by Lynne Graham
‘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 hi
‘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 …
The Volakis Vow
A marriage made of secrets …
An enthralling two-part story by bestselling author,
Lynne Graham
This month:
THE MARRIAGE BETRAYAL
Tally Spencer, an ordinary girl with no experience of relationships … Sander Volakis, an impossibly rich and handsome Greek entrepreneur. Their worlds collide in an explosion of attraction and passion. Sander’s expecting to love her and leave her, but for Tally this is love at first sight. Both are about to find that it’s not easy to walk away … because Tally is expecting Sander’s baby and he is being blackmailed into making her his wife!
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