Wife On Demand Read online

  He takes me to have and to bold. But not to love and to cherish. He wants me close so that be can punisb me.

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Also by

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Prologue

  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 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Copyright

  He takes me to have and to hold. But not to love and to cherish. He wants me close so that he can punish me.

  Hope looked up into the rock-hard face of her new husband as a thrill of fear raced through ner. “Shall I just go?” she asked.

  “No, you have to stay if we are going to make his marriage convincing.”

  “What are we going to do?” she asked faintly, her heart in her throat. Her body was on fire, her brain a maelstrom of anger and desire.

  “Let me start by telling you what we are not going to do,” Jude said in a flat, hard voice. “We are not going to do what’s in your eyes right now.”

  Dear Reader,

  A new year has begun, and in its honor we bring you six new—and wonderful!—Intimate Moments novels. First up is A Marriage-Minded Man? Linda Turner returns to THE LONE STAR SOCIAL CLUB for this scintillating tale of a cop faced with a gorgeous witness who’s offering him lots of evidence—about a crime that has yet to be committed! What’s her game? Is she involved? Is she completely crazy? Or is she totally on the level—and also the perfect woman for him?

  Then there’s Beverly Barton’s Gabriel Hawk’s Lady, the newest of THE PROTECTORS. Rorie Dean needs help rescuing her young nephew from the jungles of San Miguel, and Gabriel is the only man with the know-how to help. But what neither of them has counted on is the attraction that simmers between them, making their already dangerous mission a threat on not just one level but two!

  Welcome Suzanne Brockmann back with Love with the Proper Stranger, a steamy tale of deceptions, false identities and overwhelming passion. In Ryan’s Rescue, Karen Leabo matches a socialite on the run with a reporter hot on the trail of a story that starts looking very much like a romance. Wife on Demand is an intensely emotional marriage-of-convenience story from the pen of Alexandra Sellers. And finally, welcome historical author Barbara Ankrum, who debuts in the line with To Love a Cowboy.

  Enjoy them all, then come back next month for more excitement and passion—right here in Silhouette Intimate Moments.

  Yours,

  Leslie J. Wainger

  Senior Editor and Editorial Coordinator

  * * *

  Please address questions and book requests to:

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

  * * *

  WIFE ON DEMAND

  ALEXANDRA SELLERS

  Books by Alexandra Sellers

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  The Real Man #73

  The Male Chauvinist #110 0

  The Old Flame #154

  The Best of Friends #348

  The Man Next Door #406

  A Gentleman and a Scholar #539

  The Vagabond #579

  Dearest Enemy #635

  Roughneck #689

  Bride of the Sheikh #771

  Wife on Demand #833

  Silhouette Yours Truly

  A Nice Girl Like You

  Not Without a Wife!

  Shotgun Wedding

  ALEXANDRA SELLERS was born in Ontario, and raised in Ontario and Saskatchewan. She first came to London to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and fell in love with the city. Later, she returned to make it her permanent home. Now married to an Englishman, she lives near Hampstead Heath. As well as writing romance, she teaches a course called “How to Write a Romance Novel” in London several times a year.

  Because of a much-regretted allergy she can have no resident cat, but she receives regular charitable visits from three cats who are neighbors.

  Readers can write to her at P.O. Box 9449, London, NW3 2WH, England.

  Lyrics from “Wake Me Up to Say Goodbye” copyright

  1983 by Dorothy Poste. Used by permission.

  Prologue

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  The voice was low, and filled with all the fury she had known she would hear, all the hatred she had feared to face. Hearing it, her head jerked back, but she stood her ground.

  “I had to see you.”

  He laughed. He was changed, frighteningly changed. She would hardly have recognized him; and not just because of the unfamiliar, thick muscles bulging under his T-shirt and all down his arms, not just because of the flatter planes of his face.

  He himself was different. Or, he was different in himself. The set of his face was new, the way he now held his jaw seemed to mark a change in the way he faced the world. Once he had been cat-like, able to relax or tense at a second’s notice. Now his body, so heavily muscled, looked as though it never relaxed.

  She had not imagined that it would be so bad.

  His laughter was brief and mirthless and he looked at her with a cruel grin. He wasn’t going to help her over this, of course he wasn’t. He was giving nothing. She wanted to ask if they could sit down, but she was afraid to.

  Aware of the eyes that watched them, and the ears that perhaps overheard, she stood tongue-tied, gazing at him, telling herself she had been a fool to come. She’d thought she loved him, but who did she love now? The man he had been?

  After a moment she said quietly, “You’ve changed.”

  He smiled, but his eyes were still dark. “More muscles, ” he observed softly. “The better to hold you with, my dear. Is that why you came?” His black gaze fixed hers so that she couldn’t turn away. She caught her breath as, within her, a flame puffed into life.

