The Playboy's Fugitive Bride (27 page)

“Where are you going?”

“To Asia.”

Her eyes widened at the news.  “For how long?”

He gave a casual shrug of his shoulders.  “Two, three days, maybe.  I would prefer not to have this hanging over my head.”  He pushed to his feet then helped her up.  “Would you like to go freshen up before the ceremony?”

“No.”  She wiped her hands down her face.  “I don’t care how I look.  It’s not like this marriage is something I want to remember.”  She slanted her eyes at him.  “We’re not taking pictures are we?”

“I wasn’t planning to, but if you want—”

“I just want one thing.  Well, two.”  She stared challengingly up at him.

He spread his hands.

“I get to keep the money.”

“Absolutely.  It’s yours.  You earned it.  I had no intentions of taking it back.  What else?”

Her lips parted in surprise and she nervously shifted from one foot to another.  “I don’t want our marriage publicized.  Not immediately, anyway.”

“Why?”

Her fingers toyed with the woolly strip of fabric around her waist.  “I’m not used to that kind of attention, Massimo.  You see what happened at the country club when you made that announcement about us getting married.  I just need some time to process all this before the circus begins again.”

He’d actually thought she would ask that they not consummate their marriage tonight, a promise he would not have been able to keep.  “How much time, Nia?”  He closed his eyes briefly at the moment of
déjà vu
.  “We can’t keep our marriage a secret for too long,” he added.  Particularly when he hoped his child would be firmly planted in her belly as early as tonight.

“Just a few days, maybe a week.”

“Your request isn’t unreasonable.  And we do have up to six days before we have to officially file the marriage license.  Is that it?”  He knew there was more to it, but he chose not to pressure her for now.  All in good time.

She nodded.

“One more thing.  Do you happen to have a certified copy of your birth certificate with you?  We need it to fill out the marriage license.”

She looked flustered for a while, then nodded.  “I brought one with me, just in case you wanted more information about me.”

Strange
.  The average person didn’t travel with a birth certificate.  Then again, there was nothing average about Nia Sylk.  “Okay, let’s get this over then we’ll go home.”  He picked up the white envelope from the table.  “I’ll go get Judge Thomas while you freshen up.  He’ll be performing the ceremony,” he said, walking briskly to the door.

Massimo stepped into the corridor and closed the door behind him.  He motioned for Steven to follow him to the other end of the corridor.  “I won’t be needing this,” he said, handing him the envelope.

“Mass, are you out of your mind?”  Steven stared at him.

“Perhaps, but you have no idea what I had to do in order to get her to agree to marry me. Asking her to sign a prenup would be a bad idea,” he replied, leaning his shoulder against the wall.

“It’ll be a worse idea not to,” Steven refuted.  “You don’t know this woman, yet you’re about to grant her access to billions of your dollars.”

“I wouldn’t have access to any of it without her.”

“Not without
her
, Mass.  Without a
wife
.”  Steven eyed him speculatively.  “I’m sure Dafne would still go through with the previous plan if you asked her.  She was willing to sign a prenup.”

“Have you forgotten what she wanted in return?”

“At least you knew what you were getting into.  You know nothing about this Nia woman.  She’s not even the type you normally chase after.”  Steven set his briefcase on one of the holding benches.

An insightful fact, Massimo thought, pushing his hands into the pockets of his slacks and staring out the window into the dark forest at the back of the police station.  Nia was a small fish from a small pond.  He never fished in small ponds, not because he thought the catch was unacceptable, but because he didn’t want to be accused of corrupting some inexperienced woman or of breaking her heart.

The women he was accustomed to chasing prowled the deep end of the big ponds hoping to hook giant fish like him.  They were used to swimming with sharks.  They knew the rules and they played by them.  Nia obviously hadn’t read the manual when she ventured into the shallow end with her little homemade plan—flawed to the max.

Three days in, and she was already drowning.  She’d fallen apart tonight just because the rules had changed a little—a fact that deepened his conviction that some nasty little shark had frightened her out of the warm shallows of her familiar habitat into the deep, cold sea.  And when he found that shark, Massimo swore he would spear him.

