by Lynne Graham
‘You want me,’ Acheron breathed a little raggedly. ‘I want you.’
‘Weird, isn’t it...? I mean, we can’t even be civil to each other,’ Tabby pronounced shakily, still as out of breath as he was, recalling that wild entanglement and the fierce need he had sent powering through her and then suppressing the uncomfortable memory before standing up, smoothing down her dress with careful hands.
‘Yet you burn me up, hara mou,’ Acheron breathed huskily, springing upright with easy grace.
Tabby turned her head away. ‘Let’s not talk about that...you and me? It would be a very bad idea. We have as much in common as a cat and a dog. I’d like to see my room,’ she completed, moving back with determination towards the hall.
‘I’ll show you. We’ve frightened off the staff,’ Acheron volunteered with an unconcerned laugh. ‘I think that noise was someone bringing us coffee and we were seen.’
‘Yes, I can imagine what they saw,’ Tabby cut in stiltedly, wishing he would drop the subject.
‘Well, that’s at least one person who will believe that we’re genuine honeymooners,’ Acheron replied nonchalantly, refusing to take the hint as he led the way up the marble staircase.
‘But we’re not,’ she reminded him doggedly.
‘You’re not a very flexible personality, are you?’
‘You’d roll me out like pastry if I was,’ Tabby quipped. ‘I’m still mad at you, Acheron. You took advantage of my ignorance.’
‘I’m an alpha male, programmed at birth to take advantage,’ Acheron pointed out with unapologetic cool. ‘But you called me on it, which I wasn’t expecting.’
He pushed open double doors at the end of the corridor and exposed a small hall containing two doors. ‘That’s my room.’ He thrust open one door and then the second. ‘And yours...’
Tabby worried at her full lower lip. ‘Do we have to be so close?’
‘I don’t sleepwalk,’ Acheron murmured silkily. ‘But you’re very welcome if you choose to visit.’
‘I won’t be doing that.’ Tabby strolled in the big room, glancing into the en suite that led off and then into a dressing room to slide open a wardrobe, only to frown at the garments packed within. ‘Didn’t your last girlfriend take her clothes with her?’
‘Those are yours. I ordered them,’ Acheron explained. ‘You’ll need summer clothes here.’
Tabby spun back to study him with simmering violet eyes. ‘I’m not a dress-up doll.’
‘But you know that all I want to do is undress you, moraki mou.’
Tabby went pink again and compressed her lips.
‘You blush like a bonfire,’ Acheron remarked with sudden amusement as he strode off to make use of another door on the opposite side of the room that evidently led to his suite.
Tabby thought about turning the lock and then decided it would be petty, for surprisingly on that level she trusted him and had no fear that he might try to take what she was not prepared to offer. If she withstood his appeal, she was quite certain he would withstand hers and find some far more amusing and experienced quarry to pursue. Unfortunately, she didn’t like the idea of him with another woman in the slightest and she told herself off for that because she knew she couldn’t have it both ways. Either they were together or they were not; there was no halfway stage to explore.
Acheron stripped off for a cold shower. He was still ragingly erect and wondering when a woman had last turned him down. He couldn’t remember, and the shock of Tabby’s steely resolve still rankled. But it was a timely warning to steer clear, he reflected impatiently, his sensual mouth twisting as he stifled the urge to fantasise about having her tiny body wrapped round him while he satisfied them both. If she attached that much importance to sex, he definitely didn’t want to get involved because sex meant no more to him than an appetite that required regular satisfaction.
Tabby rifled through the new wardrobe he had acquired for her without even mentioning his intent. She tugged out a long cotton dress that looked cool and, more importantly, covered up anything that she imagined a man might find tempting. If he kept his hands off her, she would keep her hands off him. She worried at her lower lip with her teeth. She had wanted to rip his clothes off him on that sofa, and the incredible strength of the hunger he had awakened still shocked her in retrospect. But nothing more was going to happen, nothing, she stressed inwardly with more force than cool. She could handle him, of course she could. He might be a very rich, very good-looking and very manipulative male but she had always had a good gut instinct about how best to look after herself.
Buoyed up by that knowledge, Tabby got changed, freshened up and went off to find out where the nursery had been set up.
CHAPTER SIX
‘IT’S TIME YOU told me something about yourself,’ Acheron declared, settling back into his seat and cradling his wineglass in one elegant hand.
Tabby was ill at ease. The grand dining room and the table festooned with flowers and fancy dishes for the first meal they were to share as a married couple made her feel like Cinderella arriving at the ball without a prince on hand to claim her. He had watched her watching him to see which cutlery to use, and the awareness had embarrassed her, making her wish that she had never confessed her ignorance. ‘What sort of something?’
Acheron raised an ebony brow. ‘Let’s be basic—your background?’
He was so relaxed that he infuriated her, sheathed in tight faded denim jeans and a black shirt left undone at the throat. She had assumed he would dress up for dinner much as aristocrats seemed to do on television shows and, if she was honest, that was probably why she had picked the long dress. But instead of dressing up, Acheron had dressed down and, maddeningly, he still looked amazing, black hair curling a little from the shower, stubborn jaw line slightly rough with dark stubble, lustrous dark eyes pinned to her with uncompromising intensity and she couldn’t read him, couldn’t read him at all, hadn’t a clue what he was thinking about.
