Bridal Bargains (26 page)

It took every bit of will-power she could drum up to make herself follow him, dipping beneath the water in an effort to cool the heat from her face and her body then angrily resettling her bikini top before she allowed herself to surface again then make deeply reluctant strikes for the shore.

By the time she reached it he’d pulled on a pair of smooth-fitting trousers, muscles clenching tightly across his glistening back when he heard the splash of her feet as she waded through the shallows to the beach.

Bending down, he scooped up her sarong, half turned and tossed it to her. It landed in a floaty drift of white on the damp sand at her feet, and he was already snatching up his shirt and dragging it on over his glinting wet skin.

Xander thought about apologising but he’d played that hand before and too often to give the words any impact. Anyway, he was not sorry. He was angry and aroused and he could still feel her legs wrapped around him, could still taste her in his mouth. He had an ache between his legs that was threatening to envelop him.

‘You will not flaunt your body in get-ups like that excuse for a bikini,’ he clipped out, heard the words, realised he sounded like a disapproving father, hated that, uttered a driven sigh that spun him about.

She was trying to knot the sarong with fumbling fingers. Her beautiful hair was slicked to her head. She had never looked more subdued or more tragic.

‘And when we get around to making love it will not be out in the open for anyone to watch us,’ he heard himself add.

‘Behind a locked bedroom door on a bed, maybe,’ she suggested. ‘How boringly conventional of you.’

Subdued but not dead, Xander noted from that little piece of slicing derision. He could not help the smile that twitched at his mouth. It eased some of the passion-soaked aggression out of his voice.

‘More comfortable too,’ he agreed drily. ‘I was treading water out there. I don’t know how I kept us both floating. Add some of the really physical stuff and I would likely have drowned us in the process.’

‘I can swim.’

‘Not with me deep inside you,
agape mou
,’ he drawled lazily. ‘Trust me, you would have lost the will to live rather than let me go.’

She managed the knot. He had a feeling it cut off the circulation, it appeared so tight. And her cheeks went a deep shade of pink. He liked that. However, the look she sent him should have shrivelled his ego like a prune. It didn’t though. The physical part of his ego remained very much erect and full.

‘Such confidence in your prowess,’ she mocked, stalking past him to scoop up the rest of her things. ‘Don’t they always say that those who boast about it always disappoint?’

‘I will not disappoint,’ he assured with husky confidence.

‘Well, if you wait until it’s dark to prove that, I can always pretend you are someone else, then maybe you won’t.’

And with the pithy comment to cut him down to size where he stood she put the hat on her head and walked off towards the path.

A lesser man would react to such an insult. A lesser man, Xander told himself as he watched her walk away, would go after her and drag her down in the sand and make her take such foolish words back.

The better man picked up his socks and shoes and followed her at a leisurely pace, while he plotted his revenge by more—subtle methods.

Then a frown creased his smooth brow when he remembered something and increased his pace, only becoming leisurely
again once he’d caught up with her and tempered his longer stride to hers.

Hearing him coming, Nell pushed her sunglasses over her burning eyes and increased her pace. She received a glimpse of sun-dappled white shirting, black trousers and a pair of long brown bare feet as he came up beside her, but her mind saw the naked man and her tummy muscles fluttered. So did other parts.

‘I grew up on this island,’ he remarked casually. ‘As a small boy I used to walk this path each morning to swim in the cove before being shipped across to the mainland to attend school. Diving from the rocks is an exhilarating experience. The snorkelling is good out there, the fishing too—though I do not suppose the fishing part is of any interest to you.’

‘You, used to fish?’ Nell spoke the words without thinking then was angry because she’d been determined to say nothing at all.

‘You think I arrived on this earth all-powerful and arrogant?’ He mocked her lazily. ‘In the afternoons I used to fish,’ he explained. ‘Having been transported back here after my school day was finished, with my ever-present bodyguard as my only playmate.’

Now he was playing on her sympathies by drawing heart-string-plucking pictures of a small, lonely boy protected and isolated from the world because of his father’s great power and wealth.

‘My parents were always off somewhere doing important things so I rarely saw them,’ he went on. ‘Thea Sophia brought me up, taught me good manners and the major values of life. The fishing taught me how to survive on my own if I had to. I used to worry constantly that something dreadful was going to happen to those who lived here on the island with me and I would be left alone here to fend for myself. I knew that my father had powerful enemies that might decide to use me in their quest for revenge. Before the age of six I had all my hiding places picked out for when they came for me …’

‘Is there a point to you telling me this?’ She would not feel sorry for that small, anxious boy, she wouldn’t.

