‘Leave…tonight?’ Lucy gasped in astonishment, wondering if it would be wrong of her to take her daughter with her as well and then deciding that, just at that moment, losing both of them was what Jax deserved for his distrust.
‘I don’t think you should waste any more time on the Antonakos family. They don’t love or value you but we will.’
And Polly’s enthusiasm was the deciding factor for Lucy, who usually took more time to decide anything of a serious nature. But at least she didn’t feel like crying any longer, she registered with relief, because crying after Jax had gone over her like a steam roller with his nasty allegations seemed feeble. Jax didn’t want her and his father didn’t want her in his precious family and her own father had seriously disappointed her. A fresh start and the friendship of her sisters looked a lot more promising than her current situation.
‘Tonight will be fine,’ she assured Polly. ‘I’ll start packing. I suppose it will be very hot?’
‘Yes, but the pal—er…my place is air-conditioned,’ her sister informed her.
CHAPTER TEN
JAX WAS STUNNED. He ran through the empty wardrobes again as if he expected to find Lucy curled up below the empty coat hangers in hiding. He wandered back to the empty nursery, stared into the even emptier cot and then hurriedly strode back downstairs again.
‘Take me through it again,’ he urged Zenas jerkily, struggling to master the kind of emotions he generally never allowed to see the light of day. Emotions like panic, fear and insecurity that could tear a man to pieces as they had once torn apart the boy he had been. Having frequently lived those emotions in childhood and adolescence, he had sworn never to give them space again. But there they were still inside him, he discovered, just waiting their chance to jump on him and either paralyse him or urge him to make fundamentally stupid decisions…
Zenas breathed in deep, a wary eye on Jax, who was visibly pale and stressed. ‘A diplomatic limousine with a foreign flag drew up. An Arab man in a suit and a crowd of heavies got out. The man had diplomatic credentials but he spoke neither Greek nor English and was unwilling to engage with my questions. Your wife opened the door with your daughter in her arms. She had a stack of suitcases waiting in the hall—’
‘And you just let her go…?’ Jax repeated incredulously. ‘You let a bunch of foreigners kidnap—’
‘She wasn’t kidnapped. She went of her own free will,’ Zenas told him apologetically. ‘We followed the car to the airport where the whole party proceeded through VIP diplomatic channels to which we were denied access. From what we can establish a private jet flew Mrs Antonakos and the little girl to Dharia.’
The name of that country rang a bell of familiarity with Jax. His brow furrowed. There had been some connection. Thee mou, his one-time business partner, Rio Benedetti, was married to the sister of the Queen of Dharia…who was coincidentally called… Polly, just like Lucy’s long-lost sister. No, he shook away the suspicion until he thought about that slick diplomatic kidnapping—he refused to accept that Lucy had willingly left him—and then the suspicion lodged deep.
Lucy was making a statement, he told himself grimly. He should do nothing and wait for her to get in touch. Lucy would not walk out on him, he told himself. She was annoyed with him. There was nothing he could do about that. He was merely paying the price for having finally told her the truth and if she didn’t like the truth, what was he supposed to do about it? Satisfied that he had reached a mature and measured decision, Jax poured himself a stiff drink.
Within the hour he was back pacing the empty marital bedroom. He should not have been imagining Lucy there because they had never yet spent a night in his Athens villa. Yet inexplicably memories of Lucy were everywhere around him. He pictured her on the bed, the softness of her pouty lips, the delicate paleness of her skin, the silky fall of her hair running between his fingers. He snatched in a stark breath. There was a tiny spiralling blonde hair on the dressing table and the scent of the perfume he had bought her in Mykonos still lingered on the air. The bedding was still creased from where she had sat while they’d talked that very afternoon.
Talked? Well, she hadn’t really talked, he acknowledged tardily, indeed had been remarkably quiet for a chatterbox. With hindsight it became clear to Jax that she had been upset, seriously upset. And he hadn’t picked up on that. How could he not have picked up on that?
Still locked in the mindset he had had for two long years, Jax had continued to feel like the victim of her treachery. But what if there had been no betrayal in the first place? What if that ridiculous story about sharing clothes was genuine? What if he had abandoned her in Spain two years earlier without any excuse for doing so? And what if he had blown up his marriage over a stupid red dress and a mindless need to finally confront Lucy?
