The Volakis Vows: The Marriage Betrayal / Bride for Real
‘We should meet for dinner some evening,’ Sander murmured silkily.
‘You’ve got to be joking!’ Tally slung, turning on her heel to walk away without even a hint of hesitation.
‘You don’t know what you’re missing, glikia mou.’
‘Don’t I? I told you how I felt about you!’ she tossed back sharply. ‘And don’t call me your sweetheart. I’m not your sweet anything!’
‘These are absolutely beautiful!’ Binkie exclaimed, burying her nose in the fragrant bouquet of roses that had just been delivered.
‘My goodness,’ Tally remarked, joining her in the kitchen. ‘Does one of Mum’s men think she’s home from Portugal?’
‘They’re not for your mother, they’re for you!’ Binkie proclaimed, turning eyes that positively shone with satisfaction onto Tally.
‘Me?’ Tally was satisfyingly thunderstruck by that announcement and she plucked the card from between the older woman’s fingertips. Literally tearing off the envelope enclosing the tiny card, she stared down at just two words and a phone number.
Dinner? Sander
‘Oh,’ she muttered tightly, dropping the card as though it had burned her, while wondering why Sander Volakis handed out such conflicting messages. And did he seriously think that he could just toss her some flowers and she would phone him like an obedient little girl grateful for his attention and eager to forget how he had offended her?
Only five days earlier, Sander had made it painfully clear that he wanted nothing more to do with her and his insinuation that she had slept with him because he was rich had deeply insulted her. Yet he had offered her a dinner date a mere hour later when he dropped her at the train she had caught back to London. She had made it plain that she wasn’t interested, so why was he now sending her flowers? An extravagant bunch of very expensive and truly lovely roses, as well.
Binkie wanted to know everything about the sender of the flowers and Tally had to belatedly admit to meeting Sander at Westgrave Manor and share what she knew about him. Reluctant to upset Binkie, she did not tell the disheartening tale of Cosima’s antics during that weekend. Her colour fluctuating wildly beneath the older woman’s speculative scrutiny, Tally leant heavily on Sander’s allegedly bad reputation with women as she spoke. The heady glow of romantic hope in Binkie’s eyes slowly began to recede.
While Tally enjoyed arranging the roses and setting the vase in her bedroom she had no intention of making use of Sander Volakis’ mobile phone number. In a weak moment she did a search on his name on the Internet and was immediately rewarded with even more good reasons to keep him at a distance. Sander evidently specialised in leggy, famous blondes of the model, entertainment industry celebrity or socialite brand. He dated ladies who wore very small dresses or bikinis and who were papped leaving nightclubs and posing on yachts. And she was quick to remind herself that she hadn’t liked him, indeed, had wanted very badly to slap him that morning at Westgrave and had only resisted the urge in a futile effort to reclaim her lost dignity.
Bearing those important facts in mind, Tally accepted that it was very perverse of her to lie awake every night thinking about the volatile Greek and the lean hard-boned lineaments of that unforgettable face of his. Her intelligence put Sander squarely in the incompatible category, but something infinitely less rational and more contrary kept him alive and vibrant in her thoughts. Yet he had put her off sex, she conceded in rueful mortification. All very exciting up to a point and then a rather painful disappointment, she recalled with a grimace, wondering if it would have got better had he continued and then scolding herself for her lingering curiosity. She had learnt a good lesson, she told herself instead.
Getting intimate with a stranger was a very bad idea. Sander had assumed that she had sacrificed her virginity in an effort to impress him in some way. So why hadn’t he got the message when she refused to see him again?
Cosima phoned her that same morning and confided that Sander had called her to ask for Tally’s address. ‘Are you seeing him?’
‘No, but he sent me flowers,’ Tally admitted to satisfy the younger woman’s curiosity.
‘Dad was very impressed when I told him—’
‘You shouldn’t have mentioned it,’ Tally cut in. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’
‘Maybe Sander did it for a bet or something,’ her sibling suggested. ‘Why else would he be chasing you?’
‘I don’t know, but you seem to have more ideas on that score than I do,’ Tally said drily.
