The Billionaire's Bride of Innocence

Because he had a new mission: to make her pregnant again.

It was tempting. There was no doubt about it.

Lots of women in her position would take what he was offering and go on ignoring his lies. They would even try to have another child.

But Megan couldn’t do that last part. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

So what are you going to do? demanded the voice of reason. The time has come to make a decision. But which one?

Decision one: you confront James with the truth at long last and tell him what you overheard at the hospital. But, of course, if you do that then your marriage is over. You will have no alternative but to go home to your overbearing and critical mother.

Megan shuddered inside at such a prospect.

Decision two: you decide to live with James’s lies and give your marriage a second chance. You go on your second honeymoon and enjoy what your husband has to offer you. But you stay on the Pill till you feel ready to have another baby. Naturally, you don’t tell him you’re taking contraception because, if you do, your marriage will be over and you’ll be back home with Mother again.

It really was a no-brainer, not the way she was feeling right at this moment. She had to experience his lovemaking at least one more time, or go crazy.

‘That sounds…nice,’ she heard herself saying.

‘Darling,’ he murmured, reaching over to take her hand in his. ‘I can’t tell you how happy you’ve just made me. I’ve missed you terribly in bed,’ he said, stroking her fingers all the while. ‘You must know that.’

Suddenly, and perhaps perversely, she found the courage to at least give voice to one of her concerns. ‘Actually no, James,’ she choked out, even as her stomach contracted into a savage knot of desire. ‘I don’t know that.’

His eyes betrayed true surprise, his fingers stilling on hers.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You are the big boss of Images; a very rich, very powerful man. If you’d wanted sex these past few months, you’d have had no trouble getting it.’

There was no doubting his shock. Either that, or he was the best actor in the world.

‘I have never been unfaithful to you, Megan. Never! I want you and only you,’ he insisted, lifting her curled-over hand to his lips and kissing her knuckles.

It was probably a lie, Megan thought dazedly. But a brilliant one. She could perhaps live with lies like that, if he kept delivering them with such seeming sincerity, along with some of his exquisite lovemaking.

‘I’ll get right on to booking a place on Dream Island as soon as I get to work,’ he continued with his usual decisiveness. ‘But before I leave, can I tempt you with some cereal? Or a croissant?’

‘Not just now,’ she said tersely, and pulled her hand out of his hold.

James frowned as only James could, his thick dark brows beetling together, his black eyes glittering with instant disapproval. ‘As much as you’re looking incredibly lovely today, my darling, you don’t want to lose any more weight. Not if we’re going to try for another baby.’

Her nostrils sucked in sharply before she could stop them.

‘Is there a problem with that?’ he demanded to know straight away. ‘Is it still too soon for you?’

A hundred years would be too soon, she wanted to scream at him. Oh, God, what if she never wanted to have another baby? What if this fear never passed?

‘The doctor said there was no physical reason for you to have another miscarriage,’ James went on before she could find the right reply. ‘Look, you said when we married that you wanted a big family.’

‘Yes, I know I did,’ she said tightly. And she still did!

It was all so impossible, Megan realised despairingly.

‘Tell me what’s bothering you,’ he persisted.

‘I can’t.’

‘You can, you know,’ he said, reaching over and touching her hand again. ‘You can tell me anything. Would it help if I said I already know what it is?’

Megan snatched her hand away from under his. He knew she didn’t want to have a baby? Knew she was on the Pill?

‘You think you don’t want sex any more,’ he pronounced baldly as he sat back in his chair.

Megan almost laughed, just managing to hide her reaction by looking away and picking up her orange juice.

Any secret amusement—however perverse—was soon squashed when he rose abruptly from his chair and strode round to hers. Megan froze whilst he swept the glass of juice from her hand and banged it back onto the tray. Two seconds later, her chair had been twisted away from the table and he was pulling her up into his arms.

‘I should have done this last night,’ he growled as his mouth swooped.

Megan didn’t want him to kiss her, not right now!

But there was no stopping him.

