by Lynne Graham
Tansy frowned. ‘He acted like a freaking stalker… I couldn’t believe that after what he’d done he could even think I’d have anything more to do with him! How did you know that he did that?’
‘Because I’m a man and I would assume he was simply using Emma for sex until he got you. He wouldn’t have wasted all that time on you if he hadn’t been keen. I would also suggest that she was in love with Ben too and jealous of his attraction to you,’ Jude summed up with confidence.
‘And what made you the teenage love guru?’ Tansy whispered, turning over to look at him, her heart tightening. ‘A very misspent youth?’
‘I was with Althea. There was nothing misspent about my youth,’ Jude reminded her wryly. ‘That’s why I went off the rails after her. I felt like an idiot for looking for “for ever” when everyone around me the same age was settling for a “just for now” option.’
Tansy smoothed a possessive hand down over his well-defined abs, honed to perfection as she knew by daily early morning gym sessions, which she often shared although her passion was running. ‘I think that’s admirable, that you rejected the life your father and grandfather had led and set your heart on something more lasting.’
‘No, it was naive, stupid,’ Jude argued. ‘I was too young to know what I was doing—’
‘No,’ Tansy continued to disagree. ‘You just picked the wrong girl.’
An involuntary laugh escaped Jude. ‘You make it sound so simple.’
‘Sometimes it is. Someone like me would have appreciated your values,’ Tansy muttered, engaged in kissing a haphazard line down over his rippling stomach, one small hand tracing a long muscular thigh.
‘Yes, but we’re not in this long-term, are we?’ Jude muttered thickly, one hand sliding into her hair, keen to urge her in the right direction, unashamed lust gripping him with need all over again. ‘So that angle doesn’t come into it.’
Momentarily, Tansy froze and tried to make herself continue what she was doing, but it was impossible when she felt as though Jude had dropped a giant rock on her from a height, squashing breath and hope from her as he forced her back into the world of reality, rather than the world of fantasy where she had been getting rather too comfortable.
‘My goodness, I’m starving!’ she exclaimed, sitting up suddenly, rescuing herself.
Jude frowned, not an easy man to deflect, and he caught her hand before she could move off the bed. ‘What did I say?’
Her fine-featured face froze. ‘You didn’t say anything.’
‘About us not being long-term?’ Jude pressed. ‘But that’s a fact.’
‘Yes, of course, it is,’ Tansy agreed, still trying to work out how best to evade that awkward subject.
Jude scrutinised her with shrewd dark golden eyes. ‘Don’t get attached to me, moli mou. I’m a bad bet.’
Tansy flipped her rippling hair off the side of her face with a steady hand. ‘I wouldn’t get attached to you. You’re not my type,’ she replied flatly.
‘How can you say that?’ Jude demanded, thoroughly disconcerted by that reply, and spreading lean brown hands to indicate the tumbled bed she had just slid off as if it were evidence to the contrary.
Tansy steeled herself to stand where she was, naked and vulnerable and seemingly unconcerned. ‘That’s simple chemistry and basically meaningless,’ she downplayed, reaching for a robe with studious calm.
‘We’ll be flying back to Athens for my birthday party tomorrow. Isidore insisted. He always insists on throwing me a party,’ Jude imparted ruefully. ‘One would think that a thirtieth celebration could be left for me to enjoy in my own way.’
‘But listening to you, one would also think how very spoilt and entitled you are,’ Tansy incised thinly. ‘Nobody ever threw a party for me in my entire life! Your grandfather loves and cares about you. For goodness’ sake, the man’s on the phone to you every day, interested in every breath that you take! What does it take for you to appreciate what you have?’
Colour scored Jude’s high cheekbones. He clenched his teeth together on an acerbic response. Tansy viewed his family through a different scope, possibly because she had been pretty much neglected by her own mother, he reasoned inwardly. Tansy had never been put first or spoiled or indulged by a proud or loving parent. But he had been, Jude registered for possibly the first time, thinking of how every household he had lived in from childhood had revolved around him and of how Isidore had scrupulously made time for him whenever his father was unavailable. It was strange how Tansy’s opinions were changing his outlook on some areas of his life, he acknowledged uneasily.
