The Marriage Betrayal (17 page)

Shortly before eight she lit the candles on the table and studied herself in the mirror, grimacing a little, hugely self-conscious about the outfit she was wearing—although outfit was not an appropriate description. She was clad in a coffee and cream silk set of bra and knickers, teamed with heels, stockings and a loose chiffon wrap that revealed more than it concealed. Sander was not going to be left in any doubt of the invitation she was giving him and, on one level, her pride was mortified by the bold approach she was
taking.

But the bottom line was that she loved Sander and that simple truth outweighed all other considerations, she acknowledged ruefully. She could not go on indefinitely wondering what was wrong and living on the outskirts of his life like a barely tolerated poor relation. If Sander wanted his freedom back, if he was excluding her because he resented her presence, she was better finding out now and walking away before they ended up hating each other. She had to think of their child. Her own parents, Crystal and Anatole, loathed each other so much that they couldn’t even be in the same room together. Tally was willing to do almost anything to conserve a more civilised relationship with Sander if only for their child’s sake.

As the minutes marched on she had to fuss over the meal in an effort to stop it spoiling. By half-past eight she was worried; by the time he was an hour late and hadn’t even phoned she was in angry tears. She did not think she had ever felt so lonely in her life as she did watching the clock tick on in the silence. She wouldn’t let the tears fall and she couldn’t even have a drink because she was pregnant. At ten she threw the meal in the bin and just left all the dishes sitting, then took refuge in the bedroom.

Sander let himself into the apartment just after two in the morning. Having spent a large part of the evening downing vodka with the Russian consortium who had just signed a very lucrative contract with Volakis Shipping, he was remarkably sober but almost drunk with tiredness. There was a light burning in the kitchen and when he saw the dishes stacked
everywhere he was momentarily bemused because, in recent weeks, while he turned night into day struggling to keep the family
business afloat it had become an effort to even remember that he
had
a wife.

Now in the act of helping himself to some fresh orange juice from his extraordinarily well-stocked refrigerator, Sander remembered that Tally had asked him to come home to dinner. He dug out his mobile and recalled switching off the reminder he had programmed in at the club where he had entertained the Russians. He had meant to ring her when it was more convenient but had forgotten entirely. He swore and crossed the room to the dining table in the alcove, still laid with cutlery and glasses and a rather poignant little bud vase filled with a drooping posy. He stood gazing down at the trappings of the meal he had failed to show up for with a sinking heart and a conscience that was suddenly cutting him like a knife.

In the bedroom, Tally awoke when the fridge door slammed shut and she sat up, seeing the thin line of light below the door. Sander was home, Sander had actually bothered to
come
home! She scrambled off the bed, bemused to register that she was still wearing her high heels as she had fallen asleep on top of the duvet. Pushing her tumbling curls off her brow, she headed angrily into the lounge.

Sander focused on Tally in the doorway and he was staggered by her get-up: she never wore sexy lingerie for his benefit and tonight she had really pushed the boat out. Her beautiful breasts were foaming over the lace edge of a low-cut bra much racier than her usual selection, while a short robe of floral fabric barely covered skimpy high-cut knickers and did nothing at all to hide the length of leg on show. His body reacting involuntarily with all the powerful pent-up hunger of a male who had suppressed his sexual
appetite for weeks,
Sander dragged his attention from her wonderfully curvaceous body with the greatest difficulty.

‘I owe you an apology,
moli mou
. I should’ve phoned,’ he breathed, colliding with green eyes bright with angry condemnation …

T
HOSE
words were too little too late to soothe Tally.

While she acknowledged that her threatened miscarriage had got their marriage off to a poor start, she had suffered her neglect in silence. She felt as if her body’s show of weakness, which seemed to have made everything go wrong, was somehow
her
fault. She had made no demands and had voiced no complaints. Indeed she had attempted to be a supportive understanding partner, only to feel mortified by the obvious fact that her husband seemed neither to want her or need her in that role.

