by Lynne Graham
‘I bet you don’t even remember that night…’
‘I remember it very well,’ Lucy admitted, lifting her chin. ‘What’s this all about, Jax? I’m getting confused—’
His eyes narrowed, his mouth flattening. ‘I drove over to the bar and before I could get out of my car, I saw you walking down the alleyway in your red dress—’
‘It wasn’t me you saw,’ Lucy sliced in thinly. When Jax had failed to turn up to see her the night before Lucy had stayed in her attic room after doing her shift, frantically hoping that Jax would magically appear with an explanation. Like a child waiting for Santa Claus she had refused to believe he wouldn’t show up eventually and she had been terrified of somehow missing him. She had had that much faith in him, that much trust…
‘It was you. You were with a man—’
‘You’re mistaken,’ Lucy told him confidently.
‘I followed you because I assumed you were heading for the entrance that led up to your room but you weren’t,’ Jax informed her stonily. ‘You stayed outside to have sex with the man you were with against the wall.’
Her lashes fluttered up on disbelieving bright blue eyes and she stared back at him. ‘You think that I had sex with some guy in the alley?’ she demanded with a revulsion she couldn’t hide. ‘Are you kidding me?’
Lean, strong face shuttered and forbidding, Jax stood his ground because naturally he hadn’t expected her to own up to her behaviour. ‘You know I’m not kidding and what I saw that night is why you never heard from me again. There was no point in showing you that file when you were already with another man,’ he proclaimed harshly. ‘I don’t need to apologise or make excuses for not approaching you again.’
‘I agree,’ Lucy said with wooden diction, shattered inside herself but holding it all together out of pride. ‘If I had been with another man that soon, you owed me nothing. Clearly, it suited you very well to assume that night that the girl in the alley was me—’
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ Jax shot at her suspiciously.
‘Well, you’d seen that file and learned that your precious father did not approve of me. It was really incredibly convenient for you that in spite of everything you knew about me you decided to accept that file and assume that I was the sort of young woman who would have sex in an alley.’
Lucy could feel her cheekbones ache with the strain of keeping her face composed but there was a much deeper ache of pain inside her chest. She knew he didn’t love her. She knew he had never loved her. That wounding knowledge had chipped away at her upbeat outlook on their marriage and she had fought it off, telling herself to settle sensibly for what she could get. But for the first time ever, Lucy decided that Jax was bad for her.
Never mind the Antonakos fame, the money and the gorgeous looks. Two years back, she had told Jax that she loved him and she had, but he had given nothing back, not the words nor any other form of commitment. He had held back from her, he had always held back from her and now she finally knew why. But she deserved better. She deserved a man who would, at the very least, refuse to believe that she would have sex in public with some chance-met stranger. And Jax hadn’t had that faith in her and probably never would have. A horrible sense of emptiness spread inside her. Her loving him wasn’t enough.
‘It was you. I recognised the dress,’ Jax bit out, exasperated by the stretching silence and the strange way she was staring at him.
‘Yes…you may have done but it wasn’t me wearing the dress,’ Lucy countered tightly. ‘I loaned it to Tara that night because she had a hot date and I imagine she was fooling around in the alley because she could hardly bring a man back to the room we shared when I was there. Not everyone has a private room or a yacht available for these things…’
Jax froze. ‘It couldn’t have been her! Why would she have been wearing the dress I bought you?’
Lucy sent him a weary glance of exasperation. ‘Because we shared our clothes. We didn’t have much but what we had, we shared. Half the clothes you saw me wear that summer belonged to Tara.’
‘It couldn’t have been her,’ Jax repeated again doggedly, struggling to remember her friend before dimly recalling the much more worldly blonde whom Lucy had worked and lived with.
Lucy shrugged a shoulder in a jerky movement. ‘Well, it doesn’t much matter after this length of time, does it?’ she traded.
‘It matters to me. And it must matter to you,’ Jax told her with assurance.
‘No, it doesn’t,’ Lucy responded heavily.