Isidore had instilled his grandson with the belief that women were innately untrustworthy, probably in the hope of driving another wedge between Jude and his mother. After Althea had proved Isidore’s theory, Jude had strongly resisted the concept of being influenced by any woman. As for love, he was never doing that again, that went without saying. He got by fine without love, had done so for years. But the suggestion that he might have been blind to the reality that his grandfather loved him pierced him on a deep level, cutting through the barriers that his mother had set up inside his head when he was much younger. He wasn’t enjoying Tansy’s insight into his family as an onlooker, but it was certainly making him think for the first time in a long time about how his dysfunctional background could have moved certain facts weirdly out of focus.
‘I appreciate what I have,’ Jude countered ruefully. ‘Enough serious talk though…let’s concentrate on what you’re wearing for the party. It will be a very glitzy event.’
Tansy nodded with a jerk and vanished into the palatial en suite bathroom, her eyes burning with moisture. He had warned her not to get attached to him. He had missed the boat, Tansy reflected wretchedly. She had done what she had believed she would not do, had let feelings take hold, because it would never be just chemistry for her with Jude. There was just so much she liked and appreciated about him that he made her head spin.
Foremost in that line was his uncompromising honesty and his compassion for his troubled mother, whom he rarely saw. Then there was his quick and intelligent brain, because there was no denying that a clever man was the most entertaining and the best company. His kindness towards Posy, his lack of snobbishness when Tansy sometimes got things wrong because she had grown up at another social level, his generosity with other people because, for someone she had called spoilt, he was remarkably tolerant. She could have kept listing admirable attributes for longer, she conceded while she stood in the shower, letting the tears finally fall, but what was the point?
She had fallen in love with a guy who would never love her back and that broke her heart. She had nothing to hope for either, when their arrangement excluded love in favour of practicality. Jude had ringed their entire relationship with boundaries. In addition, she felt guilty about loving him, about having failed to keep emotion out of their agreement while at the same time Jude was fully meeting his end of the deal to be a father to Posy. How could she complain when she had caught feelings for him? He had specifically warned her against getting attached to him. He had, in short, given her exactly what he had promised, and it would be ridiculously naive of her to hope for anything more permanent when he had been so candid from the outset…
CHAPTER NINE
‘IT’S GORGEOUS,’ TANSY whispered as Jude clasped the fragile emerald and diamond necklace at her nape.
‘And this set isn’t an Alexandris heirloom which you can only borrow. It’s yours,’ Jude stressed, sending a shard of pain winging through her that he felt as though he had to make that fine distinction because she wasn’t a genuine Alexandris wife, with him for the long haul.
A fixed smile in place, Tansy shifted her head so that the matching earrings shimmered in the light. ‘It’s a really beautiful gift. Thank you very much,’ she murmured quietly. ‘But I don’t know when I would ever wear it again after we’re divo
rced. I can’t see me living the high life.’
Jude’s lean, strong face clenched hard. He might have warned Tansy not to get too attached to being his wife, but he didn’t like it when she referred to their eventual divorce…particularly as though it were just a heartbeat away when it wasn’t! Strangely, that outlook of hers should have been welcome but instead it set his teeth on edge. They had been together less than a couple of months, yet, all of a sudden, Tansy seemed to be racing for the finishing line as though she couldn’t wait to get away from him.
Yes, virtually overnight something had definitely changed in Tansy because she was on edge and curiously quiet. All day he had been struggling to get her to talk and relax the way she usually did. Her new reserve made him tense and made him question his own behaviour and it was already driving him absolutely crazy.
Tansy cast a last glance at her reflection in the cheval mirror. Jude’s birthday party was a very formal event. The green ballgown with its beautiful stylish embroidery glittered with crystals in the dusk light. It hugged her slender figure like a glove, fanning out below her knees in a profusion of fabric above high-heeled sandals the exact same colour.
