Mediterranean Men Unleashed: The Billionaire's Blackmailed Bride
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‘My mum told me she and my dad fell in love at first sight. They got engaged after four months and married two months after that. They had only ever lived with their parents until they married and it took time to adjust, especially as they were both virgins when they met. At least I have started off with a great lover even if you are dumb when it comes to arranging a honeymoon.’
Anton’s eyes narrowed incredulously on her smiling face and he was not in the least amused, the mention of her father hitting a raw nerve.
‘Dumb,’ he repeated. She had the cheek to call him dumb. Was she for real?
He scowled down at her and noted the shimmering sensuality in her sparkling eyes, and he did not know if he wanted to shake her or kiss her … For a man who prided himself on his control, he did not like the ambivalent way she made him feel. She looked about seventeen dressed in white shorts and a blue tee shirt the colour of her eyes, and her hair pulled back in a slide, and her youthful appearance simply increased his unwelcome sense of guilt and anger.
‘For God’s sake, Emily, you are the only dumb one around here. You can’t possibly believe that rubbish you are spouting. Your mother might have been a virgin, but your father certainly wasn’t. Trust me, I know,’ he declared with biting cynicism.
Emily’s euphoric mood took a huge knock. She stumbled back a step, her blue eyes widening at the icy expression on his brutally handsome face. The lover of a few hours ago had gone and in his place was the man with the cold, remote eyes that she had seen on the night they first met.
‘You knew my father?’ she asked, feeling her way through an atmosphere that was suddenly fraught with tension. ‘You met him?’
‘No, I never met him, but I didn’t need to to know what a womanizer he was.’
Emily could not let his slur on her father pass.
‘As you never met my father you can’t possibly know that. But I do know that my mother never lied,’ she argued in defence of her parents. She loved Anton, she had married him, but she was not going to let him walk all over her. It was bad enough she was going to share the first few days of her honeymoon with a group of strangers. ‘You’re not infallible, you know, and in this case you are wrong.’
Anton heard the belligerence in her voice, saw the defiance in her glittering blue eyes and was outraged that she was daring to argue with him. Very few people argued with him and nobody doubted his word. He could not quite believe his very new wife had the nerve to say he was wrong.
‘Your mother must have been as naive as you,’ he opined scathingly, ‘if she believed Charles Fairfax was anything other than a womanizing swine and a snob to boot.’ He was seething with anger and it made him say more than he intended. ‘He probably only married her for her aristocratic connection.’
Without her giving it a second thought Emily’s hand scythed through the air, but Anton’s strong hand caught her wrist before she could make contact with his arrogant face.
‘You little hellcat.’ He twisted her hand behind her back and hauled her hard against his long body. ‘You dare to lash out at me, because I have told you a few home truths about your sainted family.’
‘At least I have one,’ Emily spat, and was immediately disgusted with herself for what was a low blow. But somehow the passion Anton aroused in her sexually seemed to just as easily arouse her anger. She who was normally the most placid of women, and it shocked her.
She glanced up at him. He was looking at her with eyes as cold as the Arctic waste. Then abruptly he let go of her wrist and moved back as though he could not bear to touch her.
‘And do you know why I have not, Emily?’ he said with a sardonic arch of one black brow, and, not waiting for her to answer, he added, ‘Because of your lech of a father.’
‘You never knew my father, and yet you seem to dislike him,’ she murmured. She knew it from the animosity in his tone, the tension in his body, and suddenly she was afraid.
His handsome face hardened. ‘Dislike is too tame a word. I hate and despise the man, and I have every right to.’
Emily shook her head, trying to make sense of what was happening. She was too shocked to speak. How had they gone from a simmering sensual awareness to a senseless argument in minutes?
‘Once I had an older sister, Suki, a beautiful gentle girl. She was eighteen, barely more than a child herself, when she met Charles Fairfax. He seduced her and left her pregnant with his child. Five months later, after learning Fairfax had married your mother, she committed suicide. Obviously he was seeing both of them at the same time.’
