The Marriage Betrayal

Chapter NINE


Chapter TEN


THOSE words were too little too late to soothe Tally.

While she acknowledged that her threatened miscarriage had got their marriage off to a poor start, she had suffered her neglect in silence. She felt as if her body’s show of weakness, which seemed to have made everything go wrong, was somehow her fault. She had made no demands and had voiced no complaints. Indeed she had attempted to be a supportive understanding partner, only to feel mortified by the obvious fact that her husband seemed neither to want her or need her in that role.

She did not feel like a wife and Sander didn’t treat her like one either. He had made no attempt to spend time with her or to enquire into what she did with her days in a foreign city where she had no friends. Cosima had ignored both her sister’s wedding and Tally’s sending of her mobile phone number, making it clear that she did not want contact with her sibling even if she was currently living in the same country. Sander could not have made his lack of interest in Tally, his marriage and their future child more obvious and suddenly Tally could not credit that she had tolerated that indifference in silence for so long.

‘You owe me more than an apology for the last month, you owe me an explanation—’

An ebony brow quirked. ‘About what?’

Green eyes pure emerald with anger, Tally threw her hands out in a demonstration of the strong emotion rippling through her. ‘You’ve treated me like the invisible woman ever since our wedding day. Why on earth did you marry me if you were planning to behave like that? What was the point?’

His deep-set dark eyes were heavy with exhaustion and his luxuriant lashes lowered to screen his wary gaze. He shifted a broad shoulder. ‘I’m too tired for this stuff now. We’ll discuss it tomorrow—’

‘I probably won’t see you tomorrow,’ Tally interrupted. ‘Or haven’t you noticed that you walk out of here at dawn and don’t come back much before dawn the next day?’

‘I’m not in the mood for an argument—’

‘I don’t care!’ Tally broke in with fiery persistence. ‘I have the right to know where I stand. I have the right to ask you why the heck you married me when you don’t seem to want me as a wife!’

Sander’s big powerful body had pulled taut with tension and his stubborn mouth compressed as he shot her a sardonic glance. ‘Let’s not go into that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you might not like the answer I give you!’ Sander slung back before he could think better of it, his temper rising in direct proportion to his exhaustion and his impatience and knocking him off guard. He was dead on his feet: all he wanted to do was sleep. Even the hard wooden floor was beginning to look inviting.

In receipt of that bewildering response, Tally had fallen very still. ‘Why wouldn’t I like it?’

‘Leave it, Tally,’ Sander urged in exasperation, striding past her to head into the bedroom she had just vacated.

‘And what if I don’t want to leave it?’ Tally sped in his wake, refusing to back off.

‘You’ll wish you had,’ Sander told her wryly, tossing his jacket and tie down on a chair. ‘Look, I admit that you have grounds for complaint. So far, I’ve not been the most considerate husband, but tonight is not the time to call me to account for my mistakes. I’m too tired to talk right now. I’ve spent hours exchanging tall stories with a pair of Russian businessmen who could drink the Volga dry and still remain standing.’

‘You can’t throw something like that at me and then refuse to tell me the whole story.’

‘There is no story,’ Sander said flatly, standing still to unbutton his shirt.

‘I want to know why you married me!’

‘Well, not because you shout at three in the morning and demand answers that it would be a challenge for me to give you even if I was less tired,’ Sander framed wearily.

‘I deserve the truth,’ Tally challenged. ‘It seems pretty obvious that you only married me because I’m pregnant.’

Sander grimaced. ‘Tomorrow, Tally—’

‘No, not tomorrow—now!’ she fired back at him. ‘Every step of this relationship you have controlled everything but now it’s my turn. Why did you ask me to marry you?’

And in answer to that bold challenge, Sander was suddenly filled with such a swelling, unstoppable surge of rage that he could no longer hold the words back.

‘Because your father threatened to bring down Volakis Shipping if I didn’t!’

Assailed by an explanation so far from her expectations, Tally could only blink at him and stare in sheer bewilderment. ‘Excuse me? My father? He threatened you? When did that happen? Did you tell him I was pregnant?’

‘No. Someone—presumably you, your mother or even your half-sister—told Anatole about the baby, and that I was responsible. He was furious. He came to see me at my London office and demanded that I marry you. If I refused, he threatened to scare off a contract that Volakis Shipping needed to survive. Your father is an influential man in the world of business. He always has his ear to the ground. People who matter listen to his tips.’

