Читать книгу Michelle Reid Collection - Michelle Reid - Страница 56

FOR the next few days Nell felt as if she had been placed in purdah. The only people that came to visit her belonged to the medical staff, who seemed to take great pleasure in making her uncomfortable before they made her comfortable again.

The first time they allowed her to take a shower she was shocked by the extent of her bruising. If anyone had told her that with enough applied pressure you could achieve a perfect imprint of a car safety belt across your body she would not have believed them—until she saw it striking across her own slender frame in two ugly, deep bands of dark purple bruising. She had puncture holes and stitches from the keyhole surgery and her cracked ribs hurt like crazy every time she moved. She had bruises on her legs, bruises and scratches on her arms and her face due to ploughing through bushes in an open-top car—before it had slammed into the tree.

And the miserable knowledge that Xander had seen her looking like this did not make her feel any better. It was no wonder he hadn’t bothered to come and visit her again.

Her night things had been delivered, toiletries, that kind of thing. And she’d even received a dozen red roses—Xander’s way of keeping up appearances, she supposed cynically. He was probably already back in New York by now, playing the big Greek tycoon by day and the great Greek lover by night for the lovely Vanessa.

If she could she’d chuck his stupid roses through the window, but she didn’t have the strength. She’d found that she ached progressively more with each new day.

‘What do you expect? You’ve been in a car accident,’ a nurse said with a dulcet simplicity when she mentioned it to her. ‘Your body took a heck of a battering and you’re lucky that your injuries were not more serious. As it is it’s going to be weeks before you begin to feel more like your old self again.’

The shower made her feel marginally better though. And the nurse had shampooed her hair for her and taken gentle care as she blow-dried its long, silken length. By the time she’d hobbled out of the bathroom she was ready to take an interest in the outside world again.

A world in which she had some urgent things to deal with, she recalled worriedly. ‘I need a phone,’ she told the nurse as she inched her aching way across the room via any piece of furniture she could grab hold of to help support her feeble weight. ‘Isn’t it usual to have one plugged in by the bed?’

The nurse didn’t answer, her white-capped head averted as she waited for Nell to slip carefully back into the bed.

It was only then that she began to realise that not only was there no telephone in here, but the room didn’t even have a television set. What kind of private hospital was it Xander had dumped her in that it couldn’t provide even the most basic luxuries?

She demanded both. When she received neither, she changed tack and begged for a newspaper to read or a couple of magazines. It took another twenty-four hours for it to dawn on her that all forms of contact with the outside world were being deliberately withheld.

She began to fret, worrying as to what could have happened out there that they didn’t want her to know about.

Her father? Could something have happened to him? Stunned that she hadn’t thought about him before now, she sat up with a thoughtless jerk that locked her into an agonising spasm across her chest.

That was how Xander found her, sitting on the edge of the bed clutching her side and struggling to breathe in short, sharp, painful little gasps.

‘What the hell…?’ He strode forward.

‘Daddy,’ she gasped out. ‘S-something’s happened to him.’

‘When?’ He frowned. ‘I’ve heard nothing. Here, lie down again…’

His hands took control of her quivering shoulders and carefully eased her back against the high mound of pillows, the frown on his face turning to a scowl when he saw the bruising on her slender legs as he helped ease them carefully back onto the bed.

‘You look like a war zone,’ he muttered. ‘What did you think you were doing, trying to get up without help?’

‘Where’s my father?’ she cut across him anxiously. ‘Why haven’t I heard from him?’

‘But you did.’ Xander straightened up, flicking the covers over her in an act she read as contempt. ‘He’s stuck in Sydney. Did you not receive his flowers and note?’

The only flowers she’d received were the…

Turning her head, Nell looked at the vase of budding red roses and suddenly wished she were dead. ‘I thought they were from you,’ she whispered unsteadily.

He looked so thoroughly disconcerted by the idea that he would send her flowers that being dead no longer seemed bad enough. Curling away from him as much as she dared without hurting herself, Nell clutched her fingers round the covers and tugged them up to her pale cheek.

‘You thought they were from me.’ He had to repeat it, she thought as she cringed beneath the sheet. ‘And because you thought the flowers were from me you did not even bother to read the note that came with them.’

Striding round the bed, he plucked a tiny card from the middle of the roses then came back to the bed.

‘Shame on you, Nell.’ The card dropped against the pillow by her face. It was still sealed inside its envelope.

And shame on you too, she thought as she picked it up and broke the seal. Even a man that cannot stand the sight of his wife sends her flowers when she’s sick.

