by Lynne Graham
She had looked him up on the Internet, of course, she had, and could hardly have failed to notice his classic good looks. In the flesh, however, he fell into another category entirely, she thought helplessly, ensnared as she was by stunning dark eyes surrounded by a spectacular fringe of black lashes. In real life, he was as visually dazzling as a golden angel springing to sudden life from a printed page. Quite literally, Jude Alexandris took her breath away. His lean, darkly handsome features were as flawless as his bronzed skin tone, his incredible height as striking as his lean, muscular physique. She had felt his strength when he’d grabbed her before she could tumble over in her stupid heels and even that strength of his had made her go weak at the knees, burying every brain cell she possessed…
And that swiftly, Tansy burned with mortification because if there was one thing she never allowed herself to be with a man it was gullible. Being weak and impressionable had got her heart broken and her trust in the opposite sex smashed when she was only nineteen. The experience had hurt like hell and she had never quite recovered from it or regained her youthful confidence. Ever since then, though, she had been careful to avoid the attention of the kind of good-looking man who was a promiscuous sleaze beneath the superficial charm. And she knew Jude Alexandris was a legendary womaniser because not one of the photos she had seen of him online in female company had featured the same woman twice. He changed his bed partners as often as other men changed their socks and, naturally, so experienced a guy was fully aware of the pulling power of his extraordinary physical attraction.
‘Mr Alexandris,’ Tansy pronounced rather stiffly.
‘Come and sit down,’ he invited lazily. ‘Tea or coffee?’
‘Coffee, please,’ Tansy said, following him round a sectional room divider into a rather more intimate space furnished with sumptuous sofas, and sinking down into the comfortable depths of one, her tense spine rigorously protesting that amount of relaxation.
She was fighting to get a grip on her composure again, but nothing about Jude Alexandris in the flesh matched the formal online images she had viewed. He wasn’t wearing a sharply cut business suit, he was wearing faded, ripped and worn jeans that outlined long powerful thighs and narrow hips and accentuated the prowling natural grace of his every movement. An equally casual dark grey cotton top complemented the jeans. One sleeve was partially pushed up to reveal a strong brown forearm and a small tattoo that appeared to be printed letters of some sort. His garb reminded her that, although he might be older than her, he was still only in his late twenties and that, unlike her, he had felt no need to dress to impress.
Her pride stung at the knowledge that she was little more than a commodity on Alexandris’s terms. Either he would choose her, or he wouldn’t. She had put herself on the market to be bought though, she thought with sudden self-loathing. How could she blame Jude Alexandris for her stepfather’s use of virtual blackmail to get her agreement? Everything she was doing was for Posy, she reminded herself squarely, and the end would justify the means…wouldn’t it?
‘So…’ Tansy remarked in a stilted tone because she was determined not to sit there acting like the powerless person she knew herself to be in his presence. ‘You require a fake wife…’
Jude shifted a broad shoulder in a very slight shrug. ‘Only we would know it was fake. It would have to seem real to everyone else from the start to the very end,’ he advanced calmly. ‘Everything between us would have to remain confidential.’
‘I’m not a gossip, Mr Alexandris.’ In fact Tansy almost laughed at the idea of even having anyone close enough to confide in, because she had left her friends behind at university and certainly none of them had seemed to understand her decision to make herself responsible for her baby sister rather than return to the freedom of student life.
‘I trust no one,’ Jude countered without apology. ‘You would be legally required to sign a non-disclosure agreement before I married you.’
‘Understood. My stepfather explained that to me,’ Tansy acknowledged, her attention reluctantly drawn to his careless sprawl on the opposite sofa, the long, muscular line of a masculine thigh straining against well-washed denim. Her head tipped back, her colour rising as she made herself look at his face instead, encountering glittering dark eyes that made the breath hitch in her throat.
‘I find you attractive too,’ Jude Alexandris murmured as though she had spoken.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Tansy protested, the faint pink in her cheeks heating exponentially as her tummy flipped while she wondered if she truly could be read that easily by a man.
