Summer Sins: Bedded, or Wedded? / Willingly Bedded, Forcibly Wedded / The Mediterranean Billionaire's Blackmail Bargain

If only she still had her make-up on. She might look like a tart with it, but it served as a mask, a protective mask. Hiding her, the real her, from the punters and the other girls at the casino.

Hiding her from this man who had made her stomach flip full circle in the first moment of registering his appearance.

But she couldn’t hide from him now. Now, in the shadowy confines of this car he’d picked her up in, she was completely, absolutely exposed to him. An invisible shiver went through her—trepidation, alarm, and something quite, quite different. For a moment longer she went on looking at him, feeling her eyes widen, her focus start to blur. Dear God, he was just so incredible to look at …

‘Tu parles Français?’ His voice had sharpened.

‘Oui, un peu. Pourquoi?’ retorted Lissa, taken aback by the sudden question. And all too aware, with the same disturbing mix of resentment and that other reaction she would not acknowledge, that he had used the tu form of address—the one reserved, when it came to adults, to indicate either superiority or intimacy.

His response told her exactly which form he had intended—and it was like a cold shower of water. ‘Because foreign language skills are unusual in girls like you. Unless they are foreign to begin with,’ came the blunt answer.

Lissa felt a spike of antagonism go through her. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Girls like me? I see.’ Her voice was flat. ‘You mean girls too thick to do anything other than work as a hostess?’

‘Thick?’ There was a slight frown between his eyes.

‘Bête,’ Lissa supplied helpfully, with a tight, humourless smile. Resentment curdled in her. Oh, Xavier Lauran might be God’s gift to the discerning woman, but he was as full of prejudice as any other male when it came to the assumptions he made.

‘Enfin, if you are clever enough to speak a language foreign to you, why do you do the work you do?’ The cool challenge of his voice made Lissa’s chin lift. There was something else in his voice as he spoke, but she was too resentful to identify it.

‘I might as well ask why a man of your evident intelligence and background chooses to patronise the kind of place I work in?’ she countered sharply.

His face shuttered. Oh, she thought nastily, he doesn’t like it when some tarty little casino hostess dares to question his behaviour.

‘Why do you work there?’

The question shot at her. Quite ignoring the one she’d just thrown at him.

‘It’s a job,’ she answered flatly.

She looked away. It was an instinctive gesture. She didn’t want to see the expression in the man’s eyes. She knew it would be condemning. And that in itself would worsen the curdling mix of resentment and self-revulsion she always felt whenever she had to face up to how she earned money.

I don’t have any choice! She wanted to yell at him. But what was the point? A familiar wave of weariness and depression washed over her. Then, as it passed through her, she became aware that the car was already at Trafalgar Square, and was turning to go under Admiralty Arch and down the Mall towards Buckingham Palace.

‘You’ve gone too far,’ she exclaimed, her head twisting round to the Frenchman again before she leaned forward to get the attention of the driver.

‘I said I would take you home,’ came the reply, and yet again Lissa got the feeling the man was not used to being questioned.

‘No.’

Her voice was flat. Adamant.

Xavier looked at her. Curious, he registered. There was something more than negation in that voice. Something that was more akin to …

Fear. That was what it was. His pupils pinpricked as they rested on her face.

Yes, that was what was flaring in her eyes right now. There was not doubt of it. And more than fear, too. He had seen it momentarily in the casino, and he had seen it again just now, when she’d turned her face from him. It jagged an emotion in him—one that had absolutely no place in the situation. But it was there all the same.

What he had seen in her face was there again now, taut behind the fear flaring in her eyes.

Tiredness.

Quite evident, quite unmistakeable, exposed in the gaunt contours around her eyes. The girl looked exhausted.

‘Mademoiselle, it is no trouble to conduct you to your flat. There is little traffic at this hour, and the detour will not be significant. It is because of me that you missed your bus—permit me to make amends.’