‘Ne.’
He slipped into Greek, which didn’t happen often.

Xander was a man of many languages. Greek and Italian both being natural to him, the rest because he was good at them, and in the cut-throat, high-risk world he moved in it paid to know what the people around you were saying and to be able to communicate that fact.

‘You think that you are the only one to have lived a strange, dysfunctional, sheltered life but you are not,’ he stated coolly. ‘I have lived it too so I can recognise the person you are inside because I am familiar with that person.’

Nell clutched her book in tight fingers and tried hard not to ask the question he was prompting her to ask, but it came out anyway. ‘And what kind of person is that?’

‘One who hides her true self within a series of carefully constructed shells as a form of self-defence against the hurts, the fears, the rejections life has dealt her from being small and vulnerable—like myself.’

Well, he certainly knows how to top up my feelings of rejection! Nell thought angrily. ‘What rubbish,’ she snapped out loud. ‘And spare me more of this psycho-babble, Xander. I have no idea where you’re going with it and I don’t want to know.’

‘Towards a deeper understanding of each other?’ he suggested.

‘For what purpose? So you can eventually get around to bedding me before you fly off to pastures new—or old,’ she tagged on with bite. ‘In case you didn’t notice, I was easy prey out there in the water.’ God, it stung to have to admit that. ‘That means you don’t need to achieve a greater understanding of me to get what you want.’

‘You have always been easy prey,
cara
,’ he hit back. ‘The point at issue here is that I have always managed to avoid taking what has always been there to take.’

Nell pulled to a simmering stop. The hat and the sunglasses
hid her expression from him but there were other ways to transmit body language. ‘I think you’re into humiliation.’

‘No,’ he denied that. ‘I was trying to …’

She walked on again, faster, her breath singing tensely from between her clenched teeth as she pumped her legs up the final stretch of the hill.

‘Will you listen to me?’ He arrived at her side again.

‘Listen to you spelling it out for me that you married me because you saw your perfect soul mate? One you can pick up and drop at will and she won’t complain because she’s used to rejection, and all of this rotten isolation you prefer to surround her with?’

‘I married you,’ he gritted, ‘because it was either that or take you to bed without the damned ring!’

Her huff of scorn echoed high in the trees above them. ‘I was a business deal!’ She turned on him furiously, brought her foot down on a sharp piece of gravel and let out a painful, ‘Ouch!’

‘What have you done?’ he rasped.

‘Nothing.’ She rubbed at the base of her foot with a hand. ‘And we’ve never shared a bed!’ she flashed at him furiously. ‘We’ve never even shared a bedroom!’

‘Well, that’s about to change,’ he drawled.

I’m not listening to any more, Nell decided and dropped her foot to the ground to turn and start walking again, her legs and her body trembling with fury and goodness knew what else while her eyes still saw a tall, dark,
arrogant
man with tousled wet hair and a sexy damp shirt, dangling his shoes from his long brown fingers.

Topping the peak of the hill, she started down the other side of it. Below through the trees she could see the red-tiled roof of the house and the helicopter standing in its allotted spot by a glinting blue swimming pool.

All looked idyllic, a perfect haven of peace—sanctuary.

Sanctuary to hell! she thought. Her sanctuary had been in the isolation, not the place itself. Now Xander was back and the comfortable new world she’d created here was shattered.

She hated him so much it was no wonder her blood was fizzing like crazy as it coursed through her veins.

He did it again and took her by surprise, hands snaking around her waist to spin her round to face him. The shoes had landed with a clunk somewhere, her book went the same way. Next thing her hat came off, followed by her sunglasses, and were tossed aside. She caught a fleeting glimpse of a lean, dark, handsome face wearing the grim intent of what was to come, her breath caught on a gasp then that hard, hot mouth was claiming hers again and she was being kissed breathless while his hands roamed at will.

Her thighs, her hips, the smooth, rounded curve of her naked bottom beneath the covering sarong. He staked his claim without conscience, her slender back, her flat stomach, the still thrusting, pouting shape of her nipple-tight breasts. She was dizzy, narcotic, clinging to him, fingers clawing inside the shirt to bury into the tightly curling matt of hair on his chest.

It had all erupted without a warning gap now, as if one erotic encounter led straight into the next. He drew back from the kiss, face hardened by a burning desire that was no longer held in check.

‘You want that we do it right here and now, Nell—up against the nearest tree maybe?’ he gritted down at her. ‘Or shall we go back to the ocean and complete what we started there? Or would you have preferred it if we had done it two weeks ago in the bed down there where you lay injured and weak? Or we could have whiled away the hours doing it on the flight over here. Or let us take this back to our wedding night, when you were so shattered only a monster would have tried. No,’ he ground out. ‘You will not turn away from me.’

