Summer Sins: Bedded, or Wedded? / Willingly Bedded, Forcibly Wedded / The Mediterranean Billionaire's Blackmail Bargain

CHAPTER SIX

LISSA sat at the table, very still. The champagne, the wine, all the magic of the evening had drained out of her, emptying out of her like water down a well.

She hadn’t thought it would be like this. So brutal.

But then—she gave a twist to her mouth—she hadn’t thought at all, had she?

She’d sat here, floating on air, entranced by the magic of the evening, and had never thought of how it must end.

Because she hadn’t wanted it to end. She knew that this was all there could be, and she hadn’t wanted it to end, had wanted it to go on for ever and ever.

But it hadn’t. Of course it hadn’t. This had been a time out, that was all, a brief, magical time out. A gift that would at the stroke of midnight dissolve, leaving nothing behind but memories.

She felt her throat tighten. She had known the evening would end, but not like this.

She heard again, felt again, the savage civility of his voice, felt his absolute repudiation of her, dropping her hand as if it were rotting meat.

Did he have to be so brutal?

She felt tears prick in the back of her eyes and blinked, angry with herself.

Oh, come on. Wise up. Why the Little Miss Sensitive act suddenly? she berated herself. He’d said ‘dinner’, but obviously he’d had more in mind than that, and he hadn’t liked being turned down. Men never liked being turned down—and a man like him probably never had been. That was why he’d stormed off like that. She’d caught him in the most delicate part of male anatomy: his ego.

Her face puckered. But he wasn’t like that. He hadn’t been all evening. He had been wonderful. Attentive, charming, engaging, with that dry, ironic humour that brought a glint to his eye and a smile to her mouth. He had been the perfect dinner companion, and as for everything else—well, that had just been magic, the only word for it.

Until that brutal departure. Her throat tightened again, and she took a jerky sip of cooling coffee, forcing it down to try and open her throat.

It had been so out of place, that flare of icy anger. She took a painful breath. Surely a man as sophisticated, as obviously experienced with women as he was, could have managed the scene more gracefully? Even if he’d smarted at her rebuff, he need not have shown it—he could have extricated himself with élan, with a smooth word, affecting regret, with sophistication and charm. But he hadn’t. Obviously when it came to bedtime, Xavier Lauran, for all his cool sophistication, all the seductive magic of his eyes, his voice, was just another man who thought the price of a meal included a woman for the night.

He’d promised her ‘just dinner’ and like a fool she’d believed him.

She slid out from her seat. Presumably the waiting staff would take care of petty concerns like the bill, and although there was someone instantly there to help pull the table back sufficiently and bid her good-night, she knew it was pretty obvious that her escort had stormed out on her. Well. She gave a silent, heavy sigh. What was that to her? Nothing. Just as it was nothing that Xavier Lauran had proved, after all, to be a man who for all his expensive packaging still operated on the same sordid, commercial premise that any of the punters at the casino did when they thought they could indulge in some ‘private hire’ with the hostesses.

The only difference was, they were more honest about it.

She walked out of the restaurant, head held high.

She needed to change. Her own clothes had been put in another bag from the shop, and she’d checked it in to the Ladies’ Cloakroom. They would be damp still, she knew, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was getting out of here. If the boutique was closed, she’d simply put the dress, stockings and shoes neatly folded inside the original bags, and leave them with the concierge to be given to Xavier Lauran. What he did with them she didn’t care. Hand them on to the next stupid female he wanted to have for dinner … and breakfast.

Not, of course, that breakfast was necessarily on the menu. Who knew? Maybe he just chucked them out after he’d had sex with them and sent them home in his damn chauffeur-driven car. Maybe they were OK with that sort of treatment. Maybe Xavier Lauran deliberately picked up girls like he’d clearly thought her to be, cheap hostesses in cheap casinos, because he knew they’d be so impressed by him, by his flash car and his offer of dinner cooked by a French chef, and the free run of a five-star hotel boutique. Maybe Xavier Lauran deliberately—

‘Lissa—’

She stalled, head whipping around. He was heading towards her, walking from the bank of lifts. His stride was rapid, intent on intercepting her. She started forward again, her pace increasing urgently. She had to get to the Ladies. It would be sanctuary. Safety. Safe from Xavier Lauran, who’d smiled so devastatingly into her eyes and who’d only wanted a night of sex with her.