The hectic flush in Tally’s cheeks was slowly receding as shock drained the natural colour from her face. ‘I wasn’t the one who told him.’ Slowly, numbly she shook her head in an emphatic negative to underline that point, but she was still so taken aback by what he had revealed that she could not yet put it all together inside her mind. ‘And Cosima didn’t even know I was pregnant which only leaves your parents or my mother, and if she told my father, I’m amazed, because as a rule she can hardly bear to speak to him.’

‘My parents have said nothing. So it wasn’t you who talked … you didn’t run to tell stories so that your father would put pressure on me?’ His shirt hanging open to reveal a muscular bronzed wedge of hair-roughened chest, Sander searched her revealing face with incisive dark eyes. He was impressed by her demeanour and convinced that she was telling him the truth. ‘That does make me feel better.’

And Tally finally understood where the anger she had sensed in him from the outset of their marriage had come from and why it had lingered so that his bitterness soured everything between them. Naturally she could have done nothing to defuse that anger when he had chosen to keep such a massive secret from her. As comprehension sank in fully, though, she almost drowned in the flood tide of his cruelly unwelcome honesty and discovered that her shame was so great that she could no longer meet his dark golden gaze.

Her husband had been blackmailed into marrying her.

That was so horrendous, so truly unspeakable an act, that she felt as though she had been punched in the gut and was struggling without success to get air into her starved lungs. She was shaken that the father she barely knew could have so much influence that he could threaten Sander’s family business, but she was equally shocked that her father could have cared enough about her future to even consider putting pressure on the father of her child to marry her. In fact, that did not make sense to her at all.

‘My father doesn’t love me,’ Tally muttered with an unemotional acceptance of that truth that came from years of disappointed hopes. ‘He did what the family court told him he had to do: he paid my living and educational expenses. But he very rarely wants to see me. I irritate him by reminding him of my mother and, as you saw, he didn’t care enough to step out in public as my father and attend my wedding, although again he paid for it. So, bearing in mind that he doesn’t really care about me at all, why would he force you to marry me?’

‘In Anatole’s eyes it was a matter of principle and honour. You being pregnant and unmarried was an affront to his dignity,’ Sander explained grimly. ‘Anatole Karydas is very conscious of his image.’

‘He was saving face,’ Tally traded flatly, recognising that her father’s overweening sense of importance was the most likely explanation for his behaviour. ‘Did he really have enough power to damage Volakis Shipping? I didn’t realise he was that important.’

‘A whisper in the wrong place would have killed that contract. Unfortunately my late brother left the company in a much more vulnerable state than I had appreciated. I only learned how bad things were after our wedding. My father was in over his head; he’s out of touch with the way business is done these days,’ Sander admitted heavily. ‘If I wasn’t such a stubborn bastard, I would have offered my help long ago and we might have avoided the current crisis. Sadly, it took your father’s threat to make me accept that blood is thicker than water.’

But Tally wasn’t listening to that little speech or the ramifications of Sander’s belated appreciation of the strength and importance of family ties. Shock had produced a spreading puddle of ice in the pit of her stomach and her skin felt cool and clammy. Glancing up, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in a mirror across the room and thought how horribly humiliating it was to be caught swanning round in sexy lingerie in an effort to attract a man who had clearly never really wanted her for more than the light entertainment factor of a few weeks. Add in a pregnancy that had proved equally undesirable and it was little wonder that he was avoiding intimacy. In haste, she walked into the dressing room to remove the wrap and shoes she was wearing. She took out trousers and a top and put them on, pushing her feet into flat comfortable shoes and burying the memory of the fancy underpinnings she still wore and why she had bought them.

It struck her as deeply ironic that she should ultimately have her uninterested parents to thank for her humiliation and heartbreak. Now, because her mind simply could not cope with the truth about her marriage, she looked back in time instead and recalled her mother’s complacent rather than surprised response to the news that Sander had asked her daughter to marry him. Crystal had been triumphant and had undoubtedly told Anatole that Tally was pregnant. Her mother had probably enjoyed delivering that provocative news, possibly guessing how much it would annoy the older man that history was in danger of repeating itself in the next generation. Perhaps Anatole had feared that Tally’s relationship to him would once again be publicly exposed to embarrass him, along with the news that Tally was also pregnant by a Greek tycoon. For whatever reasons, he had chosen to force Sander Volakis into marrying her by threatening the future of Volakis Shipping.

There was no bouncing back from such a devastating blow, Tally acknowledged bleakly. Sander had surrendered to blackmail to protect his family’s business interests. But what else could he have done? She could only begin to imagine how tough Sander must’ve found it to allow anyone to force him into doing anything he didn’t want to do. That must truly have been a case of mind over matter, for Sander was bone-deep proud, independent and stubborn.

