by Lynne Graham
‘I’ve ordered some food for you. After you’ve eaten get some sleep,’ Alexei urged, settling her down on the bed and flipping off her shoes for her.
He settled down on the edge of the bed. A meal arrived on a tray and she discovered that she was hungrier than she had realised. ‘You don’t need to stay with me,’ she told him.
Keen dark golden eyes rested on her. ‘You’re still upset…’
‘I’m dreading what Lauren might have told the newspaper,’ Billie parried with a rueful grimace.
‘Sticks and stones,’ Alexei quipped lazily. ‘Don’t read it. Nothing that’s printed should have the slightest impact on us.’
At that assurance, Billie shot him a wry glance. ‘That wasn’t your attitude when you saw that photo of Damon and me on the beach.’
Alexei’s big powerful frame tensed. His strong jaw line clenched, his brilliant gaze veiling. ‘That was different.’
‘How?’
‘Damon Marios has always had the hots for you.’
‘That’s nonsense. For goodness’ sake, he married Ilona.’
‘Only because he blew his chances with you as a teenager. You were his first love and he was yours. For a lot of people that creates a bond that’s hard to shake off.’
‘I could never see him the same way after that day he pretended not to be with me on the ferry,’ Billie confided. ‘I was always the outsider on the island, but he made me feel like dirt when he ignored me that day.’
Alexei curved an arm round her slight shoulders. ‘He was an idiot. I was pleasantly surprised when you didn’t forgive him for it.’
‘I didn’t like what you said about him that day but it was true and that’s why you should know that I would never get involved again with Damon.’
Alexei compressed his wide sensual mouth. ‘I just don’t like him around you. You’re my wife now. He should respect that. He shouldn’t be so familiar with you. An honourable man respects those boundaries. You’re a woman, you don’t understand.’
Setting aside the tray because she was full, Billie released a drowsy laugh of disagreement. ‘Oh, I understand you perfectly. You’d like a tag on my ankle engraved with your name.’
‘This is serious. It’s got nothing to do with possessiveness or jealousy,’ Alexei hastened to declare in a tone of authority. ‘It’s simply a question of what’s right.’
‘I know. I can be serious too. I don’t like this bed because Calisto picked the bedding and once slept here with you,’ Billie confided chattily. ‘But I’m not expecting you to drag the bed out and burn it for my benefit. It’s simply a question of what’s reasonable.’
Perplexed by that unexpected turning of the tables and that particular comparison, Alexei turned his stunning dark golden eyes on her. ‘I’ll have all the beds changed.’
‘But that would be unreasonable and extravagant,’ Billie pointed out gently to underline her point. ‘Some things we just have to live with.’
Alexei sprang off the bed and looked down at her with brooding dark-as-night eyes. ‘I’m not living with you holding hands with Damon Marios. The next time I find him with a hand anywhere near you I’ll kill him!’ he intoned in a raw undertone. ‘And I don’t care if that’s unreasonable.’
With a sleepy sigh as the door snapped shut on Alexei’s hot-headed exit, Billie rested her head back on the pillows and contemplated the reality that she was married to a guy who was infinitely more possessive of her and her affections than she had ever properly appreciated. Her friendship with Damon was perfectly innocent but, clearly, it really did get under Alexei’s skin. Lying there thinking about it, she realised that even when she had worked for him Alexei had always acted as though he had a prior claim to her and a right to interfere in her private life. She should never have allowed him to behave that way, but until that moment she had never quite seen the extent of his possessiveness.
Now it brought a pained smile to her lips to recall the number of women she had watched swan through his life to pass through his various beds round the world. She had writhed with jealousy and envy and had cried herself asleep more than once over Alexei’s volatile love life, but nobody had caused her to shed more tears than Calisto Bethune, who she had once believed had his heart as well as his body. But at that point Billie took a pause for more considered reflection. She was beginning to recognise that, now that she was Alexei’s wife, it was time for her to exercise more sense and control her jealousy and her suspicions.
