The Heiress Bride. LYNNE GRAHAM

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СКАЧАТЬ An inability to give way gracefully to any will other than their own was the essential flaw in all ruthless, successful men. Well, whether he liked it or not, he was going to Paris. He had to take her to a city so that she could leave him. Staging a nifty vanishing act from a potentially remote Caribbean villa might well prove to be too great a challenge for her.

      In some surprise, Alexio picked up on the antagonistic sparks in her silence. ‘We could go sailing.’

      ‘I get seasick,’ Ione lied in a wooden little voice that concealed her panic at what was an even worse suggestion.

      Paris. Paris where he had spent so much time with Crystal, Alexio reflected in instinctive recoil, but then he looked at Ione and, seeing the anxious light in her upward glance, he felt like a selfish bastard for denying her what appeared to be her heart’s desire. ‘Paris it is, then…’

      Her smile, the smile she had not let him see until that moment, lit up her whole face to a startling degree. While he gazed into her shining green eyes and experienced a tightening sensation in his groin that was becoming all too familiar in her vicinity, he decided that it would be healthier to make new memories of one of his favourite cities.

      ‘Let me show you round the picture gallery,’ Ione suggested, daring to take the lead now that her battle was won and her worst fears vanquished.

      Instead and without warning, Alexio reached for her and drew her close, his lean hands linking with hers and then releasing them to glide with smooth expertise up to her slim shoulders. ‘First…’

      No, no, no, no! Screamed through Ione’s brain. Touching was absolutely not allowed. She stiffened, froze from head to toe, putting out defensive signals that a blind man could have sensed.

      ‘You don’t need to be nervous,’ Alexio soothed in his dark velvet drawl, that roughened timbre setting up a chain-reaction echo down her rigid spine. But he knew he was lying. Every time she froze around him, he wanted to smash down her barriers, storm an attack through her defences and watch those beautiful eyes drown in him, cling to him, hunger for him.

      She collided with smouldering golden eyes that made her head spin and her heart skip a beat in shock. She meant to step back out of reach but instead she found herself concentrating on just catching her breath. It shook her even more to feel her body wanting to push forward into the hard, all-male muscularity of his, for the rigorous control that had always been her saviour was nowhere to be found.

      ‘Alexio…’ Her own voice sounded strange to her, almost placatory.

      He brought his wide, sensual mouth drifting down onto hers and then, with rueful amusement sounding deep in his throat, he pried her sealed lips apart with the tip of his tongue and explored the moist interior of her tender mouth. As the explosion of sensual sensation hit her she shuddered in its grip, her slim body alternately tensing and dissolving in the storm of physical feelings firing through her skincells. Crushed against the unyielding wall of his chest, her breasts pinched tight into throbbing peaks and the ache that stirred at the very heart of her almost hurt.

      Alexio lifted his arrogant dark head to gaze down into her dreamy, bemused eyes with a sense of achievement entirely new to him. ‘Am I the first?’

      Having yet to regain mastery over herself in that moment and stunned by her own galloping heartbeat and excitement, Ione mumbled. ‘The first to kiss me? No…’

      In an abrupt movement, Alexio freed her. Who was she trying to kid? She hadn’t even known how to kiss until he had shown her! But the dreaminess in her eyes had dissipated and she had lost colour. Indeed, she spun away from him as if he no longer existed for her and, registering that withdrawal, he immediately suspected the most likely cause.

      ‘Who was he?’ Alexio demanded, seized by a sudden dark anger that inflamed him into an instantaneous reaction.

      Pale as death in the aftermath of that unwise admission, Ione could have bitten her own tongue out. Wounding memories were attacking her from all sides, but fear had risen uppermost again. If her father found out that she had mentioned Yannis, he would be furious. She did not consider Alexio’s anger abnormal. Her father was a hypocrite too, preaching female purity one moment and taking solace with tarts the next.

      ‘He was a fisherman’s son. It was over two years ago. He k-kissed me. That’s all,’ she lied shakily.

      Alexio’s lean, powerful hands closed back into fists and slowly uncoiled again. Why shouldn’t she have kissed someone else? And it was such a pathetic little confession that he was momentarily ashamed of himself for forcing it out of her. He could not explain the strength of his own irrational anger, and then he looked at her afresh and noted that she had turned a sort of sickly shade, her eyes refusing to meet his. That seething anger came out of nowhere at him again. He recognised that he wasn’t hearing the whole story and was torn by a primitive desire to drag all the rest of it out of her as well, for her pallor told him that that fisherman’s son had been a major event in her life.

      CHAPTER THREE

      ‘LET’S go and see those pictures,’ Alexio breathed in a raw undertone. So he was unaccustomed to the experience of a woman reeling out of his arms to think about another man. But, in the circumstances, he knew his anger was unreasonable.

      Ione was trembling. ‘Please don’t mention what I said to my father.’

      Alexio flung her an astonished glance from his brilliant eyes and his jawline hardened. ‘Of course not.’

      Ione led the way to the ultra-modern picture gallery but her tummy was still churning. Yannis had been her first and only love and it had been sweet and innocent and harmless until the day that she’d been followed and her father’s henchmen had forced her to watch as Yannis had been beaten to a pulp. Soon afterwards his family had left the island. She would never forget what her foolishness had cost him.

      And what even greater foolishness it had been to admit to her bridegroom that she was not quite untouched by human hand! He was now thinking that she might not be a virgin. As she watched him view the magnificent paintings, which she believed ought to hang in a museum where at least they would be appreciated as something other than an investment, she recognised the lingering tautness in his strong, bronzed profile. Like her father, he was the contemporary equivalent of a caveman, who wanted a bride no other man had ever dared to touch. And wouldn’t he just love it if she questioned him about his all-too-numerous affairs? Even so, she was puzzled that he had once intended to marry a woman like Crystal Denby, whose reputation had been far from spotless.

      But then Crystal had been totally, fantastically gorgeous, Ione conceded with wry acceptance. A woman blessed with such undeniable attributes got away with a great deal more than a plainer one. It must feel really good, she thought with rueful longing, to have that kind of power over a man.

      ‘I’m sorry about the way I questioned you downstairs,’ Alexio remarked in a driven undertone, swinging round without warning to level dark-as-night eyes on her triangular face. ‘I have no right to question your past.’

      His apology surprised her but she immediately sensed that he wanted to know more about Yannis, was indeed expecting and inviting her to respond with further details. Angry defiance stirred in her and only with the greatest difficulty did she resist the temptation to ask if he wanted to tell her about his lost love. Instead she simply nodded agreement in silence.

      Even though she had thwarted him, grudging admiration assailed Alexio. His wide, sensual mouth slashed into a wolfish smile of acknowledgement that exuded such СКАЧАТЬ