His hands snaked her closer, cupping her behind to lift her into even closer contact. ‘Do you understand now what I am trying to say to you? Look at us,
cara
,’ he insisted. ‘We are not what you would call passive about this. You hide your true self. I hide my true self. But here they are out in the open, two people with more passion for each other than they can safely deal with.’

‘Only when you have the time to feel like it.’

‘Well, I feel like it now!’ he rasped. ‘And if you refuse to listen to reason then maybe I will take you up against a tree, with your knees trapped beneath my arms and your heels digging into my back!’

Such a lurid, vivid picture made her push back from him, all big, shocked green eyes. ‘You’ve done it before like that!’

Xander laughed—thickly, so thoroughly disconcerted by the attack that he discovered he had no defence.

The whooshing sound of a helicopter’s rotor blades suddenly sounded overhead, saving him from having to defend himself. They both looked up then Xander uttered a thick curse.

‘We have a visitor,’ he muttered.

‘Who?’ Nell shot out as they watched the helicopter swoop down the side of the hill then come to a hovering stop beside the other one.

There was a moment of nothing, a moment of hovering stillness in Xander that brought her eyes back to his face. He didn’t look happy. He even sent her a grimace.

‘My mother,’ he said.

H
IS
mother …

Nell’s heart sank to the soles of her bare feet. The beautiful, gorgeous, always exquisitely turned out Gabriela Pascalis was paying them a visit and Nell looked like this—wet, bedraggled, and more than half-ravished.

Her voice developed a shake. ‘Did you know she was coming here?’

There was a sighed-out, ‘No,’ before he changed it to a heavy, ‘Yes … She said she was coming. I told her not to bother. I knew she would ignore me—all right?’

Nell flashed him a killing look. ‘You didn’t think to warn me about that?’

‘We were busy talking about other things—I forgot.’

He forgot …

‘And I suppose I was hoping she would listen to me for once …’

Nell didn’t even grace that with the spitting answer sitting on her tongue. Turning, she began striding down the hillside, leaving Xander cursing colourfully as he gathered up their scattered things.

She knew that mother and son did not enjoy a warm relationship, in fact the best she could describe it as was cool. They met, they embraced, they threw veiled but heavily barbed comments at each other; they embraced then parted again until the next time. It was like standing in the middle of a minefield when they were together. One step out of line and Nell had a feeling that they would both ignite and explode all over her, so she’d tended to keep very quiet and still in their company.

Not that it happened often. It wasn’t as if with a relationship like that mother and son lived in each other’s pockets. Xander
had his life and Gabriela had hers—par for the course with Xander’s relationships, she tagged on acidly. The very few times that Nell had come into contact with both of them together was usually at one of those formal functions Xander would drag her to occasionally—to keep up appearances while Vanessa hovered around somewhere in the murky background, awaiting her lover’s return.

Her skin turned cold as she thought that.

A shriek of delight suddenly filled the hillside, dragging her attention down the hill towards the house. She saw that the helicopter had settled next to the other one and Gabriela was now standing by the pool with her arms thrown wide open while Thea Sophia hurried towards her clapping her hands with delight.

To witness the dauntingly sophisticated Gabriela dressed in immaculate lavender silk fold the little black-clad bundle that was Thea Sophia to her in a noisily loving hug came as almost as big a surprise as the way Nell had just behaved with Xander up on the hill.

Where had all the warmth and affection come from? She would never have believed Gabriela capable of it if she was not seeing it with her own eyes.

The two faces of the Pascalis family, she thought grimly as she maintained a brisk pace downwards. Behind her was a man who had been as cold as ice for ninety-nine per cent of their marriage, suddenly showing her he had passion hot enough to singe layers from her skin! Now here was the drop-dead sophisticated mother putting on a demonstration of childlike adoration that would shock her peers—though anyone would love Thea Sophia, she then had to add with a brief softening inside. The sweet old lady would make the devil want to give her a loving hug.

As the two embracing women dropped out of sight behind the red-tiled roof of the house, Nell felt the silly burn of tears sting her eyes. It was stupid to feel hurt by such an open display of affection from Xander’s mother for his aunt, but that was exactly what she did feel. Gabriela had never greeted her like
that, never welcomed her with open arms and shrieks of delight. On those few tension-charged occasions they had met just the brief air-kissing of Gabriela’s perfumed cheeks had always made Nell feel as if she were desecrating holy ground.