She tried not to respond but it was a futile struggle from the start. Her mind quickly dissolved, along with her body. There was no thought of resistance. There was nothing but blind acceptance that this was where she wanted to be. In his arms. She forgot, in the heat of the moment, that her period had arrived just before dawn that morning…

Chapter Four

YES!

A wild elation swept through James when Megan finally responded. For a moment there, he’d thought she was going to reject him again.

But there was no rejection in the way she was suddenly pressing herself against him.

God, but he’d really missed her. Missed this.

She was so sweet, he thought as his mouth softened against hers. Delicious, really. His mind was already racing ahead of his actions, thinking of how for once he would make love to her out of a bed and in broad daylight. Soon he’d pick her up and carry her over to the red leather sofa under the window. Soon he’d be inside her.

First, however, he would have to get her a little more excited, or she might object. She really was incredibly shy.

He lifted his mouth from hers but he didn’t let her go, turning her round in his arms so that her back was against him. His left arm wound tightly around her waist, his right hand left free. Free to slide into the neckline of her robe and cup her breast, playing with her nipple through the thin silk of her nightie.

It was larger than he remembered. Larger and more responsive. Megan moaned softly as he played with it.

James was stunned when she wrenched herself out of his arms and whirled away.

‘You…you have to stop,’ she said, her voice shaking.

‘But why?’ he snapped. ‘You want it. I know you do.’

‘Yes, I do,’ she admitted, her face flushing. ‘I’m sorry, but we…we can’t do anything right now. I have my period.’

James almost swore. But just as well he hadn’t: Megan was not the sort of girl one used words like that with.

‘For how long?’ he asked, still a little sharply. But, hell on earth, he was in agony.

‘Till Friday at least,’ she said.

That was five whole days away! For a few seconds James struggled with his frustration before realising that those five days would eventually pass. After which…

‘Will your period definitely be finished by Saturday?’

‘Saturday should be fine,’ she said, and blushed prettily.

His eyes raked over her, noting that her eyes were sparkling and her nipples hard as rocks. It was going to be difficult keeping his hands off her till then.

He’d have to work out even harder in the gym this week to work off his frustrations.

‘We’ll fly out to Dream Island first thing Saturday morning,’ he pronounced firmly.

Megan’s eyes widened. ‘But you haven’t even booked yet. How do you know you’ll get a booking for next Saturday? Or even a flight?’

‘Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that. I’ll organise everything. Come Saturday, we’ll be on Dream Island.’

‘How long will we be gone for?’ she asked.

James was about to say a week. He really couldn’t afford to be away from the office for longer than that at the moment. He’d just started up a new addition to his business: a casting agency to cater for the increasing number of movies being made in Australia. But then he remembered that he wasn’t just whisking Megan away to have a twenty-four-seven sex-fest with her. He wanted to get her pregnant.

He’d forgotten that for a moment!

He quickly worked out the dates from what she’d told him about her period. Her peak time for conceiving would be a fortnight from today, give or take a few days either way. If they didn’t leave Sydney till Saturday he’d have to extend their holiday to at least ten days, just to be on the safe side. He couldn’t rely on getting her pregnant after they came back. She might go back into her shell when she returned. No, he would have to strike whilst his wife was hot. Which she was—very hot.

‘I thought ten days,’ he said.

She suddenly began to look worried again, for some reason.

Despite his earlier resolve to keep his hands off, he swiftly gathered her back into his arms, and kissed her again. It was worth the pain to feel her melt against him once more. Still, it was going to be a long week, sleeping beside her in bed and not being able to touch her. Knowing him, he was sure to try something and spoil everything. Better to keep her at arm’s length.

A sudden idea occurred to him.

‘Remember how great our wedding night was?’ he said, and she nodded, her eyes glistening a little. ‘Why don’t we try to re-create that?’

‘But…but…how?’

‘If you remember, we hadn’t seen each other for a few weeks before our wedding day. That time apart made our getting together again extra-special. I know it’ll only be a few days this time, but we could do something similar. You could sleep down here till we go. And have your meals down here. If you promise to eat, that is. What do you think?’

‘I think it’s a very romantic idea,’ she said, but with reservation, he thought.

‘I can be romantic, you know,’ he said teasingly.

‘Can you?’

