Читать книгу: «Mediterranean Tycoons: Masterful & Married: Marriage At His Convenience / Aristides' Convenient Wife / The Billionaire's Blackmailed Bride», страница 3

CHAPTER THREE

AMBER knew once she let the first tear fall that she would never be able to stop. Kicking off her shoes, she locked the door and padded across the polished wood floor to the spiral staircase. Grasping the rail, she ascended to the galleried sleeping area like an old woman. Spiro had asked her to go back to his place, but she’d refused. He had done enough for her for one night, she thought bitterly.

Stripping off her clothes, she walked into the huge bathroom. She glanced at the circular white marble Jacuzzi sunk into the floor, and quickly away as too many memories flooded back. Skirting the bath, she stepped into the double shower. She turned the tap on full, and stood under the power jets and let the water pound her slender body. She closed her eyes, but she could not block out the image of Lucas naked on his knees in the shower with her. Soaping every inch of her tender flesh from the tips of her toes to her head in what she had thought was complete adoration.

Why? Why had Lucas done this to her? her mind screamed, and the iron control she had exerted over her emotions all evening finally broke. The tears slowly squeezed from her eyes to slide down her cheeks. The trickle became a flood as she wept out her pain and grief, the tears mingling with the powerful spray until Amber fell to her knees, her arms wrapped around her middle, her head bowed, completely broken, defeated…

Her body shivering, Amber slowly opened her eyes. She was huddled on the floor of the shower. When had the hot water run out and turned to icy cold? She had no idea. She was freezing, her limbs numb. Slowly she staggered to her feet, turned off the tap and stepped out of the shower. Pulling a large bath towel from the rail, she wrapped it toga-style around her shaking body. She caught sight of her reflection in the mirror above the vanity basin—her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, her skin pale and cold as death.

She was still wearing the emerald necklace and earrings. Carefully she removed both, and, walking out of the bathroom, she dropped them on the dressing table, then pulled out the seat and sat down. Picking up the hair-dryer, she switched it on and methodically began drying her long hair.

Lucas had loved to see her naked with her hair smoothed silkily over her breasts. Her eyes filled with moisture at the memory, and, leaping to her feet, she staggered across the room and flung herself down on the bed. She turned her face into the pillow, shaken by another violent storm of weeping.

When it was over she felt curiously calm, and as it was just dawn she got to her feet and began to dress. She did not bother with a bra, she had no need for one, but slipped into skimpy white lace briefs. She withdrew grey-and blue-checked trousers from the wardrobe and a V-neck button-through matching blue cashmere cardigan, and put them on. She slipped her feet into soft leather loafers and descended the spiral staircase. She crossed the vast expanse of the living area to the kitchen, and opened the door just as the first rays of sun shone though the window.

Amber switched on the kettle, made herself a cup of instant coffee, and, taking it back with her into the living room, she sat down on one of the soft-cushioned sofas. She picked up the remote control for the television and switched it on. It was the twenty-four-hour news channel. She watched and waited…

Amber heard the key turn in the lock, and, switching off the television, she stood up and slowly turned to face the door.

To the man entering the room, she looked cool, calm and collected, and beautiful. ‘Amber, I am glad you are here. I thought you might have gone back with Spiro after last night,’ Lucas said smoothly, closing the door behind him and striding towards her.

Amber watched him approach. He was casually dressed in faded denim jeans, a cream-coloured roll-neck sweater and tan leather jacket. His black hair was windswept; he had never looked more attractive to her, or more out of her reach.

Her heart hardened against his masculine appeal. ‘Why would I do that, Lucas? This is my home,’ she queried coolly. A bone-numbing anger had replaced her earlier grief.

‘Good, I hoped you would be sensible.’ His long legs slightly splayed, he stopped about a foot away from her, his dark eyes sweeping over her long hair falling loose to her waist, and back up, lingering for a second too long on the proud thrust of her breasts against the soft cashmere sweater.