Why on earth hadn’t she suspected that something was badly wrong? When she contrasted Sander’s reaction when she first told him she was pregnant to his behaviour a week later, when he had asked her to marry him, she marvelled that she had happily accepted his sudden change of heart. The sad truth was that he had told her what she most wanted to hear and she had trusted and believed in him on that basis. People rarely wanted to kill the messenger who brought what appeared to be good news.

‘Tally …’ The dressing-room door was slowly pushed back and Sander looked in at her, a frown line etched between his winged ebony brows, his lean, darkly handsome features taut as he towered over her smaller figure. ‘Are you all right?’

Disturbingly aware that he had caught her in a moment of weakness, Tally straightened her slim shoulders and lifted her chin as she returned to the bedroom. ‘Of course I am.’

But regardless of what she said, Sander could see that she was very far from being all right: her face was white and strained, her eyes were blank and evasive and she was trembling as if she was cold. Guilt assailed Sander in a rolling tide of discomfiture. He cursed his bluntness and regretted the sense of rancour that had pushed him into spilling the beans. Of course she was upset; what else had he expected?

Sander closed a hand over hers and used his strength to gently push her down on the side of the bed. ‘You look as exhausted as I feel. It’s too late to talk about this now. We’ll sort everything out tomorrow,’ he told her levelly. ‘I’m going to have a shower and then I’m coming to bed.’

Tally nodded like a marionette but the instant the bathroom door closed she was on her feet again, hurrying into the dressing room to pull down a bag from an upper shelf. Tugging open drawers and racing around, she threw in clothing and keepsakes that she didn’t want to leave behind. No doubt Sander could ensure that the remainder of her belongings were transported back to London for her. Her face was wet with tears and her heart was thumping far too fast with nerves by the time she had finished packing. She relaxed a little once she recognised that the shower was still running in the bathroom. Donning a jacket, she left the apartment and travelled down in the lift.

Their marriage, which had barely got off the ground, had crashed and burned and there was nothing left worth fighting for or talking about, Tally reflected wretchedly. He didn’t love her; in the circumstances he couldn’t even particularly like her! Evidently he had strongly suspected that she might have used her father to put pressure on him to offer her a wedding ring. If ever there was a last straw in a scenario, the sheer level of Sander’s distrust in her had to be the final killing blow. He hadn’t wanted to marry her. She could not trust one word that he had said the day he proposed, because self-evidently he had only said what he had to say to get her to the altar and protect Volakis Shipping from her father’s threats.

The security man in the foyer got her a taxi that would take her to the airport. She sat in the back seat as the car travelled through dark lamplit streets and wondered how she was going to continue living in a world that no longer contained Sander. She wasn’t supposed to love him like that when he didn’t love her, but she had given up trying to explain the fiercely strong emotion she had felt for Sander from the moment she had met him. She might not have been happy living with him, but she knew she was going to be a great deal unhappier without him. At least while they’d still been together there had been hope that things might improve. Now? Now she was looking down a long, dark, empty tunnel and there was no light at all visible at the end of it.

She had forgotten that there was an airline strike. People were lying down and sitting everywhere and the queues were endless. After a long wait she learned that it would be eight hours before she could board a flight back to London. For the sake of a few hours she did not see the point of heading to a hotel. She was browsing through the shops to pass the time when she glanced up and saw Sander staring at her from across the concourse.

Aware that having told Tally the truth about their marriage had made him feel a lot less aggrieved, distrustful and tense, Sander had strolled back into their bedroom, weary but comparatively happy for a man at serious odds with his wife. And the first thing he had noticed was that the bed was empty and the lights were out in the hall. He had checked the lounge and then the second thing he’d noticed was the absence of the tiny jade frog Tally had placed on the dressing table. Her ‘lucky’ frog, which she took to exams and all important occasions—it was gone. He had looked into the dressing room and breathed in deep when he’d seen clear evidence of hasty packing.

Shock had roared through Sander then in a blinding wave. Tally had walked out on him; he couldn’t believe it, didn’t want to believe it! Tally had one priceless trait he had always taken very much for granted, but which he greatly admired. He saw her as unique amongst the women of his experience—she was a really good sport, who could usually be depended on to do the sensible thing. She was not impulsive or foolish, nor was she given to going off on emotional tangents.

Until you told her that her father had made you marry her.