She did not feel like a wife and Sander didn’t treat her like one either. He had made no attempt to spend time with her or to enquire into what she did with her days in a foreign city where she had no friends. Cosima had ignored both her sister’s wedding and Tally’s sending of her mobile phone number, making it clear that she did not want contact with her sibling even if she was currently living in the same country. Sander could not have made his lack of interest in Tally, his marriage and their future child more obvious and suddenly Tally could not credit that she had tolerated that indifference in silence for so long.

‘You owe me more than an apology for the last month, you owe me an explanation—’

An ebony brow quirked. ‘About what?’

Green eyes pure emerald with anger, Tally threw her hands out in a demonstration of the strong emotion rippling through her. ‘You’ve treated me like the invisible woman ever since our wedding day. Why on earth did you marry me if you were planning to behave like that? What was the point?’

His deep-set dark eyes were heavy with exhaustion and his luxuriant lashes lowered to screen his wary gaze. He shifted a broad shoulder. ‘I’m too tired for this stuff now. We’ll discuss it tomorrow—’

‘I probably won’t see you tomorrow,’ Tally interrupted. ‘Or haven’t you noticed that you walk out of here at dawn and don’t come back much before dawn the next day?’

‘I’m not in the mood for an argument—’

‘I don’t care!’ Tally broke in with fiery persistence. ‘I have the right to know where I stand. I have the right to ask you why the heck you married me when you don’t seem to want me as a wife!’

Sander’s big powerful body had pulled taut with tension and his stubborn mouth compressed as he shot her a sardonic glance. ‘Let’s not go into that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you might not like the answer I give you!’ Sander slung back before he could think better of it, his temper rising in direct proportion to his exhaustion and his impatience and knocking him off guard. He was dead on his feet: all he wanted to do was sleep. Even the hard wooden floor was beginning to look inviting.

In receipt of that bewildering response, Tally had fallen very still. ‘Why wouldn’t I like it?’

‘Leave it, Tally,’ Sander urged in exasperation, striding past her to head into the bedroom she had just vacated.

‘And what if I don’t want to leave it?’ Tally sped in his wake, refusing to back off.

‘You’ll wish you had,’ Sander told her wryly, tossing his jacket and tie down on a chair. ‘Look, I admit that you have grounds for complaint. So far, I’ve not been the most considerate husband, but tonight is not the time to call me to account for my mistakes. I’m too tired to talk right now. I’ve spent hours exchanging tall stories with a pair of Russian businessmen who could drink the Volga dry and still remain standing.’

‘You can’t throw something like that at me and then refuse to tell me the whole story.’

‘There
is
no story,’ Sander said flatly, standing still to unbutton his shirt.

‘I want to know why you married me!’

‘Well, not because you shout at three in the morning and demand answers that it would be a challenge for me to give you even if I was less tired,’ Sander framed wearily.

‘I deserve the truth,’ Tally challenged. ‘It seems pretty obvious that you only married me because I’m pregnant.’

Sander grimaced. ‘Tomorrow, Tally—’

‘No, not tomorrow—
now
!’ she fired back at him. ‘Every step of this relationship you have controlled everything but now it’s my turn. Why did you ask me to marry you?’

And in answer to that bold challenge, Sander was suddenly filled with such a swelling, unstoppable surge
of rage that he could no longer hold the words back.

‘Because your father threatened to bring down Volakis Shipping if I didn’t!’

Assailed by an explanation so far from her expectations, Tally could only blink at him and stare in sheer bewilderment. ‘Excuse me? My father? He threatened you? When did that happen? Did you tell him I was pregnant?’

‘No. Someone—presumably you, your mother or even your half-sister—told Anatole about the baby, and that I was responsible. He was furious. He came to see me at my London office and demanded that I marry you. If I refused, he threatened to scare off a contract that Volakis Shipping needed to survive. Your father is an influential man in the world of business. He always has his ear to the ground. People who matter listen to his tips.’

The hectic flush in Tally’s cheeks was slowly receding as shock drained the natural colour from her face. ‘I wasn’t the one who told him.’ Slowly, numbly she shook her head in an emphatic negative to underline that point, but she was still so taken aback by what he had revealed that she could not yet put it all together inside her mind. ‘And Cosima didn’t even know I was pregnant which only leaves your parents or my mother, and if
she
told my father, I’m amazed, because as a rule she can hardly bear to speak to him.’