Jax hovered and clenched his teeth hard. He wanted it dealt with and then never mentioned again. But could it have been Tara in that stupid dress? It had been dark and Tara had had long blonde hair too. Between the street lights and the shadows, it was possible that he had been mistaken. And if he had been mistaken, it would be the very first time in Jax’s life that he would ever be grateful to have made a mistake. Didn’t she appreciate that? Didn’t she understand what believing she would behave that way had done to him? Refusing to look at him, Lucy was staring at the tiled floor instead as if she were expecting it to start showing a movie and frustration racked Jax’s tall powerful frame. Women! She had gone into a weird mood now and he would probably get nothing more out of her.
‘I have a meeting. I was planning to reschedule it and take us back to Tifnos—’
‘No, go to your meeting,’ Lucy urged, her throat convulsing, and she still wouldn’t let herself look at him because she didn’t want what she felt in her heart to show.
‘We can fly back in the morning,’ Jax commented. ‘The timing would probably suit Bella better than a late flight.’
Lucy listened to the door close on his exit and continued to sit there with tears rolling silently down her cheeks. Jax had just shown her how he really thought of her and how he saw her and it was…it was ugly, uglier than she could bear or forgive or comprehend. To think that all those weeks on the island he had believed that she had been unfaithful to him and yet he hadn’t said a word, hadn’t even given her the chance to explain or defend herself. It was so cruel, so unfair but you couldn’t change a man, couldn’t alter what went on inside his head.
Jax didn’t trust her, had never trusted even a word she’d said. He had been her one and only lover and he couldn’t even believe that. She had been too young and immature at nineteen to recognise how cynical and distrustful Jax was. She had realised that he was pretty jealous and possessive but her awareness had gone no deeper than that. She thought of him seeing Tara in that grubby alley and believing it was her and a stifled sob of pain and regret and humiliation was wrenched from her. That hurt so much and it seemed with Jax at that moment that he did nothing but hurt and disillusion her. She didn’t want to stay married to a man like that, she couldn’t stay married to a man who thought so little of her…
And when the wave of conflicting emotions began to tear at Lucy more than she could stand she dug out her phone and rang her sister, Polly, desperately needing a shoulder to cry on.
Polly was a terrific listener. Lucy let the whole sorry story of her relationship with Jax and Kreon spill out and, very satisfyingly, Polly was even more appalled by the alleyway accusation than Lucy had been.
‘Come and stay with us, Lucy,’ Polly suggested warmly. ‘You need a holiday. I know you felt that you were happy with him at first but Jax doesn’t seem to appreciate you the way a husband should. It’s possible that he resents you for what your father did.’
To Lucy in that instant the prospect of walking away into a different environment shone like a bright welcoming light. ‘I don’t even know where you live, Polly,’ she pointed out unevenly.
‘In a country called Dharia. It’s one of the Gulf States,’ Polly explained.
Lucy was flummoxed by that news. ‘I don’t know how I’d get there or even how I’d get away from here.’
‘Don’t you worry about that,’ Polly told her assertively. ‘I will arrange everything. If you leave tonight, we’ll be ha
ving breakfast together in the morning and I can get hold of Ellie and she could be here by this weekend. We really do want to meet you and your daughter, Lucy.’
‘Leave…tonight?’ Lucy gasped in astonishment, wondering if it would be wrong of her to take her daughter with her as well and then deciding that, just at that moment, losing both of them was what Jax deserved for his distrust.
‘I don’t think you should waste any more time on the Antonakos family. They don’t love or value you but we will.’
And Polly’s enthusiasm was the deciding factor for Lucy, who usually took more time to decide anything of a serious nature. But at least she didn’t feel like crying any longer, she registered with relief, because crying after Jax had gone over her like a steam roller with his nasty allegations seemed feeble. Jax didn’t want her and his father didn’t want her in his precious family and her own father had seriously disappointed her. A fresh start and the friendship of her sisters looked a lot more promising than her current situation.
‘Tonight will be fine,’ she assured Polly. ‘I’ll start packing. I suppose it will be very hot?’