  “No, ” she whispered, but he overrode her.

  “Jesus Christ!” he spat. “Is that what you came for? You—! What the hell use do you think I can be to you in here? What do you want?”

  His anger hit her in waves. He took a step towards her and put his arms around her. They felt unfamiliar. Everything about him was unfamiliar. “Don’t!” she began angrily, and he said in a voice so quiet she had to stop breathing to hear, “If you struggle or shout they’ll come and take me. ”

  She stilled, and his jaw tightened, as though he’d hoped she would protest, as though what he wanted was violence. Any violence. When she stood quietly in his hold he lifted his hand and clasped her throat.

  His hand seemed larger, his skin rough as it had never been. He said, “I could break your neck before they noticed, did you think of that?”

  “No,” she said.

  “No,” he agreed. “You thought you were safe here.” He was holding her so that she couldn’t move, an arm around her back, the hand encircling her throat in a grotesque parody of desire. “Let me tell you something: you’re only safe as long as I care what happens to me. Understand?”

  She didn’t answer. “Understand?” he pressed. He was speaking with a clenched jaw, his lips pulled back from his teeth. “Guys stop caring in here every day. So if you value that little tail of yours—” he let go of her abruptly “—get out of here and don’t come back.”

  She stood her ground, gazing at him. She could hear her own laboured breathing. She wished suddenly, f
iercely, in spite of everything, that he had kissed her.

  “Damn it!” he snarled. “Get going!”

  She licked her lips. “I found something, ” she said. “Something that might help prove that you’re innocent.”

  Chapter 1

  Hope knew she was going to hate Jude Daniels long before she met him. She had known it, deep in her bones, that moment when, lying drowsily in her bed in the Swiss clinic where she had been made whole at last, she had heard her father say, “I’m going to take Jude Daniels into partnership.”

  Her father’s partner. That place had been hers by right—was still her right—for as far back as she could remember thinking about a career. At her father’s words she was filled with a hot surge of jealousy, as if something had been stolen from her. And since she could not be angry with her father, she turned it against Jude Daniels.

  If she had been honest, perhaps she would have seen what her father had already seen and accepted—that Hope had delayed taking her promised place as his partner because she did not, in her heart, want the job. If she had been honest then...

  But she was not honest. She still could not admit to herself that her future lay elsewhere than with her father. So she hated Jude Daniels as a usurper, from that moment. The cuckoo—in the nest that was rightfully hers.

  That week when she was twenty-three was not the first time her father had sat beside her hospital bed and given her terrible news. The first time had been when she was twelve, and, frightened and in unbearable pain, had cried for her mother. Then he had told her her mother was dead, killed in the accident that had so hurt Hope. He did not tell her—she found out soon enough—that from now on she would walk only with pain, and with a disfiguring limp.

  No doubt that was why she had grown so attached to her father, so dependent on him. Losing her mother and her physical freedom—maybe it had seemed as if he was all she had. Certainly she loved him deeply, desperately. From the time of the accident Hope adored her father. When asked about her future plans, Hope always said, “I’m going to be an architect like Dad,” and he always called her “my little partner.”

  When, five years later, Hope was looking at university and college prospectuses, her father asked if she was seriously considering attending architectural college with a view to joining him in his firm after graduation, and of course she wanted to do it. Of course she did. She was a girl with a natural artistic talent whom her teachers had always encouraged. She had attended the High School for the Visual and Performing Arts. But a career as artist was for the chosen few. The sensible thing would be to utilize her artistic talent within a practical career—architecture.

  She was a bright girl, her intelligence well above average. But she did not do well in her first-year exams. Her father looked at her in surprise. “I got stressed out,” she explained. “I just need a break. I’ll be fine next year, you’ll see.”

  A group of students was getting a trip together that summer to travel Europe looking at the architecture. Hope decided to join them. For three weeks she stared at castles and cathedrals and mairies and everything in between. Then, when the others were going home, she and a friend decided to finish up the holiday with a figure painting class in a French châtesu.

  “It’s being held by Petrovsky,” she told her father excitedly. “He’s living in the West now.” Vaclav Petrovsky was a Russian artist Hope admired a lot. It was an opportunity just too good and too timely to turn down.

  Petrovsky liked her work. At the end of the course, he recommended her to a friend in Paris, who ran a very small, exclusive school—only three or four students working in his studio with him...the friend liked her work, too, and took her on.

  “It’ll only be a year, and I can go straight back to university next fall,” she told her father. “It’s bound to enhance my future work as an architect; it’s not as if it’s unrelated.”

  Her father had not protested then, nor at the end of the year when de Vincennes had offered her another year of tuition. Nor at the end of that year, when she decided to travel and “just take a real, lazy holiday for once, like an ordinary tourist, and get some sun and sea into my system. I’ll come home in August refreshed and all ready to go!”

