Bridal Bargains (17 page)

‘She went happily, then, as you wanted her to,’ Claire pointed out. ‘You have to take some consolation from that.’

‘Do I?’ He smiled that brief smile and Claire couldn’t bear it because although he was staring directly ahead the moonlight shone on the moisture in his eyes.

Without thinking twice about what she was doing, she
slipped round in front of him, put her arms around him and laid her cheek against his chest. For if anyone needed physical contact with another human being right now, then it was him.

His first reaction was to stiffen at the unexpected gesture. Then, when he came to realise what she was offering him, he muttered gruffly, ‘You are too wise for your age.’

‘Age is not a prerequisite to feel what you’re feeling,’ she countered. ‘Believe me, I’ve been there, so I know.’

His answer to that was a heavy sigh, then he relaxed a little, and his hands left his pockets to link loosely around her. ‘Grigoris said you disappeared as soon as he had told everyone. Where did you go?’

‘I hid in Melanie’s room,’ she confessed, lifting her face up to wrinkle her nose at him in acknowledgement of her own cowardice. ‘I didn’t think I could have coped with their pitying looks if I’d stayed there in my bridal finery, looking about as out of place as anyone could look.’

‘You could have changed into something more—suitable,’ he suggested, refusing to let her off the hook for her desertion.

‘After all the trouble your grandmother went to, to recreate herself in me?’ she protested. ‘She would never have forgiven me!’

He smiled—he actually managed to smile! Claire began to feel dizzy at her success in teasing away his melancholy, even if it was only temporary.

‘But you changed eventually,’ he made wry note, sliding his thumbs against the silk of her robe at the base of her spine, sending a sprinkling of static washing through her.

She tried not to respond to it by concentrating all her attention on the remark. ‘After you took her to the chapel,’ she nodded. ‘I felt she wouldn’t mind if I changed then—don’t ask me why,’ she added wryly. ‘Because I don’t really understand it myself.’

‘It does not need explaining, Claire,’ he murmured very
softly. ‘You honoured her passing in the way you thought she would appreciate it the most. I—thank you for that.’

‘No need,’ she shrugged, and began to ease herself away from him as the moment when she could excuse her closeness to him as comfort began to fade.

But he didn’t let her go. Instead his loosely linked arms closed just that little bit tighter around her. And out of sheer desperation she spun in his arms to face the window, so he couldn’t see the kind of control it was taking for her not to show what his touch was doing to her.

‘You know, I won’t hold you to your commitment to Melanie now that your grandmother is no longer here,’ she told him.

‘I thought you understood that I want that commitment,’ he replied.

‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘But it is no longer necessary, is it?’ If it was ever necessary, she added silently. She’d never really understood his motives where Melanie was concerned. ‘Which seems to make a mockery of the whole thing.’

‘Things stay as they are,’ he decreed. ‘And I would prefer not to have this conversation right now.’

‘Oh, of course.’ Instantly contrite for bringing it up when naturally he wanted to think only of his grandmother, she spun around in his arms to offer him a small smile of apology. ‘Sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I just thought I would …’

‘Let me off the hook,’ he inserted for her. ‘When it still does not seem to have sunk in with you that I have no intention of being let off—or to let you off it either,’ he added pointedly.

‘Well, a sham of a marriage seems a bit of a wasted gesture now.’ She grimaced.

‘When is a sham not a sham?’ he pondered curiously.

Glancing up, Claire stopped breathing when she saw the dark gleam inside the hooded sombre eyes. He wants me, she realised. It’s the reason why he came in here, why he broke the rules and crossed my threshold without first gaining my
permission. He did not do it to talk about his grandmother but because he needs a woman to lose himself in tonight and that woman is me!

So, what are you going to do about that? she asked herself. But even as the question was filtering through her brain she was going up on tiptoe to brush her mouth against his.

His reply was a shaky sigh against the gentle pressure of her lips. ‘What was that for?’ he asked as she drew away again, trying to sound mocking and only managing to sound dreadfully needy.

‘It’s my wedding night,’ Claire reminded him softly. ‘And I want you. Will you make love to me, Andreas—please?’

