The Mills & Boon Stars Collection - Cathy Williams Mills & Boon e-Book Collections

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I knew she had a thing for him, but he saw her only as a friend.’

      Lilah winced when he described that connection. ‘Complicated...’

      ‘Nothing I couldn’t handle at the time, I thought. I was very confident with women even at that age,’ Bastien admitted bleakly. ‘Too confident, as it turned out. Of course I was infatuated with Marina. We had a one-night stand but I wanted more. I didn’t see it at the time, but she was using me to try and make Leo sit up and take notice of her.’

      ‘You were brothers. It was wrong of her to come between you like that,’ Lilah opined.

      ‘To be fair, Marina didn’t intend to cause trouble, and Leo and I have never been close. I also know why she went for the termination behind my back,’ he admitted tautly. ‘I was illegitimate and penniless—hardly a winning package for a wealthy socialite. Unfortunately when Leo heard the rumours that I had got her pregnant she lied to save face with him and pretended that I had bullied her into the abortion clinic. He’s held that against me ever since.’

      ‘That’s so unfair,’ Lilah breathed angrily.

      Bastien shrugged a broad shoulder. ‘Very little in my life has been fair,’ he derided softly. ‘That’s why I prefer to make my own luck and my own fortune. I don’t owe anyone anything and that’s how I like it, glikia mou.’

      ‘But I would prefer not to risk having an unnecessary marriage and divorce in my relationship history,’ Lilah told him quietly. ‘I think we should wait and see if we have anything to worry about first.’

      His dark golden eyes hardened. ‘Not this time.’

      ‘Even if I have conceived I don’t think I’d choose a termination,’ Lilah added.

      Bastien sprang upright and set down his coffee cup, an aggressive edge to his movements. ‘We’ll do this my way. We’ll get married.’

      Lilah stood up. ‘It’s not the course of action I would choose, Bastien.’

      ‘I don’t care. This is an amendment to our original agreement,’ he declared without hesitation. ‘Deal with it.’

      Lilah turned away from him, angry and stressed.

      ‘You’ll have a few days to think your position over,’ Bastien told her. ‘I have to make a trip to Asia, to check out some trouble at one of my manufacturing plants.’

      Taken aback, Lilah turned. ‘How long will you be away?’

      ‘About a week.’

      Lilah had a second cup of tea while Bastien talked on the phone in a foreign language. Deal with it, he had told her. An amendment to their original agreement? Was he threatening her? Would continuing refusal to marry him on her part be treated as a breach of that agreement? Did she dare push it?

      What, after all, was she planning to do should Bastien’s fears prove correct and she found herself pregnant? Her skin turned clammy with anxiety. If she was pregnant she would want Bastien’s support every step of the way, she reflected ruefully. Maybe, just maybe, she was fighting the wrong battle...

       CHAPTER NINE

      IT WAS A beautiful dress. Exquisitely simple in shape, it flattered Lilah’s slender figure, with long tight lace sleeves, a boat-shaped neckline and a slimline skirt. Her wedding gown, she acknowledged in lingering astonishment as she studied her reflection. It was her wedding day, and she still couldn’t believe that she was actually about to marry Bastien Zikos.

      The whole of the previous week had been taken up with marriage-orientated activity. Accompanied by one of Bastien’s personal assistants, a fluent French-speaker, she had undergone an interview at the local mairie—the mayor’s office, where the ceremony would take place. A whole heap of personal documents had been certified and presented on her behalf to fulfil the legal requirements, and forty-eight hours later, following a meeting with a lawyer at the chateau to protect her interests, she had signed a pre-nuptial agreement. Bastien had made liberal provision for her in the event of a divorce, offering a far more generous settlement than she thought necessary.

      ‘Look on it as compensation,’ Bastien had advised her on the phone, when she had protested the size of that settlement. ‘You didn’t want to marry me, but you’re doing it.’

      It wouldn’t be a real marriage, she told herself soothingly as she clasped the diamond pendant round her throat. And wasn’t that just as well? Bastien had been away for seven days and she had missed him almost from the moment of his departure. How was that possible? How could she miss the male she had believed she hated, who had persuaded her into a morally indefensible sexual relationship?

      Lilah walked to the window and breathed in slow and deep, struggling to calm herself. She had not become attached to Bastien, and she had not fallen for him. She was just wildly attracted to him. She had also begun to understand him better as she’d come to appreciate his tough childhood and the experiences which had made him the hard, aggressive character that he was.

      She wasn’t excusing anything he had done, was she? No—she remained fully aware of Bastien’s every flaw, and was therefore completely safe from getting attached to him, she assured herself soothingly.

      A knock sounded on the bedroom door. It was time for her to leave. Manos smiled at her as she emerged from the room, rich fabric gliding in silken folds round her legs. Bastien had had a whole rack of designer wedding gowns sent to her and she had been taken aback, having assumed that they would be bypassing all such frills.

      ‘No, this should look like a normal wedding,’ Bastien had decreed.

      Yet how could it look or feel normal when neither of them had any family members present?

      Lilah felt absurdly guilty that she was about to get married without her father’s knowledge.

      Bastien was waiting in the hall. Clad in a superbly tailored pale grey suit, he looked breathtakingly handsome. When she met his long-lashed dark golden eyes her heart thudded and her pulses quickened, and she could feel heat rushing into her cheeks.

      ‘You look fantastic,’ he husked, closing a hand over hers as she reached the bottom step.

      ‘When did you get back?’

      ‘At dawn. I slept during the flight,’ he shared, just as Stefan presented Lilah with a small bunch of flowers and she thanked him warmly.

      They came to a halt in the stone front doorway as a photographer stepped forward to capture them on film.

      ‘I wasn’t expecting him,’ Lilah admitted out of the corner of her mouth.

      ‘This is not a moment we can easily recapture,’ Bastien declared.

      ‘But who’s going to be interested?’ she whispered helplessly.

      ‘Our child will be interested in our wedding day,’ Bastien countered.

      ‘But...’ Her lips clamped shut on a rush of denial as the photographer asked her to relax and smile.

      She was convinced that there wasn’t going to be a pregnancy, or a child, but she could see that Bastien had already decided otherwise.

      A limousine whisked them to the mairie, a sleepy creamy stone building sited behind the war memorial in a small village. It was a civil ceremony, conducted by a middle-aged female official. Lilah held her breath as Bastien slid a gold ring on to her finger and she performed the same office for him, albeit more clumsily, all fingers and thumbs in her extreme self-consciousness as she thought about what the gesture actually meant: Bastien was her husband now.

      When they emerged back into the sunshine the photographer was waiting, and she laughed and smiled, suddenly grateful that the unsettling ceremony was over and she could forget about it.

      She

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