Bedded or Wedded

  JULIA JAMES

  Bedded or Wedded?

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 1

  Xavier Lauran, chief executive, chairman and majority shareholder of the XeL luxury goods company, whose ornate logo graced so many of the expensive possessions of the rich and famous, scanned down the e-mails on his desktop PC. The words of Armand’s e-mail from London leapt from the screen in front of him.

  …she’s the woman of my dreams, Xav—she doesn’t know it yet, but I’m going to marry her! Xavier’s jaw tightened. For a moment he brooded darkly, staring out over the darkening Paris skyline, the Arc de Triomphe visible from the windows of the XeL headquarters, overlooking the Place d’Etoiles. He should, right now, be leaving his office and going back to his apartment to change, ready to escort Madeline to the opera—and thereafter back to her apartment for their usual mutually enjoyable end to the evening. The arrangement suited him. Madeline de Cerasse, like all the women he selected for his leisure hours, knew what he wanted from a relationship and provided him with it—sophisticated companionship at the many social events his position required him to attend, and then, in private, equally sophisticated pleasures of an intimate nature. Physically intimate. Emotional intimacy was something Xavier neither sought nor desired. He was not, he knew with candid self-awareness, someone who let his heart rule his head.

  Unlike his brother.

  Xavier’s expression darkened. Armand always let his heart rule his head—and the last time it had happened it had been a disaster. With complete lack of judgement, he had fallen into the clutches of a woman who had taken unscrupulous advantage of his good heart, deviously trotting out some rubbish about having to keep her frail grandmother in an expensive nursing home, as well as wringing his heart with tales about the charity for African orphans she’d claimed to work for. Armand had responded generously—until Xavier, with his habitual protectiveness of his younger brother, had had the woman checked out. Only to discover she had been lying through her teeth in order to win Armand’s sympathy and money for herself.

  Armand had been duly disillusioned. But his faith in the general goodness of people—and especially women—was undiminished. And now he was talking about marriage.

  To whom? Who was this ‘woman of his dreams’? Armand had said nothing about who his intended bride was. Swiftly Xavier scanned the remaining lines of the e-mail.

  This time I’m being cautious, Xav, the way you like me to be. She doesn’t even know that I’ve anything to do with you or XeL—I deliberately haven’t told her. I want it to be a wonderful surprise! But any initial relief that Armand was showing signs of thinking with his head dissolved into deepest foreboding as he finished the e-mail.

  I know there will be problems, but I don’t care if she isn’t the ideal bride you think I should have—I love her and that has to be enough… Grimly, Xavier stared at the screen. This was not good—not good at all. Armand was admitting upfront there would be problems and that his bride was not ideal.

  Yet he was still talking about marriage.

  Alarm speared through Xavier. If this woman turned out as disastrously as the last one had, extricating his brother would be far more difficult if he married her.

  And expensive, too—Armand was not the type to consider a pre-nup. OK, so Armand was only his half brother, and had therefore not inherited the company founded by Xavier’s grandfather, another Xavier Lauran. A company which was riding high—and very lucratively—as one of the world’s most recognisable global brands of luxury goods. The exclusive XeL logo giving cachet and social status to anyone possessing any of the myriad extortionately expensive items, from watches to suitcases, which the company produced. But not only was Armand a very highly paid director of XeL, but his father, Lucian Becaud, whom Xavier’s mother had married after her early widowing when Xavier was a small child, was comfortably wealthy in his own right. Armand would be a rich catch for any woman in search of a moneyed husband.

  Was that what Armand’s intended bride was? Armand clearly did not think so. The final lines of his e-mail were adamant. Xav—this time around, trust me. I know what I’m doing, and you can’t change my mind. Please don’t interfere this time—it’s too important to me. Xavier sighed harshly. He wanted to trust Armand—but what if his brother were wrong? What if another unscrupulous woman had succeeded in blinding him to her true nature? There would be heartbreak for his brother down the line—not to mention the expense of an acrimonious divorce and the distress to Armand’s parents.

  No, he could not take the risk. Not with his own brother’s happiness. He needed to find out who this woman was, and whether his brother was safe with her. Reluctantly, but with grim determination, he reached for the phone on his desk. He would make some discreet enquiries. The company’s security team answered to him alone—and if he required them to keep his brother under surveillance for a short while they would simply assume it was for Armand’s protection. Not that his movements might reveal the identity of this woman so worryingly far from being ‘the ideal bride’, whom he’d already conceded would come with ‘problems’.

  As he waited for his head of security to answer, Xavier could feel the thoughts forming in his mind. Maybe he was overreacting. Worrying unnecessarily.

  He hoped so—he really hoped so.

  But within twenty-four hours he knew that his hopes had been in vain. As he gazed grimly down at the dossier in front of him, freshly delivered by his security team, he knew that without a doubt there was definitely—very definitely—a problem.

  Armand had been right—this girl was not ‘the ideal bride’. Xavier’s mouth thinned. But then who in their right mind would think that of a girl who worked as a hostess in a Soho casino?

