by Lynne Graham
He snapped his fingers and one of his bodyguards hurried forward to lift her luggage. She walked out into the sunshine and part of her screamed to stay. Her nerves were stretched tight as piano wires.
‘You’re not sure about doing this, are you?’ her companion divined with disturbing ease.
‘I don’t think I’ve any other option right now.’
Nikolai Arlov paused in his stride and rested his shrewd gaze on her troubled face. ‘As a husband, I should warn you that your Spanish duke won’t forgive this move in a hurry.’
Molly shrugged a feisty shoulder while she thought of all the evenings that had stretched into eternity as she had spent them alone. ‘I’ll survive,’ she replied with determination.
‘So, is this an I’m-leaving-you-for-ever or I-want-you-to-sit-up-and-take-notice walkout?’ Nikolai enquired lazily.
Molly registered that her big brother knew a lot about women. ‘The jury’s still out on that one.’
‘Because he went to Geneva? But that was work,’ Nikolai pointed out, as if putting business first was a perfectly understandable act.
Sudden tears burned at the backs of her eyes. Too much was happening all at once. Her chin tilting, she blinked rapidly. She had got by before Leandro and she would get by after him just as well. But she still had to learn how to want to do that, she acknowledged heavily. The helicopter took off and she watched the castillo ebbing from view and wondered just when she would see Leandro again and whether or not lawyers would be present at the occasion.
CHAPTER NINE
LEANDRO studied his bruised knuckles with little sense of satisfaction. He had visited Santos on the way to the airport and had found the estate manager in the act of loading up his car, apparently already aware that his secret was out. A hopeless opponent, Santos had mumbled apologies and ducked a fight. How could Molly have been attracted to a man with all the backbone of a worm?
Flying out to Geneva, regardless of events, had proved a mistake. His concentration had evaporated as increasingly nightmarish images of Molly in another man’s bed had interrupted his usual rational thinking processes. He had cut his meetings short to fly home. Once there, he had enjoyed an exchange of opinions with his mother that had led to her fuming departure within the space of an hour. Only then had he had the privacy to walk up to Molly’s abandoned bedroom.
Her exit note was a tangled tale of the new and lately rediscovered family relationships that had led to her flight in Nikolai Arlov’s helicopter. Nikolai Arlov, Leandro reflected heavily. Her brother was a Russian billionaire. But the emptiness of the room had affected Leandro much more than the revelations on paper. Her rings lay on the dressing table in rejection of their marriage. He could picture her yanking them off, green eyes blazing with anger and defiance. He could still see the indent of her tiny body on the bedspread where she had lain down. The imagery paralysed him and his fists clenched in a bitter battle with the churning emotions he had refused to acknowledge throughout the day.
He was envisaging a world without Molly and it would be a world shorn of colour or warmth. Every morning she got up to have breakfast with him and chattered tirelessly through the meal he had once enjoyed in the strictest silence with his newspapers. Now he would have the peace back and the castillo would echo around him again. He would no longer have her to come home to, a beacon at the end of a long working day spent in meetings or travelling. But that was as it should be, wasn’t it? What odds when she had been unfaithful and only a divorce could settle their differences? But he was not capable of such cool logic. He could not get beyond one basic fact: her bed was empty and she was gone.
Someone knocked on the door and he swung round to refuse that invasion of his privacy. But it was Julieta, his younger sister, who stood flushed and tear-stained in the doorway.
‘I don’t want to talk to anyone right now,’ Leandro breathed not quite steadily.
‘Even if I’m here to tell you that I’m the one who was having the affair with Fernando?’ Julieta sobbed.
There were three women in the swimming pool.
Molly lay back on her floating couch and sipped at her strawberry smoothie while twitching her toes to the beat of the dance track playing in the unashamedly luxurious pool house at Nikolai’s London home.
‘You’re looking better,’ Abbey, her brother’s red-headed, beautiful and equally pregnant wife, pronounced with approval as she awkwardly got down to towel dry her son. Danilo was a wriggling, laughing toddler with a good deal of his father’s forceful personality.
‘You were as pale as a waif when you arrived,’ Ophelia opined. ‘Now you’re eating proper meals and much more relaxed.’
Molly smiled, more than satisfied with the family circle she had found and got to know over the past week. She had spent the first few days with Ophelia and Lysander at Madrigal Court, where she had also got to know her niece and nephews, the youngest of whom was only four months old. Nikolai had insisted that DNA testing should be carried out so that no one could ever question her identity, and the tests had also revealed a connection that Molly had never suspected before.
Her father, it seemed, had definitely been the Greek tycoon, Aristide Metaxis, the man who had not only jilted her unfortunate mother at the altar, but who had also become Cathy’s long-term lover in later years. Molly did, in fact, have a vague memory of a male visitor, who had often given her sweets. It had fascinated her that Aristide’s adoptive son, Lysander, who was Ophelia’s husband, should also be her adoptive half-brother. What was more, that particular relationship would have lasting effects on her life, for, apparently, Aristide had discreetly left money in trust for an unnamed child and his lawyers were convinced that that child was Molly and that he had been well aware at the time of his death that he had a daughter.
