‘I’ll marry you. I will. But without all the fuss. Please.’
It was tempting to push her out of her comfort zone. To say that it was a big wedding or none at all. She was staring at him with a look of icy aloofness that had no doubt helped earn her the nickname of Lady Heiress. That look of untouchable elegance bordering on disdain that he understood was her tightly held shield in moments of wrenching panic. That same look he was desperate to dislodge as soon as possible, shaking her into showing her real feelings.
‘You don’t like the press any more than I do,’ she said with measured persistence. ‘If you insist on a big wedding we’ll both know it’s simply to be spiteful to me. And you’re not that petty—are you, Nikos?’
He felt his resolve slipping and a grudging admiration for her reasoned argument spread through him. Still, he drawled, ‘I’m blackmailing you into my bed and you don’t think I’m petty?’
Heat flooded her system, warring with the ice that had coated her heart. ‘No, I don’t. I think you want me to marry you. What does it matter how we do it?’
She had an excellent point. Besides Marnie there was only one other person he really cared about having at the wedding.
‘Fine,’ he said, with a nonchalant lift of his shoulders. His eyes glittered with determination. ‘So long as your father is there the rest does not greatly matter.’
* * *
‘It’s enormous,’ she intoned flatly, rubbing her fingertip over the flattened edges of paper.
Nikos’s stare was loaded with emotion. ‘It needs to be.’ His accent seemed thicker, spicier than it had been the night before. Her gaze flicked to his face, then skidded away again immediately. His face was all angles and planes, unforgiving and unrelenting.
Harsh.
She had never comprehended the full extent of that hardness before. Not in the past, anyway. When she’d loved him as much as the ocean loved the shore. She had felt, then, just like that. As if she would spend the rest of her life rolling inexorably towards him, needing to touch him, to wash over him, to feel him beneath her and around her. She had believed them to be as organically dependent as those two bodies—sea and sand. That without him she would have nowhere to go.
Foolishly, she had thought he felt the same.
But Nikos had moved on quickly, despite his protestations of love, and his bed had been such a hot spot it might as well have had its own listing on TripAdvisor.
‘Mind if I have my lawyer check this out?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Sígoura. Certainly. But that may cause a delay to proceedings.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘You mean you might not be able to help Dad in time?’
He sat back in his chair, his body taut, his face unreadable. ‘I will not apply for the marriage licence until you have signed the pre-nup.’
A frown formed a little line between her eyes. ‘Why not?’
His laugh was a sharp sound in the busy café. A woman at the table beside them angled her head curiously before going back to her book.
Marnie lowered her voice, not wanting to risk being overheard. She was obliged to lean a little closer. ‘Does it matter if I don’t sign it in the next week or two? So long as you have it before the wedding...?’
‘The minute I apply for our certificate there’s a high probability the press will pick up on it. Do you want the world to know we were hastily engaged and that the wedding was then cancelled?’
Her cheeks flamed. ‘As if the journalists of the world have nothing better to do than search the registry for your name, waiting with bated breath until such time as you see fit to hang up your well-worn bachelor belt,’ she muttered.
He arched a single brow, his expression making her feel instantly ridiculous. ‘If you believe our wedding won’t excite media interest then you’re more naive than I recall.’
Yes, she definitely felt childish now. She dragged her lower lip between her teeth, then caught the betraying gesture and mentally shook herself. She was Lady Marnie Kenington, and it was not for Nikos to berate and humiliate her.
‘Each of us on our own would create a stir of interest. Marrying one another guarantees press interest.’
‘I know.’ She nodded. There was no point, after all, in arguing the toss. He was absolutely right. ‘But we agreed on a quiet wedding.’
‘And I will do my best to arrange this,’ he promised.
‘Okay.’ She nodded again quickly.
His first instinct was to feel impressed by her ability to be reasonable in the face of an argument. But he quickly realised that she wasn’t reasonable so much as changeable. That she was deferring to him at the first sign of pressure. Was that how it had been with her parents?
His mouth was a grim line in his face. ‘There are four pages you need to sign.’
She expelled a heavy breath and tapped the pen against the side of the table.