Lissa sat back, looking at him. His voice was different. She couldn’t tell why, but it was all the same. It was kinder. For some strange, unaccountable reason she felt her throat tighten. She didn’t want this man being kind to her. He was just a stranger. A man who frequented the casino she had to work in because she had no choice—a man who was, therefore, nothing more than a punter. She didn’t want him being kind to her, doing her favours.

‘It really isn’t necessary,’ she began stiffly. ‘I couldn’t impose on you.’

He silenced her objection. ‘It is no imposition,’ he returned, and now the kindness was gone. There was only an impersonal indifference. ‘I need to make several phone calls now to the USA. Whether I make them from my hotel or from this car is irrelevant.’

As if to prove his point, he slid a long-fingered hand inside his luxurious overcoat and withdrew a mobile phone, flicking it open with an elegant twist of his wrist.

‘Give my driver your address,’ he instructed. Then he started up the phone and proceeded to punch a stored number.

For a moment Lissa just went on looking at him uncertainly. Outside, the tall trees lining the Mall flashed past with the expensively smooth ride the flash car afforded, and then they were circling around the Queen Victoria monument, wheeling past the illuminated Victorian baroque splendour of Buckingham Palace.

Xavier Lauran lifted the phone to his ear and started to talk. His French was far too rapid for Lissa even to attempt to follow it. He was clearly absorbed in the conversation. For a moment she allowed herself the pleasure of listening to his beautifully timbred voice, fluent in its own language.

Then the chauffeur was twisting his head briefly.

‘If you give me your address, Mademoiselle?’ His accent was French, too, but it did not shiver down her nerves like that of his employer.

Lissa gave in. Surely she was safe enough? Would a man who was evidently some kind of senior executive in a prestigious international company really risk any kind of scandal?

Resignedly, she gave her address, and then sat back. As the car headed down Victoria Street towards Parliament Square and the River Thames, she leaned back farther in her seat. The leather seats were deep and soft. Across from her the devastating Frenchman was paying her no more attention than if she was a block of wood, his mellifluous voice rising and falling rapidly, letting her catch nothing more than the briefest word every now and then. Outside, the flickering lights of an almost deserted London strobed in her vision. She closed her eyes to shut it out. Weariness swept down over her. She was so tired she could sleep for a thousand years and not wake.

The warmth of the car stole through her. Her breathing slowed.

She slept.

In the opposite corner of the passenger seat, Xavier paused in his interrogation of his west coast sales director. His eyes rested on her.

His thoughts were mixed. Contradictory.

The sharp shadows of her face in the streetlight set her cheekbones into relief. Long lashes swept down over her pale cheeks. In repose, her tiredness seemed to have ebbed, leaving nothing behind except the question as to why Lissa Stephens should look so tired when she had all day to sleep.

And another question, as well. Far more troubling.

Why did he feel a stab of pity at her being so tired—and why did the exhaustion in her face merely emphasise the extraordinary beauty of her bone structure?

He wanted to go on looking at her—just looking.

Then his sales director was telling him the next set of figures. With a mixture of reluctance and relief Xavier resumed his conversation. Deliberately he looked away from the girl.

Inside him, the same confused flux of emotions continued to recycle.

Emotions that were completely, absolutely, out of place when all that was required was the cool, analytical application of reason.

Yet they continued to circle all the same—to his irritation and displeasure.

‘I believe we have arrived.’

The words, murmured without expression, stirred Lissa to wakefulness. She felt dopey, her mind blurred and unable to focus. Then, with a little shake, she roused herself fully from the torpid slumber the warmth and motion of the car had induced in her.

She sat upright with an effort. The car had paused by the kerb just outside a rundown Victorian apartment block, built in the nineteenth century as social housing for the labouring poor. Unlike many parts of South London, this area had not gentrified, but the virtue of that was that it made the rent of the one-bedroom flat affordable to her. The last thing she needed was to squander money on accommodation.

She blinked. ‘Thank you. It was really very kind of you.’

