The Volakis Vow: Bride For Real Part 5

The rarity of such an announcement from Sander, who never talked about anything relations.h.i.+p-orientated if he could avoid it, sent Tally's sleepy eyes flying back open. She pushed up on an elbow and frowned at him. 'Talk?'

Sander nodded silently as though he had already used up his entire allotted vocabulary for the day. His lean strong face was taut and grim, his handsome mouth compressed.

A chill ran through Tally. 'Something's wrong,' she guessed.

'I probably shouldn't have taken you to bed,' Sander conceded, a line of dark colour accentuating the stunning slant of his cheekbones. 'But I couldn't resist the temptation.'

Tally, engaged in peeling off the stockings, which, now they'd worked their magic, she was keen to dispense with, shot him a troubled glance. 'Is this serious?'

His gaze avoided hers and she could see that he was paler than usual below his golden skin tone. 'Very. I'll wait for you downstairs.'

Tally had the fastest shower on record while she ran through all the possible bad things that could have happened to bring that austere aspect to her husband's handsome dark face. Sander was usually bombproof, untouched by the colossal insecurities that afflicted other less confident personalities, so she discarded the idea that he might be exaggerating the situation. Could it be a business disaster? Business was the most important element in Sander's world and if anything went wrong he would regard it as a personal failing, which he would feel duty bound to confess. A major row with his father? A necessary parting of the ways?

If he had had to leave Volakis s.h.i.+pping, he would undoubtedly have to rethink his financial outgoings, she reflected ruefully-her pensive gaze scanning the undeniable luxury of her surroundings. Sander had considerable pride, and retrenchment would strike him as humiliation. But Tally, raised by a mother whose finances were meagre, invariably unreliable and built on false hopes, was unconcerned by the prospect of a less indulgent lifestyle. But then Tally had considered herself to be comfortably off when she could simply pay her bills without having to follow a strict budget.

In the drawing room, Sander realised that he wanted another drink and he resisted the urge. Right now that was not the support he needed. He was painfully aware that the amount of alcohol he had consumed during his flight home had already dangerously clouded his judgement. How else could he explain the scene he had instigated in the bedroom? He should have restrained himself. His lack of control and foresight shocked him. He was convinced that he had made an already bad situation worse.

As relaxed as her husband was tense, Tally strolled in. She still looked deliciously tousled and flushed from their lovemaking and the figure-hugging purple dress looked stupendously s.e.xy on her shapely curves. Her green eyes were sparkling. Regret cut through Sander like winter ice, burning and cutting wherever it touched because he knew that the warmth he had rekindled in Morocco would be killed by what he had to tell her.

'I have a confession to make,' Sander breathed starkly, ready to plunge straight in at the deep end.

Tally's happy conviction that nothing she really needed to worry about was amiss took a beating at that moment with Sander poised in front of her as though he were facing a firing squad. Raw tension vibrated from every lean-muscled inch of his tall powerful physique. 'I didn't think you did confessions,' she muttered uncertainly, 'and I'm not sure they're always a good idea.'

'Soon after we broke up, I slept with Oleia Telis,' Sander admitted stonily.

Tally received that admission as though she had been punched when she least expected it. Strive though she did to seem strong and untouched, she flinched and the colour drained from her cheeks. Cosima's story had made her wonder on the basis that there was rarely smoke without fire. But she would have very much preferred to have been left wondering. It would have been more bearable, she reflected dully, to be left ignorant of what might have taken place between Sander and the young woman he had loved and given up as a teenager.

Tally could not help picturing the tiny, fairy-like brunette in her mind's eye. Unfortunately, Oleia Telis possessed that lethal brand of intense femininity and flawless beauty that would always turn male heads. At the very thought of Sander in bed with Oleia nausea rippled through Tally's tummy. Her imagination did not want to go there and her thoughts refused. Even so, a mindlessly ferocious wave of bitter hurt was speedily engulfing her. Of all the women Sander could have turned to, why had he had to choose Oleia? The very woman Tally felt she could least overlook. She knew enough about Sander's perverse relations.h.i.+p with Oleia to be convinced that anything he had shared with Oleia would not have been either meaningless or forgettable.