Crystal returned that evening from a month-long stay at her current boyfriend’s Portuguese villa. Deeply tanned and wearing a lot of gold jewellery, Crystal watched her daughter work on her latest interior design project for college at the dining room table and sighed. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of being so sensible, Tally?’
‘Meaning?’ Tally prompted, wondering what had etched shadows like bruises below her mother’s fine eyes.
‘Peter has decided that he wants a break from me,’ she revealed with a shrug that was clearly intended to be careless but which didn’t quite pull off the feat. ‘Thinks we’re getting too serious. Well, we have been practically living together for the past six months …’
Tally picked up on the brittle shaken note in her mother’s admission and scrambled out of her seat to wrap her arms round the thin, attractive blonde. Crystal might have a messy love life and be foolish with money, but Tally loved her mother and hated to see her hurting. ‘Oh, Mum, I’m sorry!’
‘I’ve been dumped,’ Crystal confided thickly, tears glazing her eyes. ‘I’m the one who usually does the dumping but I didn’t see it coming. I was a fool, I thought Peter was with me for the long haul …’
Tally gave the taller woman a comforting hug. ‘Never mind. You’ll meet someone else.’
‘It’s not that easy any more.’ Crystal sighed. ‘I’m forty-three next birthday, not twenty-three. Men my age want much younger women, and they get them too.’
Navel-gazing wasn’t Crystal’s thing, however, and within a couple of days Tally’s mother had regained her spirits and her extensive net of contacts and busy social calendar played their part in that revival. That weekend, Crystal headed off with a female friend to spend a week in a swanky Scottish castle. Tally, who tried to keep her mother’s financial affairs in order, stayed home to be dismayed by the size of the older woman’s credit-card bills when they arrived in the post. Crystal could spend as if there were no tomorrow and Peter, a wealthy retiree, was no longer around to support her taste for the high life. Tally resolved to make yet another attempt to persuade her mother to live more within her means. At the start of the following week, she saw Binkie off on her annual summer trip home to Poland where she stayed with her relatives.
The following evening the bell buzzed at seven. Local children had been playing the annoying game of ringing the bell and running away and Tally answered the door with a frown because she expected to find the doorstep empty. But when she found Sander Volakis there instead, his tall, beautifully built body elegantly attired in a charcoal-grey suit teamed with a gold silk tie, she was totally thrown off balance.
One part of her wanted to slam the door and double-lock it, but it was an urge mainly fostered by the awareness that she hadn’t combed her hair since lunchtime and was wearing very little make-up. As a young woman who prided herself on her common sense, she was dismayed by her sudden attack of vanity, while the other, more dominant part of her response to his appearance was to simply stare at him and enjoy the view. And when Sander, his jaw line roughened by a five o’clock shadow of stubble that only enhanced his classic masculine features and wide sensual mouth, settled his stunning night-dark eyes on her, he was very much a sight to be savoured.
‘Tally,’ he purred like a jungle cat on the prowl, studying her from beneath heavy black lashes and very much liking what he saw.
Tally didn’t do fussy fashion and her denim miniskirt and white cotton top could not have been plainer. Yet rarely had Sander been so aware of a woman’s lush curves at breast and hip or her shapely legs. As self-conscious colour stained her creamy cheeks and her green eyes widened and then veiled to conceal their expression an unfamiliar stab of possessiveness gripped him.
‘Ask me in,’ he urged.
‘No,’ Tally mumbled, her hand clinging to the door and pushing it a little more closed in rebellion.
‘Are you that scared of what might happen?’ Sander quipped with a husky sound of amusement.
‘Nothing would happen,’ Tally fielded stiffly. ‘Been there, done that.’
‘But you haven’t. We’ve barely begun,’ Sander countered forcefully, frustrated by her blank refusal to accept that reality.
‘Your choice, then,’ Tally traded, her face warm as she made that blunt reminder of the manner in which he had withdrawn from their short-lived intimacy. ‘My choice now is not to take it any further.’
‘But you’re making the wrong choice,’ Sander told her with impregnable confidence.
‘You only think that because it’s not what you want and I’m pretty sure that you only ever do what you want,’ Tally rattled off at equal speed.
‘Women don’t usually argue with me.’