‘For this to work, we would need that physical attraction. Nobody is likely to be fooled by two strangers pretending what they don’t feel, least of all my family, some of whom are shrewd judges of character.’
Tansy had paled. ‘Why would we need attraction? I assumed this was to be a marriage on paper, nothing more.’
‘Then you assumed wrong,’ Jude told her without skipping a beat. ‘Neither your stepfather nor any of my legal team are aware of the personal terms I require for this to work. There was no need for them to have access to that knowledge because I had already reached agreement in private with the woman I believed I was going to marry.’
‘Your friend…who…er…let you down,’ Tansy mumbled, playing for time while she struggled to absorb what he was telling her. ‘Perhaps you should be sharing those personal terms with me now.’
‘That was always my intention…if you met the initial requirements,’ Jude responded calmly.
Tansy was shaken by the discovery that Calvin had not, actually, been privy to the finer details of the marriage of convenience he had told her about, although he had talked with his usual aplomb as though he knew everything. Of course, it had all sounded too good to be true, she reflected ruefully, all that money upfront just to pretend to be the wife of a very rich man.
‘Sex would feature,’ Jude informed her without a shade of discomfiture. ‘For as long as we would be together it would be a normal marriage.’
‘I’m afraid that would be a deal-breaker for me,’ Tansy responded stiffly. ‘I wasn’t aware that intimacy would be involved in this arrangement, nor do I understand why it should even have to be.’
‘This marriage may well need to last a couple of years. I’m not prepared to be celibate for that length of time. But if I satisfy my needs with another woman, my family will be immediately aware that the marriage is a fake because it is widely known that I believe in marital fidelity,’ Jude explained with the same cool that somehow made her want to slap him, trip him up, in some way jolt him, because his complete calm and control while she was embarrassed and flustered infuriated her.
He believed in marital fidelity? Tansy wanted to scoff, and only with difficulty did she keep her tongue clamped in her mouth. No man who bedded as many different women as he did could possibly believe in marital fidelity! Who did he think he was kidding? Did she really look that credulous?
‘Look, I wasn’t aware of your…er…terms,’ Tansy framed awkwardly, rising with difficulty in her high heels from the sofa, clutching at the arm to steady herself. ‘There’s no point in you telling me any more as I couldn’t agree to what you’ve just suggested.’
Jude sprang upright as well. ‘Are you serious? You’re saying no, over something as trivial as sex?’
Her heart-shaped face reddened. ‘It’s not trivial to me.’
‘Is there someone else in your life? Some reason why you’re taking that attitude?’ Jude probed because, the more he looked at her, the more interested he became, and he could not credit that she would turn him down. No woman had ever turned him down and he had already felt the appreciative weight of her eyes on him, had recognised that spark of mutual attraction for what it was. That streak of individuality he had recognised in her at first glimpse further appealed to him.
‘I’d sooner not get in
to that,’ Tansy muttered, stepping back as the older woman swept in with a tray and laid it down on the coffee table. ‘But it wouldn’t work for me…’
As his housekeeper departed again, Jude recognised Tansy’s awkwardness and found it as oddly appealing a trait as the long coltish legs she didn’t seem to know what to do with. He gazed down at her, watching her worry at her full lower lip with the edge of her teeth in a nervous gesture and glance up at him from below curling lashes. It wasn’t staged and he found it incredibly sexy and he didn’t know why—didn’t know why it should send a current of primal lust to his groin that made him hard as stone within seconds.
‘We could make it work,’ he heard himself declare. ‘Sit down. We’ll talk about this.’
‘There’s really no point when I’d be wasting your time,’ Tansy mumbled, casting a longing look in the direction of the lift.
‘Tell me why it would be a deal-breaker for you. I’m curious,’ Jude admitted. ‘These days everyone is so casual about sex.’