Her voice was slightly husky with sleep, but she made herself look at the man who’d insisted on driving her home. As her eyes lifted to his face, she felt the same catch in her breath she’d had when she’d first set eyes on him. Weakness flushed through her, and a sense of disbelief that she was really here, sitting in the same car as him. For a self-indulgent moment she just went on looking at him. His face was slightly averted from her, glancing out of his window at the locality. Did his expression tighten? She didn’t know—only knew that the shadows of the car’s interior only served to accentuate the incredible contours of his face.

Then his head turned fully towards her, and his eyes came to meet hers.

Her stomach hollowed. In her still-dopey state she could not tear her own gaze away. She felt her eyes cling to his, in a moment of exchange that was like a bolt through her.

Then, ‘Mademoiselle?’

The cold draught of air at her side and the polite voice of the driver made her realise that the passenger door had been opened. They were waiting for her to get out, the chauffeur and the flash Frenchman.

She broke eye contact and got out.

‘Thank you for the lift. It was very kind of you,’ she repeated, her voice stilted. As she got out her key, she allowed herself one more glance back at the car. It hovered by the side of the road, sleek and dark and expensive. Like the man inside.

She could not see him now—he was just a darker shadow in the dark interior. Something pierced inside her. That was it, then. The last time she’d see him. That moment before she’d got out of the car. Already the driver was climbing back into his seat, closing his own door. Jerkily, she turned away, and opened the door and went inside.

Behind her, she heard the car glide away into the night.

Xavier stared unseeingly ahead of him. The street was scruffy and rundown, with litter blowing around and the dank, bleak dreariness of poverty. Not a good place to live. No wonder Lissa Stephens was eager for a way out of here.

His eyes darkened. But not at the expense of his brother.

He waited for the stab of anger to come—but instead all that came was a repeat of that sense of jarring disconcertion he’d felt when he’d set eyes on her by the bus stop and almost failed to recognise her as the same woman he’d deliberately singled out for his attention in the casino.

How could she look so different? The question sliced through him again, and once more he could give no rational explanation for the difference it made to him. It shouldn’t make a difference.

Yet it did.

And another thought was intruding—where it had no business to be.

If she looked that good without even trying, what would she look like if she were properly dressed and presented?

Immediately, without volition, his mind was there. That long blonde hair, loose but sleek, flicked back off her face, make-up subtle but enhancing the natural beauty she possessed, and her slender body gowned as a beautiful woman should always be gowned.

The image hovered in his mind. Vivid. Powerful. Alluring.

No. He would not sit here fantasising about what Lissa Stephens might look like if she were done up the way she would be if he were inviting her to spend the evening with him.

More than the evening.

No. Again he slammed the harsh, forbidding negative down across his wayward thoughts. The only reason he had anything at all to do with Lissa Stephens was to assess whether she was suitable to marry his brother. It had seemed in the casino an open and shut case. Picking her up in the street as he’d done should only have confirmed it. She should have been eager to be picked up—eager for the interest and intention of someone so obviously rich. She should have batted her thickened eyelashes at him and come on to him.

Instead, she’d shown every reluctance at getting into his car, and when she had she’d fallen asleep.

He frowned. It didn’t make sense. It was irrational. Lissa Stephens in the casino and Lissa Stephens asleep in his car seemed two quite different people, both in appearance and in behaviour.

As the car drove on, back into the brightly lit affluent West End, a world away from the dreary bleakness of south London’s poorer districts, Xavier knew he could be sure only of one thing. That he could not yet be sure about Lissa Stephens.

His investigation, he had to accept, was very far from over.

But what, precisely, should be his next step?

Well … He shifted his shoulders as if to release a sudden tension. He had the rest of the night to decide.

The rest of the night to think about Lissa Stephens.

As she stood outside the door to her ground-floor flat, Lissa paused a moment. Her emotions were strange. She was still feeling blurred from interrupted sleep. But that was not the reason.

The reason was even now driving away down the street.

