Bridal Bargains (22 page)

Her head began to ache. ‘Go away,’ she slurred out. ‘I don’t want you here.’

She could almost feel his tension slam into her. The gentle fingers still holding hers gave an involuntary twitch. Then he moved and she heard the sound of silk sliding against silk as he reached up with his other arm and another set of cool fingers gently stroked a stray lock of hair from her cheek.

‘You don’t mean that,
agape mou
,’ he murmured.

I do, Nell thought, and felt tears sting the backs of her eyelids because his light touch evoked old dreams of a gentle giant stroking her all over like that.

But that was all they were—empty old dreams that came back to haunt her occasionally. The real Xander was hard and cold and usually wishing himself elsewhere when he was with her.

How had he got here so quickly anyway? What time was it? What day? She moved restlessly then cried out in an agonised, pathetically weak whimper as real physical pain shot everywhere.

‘Don’t move, you fool!’ The sudden harshness in his voice rasped across her flesh like the serrated edge of a knife—right here—and she pushed a hand up to cover the left side of her ribs as her screaming body tried to curl up in instinctive recoil. The bed tilted beside her, long fingers moving to her narrow shoulders to keep her still.

‘Listen to me …’ his voice rasped again and she arched in
agony as pain ricocheted around her body. He tossed out a soft curse then a buzzer sounded. ‘You must try to remain still,’ he lashed down at her. ‘You are very badly bruised, and the pain in your side is due to several cracked ribs. You are also suffering from a slight concussion, and internal bleeding meant they had to operate. Nell, you—’

‘W-what kind of operation?’

‘Your appendix was damaged when you crashed your car; they had to remove it.’

Appendix? Was that all? She groaned in disbelief.

‘If you are worrying about a scar then don’t,’ Xander clipped. ‘They used keyhole surgery—barely a knick; you will be as perfect as ever in a few weeks.’

Did he really believe that she cared about some silly scarring? Down in A&E they’d been tossing about all kinds of scenarios from burst spleen to ovaries!

‘I hate you so much,’ she gasped out then burst into tears, the kind of loud, hot, choking tears that came with pure, agonising delayed shock and brought people running and had Xander letting go of her to shoot to his feet.

After that she lost sight of him when a whole army of care staff crowded in. But she could still hear his voice, cold with incision: ‘Can someone explain to me, please, why my wife shares a room with three other sick individuals? Does personal dignity have no meaning here …?’

The next time Nell woke up she was shrouded in darkness other than for a low night lamp burning somewhere up above her head. She could open her eyes without having to force them and she was feeling more comfortable, though she suspected the comfort had been drug-induced.

Moving her head on the pillow in a careful testing motion, she felt no pain attack her brow and allowed herself a sigh of relief. Then she began to take an interest in her surroundings. Something was different, though for the life of her she couldn’t say what.

‘You were moved this afternoon to a private hospital,’ a deep voice informed her.

Turning her head in the other direction, she saw Xander standing in the shadows by the window. Her heart gave a helpless little flutter then clenched.

Private hospital. Private room. ‘Why?’ she whispered in confusion.

He didn’t answer. But then why would he? A man like him did not leave his wife to the efficient care of the National Health Service when he could pay for the same service with added touches of luxury.

As she looked at him standing there in profile, staring out of the window, it didn’t take much work for her dulled senses to know his mood was grim. The jacket to his dark suit had gone and he’d loosened the tie around his throat. She could just pick out the warm sheen of his golden skin as it caught the edges of a soft lamplight.

For a moment she thought she saw a glimpse of the man she had fallen in love with a year ago.

The same man she’d seen on the evening she’d walked into her father’s study and found Xander there alone. He’d been standing like this by her father’s window, grimly contemplating what lay beyond the Georgian glass with its hand-beaten distortions that had a knack of distorting everything that was happening in the world beyond.

That was the night he had asked her to marry him; no fanfare, no romantic preliminaries. Oh, they’d been out to dinner a couple of times, and Xander tended to turn up at the same functions she would be attending and seem to make a beeline for her. People had watched curiously as he monopolised her attention and she blushed a lot because she wasn’t used to having such a man show a desire for her company.

Twenty-one years old and fresh back from spending three years high up in the Canadian Rockies with a mother who preferred getting up close and personal with pieces of driftwood she found on the shores of the Kananaskis River than she did with living people. Nell had gone to Canada for her
annual two-week visit with the reclusive Kathleen Garrett and stayed to the end when her mother had coolly informed her that she didn’t have long to live.

Nell liked to think that her quiet company had given her mother a few extra years of normal living before it all got too much. Certainly they became a bit more like mother and daughter than they’d been throughout Nell’s life when previous visits to her mother had made her feel more like an unwanted distant relative.

Coming back to England and to her father’s busy social lifestyle had come as a bit of a culture shock. She’d gone to Canada a child who’d spent most of her life being shunted from one boarding-school to another with very little contact with the social side of her industrialist father’s busy life. Three years’ living quietly with her mother had been no preparation for a girl who’d become a woman without really knowing it until she met Alexander Pascalis.

An accident waiting to happen … Nell frowned as she tried to recall who it was that had said those words to her. Then she remembered and sighed because of course it had been this tall, dark, silent man looking out of the window who’d spoken those words to her. ‘A danger to yourself and to anyone near you,’ he’d rumbled out as he’d pulled her into his arms and kissed her before sombrely asking her to marry him.

