by Penny Jordan
‘Anna, who is in charge of the household, will have everything ready for you and the twins. She and Georgiou, her husband, who has driven us here, look after the villa and its gardens between them. They have their own private quarters over the garage block, which is separate from the villa itself,’ Sander informed Ruby as the car crunched to a halt over the gravel.
Almost immediately the front door to the villa was opened to reveal a tall, well-built woman with dark hair streaked with grey and a serene expression.
It gave Ruby a fierce pang of emotion to see the way the twins automatically put their hands in Sander’s and not her own as they walked with their father towards her. Her smile of welcome for Sander was one of love and delight, and Ruby watched in amazement as Sander returned her warm hug with obvious affection. Somehow it was not what she had expected. Anna—Ruby assumed the woman was Anna—was plainly far more to Sander than merely the person who was in charge of his household.
Now she was bending down to greet the boys, not overwhelming them by hugging them as she had Sander, Ruby noted approvingly, but instead waiting for them to go to her.
Sander gave them a little push and told them, ‘This is Anna. She looked after me when I was a boy, and now she will look after you.’
Immediately Ruby’s maternal hackles rose. Her sons did not need Anna or anyone else to look after them. They had her. She stepped forward herself, placing one hand on each of her son’s shoulders, and then was completely disarmed when Anna smiled warmly and approvingly at her, as though welcoming what she had done rather than seeing it as either a challenge or a warning.
When Sander introduced her to Anna as his wife, it was obvious that Anna had been expecting them. What had Sander said to his family and those who knew him about the twins? How had he explained away the fact that he was suddenly producing them—and her? Ruby didn’t know but she did know that Anna at least was delighted to welcome the twins as Sander’s sons. It was plain she was ready to adore and spoil them, and was going to end up completely under their thumbs.
‘Anna will show you round the villa and provide you and the boys with something to eat,’ Sander informed Ruby.
He said something in Greek to Anna, who beamed at him and nodded her head vigorously, and then he was gone, striding across the white limestone floor of the entrance hall and disappearing through one of the dark wooden doors set into the white walls.
That feeling gripping her wasn’t a sense of loss, was it? A feeling of being abandoned? A longing for Sander to return, because without him their small family was incomplete? Because without him she was incomplete?
As soon as the treacherous words whispered across her mind Ruby stiffened in denial of them. But they had left an echo that wasn’t easily silenced, reminding her of all that she had suffered when she had first been foolish enough to think that he cared about her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘I’LL show you your rooms first,’ Anna told Ruby, ‘and then perhaps you would like a cup of tea before you see the rest of the villa?’
There was something genuinely warm and kind and, well, motherly about Anna that had Ruby’s initial wary hostility melting away as they walked together up the marble stairs, the twins in between them.
When they reached the top and saw the long wide landing stretching out ahead of them the twins looked at Ruby hopefully.
Shaking her head, she began, ‘No—no running inside—’ Only to have Anna smile broadly at her.
‘This is their home now, they may run if you permit it,’ she told her.
‘Very well,’ Ruby told them, relieved by Anna’s understanding of the need of two young children to let off steam, and both women watched as the boys ran down the corridor.
‘Looking at them is like looking at Sander when he was a similar age, except that—’ Anna stopped, her smile fading.
‘Except that what?’ Ruby asked her, sensitively defensive of any possible criticism being lodged against her precious sons.
As though she had guessed what Ruby was thinking, Anna patted Ruby on the arm.
‘You are a good mother—anyone can see that. Your goodness and your love for them is reflected in your sons’ smiles. Sander’s mother was not like that. Her children were a duty she resented, and they all, especially Sander, learned young not to turn to their mother for love and comfort.’
Anna’s quiet words formed an image inside Ruby’s head she didn’t want to see—an image of a young and vulnerable Sander, a child with sadness in his eyes, standing alone and hurt by his mother’s lack of love for him.
The boys raced back to them, putting an end to any more confidences from Anna about Sander’s childhood, and Ruby’s sympathy for the child that Sander had been was swiftly pushed to one side when she discovered that the two of them were going to be sharing a bedroom and a bed.
Why did she feel so unnerved and apprehensive? Ruby asked herself later, after Anna had helped her put the twins to bed and she was in the kitchen, drinking the fresh cup of tea Anna had insisted on making for her. Sander had already made it plain that she must accept that their marriage would include sexual intimacy. They both already knew that she wanted him, and she had already suffered the humiliation that had brought her, so what was there left for her to fear?
There was emotional vulnerability, Ruby admitted. With her sexual vulnerability to Sander there was already a danger that she could become sexually dependent on him, and that was bad enough. If she also became emotionally vulnerable to him might she not then become emotionally dependent on him? Where had that thought come from? She was a million miles from feeling anything emotional for Sander, wasn’t she?
Excusing herself to Anna, Ruby explained that she wanted to go up and check the twins were still sleeping as they had left them, not wanting them to wake alone in such new surroundings.
