The Price Of A Bride

Then her lashes flickered. bringing her eyes back into focus, and the bleak look was gone. ‘No,’ she replied, and rose to her feet. ‘That, I’m afraid, is none of your business.’

‘It is if we are going to be man and wife,’ he claimed.

‘And are we?’ Mia raised her sleek brows in counterchallenge. ‘Going to be man and wife?’

‘Why me?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Why, if you did not make the selection yourself, did your father set me up for this?’

‘Are you serious?’ she gasped, her green eyes widening in scathing incredulity. ‘Last week you virtually undressed me with your eyes right in front of him! The week before that you invited me to spend the weekend in Paris with you in front of a room full of people—including my father! And there wasn’t a person present who misunderstood what your intentions were, Mr Doumas,’ she informed him. ‘You certainly were not offering to show the city sights to me!’

From the moment they’d met, he’d not even attempted to hide the attraction he felt for her!

‘You set yourself up for it!’ she told him. ‘I tried to head you off, freeze you out as best as I could do in front of my father. I even told you outright at one point that you were playing with fire, coming anywhere near me! Did you take any notice?’ Her green eyes flashed. ‘Did you hell!’ she snapped, ignoring the way his expression was growing darker the more she threw at him. ‘You just smiled an amused little smile that told me you had the damned conceit to think I was playing hard to get with you—and kept on coming on to me!

‘And I’ll tell you something else,’ she continued, while he stood there, stiff-backed and riveted to the spot by what she was tossing at him. ‘Until you started pursuing me, you weren’t even up for consideration for this deal! But as soon as my father saw the way you looked at me you went right to the top of his carefully collected shoat-list of men fit to father his precious grandson! So, if you need to blame someone for this predicament you now find yourself in, blame yourself,’ she suggested. ‘You looked at me, you wanted me, you were offered me—on my father’s terms.’

‘In other words, your father is really your pimp,’ he hit back.

Oh, very good, Mia grimly acknowledged. She’d cut into him, and he had cut right back.

‘If you prefer to think of your future wife as a whore, then fine,’ she parried. ‘Though what that makes you doesn’t really bear thinking about.’

He jerked as if she’d stabbed him—and so he damn well should! He might not like what he was being dealt here, but it didn’t mean he could ride roughshod over her feelings!

‘As it happens,’ she tagged on, simply to twist the knife, ‘you also had to pass several other tests before you qualified. You were younger than the other candidates on my father’s list, as well as being more physically attractive—which was an important factor when my father was creating his grandson and heir,’ she explained. ‘But, most important of all, your family has a reputation for conceiving male children.’ There hadn’t been a female born to the Doumas line this century.

‘And, of course, you were hungrier than the rest, not only for me,’ she emphasized, ‘but for your precious island.’ And, therefore, so much easier to capture than the rest, was the bit she kept to herself.

But he took it as said. She saw that confirmed as his mouth took on a wryly understanding twist

‘And what happens to this—grandson and heir once he arrives in this world?’ he asked next. ‘Does your father come and snatch him from your breast an hour after his birth and expect me to forget I ever sired him?’

‘Good heavens, no.’ To his annoyance, she laughed again. ‘My father has a real abhorrence of children in any shape or form.’ Despite the laugh, her own bitter experience showed gratingly through. ‘He simply desires a male heir to leave all his millions to. A legitimate male heir,’ she added succinctly. ‘I am afraid I can’t go out and just get one from anywhere, if that’s what you were going to suggest next...’

It had been a half-question, which his shrug completely dismissed. ‘I’m not a complete fool,’ he drawled. ‘I would not suggest anything of the kind to you when it would mean my losing what I aim to gain from this.’

‘And the child would lose a whole lot more, when you think about it,’ Mia pointed out, referring to the size of Jack Frazier’s well-known fortune. ‘But I get full custody,’ she announced with a lift of her chin that said she expected some kind of argument about it. ‘That is not up for negotiation, Mr Doumas. It is my own condition before I will agree to any of this, and will be written into that contract my father mentioned to you.’

‘Are you saying that I will have no control at all over this child?’ he questioned sharply.

‘Not at all,’ Mia said. ‘You will have all the rights any man would expect over his own son—so long as we stay married. But once the marriage is over I get full custody.’

‘Why?’

Now there was a good question, Mia mused whimsically.

‘I mean,’ he qualified when she didn’t answer him immediately, ‘since you are making it damned obvious to me that you are no more enthusiastic about all of this than I am, why should you demand full custody of a child you don’t really want in the first place?’

‘I will love it,’ she declared, ‘no matter what his beginnings. I will love this child, Mr Doumas, not resent him, not look at him and despise him for who and what he means to me.’

‘And you think I will?’