‘Yes, but the pal—er…my place is air-conditioned,’ her sister informed her.
CHAPTER TEN
JAX WAS STUNNED. He ran through the empty wardrobes again as if he expected to find Lucy curled up below the empty coat hangers in hiding. He wandered back to the empty nursery, stared into the even emptier cot and then hurriedly strode back downstairs again.
‘Take me through it again,’ he urged Zenas jerkily, struggling to master the kind of emotions he generally never allowed to see the light of day. Emotions like panic, fear and insecurity that could tear a man to pieces as they had once torn apart the boy he had been. Having frequently lived those emotions in childhood and adolescence, he had sworn never to give them space again. But there they were still inside him, he discovered, just waiting their chance to jump on him and either paralyse him or urge him to make fundamentally stupid decisions…
Zenas breathed in deep, a wary eye on Jax, who was visibly pale and stressed. ‘A diplomatic limousine with a foreign flag drew up. An Arab man in a suit and a crowd of heavies got out. The man had diplomatic credentials but he spoke neither Greek nor English and was unwilling to engage with my questions. Your wife opened the door with your daughter in her arms. She had a stack of suitcases waiting in the hall—’
‘And you just let her go…?’ Jax repeated incredulously. ‘You let a bunch of foreigners kidnap—’
‘She wasn’t kidnapped. She went of her own free will,’ Zenas told him apologetically. ‘We followed the car to the airport where the whole party proceeded through VIP diplomatic channels to which we were denied access. From what we can establish a private jet flew Mrs Antonakos and the little girl to Dharia.’
The name of that country rang a bell of familiarity with Jax. His brow furrowed. There had been some connection. Thee mou, his one-time business partner, Rio Benedetti, was married to the sister of the Queen of Dharia…who was coincidentally called… Polly, just like Lucy’s long-lost sister. No, he shook away the suspicion until he thought about that slick diplomatic kidnapping—he refused to accept that Lucy had willingly left him—and then the suspicion lodged deep.
Lucy was making a statement, he told himself grimly. He should do nothing and wait for her to get in touch. Lucy would not walk out on him, he told himself. She was annoyed with him. There was nothing he could do about that. He was merely paying the price for having finally told her the truth and if she didn’t like the truth, what was he supposed to do about it? Satisfied that he had reached a mature and measured decision, Jax poured himself a stiff drink.
Within the hour he was back pacing the empty marital bedroom. He should not have been imagining Lucy there because they had never yet spent a night in his Athens villa. Yet inexplicably memories of Lucy were everywhere around him. He pictured her on the bed, the softness of her pouty lips, the delicate paleness of her skin, the silky fall of her hair running between his fingers. He snatched in a stark breath. There was a tiny spiralling blonde hair on the dressing table and the scent of the perfume he had bought her in Mykonos still lingered on the air. The bedding was still creased from where she had sat while they’d talked that very afternoon.
Talked? Well, she hadn’t really talked, he acknowledged tardily, indeed had been remarkably quiet for a chatterbox. With hindsight it became clear to Jax that she had been upset, seriously upset. And he hadn’t picked up on that. How could he not have picked up on that?
Still locked in the mindset he had had for two long years, Jax had continued to feel like the victim of her treachery. But what if there had been no betrayal in the first place? What if that ridiculous story about sharing clothes was genuine? What if he had abandoned her in Spain two years earlier without any excuse for doing so? And what if he had blown up his marriage over a stupid red dress and a mindless need to finally confront Lucy?
Jax paced, feeling in dire need of another drink but knowing he shouldn’t have one when his brain was already leapfrogging all over the place. Lucy and Bella were gone and he could live with that, couldn’t he? A divorce, shared custody, parental access…?
Suddenly feeling very short of breath, Jax froze. There was a tightness in his chest and a dryness in his throat and his heart was thundering in his ears. No, he couldn’t live with that option, he decided with dizzy abruptness.
