by Lynne Graham
‘You look ravishing,’ he murmured on the way out of the church, dark eyes sliding over the shapely silhouette that the elegant gown somehow accentuated, noting the way the fine silk defined the lush plumpness of her breasts and the full curve of her derrière, and more than a little surprised to realise that he was categorically aroused by the prospect of taking his bride to bed, even though he was furious with her for the choices she had made. Bad choices, wrong decisions, the sort of mistake he had to expect from someone as youthful and inexperienced in the world as she was, he reminded himself grimly.
‘Your parents are brilliant,’ she told him chirpily. ‘You lucked out there. Neither one of them asked me a single awkward question.’
‘Wait until you meet my three brothers, none of whom are known for their tact,’ Tor parried smoothly.
And the car swept them back to the enormous villa, where a throng far larger than Pixie had anticipated awaited them in a vast room with ornamental pillars that could only have been described as a modern ballroom. ‘You married someone who’s got a freaking ballroom!’ Denny gasped in her ear. ‘And his mother is still calling this affair “a very small do”!’
Possibly by Sarantos standards it was small, Pixie conceded as she was tugged inexorably into a receiving line to meet their guests and the long procession of names and faces quickly became a blur. Personal friends, business acquaintances, family friends and relatives. Tor’s three brothers were remarkably like him in looks. There truly was a very large number of people present and the only light moment of the experience for Pixie was when Isla appeared with her son and Alfie made a mad scramble out of her arms to reach his mother, smiling and chattering nonsense. Dressed in the cutest little miniature suit she had ever seen, Alfie was overjoyed at the reunion and it was a shock to her when, after giving her a hug, he twisted and held out his arms to greet Tor as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
Her baby boy was growing up and there was room in his little heart for a father now, and the immediacy of Tor’s charismatic smile and pleasure at that enthusiastic greeting from his son warmed Pixie as well. It was just at that moment that a tall dark man appeared in front of them and Tor froze, his grasp on Alfie tightening enough that the baby complained and squirmed in his hold.
‘Pixie, this is my half-brother, Sevastiano Cantarelli... I didn’t realise you were attending,’ he said flatly.
‘I was determined to drop in and offer my congratulations. I can’t stay for long,’ Sevastiano responded in his low-pitched drawl. ‘It means a lot to Papa.’
‘Yes, yes, it would,’ Tor acknowledged with a razor-edged smile as the other man moved on past, as keen to be gone, it seemed, as Tor was to see him go.
‘If you would simply tell your family the truth, you wouldn’t have been put in the position of having to entertain him,’ she whispered helplessly.
‘Don’t interfere in what you don’t understand!’ Tor countered with icy bite and she paled with hurt and surprise and looked away again, suddenly appreciating that she had spoken too freely on what was a controversial topic in Tor’s life. He might have spilled his guts the night they first met, but alcohol had powered those revelations, she reminded herself doggedly. His reaction now was a disquietingly harsh reminder that she was still an outsider, a virtual newcomer in Tor’s world, not someone who should have assumed that she had the right to wade in and offer an opinion on a matter that private and personal.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A PERFECTLY CATERED MEAL was served by uniformed staff. Speeches were made by some of Tor’s relatives and he translated them for her.
‘You’re very quiet,’ Tor murmured then. ‘I was rude earlier. I’m sorry.’
‘No, sometimes I have no filter and it was a sensitive subject.’
‘Let me explain,’ Tor urged, skating a fingertip across the back of her clenched fingers, letting her know that he knew that she was still as wound up as a clock by his rebuke. ‘For various reasons, Sev didn’t get to know our father until he had grown up and their relationship now means a lot to Hallas. My mother has become very fond of him as well. If I spoke up, it would tear them all apart. My father is a very moral man and he would feel he had to choose between his sons and exclude Sev. What good would that anguish and disappointment do any of us now?’
‘Your attitude is generous.’ Pixie was impressed by his unselfish, mature outlook while recognising the sense of family responsibility that he had allowed to trap him into silence. ‘But if your family had understood what you were really going through back then, they might have been able to offer you better support.’
‘All of that is behind me now,’ Tor insisted with impressive conviction. ‘Meeting you gave me something of a second chance.’
‘No, Alfie did that,’ Pixie contradicted without hesitation.
Tor gritted his teeth at that response but said nothing. Knowing that he was to blame for every low point in their relationship was a new experience for him and not one anyone could have said he enjoyed. His bride wasn’t in love with him, didn’t think he was the best thing ever to happen to her and didn’t even particularly crave what he could buy her either. His rational mind argued with that appraisal, reminding him that Katerina’s supposed love, which, ironically, he had never once doubted, had been an empty vessel. Love didn’t need to have anything to do with his marriage. And Pixie was naïve, honest though, loyal, everything Katerina had not been. For the very first time, he mulled over the truth that Katerina had lied to him and conducted an affair with another man that had begun even before their marriage. Three years of lies including Sofia’s birth, he reflected angrily, and even the anger was new because he was making comparisons and he saw now so clearly that his first marriage had been all wrong from the very outset.