Memories, visceral and sharp, twisted his gut. How familiar that tiny gesture was! Flashes of her studying for exams, writing lists, pausing midsentence to capture the next, flashed into his mind. When she’d had a particularly large problem to solve she’d chewed on the end of the pen, waiting for clarity to flood to her from its inky heart.
‘Nikos...’ She lifted her gaze to him. ‘Doesn’t this all seem a bit crazy?’
He didn’t react.
She huffed out a sigh. ‘I don’t know you any more. And you definitely don’t know me.’
He narrowed his eyes almost imperceptibly. ‘I know you perhaps as well as ever.’
She bit on the pen again and shook her head. ‘I just don’t see why we have to rush this.’
‘It is your father’s financial situation that puts a time limit on matters.’
‘But—’
‘No.’
He leaned across the table, pressing his hand on hers. Sparks shimmered in her heart. Angered by her body’s ongoing betrayal to his proximity, she worked overtime to conceal the explosive desire. Her glare was dripping with ice.
‘This is the only way I will help your father. It’s not a negotiation.’
Backed against a wall, she wondered why she didn’t feel more angry.
She looked down at the thick pile of papers. ‘If you expect me to sign this today then you’re going to have to explain it to me.’
‘Fine.’ He flicked a glance at his gold wristwatch.
‘Sorry if I’m taking up too much of your time,’ she snapped sarcastically, and for the briefest moment he felt the full force of her emotions—emotions she was so good at guarding. Fear, worry, stress, uncertainty.
But he had no intention of softening towards his fiancée. He nodded curtly, his expression rock-hard. ‘The first section deals with our assets. Any assets you bring to the marriage will be quarantined against becoming communal.’
‘So I get to keep what’s mine?’ she interpreted.
‘Yes. I have no interest in your money.’
The way he said it, with such vile distaste, made Marnie shiver.
‘Fine. Just as I have no interest in yours.’
He arched a brow, his face filled with sardonic amusement. ‘You mean, I presume, beyond the hundred million pounds I will be giving your father?’
Her cheeks flamed. ‘Yes.’ She couldn’t meet his eyes because she felt the sting of tears in her own.
‘Irrespective of that, you will be entitled to a sum for each year we remain married.’
‘I don’t want it,’ she said through clenched teeth.
‘Fine. Give it away. It’s not my concern.’ He reached forward impatiently and turned several pages until he arrived at the end of that section. ‘Sign here.’
Pressing her lips together, she scrawled her name, blinking her eyes furiously.
They were still suspiciously moist when she lifted her face to his. ‘Next?’
He appeared not to notice how close her emotions were to the surface. ‘The next section deals with the moral obligations of our union. Any infidelity will lead to an immediate termination of the marriage. It will also invalidate the financial agreement, and will necessitate your father returning half of the money I have given him to that date.’
She blinked in confusion. ‘You think I’m going to cheat on you?’
His lips compressed with a dark emotion, one she couldn’t fathom. ‘I could not say with certainty.’ His smile was wolfish. ‘Though I imagine this makes it considerably less likely.’
She ground her teeth together. ‘And what if you cheat?’
‘Me?’ He laughed again, this time with real humour.
‘Yeah. You’re the one who seems to be constantly auditioning lovers. What happens if you get bored in our marriage and end up in another woman’s bed?’
‘You will just have to make sure I don’t get bored.’
Her breath snagged in her throat. The threat weakened her. Her pulse throbbed painfully in her body. ‘When did you get so cynical?’
He narrowed his eyes, stunning her with the heat she felt emanating from him. ‘When do you think, agape mou?’
She shook her head, hating the implication that she’d somehow caused his character transformation. ‘Nikos...’
What did she want to say? She’d already tried to explain about Libby, and the burden she’d felt to please her parents—a burden that had increased monumentally after Libby’s death. He didn’t care. He’d said as much. She clamped her mouth shut and shook her head. It was futile.
‘I have a meeting after this.’
She swallowed, shaking her head to clear the tangle of thoughts. ‘Fine.’
‘The third section deals with children.’
Her eyes startled to his face. ‘Children?’ Her heart was jackhammering inside her chest.
He turned several pages but Marnie was too shocked to bother trying to read them. He fixed her with a direct stare. ‘It stipulates that we won’t have a child for at least five years.’
Fire and ice were flashing within her, making speech difficult. She blinked her enormous caramel eyes, then shook her head, but still it didn’t make sense. ‘You want children?’
