Bride, Bought and Paid For. HELEN BIANCHIN

       ‘You represent the only tangible entity your father possesses of any worth to me,’ Xavier posed with deceptive mildness.

      Something deep inside curled into a tight, painful ball, and she wanted nothing more than to turn and walk from the room, the building…anything to escape the compelling man who held her father’s fate in his hands.

      ‘You’re suggesting I become a form of payment in human kind?’ Each word took immense effort to enunciate, and emerged in faintly strangled tones.

      ‘You beg leniency and attempt to bargain by offering nothing in return? Whereas marriage,’ Xavier clarified succinctly, ‘will be adequate recompense for me dropping all charges against your father.’ He added in dry, mocking tones, ‘And clearing his gambling debts.’

      For a moment she lost the power to think as erotic images filled her mind…images she’d never been able to erase…Words tumbled from her lips. ‘I don’t want to marry you.’

      ‘Then we have nothing to talk about.’

      Helen Bianchin was born in New Zealand and travelled to Australia before marrying her Italian-born husband. After three years they moved, returned to New Zealand with their daughter, had two sons, then resettled in Australia. Encouraged by friends to recount anecdotes of her years as a tobacco sharefarmer’s wife living in an Italian community, Helen began setting words on paper, and her first novel was published in 1975. An animal lover, she says her terrier and Persian cat regard her study as as much theirs as hers.

      BRIDE, BOUGHT

      AND PAID FOR

      BY

      HELEN BIANCHIN

      

      

MILLS & BOON^®

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      CHAPTER ONE

      A BLUSTERY rain-shower whipped around the tram as it rode steel tracks towards the heart of Melbourne city.

      The month of October in the southern hemisphere rested on the cusp between spring and summer, neither one nor the other, and tended to provide brilliant sunshine followed by rain with matching temperatures in contrary variation on the same day.

      Rain and cool temperatures seemed incredibly appropriate, Romy decided with unaccustomed cynicism as the tram slid to a halt and disgorged several passengers before crossing the bridge spanning the Yarra River.

      Tall inner-city buildings of varied design rose as concrete and glass sentinels, and she alighted at the next tram stop, caught a break in traffic and reached the pavement.

      The nerves in her stomach clenched into a painful ball as she crossed the next intersection and entered the marble-tiled foyer of an imposing office building. Given a choice, she’d have preferred to deal with a class filled with hormone-charged, testosterone-fuelled recalcitrant teenage students who’d decided to give their English teacher the hardest day on record than confront the man who held her father’s fate in his hands.

      Of Spanish origin, New York born and bad boy made good, Xavier DeVasquez was an electronics whizz whose skills had elevated him to one of the world’s wealthiest top five hundred. A man reputed for his cut-throat business methods. A force to be reckoned with in the boardroom…and the bedroom.

      As she should know, she acknowledged silently, and endeavoured to quell the icy shiver feathering the length of her spine as the past three years vanished in the blink of an eye, providing startlingly vivid recall of a social charity event attended by several top employees of the DeVasquez Corporation, of which her father had been one. Head of the accountancy department, Andre Picard had been accompanied that evening by his wife and daughter, but it had been Romy who had drawn Xavier DeVasquez’s attention.

      The news media had failed to depict the degree of electric sexual chemistry the man exuded in person. On reflection, she hadn’t stood a chance. Too many years spent studying to be a schoolteacher had meant a meagre social existence confined mainly to the company of girlfriends in the little free time she had permitted herself.

      To suddenly have had someone of Xavier DeVasquez’s calibre express a personal interest in her had been exciting. To discover he’d wanted to see her again, almost beyond belief. He’d had his pick of women, yet he’d chosen to spend time with her. When she’d asked why, he’d merely smiled and said he admired her lack of artifice.

      Twelve weeks and three days. Romy could still remember the number of hours, the minutes.

      She’d fallen in love with him. So soon, too soon, ignoring the faint niggle of disquiet that it wasn’t real, couldn’t be real. A fantasy of shared laughter, dinners, the theatre, a movie she’d wanted to see. Their parting kiss at evening’s end, and the knowledge mere kisses would never be enough. The night she had gone back to his apartment and willingly into his bed…an innocent who had gifted him her virginity, her heart, her soul. And moved in with him the next day.

      The affair had lasted three months before she’d made what became the ultimate mistake. At dawn’s first opalescent glow, after a long night of lovemaking, she had told him that she loved him. Only to shatter into a thousand tiny pieces when he’d merely brushed his lips to her temple and said he didn’t do love.

      It had taken tremendous effort to calmly leave, to refuse his calls, accept a teaching position in another country and attempt to forget his existence.

      Impossible, when his image had taunted her in vivid dream form through the long, lonely nights, and his name, together with photographic evidence appeared in the media relating yet another business coup, or a picture of him with a stunning female at his side had been displayed on a social page.

      It had been her mother’s fight against a progressive form of cancer two years later which had brought Romy home on three month’s compassionate leave. An incredibly sad time, after which Andre had insisted she return to fulfil the remaining year of her teaching contract.

      At first she’d been reluctant to leave him, but his reassurance had been convincing, which, together with the promised support of a few close family friends, helped ease her mind.

      Her father’s desperate bid to ensure his wife’s every comfort had involved expensive treatments, the highest quality of care, and the fact he’d succeeded was laudable. Maxine Picard had gone to her grave unaware of the price her husband had paid, or the sequence of events which was to follow.

      Who could have predicted the stock market crash that sent Andre Picard to the wall? Worse, that a once honourable man would stoop to defraud, then compound the crime with a desperate gambling bid in an effort to regain financial security.

      Even Romy could have told her father it was a recipe for disaster, had she known.

      Except it had only been when her teaching contract had ended and she’d returned to Melbourne to take up a new teaching position on home ground that she’d learnt the true state of her father’s affairs.

      Everything sold, including the small apartment which had replaced the family home following Maxine’s death, the car, furniture and possessions.

      Chilling to learn Andre had been arrested, charged and was awaiting trial with a prison sentence a certainty. None of which he’d revealed in letters, emails or intermittent telephone contact during her absence.

      Instead, he’d deliberately waited until a week after her return before confiding the grim facts. A week in which she’d leased a furnished apartment, purchased a car, and taken up her new teaching position.

      How could you have been so careless? were words she’d barely refrained from uttering…followed