Bridal Bargains: The Tycoon's Bride / The Purchased Wife / The Price Of A Bride

For the first time in months—maybe even years—she felt true happiness flood through her. ‘I’m in heaven,’ she whispered.

Andreas jerked away from her as if she were a poisonous snake. Taken by surprise by his abrupt withdrawal, her eyes flicked open to watch, in a state of bewildering confusion, him not only withdraw from her body but jackknife to his feet.

But worse than that was the expression on his face as he did it. He looked utterly devastated. Big and strong and godlike as he was in his full naked glory, when his eyes clashed briefly with her startled eyes he actually shuddered, his dark head wrenching to one side as if he couldn’t bear to so much as look at her.

Hurt quivered through her, forcing her to sit up and hug her knees protectively to her chest. ‘What?’ she whispered shakily.

‘No,’ she thought she heard him utter, though even that single word was almost quashed in the way he swallowed thickly. ‘This should not have happened,’ he tagged on hoarsely.

What did he mean—it shouldn’t have happened? Claire wondered painfully. ‘Well, it just did!’ she cried, her blue eyes dark pools of anger and hurt at his cruel insensitivity.

He didn’t even acknowledge she’d spoken—couldn’t even bring himself to look at her again!

Instead he just turned and strode quickly towards his own room, wrenched open the connecting door then disappeared through it—leaving Claire staring after him, white-faced and with her flesh chilling in mind-stunning dismay.

It should not have happened …

Still sitting there long, lost minutes later, huddled over her own bent knees in the middle of a sea of tumbled white bedding, Claire was bitterly agreeing with him.

For if it hadn’t happened, then she would not have had to be sitting here feeling so painfully used then ruthlessly rejected.

Or punished would probably be a better word, she thought dully as she listened to him dressing somewhere in his own bedroom. She had also sat here suffering the sounds of him showering her scent from his flesh, because in his eagerness to get away from her he had forgotten to shut the connecting door and it stood half open, allowing her a blow-by-blow account of his every movement.

She shuddered sickeningly. Hating him, despising herself. Her first love, her first lover, and now this terrible feeling of hurt and rejection.

It should not have happened …

She had a horrible feeling that those words were branded in fire onto her very soul for ever now.

She should have run when her instincts had told her to. How could she have lost control like that and let him do what he had done?

Great to work that out in retrospect, she mused bitterly.

‘I am going back down to our guests,’ a deep voice informed her from the connecting doorway.

Claire didn’t even lift her head up. She felt soiled and tainted, and unbearably humiliated.

‘I suggest you remain here,’ he went on stiffly. ‘I will make your excuses for you, blame your early retirement on your recent accident, or bridal nerves or—something. Are you all right?’ he then tagged on with enough clear reluctance to make her wince.

‘I’m not going to be a bride,’ she mumbled from the confines of the white sheet she had pulled around her. ‘The wedding is off.’

‘Don’t be foolish,’ he sighed.

Why does he always call me foolish when I am at my most sensible? ‘I want to go home to England tomorrow,’ she insisted. ‘And I never want to set eyes on you again.’

A small silence followed that, then another sigh to precede a rasping ‘Look—I’m sorry’ that sounded tense and uncomfortable and just damned bloody irritable.

No grace in that apology, she noted acidly.

‘It was entirely my fault and I am now thoroughly ashamed of myself. Does that make you feel better?’

To know you’re ashamed? ‘No, it does not!’ she cried, lifting flashing blue eyes to find him standing there looking as if he’d never been out of those clothes all evening.

When in actual fact what he had done was simply replace the first lot with the same again from his wardrobe because the ones he’d been wearing earlier were still lying in a crumpled heap on the carpet by her bed where they’d landed after being wrenched off him.

Self-contempt rippled through her as she saw herself eagerly helping him to remove them. She shuddered again, and drew the sheet more closely around her.

‘Just go away, will you?’ she choked, realised the tears weren’t far away, and swallowed angrily down on them. For she wouldn’t cry in front of this man ever again! she vowed fiercely.

He went to say something, but a raucous laugh filtered into the room from the galleried hallway below, and whatever he had been going to say turned into a heavy, ‘I have to go back down there. We don’t have time to deal with this now.’

I don’t want to deal with it at all! Claire thought wretchedly. ‘I bet they all know by now how you dragged me up here,’ she whispered as humiliation sank its teeth deeper into her. ‘I’ll be the running joke of the party by now. Have you any idea how that makes me feel?’