'I ran into her at a party here in London. We have ... had... so many mutual friends,' Sander advanced with reluctant precision. 'It was a one-night stand, Tally. A mistake on my part-'

'A ... mistake,' Tally echoed with an unintentionally jagged laugh of disagreement at that choice of word.

'One I very much regret,' Sander continued curtly. 'She was the last woman I should have got involved with.'

Green eyes, sharp as knives, collided with his. 'So, why did you?'

Sander knew exactly what had driven him into Oleia's arms. It was actually very simple. But he did not think at that moment there was any point in sharing his reasoning, which had, admittedly, been of the very basic masculine variety. He felt he had said enough about that night and that to say more with regard to the detail lent the issue too much importance.

'When you walked out on me in France, the whole frame of my life was based on our marriage, on my being a married man, a husband. Without that frame I felt ... strange.' The word was voiced with a grimace of discomfiture. 'I needed company and distraction and I was drinking a lot ... I was on a bender the weekend I ran into Oleia,' he confided in a driven undertone, the words ricocheting from him like a volley of bullets. 'I hardly remember anything about that night.'

'That's convenient,' Tally remarked flatly, struggling not to think of him blundering around drunk and vulnerable within reach of Oleia's cunning, calculating little claws. It made her feel unduly and distressingly responsible; as if she had handed her husband over to the other woman, who'd long wanted him back on a plate.

Sander sent her a level glance. 'You may see it as convenient but it also happens to be the truth.'

'Before we got married you told me that you'd never get involved with Oleia again, that you couldn't forgive her for sleeping with someone else when you were dating as teenagers,' Tally reminded him curtly. 'So, naturally, I'm surprised that you should've ended up with her again.'

'It was wrong from every angle but I couldn't see that until the next day when I was sober enough to realise what I had done. Oleia was aware that our marriage had broken up and was ... understandably, I suppose ... hoping for more than I was willing to offer.'

'Nice to be so much in demand,' Tally commented brittly, her chest tight with pain, since he was reminding her why she had most feared Oleia Telis as a rival. It was true that Oleia had betrayed Sander by sleeping with someone else. But, surprising though it might seem in the circ.u.mstances, it also did look as though Oleia had actually loved Sander. After all, the brunette had regretted her behaviour to the extent that even years after the event she had still been set on getting Sander back.

'No, a humbling experience,' Sander traded flatly, his darkly handsome features shuttered. 'Whatever I was going through at the time I should have left her out of it.'

Evidently, he had slept with Oleia and walked away again, feeling guilty that he did not have more to give his former girlfriend. So, it could only have been s.e.x or the combustible combination of alcohol and s.e.x that had powered their reunion. The very thought of such intimacy between them still hurt though. Teeny tiny Oleia had finally got her wish and got Sander back, however briefly the liaison had lasted. Was she to believe that the liaison had proved brief?

'And I'm afraid that the repercussions from my blunder didn't end there,' Sander gritted, stunning dark eyes fixed to Tally with an intensity she could feel, his lean strong face clenched hard with strain. 'Oleia apparently fell pregnant and gave birth to a child a few months ago.'

An unearthly silence greeted that announcement.

Gooseflesh bloomed on every inch of skin exposed by Tally's dress. Shock was slamming hard through her and reducing her to the limp equivalent of a crash dummy. She parted pale bloodless lips and studied him as if she was still struggling to make what he had said comprehensible. 'That's not possible.'

'I wish it hadn't been but it seems that it was. I took a DNA test yesterday in Paris,' Sander revealed, employing a level of detail that impressed her as far too realistic to feature in what she had hoped was a crazy misunderstanding.

'A baby?' Tally whispered sickly, sweat breaking out on her short upper lip because her body was weak and reeling and a horrible light headedness was attacking her. 'You've had a baby with Oleia Telis?'