‘Not everyone,’ Tansy argued, sitting down very stiffly, only staying because he had blocked her path of escape and she didn’t want to come across as childish and immature.
He spread fluid brown hands. ‘Explain,’ he pressed with genuine curiosity.
Tansy lifted her chin although she could feel heat gathering below her skin, but she refused to be intimidated by Jude Alexandris. He was gorgeous and he was rich but neither of those things made him any better than she was. ‘I’m a virgin. I didn’t plan it that way, but the right guy never came along,’ she framed curtly. ‘I do, however, know he’s not going to be you in some mockery of a marriage.’
His black brows drew together and he knew the very minute she spoke that he was going to be that guy, no matter what it cost him, no matter how hard he had to work to achieve it. He was an Alexandris: it was ingrained in his DNA to want what anyone told him he couldn’t have, and he had wanted her the minute he’d laid eyes on her. He didn’t understand why, because she was by no means perfect and he could see that she had a slight overbite and a nose that turned up a little at the tip, giving her a faintly impish expression. And he usually went for blondes and she wasn’t blonde, not properly blonde, and yet that streaky, unruly mane of hers kept on grabbing his attention as the light glimmered over the differing shades. A virgin, though. That possibility hadn’t even occurred to him with a woman of almost twenty-three, particularly one he had already deemed to be a gold-digger. When had he become so cynical that he expected all young women to be cookie-cutter copies of each other?
‘The marriage won’t be a mockery and no woman with me will ever be treated with less than respect,’ Jude countered levelly. ‘Obviously, I would give you time to get to know me. After all, once we’re married, neither one of us will be straying very far from the other in the first few months.’
Tansy reddened even more, unwarily connecting with those tawny golden eyes locked to her, feeling the butterflies leap and jump in her tummy, her nipples snap tight inside her bra, horrendously aware of that attraction she couldn’t deny or stop in its tracks. ‘It’s not possible, just not possible,’ she proclaimed uncomfortably, shifting a hand in denial when he offered her the coffee on the tray, his manners impeccable even in a tense moment. ‘I’m sorry for wasting your time.’
Jude was astonished by her determined departure. Firstly, people never walked out on him before he had finished with them. Secondly, people generally bent over backwards to please him. Thirdly, the female sex in particular were his biggest fans.
His long powerful stride caught him up with her before she could step into the waiting lift. He reached for her hand. ‘We could make this work,’ he told her levelly. ‘Give me your phone.’
‘Why?’
‘So that you can contact me when you change your mind,’ Jude responded.
‘Are you always this confident?’ Tansy unlocked her phone and gave it to him solely to be polite.
Brilliant dark golden eyes raked her troubled face as he punched in the number. ‘Always.’
As Tansy vanished into the lift, Jude was perplexed, striving to understand her behaviour, because it didn’t make the smallest sense that a woman willing to marry him for money would baulk at the inclusion of a little sex. A venal nature was rarely accompanied by much in the way of finer feelings. As a rule, Jude had discovered, gold-diggers were very single-minded, willing to do and say anything and deceive anyone to enrich themselves. Could she really be a virgin or was that some kind of ruse? His suspicious nature was honed by having been for years a prime target of female manipulative wiles.
Tansy travelled home on the train in a daze. She couldn’t possibly have agreed to sleep with him, could she? That would have been indecent, she assured herself, and yet the closer she got to home, the more apprehensive she became about the decision she had made. She would lie to Calvin when he asked, she decided. She would say Jude had said she wasn’t suitable. It was perfectly understandable that she wasn’t willing to go to bed with Jude Alexandris just to secure her baby sister’s future…wasn’t it? It wasn’t as though he were unattractive, however, wasn’t as though she were hanging on to her inexperience for any particular reason. It would be more truthful and accurate to say that confronted with the unexpected—the sex—she had panicked and fled.
In the event, what to tell Calvin Hetherington no longer mattered when he jerked open the front door at her approach and glowered at her. ‘You told Alexandris no? You turned him down?’ he roared at her in disbelief.
