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

Behind her the silence went on and on. They hadn’t gone and she wished that they would because she was beginning to feel rather hot and shaky.

‘Please go,’ she pleaded. Then, without warning, she fainted.

Maybe he saw it coming. Maybe he was already walking over to where she stood without her being aware that he’d moved. Whatever, as Claire felt herself going, as the blood slowly drained away from her head and her legs began to go limp, a pair of arms came securely around her, and the last thing she recalled was hearing the distinctive wail of an ambulance siren as she slumped heavily against him.

After that everything became a bit hazy, and she didn’t really start making sense of what was happening to her until she was travelling in the ambulance—accompanied by none other than Aunt Laura’s boss who was cradling Melanie.

But no Aunt Laura.

‘She will be joining us later,’ the stranger replied when Claire queried her aunt’s absence. ‘She needed to attend to some urgent business.’

Frowning at him through huge, pain-bruised blue eyes, she wondered why he wasn’t taking care of his own urgent business. But their arrival at the local hospital forestalled any more conversation between them when she was taken away to be examined and x-rayed.

Her ribs, she discovered, were only bruised, but her wrist was a different matter. A broken scaphoid, the doctor called it, and they would have to put her out briefly to reset it.

‘What about Melanie?’ she fretted as the pre-med they had given her began to send her brain fuzzy. ‘How am I going to cope with my wrist in plaster? Where’s Aunt Laura?’

‘If you want your aunt here, then I will get her here,’ a deep voice that was starting to sound very familiar quietly promised. She had expected Aunt Laura’s boss to melt away once they reached the hospital, but to her surprise he had stayed with her the whole time.

‘No,’ she sighed in shaky refusal, shifting restlessly where she lay because he didn’t understand. It wasn’t that she wanted her aunt—she just needed to know where she was and what she was doing because she didn’t trust her not to take matters into her own hands where Melanie was concerned, while she was in no fit state to stop her.

‘Don’t let her take her away from me,’ she mumbled slurredly.

‘I won’t,’ the voice promised.

That was the last thing she remembered for the next hour or so, so she had no idea that he continued to stand there beside her bed grimly watching over her until they came to wheel her away.

When she did eventually resurface, it was to find herself lying in a small side room with her wrist encased in its new plaster cast and secured by a sling. They had left her fingers and thumb free at least, she noticed—not that she felt overwhelmed with gratitude for that because she knew she still wasn’t going to be able to handle a baby.

What did concern her was that it was going to take up to eight weeks to mend.

Eight weeks …

Sighing heavily, she closed her weary eyes and tried pretending that this was all just a bad dream.

‘Worrying already?’ a deep voice dryly intruded.

CHAPTER TWO

CLAIRE’S eyes flicked open, something disturbingly close to pleasure feathering across her skin as a tall, dark figure loomed up in front of her in the very disturbing form of Aunt Laura’s hot-shot tycoon banker.

‘How are you feeling?’ he enquired politely.

‘Dopey,’ she replied, with a shy little grimace.

His dark head nodded in understanding. ‘Give yourself time to recover a little from the anaesthetic,’ he advised. ‘Then—if you feel up to it—they say you can go home.’

Home … That sounded good. So good in fact that she made herself sit up and slide her feet to the ground. It was only then that she realised what a poor state her clothes were in. Her jeans were scored with dust and tar from the road, and her blouse had managed to lose half of its buttons.

No wonder he threw his jacket over me, she thought wryly, making a half-hearted attempt to tidy herself. But it was difficult to look pin-neat after the kind of day that she’d had, she decided heavily. While this man, whose eyes she could sense were watching her so intently, still looked elegant and sleek and clean even though he had spent most of the day rescuing fallen maidens, abandoned babies, and—

‘Where’s Melanie?’ she asked sharply, unable to believe she had been so irresponsible as to not give the poor baby a single thought until now!

For the first time today, he suddenly looked cross. ‘I would have expected by now that you would trust me to ensure your child is perfectly safe and well taken care of,’ he clipped out impatiently.