‘Well, you definitely don’t want to be spending time with me, Sander,’ Tally declared. ‘I think I’d always be arguing with you.’
That quip provoked a spontaneous laugh from Sander that lightened the intensity on his lean, dark, brooding features. ‘You challenge me—’
‘Which you would enjoy for what … all of five minutes?’ Tally cut in unimpressed. ‘You know what your problem is? You’re bored. That’s the only reason you’re wasting your time sending me flowers and turning up where you’re not welcome.’
For a split second, Sander was stunned by the realisation that she was spot on with that assessment. Of late, the women he took to bed had become very predictable and unexciting. In fact, he could not recall when a woman had last stirred this amount of interest in him and he wondered if it was possible that Tally’s resistance was the greatest part of her attraction. Just for once, a woman was not falling into his arms like an overripe plum or making a huge effort to please and flatter him. Indeed Tally Spencer didn’t think much of him and had no reservations about letting him know the fact.
‘I spoke too frankly and offended you. Is that all you’ve got against me?’
‘No, it’s not. You’re rich and spoilt and you think you deserve special treatment. We’ve got nothing in common, Sander.’
‘Except this, which you can’t deny …’ And before Tally could even guess his own intention, he had stepped forward to lower his handsome dark head and seal his mouth to hers in a kiss that hurtled through her unprepared body like a depth charge primed to explode on contact. Shivering, her lips swollen and tingling from the drugging pressure of his, Tally experienced a tugging ache at the very heart of her that left her literally weak at the knees.
Sander slowly lifted his head again, his brilliant gaze glittering gold enticement. ‘Dinner tomorrow night. I’ll pick you up at eight.’
And with that intense assurance that was so integral a part of him, Sander strode off without awaiting her response. Tally blinked, leant back against the door to dizzily close it and knew that he had played a blinder. That one scorching kiss, which her heart was still racing from, had nothing to do with intellect and had contrived to kill all rational thought within seconds. She thought of not being there when he called to collect her but that struck her as cowardice. Later, she fell into bed in a daze, her brain at war with an overriding but indefensible desire to see him again …
CHAPTER FIVE
TALLY went out to dinner sporting her best jeans teamed with a red top that had a low back.
She refused to agonise over the inadequacies of her under-resourced wardrobe or to get into debt buying a new outfit that she couldn’t afford. Nothing could more keenly illustrate the differences between them than her lack of fancy designer togs, but she was not going to feel embarrassed about it, she told herself firmly. She was less proud of the fact that she rifled through her mother’s make-up drawer to bolster her own meagre collection of cosmetics and had used eyeliner for only the second time in her life.
‘What did you do today?’ Sander enquired lazily, his attention dwelling with pleasure on the natural sway of her pouting breasts below the thin fabric of her top as she sat down. The conviction that she wasn’t wearing anything beneath it sparked a fire of anticipation in his loins. Thoughts of Tally had interfered with his concentration throughout his working day, an unusual enough development for a male used to keeping his sex life safely corralled within his leisure time. But lust had its own impetus and he recognised the fact, convinced that once his desire was satisfied he would recapture his inherent detachment.
‘Work experience with a design firm at Putney,’ she revealed, choosing not to add that so far she had been kept well away from the clients and firmly in the background running messages and sourcing supplies. She was eager for the chance to utilise her creative talents. ‘I have my final exams in a couple of months, so I’m starting to apply for jobs as well.’
‘You’re studying?’ Sander frowned in surprise. ‘Where does your job with Cosima Karydas fit in?’
Tally almost winced at that understandable question and reckoned that she would never make a good liar because her sibling’s fibs about their exact relationship had already slipped her mind. ‘Oh, that was just a temporary sort of one-off thing,’ she muttered uncomfortably. ‘I’m actually studying interior design at college and this is my last year.’
‘I didn’t realise that you were a student.’
‘So, tell me about what you do,’ Tally urged, keen to change the subject.
Sander mentioned interests in property, pharmaceuticals and the hospitality business and confessed that he was always on the lookout for new investment possibilities. While she could only be impressed by the long hours he evidently worked and his ambition, she sensed that he was never satisfied with his achievements and wondered why not.
