Her eyes prickling, Maxie gave her friend a hug. She blamed herself for being too frank and worrying Liz. From here on in, she decided shamefacedly, she would keep her thoughts and her plans to herself.
Angelos phoned her at six that evening. He talked with the cool detachment of someone handing out instructions to an employee. She knew herself unforgiven. His London lawyer would visit her with the prenuptial contract. The ceremony would take place the following week in the north of England.
‘Next week?’ Maxie exclaimed helplessly.
‘I’m organising a special licence.’
‘Why do we have to go north?’
‘We couldn’t marry in London without attracting attention.’
Maxie bit her lower lip painfully. So, Liz innocently assumed that such secrecy couldn’t be achieved? She didn’t know Angelos. Employing his wealth in tandem with his naturally devious mind, Angelos clearly intended to take every possible precaution.
‘Do we travel up together in heavy disguise?’
‘We’ll travel separately. I’ll meet you up there.’
‘Oh...’ Even facetious comments were squashed by such attention to detail.
‘I’m afraid that I won’t be seeing you beforehand—’
‘Why not?’ Maxie heard herself demand in disbelief, and then was furious with herself for making such an uncool response.
‘Naturally I intend to take some time off. But in order to free that space in a very tight schedule, I’ll be flying to Japan later this evening and moving on to Indonesia for the rest of the week.’
‘You’ll be seriously jet lagged by the time you get back.’
‘I’ll survive. I suggest you disengage yourself from your contract with the modelling agency—’
‘I was on the brink of signing a new one,’ Maxie admitted.
‘Excellent. Then you can simply tell them that you have changed your mind.’
Maxie was still recovering from Catriona Ferguson’s angry incredulity at their brief and unpleasant interview when she was subjected to the visit from Angelos’s lawyer.
At her request the older man read out the document she was expected to sign. If Maxie had been as avaricious as Angelos apparently believed, she would’ve been ecstatic. In return for her discretion she was offered a vast monthly allowance on top of an all-expenses-paid lifestyle, and when the marriage ended she was to receive a quite breathtaking settlement.
By the time he had finished speaking, Maxie’s nails were digging into her palms like pincers and she was extremely pale. She signed, but the only thing that gave her the strength to do so was the bitter certainty that in six months’ time she would tear up her copy of that agreement and throw the pieces scornfully back at Angelos’s feet. Only then would he appreciate that she could neither be bought nor paid off.
The church sat on the edge of a sleepy Yorkshire hamlet. Mid-morning on a weekday, the village had little traffic and even fewer people. Maxie checked her watch for the tenth time. Angelos was now eleven minutes late.
Having run out of casual conversation, the elderly rector and his wife were now uneasily anchored in the far corner of the church porch while Maxie hovered by the door like a pantomime bride, on the watch in terror that the groom had changed his mind. And it was possible, wasn’t it? The arrangements had been so detached they now seemed almost surreal.
A car had picked her up at a very early hour to ferry her north. And Angelos had phoned only twice over the past week. He would have been better not phoning at all. Her spontaneity vanished the instant she recognised her own instinctive physical response to that rich, dark drawl. It had not made for easy dialogue.
Today, I am getting married. This is my wedding day, she told herself afresh in a daze of disbelief, and of course he would turn up, but he would get a tongue-lashing when he did. Angelos... Hatred was so incredibly enervating, Maxie conceded grimly. He kept her awake at night and he haunted her dreams. That infuriated and threatened her.
In defiance of the suspicion that she was taking part in some illegal covert operation, she was wearing her scarlet dress. A scarlet dress for a scarlet woman. No doubt that would strike Angelos as an extremely appropriate choice.
Hearing the sound of an approaching car, Maxie tensed. A gleaming Mercedes closely followed by a second car pulled up. Angelos emerged from the Mercedes. Sheathed in a wonderfully well-cut navy suit, pale blue tie and white silk shirt, he looked stupendous. As his London lawyer appeared from the second car, Angelos paused to wait for him. As if he had all the time in the world, Maxie noted incredulously. Her ready temper sizzled. How dared Angelos keep her waiting and then refuse to hurry himself?
