The Marriage Betrayal (The Volakis Vow 1)

Love surged inside her but she crammed it back, refusing to say those words. Declarations of love always came with expectations attached and she didn’t want to do that to him. He had said openly, honestly, that he didn’t do love but that he did do caring and she promised herself that that was going to be enough to make her happy long term. He pressed a kiss to her lips and she tingled, inside and out, her body awakening after a long period of frustration.

‘We’re both so tired,’ Tally whispered ruefully.

‘But I won’t sleep until I feel that you’re mine again,’ Sander asserted, quietly removing her clothes with careful hands, while shedding his own with a good deal less concern.

And he was very gentle, slow and skilled and she reached a climax of breathtaking splendour and knew a happiness that made her cry. He held her close and teased her for her runaway emotions while secretly appreciating the sheer womanly tenderness of her heart. She was everything he had never thought he would want and now that he had her back he was fiercely determined never to lose her again. In that moment he had so many good intentions he was bursting with them.

‘Go to sleep,’ he urged her tenderly when she yawned and snuggled closer.

And Tally drifted off to sleep in the cradle of his strong arms, every fear of the future overcome at last.

Four months later, Tally finished hanging new curtains in the oak-floored salon of the house in the South of France, which they had made their main home, and straightened her aching back with a sigh of relief.

Sander’s brother’s house had needed a great deal of work before it could be considered either comfortable or presentable. Having bought the rundown property as an investment, Titos had never got around to fixing it up. Tally had fallen madly in love with the old farmhouse, which was crying out for a designer’s hand, and room by room she had worked through the house, setting a loving stamp on every corner of it.

‘Sander said you weren’t to climb any more ladders,’ Binkie reminded the younger woman disapprovingly from the doorway.

Tally tried not to grin. Sander’s all-male habit of laying down the law and the pronouncements and prohibitions he uttered perfectly matched Binkie’s old-fashioned expectations of a husband. Binkie had consented to come and work for them as a housekeeper after Crystal had decided that she no longer needed the older woman’s services in London. Tally had seen less of her mother since Crystal moved in with her current boyfriend, Roger, a widowed furniture manufacturer, who lived in Monaco. Crystal, however, seemed happy and more content with Roger than she had been for quite some time. In the same period Tally had heard nothing at all from her father, Anatole, and she wasn’t expecting that situation to change.

‘I was only climbing a little set of steps, not a proper ladder,’ Tally reasoned quietly.

‘You’re pregnant, you have to take care.’ The older woman sighed. ‘You should have asked me or called Marcel to help.’

Tally smiled noncommittally as she recalled Marcel the gardener’s aghast response to being asked to do anything indoors and Binkie had always been very nervous of using steps or ladders. She might now be six months pregnant, Tally acknowledged, but she was perfectly healthy and felt strong and well. She smoothed a protective hand over the swell of her tummy and smiled warmly as a little fluttering sensation indicated that her child was moving inside her. When the baby went quiet and she didn’t feel his movements, she always worried. Her baby might not be born yet but Tally was already convinced that she loved him. At the last scan she had learned that her baby was a boy and she was delighted. She didn’t care whether she had a boy or a girl and simply prayed for a healthy child.

Most days she took a dreamy tour of the room she had already lovingly decorated and furnished as a nursery in bright shades of lemon and blue. She could hardly wait to welcome their son into the world and could now scarcely recall a time when she had worried about Sander’s commitment to being a parent.

Sander had kept all his promises, Tally acknowledged with a sunny smile, her heart lifting at the thought that the husband she adored would be returning from a three-day business trip to Athens that very evening. Since that day when Sander had reclaimed her from the airport, their marriage had gone from strength to strength and he had made her the centre of his world. He shared his workday frustrations with her and there had been many, for he and his father were uneasy work colleagues and Volakis Shipping was still fighting to attain long-term security.

For the greater part of the week, Sander was based in France and he ran the family company and his own business interests from a distance. The board of directors had recognised his genius in the changes he had made in how the business operated and had infuriated his competitive father by giving Sander a rousing vote of confidence in reward. Sander and Tally both enjoyed the more relaxed pace of life in France and often had his friends to stay at the weekend. Tally enjoyed being a hostess and was now a good deal less intimidated by the beautiful girls who threw themselves at Sander’s head every chance they got.

After all, Tally knew her husband much better than she had known him when they first married. She had learned that he was not a fan of women who chased him and disliked such bold approaches. He also had no love for clubs and noisy parties and much preferred social occasions attended only by close friends.

He would be wild to take her to bed when he got home that night, Tally savoured with hot cheeks and a sliding sensation of anticipation between her thighs. Her husband was highly sexed and she was still shaken by the hot rush of excitement that just a look or a touch from Sander could awaken in her.

Two hours later, Sander strode into the house and flung down his raincoat. Coming home to Tally was always an occasion and his gaze centred on her small, curvy figure standing beside the tall glittering Christmas tree. The house was a festive wonderland of Christmas ornamentation and, as the son of parents who had only ever celebrated the season in the most low-key and tasteful manner, Sander was impressed by his wife’s wonderful homemaking skills.

Her green eyes were bright with welcome and tenderness and he headed straight for her and scooped her up against him to kiss her with passionate appreciation. Her heart racing, Tally kissed Sander back with unconcealed enthusiasm.

‘How much time have we got before dinner?’ he breathed raggedly against her reddened lips.

Angling the swell of her stomach away from him, Tally shimmied her hip in wanton invitation against his lean powerful frame. ‘Enough time,’ she assured him shamelessly, for she had planned it that way, aware that Sander would only really relax after they had made love again.

Meeting green eyes dancing with merriment and mischief, Sander laughed with unashamed masculine appreciation. He was truly happy to be home again as he walked her down to the bedroom they shared. Clothes were shed without ceremony and the kisses grew hotter than hot very quickly. Their impatience to reacquaint their bodies and sate the craving for satisfaction that tormented them both when they were parted for a few days lent an added edge of excitement. In the aftermath, her heart slowly returning to a less accelerated beat, Tally feasted her eyes on her husband’s lean, dark devastating features and whispered, ‘I missed you.’

Sander dropped another kiss on her soft full mouth and luxuriated in her embrace. ‘Once the baby’s born you’ll be able to come with me, pedhi mou.’

Tally winced at that forecast. ‘Babies like routine. I doubt if our baby will travel well.’

‘My son will,’ Sander forecast with perceptible pride. ‘To be a Volakis is to be a good traveller by air or by sea.’

Tally giggled. ‘Is that so?’

‘Of course it is. My son will be clever and he will naturally want to please his father.’

Tally half sat up and gazed lovingly down at the father of her child before saying with her usual common sense, ‘You’re always disagreeing with yours.’

‘But I will be a more caring parent and my son and I will have a closer relationship. I was always extra to requirements in my own family,’ Sander told her with a dismissive shrug that did not quite conceal his regret that it should have been that way.

‘You know …’ Tally trailed gentle appreciative fingers across one stunning masculine cheekbone ‘… you are my world.’

Sander caught her hand in his and kissed her fingertips. ‘And you are at the very heart of mine, kardoula mou. I will always be grateful to your father for ensuring that I married you … what a treasure I might have missed out of my own ignorance and immaturity!’

And Tally recognised then that all his anger on that score was really laid to rest and their relationship had turned full circle. The warmth of his acceptance and his recognition of their increasingly close ties filled her to overflowing with happiness and contentment. In spite of all her careful planning dinner was very, very late that night …