Her father’s message—brief and to the point as always with him—read: ‘Sorry to hear about your accident. Couldn’t get back to see you. Take care of yourself. Get well soon. Love Pops.’

Saying not a word, she slid the little card back into its envelope then pushed it beneath her pillow, but telling tears were welling in her eyes.

‘He wanted to come back,’ Xander dropped into the ensuing thick silence. ‘But he is locked in some important negotiations with the Australian government and I…assured him that you would understand if he remained where he was.’

So he’d stayed. That was her father. Loving in many ways but single-minded in most. Money was what really mattered, the great, grinding juggernaut of corporate business. It was no wonder her mother had left him to go back to her native Canada. When she was little, Nell had used to wonder if he even noticed that she’d gone. She was a teenager before she’d found out that her mother had begun an affair with a childhood sweetheart and had returned to Canada to be with him.

Like mother like daughter, she mused hollowly. They had a penchant for picking out the wrong men. The duration of her mother’s affair had been shorter than her marriage had been, which said so much about leaving her five-year-old daughter behind for what was supposed to have been the real love of her life.

‘You’ve washed your hair…’

‘I want a telephone,’ she demanded.

‘And the bruises on your face are beginning to fade…’ He spoke right over her as if she hadn’t spoken at all. ‘You look much better, Nell.’

What did he care? ‘I want a telephone,’ she repeated. ‘And you left me with no money. I can’t find my purse or my clothes or my mobile telephone.’

‘You don’t need them while you’re lying there.’

She turned her head to flash him a bitter look. He was standing by the bed, big and lean, taking up more space than he deserved. All six feet two inches of him honed to perfection like a piece of art. His suit was grey today, she noticed. A smooth-as-silk gunmetal grey that did not dare to show a single crease, like his white shirt and his silk-black hair and his—

‘They won’t let me have a newspaper or a magazine.’ She cut that line of thinking off before it went any further. ‘I have no TV and no telephone.’ She gave a full list of her grievances. ‘If it isn’t my father, then what is it that you are trying to hide from me, Xander?’ she demanded, knowing now that her isolation had to be down to him. Xander was the only person with enough weight to throw about. In fact she was amazed that it hadn’t occurred to her to blame him before now.

He made no answer, just stood there looking down at her through unfathomable dark eyes set in his hard, handsome face—then he turned and strode out of the room without even saying goodbye!

Nell stared after him with her eyes shot through with pained dismay. Had their disastrous marriage come down to the point where he couldn’t even be bothered to apply those strictly polite manners he usually used to such devastating effect?

It hurt—which was stupid, but it did and in places that had nothing whatsoever to do with her injuries. Five days without so much as a word from him then he strode in there looking every inch the handsome, dynamic power force he was, looked at her as if he couldn’t stand the sight of her then walked out again.

She wouldn’t cry, she told the sting at the backs of her eyes. Too fed up and too weak to do more than bite hard on her bottom lip to stop it from quivering, she stared at the roses sent by that other man in her life who strode in and out of it at his own arrogant behest.

She hated Alexander Pascalis. He’d broken her heart and she should have left him when she’d had the chance, driven off into the sunset without stopping to look back and think about what she was leaving behind, then she would not be lying here feeling so bruised and broken—and that was on the inside! If he’d cared anything for her at all he should not have married her. He should have stuck to his—

The door swung open and Xander strode back in again, catching her lying on her side staring at the roses through a glaze of tears.

‘If you miss him that much I will bring him home,’ he announced curtly.

‘Don’t put yourself out,’ she responded with acid bite. ‘What brought you back here so quickly?’

He didn’t seem to understand the question, a frown darkening his smooth brow as he moved across the room to collect a chair, which he placed by the bed at an angle so that when he sat himself down on it he was looking her directly in the face.

Nell stirred restlessly, not liking the way he’d done it, or the new look of hard intensity he was treating her to. She stared back warily, waiting to hear whatever it was he was going to hit her with. He was leaning back with his long legs stretched out in front of him and his jacket flipped open in one of those casually elegant attitudes this man pulled off with such panache. His shirt was startlingly white—he liked to wear white shirts, cool, crisp things that accentuated the width of his powerful chest and long, tightly muscled torso. Black handmade shoes, grey silk trousers, bright white shirt and a dark blue silk tie. His cleanly shaved chin had a cleft that warned all of his tough inner strength—like the well-shaped mouth that could do cynicism and sensuality at the same time and to such devastating effect. Then there was the nose that had a tendency to flare at the nostrils when he was angry. It wasn’t flaring now, but the black eyes were glinting with something not very nice, she saw.