The twins’ bedroom, like the one she was to share with Sander, looked out onto a courtyard and an infinity pool with the sea beyond it. But whilst Sander’s bedroom had glass doors that opened out onto the patio area that surrounded the pool, the boys’ room merely had a window—a safety feature for which she was extremely grateful. Glass bedroom doors, a swimming pool, and two adventurous five-year-olds were a mix that would arouse anxiety in any protective mother.
She needn’t have worried about the twins. They were both sleeping soundly, their faces turned toward one another. Love for them filled her. But as she bent towards them to kiss them it wasn’t their faces she could see but that of another young child, a child whose dark eyes, so like those of her sons, were shadowed with pain and angry pride. Sander’s eyes. They still held that angry pride now, as an adult, when he looked at her. And the pain? Her question furrowed Ruby’s brow. Emotional pain was not something she had previously equated with Sander. But the circumstances a child experienced growing up affected it all its life. She believed that wholeheartedly. If she hadn’t done so then she would not feel as strongly as she did about Sander being a part of the twins’ lives. So what had happened to Sander’s pain? Was it buried somewhere deep inside him? A sad, sore place that could never heal? A wound that was the cruellest wound of all to a child—the lack of its mother’s love?
Confused by her own thoughts, Ruby left her sleeping sons. She was tired and ready for bed herself. Her heart started beating unsteadily. Tired and ready for bed? Ready to share Sander’s bed?
The villa was beautifully decorated. The guest suite Anna had shown Ruby, and in which she would have preferred to be sleeping, was elegantly modern, the clean lines of its furniture softened by gauzy drapes, the cool white and taupe of the colour scheme broken up with touches of Mediterranean blues and greens in the artwork adorning the walls.
From the twins’ room Ruby made her way to the room she was sharing with Sander—not because she wanted to look again at the large bed and let her imagination taunt her with images of what they would share there, but because she needed to unpack, Ruby told herself firmly. Only when she opened the door to th
e bedroom the cases that had been there before had vanished, and from the en suite bathroom through the open door she could smell the sharp citrus scent of male soap and hear the sound of the shower.
Had Sander had her cases removed? Had he told Anna that he didn’t want to share a room with her? Relief warred with a jolt of female protectiveness of her position as his wife. She liked Anna, but she didn’t want the other woman to think that Sander was rejecting her. That would be humiliating. More humiliating than being forced in the silence of the night to cry out in longing to a husband who could arouse in her a hunger she could not control?
Ruby moved restlessly from one foot to the other, and then froze as the door to the en suite bathroom opened fully and Sander walked into the bedroom.
He had wrapped a towel round his hips. His body was still damp from his shower, and the white towel threw into relief the powerful tanned male V shape of his torso and the breadth of his shoulders, tapering down over strong muscles to his chest, to the hard flatness of his belly. The shadowing of dark hair slicked wetly against his skin emphasised a maleness that had Ruby trapped in its sensual spell. She wanted to look away from him. She wanted not to remember, not to feel, not to be so easily and completely overwhelmed by the need that just looking at him brought back to simmering heat. But she didn’t have that kind of self-control. Instead of satiating her desire for him, what they had already shared seemed only to have increased her need for him.
Her own intense sensuality bewildered her. She had lived for six years without ever once wanting to have sex, and yet now she only had to look at Sander to be consumed by this alien desire that seemed to have taken possession of her. Possession. Just thinking the word increased the heat licking at her body, tightening the pulse flickering eagerly deep inside her.
It was Ruby’s fault that he wanted her, Sander told himself. It was she, with her soft mouth and her hungry gaze, with her eagerness, who was responsible for his own inability to control the savage surging of his need to possess her. It was because of her that he felt this ache, this driven, agonising urgency that unleashed within him something he barely recognised as part of himself.
Like a wild storm, a tornado threatening to suck them both up into its perilous grasp, Ruby could feel the pressure of their combined desire. Fear filled her. She didn’t want this. It shamed and weakened her. Dragging her gaze from Sander’s body, she started to run towards the door in blind panic. But Sander moved faster, reaching the door before her, and the impetus of her panic slammed her into his body, the impact shocking through her.
Tears of anger—against herself, against him, and against the aching desire flooding her—filled her eyes and she curled her hands into small fists and beat them impotently against his chest. Sander seized hold of her wrists.
‘I don’t want to feel like this,’ she cried, agonized.
‘But you do. You want this, and you want me,’ he told her, before he took the denial from her lips with the ruthless pressure of his own.
Just the taste of her unleashed within him a hunger he couldn’t control. The softness of her lips, the sound she made when he kissed her, the way her whole body shuddered against his with longing, drove him in what felt like a form of madness, a need, to a place where nothing else existed or mattered, where bringing her desire within the control of his ability to satisfy it felt as though it was what he had been born for.
