‘No. It belongs to a family friend and his wedding present is the use of it. If you like cruising we can always buy one,’ he told her as the launch bounced over the sea at speed, driven by the crew member in charge of the wheel.
Pixie studied the yacht with wide eyes, struggling to accept that she was now living in a world where her bridegroom could talk carelessly about purchasing such an enormous luxury. ‘Why haven’t you bought one already?’
‘To date, I haven’t taken much time away from work and a yacht would have been a superfluous purchase for a workaholic. But that has to change with you and Alfie in my life now,’ Tor traded calmly.
She wanted to ask him if he had been an absentee husband and father during his first marriage, but on their own wedding day it felt as if that would be tacky and untimely. He had made her wary of impulsive speech as well when he had reacted badly to a tactless question earlier that day. For that reason, she made no comment and bore up beautifully to being hoisted on board the enormous yacht in her fancy gown and greeted by the captain and a glass of champagne before being guided up to the top deck and a bedroom that took her breath away.
‘I’m afraid that we now need to have a serious discussion about your brother,’ Tor murmured levelly then, utterly taking her aback with that announcement.
Bright blue eyes widening in bewilderment, Pixie slowly swivelled, silk momentarily tightening across her slender, shapely figure to draw his magnetic gaze. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Today of all days, I don’t want you to be upset,’ Tor informed her smoothly. ‘But I believe that Jordan was the source of a rather sleazy story about our first night together and Alfie that appeared in a British newspaper this morning—’
A fury unlike anything Pixie had ever felt, or indeed had even guessed she could feel, burned up her backbone like a licking flame and she went rigid with the force of it. ‘Is that so?’ she almost whispered.
‘Who else could it be but Jordan?’ Tor derided. ‘He’ll do anything for money. He has no decency, no backbone.’
‘Shut up!’ Pixie practically spat at him in her outrage at that denunciation.
His brows knotted, a look of incredulity in his smouldering golden eyes, such incivility not having featured very often in his experience. ‘Diavolos, Pixie. There is no reason for you to treat this as though it is some kind of personal attack on you. It is not intended as such.’
And Tor stood there, smokingly handsome, thrillingly sexy and towering over her. He was utterly sure of his ground in a fashion that she supposed came entirely naturally to him and yet she wanted to kill him in that instant, smite him down with heavenly lightning for blaming her poor brother for the tabloid article as well. As though Jordan had not already sinned enough and paid the price for his mistakes! He had lost her respect and the only home he had ever known, and his self-esteem was at basement level. And yes, he had deserved that punishment, but right now he was trying very hard to fix himself and pick himself up again, only he hadn’t yet mustered sufficient strength to make more than a couple of tottering steps back towards normality. At present, in her view, Jordan was more to be pitied than condemned.
‘Yes, shut up and stop talking down to me in that patronising way!’ Pixie let fly at Tor angrily again. ‘I gather you haven’t actually seen that article. Well, before you hang, draw and quarter my brother for the story, acquaint yourself with the article and the facts first.’
‘Have you seen it? I assumed you didn’t know about it,’ Tor confided in disconcertion. ‘I didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to destroy the day.’
‘So, you just destroyed it now instead by assuming that Jordan is to blame when in fact it is your own choices that brought the humiliation of that article down on the two of us!’ Pixie flung back at him in a furious counter-attack.
‘How could it be anything to do with my choices?’ Tor shot back at her icily, his own temper rising because he had not been prepared for either her attitude or the argument that had erupted. Unsurprisingly, he would never have chosen to mention the article on their wedding night had he foreseen her response.
‘Look it up online and find out, as I had to,’ Pixie urged him curtly.
Tor did nothing so basic. He shot an order to one of his personal assistants to send him an exact copy of the item, still outraged that his assumptions, his conclusions, were being questioned.
First, a photo of a woman he had never seen in his life before arrived on his screen, and he turned it towards Pixie and breathed, ‘Who is she?’
