Kitabı oku: «The Price Of A Bride»

CHAPTER ONE

JANUARY had arrived with an absolute vengeance. Standing in the window behind her father’s desk, Mia watched the way the wind was hurling the rain against the glass in fiercely gusting squalls—while behind her a different kind of storm was raging, one where two very powerful men pitched angry insults at each other.

Not that she was taking much notice of what they were actually fighting about. She knew it all already, so her presence here was really quite incidental.

Merely a silent prop to use as leverage.

‘Look, that’s the deal, Doumas!’ she heard her father state with a brittle grasp on what was left of his patience. ‘I’m not into haggling so either take what’s on offer or damn well leave it!’

‘But what you are proposing is positively barbaric!’ the other man hit back furiously. ‘I am a businessman, not a trader in white slavery! If you have difficulty finding a husband for your daughter try a marriage agency,’ he scathingly suggested, ‘for I am not for sale!’

No? Way beyond the point of being insulted by remarks like that one, Mia’s startlingly feminine mouth twitched in a cross between bitter appreciation for the clever answer Alexander Doumas had tossed back at her father and a grimace of scorn. Did he truly believe he would be standing here at all if Jack Frazier thought he couldn’t be bought?

Jack Frazier dealt only in absolute certainties. He was a rough, tough, self-made man who, having spent most of his life clawing his way up from nothing to become the corporate giant he was today, had learned very early on that attention to fine detail before he went in for the kill was the key to success.

He left nothing whatsoever to chance.

Alexander Doumas, on the other hand, was the complete antithesis of Jack. He was smooth, sleek and beautifully polished by a top-drawer Greek pedigree which could be traced back so far into history it made the average mind boggle, only, while the Frazier fortunes had been rising like some brand new star in the galaxy during the last thirty odd years, the Doumas fortunes had been steadily sinking—until this man had come on the scene.

To be fair, Alexander Doumas had not only stopped the rot in his great family’s financial affairs but had spent the last ten years of his life repairing that rot, and so successfully that he had almost completely reversed the deterioration—except for one final goal.

And he was having the rank misfortune of coming up against Jack Frazier in his efforts to achieve that one goal.

Poor devil, Mia thought with a grim kind of sympathy, because, ruthless and unswerving though he was in his own way, Alexander Doumas didn’t stand a chance of getting what he wanted from her father, without paying the price Jack Frazier was demanding for it.

‘Is that your final answer?’ Jack Frazier grimly challenged, as if to confirm his daughter’s prediction. ‘If so, then you can get out for I have nothing left to say to you.’

‘But I am willing to pay double the market price here!’

‘The door, Mr Doumas, is over there...’

Mia’s spine began to tingle, the fine muscles lining its long, slender length tensing as she waited to discover what Alexander Doumas was going to do next.

He had a straight choice, the way she saw it. He could walk out of here with his arrogant head held high and his monumental pride still firmly intact, but put aside for ever the one special dream that had brought him to this point in the first place, or he could relinquish his pride, let his own principles sink to Jack Frazier’s appalling level and pay the price being asked for that dream.

‘There has to be some other way we can resolve this,’ he muttered.

No there isn’t, Mia countered silently. For the simple reason that her father did not need another way. The Greek had called Jack Frazier barbaric, but barbarism only half covered what her father really was. As she, of all people, should know.

Jack Frazier didn’t even bother to answer. He just sat there behind his desk and waited for the other man to give in to him or leave as suggested.

‘Damn you to hell for bringing me down to this,’ Alexander Doumas grated roughly. It was the driven sound of a grudging surrender.

The next sound Mia heard was the creak of old leather as her father came to his feet. It was a familiar sound, one she had grown to recognise with dread when she was younger, and even now, at the reasonably mature age of twenty-five, she was still able to experience the same stomach-clutching response as she had in childhood.

Jack Frazier was a brute and a bully. He always had been and always would be. Man or woman. Friend or foe. Adult or child. His need to dominate made no exceptions.

‘Then I’ll leave you to discuss the finer details with my daughter,’ he concluded. ‘Get in touch with my lawyer tomorrow. He will iron out any questions you may have, then get a contract drawn up.’

With that, and sounding insultingly perfunctory now that he had the answer he wanted from the other man, Jack Frazier, cold, cruel, ruthless man that he was, walked out of the room and left them to it.

And with the closing of the study door came quite a different silence. Bitter was the only word Mia could come up with to describe it—a silence so bitter it was attacking the back of her neck like acid.

I should have left my hair down, she mused in the same dry, mockingly fatalistic way she had dealt with all of this.

It was the only way, really. She couldn’t fight it so she mocked it. It was either that or weep, and she’d done enough weeping during her twenty-five years to know very well that tears did nothing but make you feel worse.

‘Drink?’

The sound of glass chinking against fine crystal had her turning to face the room for the first time since the interview had begun. Alexander Doumas was helping himself to some of her father’s best whisky.

