The Bride Thief Read Online Free Page A

beneath her and she fell onto the white leather couch with a whomp. She realized to her shock that her body had obeyed him, even when her mind had refused.
    The plane accelerated down the runway as he sat beside her. She gripped the armrest. He calmly reached for his laptop.
    Once they were airborne, Rose glanced out the tiny window. All she could see was endless darkness with eerie moonlit clouds.
    No one could help her now. She was on her own. She took several deep breaths, trying to keep herself from panicking. “Where are you taking me?”
    He didn’t answer. He stared at the screen on his laptop and typed rapidly, then took a sip of the Scotch that the smiling stewardess brought him on a tray. Rose waited until they were left alone again before she spoke.
    “Where are you taking me?” she repeated more forcefully.
    “It’s irrelevant.”
    “Tell me where.”
    “I hardly think you’re in a position to make demands.”
    “You kidnapped me!”
    “Such a melodramatic word.”
    “How else would you describe it?”
    “Justice,” he said coldly.
    “You don’t have my passport.”
    “That’s all been arranged.”
    “How?”
    He shrugged. “As everything else is. For a price.”
    Watching beads of water condense on the outside of his glass tumbler, she clenched her hands into fists. “Tell me where we’re going right now, ” she raged. “Or else…or else…”
    He looked at her, his dark eyes amused. “Or else?”
    Oh, how she wished she had her brother’s old baseball bat, or even a heavy handbag to threaten him with! She tried to look very mean as she thundered, “You will tell me where we’re going or I will make this flight your own private hell!”
    Xerxes stared at her for a long instant. “Now that I believe,” he said mildly as his lips quirked. Typing a few last words on his computer, he turned back to face her and said, “I am taking you to Greece.”
    “Why?”
    “To force Växborg to give me what I want.”
    “And that is?”
    “If he loves you like you think,” he said the word scornfully, “he will agree to a trade.”
    “Trade?” She stared at him. “What trade?”
    “You. For her.” Taking another sip of Scotch, he set the tumbler down on the table and looked at her evenly. “I will use you to force him to divorce his wife. His real wife.”
    Rose stared at him. Slowly, she lifted her chin.
    “I am his real wife,” she said quietly. “And nothing you can say will convince me otherwise.”
    Xerxes frowned. “Is it really possible—” he searched her gaze with narrowed eyes “—that you did not know?”
    She shook her head. “There is nothing to know! You’ve made a horrible mistake!”
    “I couldn’t understand why he would pretend to marry you like this. But if you didn’t know he already had a wife…” His eyes traced her face, her breasts, her body. He tilted his head curiously. “Did you give him some kind of ultimatum? Did he think pretending to marry you was the only way he could keep you in his bed?”
    To keep her in Lars’s bed? Rose gaped at him. She’d never been in his bed—or any man’s! She was saving her virginity for her wedding night!
    The thought made her suck in her breath.
    Surely Lars wouldn’t have gone through such an elaborate wedding pretense just to get her into his bed…?
    “I will do anything for you,” Lars had said urgently last week, his pale blue eyes boring into hers. “Anything, petal. This is torture. You must be mine.”
    With a ragged breath, Rose pushed the memory aside. “Our marriage was real,” she said. “There is no other wife.”
    Abruptly, Xerxes moved to the chair directly across from her. He leaned forward, and the knees of his long legs brushed the wide skirts of her wedding gown.
    “I am telling you the truth, Rose,” he said quietly.
    She stared up at him. His face was too brutally masculine to be conventionally handsome like Lars’s sleek blond features. Instead, Xerxes had a hard, square