His heavily lashed dark eyes flared vibrant gold as the sun. 'Do you think I wanted this to happen? Choice had nothing to do with it!'

CHAPTER SEVEN.

TALLY had read about people hyperventilating and had often wondered exactly what it entailed. Now she was finding out in person. Her head was thumping and because she couldn't seem to get air into her oxygen-starved lungs she took faster, deeper breaths. But it didn't help because the dizziness and the tightness in her chest merely increased. In fear that she might faint and betray weakness, she rushed out of the room, paying no heed at all when Sander called her name in her wake.

Her heart thundering, her breath bursting noisily from her lips, she lurched into the cloakroom and flung herself back against the door staring at her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes looked like two dark holes in her pale face. Shock was still trammelling through her in sickening waves. She wanted to scream. Indeed an anguished scream was trapped in her throat, a scream of raging disbelief, pain and frustration.

How could fate be so vicious to her? Another woman had given birth successfully to Sander's child, while her baby had died. She couldn't handle that. She would never be able to handle it. It hurt too much to even think about it and she had not been able to think about it in his presence. A baby. He had had a living, breathing child with Oleia Telis! A surge of nausea forced Tally over to the toilet bowl where she lost her last meal. She wished she could get rid of her tormented thoughts as easily.

As she freshened up at the vanity unit stinging tears were running down her face and a savage sense of disbelief cut through her like a knife twisting slowly inside her. She was remembering her little boy, perfect in form but dead at birth: let down by the pitiful failure of her body to support her pregnancy. Her placenta hadn't developed properly and because of that her baby had not received the oxygen and nutrients he'd needed to survive. There had been no symptoms, no medical warnings, apart from the absence of a heartbeat when she went into labour, soon followed by the still, silent arrival of the little baby she had nurtured in her body for nine months.

Tally had had no reason to suspect that anything might go wrong. But she had still blamed herself, despising her body for letting her down when she most needed it to do a proper job and protect her baby. The doctor had told her it wasn't her fault, that there was nothing she could have done differently. He had also promised her that if she ever got pregnant again her condition would be carefully monitored to ensure the safe arrival of her child.

But in the meantime, it seemed that some other woman had borne that child for Sander. The stillbirth of their son had broken Tally's heart into jagged pieces. When she had emerged from hospital bereft, everything else in her world had become meaningless. Her husband? Her marriage? Nothing had mattered to her in the slightest while her empty arms simply craved the child she had lost. Seeing other people's babies had hurt so badly that she had not known how she could bear it. The hole in her life had been child-shaped and only her son could have filled it. Haunted by images of her little boy, for a while she had continually heard his phantom cries in nightmares when she would dream that he was lost and she would run around a bewildering maze of rooms frantically trying to find him. Night after night she had dreamt of such horrors and her need to avoid sharing those tormenting images with Sander had first led to her moving out of their bedroom into a guest room. Her excuse had been that her restlessness was disturbing his rest. In truth she had struggled to cope with waking him up and withstanding questions she did not feel mentally strong enough to answer. At one stage she had honestly feared that she was losing her mind and she had wanted to hide the fact, ironically afraid that if he knew how crazy she was becoming he would leave her just as her baby had already left her.

And now, at a time when Tally had finally decided to try and conceive again, she'd learned that Sander had already had a child with Oleia Telis. The outrageous rumour that Cosima had warned her about had proved to be true-a nightmare truth. She could not live with it ...

Sander knocked frantically on the door. 'Tally ... let me in, please!'

'Go away!' Choking back the sobs that were building up, Tally slid down the back of the door onto the cold tiled floor. She braced clammy palms on the icy tiles in an attempt to regain control. She was shaking all over and her very bones seemed to hurt. It was grief and because it was an old friend she recognised it: while sorrowing for her stillborn son she had lived with misery as her closest companion for many months. Yet she had found her path out of that long dark tunnel, turned her back on despair and begun to live again. But ... now?

