Helen Bianchin - Married For Convenience

‘Perhaps.’ His smile was a mere facsimile, his eyes dark and forbidding.

‘You expect me to act a part?’ She felt like screaming with indignant resentment. ‘ Pretend ?’

His expression was resolute, and his voice held infinite mockery. ‘You have managed admirably for the past seven months.’

‘ Six ,’ she flung back angrily, incensed by his imperturbability. ‘I cannot be held responsible for the past one and a half.’

He lifted a hand and brushed light fingers along the edge of her jaw. ‘Relieved of the barriers of your animosity for a few short weeks,’ he said, ’there was no reason to generate hatred for your Spanish esposo. ’

She closed her eyes, then slowly opened them again. ‘There wasn’t meant to be a child!’ It was a cry from the heart.

His voice gentled as he caught hold of her chin and tilted it towards him. ‘Nevertheless, there is. Its unexpected existence is something I refuse to consider as anything other than a very special gift.’ His thumb lightly caressed the lower edge of her lip. ‘For several weeks we were able to dispense with any hostility.’ His eyes darkened measurably. ‘Friends, as well as lovers.’

Her eyes glittered with anger, sheer emerald flecked with gold. ‘We can never be friends!’

A smile tinged with wry mockery tugged the edges of his mouth. ‘Perhaps at this moment you do not believe so.’ Dark eyes gleamed with cynical humour. ‘Why don’t you get into bed?’

Her pulse tripped its beat and measurably quickened—as a result of anger, she assured herself, not passion. ‘I don’t want to go to bed, and I especially don’t want to share a bed with you/

‘We share, Elise,’ he insisted in a dangerously soft voice, ‘as we have done from the beginning.’

His threat wasn’t an idle one, and she looked at him in silent mutiny for several long seconds. ‘If you touch me, so help me, I’ll hit you,’ she vouched with low-pitched vehemence, and, turning away from him, she caught up her nightgown and crossed into the bathroom to remove her make-up.

Her fingers shook so badly that the cream got into her eyes, and she dabbed frantically at it before sluicing her face.

Alejandro was in bed when she emerged, stretched out, his arms crossed behind his head.

Elise eyed him warily as she slipped in beneath the covers and closed her eyes. Seconds later she heard the snap of the bedside lamp as the room was plunged into darkness.

Slowly her lashes swept upwards, and for a long time she stared sightlessly ahead, discerning shadows and a thin strip of moonlight threading between the curtains as her eyes adjusted to the grey light of night.

She was acutely aware of every sound, her own breathing, his, and she knew the moment when Alejandro’s steadied and assumed a deep rhythmic beat.

Tomorrow, she promised as her eyelids became heavy and began to flutter down. Tomorrow she would launch an attack about the depth of his involvement with the glamorous Savannah.

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