by Lynne Graham
‘I think that if you’re prepared to marry me, you could be a little more trusting.’
‘How can you say that? When I walked in you looked at me as though you expected me to attack you!’ Apollo grated in condemnation. ‘You don’t trust me either.’
‘It’s nothing personal. I don’t trust men generally.’ Pixie lifted her chin. ‘And why do I have to see a doctor?’
‘Health check. Obviously there’s no point in us marrying if it turns out that you may not be able to conceive.’
‘So, presumably,’ Pixie framed, ‘you’re being tested as well?’
‘No.’
‘Forty per cent of infertility problems are male,’ Pixie pointed out. ‘Not much point getting me tested if you’re not going to get tested too.’
Apollo hadn’t thought of that angle and for some inexplicable reason he realised that the suggestion that he might not be fertile really annoyed him. He opened the door. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. By the way, wear the outfit I had put in the wardrobe for you.’
‘Outfit?’ she gasped, sliding off the bed and opening the wardrobe to see the blue dress and jacket that hung there in a garment bag and the silvery designer shoes and bag stowed beneath. ‘What gives you the idea that you can tell me what to wear?’
‘It’s another milestone on the road to becoming my wife. Naturally I want you to look your best,’ Apollo fielded, dragging his glittering gaze from his perusal of her slender thighs to jerk open the bedroom door again. Maybe he should’ve taken Lauren to bed, he reflected in annoyance, because he was deeply uneasy about the strength of Pixie’s appeal. Thee mou, what was the matter with him? She wasn’t a beauty but she was exceptionally pretty and there was something remarkably sexy about her as well, something that drew him on a level he didn’t understand. Was it her expressive face? Those interestingly perky breasts? The tight bottom? The so touchable thighs and small, slender feet?
Did he feel sorry for her? Was that the source of her strange appeal? He didn’t require a therapist to tell him that she suffered from low self-esteem. In the act of shutting the door, he turned and caught the filthy look she was shooting him while thinking herself unobserved and he strode down the corridor to his own bedroom laughing and feeling surprisingly upbeat for the first time since his father’s death. No, he didn’t feel sorry for Pixie, he liked that gutsy irreverent streak of hers even though he was out of necessity being forced to ensure that she reined it in. She really wasn’t impressed by him. Or by his wealth. And when had he ever met with that attitude before in a woman? In truth it was a real first for him. The women he was accustomed to would have snatched the outfit out to check that it was designer and would then have praised his generosity with loads of gratitude and flattery to ensure that he did it again.
Pixie? Not impressed. Apollo grinned.
*
Pixie woke at seven to be greeted by Manfred drawing back the curtains and setting her breakfast down on a table by the window and stepping out through the patio doors to set down a dog dish for Hector. ‘Mr Metraxis asks that you be ready for nine,’ he told her quietly.
Pixie breakfasted like a king. She loved her food and had always had a healthy appetite. Staying in Apollo’s palatial apartment was even better, she imagined, than staying in an exclusive hotel. After a shower, she dried her hair and took special care with her make-up before getting dressed.
She walked uncertainly into the huge main reception room and Apollo stared.
‘Turn round,’ he told her thickly, turning his fingers to emphasise the order.
Apollo was rapt. She was so incredibly dainty and feminine in that blue dress with the high heels accentuating her delicate ankles that he wanted to lift her off her feet and spin her round, and it was a weird prompting that bewildered him. She had the figure a model would kill for without the height.
‘I like the dress,’ he said, which wasn’t surprising since he had personally selected it.
‘It’s elegant but I’m not used to wearing skirts or heels,’ she complained. ‘I’m more of a tomboy than a fashion queen.’
He took her to see a private gynaecologist. She was questioned, examined and scanned and blood tests were taken. The results would be in by the following morning. As she emerged she saw Apollo standing talking urgently into his phone. ‘Did you have any idea? Well, no, I didn’t think it through either…it’s not funny, Vito. It was gross.’
Apollo finished the call and strode towards her with all the eagerness of a male who could not get out of the plush surgery fast enough. ‘Ready to go?’
Pixie was trying not to laugh because he had honestly sounded so shocked by what being tested had entailed and she thought it served him right after the process she had undergone without complaint. Evidently he did listen occasionally to a voice other than his own and he was playing fair at least.
‘Where to now?’ she prompted.
‘My lawyers, after which you go shopping.’
‘Oh? For what?’
‘For a wedding dress obviously and all the rest of it. I’m putting you in the charge of a professional buyer and fashion stylist. She knows what you need as per my instructions. All you have to do is act like a mannequin.’
‘But you haven’t got the test results back yet.’
‘Think positive…’ Apollo bent down, his stubbled jaw line grazing her cheek a tiny bit, and every nerve in her body tightened like a string pulled taut. ‘And I saw you smiling when you heard me talking to Vito,’ he murmured huskily. ‘No, I didn’t enjoy being handed a porn mag but ne…yes, I had a fantasy and it was about you.’
As Apollo pressed her back into the limo, Pixie twisted her head back to gape at him. ‘Me?’ she repeated in disbelief.