Or was it the other way around and she was the one who repelled deeper displays of affection? Had those defensive shells Xander talked about kept her mother-in-law at arm’s length? She didn’t know. She didn’t even know if Gabriela knew the full truth about the true disaster that her son’s marriage was.

The two women had gone from the pool area by the time Nell reached it. Making directly for the rinse shower that occupied a corner of the patio area, she switched it on and began washing the dust from her feet. The bottom of her foot still stung from its contact with the sharp stone, but as she was about to lift up the foot to inspect it she saw Xander arrive a few paces behind her and her full attention became fixed on him.

He had gathered up their things and was now placing them on one of the tables, tall, dark, uncomfortably alluring with his shiny wet hair, loose clothes and bare feet. Nothing like the man she was used to seeing—nothing. The other Xander was all skin-tingling, sophisticated charisma; this one was all—sex.

She looked away as he turned towards her, stiffened like mad when his hands snaked around her waist to gently crush fine muslin against her skin. A long brown foot with long brown toes appeared next to her foot so he could share the water sprinkling down on them.

Next the smoothness of his cheek arrived against her cheek. ‘We are being watched,
agapita
,’ he warned huskily as she tried to pull away from him.

It was all he needed to say to halt her attempt to escape. So she clamped her teeth together, kept her chin lowered and swapped one cleaned foot for the other and felt the intimacy deep in her trembling bones in watching Xander do the same thing.

‘You’re trembling all over. I like it,’ he remarked in a sexy,
husky groan by her ear, felt the heat mount her cheek and laughed softly as he brushed his lips against that tell-tale heat.

‘I’m trembling because I’m angry with you,’ she said. ‘Look at me, Xander,’ she then said heavily. ‘I’m all wet and salty and now I have to go in there and meet your mother looking like this. You should have given me more warning then at least I could have found time to shower and change before she arrived … and she will know, won’t she,’ she then added unhappily, ‘what the papers have been saying about us?’

‘And that bothers you.’

‘It bothers you too or you would not have brought me here and hidden me away like you have.’

His foot disappeared and she sensed a new grimness in him as he reached over her shoulder to turn off the shower. ‘I did not bring you here to hide you,’ he denied.

‘Yes, you did. The same as you’ve been hiding me away all year.’

‘So you thought you would make me wake up and take notice by involving yourself with another man?’

‘Isn’t that just typically arrogant of you to think I was trying to grab your attention?’ She tried to move away again but he still would not allow it, the flat of his hand resting lightly but firmly against her stomach to keep her trapped in front of him. She sucked in a short, tense breath. ‘I was leaving you, Xander,’ she stated bluntly. ‘And I was going, hoping never to set eyes on you again.’

‘You did more than set eyes on me a few minutes ago, Nell, and I don’t recall you turning away. In fact …’ He turned her to face him. His eyes wore a hard glitter. ‘I would say that you could not get enough of what you saw.’

‘That was just sex.’

‘And you know so much about it to sound so dismissive?’

Nell didn’t answer. She was glaring at the ribbon of hard brown skin dressed with crisp dark hair showing between his gaping shirt and wishing with all her heart that her tongue didn’t tingle with a desire to taste.

‘We were talking about your mother.’ She slewed her eyes sideways to stare at the glinting pool.

‘She’s here to discuss some family business.’

‘Well, maybe she will be kind enough to give me a lift off this island when she leaves.’

‘You think I would allow it?’

Green eyes flashed into contact with his. ‘Would you like to repeat that bit about not hiding me?’

He went several steps further and lowered his dark head and kissed her, not hot and driven like before but slow and gentle with just enough passion to elicit a response. ‘That is why you’re here,
agape mou
,’ he murmured as he lifted his head again. ‘We are going to kick-start this marriage.
Then
let us see if you still wish to leave.’

Xander could say this in
that
tone of voice because she’d responded. He could say it because her fingers were already in contact with his brown skin. This beautiful, defiant, contrary creature might not want to want him but hell, she did want him, Xander thought grimly.

Letting go of her, he strode off, leaving her standing there knowing that he had won that little battle without her putting up much of a defence.

Waiting in the coolness of the foyer, he viewed Nell’s arrival in the open doorway through carefully hooded eyes and had to lock his jaw to keep other parts of him under control. Lit from behind by the sunlight, she looked like a sea nymph standing in the jaws of a hungry shark.