‘Not often, I admit. But I can try.’

‘Won’t Roberta think it a bit strange if I don’t come up to the house for meals?’

‘I’ll explain what we’re doing.’

She blinked, then nodded. James smiled. That was another thing he really liked about Megan. She didn’t argue with him.

‘Great. Look, I’d better hotfoot it into the office and see to that booking post-haste. Don’t forget to eat some of this food. I’ll pick something up at work. Bye, darling.’ He squeezed her shoulder as he gave her a peck on the cheek. ‘See you tonight.’

‘No, you won’t.’

‘You’re right. I won’t. Damn. Still, it’s not that long till Saturday.’ Just a bloody eternity!

‘What happens if you can’t get a booking?’

‘I’ll get a booking,’ he said with a scowl. ‘Even if I have to buy the whole damned island!’

Chapter Five

WHICH he would, Megan accepted ruefully as she watched him hurry out of the pool house. James Logan was not a man to fail in anything he did. He was a man amongst men. A winner.

Megan knew more about her husband than he might realise she did. When he’d left her home alone during the six weeks between their engagement and wedding, she’d spent many hours checking him out on the internet, feeding her insatiable curiosity about the powerful man she’d fallen madly in love with and was about to marry. She’d read every item of news which related to him; every single article written about his background, his professional and his private lives.

There was one heck of a lot.

Although she already knew that James’s father was transport magnate Wayne Logan, Megan hadn’t known that Logan senior was a self-made billionaire who’d begun life as a lowly truck driver, becoming a multimillionaire by the time he was thirty. Of course, his marriage to the daughter of his wealthy boss had given him a leg up on the ladder of success, a strategy Megan was familiar with. Megan suspected her own mother had married for money, not for love. She was sometimes ashamed of the way her extremely materialistic mother did nothing but spend her poor father’s money.

At least Wayne Logan had pulled his weight, proving himself an astute businessman by building up his ailing father-in-law’s trucking company into the biggest in Australia. After his father-in-law passed away, Logan had gone on to bigger and better things, expanding his transport empire overseas, buying container ships and a couple of airlines, as well as more trucks.

Logan’s marriage had produced two sons. Jonathon, the elder by five years, had been killed in a car accident a few weeks after his twenty-third birthday. The Porsche he was driving—he’d run off the road and hit a telegraph pole—had been a birthday present from his doting father.

James didn’t figure largely in any articles about the Logan family until he was twenty-five, at which point he’d burst into the media spotlight—not because he’d followed into the family business as his older brother had, but as the highly successful manager of several singers and actors whose previous manager had been arrested for embezzlement three years earlier. Facing financial ruin, they’d all clubbed together at that time and turned to James for help. James had set up shop as a civil litigation lawyer after leaving university, raking up business by dropping pamphlets through letter boxes.

It came out later than none of them had known James had only been twenty-two at the time. James had always looked older than he was.

But help them he had. Not by suing the man who’d fleeced them—an impossible course of action after the gamblingaddicted fool had committed suicide—but by talking them into taking him on as their manager. James had always had the gift of the gab, it seemed, and a passion for the entertainment business.

It was history now that under the original contract they’d signed with him James had taken no commission for the first year, provided they did what he said, no questions asked. With little to lose—all of them were in danger of fast becoming ‘has-beens’ and ‘never-wases’—they’d all agreed to his terms.

Within three years, every one of James Logan’s clients was a success story and James was raking it in. His new company, Images, quickly became the most famous management agency in Australia, and he was dubbed ‘The Makeover Man’.

That was his basic modus operandi. James made people over; gave them what he called the right image, transforming the bland and the boring into the bold and the beautiful, giving each singer and actor not just a new look but also sometimes a new name, and always a new confidence. This, combined with lots of exposure on television—in everything from telethons to reality shows to guest spots on the proliferation of breakfast programmes—made his clients some of the most well-known faces in Australia and subsequently some of the most sought-after performers.

