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

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.