All the colour leached from Emily’s face. This was no senseless argument, but deadly serious. She had never even known Anton had a sister. But there was no mistaking the absolute conviction in Anton’s voice, and for him to have apparently held a grudge against her father for over a quarter of a century she found totally appalling. She could not believe what she was hearing, didn’t want to.
‘No, that cannot be true.’ She murmured a denial. ‘My father would never have betrayed my mother.’
‘Believe me, it is,’ he said harshly. ‘Women who foolishly imagine they are in love are dangerous to themselves as well as to others. My mother never fully recovered from the loss of her daughter and I was kept in ignorance of the full facts for decades. As a boy of eleven I was told Suki had died in a tragic car accident. It was only when my mother was dying I discovered the real truth.’
Her blue eyes widened in horror as she recognized the latent anger in his black eyes, the brooding expression on his face, and knew he totally believed what he had just told her. And with the knowledge came pain, a pain that built and built as the full import of his words sank into her brain.
‘When did your mother die?’
He frowned down at her. ‘Does it matter? Last December.’
Oh, my God! Only six months ago. No wonder Anton was so angry, with the death of his mother, the pain of losing his sister must have hit him all over again. From that thought came another, deeply disturbing. Shortly after his mother’s death Anton had made the acquaintance of her brother and uncle, and taken an interest in the Fairfax family and then in her. Coincidence—or something much worse, and a cold dread enveloped her.
Her eyes swept helplessly over him, the bold attractive face, the strong tanned throat revealed by the open neck of his polo shirt, the khaki shorts that hugged his lean hips ending mid-thigh and his long legs. Her heart squeezed as vivid images of his naked body flashed in her mind, the body she had worshipped last night. Anton, the man she loved, and had been certain loved her. But not any more …
CHAPTER FIVE
ANTON had shaken her world on its axis and Emily was no longer certain of anything. She could not bear to look at him.
Her mind spinning, she let her gaze roam over the view of the tiny principality. The sea as smooth as glass, the spectacular marina, the gleaming buildings were picture-postcard perfect, but wasted on her. She needed to think …
The sun was still shining but the warmth no longer seemed to touch her. Yesterday she had been a blushing bride confident in the love of her husband, but now … She let her mind wander back over the first time they had met, the sequence of events, the conversations, his proposal of marriage that had led to this moment, and belatedly she realized he had never actually said he loved her …
Not even last night in the heat of passion had the word love passed his lips.
Emily shivered as cold fingers seemed to grip her heart, the icy tendrils spreading slowly through every part of her. She was an intelligent woman, and suddenly her whirlwind courtship and fairy-tale marriage were falling apart before her eyes. Slowly she turned her head and allowed her gaze to rest on her husband’s hard, expressionless face.
‘Why did you marry me, Anton?’
‘I decided it was time I took a wife and produced an heir. I chose you because I thought you were a beautiful, sensuous woman who would fit me perfectly.’ He reached out a hand to her. ‘And I was right,’ he stated.
Emily batted his hand away. ‘And the rest.’ She stared up at him ashen-faced, horrified at the cynical practicality of his reasoning, but instinctively knowing there was more he was not telling her.
‘I might be dumb. But I am not that dumb. You only came into contact with my family after the death of your mother, and I don’t believe in coincidences. You might as well tell me the whole truth.’ And, though her heart was shattering into a million pieces, bravely she added, ‘Because it is becoming increasingly obvious you did not marry me for love.’ She prayed he would contradict her, declare he loved her and it was all a horrible mistake.
‘Why not?’ Anton said with a shrug of his broad shoulders. ‘You are now my wife—Mrs Emily Diaz, a name your father refused to acknowledge or be associated with, and it satisfies my sense of justice to know you have my name for the rest of your life.’
His dark eyes, a gleam of mocking triumph in their inky depths, clashed with her pained blue. ‘As for love, I don’t believe in it myself. Though women seem to have a desperate need to. What we shared last night and will continue to share is great sexual chemistry, not love.’
