BoughtGreeksBride Read online

  And she sounded more gauche than she ever had in her life. She’d been handling difficult social situations with grace since deportment classes when she was a mere six years old, but she’d never been proposed to…by a man she wanted, but was not at all sure wanted her. She hoped, had an inkling he might…but no certainty.

  “Anunpleasant surprise?” He didn’t sound in the least vulnerable when asking that question. Not like she would have. Instead he sounded demanding, as if he wanted answers and he wanted themnow.

  “Not unpleasant.” She shook her head, trying to clear it. “Justvery unexpected.”

  “We have been dating for three months.”

  “Yes.” They had already established that.

  “Exclusively?”

  “Yes…I mean I assumed…”

  “For me, it has been exclusive.”

  Something inside her that she had not even realized had gone tense, relaxed a little. “For me, too.”

  “Where did you think this relationship of ours was going, if not marriage?”

  “I thought maybe first…to bed,” she answered honestly. Did they even have a relationship?

  Casual dating yes…but arelationship?

  He cursed in Greek. She recognized the word from a summer she had spent studying ancient civilizations in his former homeland. It was a very nasty curse. “I don’t believe you just said that.”

  That caught her up short. “Why?” To her, it was a perfectly natural conclusion to make.

  “It is unlike you.”

  “Perhaps you don’t know me as well as you think you do.” It might not be considered appropriate to discuss such matters in a public place, but she didn’t give as much credence to proper behavior as everyone seemed to think she did. Or as her father thought she should.

  Honesty was far more important to her.

  And the fact was, he clearly didnot know her all that well if he was shocked she’d had the temerity to mention sex. Marriage to a man who was that ignorant of her inner person was not a wholly appealing proposition. If it had not beenhim doing the proposing, it would hold no appeal at all.

  “I do know you,” he insisted.

  Exasperated, she shook her head. “Notthat way.”

  “I know enough to be certain of our compatibility.”

  “Because we’ve shared a few kisses?”

  “We have shared more than kisses.” His now molten gaze reminded her just how much more.

  But as far as they’d gone, he always pulled back. Except once. The first time they’d kissed, it had almost gotten out of hand very quickly. Frightened by a wealth of emotion she wasn’t used to experiencing, she’d pulled back. Since then, he had done more than kiss her, but he’d never let the passion flare so hot and he’d certainly never made love to her completely.

  “Yes, we have, but it’s the very fact that we’ve sharedjust so much that makes me wonder if we are as compatible in that way as you seem to think.”

  “Why should you wonder this? It is obvious that you want me.” His Greek accent got thicker when he was upset. She’d noticed that during a heated business phone call she’d overheard once, but it had never happened between them before.

  She couldn’t feel badly that it was happening now. She was glad to know she could make him angry. She needed the assurance that she could impact his emotions because he certainly impacted hers. Though she would much prefer evidence of another sort of emotion and she didn’t appreciate his sentiment at all.

  “Yes,” she said between gritted teeth, “I do want you, but I’m not so sure you want me. And I’m not going to spend my life married to a man who is going to look for his passion outside of our marriage bed.”

  “Who said I would do this?” he demanded, his voice guttural and so thick with accent she had to concentrate to understand the words.

  “Who said you wouldn’t?”

  “I say.”

  “I want to believe you, but—”

  “There is no but. My honor is not in question here.”

  “I wasn’t talking about your honor. I was talking about making love.”

  “You brought up the possibility I would violate the bonds of our marriage…that is a matter of personal honor and one I do not take lightly.”

  She was glad to hear that, but it didn’t answer the real problem gnawing at her. He was business associates with her father, how much did that have to do with this marriage proposal? She simply couldn’t convince herself that Sandor was suffering from shyness in admitting undying love. The man was far too confident…if he felt something for her, he would have said so. Yet, how did a woman ask if the man proposing was doing so as part of a business arrangement or if he wanted her personally? The blunt approach would probably be best.

  Sandor wasn’t the type to respond well to subtlety.

  “Do you want me…I mean for my own sake, not simply because I’m my father’s daughter?”

  He frowned. “I would think that is obvious.”

  Maybe it was. To him. But it wasn’t to her. When he kissed her, he made no effort to hide the barely leashed passion coursing through him, but he never acted on it. It confused the heck out of her.

  “If it was obvious, I wouldn’t be asking.”

  “I do want you.” His voice dropped an octave, to a sexual purr. “Very much.”