That was the instant when it dawned on Sander that he had expected a little too much. Simultaneously, he was also remembering his life in London with Tally. A life laced with the warmth, fun, enthusiasm and spirit that were so much a part of her vitality and her genuine interest in what he did every day. His thoughts cut back across the absence of newer memories created since their wedding and went straight to an image of life without Tally. For the very first time since he had met her, Sander realised that he had moved on from the constant late nights, the wild parties and the procession of ever-changing women he had once bedded. He had moved on without ever realising the fact. He had even begun to occasionally think about the baby …

It was the work of a moment for Sander to plunge back to his feet and take action, shedding the towel and dragging out clothes with more haste than cool. Before he left the apartment he went into the depths of a drawer to remove an item he had bought earlier that week. It was small, insignificant and cheap, an impulse buy that had embarrassed him in retrospect but it was also, he hoped, a symbol for a more committed future. The security guard on the ground floor gave Sander’s unshaven, dishevelled appearance a knowing masculine appraisal that set Sander’s even white teeth on edge and while hailing another taxi for his employer confirmed—without being asked—Tally’s destination. Sander briefly toyed with the idea of saying he wasn’t heading to the airport as well and then thought about his empty apartment again and all false pride somehow fell away.

It wasn’t that he minded living alone; he was used to living alone. Furthermore he liked his freedom, his own space. It was just that he had become accustomed to Tally being there in his space, he reasoned feverishly, conscious of a looming edge of panic foreign to his experience. The candles round the bath, the cushions on his sleek leather sofas, the endearing, perfectly spelled and long-winded texts that made him smile no matter how busy he was.

Tally was his wife. Strange how he had never allowed himself to think about her in that guise until now when it might well be too late, he conceded heavily. Had he treated her like the invisible woman? That was a fair point, he had to admit. Without warning though he was plunged into a welter of surprisingly familiar recollections. He had noticed her presence in his life much more than he had been prepared to admit. The scent of her perfume and the orange soap she loved, her passion for peanuts and her music playing in the bedroom while he watched the business news and withstood the temptation to join her. It crossed his mind that had he fought the temptation a little less hard his wife might not have run away.

Women never ran out on Sander and he had long since worked out why Oleia had let him down so badly when he was a teenager. He had adored Oleia Telis but falling in love with her had made him boring, soppy and needy. There again, love had never done Sander any favours, which was why he had always fought hard to stay untouched and detached from an emotion likely to drag him down and sap his strength and peace of mind. His earliest memories of childhood were rooted in disturbing images of his mother pushing him away irritably and calling him ‘clingy’ and ‘babyish’. The rejections had been continual, yet somehow his brother had never come in for the same treatment. Sander had soon learned independence, while also learning to equate love with pain and weakness and the risk of exploitation.

‘Tally …’

Paralysed to the spot beside a magazine stand, Tally stared at Sander’s tall powerful figure as he strode towards her. She was shocked by the sight of him because it had not occurred to her that he might follow her. And, for once, his reputation for sartorial elegance was under threat. He was wearing well-worn jeans teamed with an open shirt and a black designer suit jacket. His strong jaw line was dark with stubble, highlighting the wilful beauty of his wide sensual mouth, and his black hair had dried all spiky and tousled. ‘What are you doing here?’

Sander pushed impatient fingers through his untidy black hair and breathed almost argumentatively, ‘You’re here!’ as if that answered everything.

‘That doesn’t explain why you followed me,’ Tally persisted, colliding with stunning golden-brown eyes and hurriedly looking away, even while her breath hitched in her throat and her heart began to race.

‘Look, we can’t talk here,’ Sander intoned, closing an arm round her taut spine to ease her out of the path of a man pushing past. ‘We’ll get coffee—’

‘Haven’t you noticed that this place is in turmoil with the strike? Everywhere is packed. There are no seats,’ Tally protested, sliding away from physical contact with him like an electrified eel. ‘I don’t think we have anything to talk about, Sander. After what you told me, our marriage is null and void.’

‘How can it be null and void? You’re carrying my child!’ Sander shot back at her quick as a flash.

Tally was so disconcerted by that response from a male who never ever mentioned her condition if he could help it that she stared at him. A dark rise of blood accentuated his superb cheekbones as he recognised her incredulity. He veiled his stunning dark eyes and closed a hand that brooked no argument over one of hers to draw her over to the edge of a crowded café. There he set her free and she looked on in amazement as he approached a couple of young men at a table and, withdrawing his wallet, made it worth their while to give up the table. He then retrieved her and sat her down with great determination. ‘Give me five minutes.’

You’re carrying my child!

Had that only finally sunk in? Tally was very much shaken by his appearance at the airport. It had taken all her courage and the conviction that she was doing the right thing to walk out on Sander and their marriage. She had assumed he would be relieved that she had chosen to leave without any histrionics. That he might choose instead to look that gift horse in the mouth and chase after her was a complete surprise.