And his eyes weren’t really all black, but a dark, dark brown colour, deeply set beneath thick black eyebrows and between long, dense, curling lashes that helped to shade the brown iris black.

Xander was Greek in everything he thought and did but he got his elegant carriage from his beautiful Italian mother. And Gabriela Pascalis could slay anyone with a look, just as her son could. She’d done it to Nell the first time they’d met and Gabriela had not tried to hide her shock. ‘What is Alexander playing at, wanting to marry a child? They will crucify you the moment he attempts to slot you into his sophisticated lifestyle.’

‘He loves me.’ She’d tried to stand up for herself.

‘Alexander does not do love, cara,’ his mother had drily mocked that. ‘In case you have not realised it as yet, he was hewn from rock chipped off Mount Olympus.’ She had actually meant it too. ‘No, this is more likely to be a business transaction,’ her future mother-in-law had decided without a single second’s thought to how a statement like that would make Nell feel. ‘I will have to find out what kind of business deal. Leave it to me, child. There is still time to save you from this…’

‘Finished checking me out?’ The mocking lilt to his voice brought her eyes back into focus on his face. She wished she knew what he was thinking behind that cool, smooth, sardonic mask. ‘I am still the same person you married, believe me.’

Oh, she believed. Nothing had changed. His mother had been right but Nell hadn’t listened. Not until Vanessa DeFriess had entered the frame.

‘Want do you want?’ She didn’t even attempt to sound pleasant.

He moved—not much but enough for Nell to be aware by the way her senses tightened on alert to remind her that Xander was a dangerously unpredictable beast. He might appear relaxed, but she had an itchy suspicion that he was no such thing.

‘We need to talk about your accident,’ he told her levelly. ‘The police have some questions.’

Nell dropped her eyes, concentrating her attention on her fingers where they scratched absently at the white sheet. ‘I told you, I don’t remember anything.’

‘Tell me what you do remember.’

‘We’ve been through this once.’ Her eyebrows snapped together. ‘I don’t see the use in going through it a—’

‘You would rather I allow the police to come here so that you can repeat it all to them?’

No, she wouldn’t. ‘What’s to repeat?’ Flicking him a guarded look, she looked quickly away again. ‘I remember driving down the driveway and through the gates then turning into the lane—’

‘Left or right?’

‘I don’t remember—’

‘Well, it might help if you said where it was you were going.’

‘I don’t remember that either.’

‘Try,’ he said.

‘What for?’ she flipped back. ‘What does it matter now where I was going? I obviously didn’t get there.’

‘True.’ He grimaced. ‘Instead of arriving—wherever it was—you left the road at speed on a notorious bend we all treat with respect. You then proceeded to plough through a row of bushes and concluded the journey by piling head-on into a tree.’

‘Thanks for filling in the gaps,’ she derided.

‘The car boot sprang open on impact,’ he continued, unmoved by her tone. ‘Your possessions were strewn everywhere. Sweaters, skirts, dresses, underwear…’

‘Charity!’ she declared with a sudden burst of memory. ‘I remember now, I was taking some of my old things to the charity shop in the village.’

‘Charity,’ Xander repeated in a voice as thin as silk. ‘Well, that explains the need to drive like a maniac. Now explain to me why you dismissed Hugo Vance…’

Nell froze where she lay curled on her side, her moment of triumph at her own quick thinking fizzling out at the introduction of her ex-bodyguard’s name. She moved, ignoring the creases of pain in her ribs to drag herself into a sitting position so she could grab her knees in a loose but very defensive hug, her hair slithering across her slender shoulders to float all around her in a river of rippling Titian silk.

‘I don’t need a bodyguard,’ she muttered.

‘I have three,’ Xander replied. ‘What does that tell you about what you need?’

‘I’m not you.’ She sent him an acrid look. ‘I don’t stride around the world, playing God and throwing my weight around—’

His eyes gave a sudden glint. ‘So that is how you see me—as a god that throws his weight around?’ The silken tone gave her no clue as to what was about to come next. ‘Well, my beautiful Helen,’ he drawled in a thoroughly lazy attitude, ‘just watch this space—’

In a single snaking move he was off the chair and leaning over her. The next second and he was gathering her hair up and away from her face. A controlled tug sent her head back. A stifled gasp brought her startled eyes flicking up to clash with his.