Amber saw his pupils darken, and the sudden tension in his broad frame. He was not immune to her, that much was obvious, and it simply fuelled her anger. ‘Sensible is not the word I would have chosen,’ she declared bitterly. ‘I don’t feel in the least sensible after last night, I feel madder than hell, and demand an explanation. I thought you were my boyfriend, my partner. We live together, for God’s sake!’ she cried, aware of the consuming bile rising in her throat as she studied his hard features.

Abruptly Lucas stepped back a pace, and she had the satisfaction of seeing his face darken with suppressed anger, or was it embarrassment? He didn’t appreciate being called to account for his behaviour. ‘I agree,’ he said curtly. ‘And I apologise—last night should never have happened. Christina should not have told you we were getting engaged next weekend. But then you should not have been at the party. You have Spiro to thank for last night’s fiasco, not I.’

‘Oh, no, you can’t blame this on Spiro, you lying swine,’ she shot back furiously. ‘You told me you could not get back from New York until Saturday—pressure of work, you said. What a joke!’ Blazing golden eyes clashed with his and what she saw in their obsidian depths sent an icy shiver down her spine.

‘I did not lie. I said I could not meet you until Saturday, which was perfectly true. I had a prior engagement for Friday evening,’ he drawled cynically.

‘An engagement for the rest of your life, if Christina is to be believed. I have never been so embarrassed or humiliated in all my life, and I want to know why? You owe me that much,’ Amber demanded, her voice rising stridently.

Lucas stepped forward and closed a powerful hand over both of hers. ‘Calm down and listen to me,’ he snapped back, his black eyes hard on her lovely face. ‘I had no desire to embarrass or hurt you in any way. I had every intention of telling you our affair was over before announcing my betrothal. I have never in my life begun a sexual relationship with a woman without first divesting myself of her predecessor. It is a rule of mine.’

‘Bully for you!’ she snorted inelegantly, but just the touch of his hand on hers made her pulse race and she despised herself for it. ‘You are so moral,’ she managed to drawl sarcastically. ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better that you are dumping me?’

‘Dumping…’ a grimace of distaste tightened his hard mouth ‘…is not how I would have put it. Our affair has reached its conclusion, and I hope we can part friends.’

This is not happening to me, this cannot be happening to me, Amber told herself over and over again. The blind, arrogant conceit of the man was unbelievable. Friends—he wanted them to be friends… Didn’t he know he had broken her heart, destroyed her dreams, her life? She looked up and saw the flicker of impatience in his dark eyes, the aloof expression on his handsome face, and she had her answer. It was obvious he was wondering how to extricate himself as quickly as possible.

‘And what about me?’ Amber asked quietly, amazed that her voice didn’t break.

‘Amber, we have had some great times together, but now it is over, it has to be. I have reached the age—’ he walked away from her, pacing the length of the room ‘—when it is time for me to settle down. I want a wife, a family, a home, and Christina is going to give me all that.’ Then, spinning on his heel, he walked slowly back towards her.

‘You’re bright and ambitious, I know you have a brilliant future ahead of you. But, for me, Christina is the answer. You understand.’

The numbness that had protected her for the past few hours vanished. He was ripping her heart to shreds with every word he spoke. ‘No, no, I don’t.’ She raised her eyes to meet his. ‘I thought we were a couple, and that this was our home.’ Even as she said the words, she saw the gleam of cynical amusement in his dark eyes as he glanced around the room and back at Amber.

‘Oh, come on, Amber, don’t play the innocent, it does not suit you. This was never meant to be a home, a living area with an open-galleried bedroom and a sybaritic bathroom. Could you see me entertaining my family and friends in this place?’ One dark brow arched sardonically. ‘I think not…’

Amber exploded; her hand swung in a wide arc and smashed across his face. ‘I should have done that last night,’ she yelled. ‘You arrogant, conceited, two-timing bastard.’

Lucas raised a hand to his cheek, and rubbed where she had hit him. ‘Perhaps I deserved that, so I’ll let you get away with it, Amber, but only once,’ he declared grimly. ‘Accept it is over between us and move on. I have.’

She watched the dark stain appear on his cheek where she had hit him, and immediately regretted her action. Involuntarily she raised her hand, intending to stroke the side of his face, but her wrist was caught in an iron grip. ‘No.’