‘Don’t,’ he said tautly.

Don’t what? she wondered. Don’t hurt, don’t feel used and humiliated—when she had every right to feel all of those things?

‘I hate you,’ she whispered, feeling the threatening tears burn all the hotter in her throat. ‘The deal is off. So instead of lying you may as well go and give them that little piece of juicy truth to joke about!’

Suddenly he wasn’t looking so good either, she noted. Despite the clean skin and the fresh suit of clothes, his skin wore the pallor of a man who still was not comfortable with himself.

But his words didn’t sound anything but grimly resolute. ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that,’ he refused. ‘Things have gone too far for you to pull out of our arrangement now.’

‘I was not aware that I was giving you a choice here!’ she responded.

‘And I am not giving you the choice to pull out,’ he coldly shot back as he began walking towards her.

And—surprise, surprise! Claire mocked herself caustically—the ice was back like the loyal little friend it had always been to him!

‘So listen to me, Claire, because I mean what I say …’ He arrived by the bed, his tone deep with warning.

She buried her face in her knees again because she just couldn’t bear to look him in the face this close to. He sighed harshly as if he knew exactly why she was hiding away like that.

‘Our arrangement still stands as formerly agreed,’ he grimly insisted, sounding insultingly as though he were chairing a business meeting. ‘And although I know this development has—complicated things between us slightly nothing has really changed.’

Nothing has changed? What about me? Claire wanted to yell at him. What about the wretched change you’ve brought about in me? ‘If you don’t stop talking to me like a damned computer, I am likely to start screaming,’ she breathed in seething fury.

He swung away from her—then back again, the action seeming to ignite his own fury. ‘For the love of God, Claire!’ he rasped. ‘I am trying my best to be sensible amongst all of this—’

‘Carnage,’ she supplied for him when he bit back whatever choice of word he had been going to offer.

‘Yes,’ he hissed, seeming to accept that this was indeed carnage—which only made her hurt all the harder. ‘But I can absolutely assure you this is not going to happen again. So we will go on as agreed. The marriage of convenience stands. I will take Melanie as my daughter. And you will still be free to get on with your own life unhindered by me just as soon as you are ready to. But if you think,’ he then added very seriously, ‘that I am going to let you break my grandmother’s heart in her final days, by walking away from our deal, then you are heading for trouble. For I don’t take defeat on the chin like a gentleman. I fight back and I fight dirty.’

He meant it, too. Claire could hear the ruthless ice of intent threading every single word. She shivered; he saw it happen and seemed to take that as a gesture of acquiescence because he stepped back from the bed.

‘Now I am going downstairs,’ he announced less harshly—trying, Claire assumed, to defuse the tension simmering between them now he had made his point. ‘Where I will make a very Greek joke about temperamental females with more spirit than any poor mortal male could possibly hope to deal with. And I will see you again in the morning.’

As he walked towards her door, Claire lifted her head to watch him leave with bitterness in her eyes. He turned unexpectedly, catching her looking at him, and she was trapped, caught by a pair of devil-black eyes that held knowledge of her no one else did. It hurt her, knowing that he now knew her so very intimately while she still felt she didn’t know him at all, even after what they had just done to each other here in this bed.

‘Will you be all right?’ he questioned huskily.

‘Yes,’ she nodded, and wished he would just hurry up and go so she could curl up and weep her heart out.

Yet still he lingered with those dark eyes flickering restlessly over her. ‘Shall I send Althea up to help you—do whatever it is you need her for?’ he then offered, wafting a descriptive finger at her plaster-cast.

‘I can manage.’ She quietly refused the offer.

He nodded and turned back to the door then opened it while Claire held her breath in suffocating anticipation of his finally getting out of here.

But almost immediately he changed his mind and closed the door, though he did not turn to face her again. Stiff, tense, almost pompous in his delivery, he then had the gall to murmur gruffly, ‘I would hate you to think that I do not appreciate the—honour you bestowed on me tonight. It was—’

‘Will you just go?’ Claire coldly interrupted, not wanting to know what it was.

He nodded, taking the hint. And this time when the door opened and closed again he was on the other side of it.

And at last Claire could do what she wanted to do, which was curl up in a tight ball on her side and sob her wretched heart out.

After the storm was over, she made herself get up, tape a plastic bag to her plaster-cast, then stood beneath the shower for long minutes, simply letting the heated sting of the water wash away the lingering pangs of emotion the tears hadn’t cried away.