She made it to the Ladies, hurling herself inside and then standing there trembling. She dived into a stall and plonked herself down on the closed unit. She stared at the locked door.

Her mouth pressed together.

Truth pressed down on her.

Oh, God, what a hypocrite she was. She could rant away all she liked about men thinking that dinner meant bed-and-breakfast, as well, and get on her high horse that Xavier Lauran was no better than any of them. But she knew, as she swallowed through the tight, stricken cords in her throat, that, berate him all she might, the truth was that she was a hypocrite. A one hundred per cent, fully paid-up hypocrite.

She made herself say the words. Say them clearly and plainly in her head.

I would have said yes.

If she could have, she would have said yes.

She closed her eyes, sinking down her head. She would have done it. She would have let him take her by the hand, lead her upstairs, let him take her into his arms, slide his mouth across hers to take the possession of it the way she had wanted right from the very first moment she saw him, let him take possession of her body.

For however long he wanted. For a single hour, a single night—however long he wanted her.

That was his power. That was the power she had felt flowing into her, through her, unstoppable, unavoidable. The power of an emotion that she had never felt before, but which she now felt more intensely, more overwhelmingly than she knew she would ever feel about any man again.

The power of desire.

Her eyes shadowed, and she lifted her face from her hands.

Desire she could never fulfil.

Because it was impossible, just impossible. Nothing in her life made it possible for her to say what she had longed to be able to say, that simple, sighing yes.

She stiffened her spine. Well, it was just as well she hadn’t, wasn’t it? Just as well she’d said, ‘I can’t.’ Because that had unleashed a side of Xavier Lauran he’d hidden from her all evening, ever since he’d denied buying her time for what the casino had sold it to him for.

Anger spurted through her. She was glad of it. Grateful. It helped to scour out the stupid, naïve mush that was making her hide herself away like this. It was as well she’d got the measure of the man, so she could see the ‘magic’ for what it was. For him nothing more than a ritual to be gone through before moving on to the main event of the evening. And when he was denied it he’d turned nasty.

With a heavy, hard heart, she got to her feet. She had to get out of here. She had to get changed and go home, back to her real life. She went out into the washroom area, collecting her bag of clothes from the cloakroom, then retired back into the cubicle to change. The jeans were still damp, but tough. Her jacket would keep her warm enough, and it was still early enough to travel by Tube, which would be warmer. She’d go straight home, not back to work. She couldn’t face it—not tonight. Would Xavier Lauran complain about her to the casino manager? Consider himself short-changed because she hadn’t come across for him, even after all the soft soaping he’d given her? Well, too bad. She’d assumed she was out of a job when she’d left the casino this evening—so if she was, she was.

Leaving a tip for the attendant she could ill afford, she headed out of the Ladies. The beautiful silk dress was folded back into its tissue paper, the shoes nestling in the base of the bag, stockings neatly wrapped. No one would want to wear them, obviously, but they belonged to Xavier Lauran. He’d paid for them, and he would get them back, along with the rest of what he’d dolled her up in.

She glanced warily around as she marched towards the concierge’s desk, but there was no sign of him. Good—he’d left.

She clumped heavily on the marble floor, and didn’t care. She reached the concierge and hefted up the boutique bags.

‘For Mr Xavier Lauran,’ she said shortly. ‘I don’t know his room number.’