‘I know you will,’ she said with an absolute certainty. ‘Men like you don’t like to be constantly faced with their past failures.’ She’d had experience of men of his calibre, after all—plenty of it. ‘And agreeing to this deal most definitely represents a failure to you. So I get full custody,’ she repeated firmly. ‘Once the marriage is dissolved you will receive all the visitation rights legally allowed to you—if you still want them by then, of course,’ she added, although her tone did not hold any optimism.

His eyes began to Sash—the only warning she got that she had ignited something potentially dangerous inside him before he was suddenly standing right in front of her.

Her spine became erect, her eyelashes flickering warily as he pushed his angry face close to hers. ‘You stand here with your chin held high and your beautiful eyes filled with a cold contempt for me, and dare to believe that you know exactly what kind of man I am—when you do not know me at all!’ he rasped. ‘For my son...’ His hands came up to grip her shoulders. ‘My son,’ he repeated passionately, ‘will be my heir also!’

And it was a shock. Oh, not just the power of that possessiveness for something which was, after all, only a means to an end to him, but the effect his touch was having on her. It seemed to strike directly at the very heart of her, contracting muscles so violently that it actually squeezed the air from her tightened chest on a short, shaken gasp.

‘My son will remain under my wing, no matter who—or what—his mother is!’ he vowed. ‘And if that means trapping us both into a lifelong loveless marriage, then so be it!’

‘Are we?’ Despite his anger, his biting grip, the bitter hatred he was making no effort to hide, Mia’s beautiful, defiant eyes held his. ’Are we going to many?’

His teeth showed, gleaming white and sharp and disturbingly predatorial between the angry stretch of his lips, his eyes like hard black pebbles that displayed a grinding distaste for both herself and the answer he was about to give her.

‘Yes,’ he hissed with unmasked loathing. ‘We will marry. We will do everything expected of us to meet your father’s filthy terms! But don’t,’ he warned, ‘let yourself think for a moment that it is going to be a pleasure!’

‘Then get your hands off me.’ Coldly, she swiped his hands away. ‘And don’t touch me again until it is absolutely necessary for us to touch!’

With that she turned and walked back to the window where she stood, glaring outside at the lashing rain, while she tried to get a hold on what was straining to erupt inside her.

It didn’t work. She could no more stop the words from flowing than she could stop the rain outside from falling. ‘You seem to think you have the divine right to stand there and be superior to me. But you do not,’ she muttered. ‘You have your price, just like the rest of us! Which makes you no better than my father—no better than myself!’

‘And what exactly is your price?’ he challenged grimly. ’Give me one good reason why you are agreeing to all of this and I might at least try to respect you for it!’

It was an appeal. An appeal that caught at her heart because, even through his anger, Mia could hear his genuine desire for her to give him just cause for her own part in this.

Her green eyes flashed then filmed over, as for a moment—for a tiny breathless space in time—the sheer wretched truth to that question danced on the very edge of her tongue.

But she managed to smother the feeling, bite that awful truth down and keep it back, then spun to face him with her eyes made opaque by tears that had turned to ice.

‘Money, of course,’ she replied. ‘What other price could there be?’

‘Money...’ he repeated, as though she had just confirmed every avaricious suspicion he’d held about her.

‘On the day I present my father with a grandson I receive five million pounds as payment,’ she went on. ‘No better reason to agree to this—no worse than a man who can sell himself for a piece of land and a pile of ancient stone.’

He wasn’t slow—he got her meaning. She was drawing a neat parallel between the two of them—or three people if she counted her father’s willingness to give away a Greek island to get what he wanted out of this rotten deal.

‘So make this a marriage for life if it suits you,’ she defied him. ‘I don’t care. I will be wealthy in my own right and therefore independent of you no matter how long the marriage lasts! But we will soon know how strong your resolve is,’ she added derisively, ‘once the marriage is real and your sense of entrapment begins to eat away at you!’

‘Entrapment?’ he picked up on the word and shot it scornfully back at her. ‘You naively believe I will feel trapped by this marriage? That I am prepared to change a single facet of my life to accommodate you or the vows we will make to each other?’

It was his turn to discharge a disdainful laugh, and Mia’s turn to stiffen as his meaning began to sink in. ‘I will change nothing!’ he vowed. ‘Not my way of life or my freedom to enjoy it wherever the mood takes me!’

His eyes were ablaze, anger and contempt for her lancing into her defiant face.

‘I have a mistress in Athens with whom I am very happy,’ he announced, using words like ice picks that he thrust into her. ‘She will remain my mistress no matter what I have to do to fulfil my side of this filthy bargain! I will not be discreet.’ he warned. ‘I will not make any concessions to your pride while you live with me as my so-called wife! I will hate and despise you—and bed you with alacrity at regular intervals until this child of the devil is conceived, after which I will never touch you again!