Tears blurred Emily’s vision and fiercely she blinked them away. So this was what it felt like to crash and burn. All her hopes and dreams ground to dust in a few short minutes. For a short while, a very brief two months, Anton had been the man she loved. For an even briefer twenty-four hours she had been his wife. He had made love to her, and it had been the most amazing experience of her life and she had thought she was the luckiest woman in the world to be loved by him.
But it had not been love … He freely admitted it was simply sex, nothing more.
For Anton yesterday had been about sex and some misguided notion of retribution, not love, never love …
How could she have been such a blind idiot? She had known the first time she set eyes on him, he was dangerous. She had avoided going out with him for a week. She should have trusted her gut instinct about the man.
Her shimmering blue eyes swept over him, noted the arrogant certainty in his gaze. The Anton he had been when they had first got together, the man she had thought had refrained from making love to her because he respected her, bore no relationship to the Anton before her now. Cold and cynical, he was not the man she had fallen in love with.
She shook her head in disgust, nausea clawing at her stomach as she was forced to accept the man she thought she loved did not exist …’I need the bathroom.’
‘Wait.’ He grasped her upper arm, halting her retreat. ‘This does not change anything, Emily.’
‘It does for me.’ She looked at him. ‘Let me go.’ And she meant it in every sense of the word. ‘I really do need the bathroom.’
Anton’s mouth twisted. ‘Of course.’ He removed his hand from her arm, wondering why the hell he had told Emily about her father when not long ago he had been thanking his lucky stars he had kept his mouth shut.
But then from the minute he had watched her walk down the aisle he had not been his rational self. The woman had that effect on him. Last night he had lost control in bed, a first for him, and this afternoon he had lost his temper at the mention of her father. He was going weak in the head and it had to stop.
Honesty was supposed to be good for a marriage; he’d been honest, he reasoned arrogantly. It was Emily who was unreasonable.
‘Arguing on the deck is not a great idea. We can talk later. After all, neither of us is going anywhere,’ he said dismissively.
He would catch up on some work—he had let things slide a little in his pursuit of Emily and it would give her time to cool down. She said she loved him, and she certainly wanted him. Given his experience of her sex, she’d soon get over the shock of realizing her father had feet of clay after a few days in his bed.
Emily heard the threat in his words and glanced at him in disgust and walked away. Was he really so cold, so insensitive to believe for a second they could carry on as husband and wife now she knew why he had really married her?
Emily walked into the cabin and locked the door behind her. Blindly she headed for the bathroom, and was violently sick. She began to shake uncontrollably and, ripping off her clothes, she stepped into the shower. She turned the water on full, and only then did she give way to the tears. She cried until she could cry no more. Then slowly she straightened and, picking up the shampoo provided, she washed her hair, and then scrubbed every inch of her body, trying to scrub away the scent, the memory of Anton’s touch from every pore of her skin. Trying to scrub away the pain, she had a hollow feeling that would be with her for the rest of her life …
She did not know the man she had married, had never known him. It was Nigel all over again, but worse, because she had been foolish enough to marry Anton. Nigel had wanted her for her supposed fortune and connections, and Anton—he had married her simply because her name was Fairfax. He had seduced her into marriage because he believed her father had seduced his sister. To fulfil a primitive need for revenge … no more or less … and she could not pretend otherwise.
The pain, the sense of betrayal were excruciating, but slowly as she finished washing, turned off the shower and wrapped a large towel around her naked body the pain was overtaken by a cold, numbing anger.
She thought of her parents, and, no matter what the arrogant Anton Diaz thought, she knew her father was incapable of doing what he had said. Her parents had loved each other, they had married in their twenties, and when her mother had died it had broken her father’s heart. She firmly believed it was the stress of losing his wife that had helped cause the heart attack that had killed him far too young.
It was her mother who, when she was terminally ill, had constantly told Emily to embrace life to the full, and not to waste time dwelling on past failures or grudges—life was much too short. A theory her uncle Clive had first taught her when as a child of twelve she had had to accept she was never going to be a ballet dancer.
A trait that Emily had inherited from the Deveral side of her family.