Each sound she made, each shudder of pleasure her body gave, each urgent movement against his touch that begged silently for more became a goal he had to reach—a test of his maleness he had to master, so that he would always be the only man she desired, his pleasuring of her the only pleasure that could satisfy her. Something about the pale silkiness of her skin as he slid her clothes from it made him want to touch it over and over again. His hands already knew the shape and texture of her breasts, but that knowing only made him want to feel their soft weight even more. His lips and tongue and teeth might have aroused the swollen darkness of her nipples to previous pleasure, but now he wanted to recreate that pleasure. He wanted to slide his hand over the flatness of her belly and feel her suck it in as she fought to deny the effect of his touch and lost that fight. He wanted to part the slender thighs and feel them quiver, hear the small moan from between her lips, watch as she tried and failed to stop her thighs from opening eagerly to allow him the intimacy of her sex. He loved the way her soft, delicately shaped outer lips, so primly folded, opened to the slow stroke of his fingers, her wetness eagerly awaiting him.
A shocked cry of protest streaked with primitive longing burst from Ruby’s throat as Sander gave in to the demand of his own arousal and moved down her body, to kiss the soft flesh on the inside of her thighs and then stroke the tip of his tongue the length of the female valley his skilled fingers had laid bare to his caress.
Waves of pleasure were racing through her, dragging her back to a level of sensuality where she was as out of her depth as a fledgling swimmer swept out by the tide into deep water. Each stroke of his tongue-tip against the most sensitive part of her took her deeper, until her own pleasure was swamping her, pulling her down into its embrace, until the rhythm it imposed on her was all that she knew, her response to it dictated and controlled by the lap of Sander’s tongue as finally it overwhelmed her and she was drowning in it, giving herself over completely to it.
Later, filling her with his aching flesh, feeling her desire catch fire again as her body moved with his, inciting him towards his own destruction, Sander knew with razor-sharp clarity, in the seconds before he cried out in the exultation of release, that what he was doing might be trapping her in her desire for him but it was also feeding his need for her.
CHAPTER NINE
FROM the shade of the vine-covered pergola, Ruby watched the twins as they splashed in the swimming pool under Sander’s watchful eye. It was just over six weeks now since they had arrived on the island, and the twins were loving their new life. They worshipped Sander. He was a good father, Ruby was forced to admit, giving them his time and attention, and most important of all his love. She glanced towards the house. Anna would be bringing their lunch out to them soon. A prickle of despair trickled down her spine as chilling as cold water.
This morning she was finally forcing herself to confront the possibility that she might be pregnant! The breakfasts she had been unable to eat in the morning, the tiredness that engulfed her every afternoon, the slight swelling of her breasts—all could have other explanations, but her missed period was now adding to the body of evidence.
Could she really be pregnant? Her heart jumped sickeningly inside her chest. There must be no more children, Sander had said. She must take the contraceptive pill. She had done, without missing a single one, but her symptoms were exactly the same as those she had experienced with the twins. Sander would be angry—furious, even—but what could he do? She was his wife, they were married, and she was having his child. A child she already knew he would not want.
Ruby could feel anxiety-induced nausea clogging her throat and causing perspiration to break out on her forehead. Was she right in thinking that Anna already suspected? Anna was an angel, wonderful with the children—almost a grandmother to them. After all, she had mothered Sander and his sister and brother. Somehow she seemed to know when Ruby was feeling tired and not very well, taking charge of the twins for her, giving her a kind pat when she fell back on the fiction that her lack of energy and nausea were the result of their move to a hot climate.
Sander was getting the twins out of the pool. Anna had arrived with their lunch. Determinedly, Ruby pushed her anxiety to one side.
Sander was used to working at home when he needed to, but since he had brought Ruby and his sons to the island he had discovered that he actually preferred to work at home. So that he could be with his sons, or so that he could be with Ruby? That was nonsense. A stupid question which he could not bring himself to answer.
Angrily he tried to concentrate on the screen in front of him. Th
is afternoon he was finding it hard to concentrate on the e-mails he should be answering. Because he was thinking about Ruby? If he was then it was because of the conversation he had had with Anna earlier in the day, when she had commented on what a good mother Ruby was.
‘A good mother and a good wife,’ had been her exact words. ‘You are a lucky man.’
Anna was a shrewd judge of character. She had never liked his mother, and she had protected them all from their grandfather’s temper whenever she could. She had given him the only female love he had ever known. Homely, loyal Anna liked and approved of Ruby, a woman with more in common with his mother than she had with her.
Sander frowned. He might have seen the financially grasping side of Ruby that echoed the behaviour of his mother, but he had also seen her with the twins, and he was forced to admit that she was a loving and protective mother—a mother who gave her love willingly and generously to her sons…just as she gave herself willingly and generously to him…
Now what was he thinking? He was a fool if he started allowing himself to believe that. But did he want to believe it? No, Sander denied himself. Why should he want to believe that she gave him anything? Only a weak man or a fool allowed himself to think like that, and he was neither. But didn’t the fact that he couldn’t stop himself from wanting her reveal the worst kind of male weakness?
Wasn’t the truth that even though he had tried to deny it to himself he had not been able to forget her? From that first meeting the memory of her had lain in his mind like a thorn in his flesh, driven in too deeply to be easily removed, the pain activated whenever an unwary movement caused it to make its presence felt.
He had taken her and used her as a release for his pent-up fury after his argument with his grandfather, telling himself that his behaviour was justified because she herself had sought him out.