Abbey answered the house phone by her side and then gave Molly a speculative smile. ‘Your husband is here to see you.’
Molly began paddling like mad for the side of the pool with Ophelia, an unflappable blonde, following suit at a leisurely crawl. She climbed out and caught the towel that Abbey tossed to her, wrapping it round her to warm suddenly chilled skin. A whole week had elapsed since she’d left Spain. Leandro had taken his time to come looking for her. Cramming her bare feet into flip-flops, she headed into the lift to go upstairs.
Her heart was thundering in her eardrums as she padded into the opulent drawing room and she was as out of breath as though she had been running. Leandro was a very tall, still figure by the front windows. He swung round, brilliant dark eyes zeroing in on her small figure. Her casual appearance startled him. With her black curls anchored on top of her head with a clip and a bright tangerine bikini top showing above the edges of the black and yellow towel she wore, Molly took him very much by surprise.
Superbly well dressed in a black pinstripe designer suit that was tailored to enhance every muscular angle of his lean, powerful body, Leandro had a pure physical impact that engulfed Molly like a wave breaking over her head that left her struggling for breath. A masculine dream of black hair, golden skin and lustrous dark heavily lashed eyes, he looked stunning to a woman whose senses had been starved of his presence. This, after all, was the guy she woke up searching for in her bed at night. Her breasts swelled and her body tingled back to life at the mere sight of him.
‘Your brother refused to tell me where you were,’ Leandro growled soft and low, but with all the warning threat of a tiger flexing his claws.
Molly tensed. ‘Honestly? I had no idea-’
‘I first made contact with him by phone when he was flying you back to London on the day you left a week ago.’ Leandro volunteered that information grimly. ‘He said you didn’t want to speak to me.’
Molly went pink, furious that Nikolai had chosen to make such decisions on her behalf and resenting his interference in her marriage. ‘He shouldn’t have done that, but he was probably trying to protect me.’
‘I owe you a sincere apology for my misconceptions about your
‘Oh…’ Off-balanced by his immediate apology, Molly couldn’t concentrate. ‘I haven’t spoken to her since I left. Is she all right?’
‘She was very upset about what happened between us and she’s broken up with Santos, after finding out that she wasn’t the only woman in his life. I think that in the circumstances you should have told me the truth.’
Molly drew herself up to her full insignificant height and breathed in deep. ‘You wouldn’t have believed me! From the first moment you saw Fernando talking to me, you were suspicious of us-’
‘Dios mio, I was jealous,’ Leandro admitted between gritted teeth. ‘I immediately saw his eagerness to impress you, his admiration for you.’
‘For me, and I don’t know how many other women. Fernando is a self-satisfied flirt,’ Molly cut in, ever so slightly mollified by that unexpected confession of jealousy. ‘I thought you didn’t get jealous.’
His incredible cheekbones tensed. ‘I believed that was the truth when I said it to you. I didn’t recognise what a hold jealousy had got on my mind, so that I misinterpreted everything that happened to fit my deepest…er…fears.’ His accented drawl dropped in level as he fitted in that last revealing word, low and quick. ‘Of course you were correct when you said that I should have trusted you. But you’re a very beautiful, sensual young woman and why should other men not be knocked out by you as I was?’
Her towel was slipping, revealing an eye-catching depth of cleavage. Conscious of his gaze dropping to the cups struggling to restrain her bountiful breasts, Molly reddened and hoisted her towel. Even so, her treacherous body was already reacting to that interest with a hot pulse low in her pelvis.
‘How could you just walk out on our marriage?’ Leandro demanded.
‘Easily. I was the only person making an effort in our relationship. You were never there and you made me live with your mother, who absolutely hated me!’
‘I wasn’t aware how deep her dislike of you was until she voiced certain opinions to me after you had gone. She’s returned to her home in Seville and is now aware that she is not welcome at the castillo unless she can treat you with the respect that is your right as my wife. Why did I have to wait for my mother to lose her temper to find out how she was treating you? Why didn’t you just tell me?’
It was a fair question, Molly acknowledged. ‘I didn’t know whose side you would take and I didn’t want to put you in that position. I honestly did believe that sooner or later Doña Maria would get tired of needling me and just accept me.’
‘But you deserved better than that in your own home. Naturally I would have taken your side. I have no illusions about what my mother can be like-’
‘I think she was behind the financial offer that was made to me before I married you,’ Molly said abruptly.
‘What financial offer?’
Molly gave him the details. He was staggered, genuinely staggered, when she shared the content of that meeting. He asked her to name the legal firm concerned and a flash of recognition lit his hard gaze. ‘That firm did work for the estate at one time. It is very likely that my mother was behind that offer. I had no idea that she would go to such extremes or even that she would dare to interfere in my life to that extent-’
‘She doesn’t think I’m good enough for you.’
His anger was palpable and his strong jaw line clenched. ‘Dios mio, you turned down two million pounds to marry me?’
‘Yeah…I’d have been wiser grabbing the cash and running for the hills, wouldn’t I?’ she quipped in a wry allusion to the current state of their relationship.