Sander reappeared and set a cup of tea in front of her, a beaker of strong black coffee gripped in his other hand. The strain in his gorgeous dark golden eyes was palpable, the line of his eloquent mouth compressed with the level of his fierce tension.

‘I just don’t understand what you’re doing here,’ Tally whispered truthfully. ‘It would be easier for you just to let me go.’

‘I can’t let you go,’ Sander ground out abruptly.

‘Sander! For the past month you have behaved as if I didn’t exist while I was living below the same roof,’ Tally reminded him bluntly.

‘It wasn’t deliberate. I’m not like you in relationships … I don’t think things through. I didn’t have a plan as I do in business,’ Sander advanced in a sudden flood of driven words, his beautiful eyes full of an appeal for her to listen. ‘I was just so angry—’

‘I know. I understand that,’ Tally broke in, because she did.

‘I was just living with the rage and Volakis Shipping was failing,’ he told her in a raw undertone, black lashes screening his gaze as he gulped down black coffee.

‘Even though I assume that that contract which my father originally threatened went through?’

‘The TKR contract did, but I’m afraid that that was just the tip of the iceberg. I was scared I had left it too late. I wasn’t sure I could save the company,’ Sander admitted doggedly, behaving as though every word of that confession were being dragged from him under torture, for owning up to doubts and insecurities was something he never did. ‘So, I wasn’t really thinking about our marriage the last few weeks.’

And Tally got the point, she really did. Business had come first when it forced him to marry her, and business had come first when in spite of that huge sacrifice of his freedom he had discovered that the family company might still go down. That unhappy truth must only have added to his outrage at the position he was in. She understood that perfectly.

On the other side of the table, Sander was talking into his mobile phone at a fast rate of knots. Without warning, he leapt up. ‘Come on,’ he urged, reaching down and taking charge of her cabin case.

‘Come on … where?’ she exclaimed.

‘I’ve found us a hotel. This …’ Sander sent speaking dark impatient eyes over their crowded surroundings and barely repressed a shudder. ‘This is impossible!’

Tally was willing to admit that an airport café was not the best place to stage so private a dialogue, but she was reluctant to go to a hotel with him. ‘I just don’t think we have anything left to talk about,’ she protested, almost running to keep up with his long stride.

Already fed up with talking, Sander stopped dead and reached for her instead. He hauled her up against him and bent his handsome dark head to crush her soft full lips beneath his. She tasted like strawberries and wine, hot and heady and sweeter than sweet, and his senses reeled in a seething surge of excitement. An agony and an ecstasy of feeling and sensation roared through Tally’s slim body with such intensity that she trembled. It had been so long since he touched her that she could not restrain a gasp when his tongue pierced the tender sensitivity of her mouth and the thought of a much more intimate possession turned her secret places to melted honey and left her knees shaking.

His hand curved to her hip and rocked her up against him so that she could feel the hard thrust of his erection. Golden eyes ablaze with sexual heat gazed down into her hectically flushed face expectantly.

‘Yes … yes, we do need to talk!’ Tally exclaimed abruptly, sensing that not talking and using the hotel room for a far more basic purpose would come far more naturally to him at that moment. ‘But that’s all.’

She knew it was crazy to let Sander walk her out of the airport and into a taxi to travel to a nearby hotel, but she was on automatic pilot and desperately, cravenly hoping and praying that he might have something to say that she might want to hear. She had her ticket for her flight and there was nothing to stop her from still boarding that plane, she reminded herself urgently. At the hotel she discovered that he had booked them into a penthouse suite because that was the only accommodation available.

‘I understand that you’ve spent the last month fighting to keep Volakis Shipping in business,’ she conceded, standing by a floor-deep window to look across the spacious reception room at him. ‘But you didn’t tell me about it until I’d already walked out. How can we have a future together when you won’t even share something that basic with me?’

Sander pondered that question and his ebony brows drew together in a frown line. ‘It’s easy to share when things are going well, but when it’s the other way round, talking about it makes me feel …’ he shrugged awkwardly ‘… wimpy,’ he finally pronounced with complete contempt.

‘So I’m only allowed to hear good news on the business front? Sander …’ Momentarily her voice trailed away and she semi-groaned to express her discomfiture, turning reproachful eyes on him to say, ‘You actually thought I might have put my father up to blackmailing you into marrying me.’

Sander strode forward. ‘The instant I saw your face when I said that I knew it wasn’t true!’