“Mass,” Steven said impatiently, pulling Massimo out of his ruminations.  “About the next Mrs. Andretti?  Should we put Nia on a plane to New York first thing in the morning, and fly Dafne to the States?  She could be here by tomorrow evening.  The ceremony you had planned for Monday is still good, and,” Steven continued, bending down to retrieve a white envelope from his suitcase.  “I still have the prenup you had me draw up for Dafne.”  He waved the envelope under Mass’s nose.

“Put that away.  Better yet, burn it!”

“I don’t get you.”  Steven tossed the envelope back into his briefcase and slammed the lid.  “I’ve known you for years and I’ve never seen you act so rashly about any decision you make, especially one so important—perhaps the most important of your life.”

“There’s nothing rash about my decision, Steven,” Massimo stated with a gut-wrenching certainty.  “Of all the women I’ve chased and caught over the years, I’ve never had the slightest desire to marry one of them until Nia Sylk walked into my life.  She is the next Mrs. Andretti.  The only thing she’ll be signing tonight is our marriage license,” he stated with finality.

“I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I know exactly what I’m doing.”  Massimo pushed off the wall and began walking back toward the room where his fugitive bride was waiting for him.  “Make sure both prenups are destroyed.  I don’t ever want Nia to know the real reason we got married tonight.  She thinks she has to marry me to stay out of jail and that’s the way I want to keep it.”  He stopped at the door.  “Now, I’d really appreciate it if you’ll go get Judge Thomas from upstairs.  He brought the marriage license that we still need to fill out before the ceremony.”

“You’re the boss,” Steven muttered.

Was he really, now?
  His father had forced him into a marriage he never wanted, and some peculiar energy was compelling him to marry a woman he knew little about.

He’d never felt so powerless when it came to governing his own life.

* * *

Opening her eyes, Nia stretched under the soft down feather comforter like a lazy kitten awakening from a satisfied nap.  Flat on her back, she squinted at the colorful stained glass ceiling that was blanketed with a layer of freshly fallen snow, then her eyes darted slowly around the room.  The drapes were drawn, and the flickering amber flames from the marble fireplace across the room cast bobbing shadows on the walls, but even from a great distance, she could still feel the warm glow of the fire.

With no natural lighting to guide her, it was difficult for Nia to tell if it was very early in the morning or very late at night.  She had no idea how long she’d been sleeping.

Nia cautiously inched her hands across the mattress, expecting to encounter a warm hard body sleeping quietly next to her.  She was alone in the huge bed.  She lay rigid as bits of memories from the latter part of the night seeped through her grogginess.  She’d been arrested and locked up in a cell at Granite Falls Police Station until Massimo had come to rescue her.  Some kind of rescue since he was the one who’d put her there.  His get-out-of-jail-gift to her was that she marry him, and marriage to a man like Massimo came with unbridled sex—lots of it.

Hesitantly, Nia ran her hands along her body.  Her brows furrowed when she realized that she was still fully clothed in the ugly wool dress she’d been wearing last night.  Heat rose to the surface of her skin when she remembered Massimo’s threat to hike the dress up to her waist, bend her over the table in the interrogation room at the station, and take her from behind.  He hadn’t carried out his primitive threat then and there, but he’d done some equally naughty things to her in a public place.

Nia tried to throttle the dizzying currents racing through her at the memory of Massimo pushing her panties aside and burrowing his fingers inside her.  The fact that any of the four officers at the station could have walked by and peered through the pane of glass in the door had heightened her desire and brought on an orgasm of such magnitude, she’d thought she would die from it.  Nobody had ever treated her with such disrespect before, and the current tingling in the core of her sex assured her that she’d enjoyed every moment of the scandalous act.

She squeezed her thighs together and closed her eyes as she recalled the feel of Massimo’s fingers thrusting in and out of her.  Massimo had said he couldn’t wait to make love to her, but Nia knew he hadn’t yet fulfilled his promise.  If he had, she wouldn’t just be tingling from memory, she would have a distinct throbbing between her legs—one like she’d never had before.  She would know without a shadow of a doubt that Massimo Andretti had been inside her.

