by Lynne Graham
Tansy mock-punched his shoulder. ‘You’re full of it! Do some women actually believe that nonsense?’
‘Unluckily for me, not my wife.’
Tansy stretched up on tiptoes and pressed her lips briefly, helplessly, against his. ‘Give it up now,’ she told him, wide green eyes locked to his compellingly beautiful face. ‘You couldn’t fake dejected, no matter how hard you tried!’
Jude pressed her back against the pillar and covered her parted lips hungrily, deeply with his and she trembled in response, every sense engaged in that intensely erotic connection. She could feel the fast beat of his heart, his arousal, the raw sexual tension in his lean, powerful frame and as always it thrilled her and only an awareness of their surroundings made her push jerkily against his shoulders to separate their bodies again.
Jude stared down at her. ‘This is the first time you’ve been yourself with me today,’ he told her, filling her with dismay with that unexpected insight.
‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ she protested weakly. ‘You’re imagining things.’
‘I’m neither stupid nor blind, moli mou.’
Tansy set her teeth together. How on earth could Jude read her so well? How did he know that she was desperately trying to pull back from him to protect herself? Having realised that she was in love with him, Tansy had backed off. She would do the pregnancy test tomorrow, get that out of the way. If she was pregnant, it would take Jude’s keen focus off her, wouldn’t it? He would be delighted, and he would relax then and might well assume that any change in her was due to hormones.
All she had left now was her pride, she reasoned ruefully. The last thing she needed was to be humiliated by Jude starting to handle her with kid gloves in the same careful way that she saw him trying to handle Althea. Women who made the mistake of getting too keen on Jude might annoy and exasperate him but they also seemed to awaken his compassion. Perhaps that was a result of his recollection of his father’s cruel treatment of his mother. But the very last thing Tansy wanted to be when they divorced, and remained in contact for him to see Posy and the child she hoped she was carrying, was an object of pity.
The giant tiered birthday cake was cut on the terrace beyond the ballroom where a firework display was staged simultaneously. After supper had been served, they were on the dance floor where Tansy was apologising because all she knew how to do during a slow dance was shuffle while Jude, of course, was as skilled on the floor as a formally trained dancer. In the midst of that, Isidore stood up and the music stopped abruptly as the older man called for attention.
Jude’s hand, splayed to her spine, flexed and froze as Isidore addressed his guests with a beaming smile and called for Jude to join him at his table. As they moved forward, Isidore continued speaking in Greek and there was a loud round of clapping and many shouts of approval. Unaware of what was happening, Tansy stuck by Jude’s side as he was slapped on the back and his hand was shaken by the many people approaching him. All she registered was that Jude appeared to be stunned but struggling to conceal that reality.
‘Sorry, what’s happening?’ she whispered apologetically to Isidore.
‘I’ve announced my retirement. Jude will now be taking over control of the Alexandris empire. It’s time for me to step down,’ his grandfather told her with satisfaction.
That announcement had made Jude even more the centre of attention. Tansy listened to him talk in Greek with apparent calm, but she remained conscious of the dazed light in his dark eyes that suggested that his grandfather’s retirement had come as a complete surprise to him. She wanted to ask him why that was so, but Jude had been plunged into talking business with various guests and it was some time before they were finally free to head upstairs to bed and talk. It was two in the morning and Tansy was smothering a yawn, wondering if her bone deep exhaustion could be another sign of pregnancy, because usually she could take one late night without it being a problem.
‘You’re very tired,’ Jude noted.
‘Yes. Are you going to tell me why Isidore’s announcement shocked you so much?’
‘I had no idea that that was his plan. In fact, I thought he wouldn’t even consider it until I was married with a child,’ Jude admitted tautly.
Tansy stopped in the doorway of their bedroom and stared back at him. ‘That’s why you needed a wife and wanted a child,’ she guessed.