Green eyes roamed over her burning face with dark satisfaction. ‘You, koukla mou.’
Luminous eyes taking on a faint bluish cast from the dress she wore, Pixie stared at him in astonishment. ‘You’re kidding?’
‘Why would I be kidding? If I couldn’t be attracted to you, how could we do this?’
It was a fair point but the idea that Apollo, all rippling male-muscle perfection and stunningly beautiful, could consider her attractive still stupefied Pixie. And while she stared, frozen to her seat, Apollo moved, scooping her off the seat and settling her down into his lap at a speed that thoroughly unnerved her. But then his mouth traced very gently over hers and that instinctive kick of fear that generally made her back away from men was soothed by that subtle approach, which seemed ridiculously unthreatening. Of course, it didn’t dawn on her just at that moment that Apollo had an unequalled sensual skill set that allowed him to read women very easily.
The tip of his tongue traced her upper lip and something deep down inside just melted in Pixie. He followed that tactic up with a nibble at her full lower lip and she shivered, her whole body prickling with awareness to an almost painful degree. No man had ever made her feel anything like that before and she found it wildly seductive not to feel afraid. He teased her lips open and darted his tongue in lightly and a ball of erotic heat exploded in her pelvis and one of her hands flew up into his hair, feathering through the luxuriant strands to cup his well-shaped skull. She felt hot all over and curiously energised, almost as if someone had told her she could fly when all her life she had felt grounded and awkward.
His mouth was hard and yet his lips were soft and she was exploring every sensation with her brain and her body. He tasted so good, like water after a drought, like food after a famine. His mouth claimed hers with increasing pressure and her breasts ached inside her bra, liquid heat pushing between her thighs.
He was so warm she wanted to press into his lean, muscular frame and somehow meld with him. He framed her face with his hands and kissed her with steadily escalating passion and the hungry demand she recognised was thrilling rather than scary. She tipped her head back, allowing him all the access he wanted, jerking at each erotic plunge of his tongue and on fire for the next, which was why it was such
a shock when without the smallest warning his hands dropped to her waist and he propelled her back into the seat he had snatched her off.
Blinking with disconcertion and sensual intoxication, Pixie looked at him with a frown of incomprehension as to why he had so abruptly stopped.
‘For such a small woman you pack a hell of a punch!’ Apollo growled accusingly, because he had been within an inch of ripping off her panties and bringing her down on his aching body, satisfying the raw need that had come at him out of nowhere. And he didn’t like it, he didn’t like it one bit because he had never been that close to losing control with a woman since he was a teen, and remembering that time when he had been little more than a boy toy for a mature woman’s gratification brought him out in a cold sweat of revulsion.
‘It was only a kiss,’ she framed shakily between tingling lips, even though her body was telling her different and reacting in all sorts of disappointed ways to that sudden severance from his.
‘I was ready to have you right here, right now!’ Apollo grated through clenched white teeth, his jaw line rigid because he was so furious that for a few wildly exciting moments he had forgotten who he was and who she was and that the very last thing he had been thinking of was the bottom line.
And the bottom line was business, he reminded himself grimly, the business of satisfying his father’s will and making the best he could out of being blackmailed into marriage and fatherhood.
‘Here in the car?’ Pixie gasped, looking ridiculously shocked by the concept. ‘Would you have done that?’
And the very slight widening of his gorgeous green eyes fringed by those outrageously lush black lashes of his told her that he would have and indeed had probably had sex in a limo before. That brought her down to earth again with a timely thump. She was a virgin and he was a man whore and of course he had greater expectations and fewer boundaries than the average person. She wondered how often a first kiss had led into full sex for him and a shudder of distaste rippled through her, chasing off the last of the sexual heat he had evoked.
Aware that he had overreacted and exposed a certain sensitivity he had never ever exposed to anyone before, particularly not a woman, Apollo forced himself to shrug a careless shoulder. ‘I suspect that you’re likely to find living with me rather shocking. I like sex and I like a lot of it. Considering our current situation it’s very positive that we light a fire together.’
Pixie shifted almost imperceptibly away from him to widen the gap between them. I like sex and I like a lot of it. It was quite an intimidating announcement for an inexperienced woman to absorb. Pixie’s biggest secret, kept even from Holly, was that she had never actually wanted a man before. She had always been too wary around men to shake off that inhibition by the time she grew up. Usually the minute a man started touching her she wanted him to stop and feared how far he would try to go. But somehow that instinctive recoil, that fear, had been absent with Apollo and that worried her even while she told herself that it was just as well because there was no way on earth that she could somehow avoid consummating a marriage in which she had to try and conceive a child.
They arrived at a very fancy modern glass office building and, before they got out of the limo, Apollo turned to her to say, ‘To all intents and purposes this has to seem like we’re planning a normal marriage,’ he warned her. ‘You must not mention your brother’s debt or anything of that nature.’
‘OK,’ Pixie muttered uncertainly.
‘All you have to sign is a pre-nuptial agreement with a confidentiality clause included,’ he revealed. ‘You will have your own legal team to advise you.’
‘My…own?’ she whispered shakily, her eyes wide.