‘Certainly, madam,’ the uniformed concierge said, and lowered the bags behind his desk. She nodded her thanks, and headed to the main entrance of the hotel. The revolving doors opened on to a portico where taxis and cars could draw up. Was Xavier Lauran’s chauffeured car still waiting for her? She didn’t care if it was. She wasn’t getting into it anyway. There was a Tube station quite near here, and the rain had stopped finally. It was chilly, but dry. She wanted to go home.

She hovered on the exterior concourse a moment, getting her bearings. She was somewhere in Mayfair, on the corner of one of the grand Georgian squares, but for a moment her orientation was awry. She glanced around.

And there was Xavier Lauran. Tall, hands plunged into the pockets of his cashmere overcoat. Immobile. Waiting.

He walked up to her. She tried to walk past him. He blocked her instantly, hands slipping from his pockets and catching her by her elbows.

‘Lissa—please. If you do nothing else, let me apologise.’

She stared up at him.

‘I behaved like a brute. An oaf. And I’m sorry—truly sorry.’

How he did it she didn’t know, but he guided her to the far end of the concourse, where there were no people, no cars, no doorman.

He looked down at her. There was an expression in his eyes she hadn’t seen before. It made him look … different. She didn’t know why. Could only know, right now, that her heart had started to thump. With hard, heavy slugs.

And that her throat was tight, so tight.

‘I’m truly sorry,’ he said again, and his voice was different, too, though she couldn’t tell why.

He was speaking again, and she forced herself to listen over the pounding of her heart.

‘If there is someone else in your life, then I understand. And I respect you for being honest with me—and I am sorry, truly, for having placed you in this position in the first place. Making you feel that you had to accept my invitation or risk your job—even though it’s a job I wish you didn’t have.’ He took a breath. It seemed ragged to her ears.

‘I told you I was merely inviting you for dinner, and you have my word that at the time that is all I intended. Nothing more. But—’ He took another indrawn breath. ‘When I saw you, dressed as your beauty should be dressed, I was simply blown away. I have no other excuse. And I thought …’ his eyes washed over her, and she felt her legs weaken. ‘I thought you were responding to me in the same way, for the same reason.’ His mouth pressed minutely, then released. ‘Which is why I made the invitation that I did. I did not mean it insultingly or cheaply.’

His hands around her elbows eased upwards, and without her realising it he was drawing her closer to him.

‘You are so beautiful,’ he said softly. ‘Even now, knowing as I do that you are not free, even with that knowledge I still want for this one, single time—this. Allow me, please—for it is all I can have of you.’

He lowered his head to hers.

His kiss was heaven. Soft, and lingering and exquisite. She gave herself to it, gave herself with all the yearning she was filled with to the magic in his lips, his touch, taken for those few precious moments to a paradise she had not known existed.

And then, even as her heart soared, he was drawing away from her, letting go of her.

‘Goodbye,’ he said softly.

And then he was walking away.

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘I’VE got a booking for you at an insurance company.’

The temp agency girl’s voice was brisk and businesslike. Lissa forced herself to concentrate. It was punishingly hard. For a start she was tired—but that was nothing new. Her late nights at the casino always left her tired. She should be grateful, though, that she still had a job there. She had so very nearly lost it.

But what was new, horribly, bleakly new, was this sense of the world having had all the colour drained out of it. Everything was grey.

Only one single place had colour in it—only one place was bathed in radiant, luminous light. Her memory of that evening—that precious, unforgettable evening which shone like a jewel in the secret, private place she kept it.

Yet it was a jewel with facets that were razor sharp, piercing her with pain whenever she permitted herself to remember that night.

But she had made the right decision—the only decision. There was nothing else she could have done.

Even as she told herself that, a small, treacherous voice would whisper in her inner ear.

You could have had one night … one hour … that, at least, you could have had …

But she knew she could not have done that. Knew that if she had succumbed to that exquisite temptation, the pain she felt now would be nothing in comparison. One night, one hour in his bed, would have only created a longing in her for more that she could never assuage.

He was not for her. He couldn’t be. She had duties and obligations elsewhere. Commitments.

