A Vow of Obligation (Marriage by Command 3)

His sardonic mouth curled. ‘There was no camera, no recording. That was a little white lie voiced to guarantee your good behaviour.’

‘You’re such a ruthless bastard,’ Tawny quipped shakily, fighting a red tide of rage at how easily she had been taken in. Why had she not insisted on seeing that recording the instant he’d mentioned it?

‘It got you off the theft hook,’ he reminded her without hesitation.

‘And you’ll never forget that, will you?’ But it wasn’t really a question because she already knew the answer. She would always be a thief in Navarre Cazier’s eyes and a woman he could buy for a certain price.

‘Will you change your mind about the kiss-and-tell?’ Navarre asked harshly, willing her to surrender to his demand.

‘Sorry, no … I want my five minutes of fame. Why shouldn’t I have it? Have a safe journey home,’ Tawny urged breezily.

‘Tu a un bon coup … you’re a good lay,’ he breathed with cutting cool, and seconds later the door mercifully shut on his departure.

There was no hiding from the obvious fact that making love with him again had been a serious mistake and she mentally beat herself up for that misjudgement to such an extent that she did not sleep a wink for what remained of the night. Around seven in the morning she heard Jacques arrive to collect his employer’s cases and later the sound of Navarre leaving the suite. Only when she was sure that he was gone did she finally emerge, pale and with shadowed eyes, from her room. She was shocked to find a bank draft for the sum of money he had agreed to pay her waiting on the table alongside her mobile phone. Was he making the point that, unlike her, once he had given his word he stuck to his agreements? He had ordered breakfast for eight o’clock as well and it arrived, the full works just as she liked, but the lump in her throat and the nausea in her tummy prevented her from eating anything. In the end she tucked the bank draft into her bag. Well, she couldn’t just leave it lying there, could she? In the same way she packed the clothes he had bought her into the designer luggage and departed, acknowledging that in the space of a week he had turned her inside out.

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘IF Tawny doesn’t tell Cazier soon, I intend to do it for her,’ Sergios Demonides decreed, watching his sister-in-law, Tawny, play ball in the sunshine with his older children, Paris, Milo and Eleni. Tawny’s naturally slender figure made the swelling of her pregnant stomach blatantly obvious in a swimsuit.

‘We can’t interfere like that,’ his wife, Bee, told him vehemently. ‘He hurt her. She needs time to adapt to this new development—’

‘How much time? Is she planning to wait until the baby is born and then tell him that he’s a father?’ Sergios reasoned, unimpressed. ‘A man has a right to know that he has a child coming before its birth. Surely he cannot be as irresponsible as she is—’

‘She’s not irresponsible!’ Bee argued, lifting their daughter, Angeli, into her arms as the black-haired toddler clasped her mother’s knees to steady her still-clumsy toddler steps. ‘She’s just very independent. Have you any idea of how much persuasion I had to use to get her out here for a holiday?’

Outside Tawny glanced uneasily indoors to where her sister and her brother-in-law stood talking intently. She could tell that their attention was centred on her again and she flushed, wishing that Sergios would mind his own business and stop making her feel like such a nuisance. It was typical of the strong-willed Greek to regard his unmarried sister-in-law’s pregnancy as a problem that was his duty to solve.

But that was the only cloud on her horizon in the wake of the wonderful week of luxurious relaxation she had enjoyed on Sergios’s private island, Orestos. London had been cold and wintry when she flew out and she was returning there the following day, flying back to bad weather and her very ordinary job as a waitress in a restaurant. She felt well rested and more grounded after the break she had had with her sister and her lively family though. Sergios had become the guardian of his cousin’s three orphaned children and with the recent addition of their own first child to the mix—the adorable Angeli—Bee was a very busy wife and mother. She was also very happy with her life, although that was an admission that went against the grain for Tawny, who was convinced that she could never have remained as even tempered and easy going as Bee in the radius of Sergios’s domineering nature. Sergios was one of those men who knew the right way to do everything and it was always his way. And yet Bee had this magical knack of just looking at him sometimes when he was in full extrovert flood and he would suddenly shut up and smile at her as if she had waved a magic wand across his forbidding countenance.

‘I can’t bear to think of you going back to work such long hours. You should have rested more while you were here.’ Bee sighed after dinner that evening as the two women sat out on the terrace watching the sun go down.

‘The way you did?’ Tawny teased, recalling how incredibly hectic her half-sister’s schedule had been while she was carrying her first child.

‘I had Sergios for support … and my mother,’ Bee reminded her.

Bee’s disabled mother, Emilia, lived in a cottage in the grounds of their Greek home and was very much a member of their family. In comparison, Tawny’s mother was living with her divorced boyfriend and his children in the house she had purchased with her inheritance from Tawny’s grandfather. She was aghast that her daughter had fallen pregnant outside a relationship and had urged her to have a termination, an attitude that had driven yet another wedge into the already troubled relationship between mother and daughter. No, Tawny could not look for support from that quarter, and while her grandmother, Celestine, was considerably more tolerant when it came to babies, the older woman lived quite a long way from her and with the hours Tawny had to work she only saw the little Frenchwoman about once a month.

‘It’s a shame that you told Navarre that you weren’t pregnant when he phoned you a couple of months ago,’ Bee said awkwardly.

‘I honestly thought it was the truth when I told him that. That first test I did was negative!’ Tawny reminded the brunette ruefully. ‘Do you really think I should have phoned him three weeks later and told him I’d been mistaken?’

‘Yes.’ Bee stayed firm in the face of the younger woman’s look of reproach. ‘It’s Navarre’s baby too. You have to deal with it. The longer you try to ignore the situation, the more complicated it will become.’

Tawny’s eyes stung and she blinked furiously, turning her face away to conceal the turbulent emotions that seemed so much closer to the surface since she had fallen pregnant. She was fourteen weeks along now and she was changing shape rapidly with her tummy protruding, her waist thickening and her breasts almost doubling in size. Ever since she had learned that she had concei

ved she had felt horribly vulnerable and out of control of her body and her life. All too well did she remember her mother’s distressing tales of how Tawny’s father had humiliated her with his angry scornful attitude to her conception of a child he didn’t want. Tawny had cringed at the prospect of putting herself in the same position with a man who was already suspicious of her motives.

‘I know that Navarre hurt you,’ her half-sister murmured unhappily. ‘But you should still tell him.’

‘Somehow I fell for him like a ton of bricks,’ Tawny admitted abruptly, her voice shaking because it was the very first time she had openly acknowledged that unhappy truth, and Bee immediately covered her hand with hers in a gesture of quiet understanding. ‘I never thought I could feel like that about a man and he was back out of my life again before I even realised how much he had got to me. But there was nothing I could do to make things better between us—’

‘How about just keeping your temper and talking to him?’ Bee suggested. ‘That would be a good place to make a start.’

Tawny didn’t trust herself to do that either. How could she talk to a man who would almost certainly want her to go for a termination? Why should she have to justify her desire to bring her baby into the world just because it didn’t suit him? So, she decided to text him the news late that night, saving them both from the awkwardness of a direct confrontation when it was all too likely that either or both of them might say the wrong things.

‘The first test I did was wrong. I am now 14 weeks pregnant,’ she informed him and added, utilising block capitals lest he cherish any doubts, ‘It is YOURS.’

Pressing the send button before she could lose her nerve, she slept that night soothed by the conviction that she had finally bitten the bullet and done what she had to do. Bee was shocked that her sister had decided to break the news in a text but Sergios believed that even that was preferable to keeping her condition a secret.