Bought For The Billionaire's Revenge

‘I presume you called me here because you have a plan.’ She pinned him with her golden-brown eyes until the sensation overpowered her. ‘I wish you’d stop prevaricating and just tell me.’

His smile was not one of happiness. ‘You are hardly in a position to issue commands to me.’

Marnie’s face lifted to his in surprise. ‘That’s not what I was doing.’ She shook her head timidly from side to side. ‘I didn’t mean to, anyway. It’s just...please. Tell me everything.’

He shrugged. ‘Bad decisions. Bad investments. Bad business.’ He pressed back further in his chair, the intensity of his fierce gaze sending sharp arrows of awareness and emotion through her blood. ‘The why of it doesn’t matter.’

‘It matters to me.’

He spoke on as though she hadn’t. His eyes bored into hers. ‘I believe there are not ten people in the world who would find themselves in a financial position to help your father. Even fewer who would have any motivation to do so.’

Marnie bit down on her lower lip, trying desperately to think of anyone who might have enough liquidity to inject some cash into her father’s crumbling empire.

Only one man came to mind, and he was staring at her in a way that was turning her mind to mush.

Unable to sit still for a moment longer, Marnie scraped her chair back and stalked to the window. London vibrated beneath them: a collection of cars and souls all going about their own lives, threading together into one enormous carpet of activity. She felt as if she’d been plucked out of the fibres and placed here instead, in a madhouse.

‘Dad’s never been your favourite person,’ she said softly. ‘How do I know you’re not making this up for some cruel reason of your own?’

‘Your father’s demise is not a well-kept secret, matakia mou. Anderson told me.’

‘Anderson?’ The name was like a knife in her gut. She thought of Libby’s fiancé with the shock of grief that always accompanied anything to do with her sister. With Before.

‘We’re still in touch,’ he said with a shrug, as if that wasn’t important.

‘He knows about this?’ She thought of Anderson Holt’s family, the fortune they possessed. Maybe they could help? She dismissed the thought instantly. A hundred million pounds—cash—was beyond most people’s capabilities. Besides, Arthur Kenington would never let himself be bailed out.

‘It is no secret,’ Nikos said, misunderstanding her question. ‘I imagine the whole city knows the truth of your father’s position.’

Her spine stiffened and sorrow for the man who had raised her pushed all thoughts of her late sister’s fiancé from her mind. She blinked quickly, denying the sting of tears that was threatening. She was not willing to show such weakness in front of anyone, let alone Nikos.

‘He has seemed stressed lately,’ she conceded awkwardly, keeping her vision focussed on the buzz of activity at street level.

‘I can well imagine. The idea of losing his life’s work and the legacy of his forebears will be weighing heavily on his conscience. Not to mention his monumental ego.’

She let the barb go by. Her mind was completely absorbed with trying to make sense of this information. ‘I don’t understand why he wouldn’t have said anything.’

‘Don’t you?’ His eyes flashed with anger and resentment as his last conversation with Lord Arthur Kenington came to mind. ‘The man prides himself on shielding you from the world. He would do anything to spare you the pain of actually inhabiting reality with the rest of us.’

‘You call this reality?’ she quipped, flicking a disapproving glance around the cavernous glass office decorated with modern art masterpieces and furniture that would have looked at home in a gallery.

A muscle jerked in his cheek and Marnie wished she could pull those words back. Who was she to sit in judgement of his success? She didn’t know the details, but she knew enough of his childhood to realise that if anyone on earth understood poverty it was Nikos.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said stiffly, lifting a finger to her temple and rubbing at it. ‘None of this is your fault.’

A pang of something a lot like sympathy squeezed in Nikos’s gut. Recognising that she could still evoke those emotions in him, he consciously pushed aside any softening towards her.

‘No.’ He rubbed a hand across his stubbled jaw. ‘He stands to lose it all, Marnie. His investments. His reputation. Kenington Hall. He will be a cautionary tale at best, a laughing stock more likely.’

‘Don’t...’ She shivered, thinking of what her parents had already suffered and lost in life. The thought of them enduring yet another tragedy weighed so heavily on her chest she could hardly breathe.

