Read Online Bridal Bargains by Michelle Reid - Free Book Online Page B

left her lips because the effect it had on him made her feel cruel, as his lean face closed up as tight as a drum.
    He’s actually serious! she realised. She felt her legs threaten to collapse beneath her and had to move over to one of the dark red recliners and lower herself carefully into it.
    ‘Please do not misunderstand me,’ he said, suddenly standing high on his mountain of dignity again. ‘I am not suggesting an intimate relationship. Just a—marriage of convenience if you like. Where we will maintain an appearance of intimacy. But that is all …’
    No intimacy, she repeated to herself, and as quickly as that her eyes went blank as her imagination shot off to a place where she’d stared into this man’s eyes while his mouth had been fused very
intimately
with her own.
    ‘I will, of course, ensure that the—arrangement is a beneficial one for you,’ he coldly continued. ‘The advantages in being the wife of a very wealthy man do, I think, speak for themselves. And it need not be a lifetime thing—although I will have to insist that I become Melanie’s legal father or it will not work.’
    ‘What won’t work?’ she questioned helplessly.
    But he gave a shake of his dark head. ‘I can only reveal that if I gain your agreement,’ he said. ‘But in her becoming my legal daughter,’ he went on as if she hadn’t made the interruption, ‘I will be assuring Melanie’s future—which canonly be a good thing for her, since she will also become my sole heir. And if and when you decide that it is time for you to leave me so you can get on with your own life you will not go empty-handed.’
    Claire’s mind was starting to scramble. She was sure that what he was actually saying here, in a carefully veiled way, was that he wanted Melanie, but if Claire had to come along with her, then he was prepared to agree to that.
    ‘I think you’re crazy,’ she told him.
    He grimaced, but didn’t argue the point.
    ‘You don’t even know me!’
    This time it was a shrug. ‘I am a man who has always relied on my first impression of people—and I like you, Claire,’ he said, as if that should mean something special to her. ‘I even admire you for the way you have been coping on your own with a child and little to no help from anyone.’
    ‘I do have help!’ she cried, her hackles rising at his too accurate reading of her.
    ‘Do you mean—this kind of help?’ he asked, and from his trouser pocket he withdrew a wad of bank notes.
    As she stared at them as if she had never so much as laid eyes on paper money before, it took a few moments for it to sink in what he was actually showing her.
    Her eyes shot to his. ‘Is that the money Aunt Laura left for me today?’
    ‘You dropped it on the floor in your flat when you fainted,’ he explained. ‘I picked it up and placed it in my pocket for safekeeping. I counted it earlier; there is exactly one hundred pounds here,’ he informed her grimly. ‘Knowing the dire straits of your circumstances, that you owe at least four times that amount on your rent
and
being fully aware that you also have to exist somehow, your aunt condescended to leave you a paltry one hundred pounds.’
    To Claire, who had nothing, one hundred pounds was an absolute fortune! But it obviously wasn’t to this man. For theway he tossed the money aside made his disgust more than clear.
    ‘In effect, what she was doing,’ he went on, remorseless in his determination to get his own point across, ‘was wearing you down so that you would begin to look on her proposal more favourably. I got that much out of her while you were half comatose,’ he inserted tightly. ‘And she was trying her best to explain to me why her only relatives were living in that kind of squalor.’
    Claire closed her eyes, the word ‘squalor’ cutting right to the heart of her.
    ‘You already knew about her suggestion before I told you,’ she breathed, feeling the sharp sting of one that had been well and truly