Penny Jordan - The Scandalous Warehams

His fury, and the pride that went with it, filled the air around her so that she could almost feel and taste them, Lizzie recognized.

‘Tino believes that he has backed me into a corner,’ he continued angrily. ‘That I will be prepared to buy him off in order to keep Villa Manos. My solicitors advise me that the best and only guaranteed way to block Tino’s plans is for me to marry. After all, with blackmail one payment is never the end, it is merely the beginning. If I were to give in to him now—which I have no intention of doing—Tino would think that he has me in his power.’

Privately Lizzie found it impossible to imagine that anyone, male or female, would be foolish enough to think they could control a man like Ilios Manos.

‘Why don’t you simply find someone you genuinely want to marry?’ she suggested. ‘After all, a man with your—’

‘With my what?’ Ilios stopped her. ‘With my wealth? That is exactly why I am not married and why I never intend to marry. Only a fool voluntarily puts himself in a position where a woman can enjoy a rich man’s money both in marriage and then out of it, after they both discover that they no longer want one another. The curse of wealth is that it has the same attraction for sharks as fresh blood. My marriage to you will be different. You will already have been paid to wear my name and my ring. My cousin does not have the temperament for a long fight. Once he sees that I am married he will lose interest and the marriage can be annulled.’

Lizzie shivered as she heard the implacable merciless coldness in Ilios’s voice. It reminded her all too well of what the reality of her situation was.

Once, before their parents’ death, she might have been an impulsive eager young woman who believed that one day the sensuality of her nature would find joyous fulfilment with a man who was her soul mate. But that had been a long time ago. Since then she had believed that sensuality and its satisfaction were things she had put to one side without regret. Now, though—albeit against her will—she suspected that Ilios Manos had reignited her female desire. That made her vulnerable to him in a way that could not be countenanced.

For her own sake she should protect herself by returning to England and never thinking about him or seeing him again. For her own sake. But what about her family? For them, for their sake to protect them, she needed to stay here and accept the terms that Ilios was forcing on her. How could she possibly put herself first?

As though he had access to her private thoughts, Ilios told her unkindly, ‘You have two choices. Either you agree to marry me, and in doing so give your sisters the financial protection you claim is all-important to you, or you refuse and face the consequences. Because I will pursue you for repayment of your debt to me, with all the power at my command. And I warn you—do not make the mistake of thinking I do not mean what I say or that I will not carry out my retribution.’

Two choices? He was wrong about that, Lizzie admitted bleakly to herself. She had no choice at all.

Even so, she managed to keep her head held high as she told him, ‘Very well, then. I shall marry you—although there seems to be something you have overlooked in your calculations,’ she couldn’t resist adding.

‘Which is?’ he demanded.

‘You said that Villa Manos and its lands must be passed from father to son,’ Lizzie pointed out to him.

‘And so it shall be,’ Ilios agreed. ‘We are living in the twenty-first century now,’ he told her matter-of-factly. ‘A child can be created without its parents having to meet, never mind get married.’

‘But what about love?’ Lizzie couldn’t stop herself from asking. ‘You may fall in love, and then—’

‘That will never happen. I don’t believe in what you call “love”, and I don’t want to. I would never trust any woman to have my children and not at some stage use them as pawns for her own benefit.’

The harshness in his voice warned Lizzie that this was a dangerous subject, one which raised strong emotions in him, even though she suspected that Ilios himself would refuse to accept that. But not to believe in love—of any kind … Lizzie shivered at the thought of such a cold and barren existence. Love could hurt the human heart—badly—but surely it was also woven into the weft and warp of human life in a way that made it as essential as air and water.

‘When the time comes,’ Ilios continued, ‘I shall ensure that I become the father of one or possibly two sons. They will carry my DNA along with that of a woman who will provide the eggs before being carried by a surrogate. Neither women will know who I am, because it will not be any of their business. My sons will grow up with me, knowing that I am their father.’

‘But they will never know their mother.’ Lizzie’s shock couldn’t be hidden. ‘Aren’t you concerned about how that might affect them?’

‘No. Because they will grow up knowing that they were planned and wanted—by me—and why. They will know too that I have protected them from exploitation by any woman using them for her own financial advantage. They will be far too busy learning what it means to be a Manos to worry about the absence from their lives of a woman they can call “Mother”. Unlike many other children they will never be in the position of believing that their mother loves them above all else only to find that she does not …’

Was this the reason he refused to believe in love?

‘Is that what happened to you?’ she asked softly, driven again to feel pity for the child he must have been, despite the way he had behaved towards her. The words were spoken before she could check them.

The softness of Lizzie’s voice touched a previously unrecognised area of raw pain within him that immediately had Ilios fighting to deny its existence—furious with himself for having such a vulnerability, and even more furious with Lizzie for so accurately finding it.

‘Don’t waste your time or your pity trying to psychoanalyse me. All I want from you is payment of your debt to me. Nothing less and nothing more,’ he told her coldly.

It was all too much for her to take in, Lizzie admitted numbly. Physical and emotional exhaustion claimed her as the miles flew by, and her eyes ached to be closed just as her mind ached for the panacea of sleep, so that it could escape for a little while from the daunting prospect ahead of her. If it was cowardly to allow herself to find that escape in sleep, then she would just have to be a coward, Lizzie told herself, and she allowed her eyes to close.

He had got what he wanted, so why wasn’t he feeling a greater sense of triumph? Ilios wondered. Why wasn’t he filled with a sense of righteous satisfaction in having forced Lizzie to make reparation? He had the right and the justification for feeling both of those things, after all.

Some sense he hadn’t known he possessed alerted him to the fact that Lizzie had fallen asleep again. He glanced at her. At least she would make a convincing wife—which, of course, was exactly why he had hit on this method of making her pay what she owed him. It was a perfectly logical and sensible decision for him to have made, and one which would leave him with the balance sheet of his pride healthily in credit. That was why he had been able to offer her the additional inducement of a cash payment. There was no other reason. No question of him actually having felt some sort of ridiculous compassion for the plight of her family. He simply wasn’t that kind of man and never would be. If Lizzie Wareham was the victim of circumstance rather than her own greed, as she insisted to him she was, then what was that to him? Nothing.

He had no duty to take the woes of others onto his own shoulders. His duty was solely to himself alone. Because there was only himself. Alone. That was what he was—alone. And that was the way he preferred it, and it always would be.