‘To advise you of your best interests. You must’ve had access to legal advice to make the agreement stand up in court,’ he explained. ‘I know a lot about the subject because every one of my father’s wives signed one of these agreements and half of them tried to wriggle out of it during the divorce negotiations.’
‘I won’t be wriggling anywhere,’ Pixie mumbled.
‘So, act like a girlfriend, not someone I hired!’ Apollo advised in a warning aside.
‘How would a girlfriend behave?’ she whispered.
‘I don’t know. I’ve never had one, only sexual partners,’ Apollo admitted, grasping her hand to urge her out of the limo.
‘Never?’ Pixie repeated incredulously.
‘Just think about how a real bride-to-be would behave for this and behave accordingly.’
And an hour later, seated at a large conference table where the two sets of lawyers argued, often employing terms she didn’t understand, Pixie took Apollo’s advice and acted accordingly and accidentally brought the table to a standstill of silence.
‘You mean…’ she finally grasped ‘… I get financially punished if I’m unfaithful but Apollo doesn’t? How is that fair? I won’t accept that.’
That was the instant when Apollo appreciated once again that Pixie could take advice too literally and that characteristically she was seizing on something none of his father’s wives had even picked up on. Not only had he underestimated her intelligence, he had also seemingly overlooked what appeared to be a very moral take on infidelity and his heart sank because he had never planned to be faithful during his marriage. He had planned to be very discreet but not faithful because only once in his life had he been faithful to a woman and it brought back appalling memories of betrayal and stupidity.
‘Fidelity isn’t a negotiable concept,’ Pixie declared with even greater clarity.
And every man at the table studied Pixie as though she had landed on it wearing wings and carrying a flaming sword of justice.
‘If Apollo is unfaithful he has to suffer for it,’ Pixie completed with satisfaction, wondering why Apollo wasn’t looking impressed that she had finally spoken up and behaved as a real bride-to-be surely would have done.
Apollo compressed his firm sensual mouth and studied the table. In point of fact billionaires who married penniless women didn’t expect to suffer in any way when they finally got bored, least of all financially. Was this Pixie’s clever way of trying to increase her divorce settlement? It had to be the money she was thinking about, the profit, he reasoned and then he glanced up and Pixie nailed him with grey eyes like volcanic rock and he realised that the issue of actual fidelity was one he had completely forgotten to discuss. Breathing in deep, he suggested a break for coffee.
Shown into an empty office, he studied Pixie. ‘I wasn’t planning to be faithful,’ he admitted bluntly.
‘Then this arrangement dies now. I’m not willing to have sex with a man at the same time as he is having sex with other women!’ Pixie declared in a wrathful undertone of ringing disgust.
‘You’re forgetting that this is a business arrangement.’
‘Business arrangements don’t normally include sex!’ Pixie shot back at him defensively.
A faint line of colour accentuated Apollo’s supermodel cheekbones. ‘We have an extraordinary arrangement.’
‘But you don’t get to sleep with other women and me at the same time!’ Pixie told him doggedly. ‘That’s immoral and I refuse to be part of it.’
It was what was called an impasse and Apollo had very rarely met with anything similar. Just when he was within an ace of making the first move towards his goal of regaining his birthright too! He gritted his teeth. ‘I’ll try to be faithful,’ he framed in a roughened undertone of frustration.
But Pixie was seriously disappointed in Apollo. She hated cheats and had even less time for married men who played away. And Apollo might not love her and she might not love him but it was not unreasonable for her to expect him to treat her with respect.
‘It’s not going to look much like a real marriage if you’re still acting like the biggest man whore in Europe!’ Pixie flashed back at him, watching temper flare like burning flames in Apollo’s green eyes and watching him bite it back. And why had he bitten it back? Because she had only sta
ted the truth, she suspected.
And eventually they signed the pre-nuptial agreement with an addendum that stated that the bridegroom would ‘endeavour’ to remain faithful but relations were strained right round the table, both legal teams well aware that wedding fever was at a low ebb just at that moment. Apollo was merely relieved by the knowledge that he was flying out to Athens that evening. He was also reluctantly recalling that Vito had warned him that Pixie could be hot-headed and difficult and wondering if only his haste had persuaded him to overlook that distinct drawback. What else could it have been?
But how could she be so naïve and unreasonable as to demand fidelity from him? He knew what he was, hell, even she knew what he was! But he had promised to try and he would try because he stuck to his word, even if it choked him. And on some strange level he was conscious that her stance had made him respect her. She had standards and nothing he could offer would sway her from them.
CHAPTER FIVE
PIXIE TWIRLED IN front of the full-length mirror and smiled hesitantly because her glossy reflection was unfamiliar. Having enjoyed the attentions of a make-up artist and a grooming day at a salon recommended by Holly, Pixie had never before enjoyed such a level of sophisticated presentation.
‘I really did think you’d choose to wear white,’ Holly confided.
‘White would be wasted on Apollo,’ Pixie replied, wrinkling her nose and making Holly laugh. ‘If I ever get to have a real wedding, I’ll wear white.’
‘I still can’t believe you’re marrying him. I was really shocked when Vito told me.’