‘I would be lying if I said I’m not a little tempted to leave him to his fate. A fate that, as it turns out, is not at all dissimilar to what he predicted for me.’

A shiver ran down her spine. ‘You’re still angry about that?’

His eyes flashed. ‘Angry? No. Disgusted? Yes.’ He dragged a hand through his hair, as though mentally shaking himself. ‘He would spend a lifetime repaying his creditors.’

Nikos was conscious that he was driving a proverbial knife into her. He didn’t stop.

‘Some of his decisions might even be seen as criminally negligent.’

‘Oh, my God, Nikos, don’t.’ She spun to face him; it was like being hit with a sledgehammer.

He ground his teeth, refusing to feel sympathy for her even when her world was shattering. ‘It is the truth. Would you prefer I’d said nothing?’

When she spoke her voice was hoarse, momentarily weakened by the strength of her feelings. ‘Does this bring you pleasure? Did you bring me here to gloat?’

‘To gloat?’ His smile was like a wolf’s. ‘No.’

‘Well? Then what do you want? Why are you telling me any of this?’

A muscle jerked in his cheek. ‘I could alleviate all of your father’s problems, you know.’

Hope, a fragile bird, fluttered in her gut. ‘Yes?’

‘It would not be difficult for me to fix this,’ he said with a shrug.

Marnie’s head spun at the ease of his declaration. ‘Even a hundred million pounds?’

‘I am a wealthy man. Do you not read the papers?’

‘God, Nikos.’ Relief was so palpable that she didn’t even acknowledge the insult. Hope loomed. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’

‘Delay your gratitude until you have considered the terms.’

‘The terms?’ Her brows drew together in confusion.

‘I have the means to help your father, but not yet the inducement.’

Aware she was parroting, she murmured, ‘What inducement?’

The breath burned in her lungs. Her heart was hammering so hard in her chest that she thought it might break free and make a bid for freedom. Tension was a rope, twisting around them. She waited on tenterhooks that seemed to have sharp gnashing teeth.

‘You, Marnie.’ His dark voice was at its arrogant best. ‘As my wife. Marry me and I will help him.’

CHAPTER TWO

SHE’D NEVER UNDERSTOOD how silence could vibrate until that moment. The very air they breathed seemed as if it was alive, crackling and humming around them. His words were little daggers, floating through the atmosphere, jabbing at her heart, her soul, her brain, her mind.

‘Marry me and I will help him.’

Only the sound of her heavy breathing perforated the air. For support, she pressed back against the glass window. It was warmed by the sun.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said finally, squeezing her eyes shut. Every fibre of her being instantly rejected the idea.

Or did it?

Briefly, childish fantasies bubbled inside her, spreading the kind of pleasure she’d once revelled in freely.

When she blinked a moment later, Nikos was holding a glass of water just in front of her. She took it and drank gratefully, her throat parched.

‘It is not a difficult equation. Marriage to me in exchange for a sum of money that will answer your father’s debts.’

‘That makes no sense,’ she contradicted flatly.

‘No?’

‘No!’

It seemed like the right reaction. It was an absurd proposal, after all. Wasn’t it? She should have felt panicked by the very idea. And perhaps a part of her did. This was the man who had disappeared from her life but never fully from her heart.

But panic and wariness were only tiny components of her emotional tangle. Hope and an intense flare of passionate resonance also filled her.

‘Marriage...’ Her heart squeezed. Her words were a whisper. ‘Marriage...is for people in love. That’s not us. How can you be so cavalier about it?’

He took a step closer, curling his fingers around the glass. Instead of taking it from her he kept his hand over hers. Electricity sparked along the length of her arm, shooting blue fire through her body.

‘Call it...righting a wrong,’ he said darkly, his eyes scanning her face with hard emotion. ‘Or repaying a debt.’

Her stomach rolled.

‘Your father paid me a considerable sum to get out of your life six years ago.’

Her mouth formed a perfect ‘o’ and she gasped in surprise. He gathered she hadn’t known that little piece of information. It didn’t make him proud, but he enjoyed seeing her sense of betrayal and outrage before she schooled her features once more. Her mask was excellent, though the more tightly she held on to it the more he wanted to force her to drop it. To shock her, surprise her, make her feel so strongly that she could no longer remain impassive.

