Bought for the Billionaire's Revenge(30)

He shook his head. ‘I believed that having you as my wife would make you mine. It doesn’t work like that, though.’ His expression was bleak for a moment, before hard certainty crossed it. ‘You will never be able to forget the way I propositioned you, and nor will I. I look at you and see the man I have become. A man I despise.’

‘You have helped my father,’ she said quietly. ‘I could never hate you after what you’ve done for him.’

‘You have to release us both from this. I can’t live with how I’ve hurt you.’

She nodded, her throat raw from unshed tears. ‘You have hurt me,’ she whispered. ‘Just as I hurt you. Does that make us even now?’

He stood up, moving angrily towards the glass doors and staring out. ‘You were a teenager. A grieving teenager. You hurt my pride and my ego and I left. I should have stayed. It takes courage to stay and fight for what you want. But I didn’t like how it felt to be rejected, so I went off like a sulking child.’ He thrust his hands in his pockets. ‘I didn’t deserve you.’

She lifted her feet onto the sofa so she could rest her chin against her knees. ‘Fighting would have been pointless. You would have only upset me more than I already was. I truly believed I had no choice but to end it.’

He nodded, thinking of the pregnancy test box he’d discovered. He turned slowly, but pain was a fresh wave crashing over him. She was a contradiction of fragility and strength. Broken but resolved. Determined and disappointed.

He strode to her, a guttural sound of angst tearing from his chest. ‘I have broken whatever we used to be—not you. If you are pregnant I will support you. I will make sure you have everything you and the baby need. But I will not let you use that as a reason to stay with me.’

Shock flashed over Marnie and her skin paled to paper-white. ‘The...baby?’ She swallowed. ‘How did you know?’ What was the point in denying it?

‘I found the box in our bathroom,’ he responded, so close he could touch her, but not allowing himself to do so.

She hadn’t bothered to hide it because she’d thought they would have a perfect dinner together, over which she would share with him the happy news. Happy news! Well, at least there was still some truth in that. Thoughts of the baby filled her shattered heart with a slight antiseptic against the pain.

‘Is it true?’ he asked, his words anguished.

Slowly she nodded, pulling her lower lip between her teeth. ‘Yes...’

‘Thee mou!’ He groaned, standing and running a hand over his eyes. He seemed to stand there for ever, a heaving man, his whole body showing instant rejection of the idea of their child. Just as he’d said he would.

What had she expected? That he would welcome this news?

‘I am so sorry.’ He groaned again, dropping his hand and pinning her with the full force of his shocked gaze.

‘Sorry?’ she repeated, feeling numbed now, so fresh pain wasn’t capable of sinking in.

‘First I trapped you with blackmail and now you must feel trapped by our baby. But you can leave. You must leave. A baby is no reason to continue this farce.’

She sobbed and nodded. ‘I know that.’

Neither spoke for a long time. Marnie was trying to imagine a life without Nikos and all she saw was the bleakness that had been her bedfellow for these past six years.

‘If I could fix this, I would,’ he said.

She nodded again, resting her cheek on her knees. She had chosen to stay and fight, but so far she had done a lot of listening and no actual fighting. She tried to find the strength in her heart, but it was in ruins.

‘There is something else you should know.’ He spoke with a grim finality to his words. ‘I could not find the words to explain last night.’

‘Explain what?’ she whispered, wondering at the pain in her throat.

‘I have bought Kenington Hall and put it in your name.’

She lifted her head sharply, almost giving herself whiplash in the process. Everything else disappeared from her mind. ‘You’ve what?’

He expelled a sigh and crouched down on his haunches so that their eyes were level. ‘You love the property, and I wanted you to know it to be safe. That no matter what happened to your father, or to our marriage, you would have the security of your family home.’

She let that statement sink in. ‘When did you do this?’

‘When I met with your father.’

She nodded, but nothing was making sense. ‘Were you planning to divorce me even then? Was it to be my consolation prize?’ Grief lanced her. ‘What did I do wrong? I thought we were making this work...’