How could Sander, whom she had loved so much, have had a baby with Oleia? Her small hands closed into angry fists, bitterness drenching her emotions like an acid bath even as she succeeded in holding back the tears that threatened to fall. Had she not suffered enough? Had he not hurt her enough when their marriage had fallen apart? Oleia and Sander and their child. It was a concept that tore Tally into shreds, a snapshot of the dream family she had hoped that she and Sander would build and which she had cherished in her heart. Now that future possibility had been stolen from her.

'Tally ... are you okay?'

'Of course I'm not okay?' she blasted back through the barrier of the door. 'How could you think I would be?'

'Unlock the door,' Sander ordered.

And Tally did what he demanded only because she could not stand to let him believe that she was hiding from him or the bombsh.e.l.l he had delivered. Rigid control tightening her heart-shaped face, she walked out, every movement as stiff as a board because she was holding herself so taut that her very muscles ached as though she had taken a physical battering as well as a mental one.

Sander rested his hands lightly on her taut shoulders. 'Please don't shut me out-'

'Why would I? This is your problem, not mine,' she p.r.o.nounced coldly and even while she maintained her composure she was screaming underneath that superficial show. He had a baby with Oleia. He had become a father with Oleia. In a sudden motion she sidestepped him and shook off his hands to head for the stairs.

'I realise you're very upset.'

'Is that why you dragged me off to bed when you first came home?' Tally slung at him in bitter condemnation, enraged by the recollection of how he had swept her up in pa.s.sion barely thirty minutes before he made a revelation that would destroy her world. 'Did you think s.e.x would comfort me? Or that it would make what you had to tell me any more palatable?'

'I don't know what I was thinking of, yineka mou.' Sander spread his hands in a fluid movement of frustration. 'I don't think I thought at all. I just wanted you. I'm sorry.'

'No, you're not ... sorry, I mean,' she framed fiercely, stalking up the stairs because she could no longer bear to look at him. 'You could never be sorry enough to satisfy me!'

And it was true, she reasoned dully as she hurried into her bedroom. There was nothing he could do to make everything better. There was no magic route for him to follow to win her forgiveness. As she knew with her own father a child was a lifetime commitment and once the child existed it could not be ignored, regardless of how she felt or indeed Sander felt. He had a duty to his child. Also, whether she liked it or not, he had a duty to Oleia.

Tally pulled an overnight bag out of the dressing room. She didn't know where she was planning to go, only that she could not stay below the same roof as Sander feeling as she did.

Sander stopped dead in the doorway and stared fixedly at the bag before lifting shaken golden eyes to her set face. 'You can't leave-'

'I can do whatever I like. Just as you have done,' Tally traded and then her soft mouth curled.

'Do you honestly think I wanted this situation?' he asked in blunt appeal.

The faintest colour blossomed in her wan cheeks as she acknowledged the truth of that claim. No, he would not have sought such a development, particularly not when he wanted a second chance at their marriage. In fact, nothing could be more disastrous for the prospects of their reconciliation than his discovery that he had fathered a child by another woman, Tally conceded dully. Unfortunately, her intellectual acceptance of those facts did not make one iota of difference to how she felt.

She tilted her chin in challenge. 'It's still your fault that this has happened.'

Watching her stuff sundry garments into the overnight bag with bleak, dark eyes, Sander clenched his wide sensual mouth hard. 'I admit that. I'm not trying to make any excuses for myself.'

'I can't accept Oleia having your child,' Tally framed with a bitterness she could not hide, which already felt like a creeping darkness spreading inside her, freezing out warmer, more human emotions and the ability to think without feelings getting involved. She hated the way she felt-so desperately confused, unhappy and at odds with everything-almost as much as she hated him for hurting her.