Leandro took a sudden step forward, his spectacular dark golden gaze narrowed and intent. ‘I am very grateful that you didn’t and that you went through with our marriage. I only wish I had done more with the opportunity.’
‘No, I don’t think you do,’ Molly contradicted with a rueful grimace. ‘You didn’t want any more than a shallow show of a marriage for the baby’s sake, but, unfortunately, I’m not as detached as you are. I couldn’t live like that for the rest of my days.’
‘Why didn’t you speak to me sooner about how you felt?’ Leandro prompted grimly. ‘Didn’t it occur to you that the day I believed you had spent the night with a lover was not the right moment to tackle me about my deficiencies as a husband?’
‘No. As I hadn’t been with a lover, that angle didn’t occur to me,’ Molly conceded.
‘I had spent the whole night worrying about you. Again, it’s all my own fault,’ he framed in a harsh undertone. ‘Your brother, Nikolai, left me in no doubt of that. Had you had bodyguards the paparazzi would never have got near you and I would have known where you were that night.’
‘I don’t need bodyguards. Nikolai is extremely security conscious.’
Leandro reached for her hands, which she was unconsciously wringing, and closed them firmly into his. Determined dark golden eyes locked with her anxious gaze. ‘I am not detached from you, nor do I wish to be. I want you back, mi corazón. I would have told you that a week ago, had your brother been willing to tell me where you were.’
Molly tensed, hope and doubt warring inside her in a death-defying tussle of seething conflict. ‘I’m sure you mean well, but marriage for me has to be about more than you doing the right thing for the woman carrying your child. I would never try to shut you out of our baby’s life.’
His grip on her hands was almost painfully tight. ‘How do I convince you that it will be different? This is not about doing the right thing. I’m asking you to give me the chance to prove how much I value your presence in my life.’
Tears were burning her eyes. This was the guy she loved, the guy she missed every hour of the day, and once again he was offering her what she craved, only this time around she was less naive. ‘But the point is that you didn’t value me when I was there. You didn’t even come home for dinner at night. You didn’t phone me. You didn’t look for me or show the smallest sign that you missed me when you were away from me.’
Leandro was pale as death beneath his bronzed complexion and his handsome bone structure was rigid with ferocious tension. ‘I have never found it easy to show my feelings. I would not allow myself to need you too much. I saw that as a weakness and I do not like to be in anything other than full control.’
‘Whereas I let everything show, and say and do what I feel like. We’re a very bad match, Leandro. I was lonely and unhappy with you and I don’t want to go back to that,’ she confided jerkily, fighting off temptation with all her strength because she refused to end up back where she had started. ‘Now that the break has been made, it should get easier for us both.’
‘I don’t like my life without you in it!’ Leandro launched at her rawly in the roughest tone she had ever heard from him.
‘I think you should go,’ Molly pronounced tightly.
‘I can’t walk away from you and my child!’ he bit out in a driven undertone.
‘You have to, if that’s what she wants,’ another male voice interposed from the doorway.
Molly turned her head to see her adoptive half-brothers poised just inside the room, neither of them looking particularly welcoming. ‘Nikolai-stay out of this, please!’
Fierce aggression powered through Leandro’s powerful frame when he recognised the level of family opposition in the two men’s faces. ‘Are you with Nikolai on this, Lysander?’ he asked grimly.
‘No, I don’t believe in interfering in other people’s marriages,’ the tall handsome Greek breathed with measured calm. ‘But if you cause my sister any more grief, I’ll rip you apart!’
The Russian tycoon studied Leandro with cold hostility. ‘Molly has us now. She doesn’t need anyone else.’
‘Let’s allow Molly to make that decision,’ Leandro countered, striding to the door and looking back at Molly to say, ‘You know where I’m staying.’
Nikolai patted her taut shoulder as the front door closed on Leandro’s departure. ‘You made the right decision.’
‘Only if it’s what Molly really wants,’ Lysander interposed seriously, shooting her pale face an unconvinced appraisal.
‘Molly and I both grew up without a silver spoon in our mouths.’ Nikolai intoned that reminder flatly. ‘What do you think she has in common with a duke who went to a British public school?’
‘He’s really not a snob,’ Molly mumbled helplessly in Leandro’s favour.
‘They will soon have a child in common.’ Lysander dealt his brother-in-law an impatient glance. ‘And that child is a good enough reason for Molly to take her time over deciding whether or not she wants a divorce.’
Divorce! That very word struck horror into Molly’s bones. Divorce would be so final. She would never see Leandro again unless he came to visit their child and she did not think she could bear the prospect of that. That conviction grew on her while she played with her brothers’ children that evening. Surely when she loved Leandro so much it made sense to give their marriage one more chance? Soon after reaching that conclusion, she told Abbey that she was going over to Leandro’s apartment to see him.
One of Nikolai’s security team tagged her all the way to the door and it was a relief to step inside. Leandro focused on her with frowning force, her appearance clearly coming as a surprise to him. The smell of whiskey clinging to him took her by surprise for Leandro rarely drank. In addition, he was not his usual perfectly groomed self. His tie was missing, his jacket crumpled and he badly needed a shave.
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