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‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you what you seem to want to hear,’ Sander delivered in a grudging undertone, his discomfiture patent.
It was Tally’s turn to pale and the fierce tension made her tummy roll with nausea. For a disturbing instant she just wanted to burst into distraught tears at having received confirmation of what she now knew she had most feared. She was intensely mortified. What on earth had possessed her? She felt unbelievably stupid and naïve for ever having dreamt that Sander might not have sought sexual solace while they were living apart and divorcing. Where had her wits been while she entertained such an unlikely possibility? Sander was, and always had been, a very sexual being.
‘I don’t want to know any more,’ she told him starkly, turning away in outright physical rejection, clutching the towel round her trembling body with defensive hands. Her skin was clammy with shock while she struggled to suppress the most destructive wave of sick and bitter jealousy that she had ever experienced. In the space of seconds she had travelled from revived feelings of tenderness to pungent acrimonious hatred. Lost in grief for their infant son, she had fled back to England with a broken heart to lick her wounds and rebuild her life as a single woman while Sander had evidently partied and shared his beautiful body with a range of new lovers.
‘You’re not being fair,’ Sander murmured flatly, recognising that judgement was being meted out without further debate.
‘Perhaps not … but I can’t help how I feel,’ Tally responded in a cold tone of finality and mentally she was already shutting up shop on the events of the past twenty-four hours.
She had made yet another mistake but not an insuperable one, she reasoned in the first frantic surge of needing to sort her tumultuous emotions out before they swallowed her alive and destroyed her. Over the past year she had fought hard to regain her independence and overcome her heartache and she was determined not to revisit those dark days of depression and self-doubt. It wasn’t that unusual for husbands and wives on the brink of divorce to have one final reunion, she told herself urgently. She had mistaken familiarity for attraction and echoes of the love she had once felt for Sander had clearly confused her. She’d made a mistake, nothing more, nothing less. She didn’t need to make a production out of it and she didn’t need to flail herself for her stupidity either. Sander was a heartstoppingly handsome and sexy man and a long period of celibacy had probably made her more vulnerable.
‘We just did something very silly,’ she muttered, picking up clothes that she had been packing the evening before and sifting through them to find a fresh outfit to wear.
‘No, we did not,’ Sander contradicted with fierce conviction and then, thinking about what she had said and how she had reacted to his honesty, he frowned. ‘Are you telling me that you haven’t slept with Robert Miller?’
‘I’m not telling you anything!’ Tally shot back, refusing to be drawn on that topic and wishing she had had enough sense not to put such a revealing weapon within his reach. Were he to realise that her relationship with the other man remained platonic he would soon guess that she had moved on less smoothly than he had from their break-up and she could not bear to admit that truth to him. It was the wrong moment for her to appreciate that in her heart she had still felt married and loyal to Sander Volakis. ‘I won’t even discuss such a thing …’
‘But while practising your usual double standards, it was all right to put me on the spot,’ Sander traded harshly and then he groaned out loud as though he regretted the tone of that response and, with a bitten-off curse, he reached for her small hands instead. ‘Tally … come here …’
Rage suddenly lanced through Tally like a jet-propelled rocket and her green eyes flashed like emeralds. ‘Don’t touch me!’ she snapped, trailing her fingers pointedly free of his hold.
‘Obviously I should have lied when you asked me that question but that’s not my style.’ His long, lean, powerful body rigid, Sander cornered her and closed lean brown hands to her elbows instead of her hands. His dark eyes were bright with angry frustration. ‘I won’t let you do this to us. You still want me.’
‘No, I don’t. I don’t know what came over me—this was a mistake, meeting you here in this house again was like stepping into a time slip!’ Tally protested vehemently, desperate to make him believe that for the sake of her pride.
He watched her jerky movements as she dressed in front of him, disdaining a bra in her haste to cover up again. Against his will, his gaze was drawn by the bounce of her full rose-tipped breasts as she hauled on a T-shirt and even after the night they had shared the tightening at his groin was automatic. He didn’t want to listen to her spouting rubbish about mistakes and time slips. He didn’t want her to leave. Not only did he want his wife back, but he also wanted to keep her in bed for at least a week in the hope of sating a craving that no other woman could come close to satisfying.
‘The hunger is still there between us, moli mou,’ Sander growled. ‘As strong as ever …’
His dark deep drawl vibrated down her taut spinal cord and she glanced up from below feathery lashes and connected warily with hot golden eyes that challenged her. Her nipples tingled and swelled and she froze in disbelief that she could still be so susceptible to his allure.
‘You know exactly what I’m talking about,’ Sander pronounced with satisfaction.