She looked away from his long, still frame, not wanting to go back to those days when she’d loved him so badly she would have crawled barefooted over broken glass if that was what it took to be with him. Those days were long gone, along with her pride, her self-respect and her starry-eyed infatuation.

Her mouth was still dry, the muzzy effects of whatever they’d given her to stem the pain making her limbs feel weighted down with lead. When she tried to lift her hand towards the glass of water she could see on the cupboard beside her, she could barely raise her fingers off the bed.

‘I need a drink,’ she whispered hoarsely.

He was there in a second, sitting down on the bed and sliding an arm beneath her shoulders to lift her enough to place the
glass to her lips. She felt his warmth and his strength as she sipped the water, both alien sensations when she hadn’t been held even this close to him since the day of their marriage.

‘Thank you,’ she breathed as the glass was withdrawn again.

He controlled her gentle slide back onto the pillows then sat back a little but didn’t move away. Something was flickering in his dark eyes that she couldn’t decipher—but then he was not the kind of man who wanted other people to read his thoughts—too precious, too—

‘Your car was a write-off,’ he remarked unexpectedly.

Her slender shoulders tensed in sudden wariness. ‘W-was it?’

He nodded. His firmly held mouth gave a tense little twitch. ‘You had to have been driving very fast to impale it so thoroughly on that tree.’

Nell lowered her eyes on a wince. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘Nothing?’ he questioned.

‘Only driving through the gates at Rosemere then turning into the lane. After that—nothing,’ she lied huskily.

He was silent for a few seconds and she could feel him studying her. Her cheeks began to heat. Lying had never been her forte. But what the devil did not know could not hurt him, she thought with a stab at dry sarcasm that was supposed to make her feel brave but didn’t.

‘W-what time is it?’ She changed the subject.

Xander sprang back to his feet before glancing at the gold watch circling his wrist. ‘Two-thirty in the morning.’

Nell lifted her eyes to watch the prowling grace of his long body as he took up his position by the window again.

‘I thought you were in New York.’

‘I came back—obviously.’

With or without Vanessa? she wondered. ‘Well, don’t feel like you have to hang around here for my benefit,’ she said tightly.

He didn’t usually hang around. He strode in and out of her life like a visiting patron, asked all the right polite questions about what she’d been doing since he’d seen her last and sometimes
even lingered long enough to drag her out with him to some formal function—just to keep up appearances. He occupied the suite adjoining her bedroom suite but had never slept in it. Appearances, it seemed, only went as far as delivering her to her bedroom door before he turned and strode out of the house again.

‘It is expected.’

And that’s telling me, Nell thought with another wince. ‘Well, I hereby relieve you of your duty,’ she threw back, moved restlessly, which hurt, so she made herself go still again. And her eyelids were growing too heavy to hold up any longer. ‘Go away, Xander.’ Even her voice was beginning to sound slurry. ‘You make me nervous, hanging around like this …’

Not so you would notice, Xander thought darkly as he watched the little liar drop into a deep sleep almost before her dismissal of him was complete.

The night-light above her bed was highlighting her sickly pallor along with the swollen cuts and bruises that distorted her beautiful face. She would be shocked if she knew what she looked like.

Hell, the miserable state of her wounded body shocked him.

And her hair was a mess, lying in lank, long copper tangles across the pillow. Oddly, he liked it better when it was left to do its own thing like this. The first time he’d seen her she’d been stepping into her father’s house, having just arrived back from taking the dogs for a walk. It had been windy and cold outside and her face was shining, her incredible waist-length hair wild and rippling with life. Green eyes circled by a fascinating ring of turquoise had been alight with laughter because the smallest of the dogs, a golden Labrador puppy determined to get into the house first, had bounded past her, only to land on its rear and start to slither right across the slippery polished floor to come to a halt at his feet.

She’d noticed him then, lifting her eyes up from his black leather shoes on one of those slow, curious journeys he’d learned to recognise as a habit she had that set his libido on
heat. By the time she’d reached his face her laughter had died to sweet, blushing shyness.

What a hook, he mocked now, recalling what happened to him every time she’d blushed like that for him—or even just looked at him.

Xander looked away and went back to his grim contemplation of the unremarkable view of the darkness outside the window, not wanting to remember what came after the blushing look.

He should have backed off while he still had a chance then—right off. If he had done they would not be in the mess they were now in. It was not his thing to mix business with pleasure, and the kind of business he’d had going with Julian Garrett had needed a cool, clear head.

Sexual desire was neither cool nor clear-headed. It liked to catch you out when you were not paying attention. He’d had a mistress, a beautiful, warm and passionately sensual woman who knew what he liked and did not expect too much back, so what did he need with a wild-haired, beautiful-eyed
ingénue
with a freakish kind of innocence written into her blushing face?

A sigh ripped from him. Nell was right and he should leave. He should get the hell away from here and begin the unpalatable task of some very urgent damage control, only he had a feeling it was already too late.

The tabloid Press would already be running, churning out their damning accusations cloaked in rumour and suggestion. The only part of it all that he had going for him was the Press did not know what Nell had been in the process of doing when she crashed her car on that quiet country lane.

His pager gave a beep. Turning away from the window, he went to collect his jacket from where he’d tossed it on a chair and dug the pager out of one of the pockets.

Hugo Vance was trying to reach him. His teeth came together with a snap.

And so to discover the truth about his wife’s
new friend
, he thought grimly, shrugged on his jacket, sent Nell one final, searing dark glance then quietly let himself out of the room.

F
OR
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 …’