She’d be naked too, since Massimo would never be satisfied with making love to his wife for the first time while she was fully clothed, and then leaving her bed that quickly.  Pulling her left hand from under the covers, Nia held it up.  The huge diamond of her engagement ring and the studded cuts embedded around the circumference of the white gold wedding band shimmered in the firelight.

Massimo had insisted they get married last night because he would be going away on business in a few days and didn’t want it hanging over his head.  What he really meant was that he wasn’t giving her another chance to run off while he was gone.  As her lover, he had no legal rights over her.  As her husband, he could use his power and money to track her to hell.  He might even be able to have her extradited if he could prove that she’d deceived him.  And God, had she deceived him.  Nia Sylk wasn’t even her real name.  It was legally changed, but it wasn’t hers.

It’s a good thing Massimo had been preoccupied with a business call when she was filling out her portion of the marriage license, or her cover would have been blown.  The judge was none the wiser, and hadn’t asked any questions.

Nia had tucked her birth certificate away, and then faced Massimo in that small, bare-walled room and promised to love him, cherish him, and take care of him for the rest of her life, and he had promised to do the same for her.  But he knew, as well as she, that neither loving nor cherishing each other was part of the contract, and that neither one of them was staying the course of this ruse for life.  How could they, when couples who’d married for love couldn’t even keep it together?

They didn’t have a frog’s chance in a snake pit.

Witnesses to their vows of deception were Steven Lynd, Massimo’s attorney—whose mouth had been set in disapproval all throughout the ceremony, and the four officers who made up GFPD.  The officers had seemed thrilled to be part of such a sacred ritual.  One of the richest and most powerful men in the world exchanging vows was probably the most exciting thing to have ever happen at the station.

When the judge pronounced them husband and wife and told Massimo he could kiss his bride, Massimo had done so quite rapaciously as the all-male wedding party—except for Steven—cheered him on from the sidelines.

Nia was certain that Steven thought she was nothing but a gold-digger who would one day cost his client a whole lot of grief, trouble, and money, especially since Massimo hadn’t asked her to sign a prenuptial agreement.  Nia had no idea how she would have reacted if Massimo had asked her to sign one.  She might have feigned insult and refused, at which point he might have ripped it up and gone through with the marriage anyway, or he might have decided to keep her locked up until she signed it.  Either way, Massimo would have gotten what he wanted in the end. 
Her.
  Nia could not have risked being detained indefinitely, and so had gone along with Massimo’s plan.

She didn’t blame Steven for harboring suspicions about her.  She would have been happy to tell him that she already had all the money she wanted from his client since Massimo had told her the two million dollars was hers to keep.

After Steven and the judge left, Officer Jordan, the Chief of Police, had handed her the folder she’d seen on the table in the interrogation room.  Her rap sheet, fingerprints, mug shots, and booking report were inside.  He told her to put them through the shredder, apologized for any humiliation he’d caused her, and promised it was her first and last arrest in this county, seeing she was apt to throw up in police cruisers.

Massimo had rushed her out of the station as the officers threw rice at them—rice that Massimo had brought from Azi’s kitchen for the occasion.  He just thought of everything.

Neither one of them had uttered a word on the ride home.  He’d just pulled her close.  Nia remembered laying her head on his chest and being so tired that it was possible that she’d fallen asleep in his arms.  She remembered him picking her up and bringing her inside, and pulling off her shoes and stockings.  The last thing Nia remembered about last night was Massimo placing her gently down in the middle of the bed and pulling the covers up over her.

Nia propped herself up on her elbows and peered around the room, half expecting Massimo to emerge from the shadows and demand that she perform her wifely duties now that she was rested.  She glanced at the clock on the nightstand.  It was a little past six a.m.

So it was morning.  Saturday morning.  She should be on a plane out of Manchester to New York with her two million dollars sitting on her lap.  Instead, she was lying in her marital bed, still fully clothed, still a virgin, and alone.

Where was her husband?