Penny Jordan - The Scandalous Warehams

‘What do you mean by “sensible”?’ Ilios asked.

Lizzie shook her head. ‘Perhaps I could work for you as an interior designer?’

‘The constructions in which I am involved are very large-scale commercial projects—schools, offices, corporate buildings, that kind of thing. However …’ Ilios paused, turning to give her an assessing look in the shadowy darkness of his car. ‘There is an alternative means by which you could clear the debt between us.’

Lizzie moistened her suddenly dry lips with the tip of her tongue, before asking in a voice that was slightly hoarse with tension, ‘And that is?’

The Bentley picked up speed as Ilios overtook the car in front of them. The delay in answering her ratcheted up Lizzie’s tension.

It seemed an aeon before he turned towards her, his profile outlined by the moonlight beaming into the car. It was an undeniably handsome and very sensually male profile, Lizzie admitted, but there was a harshness in the downward turn of his mouth, that made her shiver inwardly. She wasn’t sure which she feared the most: the effect of his harshness on her too easily bruised emotions, or the effect of his sensuality on her equally easily aroused senses.

‘Marriage,’ Ilios told her.

‘MARRIAGE?’ Lizzie repeated unsteadily, feeling that she must somehow have misunderstood him.

‘According to my solicitors I am in need of a wife,’ Ilios informed her curtly. ‘And since you claim you cannot repay me in cash, and since I have no appetite for the kind of woman who so easily shares her body with any man who has had the price to pay for it, I have decided that this is best way for me to recoup what I have lost and take payment from you.’

Lizzie felt as though glue had been poured into her brain, locking it together and jamming her ability to think.

The only words she could summon were the words, Ilios Manos, marriage , and danger —all written large in bright red ink.

‘No,’ she told Ilios shakily, before she could do the utterly reckless, dangerous and unthinkable and say yes. Whatever the reason Ilios might want her as a wife, it was absolutely not because he wanted her , and she had better hang on to that fact, Lizzie told herself, not start spinning crazily foolish fantasies and daydreams about Mr Right, Cinderella and happy ever after, filled with nights of sensual delight and days of blissful joy.

A categorical no was not the answer Ilios wanted, and nor was it the answer he had expected. He knew of a dozen women at least who would have been delirious with joy at the thought of becoming his wife, quite apart from the fact that Lizzie Wareham was in no position to dare to refuse him anything. She was certainly not going to be allowed to do so. Didn’t she realise the position she was in? A position in which he held all the aces and she held none. If not, then perhaps it was time he made that position completely clear to her.

‘No?’ he challenged her coldly. ‘So it is just as I thought. All that you have said to me about your desire to protect your sisters—your family—is nothing more than lies and total fiction.’ He paused. A man of action and powerful determination, Ilios did not waste time analysing his decisions once he had made them, or asking himself what might have motivated them—even when they involved the kind of turnaround that had taken place inside his head since that very morning. He had decided Lizzie would be his wife.

He also hated not winning; once he had decided upon a course of action he stuck to it, no matter what obstacles lay in his way. Obstacles could be crushed and then removed. It was simply a matter of finding the right method to do so, with speed and efficiency, and Ilios thought he knew exactly the right method to shift the obstacle to his plans that was Lizzie’s ‘no’.

‘I was about to say—before you were so quick to refuse me—that I am also prepared to pay you a bonus of one hundred thousand pounds, on the understanding that for your part you conduct yourself in public at all times during our enforced relationship as you would were that relationship real. In other words I expect you, in your role as my fiancée and then my wife, to behave.’

A bonus? What he meant was a bribe , Lizzie acknowledged, feeling sickened as much by her awareness of how little she could now afford to refuse as by her personal feelings swirling through her at the thought of being married to him.

‘To behave as though I’m in love with you?’ Lizzie supplied lightly, determined not to let him see how humiliated she felt. The thought of having to act as though she loved him filled her with an immediate and self-defensive need to refuse.

It was bad enough that he was humiliating her by offering her money, without her own painful awareness of her fear that the physical longing he aroused in her so easily might overwhelm her.

A truly brave person did not turn and flee from their own fear and danger, Lizzie reminded herself. A truly brave person stood their ground and fought to overcome it, to make themselves even stronger. And besides, how could she turn down the money he was prepared to offer her when she knew what it would mean at home. It would clear the mortgage, for one thing, and leave nearly ten thousand pounds’ much needed ‘rainy day money’.

It meant that she would be quite literally selling herself to him—a man she already knew affected her as no man ever had. But she had to accept his offer for the sake of her family. How could she live with herself if she didn’t, knowing the huge difference it would make to their lives?

‘To behave as though our relationship is genuine and desired by both of us,’ Ilios told her. ‘Very, well, then.’ he continued, when Lizzie remained silent. ‘If you prefer to have your family stripped of the roof over their heads—’

What kind of fool was she to dare to try and refuse him? What was she expecting? That he would turn into some kind of white knight in shining armour? Some kind of saviour who would generously let her off any kind of payment? It was time she grew up and learned as he had had to learn that saviours didn’t exist. The only way to escape from the burdens life presented you with was to dig your own way out from under them—with your bare hands, if necessary, as he had. No doubt she expected him to feel sorry for her, with her tale of how her family had suffered and how she believed it was her duty to protect them. Why should he? Who had ever protected him when he had needed protection? No one. Hardship made a person stronger, unless they were so weak in the first place that they went to the wall. She must know that herself, since she had strength.

Ilios frowned. When and how had he decided, without knowing more about her, that Lizzie Wareham had strength? Strength was something he admired and respected, after all. Especially when that strength was hard-won.

‘No, of course I don’t,’ Lizzie told Ilios fiercely, immediately tormented by the horrific images his callous words had conjured up. ‘I just don’t understand why you should want to marry me.’

It was the wrong thing to have said.

‘I don’t,’ Ilios assured her, and the look he gave her sliced her pride to the bone. ‘It is my lawyers who believe that the best way for me to protect what is rightfully mine from my cousin’s greedy machinations is for me to marry. Tino needs money. He thinks he can blackmail me into giving him that money by threatening to challenge my right of inheritance under our grandfather’s will. He knows that I will never give up what is in effect a sacred charge on me, a duty to both the history of our name and its future, so he thinks I will give in to him. But I shall not. He claims that the fact that I am known to have sworn never to marry and do not have a wife means I have broken an unwritten article of faith—namely that Villa Manos must be passed down through the male line of our family. Villa Manos and its lands are a sacred trust. They have been in our family for over five hundred years. They are the essence of what we are. Manos blood, my father’s blood, was sacrificed for them. There is nothing I will not do to hold my duty and to meet it. Nothing!’