Tally was relieved by his immediate withdrawal of that suspicion. ‘But how could you even think I was capable of that kind of manipulation?’

‘Blame the world I live in, moli mou. People use whatever weapon they can find to get on in life.’

‘But that’s not who I am, that’s not what I’m about,’ Tally argued with pained sincerity.

‘I used to believe that and then, when you fell pregnant, I had doubts. Your father’s blackmail made me doubt you even more, but I couldn’t risk a confrontation with you before the wedding to satisfy myself on that score.’

With reluctance, Tally accepted that he could not have come clean with her at that stage. But she had so many other concerns that the silence simmered.

‘Throw whatever you have to throw,’ Sander urged in raw encouragement. ‘Bring it—I can take it.’

‘Feeling as you have to feel about being railroaded into our marriage, why on earth have you come after me?’ Tally demanded emotively. ‘Why didn’t you just let me go?’

‘Because I can’t!’ Sander proclaimed without hesitation. ‘I thought of my life before I met you and I don’t miss any aspect of it. I don’t want my freedom back, I want you to stay with me.’

‘You feel bad about the way this has happened. I think that’s your conscience talking.’

‘If I thought I would be happier if you left Greece, I wouldn’t be here asking you to stay,’ Sander told her with an assurance that was persuasive. ‘I’m not that much of a fool.’

Exhaustion catching up with her, Tally sank heavily down on a seat. ‘You don’t love me. Look at it from my point of view: what would I stay for?’

Sander studied her small determined figure with brooding force. He wondered how he could explain why he wanted her when he couldn’t explain it even to his own satisfaction. As he watched her chin came up, corkscrew curls the colour of marmalade dancing back from her cheekbones and enhancing evocative green eyes.

With a stifled curse he lifted his lean brown hands to inscribe an arc of frustration in the air and he broke the simmering silence. ‘I don’t do love but there’s a whole host of other things I can offer you, pedhi mou,’ he argued vehemently, a muscle snapping taut at the corner of his stubborn sensual mouth. ‘I’ll be there for you when you’re lonely or scared or ill. There won’t be any other woman in my life. I won’t let business come between us again. I’ll make time for us to be together. You will be the centre of my world and I will spoil you and the baby, that I promise you.’

Sander spoke with far more emotion than she had ever heard him use before and the rough edge to his dark deep drawl and the strain in his beautiful dark eyes added another whole layer of sincerity to that speech. Tally was impressed and her heart was touched. She was even more pleased to hear his reference to the child she carried. He was offering to care for her as she had once believed he cared for her and it crossed her mind that had it not been for the distressing effect of her father’s blackmail Sander might never have stopped caring for her.

‘You never mention the baby,’ she remarked awkwardly.

Sander dug his hand into a pocket and removed something, which he extended to her. ‘I bought it a couple of weeks ago. I saw it in a window.’

Tally accepted the little brightly painted metal train and her eyes burned and prickled with a surge of moisture. It was an elaborate adult toy built of tiny components and would have been ridiculously dangerous to give to a young child. But Sander had no notion of such safety hazards and with this particular purchase it was very much the thought that had prompted it that counted.

‘I mean, girls can play with trains too,’ Sander added in forceful addition, keen to let her know that he wasn’t being sexist.

‘Of course they can,’ she agreed gruffly, her throat aching.

You will be the centre of my world. That, and a promise of fidelity would be enough for her, Tally reflected fiercely. Love would have been the icing on the cake, love would have made everything perfect, but she knew that she didn’t live in a perfect world and she had not yet given up all hope. Maybe some day he would fall in love with her.

Sander closed his arms round her and almost squeezed the oxygen from her lungs as he crushed her to him in a driven embrace that said far more about his troubled and vulnerable state of mind than his words. ‘I want you to be my wife. I want you to be a permanent part of my life, pedhi mou,’ he swore feelingly. ‘And I promise that you won’t regret staying with me.’

‘I’d better not,’ Tally told him tightly, fighting the emotion threatening to paralyse her vocal cords, when she saw the suspicious glimmer of moisture in his beautiful dark eyes and realised that he too was fighting to control strong feelings. ‘But you’ll have to be on your very best behaviour.’

Sander loosened his grip, only long enough to stoop and sweep her right off her feet into his arms and grin down at her. ‘Absolutely.’

‘I expect action in the bedroom every night,’ Tally warned him, reddening but desperate to take the tension out of the atmosphere.

She was rewarded by his dazzling grin. ‘If only you knew how hard it was to keep my distance, but every time I was tempted I thought about the blackmail and I felt like I was being controlled by your father. That just made me angry again,’ he admitted gruffly.