Stepping into full view, her attention all for Angelos as he mounted the shallow steps to the door, Maxie snapped, ‘And what sort of a time do you call this? Where the heck have you been?’
As his lawyer froze into shattered stillness, Angelos’s black eyes lit on Maxie like burnished blazing gold. And then a funny thing happened. A sudden scorching smile of raw amusement wiped the disturbing detachment from his savagely handsome features. ‘We had to wait thirty minutes for a landing slot at the airport. Short of a parachute jump, there wasn’t much I could do about that.’
Suddenly self-conscious, her cheeks flaming, Maxie shrugged. ‘OK.’
‘Thanks for wearing my favourite outfit. You look spectacular,’ Angelos murmured huskily in her ear, before he moved smoothly forward to offer his apologies to the rector for his late arrival.
Minutes later, they were walking down the aisle. As the ceremony began Maxie looked tautly around herself and then down at her empty hands. Not even a flower to hold. And her dress—so inappropriate, so strident against the timeworn simplicity of the church and its quiet atmosphere of loving piety. But then what did love have to do with her agreement with Angelos?
Suddenly she felt the most terrible fraud. Like any other woman, she had had wedding day dreams. Not one of them had included marrying a man who didn’t love her. Not one of them had included the absence of her father and of even a single friend or well-wisher. Her eyes prickled with tears. Finding herself all choked up, Maxie blinked rapidly, mortified by her own emotionalism. A ring was slid onto her wedding finger. And then it was over. When Angelos tried to kiss her, she twisted her golden head away and presented him with a cool, damp cheek.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Angelos demanded as he strode down the steps, one big hand stubbornly enclosing hers in spite of her evasive attempts to ease free of him. ‘Why the tears?’
‘I feel horribly guilty...we just took vows we didn’t mean.’
Maxie climbed into the Mercedes. After a brief exchange with his lawyer, Angelos swung into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. Starting the engine, he drove off. The silence between them screeched louder with every passing minute.
‘Tell me, is there the slightest hope of any bridal joy on the horizon?’ Angelos finally enquired in a charged and sardonic undertone.
‘I don’t feel like a bride,’ Maxie responded flatly. ‘I thought you’d be pleased about that.’
Angelos brought the Mercedes to a sudden halt on the quiet country road. As he snapped free his seat belt Maxie turned to look at him, wondering why he had stopped. With a lack of cool that took her completely by surprise, Angelos pulled her into his powerful arms and sealed his mouth to hers in a hot, hard, punishing kiss. Maxie struck his broad muscular back with balled fists of outrage, but all that pent-up passion he unleashed surged through her like a lightning bolt of retribution.
Her head swam; her heartbeat thundered insanely fast. Her fists uncoiled, her fingers flexed and then rose to knot round the back of his strong neck. She clung. He prised her lips apart and with a ragged groan of need let his tongue delve deep. Excited beyond belief at that intensely sexual assault, Maxie reacted with a whimpering, startled moan of pleasure, and then as abruptly as he had reached for her Angelos released her again, his hard profile taut
‘We haven’t got time for this. I don’t want to have to hang around at the airport.’
Maxie’s swollen mouth tingled. She lowered her head, but as Angelos shifted restlessly on the seat and switched the engine back on she could not help but notice that he was sexually aroused. Her face burning from that intimate awareness, she swiftly averted her attention again. He seemed to get that way very easily, she thought nervously. And only then did Maxie admit to herself that her own lack of sexual experience had now become a source of some anxiety to her.
For a cool, sophisticated male, Angelos had seemed alarmingly close to the edge of his control. If he could react like that to one kiss, what would he be like tonight?
That Greek temperament of his was fiery. Virile, overwhelming masculinity powered his smouldering passion to possess, which she had already frustrated more than once. And, since he believed that she had had other lovers, maybe he wouldn’t bother too much with preliminaries. Maybe he would just expect her to be as hot and impatient as he was for satisfaction...
For goodness’ sake, Angelos wasn’t a clumsy teenager, she told herself in exasperation. As experienced as he undoubtedly was in the bedroom, he was sure to be a skilled and considerate lover. And he would never guess that she was inexperienced. She had once read on a problem page that most men couldn’t even tell whether a woman was a virgin or not.