And as so often before when life challenged Jax, anger came to his rescue. He wasn’t letting the queen of some tinpot country steal his wife and child! Lucy had been lured away from him and misled and he was going to get her back pronto where she belonged, which was in Greece with him.
*
‘By the sound of it, Jax really doesn’t know how to deal with the emotional stuff,’ Ellie remarked with a wry smile on her lips.
‘That’s an understatement,’ Polly inputted with a sniff. ‘That alley business…accusing her of that—’
Ellie laughed and Lucy looked at her redheaded sister in surprise. ‘But don’t you see? It was all still as fresh as yesterday for Jax, which tells you that he never got over it. Two years on he’s still agonising over that alley…yet he still decides to stay married to you, he takes you on a honeymoon, acts happy, treats you decently in every other way. It took the equivalent of torture to get the story about the alley out of him because he’s ashamed that he still wants you, regardless of what he supposedly thinks you did. No, really, Lucy…you can learn a lot from reading between the lines.’
Lucy smiled at that more optimistic viewpoint even if she didn’t quite believe in it. She coiled back into her comfortable corner of the sofa in the beautiful room with its impossibly high domed ceiling and wished that she could see what Ellie appeared to see in Jax’s behaviour. Her two sisters were so different. Polly was warm and caring, almost motherly, while Ellie was very clever and sympathetic and their children, her nephews and nieces, she noted with pleasure, were simply gorgeous.
Polly’s boys, Karim and Hassan and Ellie’s daughter, Teresina were playing out in the shaded courtyard on trikes. Ellie was feeding her baby boy, Olly, with a bottle while Polly was nursing her newborn daughter, Haifa. Bella was watching the older children scoot around on their bikes while chasing a ball. Karim got off his bike simply to move Bella back a little with her toys, looking out for the toddler in the most considerate way for a small boy.
Lucy was shaken to admit that she would have been crazily happy in her sister’s gorgeous royal palace were it not for Jax’s absence. The discovery that her eldest sister was a ruling queen with her husband, Rashad, and that Ellie was the working wife of a fabulously wealthy Italian had certainly helped to take Lucy’s mind off her own problems. The three women had sat up into the early hours the first night they were all together, exchanging histories, talking about the three rings they had inherited and catching up on a lifetime of different experiences.
Talking about Jax had come later and had sent Lucy’s mood plummeting a
gain because, even though she still felt that walking out on Jax had been the only thing she could do, there was a hollow place inside her where her heart had been ripped out.
In the back of her mind lurked the conviction that Jax had been hurt so much in life just like herself yet they dealt with emotions in very different ways. Jax buried his, hid troubling issues and lived in virtual denial of his feelings. Lucy wore everything on the surface and picked herself up again emotionally no matter how often she was kicked. But she hadn’t reacted that way at her last encounter with Jax, she acknowledged. He had hurt her too much and for the first time ever with Jax she had hidden her feelings as well.
In a sense that had been cruel of her and hitting him over the head with something large and heavy might have been kinder. Feelings had to be shoved in Jax’s face like placards for him to read them. He had probably been very shocked by her departure and he was probably furious that she had taken their daughter with her. But he still wouldn’t understand why she had left, which bothered her. The truth was all that had mattered to Jax and he had finally told it without grasping the damage he was doing. He had expected her to excuse him for past events soured by their fathers’ machinations. He had not been capable of realising that she had been devastated because everything he had said had spelled out the message that he had never loved, respected or even understood her. How could she possibly love someone like that?
‘He’s a man. He might as well be from another planet,’ Ellie mocked quietly. ‘Rio was exactly the same, hiding things, holding onto the past—’
‘Rashad too,’ Polly admitted ruefully. ‘So, perhaps Jax could be rehabilitated…’
Lucy studied her linked hands, unable to imagine Jax budging a stubborn inch from his own convictions.
The door opened, framing Rashad, the King of Dharia. Tall and very handsome, he flashed a smile at his wife. ‘Polly…we have a visitor. He thinks we kidnapped his wife. What would you have to say to that?’