She moved forward and lifted her other hand to rest on the soft wool sweater covering his broad chest. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. But the familiar feel of his hard muscles beneath her fingers sent shivers of delight arcing though her body. She loved this man with all her heart, and helplessly she tilted back her head and looked up into his darkly attractive face. ‘Please, Lucas.’ She felt him stiffen, and she moved even closer, and slid her hand up over his chest and around the nape of his neck.

‘We are so good together, Lucas, you know we are.’ It had been two long months since she had felt the warmth of his caress and she ached for him. Suddenly she was fighting for her man, and using every skill at her disposal. She saw his pupils dilate as her breasts brushed against his hard chest, and involuntarily her fingers trailed with tactile delight up through the hair at the back of his neck. ‘Kiss me, Lucas, you know you want to.’ Gently she urged his head down towards her eager lips.

‘No, Amber.’ His large hands gripped her shoulders to push her away just as she brushed her lips against his, the tip of her tongue darting out to gain access to his mouth. She heard the intake of his breath as his arms jerked her to him and their bodies met in searing contact, and she was lost in the dark, heady hunger of the kiss for an instant, before his hands caught her shoulders and he forced her back at arm’s length.

Lucas Karadines didn’t like the way she affected him. His dark eyes glittered dangerously. His own mother had been addicted to sex, one lover after another until she’d died. Her last lover had kicked a young boy of thirteen out on the street. So he fought the temptation and won. ‘You are a very sexy lady, Amber, but I am not such a bastard as to take what you’re offering. It’s over.’

‘But if you want a wife, why not me? I love you, Lucas, and I thought you loved me,’ Amber pleaded, raising an unsteady hand and tenderly brushing a few black silky strands of his hair from his brow. ‘I could give you children, anything you want.’ She was laying her heart, her life, on the line, begging him. She had lost all pride, all anger, and she didn’t care. She looked deep into his dark eyes, her own beseeching his. She thought she saw a flicker of uncertainty in the depths of his, but she was mistaken.

‘No, Amber.’ A grim smile twisted the corners of his sensual mouth. ‘I never lied to you—I never once mentioned love.’

His words lashed her like a whip flailing her alive; she closed her eyes for an instant, searching her mind. He was right, he had never said he loved her. How had she made such an enormous mistake? His hands fell from her shoulders and she opened her eyes. She could actually see him mentally withdrawing from her as he physically moved back a step.

‘You are a lovely girl, but you are not the wife and mother type.’ His breathing was heavy but his dark eyes held unmistakable, unyielding will-power. ‘You’re a career woman—you compete in a male-dominated industry, and you are as good as, if not better than, most of the men, by all accounts. You wouldn’t last six months as a stay-at-home wife. You would be bored out of your skull. So don’t fool yourself, Amber. You’re strictly lover material.’

She listened with growing horror. ‘Is that really what you think?’ she muttered sickly. ‘All this time you saw me as your lover, a sex object, nothing else.’

He shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘The term is not important. What we shared was a mutually agreeable relationship.’ His dark eyes skimmed over her shapely figure and he made no effort to hide his masculine appreciation. ‘And great sex.’

His deliberate sensual scrutiny made her breasts swell in instant awareness, and hot colour flooded her cheeks and he noticed. ‘Be honest, Amber, you’re no shy young maid, never were. You’re a born hedonist, you thrive on sensual pleasure, the pleasure I gave you. But you’re a sophisticated lady—admit it, if we have spent six months together since we met it would be a miracle, and that mostly in bed. Ours was a sexual relationship, nothing more.’

For him maybe, but for Amber it had been everything. She only had to look at him to remember the powerful strength of his all-male body when he possessed her, caressed her. ‘Nothing more,’ she parroted his words with horror.

‘Exactly.’ He sounded relieved, actually believing she had agreed with him. And blithely carried on adding insult to injury. ‘But Christina is different. She is sweet and innocent and has no desire to do anything other than be my wife, and bear my children.’