And more, so much more than that—she had love. Love and responsibility and care. She couldn’t abandon them. Not for a night, not for an hour, not for a minute.

But it was hard—however much she reminded herself that it was impossible to indulge her desire for the man who had, out of nowhere, suddenly transformed her life. She knew she had to forget him but the longing could not be suppressed. Only repressed. Shut down tightly into the box of ‘might have beens.’

Well, there were a lot of ‘might have beens’ in her life. And they had all ended with that hideous, bloody mess of twisted metal and broken bodies.

Except her body.

Guilt, survivor guilt, seared through her. As she stood up from the chair in the agency, her legs strong and healthy, her body strong and healthy, she felt guilt go through her. Guilt and resolution.

Keep going—keep going. Work, by day and by night, work and earn and save.

But would she ever have enough?

Into her mind, the treacherous thought came again.

If only Armand.

But it had been days now, days after days, and nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Hope had drained out of her. Just as colour had drained out of her life.

She got to her feet, ready to set out for the insurance company’s offices. At least temping gave her higher rates than permanent work, and it was flexible enough for her needs—like the days she had to get to the hospital.

Guilt stabbed her, as it always did whenever she fell into self-pity or resentment. She had no right whatsoever to either emotion.

She had walked out of the crash without a scratch.

In her mind’s eye formed, as it always did, the image that haunted her, tormented her. The hospital chapel, the two cold, still bodies.

And one more body, still alive, but broken, still broken.

Pain choked her. And guilt. Not just guilt for having walked out of the crash that had destroyed so much, but guilt now for wanting even more from life than what she already had.

Wanting Xavier Lauran.

Whom she could never have.

Xavier sat at his desk, his eyes resting on the unopened e-mail on his screen. It was from Armand. His expression tightened. He did not want to open the e-mail. Did not want to read it. He didn’t want to think about Armand, and most of all he did not want to think about the woman his brother wanted to marry.

Not thinking about Lissa Stevens was essential. He had spent every day since that night at the hotel not thinking about her. He had spent every night battling not to remember her.

A bitter smile twisted his mouth. The saying was true—the road to hell was paved with good intentions. He’d had only good intentions when he’d made the decision to check out the woman Armand had talked about wanting to marry. His only thought then had been to save his brother from a disaster that, on past performance, was a real risk. But his good intentions had turned on him.

At some point he knew, with that cool, rational brain that he’d used to live his life by, he would have to think about Lissa Stephens. He would have to come to terms with the disaster that had befallen not his brother but himself. He had fallen, head first, into a pit of his own making. A pit he could not escape but which he had to find a way of dealing with.

Just how he was going to deal with it, however, was at the moment completely beyond him. His eyes shadowed. He had wanted Lissa Stephens that fateful night with an intensity that had shocked him as much as it had enthralled him—and he still wanted her. Wanted her more than ever. She was a presence he could not rid himself of, a memory he could not burn out of his mind. Though he refused to let himself think of her, that did not mean she was not there.

He wanted her.

He wanted her, and he did not care that she worked in a casino, did not care that he still did not know whether she was or was not fit to marry his brother, did not care if she was going to marry his brother.

It did not stop him wanting her.

What was he going to do? How could he meet her again, on Armand’s arm, and know that she was never going to be his?

The thought tormented him, the harsh, brutal knowledge that she was forbidden to him. Never before in his life had any woman he’d wanted been forbidden to him. He had never looked at married women, and none who were unmarried, with whom he’d decided to embark on a liaison, had ever turned him down. Why should they have? He had always been able to have the women he wanted. It had never been an issue, never been something he’d thought deeply about, never had cause to. He’d selected women from the many available to him with the same rationale he brought to bear on everything in his life. She would be beautiful, chic, well educated, well-bred, an habituée of the circles in which he moved. She would be experienced in the art of love, and she would want exactly what he wanted—a sensual, suitable sexual and social partner who would fit the space in his life which he allocated for that purpose. And when the affair lost its flavour, as it always did at some point, then she would agree with him that it was time to part, without rancour or regret.