To be fair, Alexei had followed her to London purely to be there for her when she emerged in distress from her meeting with her recalcitrant mother. She was astonished that he had made such an effort on her behalf, and that he had understood her strained relationship with Lauren well enough to grasp that she would be upset and in need of support. But there had been other occasions in her long acquaintance with Alexei when he had shown himself to be equally thoughtful, she reminded herself ruefully. When had she chosen to forget that? That Alexei, without any prompting from her, had shown up to offer her that support and sympathy meant a great deal to Billie, particularly when sixth sense warned her that he had no time for Lauren at all and even less patience with her shenanigans.
Billie dozed off for several hours and wakened after midnight to find that she was still wearing her clothes. Suppressing a sigh, she got up, stripped off and dragged a nightdress out of her case before taking a shower to freshen up. Through the communicating door with the adjoining bedroom, she could hear distant strains of the television news playing and realised that that must be where Alexei was sleeping. Of course, after she had refused him that night at Hazlehurst, she mused wryly, he was unlikely to share the same room with her. After drying off her damp hair, she got back into bed and doused the lights. For half an hour she tossed and turned, thinking about Alexei, wishing he were with her, missing him, feeling deprived. And then suddenly she sat up, asked herself if she was a woman or a mouse, and got out of bed again.
She didn’t knock on the communicating door and when she opened it the room was in darkness. ‘It’s only me,’ she announced, feeling horrendously self-conscious.
‘I didn’t think it was a burglar,’ Alexei murmured huskily.
In the faint light seeping round the edges of the blinds, she picked out the dim shape of the bed and headed for it like a homing pigeon. Pushing back the duvet, she slid beneath it and wriggled across the cool expanse of the mattress until she found the hot, hard heat of him.
‘You do realise that there will be consequences if you stay, yineka mou?’ Alexei prompted thickly, one lean hand splaying across the feminine swell of her hip to press her into suggestive contact with the insistent swell of his growing erection.
Dry-mouthed and breathless, Billie snuggled into him, her heart pounding like an overwound clock. ‘I was hoping so,’ she admitted with a wanton little squirm of her hips in encouragement. ‘I mean, I am returning to France with you tomorrow.’
Alexei rolled her under his lean powerful body and kissed her breathless. He tasted of wine and sex and the urgency pulsing through him lit her up like a blazing fire inside. ‘So that we can enjoy the honeymoon we never had,’ he breathed in a voice full of erotic promise.
‘That’s not the only r-reason I’m coming to France,’ she stammered as he carried her fingers down to his hard male heat and the need in her leapt like a flame fanned into a blaze by the wind. She quivered, plunged her other hand impatiently into his luxuriant black hair and dragged his mouth back down onto hers. Her excitement licking out of her control, she trembled with hungry longing and it was long past dawn before she finally slept again.
CHAPTER TEN
OVER four weeks later, Billie awakened in the glorious illuminating light that Provence was famous for and didn’t waste any time in checking the other side of the big bed, because she knew she would be alone. A lie-in for Alexei was staying in bed past dawn and it was now after ten. Stifling a drowsy yawn, she stretched with voluptuous pleasure, a smug smile tiltin
g her mouth when the movement made her aware of all the little aches and pains of a woman enjoying an active and adventurous love life.
In that department, Alexei was incomparable, she reflected with helpless satisfaction. It also seemed to her as though every time they made love she felt closer to him. Did he still think of their intimacy as just sex? She didn’t know, hadn’t asked, and had no plans to enquire or pick holes in the happiness she had found with him. What did the words matter anyway? What really mattered was how Alexei behaved and the connection between them was very strong. With Nicky thrown into the mix and fully shared, that bond had definitely deepened.
It had been a relief that, as yet, no tell-all revelations had appeared in print following Lauren’s interviews with a journalist. But the threat of what her mother might have said still hung over Billie’s head and bothered her in uneasy moments. After all, intelligence warned her that no newspaper would have paid Lauren a lot of money for information that they had no intention of publishing. She hadn’t heard a word from the older woman, who was still in London living it up on the proceeds of her betrayal, according to Hilary.