‘That possibility only added an inducement, but it’s not why I needed a wife or chose to marry. Ever have the feeling that you’ve been played?’ Jude breathed in a raw undertone as he doffed his tuxedo and poured himself a whiskey from the bar in the sitting room, kicking off his shoes, unbuttoning his shirt, the seething tension in his big, powerful frame blatant ‘That’s how I feel right now. Isidore played me—’
Tansy gave him a bemused look. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘My mother, Clio, lives in an Alexandris property in Italy. She’s lived there ever since the divorce. She got virtually no money when she left my father and Isidore allowed her to move into the Villa Bardani because initially she still had custody of me. He did offer to buy her a house in Greece, but she refused to come back here. A couple of centuries ago the gardens at the villa were a showpiece but over the years they were allowed to fall into ruin. After she lost custody of me, Clio became obsessed with restoring the villa’s gardens. She had nothing else in her life to focus on.’
‘Why did she lose custody of you?’
‘She had a nervous breakdown and slashed her wrists when she was alone in the house with me,’ Jude offered flatly. ‘For that reason, she was deemed mentally unfit by the courts to look after a young child.’
Shock engulfed Tansy, for she had never dreamt that something so distressing lay behind Clio’s loss of custody of Jude. His parents had had a dreadful marriage and it made Tansy wonder how much that truth had influenced Jude in his desire for a more practical union, shorn of emotion. After all, powerful emotions had proved destructive in his parents’ marriage and must have damaged Jude’s faith in them as well. How could he ever approve of love or even want it when some kind of love had originally brought his parents together? And Althea had claimed to love Jude as well, even after betraying his trust.
‘Oh, my word…that’s a horrible story,’ she whispered in a pained tone of sympathy. ‘Divorce, then a breakdown, followed by the loss of her son into the bargain. Your mother suffered.’
‘Exactly,’ Jude incised, his lean, strong face grim and taut. ‘This family destroyed Clio. I have a difficult relationship with her as well. She can’t seem to separate me from my father inside her head. But I still care about her and believe that she deserves happiness. The gardens she restored over the past twenty years are now world-renowned and she’s out there labouring in them from dawn to dusk with the gardeners. Those gardens mean everything to her…and Isidore threatened to send her an eviction notice.’
Tansy blinked rapidly. ‘He…what?’
‘She has never had a legal right to live there or even be on the property because it belongs to my family. My grandfather said he would throw her out and refuse her access to the gardens which belong to the villa unless I was married by my thirtieth birthday. I believed he would do it too, because he loathes her,’ Jude admitted curtly.
‘And that’s why you needed a wife,’ Tansy whispered, sinking down into the nearest seat before her wobbly legs could betray how much shock she was in. She had simply assumed that he had some business or inheritance reason for requiring a wife and it had not seemed worth her while to dig any deeper. She had never dreamt that his motive might be so personal or so family-oriented. And that he had gone to such extremes to protect a woman whom he rarely even saw impressed her even more.
‘Isidore was playing me,’ Jude bit out harshly. ‘He wanted to see me married and settled before he retired, but I suspect that he never had any serious intention of evicting Clio from her home.’
>
‘Perhaps not.’
‘Because it would have alienated me for ever,’ Jude delivered with a bitter edge to his intonation. ‘I assumed the worst of him, and he encouraged me to do so.’
Isidore had fooled him, Jude acknowledged, but, even worse, Isidore had known that his grandson would believe the very worst of him and that fact bothered Jude. Had he shown his distrust to his grandfather so clearly? Evidently he had and Jude’s lack of faith would only have increased Isidore’s resentment of his daughter-in-law. A tangled mixture of shame and guilt and resentment infiltrated Jude. Somewhere during the years of his childhood, he had discarded the ability to stand back and clearly read those closest to him. He had believed blindly in everything Clio told him, had judged his grandfather to be a cruel, hard man. Yet that same cruel, hard man had proved to be a loving grandparent, indeed a much more caring and supportive parental figure than Jude’s distinctly distant father.