So, this time around, Tor reflected grimly, he wasn’t compromising, he wasn’t making any allowances for misunderstandings or mistakes. He was going to be who he was, tough, and when it came to telling his wife that she had gone wrong he was going to grasp that hot iron and go for the burn.
* * *
‘Where are we going?’ Pixie questioned breathlessly some hours later as she climbed out of the car down at the small harbour. ‘And what about Alfie?’
‘Alfie and his nanny will join us tomorrow. We can manage one night without him...right?’ Tor arrowed up a questioning black brow as he bent down, curving an arm to her spine, and even in moonlight she felt the heat of embarrassment at being exposed as an overprotective mother.
As her gaze clashed in the moonlight with those stunning dark glittering eyes of his, her heart jumped inside her chest and her lower limbs turned liquid. His fierce attraction rocked her where she stood and almost instinctively she leant into him for support, literally mortified by the effect he could have on her because the feelings he inspired in her were so powerful and so far removed, she believed, from his reaction to her.
‘It would be cruel to lift Alfie out of his cot at this hour,’ she agreed, deliberately stepping back a few inches from him, striving to act cooler.
‘Especially after he was exhausted by his social whirl.’ Tor’s expressive mouth quirked as he recalled his son being passed around like a parcel between groups of cooing women during the reception. Alfie certainly wasn’t shy, and his unusual combination of golden curls and dark eyes attracted attention as much as his smiles and chuckles. ‘At least he wasn’t scared and shaken up like he was the day Jordan abandoned him,’ Tor completed, knowing he would never forget the sight of his son clawing his way up his mother’s body and clinging in the aftermath of an ordeal that had visibly traumatised him.
Pixie gasped a little in surprise as he bent and simply lifted her off her feet to lower her down into the launch tied up by the jetty. She winced at his words though, wishing he wouldn’t remind her of her brother’s lowest moment and worst mistake. ‘You still haven’t said where we’re going... You said I di
dn’t need to get changed and now I’m wearing a wedding dress in a boat.’
‘To board a much larger vessel,’ Tor sliced in, indicating the huge yacht anchored out in the bay and silhouetted against the starry night sky.
‘You own a yacht?’
‘No. It belongs to a family friend and his wedding present is the use of it. If you like cruising we can always buy one,’ he told her as the launch bounced over the sea at speed, driven by the crew member in charge of the wheel.
Pixie studied the yacht with wide eyes, struggling to accept that she was now living in a world where her bridegroom could talk carelessly about purchasing such an enormous luxury. ‘Why haven’t you bought one already?’
‘To date, I haven’t taken much time away from work and a yacht would have been a superfluous purchase for a workaholic. But that has to change with you and Alfie in my life now,’ Tor traded calmly.
She wanted to ask him if he had been an absentee husband and father during his first marriage, but on their own wedding day it felt as if that would be tacky and untimely. He had made her wary of impulsive speech as well when he had reacted badly to a tactless question earlier that day. For that reason, she made no comment and bore up beautifully to being hoisted on board the enormous yacht in her fancy gown and greeted by the captain and a glass of champagne before being guided up to the top deck and a bedroom that took her breath away.
‘I’m afraid that we now need to have a serious discussion about your brother,’ Tor murmured levelly then, utterly taking her aback with that announcement.
Bright blue eyes widening in bewilderment, Pixie slowly swivelled, silk momentarily tightening across her slender, shapely figure to draw his magnetic gaze. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Today of all days, I don’t want you to be upset,’ Tor informed her smoothly. ‘But I believe that Jordan was the source of a rather sleazy story about our first night together and Alfie that appeared in a British newspaper this morning—’
A fury unlike anything Pixie had ever felt, or indeed had even guessed she could feel, burned up her backbone like a licking flame and she went rigid with the force of it. ‘Is that so?’ she almost whispered.
‘Who else could it be but Jordan?’ Tor derided. ‘He’ll do anything for money. He has no decency, no backbone.’
‘Shut up!’ Pixie practically spat at him in her outrage at that denunciation.
His brows knotted, a look of incredulity in his smouldering golden eyes, such incivility not having featured very often in his experience. ‘Diavolos, Pixie. There is no reason for you to treat this as though it is some kind of personal attack on you. It is not intended as such.’
And Tor stood there, smokingly handsome, thrillingly sexy and towering over her. He was utterly sure of his ground in a fashion that she supposed came entirely naturally to him and yet she wanted to kill him in that instant, smite him down with heavenly lightning for blaming her poor brother for the tabloid article as well. As though Jordan had not already sinned enough and paid the price for his mistakes! He had lost her respect and the only home he had ever known, and his self-esteem was at basement level. And yes, he had deserved that punishment, but right now he was trying very hard to fix himself and pick himself up again, only he hadn’t yet mustered sufficient strength to make more than a couple of tottering steps back towards normality. At present, in her view, Jordan was more to be pitied than condemned.
‘Yes, shut up and stop talking down to me in that patronising way!’ Pixie let fly at Tor angrily again. ‘I gather you haven’t actually seen that article. Well, before you hang, draw and quarter my brother for the story, acquaint yourself with the article and the facts first.’