  That she was just that was indisputable. Armand had been followed leaving the London HQ of XeL at the end of the working day, and taking a taxi to a part of South London no one would live in by choice. There, he had been granted entry to a ground-floor flat in a rundown tenement block by a young woman who had welcomed him warmly. He had stayed until mid-evening, when the woman had seen him out. Whereupon Armand had embraced her on the doorstep and spoken earnestly to her. The young woman had then been kept under surveillance herself, and within half an hour had left the flat. She had been followed to Soho, to the casino named in the dossier, where enquiries had confirmed she was employed as a hostess.

  Xavier dropped the baldly written report down on his desk. His stomach clenched. This was the woman Armand intended to marry? To bring home to his family, be the mother of his children?

  Was he completely mad?

  With a harsh intake of breath, he ripped open the envelope marked with a single name: Lissa Stephens.

  Then he slid out a photo, and stared at it. Just what was it that Lissa Stephens possessed by way of charms to entrap his brother?

  As he stared, Xavier’s disbelief mounted. As did his bleak dismay. The girl had been photographed at the casino, presumably covertly, by one of his security team’s agents. She could hardly have looked worse.

  Blonde, backcombed hair, make-up a centimetre thick, a scarlet slash of a mouth and a skimpy satin low-cut dress. Crudely…blatantly…displayed.

  What the hell did Armand see in her?

  Revulsion shot through him. How could Armand possibly want a woman like that?

  Xavier’s eyes narrowed. Did his brother even know she was a casino hostess in London’s infamous red light district, Soho? He fe
lt the blood run cold in his veins. And was that revelation merely the tip of the iceberg?

  He could feel his own revulsion mount in him, and with deliberate effort he contained it. It was essential—to his brother’s happiness, and his parents’—that the right call be made on this Lissa Stephens. Reason demanded that there was a chance—however slim—that appearances were deceptive. Reason, not emotion.

  Could it possibly be that the girl was not as bad as she looked?

  His eyes went to the photo again. Disbelief shot through him—could this really be the woman his brother wanted to marry? The very thought of Armand marrying such a female, presenting her to their mother, his father, seeing her making herself at home in the beautiful Riviera villa in Menton, watching his brother be first besotted and then bitterly disillusioned, was anathema.

  He looked down at the two-dimensional image of Lissa Stephens, trying to see beyond it. He could read nothing from her expression, her make-up was like a mask, but one aspect of her appearance she could not mask.

  Her eyes.

  They were hard. The eyes of a woman who would see his brother’s good heart as a weakness to be taken advantage of. Armand’s words sounded in his mind.

  I know what I’m doing… Did he? Or did he just think he did—as he had before, until he’d had the truth presented to him? A harsh, heavy sigh escaped Xavier. He couldn’t take that risk. If the woman that Armand wanted to marry was what she looked to be, then he had to protect him from her.

  But how to know that?

  Slowly, he got to his feet and walked across the large office, with its beautiful mouldings and high ceilings, and gazed out of the wide windows. The never-ending swirl of traffic around the Arc de Triomphe blurred before his eyes.

  He had not steered XeL to the pinnacle it now stood upon without being able to make good judgements, shrewd decisions. His cool, analytical mind was capable of assessing anything from the optimum time to launch a new range of goods in any particular line to which overseas markets would prove the most profitable in the near to mid-term, and which of the many women of his acquaintance eager to become his next chère amie he would choose.

  Now, faced with what could well be the debacle of a mésalliance that would devastate his brother and appal his mother and stepfather, Xavier knew he must apply the same detached, rational assessment to Armand’s situation. And in the end, for something this important, this crucial to his brother’s happiness and his family’s peace of mind, a bare investigative report and a photo were not enough. Nowhere near enough.

  He would have to check her out. See for himself. Judge her for himself.

  It was a task that had to be done. He might not want to do it, but he must. Whatever was required he would do.

  His brother deserved no less.

  As for Lissa Stephens…His eyes darkened to slate. Well, he would find out, personally, just exactly what it was she deserved. His brother as her husband—or something quite different.

  Chapter 2

  Lissa surreptitiously smothered a yawn, then, by force of will, turned it into a smile and murmured some facile pleasantry to the two men sitting at the table with her. Tiredness washed over her in a debilitating wave. Dear God, when would she get enough sleep ever again? She knew she had to be grateful for this job—even though what she was doing was demeaning, soul-destroying, morally dubious and grated on every last shred of sensibility in her.

  Her face hardened momentarily. Well, tough. She needed the money. She needed it badly. Badly enough to put in a day’s secretarial work temping in the City, and then work here until the early hours. The only other night job would have been cleaning—and it simply didn’t pay as well.

  Money, she thought grimly. It just came right back down to that—no escape. She needed money. She needed to earn as much as she could, in as short a time as she could, and that was all there was to it. No escape, no let up. And none likely, either.

  Or was there? Through her weariness of body and spirit, a familiar, dangerously alluring thought flickered.

  Armand.

  Armand and his money could make it all happen so, so quickly. For just a few tantalising moments she allowed herself the luxury of daydreaming—how easy everything would be.