What she saw glowing there set her trembling. ‘You’re hurting—’

‘No, I’m not,’ he denied through gritted teeth. ‘But I am teetering, cara mia, so watch out how many more lies you wish to spout at me!’

‘I’m not lying!’

‘No?’ With some more of that controlled strength he wound her hair around his fingers, urging her head back an extra vulnerable inch so as to expose the long, creamy length of her slender throat.

‘You were leaving me,’ he bit at her in hard accusation. ‘You were speeding like a crazy woman down that lane because you were leaving me for another man and you got rid of Vance to give yourself a nice clean getaway, only that damn tree got in the way!’

Caught out lying so thoroughly, she felt hot colour rush into her cheeks. His eyes flared as he watched it happen. Defiance rose in response.

‘So what if I was?’ she tossed back at him. ‘What possible difference was it going to make to the way you run your life? We don’t have a marriage, we have a business arrangement that I didn’t even get to have a say about!’ Tears were burning now—hot, angry tears. ‘And I dismissed Hugo a week ago, much that you noticed or cared! I have a right to live my own life any way I want—’

‘And let another man make love to you any time that you want?’

The raking insert closed Nell’s throat, strangling her breath and the denial she could have given in answer to that. Her angry lips followed suit, snapping shut because she didn’t want to say it. She did not want to give him anything that could feed his mammoth ego.

The silence between them began to spark like static, his lean face strapped by a fury that stretched his golden skin across the bones in his cheeks as their eyes made war across a gap of barely an inch. Then his other hand came up to cover her throat, light-fingered and gentle but oh, so menacing.

‘Say it, yenika,’ he encouraged thinly. ‘Live dangerously…’

He thought she was holding back from admitting she had taken a lover, Nell realised, and felt the triumph in that tingle all the way down to her feet. She moistened her lips—tempted, so desperately tempted that she did not know how she managed to keep the lie back. Their eyes continued to war across several taut, suffocating seconds. It was exciting, knowing that she had the power to shatter his precious ego with a single soft word like yes.

The tips of his long fingers moved on her throat, locating a wildly beating pulse. Nell needed to take a breath, her ribs were hurting under the pressure she was placing on them, and in the end she managed a short, tense tug of air into her lungs before improvising shakily, ‘If you want to strangle m-me then go ahead; I’m in no fit state to stop you.’

Surprise lit his face. He glanced down to where his fingers curved her throat, dark lashes curling over his eyes before lifting again to view the way his other fingers were knotted into her hair. There was yet another second of taut, breathtaking stillness in which the entire world seemed to grind to a halt. Then the fingers began to slide again, moving almost sensuously against stretched, smooth, creamy flesh as they began to make a slow retreat.

Relief quivered through her, parting her lips on a small, soft gasp. The fingers paused, she held her breath again, felt a different kind of excitement erupt as she flicked a look into the deep, dark, swirling depths of his eyes and saw what she’d always seen there.

Xander had always desired her and Nell had always known it. Whatever else had motivated him into marrying her, the desire had always been the added incentive that made the deal worthwhile.

‘You remind me of a sleeping siren,’ he murmured. ‘It is the only thing that has kept you safe for the last year. Give me one small hint, cara, that you have given to someone else that which I have resisted and you will spend the rest of your days regretting it.’

It was just too tempting to resist this time. Defiance back in her eyes, she opened her mouth ‘I—’

His mouth arrived to stop whatever she had been about to utter. Shock hit her broadside, sheer surprise at the unexpectedness of it holding her utterly transfixed. He hadn’t kissed her once since their wedding night and then he’d been so angry—hard and punishing with frustrated desire. This was different, the anger was still there but the rest was warm, deep and sensually tantalising, the way he used his lips to prise hers apart then stroked the inner recesses of her mouth.

It was her very first tongue-to-tongue experience and the pleasurable sensations it fed into her tapped into one of her many restless, hopeless dreams about moments like this. The warm, clean, expensive scent of him, the smooth, knowing expertise with which he moulded her mouth to his, the slight rasping brush of his skin against her soft skin, the trailing, sensual drag she could feel on her senses that made her relax into him.

He drew back the moment he felt her first tentative response to him. Eyes too dark to read watched the soft quiver of her mouth before he looked deeply into the swirling green confusion mirrored in her eyes. Then he smiled.

‘There,’ he murmured with silken huskiness. ‘I have just saved you from yourself. Aren’t you fortunate to have a caring husband like me?’