‘Saffron Wells—an actress. The beauty who brought you back to the house that night. You allowed her to pick you up and bring you back there and I suspect that she saw you leaving the room I was using the next morning.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about and you know it!’ Tor thundered at her, while grudgingly recalling that vague memory of someone coming down the stairs in that house that morning. Disorientated and in a bad mood, he hadn’t even turned round to see who it was. ‘Because you flatly refused to tell me everything about that night!’
Pixie was in no mood to compromise when she was still so angry with him. On a level she didn’t want to examine, some of her anger related to the weirdest current of possessiveness inside her. It still annoyed her that he had allowed Saffron to pick him up, even if he hadn’t done anything with the other woman, and even though she knew she would never have met him otherwise, that annoyance went surprisingly deep.
‘Saffron brought you back to the house in the first place. You apparently believed you were accompanying her to a party, but she thought she was bringing you home for the night. You rejected her because supposedly you weren’t in the mood and she stormed off... At least that’s what you told me happened. But for all I know,’ Pixie breathed with withering bite, ‘you slept with her too before I came into the kitchen, where you were waiting for a taxi!’
Tor swore in vicious Greek at being slapped in the face with that character assassination. ‘I may have been drunk, I may have slept with you that night, but I’m no playboy and you know it.’
‘According to your online images, you’ve been around...a lot,’ Pixie emphasised, unimpressed. ‘However, I’d say it’s unlikely anything happened between you because I think you offended her and that’s one good reason why she sold that story. Her being passed over for someone as ordinary as me would have been the last straw. The other reason is that, being a media person, she lapped up the opportunity to get her picture into a newspaper.’
Tor was frowning now. ‘But if she was some random woman in that house, how could she possibly have known about you getting pregnant and all the rest of it when you left the property only a couple of days later?’
‘There were other connections involved. I was using Steph’s room that night. Steph was one of the other tenants and I worked with her sister. I had ongoing contact with Steph because of my cat, Coco. Steph only finally gave Coco to me when I was pregnant,’ Pixie recited wearily, the fury draining from her without warning. ‘Someone somewhere talked and connected the dots and that’s how the story about us got out. It had nothing at all to do with my brother, who knew less than you did about what happened that night until very recently.’
His lean dark features hard and forbidding, Tor jerked his chin in acknowledgement of that likelihood. He was angry because he had got it badly wrong again with his bride. He was angry because he had been so sure of his facts when a thieving, dishonest, greedy character, such as he regarded Jordan to be, had been in the mix and available to blame. But he was still stunned by the level of her loyalty to her brother, her childhood memories of th
e other man evidently sufficient to restore some measure of her faith and affection for him.
Her attitude made him think of his own response to Sevastiano, the older brother he had only met when they were both adults. Tor had found it an unnerving experience to go from being the eldest son in the family to the discovery that his father’s eldest child had actually been born to another woman before his marriage to Tor’s mother. If he was honest, he had never really given Sevastiano a fair crack of the whip and learning that Katerina had been unfaithful to him with Sev had been the last nail in the coffin. No semblance of sibling affection had ever developed.
Shaking off that momentary attack of self-examination, Tor straightened his broad shoulders. ‘I owe you an apology,’ he breathed between gritted teeth. ‘But make some allowances for the difference between our natures. When it comes to your brother, I’m less forgiving of his wrongs towards you and my son and much more about punishment, while you’re overflowing with compassion and a desperate desire to rehabilitate him. But please accept that my strongest motivation is to protect you from Jordan and ensure that he cannot take advantage of you or hurt you again.’
Pixie nodded jerkily, tears stinging the backs of her eyes because this was not how she had imagined her wedding night would turn out, with them at loggerheads, angry words having been exchanged and now all the subsequent discomfiture of the aftermath. ‘Apology accepted,’ she said stiffly, crossing the room to explore through a door and discover to her relief that it led into a bathroom where she could excusably escape for long enough to regroup. ‘I’m going to treat myself to a bath...if you don’t mind?’
‘Of course not,’ Tor murmured tautly, wondering how to dig himself back out of the hole he had dug for himself and coming up blank from lack of practice in that field.