Jax paced, feeling in dire need of another drink but knowing he shouldn’t have one when his brain was already leapfrogging all over the place. Lucy and Bella were gone and he could live with that, couldn’t he? A divorce, shared custody, parental access…?
Suddenly feeling very short of breath, Jax froze. There was a tightness in his chest and a dryness in his throat and his heart was thundering in his ears. No, he couldn’t live with that option, he decided with dizzy abruptness.
And as so often before when life challenged Jax, anger came to his rescue. He wasn’t letting the queen of some tinpot country steal his wife and child! Lucy had been lured away from him and misled and he was going to get her back pronto where she belonged, which was in Greece with him.
*
‘By the sound of it, Jax really doesn’t know how to deal with the emotional stuff,’ Ellie remarked with a wry smile on her lips.
‘That’s an understatement,’ Polly inputted with a sniff. ‘That alley business…accusing her of that—’
Ellie laughed and Lucy looked at her redheaded sister in surprise. ‘But don’t you see? It was all still as fresh as yesterday for Jax, which tells you that he never got over it. Two years on he’s still agonising over that alley…yet he still decides to stay married to you, he takes you on a honeymoon, acts happy, treats you decently in every other way. It took the equivalent of torture to get the story about the alley out of him because he’s ashamed that he still wants you, regardless of what he supposedly thinks you did. No, really, Lucy…you can learn a lot from reading between the lines.’
Lucy smiled at that more optimistic viewpoint even if she didn’t quite believe in it. She coiled back into her comfortable corner of the sofa in the beautiful room with its impossibly high domed ceiling and wished that she could see what Ellie appeared to see in Jax’s behaviour. Her two sisters were so different. Polly was warm and caring, almost motherly, while Ellie was very clever and sympathetic and their children, her nephews and nieces, she noted with pleasure, were simply gorgeous.
Polly’s boys, Karim and Hassan and Ellie’s daughter, Teresina were playing out in the shaded courtyard on trikes. Ellie was feeding her baby boy, Olly, with a bottle while Polly was nursing her newborn daughter, Haifa. Bella was watching the older children scoot around on their bikes while chasing a ball. Karim got off his bike simply to move Bella back a little with her toys, looking out for the toddler in the most considerate way for a small boy.
Lucy was shaken to admit that she would have been crazily happy in her sister’s gorgeous royal palace were it not for Jax’s absence. The discovery that her eldest sister was a ruling queen with her husband, Rashad, and that Ellie was the working wife of a fabulously wealthy Italian had certainly helped to take Lucy’s mind off her own problems. The three women had sat up into the early hours the first night they were all together, exchanging histories, talking about the three rings they had inherited and catching up on a lifetime of different experiences.
Talking about Jax had come later and had sent Lucy’s mood plummeting a
gain because, even though she still felt that walking out on Jax had been the only thing she could do, there was a hollow place inside her where her heart had been ripped out.
In the back of her mind lurked the conviction that Jax had been hurt so much in life just like herself yet they dealt with emotions in very different ways. Jax buried his, hid troubling issues and lived in virtual denial of his feelings. Lucy wore everything on the surface and picked herself up again emotionally no matter how often she was kicked. But she hadn’t reacted that way at her last encounter with Jax, she acknowledged. He had hurt her too much and for the first time ever with Jax she had hidden her feelings as well.
In a sense that had been cruel of her and hitting him over the head with something large and heavy might have been kinder. Feelings had to be shoved in Jax’s face like placards for him to read them. He had probably been very shocked by her departure and he was probably furious that she had taken their daughter with her. But he still wouldn’t understand why she had left, which bothered her. The truth was all that had mattered to Jax and he had finally told it without grasping the damage he was doing. He had expected her to excuse him for past events soured by their fathers’ machinations. He had not been capable of realising that she had been devastated because everything he had said had spelled out the message that he had never loved, respected or even understood her. How could she possibly love someone like that?
‘He’s a man. He might as well be from another planet,’ Ellie mocked quietly. ‘Rio was exactly the same, hiding things, holding onto the past—’
‘Rashad too,’ Polly admitted ruefully. ‘So, perhaps Jax could be rehabilitated…’
Lucy studied her linked hands, unable to imagine Jax budging a stubborn inch from his own convictions.
The door opened, framing Rashad, the King of Dharia. Tall and very handsome, he flashed a smile at his wife. ‘Polly…we have a visitor. He thinks we kidnapped his wife. What would you have to say to that?’