  But she had not taken a real, lazy holiday. She had taken her easel and paints with her. In Cannes, sitting in the harbour on a windy day with a pair of binoculars, she had painted a yacht out on the water, struggling to come in against a steady offshore breeze. The picture was full of seaspray and struggle, with the yacht’s name just visible on the stern.

  Someone, seeing her, had mentioned it to the owners, and before she knew it Hope had sold her first painting, and made some new friends.

  August came and went. She painted pictures of their yachts for her new circle of friends and for the first time did not need the money her father regularly deposited into her bank for her. This time she forgot to phone with an explanation. Late in October she called to say that she was going to the Maldives on the yacht of some friends; they would winter in the Indian Ocean. She was looking forward to painting tropical paradise.

  It was there, living a life of leisure that her father’s money would have allowed her to follow for the rest of her life, that Hope began to take stock. Her life needed direction, or she would wake up and discover twenty years had passed. Some decision had to be made.

  One night, invited to drinks on a megayacht, she met Raoul Spitzen, a doctor who ran some kind of clinic in Switzerland. He asked her about her limp and offered to examine her with a view to treatment.

  “How old were you?” he asked during the examination.

  “Twelve.”

  “What was the accident?”

  “Automobile. My mother was driving us...she was killed.”

  “Ah. The hip gives you a lot of discomfort?”

  Hope only nodded.

  “Can you engage in sexual intercourse?”

  “I don’t—I’ve always thought I couldn’t,” she said hoarsely, though there was no reason for her voice to catch. Hope had long ago faced the fact that she was unlikely to lead a normal life.

  “There are one or two positions, of course, where it might be possible without pain, but perhaps a young woman does not feel confident about explaining the details to a first-time lover,” Raoul Spitzen said, and went on with bluff good nature, “Well, even if we do not get rid of the limp entirely, we can at least normalize your life. You will be free of pain. You will be able to marry and have babies.”

  So Hope’s life suddenly had direction. She was going to be made whole. She was going to be normal.

  The operation was only the first step. Afterwards would come months of physiotherapy and exercise, teaching her muscles to move in a new way, while she painted the Alps that so magnificently surrounded the clinic. Then a second operation would make her good as new.

  Her father came to be with her at the time of the first operation. A few days later, at her bedside, he told her, “I’m taking Jude Daniels into partnership.

  “I’m getting older, Hope. I need a partner,” he had said, by way of explanation.

  Maybe it was the possessiveness that crept into his tone, as if he had said, “I need a son,” but Hope felt a burning, uncharacteristic jealousy, and the first stab of dislike for Jude Daniels.

  “But—Jude Daniels?” she mouthed in astonishment, and the floating post-operative fog left her. “Why?”

  She knew who Jude Daniels was, of course. Everybody in the Toronto architectural community—and many who were not—knew who Jude Daniels was: innovative, heretic, iconoclast, or burr under the establishment saddle, depending on your point of view.

  He followed no particular school in his own buildings. Neither “post-modernist” nor “deconstructionist” nor “traditionalist” himself, he built buildings, Jude Daniels said, according to need. Which meant he could challenge everyone.

  When Jude Daniels disapproved of a colleague’s building, he said so—sometimes in print—and ruthlessly e
numerated its flaws. He regularly broke the architects’ unwritten code of silence. Hope knew architects who absolutely hated him.

  Not her father, apparently. “Because he’s a very fine architect, and I like him,” Hal Thompson said. “He doesn’t put up with the second-rate. He reminds me of myself at that age, only he has more courage to stand against the crowd than I did.”

  Hal Thompson had always himself been considered something of a maverick within the profession. Unusually, he had never gone into partnership of any kind, though it had been offered often enough, and by the biggest firms. He preferred to have complete control. When he won big building contracts, he would take on one of the big multi-partner firms as “associates,” but the last word was always his.

  She had always assumed the place was there for her in her father’s office whenever she wanted it. She had believed he would take on no partner, if not his daughter.

  She wanted to say, “What about me?” but she did not say it. Instead she thought that Jude Daniels had taken her place when she was weak and unable to defend herself.

  It was nearly another year before she came home at last. By that time she was another woman, a new Hope Thompson. She could walk now, virtually without a limp, entirely without pain. She had blossomed into confidence, even into beauty. At twenty-four she was almost newborn, enjoying her female power in a way that girls of sixteen already take for granted.

  But she was more practised than a girl of sixteen, more subtle. She had had a long time of watching women’s use of their sexual power, without feeling she had any. Her use of it was mature and fresh at the same time. What was even more enchanting, sometimes she forgot she had it. Her eyes would light with joy when something reminded her.