‘You look like a Venus…it’s outrageously sexy,’ Jude intoned huskily, long fingers stroking down her slender spine.
Her breath caught in her throat and she quivered, but still she stepped away, practising the self-denial he had once mocked. ‘I’m not curvy enough for that comparison.’
‘Curvy enough from what I can see, moraki mou,’ Jude remarked with amusement, narrowed eyes resting pointedly on the delicate but full pout of her bosom below the fitted dress.
My goodness, had he noticed that she had got a little bigger there? Tansy frowned, suspecting that she needed new bras because her opulent lingerie was becoming too tight. Had she been overeating? But she so rarely put on weight, she mused in bewilderment.
When had she last had a period? Tansy froze at that sudden thought and then opened her phone, where she had always kept a note of her cycle, only to discover that she hadn’t even set up a record for the simple reason that she had not had a period since her marriage. Not one single one! Could it be that she was pregnant? The shock of that possibility thrilled through her and she thought of the pregnancy tests she had purchased some weeks earlier for just such an occasion, resolving to utilise one as soon as possible.
‘Althea’s been invited,’ Jude informed her grimly, interrupting the frantic surge of her thoughts. ‘Unfortunately, Isidore regards her as an old friend of mine. I should’ve told him what’s been happening with her.’
‘Just smile pleasantly at her and keep your distance,’ Tansy advised.
‘She’s too brash to take the hint whereas you are probably the least pushy woman I’ve ever met,’ Jude mused. ‘I’m not sure that’s always an advantage with me.’
‘Well, I’ve never aspired to being perfect,’ Tansy countered a shade tartly.
‘And you’re so prickly all of a sudden!’ Jude complained, closing a hand over hers to walk her out of the bedroom, a tall, devastatingly handsome figure in an exquisitely tailored dinner jacket and narrow-cut trousers. ‘You didn’t used to be.’
Tansy reddened because she knew that she wasn’t in the best of moods after the sleepless night she had endured, agonising over her feelings for him. ‘There’s a first time for everything.’
‘I still like you, prickly or not, moli mou,’ Jude teased, closing a powerful arm round her narrow spine as they came to a halt in the door of the nursery.
Shaking off her bedding, Posy clawed her way upright in the cot, little eyes bright as she gripped the top rail and bounced in mad excitement. ‘Da… Da!’ she yelled, round little face wreathed in welcome.
‘I still can’t get over the fact that, although you say he didn’t receive that money, Calvin hasn’t been in touch to demand it,’ Tansy admitted half under her breath as Jude cheerfully broke her rules to lift her sister out of the cot and cuddle her.
‘She’s supposed to be in bed to sleep for the night, Jude,’ she scolded. ‘That’s unsettling for her. Routine is important—’
Jude dealt her an amused glance. ‘It’s equally important to be spontaneous sometimes as well,’ he retorted in direct disagreement. ‘As for Calvin, his number’s blocked on your phone, which is why you haven’t heard from him.’
‘Blocked?’ Tansy exclaimed in disbelief. ‘How did that happen?’
‘It was set up on your new phone before I gave it to you,’ Jude admitted without apology. ‘I didn’t want him harassing you.’
‘You don’t have the right to make that kind of decision on my behalf!’ Tansy whispered in fierce dismay. ‘Because he hasn’t heard from me, he’ll be even more furious and that’s not a good idea with Calvin.’
‘Allow me to deal with Hetherington,’ Jude countered smoothly. ‘He’s my headache now. No way will I allow him to get his paws on this little girl again.’
Colour had burnished Tansy’s face into animation and anger. ‘That’s not the point.’
‘It’s exactly the point,’ Jude incised with cool, crushing finality as he settled the baby back in her cot and gently covered her up again. ‘I am better equipped to deal with the Calvins of this world than you are.’
Having had access to the angry texts that Calvin Hetherington had already sent his stepdaughter, Jude was relieved that he had protected Tansy from them. So far, her stepfather had threatened to sell his story to the media and set the police on them for abducting his daughter without his permission. Tansy didn’t need the stress of those threats. Jude was using every expert in the field to keep Posy’s father at bay until another investigation by Calvin’s former employers was complete. Regaining custody of the daughter he had never wanted was likely to be the last thing on Calvin’s mind once he had more worrying developments to consider, Jude mused.