‘Well, you may be married but I wouldn’t say you’re settled with a divorce already organised as a happy ending,’ Tansy pointed out in consolation.
‘I’m so comforted,’ Jude bit out with a razor-edged smile, jolted more than he liked by that unwelcome reminder.
‘I’m off to bed,’ Tansy said, surrendering to the tense atmosphere, reminding herself that the perplexing rights and wrongs of Jude’s family were not really any of her business because she wasn’t a true wife. Not that Isidore appeared to appreciate that fact, she conceded ruefully. She saw that just as Jude had not realised his grandfather was wielding an empty threat as a weapon, Isidore had not realised that Jude might choose to make a fake marriage rather than a real one. Two tricky, too clever, too stubborn personalities from the same family, she acknowledged, well, fancy that. Jude and his grandfather were chips off the very same block.
Freshened up and sheathed in a silk nightie, she climbed into bed. Jude paced the sitting room, initially outraged that Isidore had duped him and unable to get past that fact. He had raced off like a knight in shining armour to come to his mother’s rescue, but it hadn’t been necessary. That was a galling footnote to the sacrifices he had made and yet hadn’t Isidore created a better outcome for all of them? Clio was safe, Jude was, to all intents and purposes, happily married and newly conscious that he had a grandfather who appeared to love him.
Not a grandfather who viewed him solely as a necessary heir, but a man who had seen and possibly understood Jude’s reluctance to risk his emotions in any close relationship. After all, emotions were messy and made you vulnerable, and Jude had perfectly grasped that fact after his mother, distraught over Dion’s many infidelities, had tried to take her own life. Jude had been prepared to marry only if emotion could be removed from the equation.
And his marriage of convenience with Tansy had scarcely proved a punishment, he reflected with a sudden grin at his own melodramatic frame of mind. Tansy was wonderfully straightforward, and hadn’t he ultimately received everything that he had once craved? His freedom in business from Isidore’s interference? The right to steer the Alexandris empire in a more innovative direction? It had taken the wife he had never thought to have to persuade him that his grandfather was not the callous monster Clio had once depicted. Jude had finally seen his grandfather’s love for him as clear as day and it had shaken him almost as much as Isidore’s retirement plans.
Naturally, his mother had had a confrontational relationship with his grandfather, who had remained loyal to his only son. There was more than one side to his parents’ broken marriage and the divisions in his family were not as black and white as Jude had once believed. In a much better mood at having faced that truth, Jude went for a shower.
Gentle fingertips smoothed down Tansy’s thigh, trailing against silk, piercing through her drowsiness. ‘Jude,’ she muttered.
‘I’m sorry I was angry. It was nothing to do with you,’ Jude husked, tugging her back against him.
‘It’s OK…’ she mumbled, wriggling her bottom back into the heat of his arousal, registering the sizzle of awareness travelling through her whole body.
He kissed the nape of her neck, dallied there, found the slope of her shoulder and let his teeth graze the tender skin and a tiny moan was wrenched from her parted lips, eyes opening in the moonlight as she stretched back into the heat of him. His hands found the achingly sensitive peaks of her breasts and she flipped over and arched into him like a shameless hussy, finding his carnal mouth for herself. And all the inner tensions and insecurities she had been crushing down blew her wide open with hunger for him.
In one powerful stroke he drove into her and the excitement took over, pushing her into an electrifying climax that almost wiped her out into unconsciousness.
‘That was absolutely incredible,’ Jude husked, and that was the last thing she remembered until she shifted awake soon after dawn, dug out one of the pregnancy tests she had bought and crept off to the bathroom to use it.
Tansy stared in near disbelief at the positive result on the wand. She had had her suspicions, but she had not really believed until that moment that she could be pregnant. Her brain hadn’t quite been prepared yet for that development and for a long time she sat on the edge of a glitzy bathtub, set in marble, contemplating the test. Her hand splayed across her stomach as she pictured a tiny version of her and Jude and her heart raced with happiness and a hundred expectations of the future.
