The Marriage Betrayal (The Volakis Vow 1)

THOSE words were too little too late to soothe Tally.

While she acknowledged that her threatened miscarriage had got their marriage off to a poor start, she had suffered her neglect in silence. She felt as if her body’s show of weakness, which seemed to have made everything go wrong, was somehow her fault. She had made no demands and had voiced no complaints. Indeed she had attempted to be a supportive understanding partner, only to feel mortified by the obvious fact that her husband seemed neither to want her or need her in that role.

She did not feel like a wife and Sander didn’t treat her like one either. He had made no attempt to spend time with her or to enquire into what she did with her days in a foreign city where she had no friends. Cosima had ignored both her sister’s wedding and Tally’s sending of her mobile phone number, making it clear that she did not want contact with her sibling even if she was currently living in the same country. Sander could not have made his lack of interest in Tally, his marriage and their future child more obvious and suddenly Tally could not credit that she had tolerated that indifference in silence for so long.

‘You owe me more than an apology for the last month, you owe me an explanation—’

An ebony brow quirked. ‘About what?’

Green eyes pure emerald with anger, Tally threw her hands out in a demonstration of the strong emotion rippling through her. ‘You’ve treated me like the invisible woman ever since our wedding day. Why on earth did you marry me if you were planning to behave like that? What was the point?’

His deep-set dark eyes were heavy with exhaustion and his luxuriant lashes lowered to screen his wary gaze. He shifted a broad shoulder. ‘I’m too tired for this stuff now. We’ll discuss it tomorrow—’

‘I probably won’t see you tomorrow,’ Tally interrupted. ‘Or haven’t you noticed that you walk out of here at dawn and don’t come back much before dawn the next day?’

‘I’m not in the mood for an argument—’

‘I don’t care!’ Tally broke in with fiery persistence. ‘I have the right to know where I stand. I have the right to ask you why the heck you married me when you don’t seem to want me as a wife!’

Sander’s big powerful body had pulled taut with tension and his stubborn mouth compressed as he shot her a sardonic glance. ‘Let’s not go into that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you might not like the answer I give you!’ Sander slung back before he could think better of it, his temper rising in direct proportion to his exhaustion and his impatience and knocking him off guard. He was dead on his feet: all he wanted to do was sleep. Even the hard wooden floor was beginning to look inviting.

In receipt of that bewildering response, Tally had fallen very still. ‘Why wouldn’t I like it?’

‘Leave it, Tally,’ Sander urged in exasperation, striding past her to head into the bedroom she had just vacated.

‘And what if I don’t want to leave it?’ Tally sped in his wake, refusing to back off.

‘You’ll wish you had,’ Sander told her wryly, tossing his jacket and tie down on a chair. ‘Look, I admit that you have grounds for complaint. So far, I’ve not been the most considerate husband, but tonight is not the time to call me to account for my mistakes. I’m too tired to talk right now. I’ve spent hours exchanging tall stories with a pair of Russian businessmen who could drink the Volga dry and still remain standing.’

‘You can’t throw something like that at me and then refuse to tell me the whole story.’

‘There is no story,’ Sander said flatly, standing still to unbutton his shirt.

‘I want to know why you married me!’

‘Well, not because you shout at three in the morning and demand answers that it would be a challenge for me to give you even if I was less tired,’ Sander framed wearily.

‘I deserve the truth,’ Tally challenged. ‘It seems pretty obvious that you only married me because I’m pregnant.’

Sander grimaced. ‘Tomorrow, Tally—’

‘No, not tomorrow—now!’ she fired back at him. ‘Every step of this relationship you have controlled everything but now it’s my turn. Why did you ask me to marry you?’

And in answer to that bold challenge, Sander was suddenly filled with such a swelling, unstoppable surge of rage that he could no longer hold the words back.

‘Because your father threatened to bring down Volakis Shipping if I didn’t!’

Assailed by an explanation so far from her expectations, Tally could only blink at him and stare in sheer bewilderment. ‘Excuse me? My father? He threatened you? When did that happen? Did you tell him I was pregnant?’

‘No. Someone—presumably you, your mother or even your half-sister—told Anatole about the baby, and that I was responsible. He was furious. He came to see me at my London office and demanded that I mar

ry you. If I refused, he threatened to scare off a contract that Volakis Shipping needed to survive. Your father is an influential man in the world of business. He always has his ear to the ground. People who matter listen to his tips.’

The hectic flush in Tally’s cheeks was slowly receding as shock drained the natural colour from her face. ‘I wasn’t the one who told him.’ Slowly, numbly she shook her head in an emphatic negative to underline that point, but she was still so taken aback by what he had revealed that she could not yet put it all together inside her mind. ‘And Cosima didn’t even know I was pregnant which only leaves your parents or my mother, and if she told my father, I’m amazed, because as a rule she can hardly bear to speak to him.’

‘My parents have said nothing. So it wasn’t you who talked … you didn’t run to tell stories so that your father would put pressure on me?’ His shirt hanging open to reveal a muscular bronzed wedge of hair-roughened chest, Sander searched her revealing face with incisive dark eyes. He was impressed by her demeanour and convinced that she was telling him the truth. ‘That does make me feel better.’

And Tally finally understood where the anger she had sensed in him from the outset of their marriage had come from and why it had lingered so that his bitterness soured everything between them. Naturally she could have done nothing to defuse that anger when he had chosen to keep such a massive secret from her. As comprehension sank in fully, though, she almost drowned in the flood tide of his cruelly unwelcome honesty and discovered that her shame was so great that she could no longer meet his dark golden gaze.

Her husband had been blackmailed into marrying her.

That was so horrendous, so truly unspeakable an act, that she felt as though she had been punched in the gut and was struggling without success to get air into her starved lungs. She was shaken that the father she barely knew could have so much influence that he could threaten Sander’s family business, but she was equally shocked that her father could have cared enough about her future to even consider putting pressure on the father of her child to marry her. In fact, that did not make sense to her at all.