He was the hungry shark. If they had been alone here he would be closing those jaws and carrying her off to finish what he’d started out there. He’d laid down the gauntlet as to where this marriage of theirs was going to go from here and by the way she was hovering in the doorway he would say that she knew she did not stand a chance of changing that course.

She began walking forward. As he watched her come closer his head played a tempting little scene that involved him carrying her up the stairs and laying her on the bed then stripping away the few scraps she wore.

Though maybe he would leave the G-string in place, he thought darkly, seeing his mouth tracing its skimpy white lines with a chain of tongue-tipped kisses that would have her begging him to take it off.

That was how he wanted her—begging. He wanted her spreading those slender golden thighs and inviting him in. He wanted her arms around his neck and her eyes pleading and—

A frown clipped his brows together. ‘Go and make yourself presentable while I entertain our—guest,’ he instructed.

‘But your mother will think it rude if I don’t—’

His eyes made a glinting sweep over the now damp strip of Indian cotton that was doing so little to hide the brevity of what was beneath. ‘Trust me, you will feel better if you take time to change.’

A self-conscious flush mounted her cheeks. ‘You don’t look so presentable yourself,’ she still had the spirit to hit back as she walked by him.

Xander just grinned. ‘The difference being that I don’t care what other people think when they look at me.’

Only because he still managed to look fabulous even with bare feet and his damp shirt lying open down his hair-tangled, muscle-contoured, bronzed front, Nell thought as she took to the stairs without further argument.

If she’d looked back she would have caught him quickly fastening buttons and combing long fingers through his hair. And the expression on his face had changed from lazily indifferent to grim.

He could have done without this intrusion from his mother today of all days. When she had rung his apartment in Athens this morning with an urgent request to see him, only to be told he was coming to the island, the last thing he had expected was for her to promptly invite herself and he’d told her not to come.

Though in truth, now she was here, he had some things of his own he needed to thrash out with his mother, things he preferred to get out of the way before his single-minded seduction of his beautiful wife continued along its present course.

Thinking about that exciting creature he’d met in the cove an hour ago set his nerves on edge. Nell had turned the tables on him with her provocative performance, and what was bothering him was why she had done it.

As the aggravating witch had just pointed out, three weeks ago she had been leaving him for another man.

A man, no less, that she’d been trying to contact via the telephone in his study here ever since she’d arrived on the island, but, like himself and the small army of people he had out there looking for him, Nell had discovered that Marcel Dubois had effectively disappeared from the face of the earth.

Scared of the repercussions when he heard of Nell’s accident and knew that her husband was about to find out about them? If so, the Frenchman should have thought about those repercussions sooner—before he lured Nell into taking flight.

But that was not the point that was troubling Xander right now as he stood outside the salon door, grimly tidying himself. Nell was still trying to contact the cowardly swine yet she’d responded to him like a woman who’d been suppressing her desires for too long.

Hedging her bets? Using him as a substitute for her new love? Had that bastard woken her up to her own sexual desires and after three weeks without him she was hungry enough to let any man have her—even the one she believed was having an affair with another woman?

Anger bit its sharp teeth into him at the mere idea of another man taking what belonged to him. He threw open the salon door and stepped inside to the smell of his mother’s perfume and to see an aunt who was all beaming smiles because her favourite person had come for a visit.

Shame that the son did not feel the same way. ‘OK, Madre, let us make this brief. I have more important things to do than listen to your business troubles today.’

‘I think you have already been dealing with your—business,
caro
,’ his mother drawled with a swift up-and-down glance of his dishevelled state despite the attempt to tidy up. ‘And there
was I, thinking as I flew here that at last Alexander will know what it feels like when a marriage flounders on the rocks …’

‘Your marriage did not flounder; you scuppered it,’ he incised.

‘If you two are going to fight I will leave you,’ Thea Sophia put in and headed for the door, her beaming smile lost. ‘You might also like to embrace each other
before
you tear each other to pieces,’ she added sternly before she walked out.

Fifteen minutes later and Nell was coming down the stairs again after the quickest shower on record and with her freshly washed hair rough-dried by an urgent towel then left to do its own thing while she scrambled around for something suitable to wear. The fact that whoever had packed for her in England had chosen almost all of the clothes she’d bought for her nonexistent honeymoon did not make the choice a simple one. One, the clothes had been bought with Xander and romance in mind. Two, they were now a full season out of date. So to have to put on one of the slinky off-the-shoulder short dresses in last season’s rich jade colour did not give her confidence a major boost as she hovered outside the salon door, running nervous fingers down a mid-thigh-length dress that might do good things for her eyes and her figure but was going to look out-of-date to her super-elegant, fashion-guru mother-in-law.