Jude’s arm enclosed Tansy again on their passage down the sweeping staircase. Her colour was high, her mood on edge. Jude had a tendency to just take over, convinced that he knew better than her. But he should have told her about blocking her stepfather’s calls, shouldn’t have he? She would have panicked, she acknowledged, because she was horribly conscious that the law would be on Calvin’s side as a birth parent and not on theirs.
As for Jude’s words earlier… I still like you. It was better than nothing, she supposed unhappily. Not a lot to write home about though, when she was insanely in love with him! Perhaps she was a glutton for punishment, she conceded as they descended the stairs into a crush of the most unbelievably beautiful and glamorous women, who were all keen to personally congratulate the gorgeous heir to the Alexandris fortune on his birthday. In short, Jude was being mobbed.
As Tansy stood off to one side, a waiter served her with a glass of champagne, and she asked him to bring her a sparkling water in a champagne glass instead.
Isidore Alexandris appeared in front of her. ‘I believe Jude is taking you to meet his mother tomorrow—’
‘Yes.’ But Jude had mentioned that fact only in passing, and not for the first time she had received the impression that questions about his surviving parent were not a welcome source of conversation. Jude, she had sensed, was very protective of his mother.
Isidore compressed his lips. ‘Stick by his side. Clio was difficult and Dion and I were hard on her because she did a lot of damage to Jude when he was a boy,’ he breathed in a driven undertone. ‘Her bitterness was like poison. Jude had been indoctrinated and traumatised by the time his father won custody of him. I still can’t abide the woman but, to be fair, there were faults on both sides. None of us deserve a trophy for our behaviour back then.’
‘Jude did refer to the…family bad feeling,’ Tansy selected with tact. ‘But he doesn’t discuss her with me.’
‘He wouldn’t,’ Isidore commented wryly. ‘He’s very loyal to anyone he cares about, but I have never beli
eved that she deserved that loyalty.’
As Tansy accompanied Isidore into the crowded ballroom, she saw Althea, glowing and gorgeous in a tight black dress that showcased her bountiful curves, and quickly looked away again. She was disconcerted when Althea approached her, dropping down fluidly into the vacant seat beside her. ‘We didn’t get to talk at the wedding,’ the blonde declared. ‘How are you finding married life?’
‘It’s wonderful,’ Tansy responded with a smile to equal the brilliance of her companion’s.
‘Jude and I are incredibly close. I hope you don’t intend to interfere with our friendship. Jude would be furious with you,’ Althea informed her smoothly.
‘I think that since you confronted him on our wedding day some things may have changed,’ Tansy countered with quiet dignity. ‘Jude wouldn’t enjoy another scene—’
Althea’s eyes flared with resentment. ‘Who the hell do you think you are to tell me that?’
‘His wife.’ Tansy breathed in deep, studying the blonde, seeing what Jude probably did not see in his first love: a pampered and arrogant beauty unaccustomed to meeting with rejection. ‘You had Jude once and you blew it. That’s not on him, that’s on you.’
As Althea spluttered in fury at that blunt rejoinder, Tansy eased upright in her high heels and walked away. A hand closed over hers and steered her behind an ornate pillar. She glanced up in consternation to see Jude gazing down at her with a dazzling smile of appreciation. ‘I can’t believe that I’ve reached the age of thirty before meeting a woman who wants to rescue me, protect me…’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Tansy asked, still flushed from her encounter with his ex-girlfriend.
‘I overheard your conversation with Althea. You were warning her off for my benefit. That was very sweet,’ Jude labelled softly. ‘And very sexy.’
Relief that he wasn’t offended, allied with that comment, made Tansy laugh. ‘According to you, everything I do is sexy.’
Glittering dark golden eyes full of heat swept her animated face. ‘It is,’ he confirmed.