Jude strolled into the bathroom naked as she emerged. ‘You’re up early—’
Tansy spun round to face him. ‘I’ve got news!’ she heard herself exclaim, excitement and a sense of achievement bubbling through her.
Jude switched on the shower and sent her a level glance. ‘Yes?’ he pressed with subdued amusement, wondering what the heck she was so pleased about.
‘I’m pregnant!’ she told him.
And halfway into the shower, Jude froze, and he unmistakably paled as though she had given him bad news. ‘Right… OK,’ he breathed, vanishing into the shower, turning to face the wall, the tension in the muscles of his smooth golden back unhidden.
Tansy’s excitement drained away like sand through an egg timer. She blinked, utterly at a loss as to why her announcement had proved to be a damp squib instead of a source of satisfaction and pleasure.
Jude wanted to punch the wall. The terms of the prenup they had both signed were etched in letters of fire inside his head. He had had every clause written according to how he wanted the marriage to play out. He had wanted his freedom back as soon as possible, had wanted a separation the minute he estimated it could reasonably be demanded. Back then everything had seemed so simple to him because he had assumed he would want his life back as it had been. But now, all of a sudden and without the smallest warning, he was discovering that what he had thought he had wanted wasn’t actually what he wanted at all…in fact it was the very last thing he wanted.
CHAPTER TEN
WHAT WERE THE odds of a pregnancy occurring in so short a time? Jude asked himself, thinking of his grandfather, who had fathered only one child even though he had had three wives, and his own father, who had cast his sperm even more liberally and had still only managed to produce one child. And he got a conception in the space of a couple of months. Isidore would be jubilant, any kid, boy or girl, figuring as a virtual miracle in his eyes. In other circumstances, Jude might have been jubilant as well, especially if he could picture a baby like Posy, except with Tansy’s hair and maybe Tansy’s smile. Or a little boy. It wasn’t as though he had any preference…
But for now he had to make the best of things, particularly because he had got what he had asked for, what he had bargained so hard to have. Where had his wits been? Why had he not foreseen what might happen? What might go wrong?
Later that morning, Tansy toyed with the idea of saying several tart things to Jude once they were ensconced in the private jet and flying to Italy. But in the end she said nothing about the baby she
was carrying, noting instead the frequency with which Jude’s gaze rested on her stomach while realising that, in spite of his silence, he was hugely conscious of her pregnancy. And since that was the case, why did he have so little to say about it? In fact, it seemed as though her little announcement had utterly silenced him. Or was it that Jude was not looking forward to introducing her to his mother, who was, by all accounts, a challenging personality?
Tansy could only suppose that Jude was brooding because he now appreciated that everything he had done had been for nothing. He had gained a wife, a child in Posy and conceived another, radically altering his lifestyle for no good reason. In the end, after all, Isidore had handed his grandson everything he wanted on a golden plate. Yet, angry and hurt as Tansy was with Jude, she could not judge him harshly for striving to protect his mother. Conceding how hard she had worked to protect her little sister from harm, she had no right to judge anyone.
‘How did your mother meet your father?’ Tansy asked Jude abruptly.
‘She was the gardener at a house he visited in Florence. He said it was love at first sight.’
‘But from what you’ve said it was a love at first sight that only lasted about five minutes,’ Tansy qualified ruefully.
‘According to him, he told her before he married her that even though he loved her he could never be faithful.’
‘When did he tell you that?’
‘Shortly before he died when I was eighteen. I don’t think Clio ever got over him. She still keeps a portrait of him in her cottage, which is a little strange if you consider the level of animosity there was between them.’
Tansy frowned. ‘She lives in a cottage? I thought she lived in some big villa.’
‘She did up until she lost custody of me. After that she moved into a house on the Bardani estate because she said she didn’t want to owe the Alexandris family anything.’