  She licked her lips. “That’s…that’s good.”

  “But for me, the commitment comes first…then we make love.”

  She doubted he was a virgin, but apparently he ascribed to the standard some men still maintained about the women they intended to marry. “You’ve got some very old-fashioned views.”

  “Yes. I am not ashamed this is so. I was born in a traditional Greek village. My grandfather’s beliefs may not find wholesale acceptance in me, but his influence is there.”

  “Sandor,” she said, latching onto a topic less volatile to her emotions. “You never talk about your past. I don’t know if your dad is dead, if your parents are divorced or why it is that you never mention your father, but your grandfather pops up in conversation on occasion. I know he’s gone…at least I know that much,” she muttered under her breath, “but I don’t know why you and your mother live here in America. I don’t know so much about you.”

  “Chief being the way I screw.”

  “Sandor,” she hissed while her entire body blushed.

  He glared. “I can be crude. Yes. It comes from the background you know so little about. But another thing comes from that past…the belief that a man does not take a virgin to his bed unless he is engaged to, but preferably married to her.”

  “Is that something your grandfather taught you?”

  “He drilled it into me every day of my life while he lived. Only a man totally lacking in honor would do so.”

  “I see.” She had a feeling there was a lot more to this topic she planned to explore, but first she was going to set the record straight on something else. “However, between us…the point is moot because I’m not a virgin.”

  “Of course you are.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “AND WHAT HASmade you draw this brilliant conclusion?” she demanded in a tone her dad would have recognized with trepidation.

  Ellie didn’t get mad easily, but once she was angry…she didn’t back down.

  “Look at the way you blush when we discuss sex.”

  “Married women blush. If that’s your full supporting argument, you need to hone your deductive reasoning skills.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Do not play games with me about this. I know what I know.”

  “What you think you know.”

  “Stop this foolish claim. I am sorry if my observation has piqued your feminine pride, but I will never allow you to lie to me.”

  “Have issues with honesty do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s surprising. Most businessmen at your level can be very inventive with the truth.”

  “But I will not tolerate untruth from
those in my personal life. Ever.”

  “And will you give the same level of integrity to a relationship?”

  “Count on it.”

  “In that case, let me repeat…I am not a virgin.”

  His jaw tautened and white lines appeared at the corners of his mouth. He was getting seriously upset by her adamant claim to sexual experience. “You have never had a serious relationship.”

  “Is that what my father told you?”

  He didn’t even look uncomfortable at being accused of talking about her in very private terms with her father. “Yes.”

  “Well, he obviously doesn’t know everything about me, which should hardly come as a surprise.” He had to have seen ample evidence during the time they’d been dating how far from close she was with George Wentworth.

  “He has reason to know certain things.”

  “You mean the bodyguards I supposedly no longer have?”

  Sandor managed to look slightly chagrined. “You know about the security service?”

  “Of course.” She rolled her eyes. “Please. Just because I told my dad I didn’t want a bodyguard any longer doesn’t mean he listened to me, but at least with them as silent anddistant watchers, I have a little more privacy than I did when my bodyguards remained within touching distance.”

  “Notthat much privacy.”

  He meant not enough for her father not to know if she had a man stay the night or had done so with one. “I don’t have to sleep over with a man to have sex with one.”

  “But you would have to have had a relationship that went beyond a few casual dates because you are not the type of woman to sleep with a man on a whim.”

  “You’re so sure about that?”

  “Yes.”

  She couldn’t deny it because he was right. And she did not lie. Like him, she hated lies. Like the lie when a person told you they loved you but didn’t. Not really.

  “So…I have had more than one relationship that lasted a few months. I’m twenty-four years old, after all.”

  “But none of those relationships were deep.”

  “How do you know? My father said so,” she guessed. “You can’t trust the judgment of a man who thinks that balance sheets are more comprehensible than people. He doesn’tknow me.”

  “Like I do not know you?”

  “I’m afraid so, yes.”

  Sandor shook his head with an impatient jerk. “You are wrong.”

  But she wasn’t. Sandor did not know her any better than her father did, which meant he couldn’t care for her any more deeply than her dad. While the knowledge hurt, it also really begged the question why Sandor wanted to marry her.

  He was looking at her as if he expected another argument, but she didn’t have to convince Sandor of her point of view. In this instance, it was her opinion that mattered and his confident insistence wasn’t going to change it.