‘You did nothing wrong, Marnie, except fall in love with an arrogant, selfish bastard like me.’ He dropped his head into his hands. ‘I didn’t buy the house because I wanted to leave you. I bought it because I wanted you to understand that you have options. That you and your family are safe. Even before speaking with your mother I knew I had to give you back your freedom before I could even hope to make amends.’

‘I have never considered myself to lack freedom,’ she inserted seriously, her eyes sparkling, her mind moving quickly. ‘So you did want to make this marriage a real one?’

A muscle jerked in his jaw. ‘I cannot say if I ever thought of it in those terms.’

He dared to lift a hand and touch her soft hair. Fear at what he was on the brink of losing was all around him—a pit of despair he knew would swallow him if he didn’t explain himself better than he was doing now.

‘I knew only that I wanted you to look at me with the love you once felt. That I wanted to be able to smile at you with the love that is in here.’ He tapped his hand against his chest.

Marnie made a sound of disbelief.

‘You should leave me. You can go and it will not change how I feel about you. Your father is out of debt. Kenington Hall is safe in your hands. And I will be as involved as you allow me to be in our child’s life. You must decide what will make you happy.’

Happy? That felt so far away.

She stood up, something snapping inside her. She could no longer sit still as though this were a normal discussion. Her temper flared. She spun round, her hands on her hips, her face showing the full extent of her rage. There was nothing remotely cold about her now. She was all feelings and flame.

‘You’re such an idiot!’ she shouted at the top of her lungs. ‘I have always loved you! Always! Even when I thought I was over you, how could I be? I married you! And—newsflash!—I didn’t have to! Even to save my father’s financial situation. I would only ever have married one man on earth. You. Only you.’

She wrapped her arms around herself.

‘You were right before, when you said that you should have stayed and fought for what we were. I don’t think it would have made a difference, but it’s what you do when you’re in love with someone. You don’t bloody walk away. I’m not going to walk away now, because I love you—even when you’re almost impossible to comprehend.’

He stared at her, but his expression was blank, as though her words were a problem he had to decode.

‘I was furious with you when we got married. Livid. What a stupid thing you did, blackmailing me like this! But I still loved you. Every night of this marriage has been like slowly unwrapping a present, piece by piece, getting to find my way back to you—’

‘I have pushed you away,’ he interrupted, arguing the sense of her statement.

‘Yes, you have—but you’ve also pulled me close. So close that I’ve been inside your soul. You’ve let me in. And you dare turn up with divorce papers, as though our marriage is a simple contract you can dissolve? You dare relegate our love to an agreement that you alone can end?’

Startled by her anger, he stood, wishing to placate her. He put an arm on her shoulder but she jerked away.

‘No!’ she snapped. ‘I’m not finished yet.’

Her eyes held a warning and, fascinated, he was silent.

‘You have been hitting me over the head with the fact that I flicked a switch and walked away from you six years ago. I didn’t. I didn’t flick a switch. I made the worst mistake of my life when I left you, and I’m not going to do it again.’ She straightened her shoulders. ‘If you want to divorce me—if you don’t want me any more—then tell me that. You can make that decision. But don’t tell me that leaving you is in my best interests—because I know what life is like without you and there is no life on earth that I want more than this life, here—right here with you.’

His breath was ragged, torn from his lungs. ‘How can you feel that?’ he murmured with a growing sense of wonderment. ‘I have been—’

‘You have been Nikos.’ She cut across him, but softly, kindly, with the compassion that was always so close to her surface. ‘Determined, arrogant and good.’ She moved closer. ‘Do you think either of us really understood what we were doing and why? You wanted to help my family. I believe that was at the heart of everything you did.’

He made a sound and shook his head, but she lifted a finger to his lips.

‘Whatever motivated you to blackmail me into this marriage, I will never resent you for it. How can I? I’ve missed you and now I have you.’ She paused, her eyes scanning his. ‘I do have you, don’t I?’