GREEK HUSBAND

Chapter 40

'You could explain now about Marina,' she proffered tersely.

'No, that ship's already sailed,' Edward slammed back at her coolly. 'Are you marrying me on Friday or not?'

Bella wanted to say not, to puncture his carapace of arrogant strength and challenge him, but her character was grounded very firmly in compassion and the risk of her relatives having to pay a high price for her mistake in getting pregnant by the wrong man was not one she could ignore. She snatched in a wavering breath and damned him with her pale green defiant gaze. 'I'll give you an answer in the morning.'

'Why drag this out?'

'Because it's a very big decision,' Bella countered quietly. 'I'll tell you what I've decided tomorrow.'

Impatience ailed Edward and he gritted his strong white teeth. Her eyes were luminous pools of pale green but he noticed the dark circles etched below them and her general pallor. 'You look very tired.'

Bella colored in receipt of that unflattering comment. 'I'm going back downstairs to go straight to bed.'

'Have you eaten?' he shot at her as she reached the door.

'Yes,' she said.

'I'll meet you here for breakfast at eight in the morning,' Edward decreed.

How could she marry a man who had been planning to marry another woman for three long years? How could she surrender to blackmail? Would Edward really damage her aunt's and uncle's livelihoods and careers? Or was he bluffing? And if bluffing was a possibility was she prepared to light the fuse and wait and see what actually happened if she said no?

Bella lay in bed mulling over those weighty questions. Although she had completely dismissed the idea, Edward had mentioned marriage the very first day he'd discovered she was pregnant, she recalled ruefully. It seemed that marrying the mother of his child was important to him, so important he had immediately recognized it as a necessity. Not that that excused him in any way for employing threats when persuasion had failed, she reasoned.

Bella had so many unanswered questions that she was now wishing that she had listened to what Edward had had to say for himself earlier that day at his apartment. Clearly, Edward's relationship with Marina was unusual. When Marina had introduced herself to Bella, she had been fairly polite and remarkably composed for a female whose fiancé had just dumped her for another woman. Even so, Marina had repeatedly said that Bella having Edward's child would wreck all their lives. It was possible that Marina was simply a good actress but even that didn't explain the peculiarity of Marina visiting Bella to try and buy her off and then freely admitting that embarrassing fact to Edward.

Her head beginning to pound with the strain of her anxious reflections, Bella acknowledged that had Marina not existed she would've agreed to marry Edward. After all, it was best to be honest with herself: she did want Edward in spite of the shocks he had dealt her. It wasn't sensible, it wasn't justifiable but she had pretty much been infatuated with Edward from the moment she'd met him. On those grounds and bearing in mind the reality that she would very much like her baby to grow up with a father, shouldn't she give marriage a chance?

Only, how did she marry a male willing to blackmail her into agreement? That was wrong, that was so wrong. And the best of it was, she was convinced that Edward knew it was wrong but he had still put that pressure on her in an effort to get what he wanted. She did owe a debt of care to her uncle and aunt and if their lives were blighted because of something she had done she would be gutted, which didn't give her much in the way of choice. On the other hand, Bella reflected as she swallowed another yawn, she could agree to a marriage with certain provisos attached.

* * *

Edward studied Bella as she joined him for breakfast, her face blank, her eyes uninformative. He reckoned she would make a good poker player and the challenge of that talent in a potential wife amused him. 'Well?' he prompted grimly, still annoyed that she had forced him to wait for her answer.

Bella sipped at her tea, wishing that Edward didn't look quite so amazing first thing in the morning when she felt washed out and weary. There he was with his dark golden eyes alive with potent leaping energy, his blue-black hair still damps from the shower, and his hard jawline close-shaven. He wore yet another one of those remarkably well-tailored suits that beautifully defined his lean, muscular build. 'I'll say yes because you really haven't given me a choice.'