‘My background’s not pretty,’ she warned him.
He shrugged a shoulder in dismissal of that objection.
Tabby clenched her teeth and stiffened her backbone. ‘I imagine my conception was an accident. My parents weren’t married. My mother once told me they were going to give me up for adoption until they discovered that having a child meant they could get better housing and more benefits out of the welfare system. They were both druggies.’
Acheron no longer seemed quite so relaxed and he sat forward with a sudden frown. ‘Addicts?’
‘I warned you that it wasn’t pretty. Their drug of choice was whatever was cheapest and most easily available. They weren’t parents in the normal sense of the word, and I don’t think they were even that keen on each other because they had terrible fights. I was simply the child who lived with them,’ Tabby proffered tightly. ‘And I got in the way...frequently because children have needs and they didn’t meet them.’
Acheron forced his shoulders back into the chair, his astonishment at what she had told him concealed by his impassive expression. He almost told her then and there in a revelation that would have been unprecedented for him that they had much more in common than a cat and a dog.
‘Have you heard enough?’ Tabby enquired hopefully.
‘I want to hear it all,’ Acheron contradicted levelly, slowly comprehending the base level of painful isolation and insecurity from which that chippy, aggressive manner of hers had undoubtedly been forged. Tabby had been forced at an early age to learn to fight for her survival, and that he understood.
‘I was the kid in the wrong clothes at school...when they got me there, which wasn’t very often. Then my father started to take me with him as a lookout when he burgled houses,’ she confided flatly, hating every word she was telling him but somehow needing him to know that she could handle her troubled, crime-infested childhood
and indeed had moved far beyond it. ‘Social Services got involved when he was caught in the act and eventually, because I was missing so much school and my parents were incapable of looking after me properly, I was put into care.’
‘As was I,’ Acheron admitted gruffly. ‘I was ten years old. What age were you?’
Tabby stared back at him wide-eyed. ‘You...were in care? But your parents must have been so wealthy.’
‘Which doesn’t necessarily mean that they were any more responsible than yours,’ Acheron pointed out drily. ‘Believe me, my mother’s money didn’t protect me, although it did protect her until the day she died from an overdose. Her lawyers rushed her out of the country before she could be prosecuted for neglecting me.’
‘What about your father?’ Tabby prompted sickly, still shaken and appalled that he, who seemed so very assured and rich and protected, could ever have lived within the care system as she had. All at once she felt guilty about the assumptions she had made.
‘His marriage to my mother only lasted about five minutes. When she got bored with him she told him that the child she was expecting—me—was the child of her previous lover...and he believed her,’ Acheron explained flatly. ‘He couldn’t have afforded to fight her for custody in any case. I met him for the first time when I was in my twenties. He came to see me in London because a relative of his had noticed how very alike we looked in a newspaper photograph.’
‘So what did your mother do with you?’ Tabby asked, sipping at her glass of water.
‘Very little. The trust who controlled her millions paid for a squad of carers to look after her and keep her worst excesses out of the newspapers. She was addicted to drugs too,’ Acheron divulged tautly. ‘But once I was no longer a baby none of her staff had a direct mandate to look after me, and my mother was, all too frequently, high as a kite. So I was left to my own devices, which eventually attracted the attention of the authorities. I had no other relatives to take responsibility for me.’
Painfully aware of the grim memories shadowing his eyes and the sad knowledge that his father could not have been waiting in the wings to take charge of him, Tabby stretched her hand across the table without even thinking about it and rested it down on his, where his long, elegant fingers were braced on the tablecloth. ‘I’m sorry.’
His arrogant dark head came up at a combative angle even as he lifted his hand to close it round hers, glancing down at their linked hands in virtual bewilderment as if he couldn’t quite work out how that connection had happened. Dark colour crawled up to accentuate the high cheekbones that gave his face such strength and definition. ‘Why would you be sorry? I imagine I got off lighter than you. I suspect you were physically mistreated...?’
Her oval face froze. ‘Yes,’ she almost whispered in confirmation.
‘I only met with physical abuse after I entered the care system. I was an obnoxious little brat by then, semi-feral and may well have deserved what I got,’ Acheron volunteered between gritted teeth.
‘No child deserves pain,’ Tabby argued.
‘I endured two years of complete hell and innumerable different homes until my mother died and the trustees rescued me. I was sent off to boarding school for what remained of my childhood.’
Tabby’s heart squeezed tight and her throat thickened at the awareness that just like her he had grown up knowing nothing of the love and security of a happy home and committed parents. She had been so wrong about him and it shamed her that she had been so biased purely because his late mother had been a famous Greek heiress. ‘You never forget it...how powerless and lost you feel,’ she framed unevenly.
Acheron looked across the table at her, his stunning dark golden eyes glittering. ‘You leave it behind you, move on,’ he told her squarely, suddenly releasing her hand.
‘Yes, but it’s always there somewhere in the back of your mind.’ Starstruck even as she yanked her hand back, she collided with his eyes and the rare warmth of connection there and it made her feel not as if she was falling but instead flying high as a bird, breathless and thrilled.