  “I am not relying on his word alone,” Sandor said. “I had you investigated.” His expression showed not even a hint of remorse at the claim.

  “What?Why? ”

  “When I first started considering you as a potential wife, I thought it prudent.”

  “You are kidding.”

  “No.”

  “I would have thought you too arrogant to believe you needed anything besides your own reading of a person in a situation like this.”

  “You have called me arrogant before.”

  “Have I?”

  “Yes, the time I told you who would win the Super Bowl.”

  “You were so sure you were right and you aren’t even a football fan.”

  He shrugged. “And yet Iwas right.”

  “Well, you’re wrong about me being a virgin.” And as much as the memories of the reason for her lack of innocence hurt, she felt a certain grim satisfaction in catching him in the wrong.

  Maybe she should be offended he’d had her investigated, but she wasn’t. She was, however, bothered. If Sandor wanted a relationship with her, why hadn’t he made the effort to get to know her better rather than having her investigated? Maybe it wouldn’t be so worrisome if he’d done it in addition to the investigation, but he hadn’t.

  The similarities to her dad were piling up and not in a good way. She’d been raised by a man who would have done the exact same thing in such a situation, who even now kept her under constant surveillance—ostensibly for her safety’s sake. After all, she was the daughter of a very wealthy and influential man. However, he wasn’t above using that so-called security to monitor more than her safety. She didn’t know what her father thought his knowledge was going to do for him.

  If he wanted a better relationship with her, he wasn’t going to have it via a silent security detail. Only maybe that was just the way he liked it. He felt like he was doing his fatherly duty without getting emotionally involved.

  “My investigator is very thorough,” Sandor said, breaking into her derailed thoughts.

  “Even the best investigators make mistakes.”

  “Perhaps.” But she could tell he didn’t believe her.

  Instead of annoying her, it made her laugh. “We could go back to my apartment and I could prove it to you.”

  He looked far from amused. His dark eyes glinted with a warning she had no intention of heeding. “Are you trying to shock me,pethi mou ?”

  “Challenging you, I think.” Recklessness filled her to bursting.

  She didn’t know if it came from the unexpected proposal that had mentioned not one word of love, from memories she’d prefer to forget, or from the renewed evidence that her father wanted no emotional connection to her, but the strictures of a lifetime were falling like dominos around her.

  No, she wasn’t the type of woman to view sex casually, but she wasn’t a virgin and she was darned if she would marry a man who could turn himself off from her so easily. She didn’t want Sandor to be like her father. She couldn’t stand for their relationship to be as cold and distant.

  “Why do you feel the need to challenge me?” he asked, sounding baffled.

  It was almost cute, in an arrogant, macho reaction to what should have been a straightforward topic kind of way.

  “Why don’t you want me enough to have seduced me?” Or even accepted her sometimes not too subtle invitations?

  “I told you.”

  “You believe I’m a virgin, so that puts me off-limits until the wedding night.”

  “Essentially…yes. Perhaps not until the wedding night, but definitely until the wedding is a date on the calendar.”

  “This is not the Dark Ages.”

  “Integrity has no time limit.”

  “Is that one of your grandfather’s sayings?”

  For a second his eyes burned with a pain that could not be mistaken. “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “I don’t understand why you want to marry me. You don’t love me.”

  “And your friends have all married for the sake of some ephemeral emotion that cannot even be counted on to last past the cooling of the sheets in most cases?”

  “No.” She wouldn’t pretend that all her acquaintances had married because they were in love. “But they aren’t me and I happen to believe in thatephemeral emotion . I want more from marriage than a businesslike merging of two people’s lives.” She wanted more from life than that, period…but had no idea how to get it.

  Other people found love so easily, but not her. But that didn’t mean she had given up hoping to find it.

  “And you will have more. We are compatible, in every way. We will have a family. You even enjoy my mother’s company.”

  “She’s easy to like, but you say that like it’s a major consideration.”

  “Since I choose to have my mother live near me like a good Greek son, it is.”

  “I wouldn’t mind living with your mother, but I’m not so sure about her son.”

  “So, youare considering my proposal?”

  Was she? Her heart beat too fast, the pain of uncertainty squeezing her chest
tight. Shewas. No matter what he believed about love, she was afraid she was already irrevocably in love with him—or headed there fast. What a hopelessly terrifying thought. “Yes, but I can’t give you an answer right now.”