He put his thumb-pad over her lower lip, remembering how soft they were to kiss.

‘I didn’t know.’ Her eyes were earnest and it didn’t enter his mind to doubt her.

‘No.’ He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t necessary, in any event. He obviously didn’t realise that you had already conclusively ended things.’

Marnie’s heart squeezed. ‘I had no choice.’

‘Of course you had a damned choice.’ He controlled his temper with effort. ‘You could have told him that you’d fallen in love with me. That no amount of comment about the fact that I didn’t live up to his exalted expectations would change how you felt about me. You could have told him to shove his snobbery and his stupidity. You could have fought for what we were—as I would have.’

She sucked in a deep breath. The pain was as fresh in that instant as if it was six years ago. She ached all over. ‘You know what we’d been through.’ She squeezed her eyes shut. ‘What my family had lost. I couldn’t hurt him. I had to choose between him and...what I felt for you.’

‘And you chose him.’ His stare was filled with a startling wave of resentment. ‘You switched something in here—’ he lifted a finger to her chest, pointing at her heart ‘—and that was it. It was over.’

She swallowed convulsively. It had been nothing like that. He made it sound easy. As if she’d simply decided to forget Nikos and move on. But she hadn’t. She’d agonised over the decision.

She’d tried to explain to her parents that she didn’t care that Nikos didn’t have money or come from one of the established families they approved of. But arguments had led to the unsupportable—her mother in tears, her father furious and not speaking to Marnie, and the certainty that they just wanted Libby back—perfect Libby—to make good choices and be the daughter they were proud of.

‘In any event, the financial...compensation for leaving you helped to soften the blow. At first I swore I wouldn’t take it. But then...’

He spoke with gravelled inflection, sucking Marnie back to the present.

‘I was so angry with you, with him. I took it and I told myself I’d double it—just to prove him wrong. To prove a point.’

Marnie’s cheeks were flushed. His hand moved to cup her face. She could have pulled away, but she didn’t. ‘I think you did more than that.’

His smile was grim. ‘Yes.’

So Arthur had given her boyfriend money to get out of her life? A chill ran the length of her spine. It seemed like a step too far. Pressuring her to end it was one thing, but actually forcing Nikos out?

‘I’m sorry he got involved like that. It wasn’t his place to...to pay you off.’

‘Not when you’d already done his bidding,’ Nikos responded with a lift of his shoulders. ‘Your father forbade you from seeing me and, like a good little Lady Heiress, you jumped when he clicked his fingers.’

‘Don’t call me that,’ she said distractedly, hating the tabloid press’s moniker for her.

It wasn’t that it was cruelly meant, only that they mistook her natural reserve for something far more grandiose: snobbery. Pretension. Airs and graces. The kind of aristocratic aspirations that Marnie had never fallen in line with despite the value her parents put on them. The values that had been at the root of their disapproval of Nikos.

‘So this is revenge?’ she murmured, her eyes clashing fiercely with his. Pain lanced through her.

‘Yes.’

‘A dish best served cold?’ She shook her head sadly, dislodging his hand. ‘You’ve waited six years for this.’

‘Yes.’ He brought his body closer, crushing her with his strong thighs, his broad chest. ‘But there will be nothing cold about our marriage.’

Desire lurched through her. The world began to spin wildly off its axis. ‘There won’t be a marriage,’ she said, with a confidence that was completely forged. Already the options were closing in around her. ‘And there certainly won’t be...what you’re...suggesting.’

‘What’s the matter, agape mou? Do you worry that we won’t still feel as we did then?’

He ground his hips against her and she groaned as sensations that had long since been relegated to the past flared in her belly. Of their own volition her fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt, the warmth from his chest a balm to her fraught nerves.

‘Do you remember how I respected your innocence?’ He brought his mouth close to hers, so that his words were a breath on her lips. ‘How I told you we should wait until we were married, or at least engaged?’

Shame, desire, misery and despair slid through her like a headless snake, twisting and writhing in her heart. She pulled her lower lip between her teeth and nodded once.

‘How, even though I had kissed your body all over, and you had begged me to take you, I insisted that I wanted to wait? Because I thought I loved you and that it mattered.’