‘But you’re not angry any more,’ Tally pointed out soothingly, reaching up a caressing hand to his strong jaw line as he laid her down on a wide divan bed in the bedroom.

Sander shed his jacket and came down beside her and she hugged him tight, her heart racing. He felt the terrible tension seep out of him and he held her close, one hand smoothing back her hair from her face.

‘I have a house in the South of France. It belonged to Titos and he left it to me in his will. We never had a honeymoon and I think it’s time I remedied that, pedhi mou,’ Sander murmured. ‘At the very least, we’ll stay there for a few weeks and make a fresh start—’

‘A fresh start begins in here,’ Tally argued, pressing his broad chest over his heart in emphasis. ‘It doesn’t matter where we are, just that we’re together—together in body and spirit.’

Sander cupped her chin and gazed deep in her shining eyes, marvelling at the strength of her optimistic spirit while experiencing a blessed sense of peace that was new to his restless nature. ‘I do care about you: the last month is just a blur of meetings and late nights. I’ve been very selfish. I am very selfish, matia mou,’ he concluded in apologetic warning, anxious dark eyes skimming to her from below spiky dark lashes.

‘I knew you weren’t perfect. But I signed up for the long haul,’ Tally whispered unevenly, loving him so much as she met his dark steady gaze that tears were only seconds away in the great tide of emotion sweeping through her.

Sander looked down at her. ‘Just don’t give up on me. I can learn, I can do everything better.’

Tally rested a fingertip against his sculpted lips. ‘It’s not a competition.’

‘Competition brings out the best in me.’ He sighed.

Love surged inside her but she crammed it back, refusing to say those words. Declarations of love always came with expectations attached and she didn’t want to do that to him. He had said openly, honestly, that he didn’t do love but that he did do caring and she promised herself that that was going to be enough to make her happy long term. He pressed a kiss to her lips and she tingled, inside and out, her body awakening after a long period of frustration.

‘We’re both so tired,’ Tally whispered ruefully.

‘But I won’t sleep until I feel that you’re mine again,’ Sander asserted, quietly removing her clothes with careful hands, while shedding his own with a good deal less concern.

And he was very gentle, slow and skilled and she reached a climax of breathtaking splendour and knew a happiness that made her cry. He held her close and teased her for her runaway emotions while secretly appreciating the sheer womanly tenderness of her heart. She was everything he had never thought he would want and now that he had her back he was fiercely determined never to lose her again. In that moment he had so many good intentions he was bursting with them.

‘Go to sleep,’ he urged her tenderly when she yawned and snuggled closer.

And Tally drifted off to sleep in the cradle of his strong arms, every fear of the future overcome at last.

Four months later, Tally finished hanging new curtains in the oak-floored salon of the house in the South of France, which they had made their main home, and straightened her aching back with a sigh of relief.

Sander’s brother’s house had needed a great deal of work before it could be considered either comfortable or presentable. Having bought the rundown property as an investment, Titos had never got around to fixing it up. Tally had fallen madly in love with the old farmhouse, which was crying out for a designer’s hand, and room by room she had worked through the house, setting a loving stamp on every corner of it.

‘Sander said you weren’t to climb any more ladders,’ Binkie reminded the younger woman disapprovingly from the doorway.

Tally tried not to grin. Sander’s all-male habit of laying down the law and the pronouncements and prohibitions he uttered perfectly matched Binkie’s old-fashioned expectations of a husband. Binkie had consented to come and work for them as a housekeeper after Crystal had decided that she no longer needed the older woman’s services in London. Tally had seen less of her mother since Crystal moved in with her current boyfriend, Roger, a widowed furniture manufacturer, who lived in Monaco. Crystal, however, seemed happy and more content with Roger than she had been for quite some time. In the same period Tally had heard nothing at all from her father, Anatole, and she wasn’t expecting that situation to change.

‘I was only climbing a little set of steps, not a proper ladder,’ Tally reasoned quietly.

‘You’re pregnant, you have to take care.’ The older woman sighed. ‘You should have asked me or called Marcel to help.’

Tally smiled noncommittally as she recalled Marcel the gardener’s aghast response to being asked to do anything indoors and Binkie had always been very nervous of using steps or ladders. She might now be six months pregnant, Tally acknowledged, but she was perfectly healthy and felt strong and well. She smoothed a protective hand over the swell of her tummy and smiled warmly as a little fluttering sensation indicated that her child was moving inside her. When the baby went quiet and she didn’t feel his movements, she always worried. Her baby might not be born yet but Tally was already convinced that she loved him. At the last scan she had learned that her baby was a boy and she was delighted. She didn’t care whether she had a boy or a girl and simply prayed for a healthy child.