But now he had been given a poisoned chalice by fate.

I desire my brother’s bride …

With tight, heavy emotion he clicked on Armand’s e-mail. His eyes scanned the words rapidly. It was just about his upcoming business schedule in the USA. Nothing about marriage plans.

Why not?

The question hung in Xavier’s focus. Why had Armand gone so quiet on a topic he’d written so enthusiastically about only a short time ago? Xavier’s mouth tightened. Was Armand’s reticence now because he did not trust his brother not to interfere, even though he’d asked him not to? Did he suspect that being despatched to the Middle East and America had been a deliberate ploy on his part?

A heavy rasp escaped Xavier. What did it matter? From now on he was out of it—he had to keep a very, very long distance from Armand and his plans to marry Lissa Stephens. It was the only safe thing to do—the only rational thing.

Lissa Stephens could never be his.

However much he wanted her.

It had been a long, tiring day, and Lissa had to force herself to walk briskly out of her local Tube station in the rush-hour crowds. She carried bags of grocery shopping bought from one of the City supermarkets. It meant lugging the bags home, but there was no supermarket near her flat—only a dingy convenience store near the entrance to the station, stocking overpriced groceries and sad looking fruit and vegetables. This part of London depressed her. Here in the tatty concrete wilderness around the Tube station, an unsuccessful urban regeneration project of the fifties and sixties, where the only people were those who could not afford anywhere better, her spirits never failed to droop.

But, however depressing the area, her flat did nevertheless have advantages. Not only was it social housing, so the rent was low for London, but it was also on the ground floor, and only a quarter of a mile away from St Nathaniel’s Hospital, which made her mandatory weekly visits there blessedly easier.

Her expression changed slightly as she rebalanced her shopping bags and continued to trudge homeward in the dusk.

It had been on one of her weekly visits to St Nat’s that she had first met Armand. He had been visiting a colleague who had collapsed with a heart attack, so he’d said later, but it had taken only a single look as they’d waited for the elevator together for him to smile, so warmly, so appreciatively.

And that was how it had started.

If only—

No. Automatically she cut off the pointless hope. There was no purpose in holding on to it. It was folly to hold out for the happy-ever-after ending that she dreamed of, where Armand’s magic wand would make everything all right. In the end there was only herself to rely on. Even as she forced herself to recall that, a thought came to her.

Xavier …

Xavier Lauran is rich …

No.

It was impossible and out of the question. She must not let her thoughts stray in that dangerously tempting direction. She must not let her thoughts stray to him, period. Doing so was like poking a wound with a stick, just to see the blood run.

She reached the old Victorian tenement and got out her keys. Her spirits low, battered on all fronts, she told herself she had to keep on at the task ahead of her. She could do nothing else. All her strength, her focus, her time and her will-power, had to be bent to that purpose only.

Work, earn, save. No let up, no reprieve. For as long as it took.

As she opened the door to the flat, she froze. There were voices inside, and they were not coming from the television. One was familiar, but the tone was not familiar, at all. It was excited, happy, with no trace of either the thread of pain or the drug-induced slurring. The other voice was also familiar but hearing it made her surge disbelievingly into the living room and stop dead. A figure unfolded from the battered sofa. Lissa’s face lit.

‘Armand,’ she cried.

She went into his outstretched arms.

‘Xavier, have you been listening to anything I’ve said?’

The voice beside him was light, with a teasing note, but Xavier had to force himself to pay attention. He’d had to force himself to pay attention to everything that Madeline de Cerasse had said to him all evening. He’d taken her out to dinner. It had been a deliberate gesture on his part. Completely rational. He needed, he knew, to pick up his normal life. He needed, he knew even better, to have sex as soon as possible. With another woman. And since he was, he realised, technically still regarded as her lover, at least by her, he knew it would have to be Madeline.