‘No, thank you,’ she said, and stayed where she was, with her arms lightly folded beneath the gentle thrust of her breasts, while she watched him toss back a rather large measure.

Poor devil, she thought again. Men of his ilk just weren’t used to surrendering anything to anyone—never mind to a nasty piece of work like her father.

Alexander Doumas had arrived here this afternoon, looking supremely confident in his ability to strike a fair agreement with Jack Frazier. Now he was having to deal with the very unpalatable fact that he had been well and truly scuppered—caught hook, line and sinker by a man who always knew exactly what bait to use to catch his prey. And even the fine flavour of her father’s best malt whisky. wasn’t masking the nasty taste that capture had placed in his mouth.

He glanced at her, his deep-set, dark brown Mediterranean eyes flicking her a whiplashing look of contempt from beneath the glowering dip of his frowning black eyebrows. ‘You had a lot to say for yourself,’ he commented in a clipped voice.

Mia gave an empty little shrug. ‘Better men than me have taken him on and failed,’ she countered.

She was referring to him, of course, and the way he grimaced into his glass acknowledged the point.

‘So you are quite happy to agree to all of this, I must presume.’

Happy? Mia picked up the word and tasted it for a few moments, before deciding ruefully, mat—yes—she was, she supposed, happy to do whatever it would take to fulfil her side of this filthy bargain.

‘Let me explain something to you,’ she offered in a tone gauged to soothe not aggravate. ‘My father never puts any plan into action unless he is absolutely sure that all participants are going to agree to whatever it is he wants from them. It’s the way he works. The way he has always worked,’ she tagged on pointedly. ‘So, if you are hoping to find your redemption through me, I’m sorry to disappoint you.’ .

‘In other words—’ His burning gaze was back on her again ‘—you are willing to sleep with anyone if Daddy commands it.’

‘Yes.’ Despite the deliberate insult, her coolly composed face showed absolutely nothing—no hint of offence, no distaste, not even anger.

His did, though, showing all of those things plus a few others all meant to label her nothing better man a trollop.

Maybe she was nothing better than a trollop, allowing her father to do this to her, Mia conceded. Certainly, past history had marked her as a trollop.

‘Did you do the choosing yourself?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Is that what this is really all about?’

Taken by surprise by the suggestion, her eyes widened. Then she laughed—a surprisingly pleasant sound amidst all the bitterness and tension. ‘Oh. no,’ she said. ‘You said yourself that my father is a barbarian. It would go totally against his character to allow me to choose anything for myself. But how conceited of you to suggest it...’ she added softly.

‘It had to be asked,’ he said, stiffening slightly at the gentle censure.

‘Did it?’ Mia was not so sure about that. ‘It seems to me that you’re seeing yourself as the only victim here, Mr Doumas,’ she said more soberly. ‘And at this juncture it may well help if I remind you that there tend to be different kinds of victims in most disasters.’

‘And you are a victim of your own father’s tyranny—is that what you are trying to tell me?’

His scepticism was clear. Her green eyes darkened. If Alexander Doumas came to know her better he would take careful note of that. She was Jack Frazier’s daughter after all.

‘I am not trying to tell you anything,’ Mia coolly countered. ‘I don’t have to justify myself to you, you see.’

After all, she thought, why should she defend herself when his own reasons for agreeing to this were not that defensible?

Not that he was seeing it like that, she wryly acknowledged. Alexander Doumas was looking for a scapegoat on which to blame his own shortcomings.

‘No,’ he murmured cynically. ‘You merely have to go to bed with me.’

And she, Mia noted, was going to be his scapegoat.

‘Of course, I do understand that my lot is the much easier one,’ she conceded, with that same dangerously deceptive mildness. ‘Being a woman, all I need to do is lie down, close my eyes and mentally switch off, whereas you have to bring yourself to...er...perform. But God help us both,’ she added drily, ‘if you find me so repulsive that you can’t manage it because we will really have a problem then.’

She had managed to actually shock him, Mia was gratified to note—bad managed to make him look at her and see her, instead of just concentrating on showing her his contempt.

With a wry smile of satisfaction she deserted her post by the window at last to come around her father’s desk and walk across the room towards the two high wing-backed leather armchairs that flanked the polished mahogany fireplace.

A log fire was burning in the grate, the leaping flames trying their best to add some warmth to a room that did not know the meaning of the word—not in Jack Frazier’s house, anyway.

But the flames did manage to highlight the rich, burnished copper of Mia’s hair as she walked towards them. Although she didn’t look at Alexander Doumas as she moved, she felt his narrowed gaze following her.

Eyeing up the merchandise, she thought, cynically mocking that scrutiny.

Well, let him, she thought defiantly as she felt his gaze sweep over the smooth lines of her face, which she had been told was beautiful although she did not see any beauty in it herself.