Most days she took a dreamy tour of the room she had already lovingly decorated and furnished as a nursery in bright shades of lemon and blue. She could hardly wait to welcome their son into the world and could now scarcely recall a time when she had worried about Sander’s commitment to being a parent.

Sander had kept all his promises, Tally acknowledged with a sunny smile, her heart lifting at the thought that the husband she adored would be returning from a three-day business trip to Athens that very evening. Since that day when Sander had reclaimed her from the airport, their marriage had gone from strength to strength and he had made her the centre of his world. He shared his workday frustrations with her and there had been many, for he and his father were uneasy work colleagues and Volakis Shipping was still fighting to attain long-term security.

For the greater part of the week, Sander was based in France and he ran the family company and his own business interests from a distance. The board of directors had recognised his genius in the changes he had made in how the business operated and had infuriated his competitive father by giving Sander a rousing vote of confidence in reward. Sander and Tally both enjoyed the more relaxed pace of life in France and often had his friends to stay at the weekend. Tally enjoyed being a hostess and was now a good deal less intimidated by the beautiful girls who threw themselves at Sander’s head every chance they got.

After all, Tally knew her husband much better than she had known him when they first married. She had learned that he was not a fan of women who chased him and disliked such bold approaches. He also had no love for clubs and noisy parties and much preferred social occasions attended only by close friends.

He would be wild to take her to bed when he got home that night, Tally savoured with hot cheeks and a sliding sensation of anticipation between her thighs. Her husband was highly sexed and she was still shaken by the hot rush of excitement that just a look or a touch from Sander could awaken in her.

Two hours later, Sander strode into the house and flung down his raincoat. Coming home to Tally was always an occasion and his gaze centred on her small, curvy figure standing beside the tall glittering Christmas tree. The house was a festive wonderland of Christmas ornamentation and, as the son of parents who had only ever celebrated the season in the most low-key and tasteful manner, Sander was impressed by his wife’s wonderful homemaking skills.

Her green eyes were bright with welcome and tenderness and he headed straight for her and scooped her up against him to kiss her with passionate appreciation. Her heart racing, Tally kissed Sander back with unconcealed enthusiasm.

‘How much time have we got before dinner?’ he breathed raggedly against her reddened lips.

Angling the swell of her stomach away from him, Tally shimmied her hip in wanton invitation against his lean powerful frame. ‘Enough time,’ she assured him shamelessly, for she had planned it that way, aware that Sander would only really relax after they had made love again.

Meeting green eyes dancing with merriment and mischief, Sander laughed with unashamed masculine appreciation. He was truly happy to be home again as he walked her down to the bedroom they shared. Clothes were shed without ceremony and the kisses grew hotter than hot very quickly. Their impatience to reacquaint their bodies and sate the craving for satisfaction that tormented them both when they were parted for a few days lent an added edge of excitement. In the aftermath, her heart slowly returning to a less accelerated beat, Tally feasted her eyes on her husband’s lean, dark devastating features and whispered, ‘I missed you.’

Sander dropped another kiss on her soft full mouth and luxuriated in her embrace. ‘Once the baby’s born you’ll be able to come with me, pedhi mou.’

Tally winced at that forecast. ‘Babies like routine. I doubt if our baby will travel well.’

‘My son will,’ Sander forecast with perceptible pride. ‘To be a Volakis is to be a good traveller by air or by sea.’

Tally giggled. ‘Is that so?’

‘Of course it is. My son will be clever and he will naturally want to please his father.’

Tally half sat up and gazed lovingly down at the father of her child before saying with her usual common sense, ‘You’re always disagreeing with yours.’

‘But I will be a more caring parent and my son and I will have a closer relationship. I was always extra to requirements in my own family,’ Sander told her with a dismissive shrug that did not quite conceal his regret that it should have been that way.

‘You know …’ Tally trailed gentle appreciative fingers across one stunning masculine cheekbone ‘… you are my world.’

Sander caught her hand in his and kissed her fingertips. ‘And you are at the very heart of mine, kardoula mou. I will always be grateful to your father for ensuring that I married you … what a treasure I might have missed out of my own ignorance and immaturity!’

And Tally recognised then that all his anger on that score was really laid to rest and their relationship had turned full circle. The warmth of his acceptance and his recognition of their increasingly close ties filled her to overflowing with happiness and contentment. In spite of all her careful planning dinner was very, very late that night …