All emotion on rigid lockdown, Sander was most concerned with the fact that Tally, who had only just come back to him, appeared to be walking out on him again. He didn't know what to say. His clever mind was as infuriatingly blank as an unwritten page, a rare state of affairs that mocked his superficial self-control. He wanted to act like a caveman and rip the bag off her and lock it away, lock her away just to keep her in his house. But that would be madness and fortunately his brain knew it, so that while his hands clenched into powerful fists of restraint he neither said nor did anything. His seething sense of frustration threatened to choke him.

In the humming deafening silence, Tally decided that she would simply return to her apartment for the night. She would have liked a friend to talk to, but she thought Cosima was too young and inexperienced and she didn't want to drag her mother into what was happening in her marriage. Unhappily, she did not feel close enough to Crystal to feel that she could safely share her sense of devastation with the older woman. And Binkie, whom Tally would once have confided in, was too far away in her current live-in employment in Devon to offer any support.

'Is it a boy or a girl?' That question about Oleia's child sprang from Tally's tongue before she was even properly aware that she could not resist the temptation to ask it.

'A little girl,' Sander supplied gruffly. 'I honestly didn't know about her until the day before yesterday, Tally. But now that I do know I have to take care of her.'

'Of course,' Tally agreed woodenly, knowing what she ought to say as a decent human being, even if it wasn't necessarily what she was feeling.

'Right now I'm trying to hire a top-flight nanny. The child's current French carer, Suzette, wants to leave but the agency nanny I'd arranged to meet us in London cried off at the last minute,' Sander informed her gravely. 'I'm still waiting on a replacement arriving.'

In the act of yanking a jacket off a hanger in the dressing room, Tally peered back into the bedroom in surprise. 'You had to engage a nanny? How did it become your job to organise child care?'

And Sander realised belatedly what he had not yet explained and he released his breath in a slow measured hiss, his even white teeth gritting. In as few words as he could manage he told her about Edouard Arpin's phone call and what his trip to Paris had entailed.

'But Oleia was so young; how can she be dead? What happened to her? Did she die in childbirth?' Tally queried incredulously, knocked off balance by the startling news that the young Greek woman was no longer alive.

'No, of course not. Lili's four months old. The French nanny said that Oleia was drinking heavily. When she came down with the flu it turned into pneumonia and she pa.s.sed away within twenty-four hours of being admitted to hospital,' he advanced grimly. 'That's all that I know.'

So, Sander had literally been left holding the baby, Tally registered in considerable confusion, unsure how she felt about what she had just learned. By the act of dying, Oleia had made Sander fully responsible for his own child. Presumably when she drew up her will Oleia either hadn't known that Sander was not the most enthusiastic guy around when it came to parenting or she hadn't cared. Or perhaps Oleia had had n.o.body else for the role, Tally conceded-dismayed by her own lack of charity. Were angry resentment and hurt turning her into a thoroughly nasty person?

'Where are you planning to go?' Sander demanded abruptly, his Greek accent razoring along the edge of his diction in a dangerous warning of his stormy mood.

'Back to my apartment-for tonight anyway. I just need to be on my own,' Tally said, grimacing at the defensive note she could hear in her own voice.

'I'll book into the hotel if you like and you can stay on here,' Sander proffered, dark eyes keenly welded to her troubled face.

'I'd prefer to stay in my apartment.' Tally lifted the bag to walk to the front door.

'I don't want you to leave....'

Reluctantly she turned to look at him again. His proud, dark head was held high, his cla.s.sic bone structure taut as he stared back at her, willing her to listen. 'I can't stay right now,' she told him doggedly.

'I'll give you a lift, then.'

In the end it seemed easier just to let him drop her off. But the atmosphere inside the car was suffocatingly tense. Lili, Tally was thinking painfully, a little girl. Oleia, whose powers of attraction Tally had feared and resented, had gone and left a legacy. A precious legacy, Binkie would have called the baby, while reiterating that every child was a gift from G.o.d and should be treated as such. How could she hate an innocent child, who had already lost her mother at such a young age? What had happened to her sense of compa.s.sion?

