The Scandalous Warehams. Penny Jordan
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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.
Ilios put his foot down on the accelerator. His need to focus on the increased speed with which he was driving might be giving him an excuse not to focus on the woman sleeping at his side, but it was not an excuse he needed, he assured himself. Nor was it anything to do with him if the angle at which she was sleeping was likely to give her a stiff neck. But his foot was covering the brake in the minute gap between him recognising her discomfort and refuting his need to become involved in it.
Some instinct told Lizzie that something had changed and that she needed to wake up. A scent—alien and pulse-quickening, and yet also familiar and desired—caught at her senses, like the warmth of the heat from another body close to her own, the touch of a hand on her skin. Slowly Lizzie opened her eyes, her heart banging into her chest wall as she realised that she was practically lying flat in the front seat of the Bentley, with Ilios leaning over her. The soft light illuminated the interior of the car, and with it the carved perfection of his features.
Inside her head a tape played, trapping her when she was too vulnerable to stop it, tormenting her with images of herself reaching up to touch his face with her fingertips, exploring its chiselled features. Surely it should be impossible for a real live man to have such classically perfect male features?
She wanted to touch him, to run her fingertips over his face as though he were indeed a marvellous sculpture, created by hands so skilled that one could not help but yearn to touch the masterpiece they had created.
She could almost feel the hard-cut shape of his mouth—the lower lip full and sensual, the groove from the centre of his top lip to his nose clearly marked. A sign of great sensuality, so she had once read. His skin would feel warm and dry, and as she explored the pattern of his lips he would reach out and take hold of her wrist, kissing her fingers.
Frantically Lizzie struggled to sit upright, panicked by Ilios’s proximity and the unwanted images inside her head to which it was giving rise.
His sharp, ‘Be still’, was harshly commanding, his eyes a deep dark gold in the soft light of the interior of the car. Hadn’t it been the Greek King Midas whose touch had turned everything before him to gold, thus depriving him of life-giving water and food? Even his son had been turned into a golden statue by his touch, leaving him unable to return his love. Was that what had happened to Ilios? Had the circumstances of his birth and the burden of his inheritance deprived him of the ability to feel love? What if it had? Why should that matter to her?
‘There is no cause for you to act like a nervous virgin. I was simply adjusting your seat so that you could sleep in it safety.’
Lizzie’s