As Billie laid out clothes after a quick shower she marvelled that she and Alexei had been staying at their rambling comfortable chateau for almost five weeks. Their days had slowly fallen into a pattern: mornings, Alexei usually worked and often she worked with him. Alexei had, on average, only left the South of France once a week for important meetings and was delegating all that he could.
Dressed in a blue sundress, Billie walked out onto the stone balcony to survey the timeless landscape of vineyards, lavender fields and distant cliffs. The views still enchanted her. Sometimes she and Alexei walked down the cobble-stoned street to have coffee and a croissant in the village square. Occasionally they dined at the quaint little restaurant built into the fortified walls that surrounded the village. And what she loved most about the area was that, aside of the attention Nicky attracted as he smiled out of his buggy, nobody took the slightest bit of notice of them. By common consent they had stayed away from the Côte D’Azur and the exclusive resorts where Alexei would be instantly recognisable and constantly approached.
An exquisite ruby-and-diamond ring in the design of a flower shone on Billie’s finger in the glorious sunlight. Alexei had given it to her on the memorable night they went clubbing in a funky old warehouse in Marseille and he’d taught her to dance the salsa.
‘What’s that for?’ she had asked when he gave her the ring.
And Alexei had laughed. ‘You’re not supposed to say that. It makes a gift sound like some sort of payment and although I have given many gifts in that line in the past you don’t come into that category. Of course I could tell you it’s because you’re great in bed, or because you’re beautiful, or because you’re the only lover I’ve ever had with hair the colour of a sunset.’ At that point in his teasing little speech, Alexei had suddenly frowned and his gaze had taken on a curious abstracted quality. ‘I saw the true attraction of your hair the first time I saw it in sunlight…and I told you,’ he had completed with sudden harsh emphasis as he frowned. ‘I told you that on the night after the funeral.’
‘You’ve finally remembered something!’ Billie had exclaimed with pleasure. ‘Do you remember how you felt that night? What you were thinking about?’
Alexei had tensed. ‘Oh, yes,’ he had confirmed, but he had not gone on to share any revelations on that score, although it had seemed to her that he was rather distant for the rest of that day and, indeed, the days that followed. Her elation that he had at last recalled some facet of that evening had gradually dwindled when he’d failed to mention it again.
Sometimes they played at being tourists, going further afield to sleepy hilltop villages where they wandered round market stalls piled high with fresh produce in dazzling colours and bought home-made bread, olives, honey and also armfuls of lavender that Billie loved to use to scent the chateau. To Alexei’s amusement, Marie, their housekeeper, never failed to point out that produce just as good, indeed most probably superior, could be bought right on the doorstep.
Billie had learned a lot more than she had thought she needed to know about the running of an organic vineyard. Alexei took a knowledgeable interest in every step of the process and was currently teaching her to differentiate between an acceptable wine and a superlative one. Only the previous year the Domaine Claudel label had won an award and Alexei was eager to build on that success. Billie was less interested in the wine than she was in Alexei’s enthusiasm in the face of a challenge.
Now she descended the stairs and frowned when she heard Nicky howling. She followed the source of his cries to the library where Alexei had abandoned his attempt to work to pull his son out of the wastepaper basket he had knocked over.
Having learned to crawl early, Nicky had rapidly become a little menace. Suddenly he couldn’t be depended on to stay where he was put any more and if there was anything dangerous within reach he seemed to home in on it. He had trailed out the contents of drawers and cupboards, shredded books and burrowed into pot plants. He was a baby on a demolition mission, set on causing the maximum possible destruction to his surroundings.
‘No, you can’t do that,’ Alexei was telling his son as he lifted him, and as the little boy snatched a pen off the desk added. ‘No, you can’t have that either.’