But, then, she didn’t like herself very much and they did say that beauty was in the eyes of the beholder.

Therefore, it followed that neither would this man be seeing any beauty in her right now, she supposed, as he was so actively despising her at this moment.

Oh, she was no hound-dog. Mia wasn’t so eaten up with self-hate that she couldn’t see that her hair, face, body and legs combined to present a reasonably attractive picture.

Whatever this man was feeling about her right now, she knew that he had looked at her before today and had wanted her so his expression of distaste simply failed to impress her.

Reaching the two chairs, she turned, felt his gaze dip over the slender curves of her figure—so carefully muted by the simple coffee-coloured pure wool dress she was wearing—and chose the chair which would place him directly in her sight so she could watch those eyes draw down the long length of her silk-stockinged legs as she sat and smoothly crossed one knee over the other.

Alexander Doumas was no hound-dog himself, Mia had to acknowledge. In fact, she supposed he was what most fanciful females would have seen as ideal husband material—tall, tanned and undeniably handsome, with the kind of tightly contoured Greek-god body on which top designers liked to hang their very exclusive clothes.

Indeed, that iron grey silk suit looked very definitely top designer wear. He wore his straight black hair short at the back and neat at the front, and the rich smoothness of his olive-toned skin covered superb bone structure that perhaps said more about his high-born lineage than anything else about him.

He had a good mouth, too—even if it was being spoiled by anger and disgust at the moment—and his long, rather thin nose balanced well with the rest of his cleanly chiselled features.

But it was his eyes that made him special—deep-set, dark brown, lushly fringed, deceptively languid eyes that, even when they were showing disdain, could still stir the senses.

Her senses, she noted as she watched those eyes settle on the point where her slender legs disappeared under the hem of her dress and felt a warm, tingling sensation skitter along her inner thighs in response.

‘Well,’ she prompted, unable to resist the dig, ‘do you have a problem there?’

He stiffened, the finely corded muscles along his strong jawbone clenching when he realised he had been caught staring. ‘No,’ he admitted on a rasping mutter.

At least he’s being honest about it, Mia reflected ruefully. And so he should be, having spent the last month trying to get her into his bed!

‘Then your only problem,’ she went on coolly, ‘is having to decide whether you want your lost island of Atlanta—or whatever it is called,’ she mocked flippantly, ‘badly enough to relinquish your single status to get it.’

‘But it isn’t just my single status I’m being tapped for, is it?’ he threw back sourly.

‘No,’ she agreed, with another wry smile of appreciation at his wit, even in the face of all this horror. ‘And you are going to have to...er...produce pretty potently, too, if you want this arrangement kept short-term.’

That had his gaze narrowing sharply on her studiedly impassive green eyes. He didn’t like the tone of voice she had used but she didn’t care that he didn’t like it. She didn’t like Alexander Doumas.

However, she would go to bed with him, if that was what it would take to get what she needed to gain from this dastardly deal.

‘And what is the incentive that makes you agree to all of this?’

Mia didn’t answer, wondering bleakly what his reaction would be if she told him the truth.

He was still standing by her father’s drinks cabinet, his body tense and his expression tight with anger and contempt—tor her, for himself, or even for both of them, she wasn’t sure. And it really didn’t matter because there was a whole lot more at stake here than his personal contempt—or even her own self-contempt, come to that.

Her father wanted a grandson to replace the son who had foolishly got himself killed in a car accident several months ago. Alexander Doumas had been chosen to father that grandson—Mia to be the vessel in which the poor child would be seeded.

This man’s reasons for agreeing to any of this were based on his own personal ambitions. He wanted to get back the family island that lay somewhere off the Greek mainland, which his father had been forced to sell during the downfall of the family fortunes. Jack Frazier was the only person who could return it to him since he now owned the deeds to the island.

Mia, on the other hand, stood to gain far more than what amounted to a pile of ancient Greek rock. What was more, she was quite prepared to do anything to complete her side of the bargain she had made with her father.

‘Like you, I get back something that once belonged to me,’ she murmured eventually.

‘Am I to be told what?’

Her eyes clouded over, her mind shooting off to some dark, dark place inside her that made her look so bleak and saddened it actually threatened to breach his bristling contempt.

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!

‘But,’ he added harshly, ‘if you truly believe I will also let you walk away with that child then you are living in a dream world because I will not!’

‘Then the deal is off,’ Mia instantly retaliated, using her father’s tactics to make her own point.

After all, he hadn’t given in to the big one—namely, agreeing to marry her and produce Jack Frazier’s grandchild in what amounted to cold blood—without being desperate! And she would have her way in this if only because she had to glimpse some light at the end of this long dark tunnel or she knew she would not survive.

‘Try telling your father that,’ he derided, his eyes narrowing as her cheeks went white. ‘You are afraid of him. I saw that from the first moment I set eyes on you.’