So why was she even giving Anton’s tragic tale a second thought? Where he had got it from she had no idea, and she cared even less. As for her marriage, as far as she was concerned it was over …
Five minutes later, dressed in casual drawstring linen trousers and a matching sleeveless top, Emily lifted her suitcase onto the bed and began to methodically pack the clothes she had unpacked only hours before.
She heard a knock on the door but ignored it.
She was immune to everything except the need to leave. She snapped the suitcase shut, and straightened up. Now all she needed was her travel bag and she was out of here.
‘Just what the hell do you think you are doing?’ a deep voice roared. And Emily spun round to see Anton striding towards her. ‘How dare you lock me out?’ he demanded. His black eyes leaping with fury, he grasped her shoulder. ‘What the hell do you think you are playing at, woman?’
‘I am not playing. I am leaving … The game is over,’ she said, standing tall and proud. ‘Your game,’ she said bitterly.
Emily felt nothing for him. She was cocooned in a block of ice. The hands on her shoulders, the close proximity of his big body had no effect on her. Except to reinforce her determination to leave. It was bad enough she had made the mistake of marrying him. She was certainly not going to allow him to manhandle her.
Anton was furious. He had got no work done, he couldn’t seem to concentrate, and finally he had given up and decided to smooth things over with Emily, only to find she had locked him out of their cabin. Not that it mattered—he had a master-key. But his temper was at breaking-point.
‘Over my dead body.’
‘That would be my preference,’ Emily tossed back.
She felt his great body tense and his hands fell from her shoulders. She watched his handsome face darken and for a second she thought she saw a flash of pain in his eyes, and for a moment she was ashamed of her hateful comment. She would not wish anybody dead. But Anton had the knack of making her say and feel things she did not want to.
‘Well, I think I can safely say, barring accidents, you will not get your wish any time soon. Though for the foreseeable future it appears I must watch my back where you are concerned, my sweet loving wife, because I have no intention of letting you leave. Not now. Not ever.’
‘You have no choice.’ She tilted up her chin and drew on every ounce of her pride to face him. ‘As far as I am concerned the marriage is finished.’
Anton’s dark eyes studied her.
He was furious at her defiance but he did not let it show. Because in a way he could understand her distress, her desire to lash back at him, though he had not appreciated her wishing him dead.
He didn’t do emotions, other than over death and birth maybe. But Emily was an emotional, passionate woman, as she had proved spectacularly last night. She had been brought up on love and happy ever after. Hell, he could still hear her cries of love ringing in his ears when he had taken possession of her exquisite body. And he would again, he thought confidently. She just needed time to adjust to the reality of life as his wife.
‘We always have a choice, Emily,’ he murmured silkily, and, snaking an arm around her waist, he pulled her into the strength of his powerful body. ‘Your choice is quite simple. You stay with me, your husband,’ he emphasized, grasping her chin between his fingers and tilting her face up to his. ‘You behave civilly as my wife and the perfect hostess I know you to be with our guests and you can continue to dabble at your career until you’re pregnant with my child. Something that was implicit in the promise you made yesterday, I seem to recall.’
She stared at him. ‘That was before I knew the truth. Now let me go.’
Her usual luminous blue eyes were impenetrable, her body rigid in his hold, and it made Anton want to pierce her icy control … Something he would never have imagined she was capable of.
‘You have two choices. One, you stay with me. The other is you return to your brother’s home, and his pregnant wife, and inform them you have left me.’ He let his hand stroke down her throat, a finger resting on the pulse that beat wildly in her neck. Not such icy control as he had thought …
‘Then you can explain that naturally, as I am deeply upset, I am severing all ties with your family,’ he drawled with mocking sarcasm. ‘Which unfortunately for Fairfax Engineering will mean an immediate repayment of the loans I forwarded some months ago for the expansion of the company.’
Then, like all good predators, he watched and waited for his victim to recognize her fate.