As she frowned at the comment, he brushed a contemptuous kiss across her still parted mouth then drew right away, fingers trailing from her throat and untangling from her silken hair while she continued to puzzle—until she remembered what she had been about to say before the kiss.

She shivered, horrified at how easily she had let herself be diverted. Resentment poured into her bloodstream. ‘I still intend to leave you the moment I get out of here,’ she said.

‘You will not.’ He was already on his feet and replacing the chair back from where he’d got it. ‘And I will tell you why.’ He sent her a cold look down the length of his arrogant nose. ‘We still have a contract to fulfil.’

Nell lifted her chin to him, green eyes wishing him dead now. ‘I signed under duress.’

‘You mean you signed without reading it.’

Because she’d loved him so much she was blind! ‘How many women would expect to be duped by both their own father and their future husband?’ she defended her own piece of stupid folly.

Xander nodded in agreement. ‘I offered to renegotiate,’ he then reminded her. ‘You turned the offer down, so the contract stands as written and signed.’

‘And all for the love of money,’ she said bitterly.

‘A loan of fifty million pounds to haul your father out of trouble is a lot of money, Nell. Have you got the resources to pay me back?’

He knew she hadn’t. The only money Nell had even a loose connection to was tied up in trusts left by her grandmother for any children Nell might have. And what her mother had left would not even pay back a tenth of what was owed to Xander.

‘But I was not referring to the money,’ he slid in smoothly. ‘I was referring to the other clause—the one which involves me protecting my investment by you providing me with my son and heir to inherit from your father.’

Effectively putting Nell right out of the inheritance loop! ‘Not with my permission.’

‘With your permission,’ he insisted. ‘And at my time of choosing…’

He came back to the bed to lean over her again, ignoring her defensive jerk as he began plumping up the pillows behind her back. ‘I have been very patient with you until now, yenika mou—’

‘Because you had more—interesting things to do.’

As a direct shot about Vanessa, it went wide of its mark.

‘Because,’ he corrected, ‘when we married you were nothing but a wounded babe in arms only a monster would have forced himself upon. The arrival of another man on the scene tells me I may well have been too patient with you.’ Taking her by the shoulders, he gently urged her to lie back. Then his eyes were pinning her there, relentless and hard. ‘Your growing time is up, Nell. I want a proper wife. Renege on the contract we made and I will take you, your father and your boyfriend to the cleaners and hang you all out to dry.’

‘And cause yourself a nasty scandal involving yourself, your mistress and your lousy unfaithfulness?’

‘Is that why you thought you could leave and get away with it?’ Black silk eyebrows made a mocking arch. ‘You think that because Vanessa has suddenly arrived back on the scene it gives you a tasty weapon to wield? I will let you into a little secret,’ he murmured, a taunting fingertip making a swipe of her full bottom lip before he replaced it with the casual brush of his mouth. ‘Vanessa has never been off the scene,’ he informed her smoothly. ‘I am just very discreet—usually.’

It was like being kicked while she was already down on the ground. It didn’t help that her lips had filled with soft, pulsing heat. ‘I hope you both rot in hell,’ she breathed thickly.

‘But you still want me, as that beautiful, quivering, hungry mouth is telling me.’ He smiled a very grim smile. ‘And if you were not so battered and bruised I would show you how much you want me.’

‘I—’

He saw the lie coming, the tight repudiation of his arrogant confidence, and he swooped, claiming her parted mouth and pressing her back into the pillows. The long length of his torso followed, exerting a controlled power that stopped just short of crushing her beneath his weight. Nell felt taken over, overwhelmed, besieged. The scent of him, the heat, the way he used this kiss to demonstrate the difference between taunting and a full sexual onslaught. Hot tingles of sensation flared up from nowhere with the stabbing invasion of his tongue. Fierce heat rushed through her bloodstream, desire like she’d never known before set her groaning in protest and lifting up her hands to push at his chest.

But Xander was going nowhere, the unyielding contours of his body remaining firm as he deepened the kiss with an unhidden hunger that had Nell stretching beneath him in a wild sensual act that arched her slender shape from breasts to toes. He moved with her, a very male thigh finding a place for itself between her thighs. The bedcovers should have lessened the coiling spring of intimacy she was experiencing but did nothing of the kind.

She tried to drag in some air but found that she couldn’t. She tried to separate their mouths but he had control. His tongue slid across her tongue and set it quivering as it hungrily began to follow his lead. Nothing had prepared her for a kiss like this. A kiss that sparked senses alive in every intimate place she had. When his hand covered the arching thrust of one of her breasts she almost shattered into little pieces, writhing and gasping as the rosebud nipple stung as it tightened to push into his palm.