Accompanying him into an exquisitely renovated Georgian building with a handsome entrance foyer, she comfortably envisaged the exclusive restaurant she assumed they were heading to next, only to find herself lodged in a lift instead. ‘Where’s the restaurant?’ she prompted.
‘There isn’t one.’ Sander stood back for her to precede him out of the lift and then stuck a key in the lock of the door on the other side of the gracious landing. ‘We’re eating in …’
Discomfiture immediately gripped Tally, for she had not bargained on a private meal in the intimate setting of his home and would have preferred dining in a public place. Curiosity, however, about his chosen surroundings took her in silence through the first minutes of entering his apartment. The high-tech finish, wooden floors and understated furniture were very masculine but made the most of the classic proportions of the rooms. A dining table was already set with flickering candles in readiness for their meal and her soft pink mouth compressed.
‘I would’ve preferred to have dined out,’ she told him candidly.
Surprise at that comment made Sander elevate an ebony brow. ‘Why?’
Tally wrinkled her nose and wondered if she dared to be honest a split second before she defied the urge to play dumb for his benefit. ‘This feels like a set-up …’
‘What the hell does that mean?’ Sander frowned as a woman in an apron appeared with a pair of plates and hovered uncertainly. He addressed her in Greek, telling her to go ahead and serve the meal.
Stiff with awkwardness, Tally took a reluctant seat and unfurled her napkin.
‘Explain what you meant,’ Sander prompted drily.
The starter looked very enticing but the tension in the atmosphere had loosed a flock of uneasy butterflies in the pit of Tally’s stomach. She lifted her knife and fork with an appetite that was already on the wane. ‘You staged the meal here because you expect me to sleep with you tonight,’ she framed curtly and she glanced up, eyes as fresh a green as clover leaves after rain and sparkling with condemnation. ‘You’ve got a hell of a nerve!’
Sander had indeed expected exactly that scenario to develop and had chosen the most convenient backdrop for that desired conclusion to the evening. ‘Because I want you? Am I supposed to apologise for that?’
‘No, but …’ Tally hesitated and then pressed on to speak her mind. ‘But I’m more than just a body. I’m a person and I don’t want to be here with you if all you’re interested in is sex!’
His dark golden gaze veiled, Sander could not restrain an instinctive need to wince at her lack of tact and sophistication. He wondered what possible response she was hoping to receive at such an early stage of their acquaintance. ‘I’d like you to stay the night,’ he traded without an ounce of embarrassment. ‘That’s a natural, normal aspiration for me to have.’
Colour ran up below Tally’s creamy skin in a flying banner of embarrassment. She had boxed herself into a corner with her declaration, made it clear that while he might want only her body, she was in the market for something deeper and more meaningful, but that had not been her intention. ‘I just don’t like the way you make assumptions,’ she breathed in a taut undertone.
‘You have the right to say no.’ Sander voiced that reminder in a tone as smooth as silk.
‘Don’t patronise me!’ Tally fired back at him, throwing down her knife and fork and pushing her plate away in an angry gesture.
‘You’re very quick-tempered,’ Sander remarked.
Discomfiture attacking her in receipt of that opinion, Tally tugged her plate back and began doggedly to eat, barely tasting the delicious dish in her determination to appear calm and composed.
‘Always ready and willing to have a fight with me,’ Sander continued.
‘I don’t even know what I’m doing here with you!’ Tally exclaimed helplessly.
‘Oh, that’s easy,’ Sander quipped, filling her wine glass. ‘You’re with me for the exact same reason I’m with you. You can’t stay away.’
The truth of that statement hit Tally as hard as a head-on collision. She looked at him and it was as if he had cast a spell on her, for it was a challenge even to look away, never mind walk away. Desire had dug greedy claws into her body, awakening the hormones that inspired craving and stealing her freedom of choice. He infuriated her and he had insulted her, yet she had still agreed to dinner. Suddenly even madder with herself than she was with him, Tally pushed back her chair and stood up. ‘I shouldn’t be here. Don’t worry, I’ll make my own way home.’
Sander slowly rose upright, keen dark golden eyes locked to her hectically flushed face. ‘Are you always as impetuous as this?’