Had she said it to protect his pride so he didn’t have to lower it to ask her the same question? Claire wondered later. Or was it just that she was responding to her own needs?

Whichever it was, at least he didn’t reject her—as she knew he was very capable of doing. Instead he released a muffled curse then was fiercely claiming her mouth.

Standing there with the moonlight shining in on them, he caressed and stroked and kissed the nightdress from her body, then stood back a little to sombrely rid himself of his own clothes.

He wasn’t happy with himself for wanting her like this, and Claire wished she had the experience to remove his clothes for him in a way that would make him lose touch with himself, never mind his reservations. But she was no
femme fatale
, and with one near-useless hand she knew she wouldn’t be able to pull it off with any grace. So she had to content herself with watching his moon-kissed, satiny flesh appear as his shirt was removed before he bent down to remove his shoes and socks.

Yet he stopped right there. Claire frowned at him as he reached for her again. ‘You haven’t finished,’ she whispered.

‘I will,’ he promised. ‘But later …’

Later turned out to be after he had carried her to the bed and laid her down on it. Later was when he had driven her
into a mindless state of unbearable arousal that left not a single inch of her flesh untouched by his touch. Later was after she had driven him almost over the edge by trailing her mouth over his chest and had learned the intense pleasure in toying with a small, tight male nipple.

Later was when she had grown bold enough to move on downwards, utilising the expertise with which he had aroused her to arouse him. But when her sensual journey was halted by the waistband of his trousers he stopped her from taking them from him by pulling her beneath him, and, ignoring her small cry of protest at his frustrating tactics, he began the whole wildly erotic process of arousing her all over again.

So by the time his idea of later arrived she was so lost in the sensual haze he had created that she didn’t even notice him ridding himself of the wretched trousers until he came over her and she felt the power of his naked arousal just before he pushed urgently inside her …

This time, it really should not have happened.

‘Don’t say anything,’ she warned him.

She was sitting at Lefka’s huge scrubbed kitchen table, hugging a mug of hot coffee in her hands as if her life depended on it. There was no colour in her face whatsoever, and her hair was a tangled mess around her shoulders, her body cloaked in a towelling bathrobe that covered her from neck to feet.

He, by contrast, was fully dressed in fresh trousers and a polo shirt. He looked neat, clean, perfectly presented. But then, he’d shot off into his bathroom so damned fast that he could have had ten showers before Claire had recovered enough to move!

After he had lifted his weight from her, of course—quickly, like the last time. Body still shuddering—like the last time.

‘I—’

‘I said don’t!’ she choked out.

The silence screamed. The tension, the bitterness. Like an action replay of last time.

Then he sighed and moved away, walking wearily across the kitchen. Checking the coffee-pot with his hand, he poured himself out a cup then came to sit down at the table.

Claire flicked him a glance. He was staring down at his drink and his shoulders were hunched over. The strain of the last twelve hours was so severe in his face now that he looked like a man who was having to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders.

She looked away before she started feeling sorry for him again. He might look like Atlas, but he isn’t, she reminded herself brutally. He is just a man—an ordinary man with ordinary appetites. And an extraordinary way of dealing with the aftermath.

‘Do you have a mistress?’ she shot at him.

His head came up, dark eyes very guarded. ‘What?’ he murmured warily.

‘Desmona did warn me that you had a mistress tucked away somewhere, but with everything else I forgot to ask. So I am asking you now.’

‘Desmona said that?’ He frowned. ‘When?’

‘At the betrothal thing.’ She refused to call it a party. ‘She pointed out a couple of candidates and suggested I choose.’ Her eyes flicked up again, catching him without his guard, and his expression was—

She looked away again quickly, not wanting to acknowledge what that expression was telling her because it had the power to shatter the brand-new shell of protection she was hugging closely around her.

‘You haven’t answered the question,’ she prompted huskily.

‘There is no one,’ he said.

Eyes fixed on her cup, she tried to decide if she could believe him when the man found it so easy to be economical with the truth.

‘There is no one, Claire,’ he repeated in the kind of tone that forced her to believe him. ‘I would not do that to you. Desmona was talking like a loser, that was all.’

Which was what Claire had told herself when Desmona had fed her the poison, she remembered. ‘Good,’ she said, deciding to believe him. ‘That means I have one less guilty sin to carry around with me.’