‘Why?’ Claire immediately challenged that. ‘Because my aunt Laura works for you?’

Something made his broad shoulders flex in sudden tension, though what made them do it Claire had no idea, but she felt her own tension rise in response to it.

‘Just because you were gracious enough to pick me up and dust me off, then condescended to accompany me here instead of going off to Milan, that does not automatically win trust, you know,’ she pointed out, coming upright on decidedly shaky legs.

‘Madrid,’ he corrected her absently—as if it really mattered!

‘I don’t know you from Adam,’ Claire continued as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘For all I know you may be one of those weirdos that prey on innocent young females in vulnerable situations!’

A wild thing to say—a terrible thing to say considering what he had done for her today. Watching the way his elegant frame stiffened in affront, Claire was instantly contrite.

But as she opened her mouth to apologise he beat her to it—by retaliating in kind.

‘Young you may be,’ he grimly conceded. ‘What are you, after all—not much more than eighteen? And vulnerable you certainly are at the moment—one only has to look at your face to know that a relatively minor road accident was not enough to cause quite that amount of fatigue in one so young. But innocent?’ he questioned with cutting cynicism. ‘One cannot be innocent and give birth to a child, Miss Stenson. It is, believe me, a physical impossibility.’

Two things hit her simultaneously as she stood there absorbing all of that. One was the obvious fact that he had got her age wrong. And the other was his mistaken belief that Melanie was her daughter!

Had Aunt Laura not bothered to explain anything to him? she wondered. And who the hell did he think he was, standing in judgement over her, anyway?

‘I am not eighteen—I am twenty-one!’ she corrected him angrily. ‘And Melanie is not my daughter—she’s my sister! Our mother died, you see, just two weeks after giving birth. And if you hadn’t been so quick to send my aunt off to do whatever business you felt was more important to her than we are,’ she railed on, regardless of the clear fact that she had already managed to turn him to stone, ‘then maybe she would have had the chance to explain all of this to you, so you didn’t have to stand here insulting me! And my innocence or lack of it is none of your damned business,’ she tagged on for good measure.

At that point, and giving neither of them a chance to recover, the door swung open and a nurse walked in carrying Melanie.

‘Ah, you’re awake.’ She smiled at Claire, seemingly unaware of the sizzling atmosphere she had walked into. Stepping over to the bed, she gently laid the sleeping baby down on it. ‘She has been fed, changed and generally spoiled,’ she informed them as she straightened. ‘So you need not concern yourself about her welfare for the next few hours.’

‘Thank you,’ Claire murmured politely. ‘You’ve all been very kind.’

‘No problem,’ the nurse dismissed. ‘If you feel up to it, you can leave whenever you want,’ she concluded, and with a brisk squeak of rubber on linoleum was gone again—leaving a tension behind her that stuck like glue to Claire’s teeth and her throat, making it impossible for her to speak or swallow.

So instead she moved to check on the baby. As the nurse had assured her, Melanie looked perfectly contented. Her left hand went out to gently touch a petal-soft cheek while he looked on in grim silence.

‘I apologise,’ he murmured suddenly. ‘For the—altercation earlier. I had no right to remark upon either your life or your morals. And I certainly had no right to make certain assumptions about either you or your situation. I am, in fact, ashamed of myself for doing so.’

Quite a climb-down, Claire made note, nodding in acceptance of his apology. ‘Who are you?’ she then asked curiously. ‘I mean—what is your name? It seems crazy that we have spent almost half the day together and I don’t even know your name.’

‘Your aunt never mentioned me?’ he questioned.

Claire shook her head. ‘Only that she worked with the head of a merchant bank,’ she told him.

He seemed to need a few moments to take this information in, which Claire thought was rather odd of him. ‘My name is Andreas Markopoulou,’ he then supplied. ‘I am Greek,’ he added, as though he felt it needed saying.

Feeling suddenly quite painfully at a loss as to what she was supposed to do with his name now that she had it, all Claire could come up with was another small nod of acknowledgement.