His biggest success story back then had been Jessica Mason, a country-and-western performer in her late twenties, who’d once won a ‘Golden Guitar’ in her late teens, but had languished in mediocrity ever since. She’d also gained about twenty kilos in that time. James didn’t change her name, though he shortened her first name to Jessie and left off the last. He personally supervised her diet and exercise programme till she was back to her optimum weight of fifty-two kilos, allowing her very good figure to emerge once more. Her long mass of rather ratty blonde hair was dyed jet-black and her wardrobe was changed from fringed suede vests and cowboy boots to long, flowing skirts, low-cut tops and jewelencrusted sandals.

Her first album—titled ‘Barefoot Gypsy’—had one of the sexiest covers ever produced, with Jessie standing next to a camp fire in a flamenco-style pose, with her skirt lifted high to expose a lot of hip and thigh, her head thrown back so that her wild black curls flowed down her back and her obviously braless breasts thrust up high against the gauzy white blouse she was almost wearing.

The album had gone gold within days; platinum within weeks. Years later it was still selling. Of course, this wasn’t entirely due to the provocative cover, though it played a big part. The songs on the CD backed up the promise of the packaging, being moody and sexy, with great lyrics and throbbing rhythms.

‘You still have to deliver,’ James was quoted as saying when he was accused of selling sex. ‘My singers can sing, and my actors can act. The trouble with the entertainment industry is that the truly talented don’t always get the opportunity to show what they can do. I give my people that opportunity by promoting them in a way which gets them noticed.’

It was inevitable that James would eventually extend his business interests into the advertising industry.

‘Products aren’t much different from people,’ he was also quoted as saying in another article after he’d started up Images Advertising. ‘They require an image to be successful, as do companies. Come to me and I’ll guarantee to increase your sales in six months, or I’ll give you your money back.’

This extremely bold statement had seen stressed sales and marketing managers flocking to James to perform his magic. And perform it he had, with the help of the highly creative, lateral-thinking staff he’d hired.

By the age of thirty James had become a multimillionaire and something of a playboy. The internet threw up hundreds of photographs of him doing what playboys did during their leisure hours: there were snapshots of him at the races, at movie premieres, at swish charity dos and golfing tournaments; on yachts, driving sports cars and relaxing in five-star resorts.

Most of the photographs showed James with a different dolly-bird on his arm. It came as a surprise to the Press when, at the age of thirty-two, he married Jackie Foster, the Australian supermodel. He’d been tabbed to stay a swinging bachelor for a few more years.

Megan had only felt minor jealousy over James’s earlier girlfriends. They were way in the past, after all. But she’d taken one look at the photographs of James’s first wedding day and realised she had a long way to go before her bridal snaps would even compare. Jackie Foster had made a simply stunning bride.

Megan still wasn’t jealous. James had done a good job of convincing Megan she was what he wanted, not Jackie Foster. Suddenly, however, she’d not been happy with the way she looked. The least she could do was make the best of herself. So she’d turned to a fashion guru for help—not her overly critical mother!—and been very pleased with the result. She’d swanned down that aisle on her own wedding day believing she was truly beautiful, and also believing that she had her husband-to-be’s true love.

‘What a fool I was,’ she muttered as she picked up a piece of toast and gave it a savage bite.

What hadn’t she believed back then?

Thinking about her husband’s lies and deceptions stirred up a hornets’ nest of anger inside Megan. Some directed at James, but most directed at herself. She should have confronted him with the truth at the hospital, when the hurt had been fresh in her mind, and in her heart. She should not have left it.

It was too late now. She was trapped, not just by her unrequited love for the man, but also by her renewed desire for him. She wanted to go on that second honeymoon with him quite desperately. Wanted him to make love to her for days on end. No use pretending differently. No use thinking she was going to do or say anything which would stop that from happening.

Standing up, Megan walked over to the easel and lifted the dust cloth from the painting. What she saw there still had the power to shock her…but also to excite her.

The phone ringing startled Megan. Impossible for James to be in his office yet. He’d only left ten minutes earlier. Of course, he could be ringing her from his car phone, but she didn’t think so. He didn’t do that too often.

Megan winced at the thought it might be her mother, wanting to know the ins and outs of Hugh’s wedding. She’d rung last night as Megan had been undressing for bed. Megan had put her off at the time, saying she had a headache.

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