‘What we did just now was not sinful,’ he denied.

‘No?’ she mocked. ‘Well, it certainly feels as if I’ve just done something dreadful.’

‘We made love!’ he husked.

‘No—we had sex!’ she burst out. ‘Just the same as we did a week ago. W-we had sex, then you walked away—just like you did a week ago. And I f-feel unclean,’ she added painfully. ‘Just like I did a week ago.’

‘I did not walk away from
you
just now,’ he asserted heavily. ‘I walked away from—’

The words stopped.

Sitting there with bated breath, Claire waited for him to continue. But he didn’t. Instead he ran a tired hand through his perfectly combed hair—and added nothing.

‘May you burn in hell,’ she murmured succinctly.

To her surprise he laughed—albeit cynically. ‘I have been burning away in that place for years,’ he drawled with an irony that flew right by her. ‘You will have to come up with a better curse than that to hurt me.’

And why do I get the impression that he knows exactly what that curse would be? she wondered, seeing a flash of something almost haunted pass across his eyes.

‘Whatever,’ she said, dismissing the look—because she had to do that if she was to remain strong. ‘Burn in hell or laugh at it. It doesn’t really matter to me. I don’t want you to come near me like that ever again—do you hear?’

With that she got up with the intention of leaving him—but his next words stopped her. ‘I’m sorry if I let you down,’
he said very huskily. ‘I didn’t do it to hurt you, Claire. I just didn’t think.’

‘You mean—you always walk away from a woman directly after making love to her?’ she asked derisively.

There was a distinct pause—more a guarded hesitation—before he sighed out, ‘Yes.’

‘The man on a mountain,’ she murmured softly, aware that the cryptic remark would mean nothing to him. She shivered inwardly. ‘I understand now. It’s yourself you feel the need to walk away from.’

She had been throwing out words haphazardly with the specific need to hurt him, but as she stood there watching his face grow white beneath his olive skin before it closed up altogether Claire realised, with a small shock, that she had hit the nail right upon its head!

‘You know me so well,’ he drawled, offering her that grim brief smile again in an effort to cover his reaction up.

And she wanted to hit him—probably would have done if she hadn’t noticed the tremor in his fingers as he reached for his cup. He was more affected by all of this than he wanted her to believe.

What was it with him, Claire wondered furiously, that he hated wanting her as a woman so much that he kept his wretched sexuality hidden inside his trousers until the very last moment? As if he had still been praying for deliverance right up until then, she realised with a shudder.

And on a muffled sob she turned and ran from the kitchen—kept on running, across the hall and up the stairs, desperately needing to get to her room before she broke down and wept.

Panting and sobbing together by the time she reached her bedroom, she barely had a chance to close the door before it was thrust open again.

‘Go away!’ she cried.

‘Don’t …’ he groaned, reaching out to pull her into his arms.

To her horror she pressed her face into his chest and sobbed all the harder.

It wasn’t fair! she told herself pitiably. He loved his grandmother. He could love Melanie. Why was it so terrible for him to try to love her?

His first wife, she then remembered with a sudden chilling of her flesh. She must have been quite something to have locked his heart up as totally as this.

Fighting for control of the tears now, she tried to push away from him.

‘No,’ he refused, his arms only tightening around her.

Her face lifted away from his chest, blue eyes awash with so many painful things that it was impossible to pick which was hurting her the most. ‘Oh, please,’ she pleaded helplessly. ‘Please, Andreas, let me go.’

For some unfathomable reason, hearing her use his name in that pained, wretched way unlocked something desperate inside him. His chest expanded on a tense draw of air, his eyes flashing with some awful emotion—then he lowered his head and crushed her mouth to his with a hunger so fierce that it caught her utterly blindsided.

Once again Claire discovered that she didn’t stand a chance. Not with emotions running as rife inside her as they were doing right now. And his mouth was hot, the taste of her own tears mingling with the moistness of his tongue. It was a seductive combination. The passion ignited like a fork of lightning that exploded to smithereens all hope of control. She didn’t even notice when her robe fell apart, or hear his muffled curses as he struggled with the zip on his straining trousers.