The Greek Tycoon's Unexpected Wife

‘Tell me now,’ he whispered, and the softly menacing tone scared her more than his earlier outrage. ‘Exactly how much will it cost me to be free of you?’

‘I…Nothing,’ she croaked, wondering suddenly if he meant to harm her.

His hands tightened round her wrists. His jaw clenched in a spasm of tension. His eyes burned into hers.

‘I will be free of you, either by annulment or divorce, whatever is faster. And I will pay a reasonable amount to purchase your silence, with a watertight, legally binding agreement.’

Tessa’s eyes widened as she watched his lips move, heard his words. Yet they didn’t make sense. This was crazy!

‘But there’s no need. We were never married!’

‘Sto Diavolo! Of course we were married. Why else would you have my ring? Why else would you be here, angling for my money?’

She shook her head and the room swirled round her. She was almost glad of his tight grip holding her steady.

‘But the man who performed the ceremony—he wasn’t a priest. The ceremony was a sham, a ploy to help me escape.’

His eyes bored into hers and something twisted in the pit of her stomach. For an instant she thought she saw a flicker of doubt in his expression.

But then he was speaking again, slowly, clearly, almost brutally. She fought to catch her breath as his words pounded into her brain.

‘He wasn’t a priest. He was from the local town hall and he was legally empowered to marry us.’ His words were slow, deliberate and unavoidable. ‘Everything was done legally, even the witnesses for the official record.’

Tessa opened her mouth to gasp in some oxygen, to protest. But his words continued: remorseless, fantastic.

‘The marriage was legitimate,’ said Stavros Denakis. There was a bitter twist to his lips, utter distaste in his eyes.

‘We are husband and wife.’

CHAPTER THREE

TESSA’S pulse galloped, loud in the raw silence that echoed with his words. Her hollow stomach cramped.

‘You’re not joking, are you?’ she whispered at last when she found her voice.

The mocking slant of his eyebrows betrayed scorn. That expression of disdain on his hard, aristocratic face made him look like some superior pagan god.

‘I do not joke about such things.’ He leaned back against the leather sofa and crossed his arms over his deep chest. Scepticism and impatience radiated from him.

And still she felt the sizzle of heat where his hands had encircled her skin.

‘Are you sure?’ she was desperate enough to ask. ‘Absolutely sure?’ That day had been so chaotic after all.

‘Your show of astonishment is truly touching,’ he murmured. ‘But don’t keep up the act on my account.’

She winced as his sarcasm flayed her fragile self-possession. The man’s tongue was pure poison.

‘You really believe I would make a mistake about something like that?’ He paused, his eyes narrowing as he scanned her features. ‘I even have the wedding certificate to prove it. Signed, witnessed and legally binding.’

Tessa sank back into the embrace of soft leather, her mind racing.

She was married? Had been married for four years?

She pressed a hand to her chest where a sharp knot of shock bruised her. She was married to him?

‘But why did you use a justice of the peace? It didn’t have to be a real marriage. Just something to…’

‘To get you out of prison?’ No mistaking the sneer in his tone. It matched his frosty eyes and the curl of his lip. His expression was judgemental, dismissive.

‘Any stranger would have done.’ Tessa refused to be cowed. If this was true, this ridiculous situation was his fault, not hers! ‘There was no need actually to marry me!’

‘Believe me,’ he leaned close and the wrath simmering in his eyes forced her back away from him, ‘if there’d been an alternative, any alternative, I would have taken it.’

His gaze held her in a grip so powerful she could barely breathe. She felt as if her ribs were in a vice, constricting the flow of air to her lungs.

‘It may have escaped your notice,’ he said, ‘but a little town the size of San Miguel can be remarkably short of helpful strangers willing to perjure themselves in order to rescue a foreigner from the local gaol.

‘Time was short and I’d already had enough trouble persuading your gaolers to let me see you, let alone permit a wedding on the premises.’

Her head swam and she shut her eyes. She’d walked into a nightmare. If only she hadn’t given in to the compulsion to see him again, the man she’d believed for years had given his life to save hers.

‘It was a real marriage or nothing,’ he continued, his voice like rough velvet against her abraded nerves. ‘As you very well knew.’

Her eyes snapped open. They were back to that again. He was a man of such persistent suspicion. For a fleeting moment Tessa wondered what had made him so distrustful.

‘I knew none of this. Nothing at all until just now.’

She watched the shimmer of disbelief glaze his eyes and his jaw harden impatiently. There was no way she’d ever convince him. He was determined to believe she’d somehow deliberately trapped him into marriage.

If the idea weren’t so fantastic, and so appalling, she’d be laughing her head off. Her snaring some uppity billionaire with an ego the size of South America! As if!

‘Why didn’t you say something at the time?’

‘What?’ He shook his head. ‘You wished me to apologise within earshot of the celebrant and the prison guards that our hasty plans had changed? That we’d have to make do with a real wedding and worry about dissolving the marriage later? You really think they’d have let us proceed?’ His dark brows arched in mock-surprise.

She squeezed her eyes shut against the spinning sensation that accelerated when she met his glare. If she could just sit here alone. Get her breath. In time she’d work something out. She was a survivor. She had years of practice keeping herself alive. A furious Greek tycoon with an ego problem and a marriage certificate were nothing after what she’d been through. Right?

Tessa clenched her fists, trying to dredge up some energy to deal with this situation. But she was exhausted.

‘Here, drink this!’

She opened her eyes to find him leaning over her, filling her vision with his wide shoulders and massive chest. His accusing eyes.

A skitter of sensation scudded down her spine. Trepidation? Anger?

Or something else?

‘No, thank you. I don’t need—’ she spluttered as he pressed a small glass against her lips and a rocket of aniseed fire blasted into her mouth and down her throat.