He dropped his hands to her hips, holding her still as he pushed against her once more. She tilted her head back as far as she could, the window’s glass providing a hard barrier.

‘Do you remember how you laughed in my face and told me you’d never marry someone like me?’

Those words! How she’d hated saying them! She’d rehearsed them for days, and when the moment had come only the belief that she was doing the right thing for her family had spurred her on to say them. It was the most difficult thing she’d ever done. Even now, six years later, she wondered at the way she’d been led away from him despite the intensity of her feelings.

‘Do you?’ he demanded, scraping his lips against her neck, sending her pulse rioting out of control.

‘Yes!’ She groaned as desire and memory weakened her body.

‘I have met many people like you in my life—like your father. Snobs who value centuries-old fortune above all else.’

‘That isn’t me,’ she said with quiet determination.

‘Of course it is.’ He almost laughed. ‘You broke up with me because you knew your destiny was to marry someone like you. Somebody that your parents approved of.’

‘That’s what they wanted. I just wanted you.’

‘Not enough.’ He sobered, his mouth a grim slash.

Frustrated, she tried to appeal to the man he’d once been: the man who had known her better than anyone on earth. ‘God, Nikos. You know what my life was like then. We’d just buried Libby. We were all in mourning. I couldn’t upset them like you wanted me to. I couldn’t. Don’t you dare think for a moment it was because I thought you weren’t good enough.’

‘You thought as your parents wished you to,’ he said with coldness, shrugging as though it no longer mattered. ‘But they will shortly come to realise there is one thing that carries more sway than birth and breeding. And when you are as broke as your father that is money.’

His words fell like bricks against her chest.

‘Now you will marry me, and he will have to spend the rest of his life knowing it was me—the man he wouldn’t have in his house—who was his salvation.’

The sheer fury of his words whipped her like a rope. ‘Nikos,’ she said, surprised at how calm she could sound in the midst of his stormy declaration. ‘He should never have made you feel like that.’

‘Your father could have called me every name under the sun for all I cared, agape. It was you I expected more of.’

She swallowed. Expectations were not new to Marnie. Her parents’. Her sister’s. Her own.

‘And now you will marry me.’

Anticipation formed a cliff’s edge and she was tumbling over it, free-falling from a great height. She shook her head, but they both knew it was denial for the sake of it.

‘No more waiting,’ he intoned darkly, crushing his mouth to hers in a kiss that stole her breath and coloured her soul.

His tongue clashed with hers. It was a kiss of slavish possession, a kiss designed to challenge and disarm. He blew away every defence she had, reminding her that his body had always been able to manipulate hers. A single look had always been enough to make her break out in a cold sweat of need.

‘No more waiting.’

‘You can’t still want me,’ she said into his mouth, wrapping her hands around his back. ‘You’ve hardly lived the life of a monk. I would have thought I’d lost all appeal by now.’

‘Call it unfinished business,’ he responded, breaking the kiss to scrape his lips down her neck, nipping at her shoulder.

She pushed her hips forward, instinctively wanting more. Wanting everything.

Her brain was wrapped in cotton wool, foggy and filled with questions softened by confusion. ‘It was six years ago.’

‘Yes. And still you’re the only woman I have ever believed myself in love with. The only woman I have ever wanted a future with. Once upon a time for love.’

‘And now?’

‘For...less noble reasons.’

He stepped away, breaking their kiss so easily it made her head spin.

‘Your father isn’t the only one I intend to prove wrong.’

She narrowed her eyes, her heart racing. ‘What does that mean?’

His laugh was without humour. ‘You said I didn’t mean anything to you. That I had been merely a distraction when you needed to escape grief.’

He brought his face closer to hers once more—so close that she could see the thousands of tiny prisms of light that danced in his eyes.

‘You told me you didn’t want me.’

‘I...’ She squeezed her eyes shut. ‘I don’t remember saying that,’ she lied.

‘You said it. And I will delight in showing you how wrong you were.’

He stepped away, leaving her cresting a wave of emotion. Striving to sound cool, she said, ‘So you’ve been...what? Pining for me for six years? Give me a break, Nikos. You moved on pretty damned fast, so it’s a little disingenuous to be playing the heartbroken ex-lover now.’