He saw the puzzled expression on her face, could almost see her mind assimilating what he had said, and knew the moment she realized. Anger flared in her wide blue eyes and flags of colour stained her cheeks. She twisted out of his hold and he let her, smiling inwardly. He knew she was not going anywhere …
Emily took a few steps back on legs that trembled. The numbness that had protected her since his shocking revelation about her father was fading fast and the effort to remain unaffected by his closeness had taken every bit of control she possessed. She was horribly conscious that just being held against him had made her traitorous body achingly aware of him and was furious at herself and him … She drew in a few deep steadying breaths and wrapped her arms defensively around her midriff, grittily determined to control her anger and the rest …
The silence lengthened.
She could feel Anton watching, waiting, and finally, when she was confident she could speak to him without tearing the lying rat’s eyes out, she glanced across at him.
‘And what exactly does that mean for Fairfax?’ she asked in a cool little voice.
‘An educated guess. The expansion will have to stop and they will be in deep financial trouble, and probably ripe for a hostile takeover.’ He gave her a humourless smile. ‘As I said before, the choice is yours, Emily.’
He didn’t need to add a takeover by him. Emily figured that out for herself. ‘You would do that …’ she prompted, and saw his proud head incline slightly, the glimmer of triumph in his dark eyes, and she knew the answer.
‘If I have to. I will do anything to keep you.’
A hysterical laugh rose in her throat and she choked it back. He would do anything to keep her. A few hours ago she would have been flattered by his words, now she was just sickened.
Suddenly her legs threatened to collapse beneath her, and abruptly she sat down on the bed, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, and stared up at him in sheer disbelief …
She shook her head and looked down at her hands, her gaze lingering on the gold band on her finger. What a travesty …
Slowly she reran the scenario of the future of their marriage Anton had painted in her head. It did not take a genius to work out he must have planned this all along. She also realized there was one glaring flaw in the choice he had given her as far as she was concerned.
‘If what you say is true you can take the company any time, whether we are together or not,’ she said slowly. ‘And you freely admit you don’t love me, or anyone else for that matter. We both know you can have any woman you want without much effort, and frequently do by all accounts.’ Though picturing him in another woman’s arms doing what he had done to her was like a knife to her heart. She paused for a moment, drawing on every bit of will-power she could before lifting her head and asking, ‘So why on earth, Anton, would I stay with you?’
He stood towering over her, his expression unreadable. He was so close she imagined she felt the warmth of his body reaching out to her, and she trembled and despised herself for it.
Then he smiled—he actually smiled, all confident macho male, and she wanted to thump him. He sat down beside her, his great body angled towards her, and hastily she moved away, but banged against her damn suitcase and sent it tumbling to the floor.
‘Steady, Emily.’ He reached across her to put a restraining hand on her arm and she flinched at the contact. ‘And though I am flattered you think I can have any woman I want, I want only you.’
Anton knew he had her. He had noted her tremble. His original assessment was right—in a few days she would forget this nonsense about leaving him. But he had to tread warily. Naturally she was upset and angry because he had forced her to face reality and accept he was not quite the Prince Charming she had imagined … but as human as the next man.
He had not got where he was today without being ruthless when it came to what he wanted. He never took an insult to his integrity without seeking retribution. Anything less was a sign of weakness, and no one could accuse him of that.
But he could do charming …
She was as skittish as the newborn foals he bred on his ranch in Peru and needed gentle handling. She would stay with him anyway, of that he was determined. But he would prefer her to stay with him willingly and what he wanted he always got.
‘I regret arguing with you, but you have a knack of inflaming all my passions.’ He grimaced. ‘I never meant to tell you the truth about your father, but your rosy view of him spiked my temper and for that I apologize. So now can we put this argument behind us, and get on with our marriage? It is up to you, Emily, but I promise if you stay I will never harm your family firm in any way.’ He reached for her hand, and he found he was grasping air as she shot off the bed at the speed of light, and spun around to stare down at him.
Surprise didn’t cut it; he had been at his caring best, what more did she want? His mouth grim, Anton studied her. God, she was magnificent. Statuesque, her blue eyes blazing, her perfect breasts rising and falling in her agitation, her hands placed defiantly on her slender hips. He was aroused simply looking at her, and then she spoke, and his softly-softly approach flew out of the window.