But Tally was determined not to listen. Convinced that the more heed she paid him, the more likely it was that she would do something foolish again, she was determined to escape. Flipping the case that she had begun packing the day before open again, she began to settle a pile of garments into it.
‘You can’t just walk away and pretend this didn’t happen,’ Sander breathed levelly.
‘I can do whatever I blasted well want!’ Tally flared back, shooting his lean, strong profile a defiant glance.
Raking impatient fingers through his black, spiky hair, Sander dealt her a narrow-eyed intent appraisal. His dark eyes, sharp as knives, brought goose flesh up on her bare arms in spite of the warm temperature. ‘One way or another I’ll get you back, yineka mou.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Tally fielded flatly, her small face stiff with self-discipline as she flipped down the lid on the case and closed it. ‘We’ll be divorced in a couple of months. I don’t want anything else from this place. This is the past and I’ve moved on—’
‘Only an hour ago you were happily reliving that past,’ Sander murmured, smooth as silk.
‘Everybody makes mistakes and you’re mine,’ Tally retorted curtly, heading for the door as fast as her legs would carry her.
Sander intercepted her and removed the case from her hold to carry it downstairs for her. ‘A mistake you evidently enjoyed repeating,’ he traded softly.
Guilty colour ran like a banner into her cheeks as she locked the case into the boot of the car outside. Tormenting images of Sander with other women were playing over and over again inside her head, acting like a refined sort of torture on her vulnerable mind. Mounting distress at those wounding inner pictures made her hand shake as she searched for her keys in her bag.
Frowning down at her, because he was an observant man, Sander rested a lean hand on the driver’s door. ‘Are you sure that you’re feeling well enough to drive?’
‘I’m perfectly fine.’ Annoyed that she had not contrived to fool him with her façade of calm, Tally jumped into the car without further ado, terrified that she might betray her insecurity in other ways.
‘You’re running away again, just like you did when you walked out on our marriage,’ Sander condemned bleakly.
‘I’m being sensible!’ Tally contradicted in fierce disagreement and slammed the door shut.
As she drove off she refused to allow herself a backward glance at his tall powerful figure in the driving mirror. That would have been surrendering to weakness and she was ashamed enough of her behaviour over the past twelve hours to feel that she had to withstand even that minor temptation.
All the while sh
e was thinking of the many times in her life when she’d had to be tough and control emotions that seemed stronger than those of other people. When she was still a child she had often longed for unconditional love from those close to her. Binkie, of course, had loved Tally, but even at a young age Tally had appreciated that Binkie was in a different category as an employee, a housekeeper and childminder, paid by Tally’s mother to do a job. Either the people Tally loved did not have the capacity to love that strongly or she herself did not have the special je ne sais quoi that inspired that depth of feeling in others. Yet she knew that when she loved people she loved with her whole heart and usually got badly hurt.
The most important person in her mother’s, Crystal’s, world, however, was generally the current man in her life. But then Crystal Spencer was very much a man’s woman and as mother and daughter shared few interests both women had learned to compromise in their expectations of each other. Equally, Tally’s father, Anatole, had always made it obvious that he was ashamed of his elder daughter’s illegitimate birth and, since he was a man to whom appearances meant a great deal, he had never been prepared to openly acknowledge her as his child. The feelings of his current wife, who had long preferred to pretend Tally didn’t exist, were much more important to him.
Had that unfortunate background encouraged her to look for too much support and attention from Sander? Tally asked herself suddenly. Had she been too needy in their relationship? Had she expected too much from a young man thrust into marriage and parenthood when he had not, at first, chosen to freely embrace either? Her ruminations about her marriage always seemed to return to the same cruel fact: when Tally had fallen pregnant her father had blackmailed Sander into marrying her by threatening the stability of Volakis Shipping. Even though Sander had later insisted that he wanted to stay married to Tally, the truth of the terms on which their marriage had initially been built was a humiliation that could never be ignored or forgotten.
Yet she had loved Sander so much in those days that she had closed her eyes to the flaws in their relationship. He had not loved her, nor had he pretended to do so. He had wanted her, supported her, cared for her, entertained her in and out of bed, but he had never felt for her the depth of emotion that she had felt for him. And that heart-rending truth had ensured that right from the start Tally felt like the lesser and weaker partner in their marriage.
With every kilometre of French autoroute that she travelled along, taking her further and further from Sander, Tally was increasingly conscious of a tight, funny ache inside that felt remarkably like the pain of intense loss. She suppressed the sensation, fighting its worrying pull on her disordered senses. That was only her imagination overreacting, she told herself impatiently.