He muttered something, went to move away, her hands stopped pushing at his chest and slid up to bury themselves in his hair so she could hold this amazing, sensational mouth clamped to her own. She didn’t know she had the ability to behave like a wanton, but wanton she felt and wanton she acted, writhing beneath him, ignoring the many twinges of physical agony because everything else that was happening to her was oh, so much more important. When his thigh pressed into greater contact with the apex of her thighs she went up like tinder, a thick cry of pleasure coiling in her throat.

A knock sounded at the door. Xander drew back like a man bitten. Eyes like burning black coals scorched her a blistering look. Two hot streaks raked his high cheekbones; his mouth pulsed visibly even though it was suddenly stretched taut. She was panting and still clinging to his hair, the green of her eyes glazed by the stunning shock of her own loss of control.

‘This had better be your awakening, cara, or you’re dead,’ he blasted down at her, voice rusted by jealous desire.

Before she could construct any kind of answer he had moved away, landing on his feet beside the bed. He did not look at her again until he’d stridden to the door and grasped the handle. The pause he made then sang between them, stretched taut and raw by that final rasping threat.

He was angry—still angry. The kiss had been delivered in anger, the deliberate assault of angry passion that left her lying here hot and trembling, shaken to her core by her own response, her mouth, her body, her deserted breast with its stinging nipple feeling utterly, shamefully bereft.

‘Hypocrite,’ she heard herself whisper across a throat thickened by the bubble of tears to come.

The charge swung him round to lance her with a hard, glinting look. ‘And primitive with it,’ he extended grimly. ‘Forget the lover,’ he warned thinly. ‘You will not be laying eyes on him again.’

The note in his tone brought Nell upright. ‘Why—w-what have you done to him?’ she demanded in alarm.

‘As yet—nothing.’ His eyes blackened dangerously. ‘His fate rests in the future when I have more time to discover if he taught you more than just how to kiss.’

Nell blinked then blushed at his thinking behind that revealing comment. He thought it was Marcel who’d taught her to kiss as she’d just done! Her kiss-numb lips parted to speak a denial then closed again. Let his primitive side twist his gut, she thought angrily, lowering her gaze from the piercing hardness of his. Let him learn what it felt like to imagine her locked in naked passion with another man as she had spent the last year imagining him with Vanessa the tramp!

‘I will be away for the next few days but will be back in time to collect you from here on Saturday.’

This final piece of news brought her eyes flickering up again as he opened the door and left without another word, allowing whoever had knocked on the door earlier to come into the room.

It was one of his personal bodyguards, his polite greeting spoiled by the tough look on his face. He placed something down on the bedside cupboard. ‘Mr Pascalis gave his permission for you to have these,’ he said, then went to leave the room.

‘H-how long have you been standing out there?’ she asked, horrified that he might have heard or—worse—seen what had been going on in here through the little window in the door!

‘Since you arrived in this hospital,’ Jake Mather replied.

Nell stared at the door closing behind Jake Mather’s bulky frame. She’d been under guard without even knowing it. She was in prison. She had been completely surrounded and isolated from the outside world. A shiver shot through her. It was like being back at Rosemere only worse.

Mr Pascalis gave his permission…She turned her head to look at what Xander had kindly given his permission to.

It was a neat stack of magazines. Reaching out to pick the top one of the stack, she let it unfold so she could see the front page in all its damning glory. ‘Greek tycoon’s wife tries to kill herself after he flaunts his mistress.’

No wonder he saw no threat in a scandal—it was already here!

She plucked up another paper and another, swapped them for the magazines. Scandal galore was splashed across the pages. There were even photographs of her wrecked car! She turned the page on those pictures quickly as nausea swam up inside.

But there was no mention of Marcel anywhere, which told her exactly what Xander was doing. Her imprisonment here had nothing to do with contracts or primitive demonstrations of ownership—but with damage control, pure and simple damage control!

He didn’t want it reported that his wife had been leaving him for another man when she crashed her car!

He would rather they report that she was attempting to kill herself. What did that say about the size of his ego?

Kill herself? Where had they dragged up that big lie from? Had Xander himself put it out there?

She hated him. Oh, God, she hated him. No wonder she was being so thoroughly isolated. He didn’t want her retaliating with the truth!

Leaving him for another man…Oh, how she wished she’d managed to go through with it. She would have written her own headline. ‘Wife of philandering Greek tycoon leaves him for Frenchman!’