From the doorway, Billie watched as Nicky breathed in deep and bawled in bad temper, his lower lip jutting with baby-rage at the restrictions being put on his freedom.
‘And that’s not going to get you anywhere either,’ Alexei asserted, dropping down to lift one of the toys on the floor and hand it to his enraged son.
Nicky flung the toy away and howled even louder.
Alexei sat down and let his son claw his way upright by holding onto his jacket. Nicky jumped and his temper cleared like magic, for there was nothing he liked more at present than the ability to stand upright and bounce with energetic thoroughness.
Arms wrapping round Nicky to support him in a hug, Alexei cast languorous dark golden eyes across the room to Billie’s slender blue-clad figure and he smiled his heartbreakingly beautiful smile. ‘I thought you were never going to surface today.’
‘And whose fault is it that I’m so tired?’ Billie fired back readily before she could think better of that comment.
Alexei raised a sleek ebony brow in surprise at that question. ‘I distinctly remember being woken up in the early hours by a very demanding woman.’
Billie turned hot pink at the memory. Sometimes she just stretched out and found him in the bed and desire would roar through her like an express train. She just couldn’t quite believe that Alexei was now hers to touch and love. Proximity to him had made her greedy and sexier than she had ever thought she could be. The knowledge that he always seemed to want her had lifted her confidence. She wore lingerie that would have made her blush just months earlier; occasionally, she wore very little at all.
Nicky rested his little dark head down on Alexei’s shoulder and sagged, long lashes sweeping on his cheekbones.
‘I’ll put him down for a nap,’ Billie said.
Alexei slid lithely upright and led the way up the staircase. Billie changed her son and made him comfortable in his cot in the room next to their own. Kasma was out for the day and, although a local girl took over in her absence to ensure that the young Greek woman didn’t have to work too many hours on the trot, Alexei and Billie regularly took charge of their son and saw to his needs without help.
Alexei stared down into the cot where Nicky was half-heartedly trying to reach for his little pink toes and then he glanced across at Billie. ‘I’d like another child.’
Astonished by that abrupt confession and unprepared for it, Billie frowned.
‘I wasn’t part of it when you were carrying Nikolos. I missed out on everything,’ Alexei pointed out levelly.
‘You know why I didn’t tell you,’ Billie reminded him defensively.
‘I know yo
u decided that my girlfriend was more important to me than my unborn child,’ Alexei countered. ‘But that was your mistake. I would have put my child’s needs first, just as my father once did. It’s a shame that you didn’t give me the chance to prove that to you firsthand.’
A frisson of fierce annoyance washed away all the warm feelings that Billie had experienced watching Alexei handle their son with such patience, common sense and warmth. But his skill as a parent aside, wasn’t she entitled to have some pride? To want a man who was not simply with her because she had fallen accidentally pregnant? With hindsight, Billie now recognised that it was the fear of Alexei feeling responsible for her because she was pregnant rather than freely choosing to be with her that had made her stay silent after she had conceived. Calisto had been more competition than Billie had felt up to taking on and challenging. She needed to be wanted for herself, not for her son’s benefit. But just how deep did that attitude of Alexei’s go? Was he only set on showing her what a wonderful guy he could be in retrospect? Or was their honeymoon ninety per cent fake as he made a very clever and rational attempt to give their marriage sound and lasting foundations? That suspicion sent a shiver down her sensitive spine.
‘I think one child is enough for us right now,’ she responded quietly.
Stunning golden eyes as bright as sunlight raked over her tense, uneasy expression. ‘You still don’t trust me. Do you think I’m so selfish that I would suggest having another child without the intention of our marriage lasting?’
‘It’s not a matter of trust,’ Billie reasoned hurriedly. ‘I just need more time with you to believe that.’
‘Nicky has roused emotions in me that I never realised I could feel,’ Alexei volunteered, startling her with that admission. ‘You’re surprised…I’m surprised. But I was bored with my life as it was. I’m much more ready to be a family man than I ever appreciated, yineka mou.’