‘My parents have said nothing. So it wasn’t you who talked … you didn’t run to tell stories so that your father would put pressure on me?’ His shirt hanging open to reveal a muscular bronzed wedge of hair-roughened chest, Sander searched her revealing face with incisive dark eyes. He was impressed by her demeanour and convinced that she was telling him the
truth. ‘That does make me feel better.’

And Tally finally understood where the anger she had sensed in him from the outset of their marriage had come from and why it had lingered so that his bitterness soured everything between them. Naturally she could have done nothing to defuse that anger when he had chosen to keep such a massive secret from her. As comprehension sank in fully, though, she almost drowned in the flood tide of his cruelly unwelcome honesty and discovered that her shame was so great that she could no longer meet his dark golden gaze.

Her husband had been blackmailed into marrying her.

That was so horrendous, so truly unspeakable an act, that she felt as though she had been punched in the gut and was struggling without success to get air into her starved lungs. She was shaken that the father she barely knew could have so much influence that he could threaten Sander’s family business, but she was equally shocked that her father could have cared enough about her future to even consider putting pressure on the father of her child to marry her. In fact, that did not make sense to her at all.

‘My father doesn’t love me,’ Tally muttered with an unemotional acceptance of that truth that came from years of disappointed hopes. ‘He did what the family court told him he had to do: he paid my living and educational expenses. But he very rarely wants to see me. I irritate him by reminding him of my mother and, as you saw, he didn’t care enough to step out in public as my father and attend my wedding, although again he paid for it. So, bearing in mind that he doesn’t really care about me at all, why would he force you to marry me?’

‘In Anatole’s eyes it was a matter of principle and
honour. You being pregnant and unmarried was an affront to
his
dignity,’ Sander explained grimly. ‘Anatole Karydas is very conscious of his image.’

‘He was saving face,’ Tally traded flatly, recognising that her father’s overweening sense of importance was the most likely explanation for his behaviour. ‘Did he really have enough power to damage Volakis Shipping? I didn’t realise he was that important.’

‘A whisper in the wrong place would have killed that contract. Unfortunately my late brother left the company in a much more vulnerable state than I had appreciated. I only learned how bad things were after our wedding. My father was in over his head; he’s out of touch with the way business is done these days,’ Sander admitted heavily. ‘If I wasn’t such a stubborn bastard, I would have offered my help long ago and we might have avoided the current crisis. Sadly, it took your father’s threat to make me accept that blood is thicker than water.’

But Tally wasn’t listening to that little speech or the ramifications of Sander’s belated appreciation of the strength and importance of family ties. Shock had produced a spreading puddle of ice in the pit of her stomach and her skin felt cool and clammy. Glancing up, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in a mirror across the room and thought how horribly humiliating it was to be caught swanning round in sexy lingerie in an effort to attract a man who had clearly never really wanted her for more than the light entertainment factor of a few weeks. Add in a pregnancy that had proved equally undesirable and it was little wonder that he was avoiding intimacy. In haste, she walked into the dressing room to remove the wrap and shoes she was wearing. She took out trousers and a top and put them
on, pushing her feet into flat comfortable shoes and burying the memory of
the fancy underpinnings she still wore and why she had bought them.

It struck her as deeply ironic that she should ultimately have her uninterested parents to thank for her humiliation and heartbreak. Now, because her mind simply could not cope with the truth about her marriage, she looked back in time instead and recalled her mother’s complacent rather than surprised response to the news that Sander had asked her daughter to marry him. Crystal had been triumphant and had undoubtedly told Anatole that Tally was pregnant. Her mother had probably enjoyed delivering that provocative news, possibly guessing how much it would annoy the older man that history was in danger of repeating itself in the next generation. Perhaps Anatole had feared that Tally’s relationship to him would once again be publicly exposed to embarrass him, along with the news that Tally was also pregnant by a Greek tycoon. For whatever reasons, he had chosen to force Sander Volakis into marrying her by threatening the future of Volakis Shipping.