  No—she must not allow herself to think about that. To allow herself hope. He had been out of touch for several days now, and she simply had to allow for the very real possibility that she had only been imagining his interest. That whatever hopes he had left behind, he was just not coming back.

  Her throat tightened—disappointment was cruel, but she had always had to face the possibility that his interest was only temporary, a novelty. She could not, must not, rely on it. Rely on him. She stiffened her spine—it was pointless to expect anyone to wave a magic wand and make everything miraculously better.

  She made herself focus on the two businessmen. At least they were engaged in talking to each other now—something about sales figures—rather than paying attention to her. Her gaze wandered off again.

  And halted in mid-sweep.

  Someone had just entered the casino’s bar area. Someone who, she could instantly see, stood out from the rest of the punters here the same way a racehorse stood out from a field of hacks. Lissa’s eyes widened.

  He should be somewhere seriously flash—Monte Carlo, Marbella, one of the top West End hotels like the Ritz or the Savoy.

  It was his whole appearance—from the superbly cut tuxedo that must have been handmade to sit so perfectly on his body, to the glint of gold at his pristine white cuffs and the razored perfection of his haircut.

  And the tan. Nothing artificial or overdone about his skin tone—his was the real thing. Part nature, part thanks to a Riviera lifestyle.

  He looked—rich. Seriously rich. Her stomach gave a little skip. The way Armand did sometimes. With a casual, inbred elegance that could never be put on. That you had to be raised with to show it the way Armand and this guy did.

  He had something else in common with Armand—he wasn’t English. That was obvious. No Englishman had the kind of svelte elegance that fitted like a smooth, flawless glove over bone-deep masculinity. But although Armand, too, possessed those rich continental looks, there was a very clear distinction between him and this man.

  Armand’s face was pleasant-looking, with an open, friendly expression. The man who had just walked in—her stomach gave a skip that turned into a full-scale 360 degree flip—was the most devastating male she’d ever set eyes on.

  It was the tall, lean body, the tanned, planed face with its thin blade of a nose, the high cheekbones, perfectly contoured jaw-line, sculpted mouth. And the eyes. Dark, shadowed, with etched eyebrows that just for a moment gave the set of his face a saturnine expression.

  Her stomach flipped again, and she could feel a sudden pulse at her throat. She tried to subdue it. She’d seen handsome men before. Why make such a fuss over this one?

  The answer came to her. Because she’d never seen a man like this before, that’s why.

  The pulse beat at her throat again.

  Annoyed with herself now, she made to pull her eyes away. What on earth did it matter that she’d never seen a man as devastating as that before? He was a punter, that was all. And, as a punter, the only interest anyone working here in the casino would have in him was in parting him from as much money as they could.

  Even as the thought formed in her mind she saw the casino manager gliding forward. His eyes must be glinting, Lissa thought, at the prospect of such a fat fish arriving in his net. Through lowered lashes she watched the byplay of the manager fawning on the new arrival. Then, with a swift, searching glance around the bar, he beckoned for a hostess. The best in the house. Lissa was not surprised. Tanya was a voluptuous Slavic blonde, and she sashayed towards the newcomer, bestowing a sultry smile on him. The new arrival glanced at her, eyes narrowing very slightly.

  Then Lissa’s attention was diverted. A hand came down on her bare arm.

  ‘I feel like dancin
g,’ one of the two men at her table announced.

  Hiding her reluctance, Lissa smiled as if delighted, and got to her feet. Just beyond the bar was a small dance area where the music was coming from. She was grateful it was upbeat and fast, requiring little more than jerky gyration. But two minutes later the music segued into a slow number, and her escort slid his hands around her waist. She tried not to flinch, though she hated close dancing with punters.

  Then, abruptly, there was someone else there.

  Xavier let the blonde hang on his sleeve, but he took no notice of her. His attention was entirely focussed on his mark.

  Lissa Stephens.

  In the flesh. And no different from the photo in the dossier. Blonde hair, backcombed and sprayed for volume, far too much make-up, and a figure moulded tightly in a cheap satin dress. For a moment a stab of black rage speared him that such a blatantly tarty female could embroil his idiotic brother. What the hell did Armand see in her?

  ‘I adore dancing,’ the hostess at his side gushed breathily.

  Xavier could hear her accent—Polish, Russian, something in that region. Presumably she’d come to London in the hope of a better life than she would have at home. He felt a flicker of compunction. For so many of the former Eastern Bloc life was tough, and he couldn’t blame such women for trying to improve their economic circumstances, even if in distasteful ways such as being a casino hostess, or worse. Then his eyes hardened again. That allowance might be made for immigrants, but could it extend to someone like Lissa Stephens? She’d grown up with the advantages of a free education, free health care and, if necessary, free housing. So what need was there for her to work in a place like this—unless she chose to? And what did it say about a woman who wanted a job like this?

  Time to move in on Lissa Stephens and take her measure close up.

  He walked to where she was dancing in a clinch.

  ‘My dance,’ he said.