Her teeth had bitten into her bottom lip as she listened to him praise his Christina, and the salty tang of blood coated her tongue. ‘I was innocent until you seduced me,’ she reminded him, the hurt almost too much to bear. He knew she’d been a virgin when he’d first made love to her. She had given him the greatest gift a woman could give a man, her heart, body and soul, and he had the gall to label her a hedonist…

‘Ah, Amber…’ He shook his dark head in a mocking gesture. ‘You know as well as I do that it was no great moral conviction that kept you a virgin. It was probably the fact you had spent the last four years living with a couple of gay men and their friends and hadn’t much opportunity. You would have jumped into bed with me the first day you arrived at the villa.’ Lucas shot her a cynical smile. ‘With your minuscule bikinis, and designer clothes, you were no retiring violet. You were desperate for a man, and it was my restraint, my strict rule not to take on a new lover without first leaving the old that meant we waited until I had got back from New York. Seduction did not come into it.’

‘I see.’ And she did… She closed her eyes for a brief moment, blocking out the picture of his hard, cynical face, her hands clenching into fists at her sides. He thought of her as a sexy woman who had been easy to take, who could respond to any man’s caress with equal fervour, not just his. Eagerly she had followed where he’d led, plunging the erotic depths with a hunger that had known no bounds, confident that he’d loved her, and everything had been permissible between two lovers. Her own innate honesty forced her to admit it was not all his fault. She had deliberately set out to appear to be the sort of woman she’d imagined he wanted. ‘Hoist by her own petard’ was the phrase that sprang to mind… Lucas did not know her at all, never had, and, worse, did not want to.

‘Tell me, Lucas, if I had held out for a ring, would you have married me?’ Amber demanded, black anger filling her heart at his chauvinistic attitude, never mind his betrayal.

He stared at her, his hard mouth suddenly cruel. ‘With you the question would never arise. If you remember, I did ask you to give up work so we could spend more time together, and you could not even do that. So the answer is no. You’re a thoroughly modern woman, equal to a man, you work hard and play hard.’

‘And your Christina is not?’ She arched one delicate brow in a gesture of mocking disbelief. ‘A year in Switzerland, all those hunky ski instructors,’ she taunted him, the memory of the young girl’s conversation last night still clear in her mind.

That appeared to catch him on the raw, and for a moment he looked almost savage. ‘Leave Christina out of this,’ he ordered curtly. ‘You disappoint me, Amber, I did not think you could sink so low as to maliciously malign a young girl’s reputation, a girl you hardly know,’ he drawled contemptuously.

Amber stared at his hard, cold face, willing herself not to feel hurt by his immediate defence of the girl. Then it hit her. ‘You’ve never slept with Christina, and you think you love her. I’m right, aren’t I?’ she demanded, not sure whether to laugh or cry. Lucas Karadines, a powerful, dynamic businessman viewed with fear and awe by his competitors, was fooled by a pseudo-innocent eighteen-year-old going on eighty.

‘Yes, I love Christina, and I am going to marry her.’ He gave the only answer he could. He wasn’t sure he believed in love. His mother had fallen in love with depressing regularity, when basically it had been sex. He had no intention of making the same mistake. He had chosen carefully and made the commitment to Christina and both of their families in traditional Greek fashion, and he was determined to honour it and make his marriage a success.

Amber stared at him. Oh, heavens, she silently screamed. It was true. She saw the absolute sincerity in his dark eyes, heard it in the tone of his voice, and was convinced. Never mind business, Lucas honestly thought he loved the girl. Her shoulders drooping, she closed her eyes for a second, all the fight draining out of her, and a dull acceptance taking its place. ‘I suppose I’d better go and pack.’

‘No.’ Lucas caught her shoulder and turned her back to face him. ‘Sit down, Amber. I am not so unfeeling I would see you deprived of your home.’

It never was a home, he had made that abundantly clear, but her traitorous limbs gave way beneath her and she sank thankfully down onto the soft cushions. ‘No.’ Amber looked at him towering over her, with all the bitterness of her feelings in her eyes. ‘Then what now, Lucas? If you’re waiting for my blessing, you’re wasting your time.’ He was sliding something from the inside pocket of his jacket—a long manila envelope.