Tally paled, wondering if she shared more with her mother than she had ever appreciated because he seemed to draw out a side of her nature that she was unfamiliar with: an ardent, capricious, insecure side, which made her feel incredibly vulnerable. Suddenly she was acting a world away from the stable, sensible and fairly unemotional young woman she had always assumed that she was. He made her want things she had never wanted, like long straight blonde hair, a body the shape of a pencil and endless legs. He made her want to be irresistible, the sort of woman men fought over and loved to the brink of insanity.
‘You make me impulsive,’ she admitted grudgingly.
‘You have a weird effect on me too,’ Sander confided with an eloquent shift of two lean brown hands. ‘I was convinced that I wanted nothing more to do with you, but the minute I saw you leaving Westgrave Manor I drove after you and asked you out to dinner.’
And Tally’s barrier of apprehension and insecurity tumbled down there and then because those revealing, almost bemused words of his soothed her concern and eased her distrust. It didn’t sound like a male pickup line and she had heard most of them from the smarmy, ‘Did it hurt when you fell out of heaven?’ to the coarse, ‘Fancy a shag?’ It sounded as though he was telling the truth and that he was equally mystified by the way he reacted to her.
Once again she sat down and the main course was served. Finally starting to relax, she ate and asked questions about the flat, for the strikingly effective combination of contemporary décor married to Georgian classic elegance appealed to her creative instincts. Sander told her that he had renovated the entire building before converting it into apartments, keeping the most spacious for his own use. She chattered about her college course and let down her guard to the extent that she had to swallow back an unwise reference to her father, before confiding that one day she wanted to open her own design company.
In the lounge Sander sat back and enjoyed her bubbling animation. He found her surprisingly good company; she had none of the conceit and superficiality he was accustomed to meeting with in women. Tally met his stunning dark golden eyes and felt the intensity there to the extent that her mouth ran dry and her heartbeat accelerated. He reached out a graceful hand and removed her wine glass from her grasp to set it aside. And, without the smallest hesitation, she shifted closer, wanting, needing to connect. Long fingers curving to her slim shoulder, he bent his head to toy with her soft full lips until the heat of anticipation was tingling and burning between her thighs. What shocked her was how very quickly and powerfully she felt the pull of his sexual magnetism.
He kissed her softly and then he kissed her hard, his lips urgent and demanding around the skilled plunge of his tongue into the sensitive interior of her mouth. She clung to him as if he were the only rock in a storm and gasped in startled response when he burrowed below her top to close a hungry hand over the fullness of her breasts. As he massaged the pouting swells and the tender prominence of her nipples with skilled fingers excitement began to hurtle through her in an unstoppable wave.
‘Let’s move this to the bedroom,’ Sander urged thickly, hauling her upright and pausing to kiss her with a passionate dominance that lit up every skin cell in her quivering body.
The yearning hit a high and she wound her arms round him and kissed him back with the same passion, loving the taste of his strong sensual mouth and the scent of his skin. With a gruff sound of satisfaction he lifted her up into his arms and strode into the bedroom across the landing.
He settled her down on the bed and suddenly tensed. ‘Something I forgot to say,’ he breathed, beautiful eyes welded to her flushed face. ‘I don’t do exclusivity …’
‘Okay,’ Tally fielded without even having to think about it. ‘You don’t do exclusivity. I don’t do sex.’
Sander froze and slowly dragged his hands from her. ‘You can’t be serious.’
Bright green eyes focused on him. ‘Do other women settle for that, “I don’t do exclusivity” malarkey?’
‘With all the options out there, who wants to be tied down? They settle for it,’ Sander asserted.
Tally sighed and shook her head. ‘I won’t,’ she said almost apologetically, her gaze clinging ruefully to his lean, darkly handsome features.
Sander groaned out loud and fell back a step. She could not have missed the pronounced bulge of his erection below his jeans. ‘You have me over a … barrel …’
‘Or, in this case … a bed?’ Tally suggested, struggling to cool the tingling heat at the centre of her body with will power alone but stubbornly unprepared to compromise. ‘It’s your choice.’
‘This is ridiculous.’ Seething frustration filled Sander when she fired back the same reminder he had used with her only minutes earlier. ‘It’s not as though you’re still a virgin, either.’