After putting on one of her new silk nightdresses, she began picking up his clothes and folding them neatly before taking them through to his room, reasonably sure she was not going to walk in on him.

Like her own room, his was lit by only a single small lamp left burning on the bedside table. In fact, in almost every way the room was a match to hers, she noticed—except his bed didn’t look as if war had taken place in it, she thought with a small shudder as she laid the clothes down on the smooth pale grey counterpane then walked back into her own room to eye with distaste her tumbled bed.

An honour, he had called it. She called it a waste of something so very precious and she knew there was no way she could sleep in this bed again tonight.

Tears back and burning, with an angry jerk, she turned away from the wretched bed and walked across the room to the soft-cushioned sofa, where she curled herself up, then closed her eyes tightly in a grimly determined effort to shut the last dreadful hour right out of her head.

Surprisingly she slept, though she hadn’t really expected to be able to switch her mind off as easily as that. Moreover, she slept long and heavily, and awoke the next morning vaguely aware of half surfacing only once during the night when she’d been dreaming that she was being carried.

It had been a disturbing sensation. Strangely painful though not in a physical way, she recalled as she lay there watching the morning sunlight draw patterns on the ceiling via the white voile drapes covering the windows.

‘Don’t cry,’ an unbelievably gentle voice echoed inside her head.

Recognising that voice, she sat up with a start, saw she was back in her bed and knew exactly how she’d got there. It had been no dream last night! Andreas had come into her room and found her asleep on the sofa! He’d woken her up when he’d gathered her into his arms to carry her back to bed, and she even remembered the raw humiliation in starting to cry all over again!

Oh, how could you, Claire? she chided herself furiously. How could you let him see how hurt you are?

And there was worse—much worse, she recalled, closing her eyes in the hopes of shutting it all out again. But it would not be shut out. And she saw herself clinging to him. Saw him lay her gently on the bed then come down to lie beside her. She felt the light brush of his lips on her cheek and the way his hands had stroked her, quietly soothing her back into oblivion before he must have got up and placed the covers over her.

I hate him, she thought angrily. I really, really hate him for catching me out like that!

Too angry to just sit there tormenting herself, she got up and dressed quickly, needing to soothe her savaged ego by spending some time with Melanie.

She could even make herself a drink there, since the nursery came with its own fully equipped kitchen, which would save her having to face Andreas across the breakfast table.

The idea lifted her spirits, and as her brain fed that inspired thought to her stomach she realised just how desperate she was for some food and a hot cup of tea.

Dressed comfortably in a sage-green tee shirt and a pair of slim-fitting yellow Capri pants, she stepped out of her room to be immediately struck by how quiet the rest of the house was.

Early though she knew it was, she had expected the house to be a hive of activity by now as the staff cleared up after last night’s party. But as she peered over the gallery rail at the huge hallway below she saw that the place had already been wiped clean of all evidence of partying.

The staff must have been working until the early hours, she realised, leaving them at liberty to have a well-earned lie-in this morning which probably meant that she was the only person up and around.

A prospect that suited her very well while she was still struggling to deal with what had happened last night, and she resolved to use their long day yesterday as an excuse for them to leave her to take care of Melanie today.

The nursery would give her somewhere to hide. Somewhere to lick her wounds and try to come to a decision as to what she was going to do. For the impulse to just pick up the baby and run before she dug herself even deeper into the mire her emotions were in was a gnawing ache that filled her brain.

If it hadn’t been for Andreas’s grandmother, she had a suspicion she would have done it already and stolen away in the dead of night like a thief running off with the family silver.

Also there was still Melanie to consider. Melanie who could gain so much from living this kind of luxury life—and so little from the life Claire could give her.

Not many pluses in favour of running, she heavily concluded, and she hadn’t even taken into consideration the dire threat of retribution Andreas had laid on her last night.

Inside the nursery all was quiet, the early morning sunlight diffused by the pretty apple-green curtains still drawn across the windows. Claire quietly closed the door behind her, and was about to walk over to the crib to check on the baby when a sound in the other corner of the room had her head twisting round, expecting to see Althea—only to freeze when she found herself looking at Andreas.

Dressed in what looked like a white cotton tracksuit, he was sitting in the comfortable rocking-chair in the corner, cradling a sleeping Melanie in his arms.

His eyes were closed, his dark head resting back against the chair’s cushioned back—though he wasn’t asleep. The way one long brown bare foot was rhythmically keeping the chair rocking while the other rested across its knee told her that.

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