‘Not if you discipline yourself,’ Acheron asserted smoothly.
‘Tell me about your father’s will,’ Tabby urged, already dreading the return of the cold reserve that was beginning to clench his lean, darkly handsome features again.
‘Some other time. We’ve raked over enough personal stuff for one evening...surely?’ A sleek black emphatic brow lifted, the force of his will bearing down on her from the lambent glow of his beautiful lustrous dark eyes.
And Tabby, who was usually like a nail stuck to a magnet when in the grip of curiosity, quelled her desire to know more, conceding that, for a male as famously reticent as he was, he had been remarkably frank with her when he hadn’t needed to be, for she knew of no stories referring to his dysfunctional upbringing that had ever appeared in the media. She swallowed back her questions and lifted a fork to attack the dessert that had been brought to the table.
‘I’m crazy about meringue,’ she confided. ‘And this is perfectly cooked, crunchy on the outside, soft inside.’
A flashing smile crossed his wide, sensual mouth. ‘A little like you, then? All fight on the surface and then all tender when it comes to another woman’s child?’
In receipt of that rare smile, she felt her heart race. ‘I only want Amber to have all the things I never had.’
‘An admirable ambition. I’ve never had the desire to reproduce,’ Acheron admitted, watching the tip of her tongue flick out to catch a tiny white crumb of meringue that could not possibly have tasted any sweeter than her lush mouth. Just like that he was hard as a rock again, imagining what else she might be able to do with her tongue, and the heavy pulse of mounting need at his groin was infuriating. It made him feel out of control and, because he despised that kind of weakness in any part of his life, he gritted his teeth and battled for restraint.
‘I’ve never been the broody sort,’ Tabby burbled, licking the fork before dipping it into the delicious dessert again, uncomfortably aware of the dark golden swoop of his gaze following her every move. ‘But I was with Sonia when Amber was born and then I had to look after her the first few weeks until Sonia was strong enough after her stroke to leave hospital. I’m afraid that by that stage I was committed heart, soul and body to Amber...our attachment just happened and then Sonia had the second stroke and died immediately.’ She paused, clashed with his caramel-shaded eyes and felt her mouth run dry. ‘Please stop staring at me.’
‘Then stop playing with the fork,’ Acheron suggested huskily. ‘Naturally I’m picturing you spread across the table as an infinitely more appealing main course than the one I’ve eaten.’
Surprised colour sprang into her face, and she dropped the fork with a clatter. ‘Do you ever think of anything but sex?’
‘And you’re not thinking about it too?’ Acheron derided thickly, studying her with burning intensity.
And the pink in her cheeks burned hotter than ever because he was perfectly correct. His raw masculine virility called to her on a visceral level. The table between them felt like a barrier she wanted to push out of the way. She wanted things she had never wanted before. She wanted to taste that intriguing little triangle of brown male skin visible below his throat, kiss a path along that stubborn jaw line, touch, explore. And even worse the mere thought of such experimentation made the blood race through her veins, her nipples tighten and push against her bodice while a liquid sensation of squirming warmth flowered between her thighs. So, this is lust, she told herself sharply. Grow up and deal with it like a woman, not a frightened little girl.
Acheron thrust back his chair and vaulted to his full commanding height of well over six feet. ‘Come on...’
‘No, sit down,’ Tabby told him shakily, very much afraid that she knew exactly where he wanted her to go and even more afraid that she was ready to say yes, for n
ever in her life had she ever felt anything as powerful as the primitive longing he awakened in her.
‘Don’t look at me like that and then try to tell me what to do, hara mou. It doesn’t work,’ Acheron advised, strolling round the table to move behind her and tug out the chair with her still seated in it.
‘One of us has to try to be sensible,’ Tabby protested in desperation.
Acheron bent down and scooped her out of the chair as if she were a child. ‘Why?’ he queried thickly, his warm breath fanning her throat. ‘We’re not hurting anyone. We’re both free agents. We can do as we like—’
‘That’s not how I live.’
‘You’ve trapped yourself in a cage of irrational rules because that makes you feel safe,’ Acheron countered, striding across the hall with her still cradled in his arms. ‘But I can keep you safe too...’
Only he could still hurt her, just as easily as he could silence her arguments and sweep her literally off her feet, Tabby acknowledged feverishly even as her fingers reached up of their own accord to skate admiringly along the clean, hard line of his jaw. ‘You don’t make me feel safe.’
‘But then you don’t trust anyone,’ Acheron countered with a swift downward glance at her anxious face. ‘Neither do I. Even so, I can promise you that I won’t lie to you.’
‘Not much of a comfort when you could give tips to Machiavelli on how best to get your own way by nefarious means,’ Tabby traded, provoking a surprised laugh from Acheron as he mounted the stairs. She knew decision time had come and gone and she wanted his mouth on hers so badly that it literally hurt even to think about it.
He lowered her to the carpet to open the first door, grabbed her hand as though he was afraid she would run off last minute and virtually dragged her into his bedroom. ‘Now, I finally have you where I want you. Can you believe that this is our wedding night?’