In the leather-scented comfort of the sleek Ferrari, Tally stole a glance at Sander, her attention lingering on his strong profile and the sweep of the ridiculously long lashes that shadowed his superb cheekbones. His gaze, deep-set and dark as pitch, swivelled and struck hers. As if she had been burned she dropped her eyes instead to the shapely male hands controlling the steering wheel. Only an hour ago those long brown fingers had stroked her body to ecstasy. Her face burned in mortification at the memory and somewhere in the region of her pelvis her body clenched tightly in on itself.

'You shouldn't be alone this evening,' Sander a.s.serted.

'It's better than being with you,' she mumbled sickly, affronted by the way her thoughts were leaping and darting in all directions without an ounce of self-control.

'I shouldn't have made love to you,' Sander admitted in a dark driven undertone. 'But it wasn't calculated. I just couldn't resist you.'

'Like you couldn't resist her?' And the instant that scornful comment escaped Tally she wished the words would disappear. She gritted her teeth together as if she was striving to physically restrain herself from asking anything else that might reveal the humiliating thoughts tormenting her.

Oleia was dead, but that didn't lessen the sense of betrayal Tally was experiencing. Once Oleia had basked in Sander's love. Love was a much deeper and more lasting emotion than Tally herself had ever stirred in her husband. That comparison could only wound. Sander had enjoyed Tally's company and had labelled her terrific in bed, but that had been the extent of her pulling power. Pain was steadily eating her alive and, just then, the prospect of Oleia's infant daughter was more than Tally could handle even thinking about. She thrust the knowledge of the child's existence deep, where it couldn't touch her. She wanted to forget. She wished he hadn't had to tell her: she wasn't a bad person, she was just human and weak, she told herself wretchedly.

Outside her apartment block, Sander sprang out and removed her bag from the car.

Across the low slung bonnet Tally clashed unwarily with his stunning dark golden gaze. It was one of those moments when Sander was unmistakeably CEO of Volakis s.h.i.+pping, an international tyc.o.o.n of considerable wealth and influence. He stood tall and straight, power etched in every masculine angle of his lean dark face.

'We have to deal with this as a couple. We still belong together, yineka mou,' Sander declared with admirable conviction as he reluctantly pa.s.sed over the bag.

'Like oil and water?' Tally shot back at him, rage coming out of nowhere and surging up through her slim length like lava ready to overflow. Green eyes cutting as lasers, she glared at him. 'And don't call me that. Don't remind me that I'm your wife. It's hardly something I'm likely to boast about!'

Anger blazed hot as the sun in Sander's expressive eyes. 'Don't insult me. I have been as honest with you as I know how to be, but please don't forget that if you hadn't walked out on our marriage last year that child would never have been born!'

Cut to the bone by that bold reminder, Tally slammed the car door with violence. There was too much truth in that retaliation for her to brush it off and the last thing she needed to feel just then was that she had brought her sufferings down on herself. Outraged by his audacity, she stalked away without a backward glance. It was a relief to close the apartment door behind her and know that he could no longer witness her reactions, but she paced the confines of her home like a lost soul unable to find a place to settle. She knew she ought to eat but she wasn't hungry and when darkness fell she went to bed and prayed for sleep. Only sleep would give her solace, for at least while she slept she would not be forced to think any more.

Fate, however, still had one more punishment in store for her. Although it was a while since she had last had the nightmare in which she heard her son cry while she searched without success for him, she had a bad dream that night. A dream that ended with a different twist. In this new version she found the nursery where the baby was crying and rushed in, only to look down in horror into the cot at a totally unfamiliar child. That jarring experience woke her up with the sheet sticking to her perspiring skin. She was shaking so badly she could barely manage to switch the bedside light on. She had hoped those disturbing dreams, brought on by the grief that her mind was struggling to cope with, had gone for ever. The altered conclusion to the nightmare, clearly the result of what Sander had told her about his little daughter, Lili, was just one more slap in the face. She got up early and went for a shower, arriving at work well in advance of her staff.