‘You have no need to leave—I am going. I’ll send someone round this afternoon to collect the few things I have here, and you’d better keep these—you will need them.’

The last half-hour had been the hardest of Lucas Karadines’s life. It had taken all his monumental control not to take what Amber had been offering. He would not dare come back himself, because deep down he knew he would not be able to resist making love to her one more time. He dropped the envelope and his set of keys to the apartment down onto the sofa beside her. ‘Goodbye, Amber.’ He hesitated for a second, his night-black eyes lingering on her pale face. ‘I’m…’

‘Just go.’ Her lips twisted; if he said sorry she would kill him. His dark head bent towards her and she felt the brush of his lips against her hair and flinched. She didn’t need his pity. And, flinging her head back, she sat rigidly on the edge of the sofa, her golden eyes hating him.

Lucas straightened up. ‘Look after yourself.’ And, brushing past her, he headed for the door. He opened the door and paused, finally turning to add, ‘By the way, if you’re thinking of taking up the offer Clive Thompson made you, don’t. The man is not to be trusted.’

A harsh laugh escaped her. ‘It takes one to know one. Get out.’ And, picking up a scatter cushion, she flung it at him. It bounced harmlessly off the closed door and fell to the floor.

Amber looked around her at the apartment that she had mistakenly thought was a home with new eyes, and groaned out loud. Lucas was right. How could she have been so stupid, so gullible? She had tried to add a few touches, the scatter cushions, a couple of framed photographs of her mother, and Tim. A painting she had bought on a trip around a gallery with Spiro. The rug was the only thing in the place that she and Lucas had chosen together. It was exactly as Lucas had said: a bachelor pad, or a love-nest.

She had to get out, she thought brutally. It didn’t matter where as long it was somewhere that did not remind her of Lucas. But first she had to pack up his clothes—hadn’t he said he was sending someone over to collect them?

She jumped to her feet and the manila envelope fell from her knee to the floor; she bent down and picked it up. Slitting open the envelope, she withdrew a folded document. She read it, her eyes widening in amazement that quickly turned to fury. Her first thought was to rip it up, but she hesitated… The paper dropped from her hand to flutter back to the floor.

It was the deeds for the apartment in her name, and it was dated two weeks ago. She felt sick and defiled; he had paid her off like some cheap whore. Perhaps not cheap, she amended, but her fury knew no bounds. She marched into the kitchen and took the scissors from the kitchen drawer, and then headed straight upstairs. With grim determination she slid back the wardrobe door. Earlier she had run her hands over Lucas’s clothes, in need of reassurance. Now she touched them for a completely different reason.

Working quickly, Amber emptied the wardrobe and drawers of every item that belonged to Lucas, and packed them in one suitcase. That told her something. Her mouth tightened in a rare grimace of cynicism. If she had needed any further convincing that Lucas had considered her nothing more than a convenient bed partner, the fact that he had left so few clothes in the place she had thought was his home said it all.

When a little man called a few hours later and asked for Mr Karadines’s luggage she handed over the suitcase without a word, and closed the door in the man’s face. She only wished she could close the door to her heart as firmly on the memory of Lucas Karadines.

A few hours later on the other side of London, Lucas Karadines stood in the middle of his hotel bedroom and stared in fury at the pair of trousers his father’s valet was holding out to him.

‘I’m afraid, sir, I’ve checked, and all three suits in the luggage I collected from the lady’s apartment are the same.’ The little wizened man was having the greatest difficulty keeping the smile from his face. ‘The fly panel has been rather roughly cut out of all of them.’

A torrent of Greek curses turned the air blue as Lucas stormed across the room and picked up the telephone and began pressing out the number he knew by heart. Then suddenly he stopped halfway through, and replaced the receiver. No, there was no point—Amber was out of his life and he wanted it to stay that way. But a reluctant smile quirked the corners of his firm mouth. He should have expected some such thing. Amber was a passionate character in every way; it was what had drawn him to her in the first place. A shadow darkened his tanned features as he instructed the valet to press another suit. With brutal honesty he recognised Amber had some justification. She should never have discovered by a third party their relationship was over, and certainly not in so public a manner.