‘Have you seen it? I assumed you didn’t know about it,’ Tor confided in disconcertion. ‘I didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to destroy the day.’
‘So, you just destroyed it now instead by assuming that Jordan is to blame when in fact it is your own choices that brought the humiliation of that article down on the two of us!’ Pixie flung back at him in a furious counter-attack.
‘How could it be anything to do with my choices?’ Tor shot back at her icily, his own temper rising because he had not been prepared for either her attitude or the argument that had erupted. Unsurprisingly, he would never have chosen to mention the article on their wedding night had he foreseen her response.
‘Look it up online and find out, as I had to,’ Pixie urged him curtly.
Tor did nothing so basic. He shot an order to one of his personal assistants to send him an exact copy of the item, still outraged that his assumptions, his conclusions, were being questioned.
First, a photo of a woman he had never seen in his life before arrived on his screen, and he turned it towards Pixie and breathed, ‘Who is she?’
‘Saffron Wells—an actress. The beauty who brought you back to the house that night. You allowed her to pick you up and bring you back there and I suspect that she saw you leaving the room I was using the next morning.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about and you know it!’ Tor thundered at her, while grudgingly recalling that vague memory of someone coming down the stairs in that house that morning. Disorientated and in a bad mood, he hadn’t even turned round to see who it was. ‘Because you flatly refused to tell me everything about that night!’
Pixie was in no mood to compromise when she was still so angry with him. On a level she didn’t want to examine, some of her anger related to the weirdest current of possessiveness inside her. It still annoyed her that he had allowed Saffron to pick him up, even if he hadn’t done anything with the other woman, and even though she knew she would never have met him otherwise, that annoyance went surprisingly deep.
‘Saffron brought you back to the house in the first place. You apparently believed you were accompanying her to a party, but she thought she was bringing you home for the night. You rejected her because supposedly you weren’t in the mood and she stormed off... At least that’s what you told me happened. But for all I know,’ Pixie breathed with withering bite, ‘you slept with her too before I came into the kitchen, where you were waiting for a taxi!’
Tor swore in vicious Greek at being slapped in the face with that character assassination. ‘I may have been drunk, I may have slept with you that night, but I’m no playboy and you know it.’
‘According to your online images, you’ve been around...a lot,’ Pixie emphasised, unimpressed. ‘However, I’d say it’s unlikely anything happened between you because I think you offended her and that’s one good reason why she sold that story. Her being passed over for someone as ordinary as me would have been the last straw. The other reason is that, being a media person, she lapped up the opportunity to get her picture into a newspaper.’
Tor was frowning now. ‘But if she was some random woman in that house, how could she possibly have known about you getting pregnant and all the rest of it when you left the property only a couple of days later?’
‘There were other connections involved. I was using Steph’s room that night. Steph was one of the other tenants and I worked with her sister. I had ongoing contact with Steph because of my cat, Coco. Steph only finally gave Coco to me when I was pregnant,’ Pixie recited wearily, the fury draining from her without warning. ‘Someone somewhere talked and connected the dots and that’s how the story about us got out. It had nothing at all to do with my brother, who knew less than you did about what happened that night until very recently.’
His lean dark features hard and forbidding, Tor jerked his chin in acknowledgement of that likelihood. He was angry because he had got it badly wrong again with his bride. He was angry because he had been so sure of his facts when a thieving, dishonest, greedy character, such as he regarded Jordan to be, had been in the mix and available to blame. But he was still stunned by the level of her loyalty to her brother, her childhood memories of th
e other man evidently sufficient to restore some measure of her faith and affection for him.
Her attitude made him think of his own response to Sevastiano, the older brother he had only met when they were both adults. Tor had found it an unnerving experience to go from being the eldest son in the family to the discovery that his father’s eldest child had actually been born to another woman before his marriage to Tor’s mother. If he was honest, he had never really given Sevastiano a fair crack of the whip and learning that Katerina had been unfaithful to him with Sev had been the last nail in the coffin. No semblance of sibling affection had ever developed.
Shaking off that momentary attack of self-examination, Tor straightened his broad shoulders. ‘I owe you an apology,’ he breathed between gritted teeth. ‘But make some allowances for the difference between our natures. When it comes to your brother, I’m less forgiving of his wrongs towards you and my son and much more about punishment, while you’re overflowing with compassion and a desperate desire to rehabilitate him. But please accept that my strongest motivation is to protect you from Jordan and ensure that he cannot take advantage of you or hurt you again.’
Pixie nodded jerkily, tears stinging the backs of her eyes because this was not how she had imagined her wedding night would turn out, with them at loggerheads, angry words having been exchanged and now all the subsequent discomfiture of the aftermath. ‘Apology accepted,’ she said stiffly, crossing the room to explore through a door and discover to her relief that it led into a bathroom where she could excusably escape for long enough to regroup. ‘I’m going to treat myself to a bath...if you don’t mind?’
‘Of course not,’ Tor murmured tautly, wondering how to dig himself back out of the hole he had dug for himself and coming up blank from lack of practice in that field.