Why did he do it? Why did he offer me a lift and go out of his way to drive me back here, miles away?

Any wariness that he might have had less than honourable intentions had been completely unfounded. He hadn’t made the slightest attempt to make a move on her, and certainly her own attitude had scarcely been inviting.

Deliberately so. Because what, dear God, would have been the point? Even without any of the complications in her life, the guy was still a punter, and therefore completely out of bounds. He might be like something out of Continental movie in terms of looks, but if he’d actually thought he might pick her up sexually, knowing her to be a casino hostess, it would only have been because he himself was a sleazeball.

But he wasn’t that.

Apart from that moment when he’d shown surprise that a woman working as a hostess could possibly be capable of learning a foreign language, he hadn’t actually dissed her at all. In fact, if she’d had to describe his attitude towards her she would have had to say it was one of civility and nothing more.

She frowned again. So why had he offered her a lift? Some kind of Gallic gallantry after making her miss her bus? If so, it had been an over-the-top gesture, and she’d responded appropriately by asking to be let out at Trafalgar Square. He could have done that and gone on his way.

But he hadn’t. He’d insisted on driving her all the way back here. But why?

Impatiently she brushed the question from her head. It was pointless asking it—she wasn’t going to get an answer. And the answer didn’t matter anyway.

Xavier Lauran was not someone she was going to encounter a second time after all.

For the briefest moment, as she inserted her key into the lock and turned it quietly, she felt a pang go through her. He had walked into her life—and out again. The most incredible-looking male she’d ever seen. A man to take her breath away, stop the blood in her pulse, hollow out her stomach.

Gone.

The pang bit again. Her eyes clouded. Then, with a tightening of her chin, she let herself inside her flat. Xavier Lauran had been and gone in her life, and that was that. And it was just as well.

There was no room in her life for him. None at all.

No room for anyone except—

‘Lissy, you’re home.’ The voice that spoke out of the darkness was soft, and very slightly slurred.

Lissa walked into the bedroom. Her life closed around her. Familiar, loving, but cruel and bleak.

Xavier stood by the uncurtained windows of his hotel suite and moodily nursed a cognac glass between his fingers. He looked down at the silent street below.

He should go to bed. Go to sleep. But he didn’t feel tired. There was a restlessness pacing in his veins. A question circulating in his head.

What was he going to do about Lissa Stephens?

He’d thought it would be cut and dried. That the trashy casino hostess gushing over him was all the evidence he needed that she was the last person he should allow his brother to marry. The carefully orchestrated offer of a lift was merely supposed to have given the girl the opportunity to do what any of her co-workers would surely have done.

But she hadn’t.

Why not?

The cynical answer was that a woman with sufficient—if unexpected—intelligence to have learnt a foreign language was also one that was too smart to jeopardise what she had going with another wealthy man—his brother—to risk a fleeting interlude with anyone else. And maybe that was the reason she hadn’t given him the come on.

But maybe it was for a quite different reason. Logic demanded that he consider that possibility. One that was at odds with the woman he had thought she obviously was. Maybe Lissa Stephens simply wasn’t the kind of girl the evidence said she was.

The slow, unconscious swirling of the cognac in his glass halted abruptly.

He had to know for sure.

And there was, Xavier knew, with a sudden clenching of his stomach, an obvious way to find out.

Spend more time with her.

Conflicting emotions flashed through him as he articulated the thought—and neither was welcome. Emotion seldom was. But he had to recognise it, all the same. One was extreme reluctance—reluctance for a reason that was troublingly evident in the second emotion flaring in him. An emotion that was completely and absolutely inappropriate to the situation. But it was there, all the same—and he could do nothing about it.

Anticipation.

With a sudden lift of his hand, he raised the cognac glass to his lips and took a mouthful of the fine, fiery liquid. He might as well face it—he wanted to see the girl again. Wanted to spend more time with her.

And it was not just to check her out for his brother.