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps. One day. It’s hard to imagine right now—and with you.’
‘Oh, gee, thanks.’ She rolled her eyes in an attempt to hide the way his words had wounded her. ‘As if I’m just lining up to be your baby-baker.’
‘My...baby-baker?’ Despite himself, he felt a smile tickle the corner of his lips.
‘I can’t believe you’re actually contracting hypothetical children.’
He arched a brow. ‘It makes sense.’
‘A baby isn’t...’ She dropped her gaze. ‘A baby isn’t Section Three, Subsection Eleven A. A baby is a little person. A new life! You have no right to...to...make such arbitrary decisions about something that should be magical and wonderful.’
‘A baby between us would never be magical and wonderful,’ he responded, with such ease that she genuinely believed he hadn’t intended to be unkind. ‘It is the very last thing I would want. As for it being arbitrary...’ He shrugged his broad shoulders with an air of unconcern. ‘You seemed perfectly fine making such decisions in the past.’
‘Not about a child!’
‘You just said you don’t want to be my...baby-baker. Have you changed your mind suddenly?’ he asked cynically, his eyes drifting over her features with genuine interest.
‘No.’ She bit down on her lip. The lie—and she recognised it as such—hurt. Images of what their children might look like were hard to shake. Instantly she could see a tiny chubby version of Nikos, with his imperious expression and dark eyes, and her heart seemed to soar at the prospect.
‘Our marriage is not one of love. I can think of nothing worse than bringing a child into that situation.’
‘But in five years?’ she heard herself ask, as if from a long way away.
He shrugged insolently. ‘In five years we will either have found a way to live together with a degree of harmony, or we will hate one another and have long since divorced. It gives us time to see what’s what. No?’
She nodded jerkily. He was right. She knew he was. But as she signed her name on the bottom of the page she felt as if she was strangling a large part of herself.
‘Next?’ She forced a tight smile to her lips; her tone was cool.
‘A simple confidentiality agreement. Our business is our own. The press has a fascination with you, and I have often thought, despite what you say, that you court their interest.’
‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ she interrupted sharply. ‘I go out of my way to stay off their radar.’
‘Which in and of itself only heightens their attention and speculation.’
‘So I flirt with the press by hiding from them?’ She crossed her legs beneath the table. ‘That’s absurd.’
‘You are “Lady Heiress”. They call you that because of your behaviour—’
‘They call me that,’ she interrupted testily, ‘because I refuse to engage with them. After Libby died they were everywhere. I was only seventeen, and they followed me around for sport.’
She didn’t add how horrible their comparisons to the beautiful Libby had made her feel. How Marnie’s far less stunning looks had drawn the press’s derision. She had refused to court them in order to create the impression that she didn’t care, but each article had eroded a piece of her confidence until only the ‘Lady Heiress’ construct had remained. Being cold and untouchable, a renowned ice queen, was better than being the less beautiful, less popular, less charismatic sister of Lady Elizabeth Kenington.
He shrugged. ‘You will not be of such interest in Greece. Here you are a society princess. There you will be only my wife.’
Why did that prospect make everything inside her sing? Not just the prospect of marrying him, but of escaping it all! The intrusions and invasions. Freedom was a gulf before her.
‘Your parents are included in this agreement. They are to believe our wedding is a real one.’
‘Oh? I would have thought you’d like to throw the terms of our deal in Dad’s face, just to see him suffer,’ she couldn’t help snapping.
‘Perhaps one day.’ His smile tilted her world off-balance. ‘But that is my decision. Not yours.’
She furrowed her brow. ‘This agreement doesn’t apply to you?’
‘No. It is a contract for you. So you understand what is expected of you.’
‘That definitely isn’t fair.’
He laughed. ‘Perhaps not. Do you want to walk away, Marnie?’
The sting of tears was back. She lowered her eyes in an attempt to hide them and shook her head. But when she put her signature to the bottom of the page she added something unexpected.
A single teardrop rolled down her cheek and splashed onto the white paper, unconsciously dotting the ‘i’. It was the perfect addition to the deal—almost like a blood promise.
She closed the contract and pushed it across the table.
It was done, then, and there was nothing left to do but marry the man. Except, of course, to break the news to her parents.