Tansy paled. ‘Don’t shout…you’ll upset Posy.’
‘Susie’s taken her out to the park.’
‘How did you find out I said no?’ Tansy asked flatly.
‘I rang him to ask how it went…and you blew it, for some crazy reason, you blew it!’ Calvin snapped at her furiously. ‘He was willing to proceed, you weren’t. What happened? What are you playing at?’ her stepfather demanded in a rage.
Recognising that Jude had protected his own privacy, Tansy shrugged. ‘We just didn’t gel.’
‘Well, too bad for you!’ her enraged stepfather launched back at her. ‘You can go upstairs right now and pack and get out.’
‘Get out?’ Tansy echoed in shock.
‘Why would I let you stay on here after you’ve wrecked the best opportunity we were ever going to get of saving this situation?’ he slammed back at her, full of rancour.
‘Because I look after your daughter and the house,’ Tansy reminded him gently.
Calvin studied her with hard, resentful eyes. ‘Susie will take care of both from now on. Go on, pack… I want you out before the end of the day!’
Tansy went upstairs on wooden legs and collapsed down on the edge of the bed. That was the moment that it dawned on her that she had no rights whatsoever in the situation she was in. She had no right to stay on in the house, which had originally been bought by her own father, because it now belonged wholly to Calvin and she wasn’t a tenant. She had no right to interfere in Calvin’s care arrangements for his daughter either because she was only a half-sister.
Susie would be free and unsupervised to do as she liked with the little girl. She could lose her temper and shout at Posy and slap her when she cried. Tansy shuddered at that memory. She could leave Posy unchanged in her cot whenever she liked and for as long as she liked, walk away while the child was in the bath, careless of her safety, and feed her inappropriate food because there wasn’t going to be anyone around to object.
Tansy’s chest went hollow at the thought of the baby she loved being subjected to such treatment round the clock. Susie didn’t mean to be cruel, she was just too immature to be looking after a baby that wasn’t her own, but she was also too much in love with Tansy’s stepfather and too keen to move in with him to admit that unwelcome truth. It would be Posy who suffered for Tansy’s refusal to consider having a ‘normal’ marriage with Jude Al
exandris.
Her bedroom door was thrust open and two suitcases were set down firmly in front of her. ‘It’s best you go,’ Calvin told her curtly. ‘I could never forgive you for this.’
As he slammed the door behind him again, Tansy pulled out her phone and agonised while she looked for Jude’s number in her contacts. She couldn’t find it until she read ‘future husband’ in the list, and almost spontaneously combusted in rage because there was ordinary confidence and then there was the kind of glaring discordant confidence that made a woman want to run over a man with a steamroller to painfully squash the attitude and bravado out of him. And that was Jude’s variety.
She called the number. ‘Hello? Would that be future husband I’m addressing?’
‘I don’t know. Am I?’ Jude enquired, not one whit surprised, it seemed, by her callback.
‘That would have to be a yes,’ Tansy bit out between clenched teeth. ‘If you still want me to marry you, I’ll agree.’
‘We still have more to discuss,’ Jude retorted crisply.
Tansy breathed in sustaining air fast and hard and wondered what it was about him that filled her with such irritation and rage. It wasn’t reasonable. She might find his marital terms offensive and unpalatable, but he had presented them calmly and politely. It was not his fault that Calvin had tied her up in knots over Posy’s future. It was not his fault that she loved her half-sister as much as if she had given birth to her, which was hardly surprising when she had been looking after the child since the day of her birth. Like any new mother, Tansy had done the sleepless nights, the anxiety attacks and fears that she was doing something wrong, and then the moments of pure gold when she looked down at Posy and her heart just threatened to burst with sheer love.
‘When do you want to see me again?’
‘This afternoon at my office. I don’t have time to waste,’ Jude told her with audible impatience. ‘I’ll text you the address. Come as soon as you can—I’ll fit you in.’