The kick of the cognac to his system seemed to release something in him. A hot pulse through his veins.

He wanted to see her again all right.

Danger prickled on his skin.

He shouldn’t do this.

The cool, analytical voice of reason spoke inside his head. It was the voice he always listened to. The voice he ran XeL with, ran his life with—the voice he listened to which had advised him to disentangle his brother from his previous mésalliance. It was the voice with which he selected the women for his bed. Suitable women, appropriate women, who moved in his world, who were part of it, and knew the rules by which he conducted his affairs. Women quite unlike the likes of Lissa Stephens, with her confusing double image—one moment a cheap casino hostess and the next.

He shouldn’t have thought of Lissa Stephens. Shouldn’t have remembered that second image of hers, the one that had come like a blow out of nowhere in a rain-wet London street in the bleak fag end of the night.

But it was too late. It was in his head, etched like a diamond against murky smoke. The pure, bare, unadorned beauty of her profile turned away from him. The long fall of pale hair from its high plume. The upturned collar of her cheap jacket that nevertheless framed the crystal contours of her face.

Of its own volition his hand lifted the glass to his mouth again, and he took another mouthful. He wanted to see that image again. Wanted to look at it. At her.

He needed to know.

The words formed in his mind.

He needed to know. Was she, against all evidence, a fit woman to marry his brother? That was what he needed to find out.

Nothing else. That was, after all, the only question on the table. The only question that could be on the table.

Sharply, he turned away. There was nothing else he needed to know about Lissa Stephens.

As he deposited, with a jerkier movement than was necessary, the cognac glass on a table as he passed it, by heading to his bedroom, he screened out the word that had formed in his consciousness.

Menteur.

Liar.

Lissa lay, staring at the ceiling unseen above her. From time to time, through the muffling of the bedroom door, she could hear a train rattling along the tracks that ran past the rear of the poky flat. From beside her, on the next pillow in the double bed, came the rhythmic rise and fall of slightly stertorous, drug-induced breathing.

She gazed upward into the dark.

For all her extreme weariness she could not sleep. Even though she knew she had to be up again in a few hours, her mind was wide awake.

Thinking. Remembering.

And—worse still—imagining.

About one single face. One single man.

Angrily, she tried to force the image from her mind.

What was the point in thinking about him? None—none at all. So why was she doing it?

Because her mind would not go anywhere else.

Would not even think about the one thing that, above all else in her life, she always thought about. The one person she always had to think about.

Guilt drenched through her. Oh, God—how low could she stoop? Even thinking it with a note of resentment, however faint. Automatically, as if to assuage her own guilt, she reached out a hand to let it rest lightly on the sleeping form beside her. A wave of love and pity welled in her.

If only she could wave a magic wand. If only she could make it somehow instantly better. If only she could …

But she couldn’t. Bleakness chilled in her throat. There was no magic wand. Nothing like that. Only a tiny sliver of hope. And even to seize that meant that all her waking hours had to be dedicated to one thing and one thing only—earning money. Saving money. Little by little. Slowly, oh, so slowly.

Unless Armand …

The chill intensified.

He hadn’t phoned. She had hoped against hope that tonight he would, but there had been nothing. That made it three nights in a row, not hearing from him.

He’s gone.

The grim words tolled in her brain. She might try to dispel them, but they would not disappear.

Gone.

A single word, extinguishing hope—hope she should not have allowed herself.

Against her will the image formed in her mind of sable hair and dark eyes and a sculpted mouth.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘LISSA, the manager wants you. In his office. Sharpish!’

Lissa swivelled her head from her cramped place at the vanity unit in the crowded dressing room that she and the other hostesses changed in. She had only just arrived, and was about to start on her make-up.

She frowned at the command, issued by one of the staff from the door.

‘What for?’

A shrug was her only answer, and with a sigh Lissa got to her feet again and made her way out of the dressing room. A couple of the other girls looked at her curiously.

The manager’s office overlooked the casino floor, which was currently thinly populated.