‘We were never lovers, agape.’

Her stomach churned; her cheeks were pink. ‘That’s not the point I’m making.’

‘Whatever point it is you are attempting to make it is irrelevant to me.’

She sucked in an indignant breath but he continued. ‘I have not been pining for you. But I am an opportunist.’ His smile was almost cruel—at least it looked it to Marnie. ‘Your father’s situation presented me with an opportunity I felt I couldn’t resist.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ she snapped, trying desperately to think of a way out. A way to make him realise how foolhardy this was!

‘You will spend every day of our marriage faced with the reality of just how wrong you were.’

Speechless, she fidgeted with her ring, her mind unable to grasp exactly what was going on.

Seemingly he took her silence as a form of agreement. ‘A licence can be arranged within fifteen days. I have engaged a wedding planner to oversee the details. Her card is on my desk; take it when you leave.’

She shook her head as the words he was saying tumbled over her. She needed to process what was going on. ‘Wait a second. It’s too sudden. Too soon.’

He arched a single thick brow. ‘Any delay will make it impossible for me to help your father in time.’

‘You’re saying we have to actually be married before you’ll help him?’

His lip twisted in a smile of cynical derision. ‘It would hardly make sense to prop him up before the pleasure of having you... As my wife.’

To Marnie, his slight pause implied that he meant something else altogether. That he wanted to sleep with her before money changed hands. It made her feel instantly dirty, and she shifted away from the window, crossing her arms in an attempt to stem the pain that was perforating her heart.

‘Do you think I’d renege on our deal?’ she asked, realising only after posing the question that it showed her acquiescence when she hadn’t actually intended to agree...yet.

‘I think you will do whatever pleases you—as you always have done.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Forgive me—what is the expression? Having been bitten, I am...?’

‘Once bitten, twice shy.’ She sucked in an unsteady breath, waiting for relief to calm her lungs. But still they burned painfully. She tried to salvage her pride. ‘If I agree to do this, I will go through with it.’

‘I’m not sure I can put much stock in your assurances,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I credit you and your father for my scepticism. Were it not for you, perhaps I would have continued to take promises at face value. Now I live and die by contracts.’

‘That’s fine in business. I’m sure it’s wise, in fact. But marriage is different, surely.’

‘A real marriage,’ he conceded, with a tight nod.

‘You’re saying you don’t want ours to be a real marriage?’

His laugh sent a shiver down her spine. ‘Oh, in the most important ways it will be.’

‘Meaning...?’ she challenged—though how could she not understand his intention?

‘Meaning, Marnie, that I have no interest in paying a hundred million pounds and tying myself to a woman purely for revenge.’

His smile curled her toes.

‘There will be other benefits to our marriage.’

Her heart slammed hard in her chest. ‘I...’ She clamped her mouth shut.

What had she been about to say? That she was still a virgin? That after being so madly in love with him and letting him go she’d found she couldn’t feel that same desire for another man? Especially not the men her parents approved of her dating.

‘I’m not going to sleep with you just because you appear out of the blue...’

‘That is not why you’ll sleep with me,’ he said.

He spoke with a confidence that infuriated her. But he was right! Despite the passage of time, and the insufferable situation she found herself in, she couldn’t deny that the same need was rioting through her now, just as it had in their past.

‘This is a deal-breaker,’ he said with a shrug. ‘These are my terms. Accept them or don’t.’

‘Wait.’ She shook her head and lifted a hand to make him pause for a moment. But she was drowning. Possibilities, questions, wants, needs, doubts were churning around inside her—it was background noise but it was going to suck her under. ‘There’s so much more to discuss.’

‘Such as?’ he prompted, crossing his arms over his broad chest.

She tried not to notice the way the fabric strained to reveal his impressive pectoral definition.

‘Well, such as...’ She darted her tongue out and licked her lower lip. ‘Say I went along with this absolutely crazy idea—and I’m not saying I will, because clearly it’s madness—where would you see us living?’

‘That is also non-negotiable. Greece.’

‘Greece?’ She was in free fall again. ‘Greece, as in... You mean Greece?’

He stared at her for a long moment, his eyes mocking her. ‘Athens. My home.’

‘But I’ve always lived here. I can’t move.’