Modern Romance - The Best of the Year

‘You’re so honest sometimes you terrify me, glyka mou,’ Acheron confided ruefully. ‘And if this honeymoon is going to work, we will each have to compromise our most cherished ideals.’

* * *

Acheron peered down at the red-rose tattoo adorning Tabby’s slender arm with a frown and stroked a finger gently across it. ‘The skin underneath feels rough and the design is already blurred. The tattooist must have damaged your skin.’

Tabby gritted her teeth, relaxation abandoned as she yanked her arm free of his light hold. ‘Don’t touch me there.’

Lustrous dark golden eyes scrutinised her from below inky-black lashes. ‘Why not?’

‘Are we about to have another one of those conversations in which you suggest that I go for laser treatment to have it removed?’ Tabby condemned, her small face taut and pale as she decided it was time to tell him the truth, which would surely conclude his interest in the subject. ‘If you must know, I won’t have it removed because it’s covering up an ugly scar. In fact, the scar was there first. The tattooist did a marvellous job but he couldn’t have made the ink design perfect when my skin was far from perfect to begin with.’

His lean dark features were frowning now. ‘What sort of a scar?’

‘Take it from me...you really don’t want to know,’ Tabby told him warningly, pulling away from him to scramble to her feet in the shade of the pine trees that overhung the pinkish pale sand. After checking that Amber still lay splayed out on her blanket in sleeping abandonment, her olive-skinned chubby limbs protruding starfish fashion from her white broderie anglaise playsuit, her rosebud mouth soft and relaxed, Tabby stalked on down the beach, a slight figure clad in shorts and a bikini top.

Acheron, she thought, her hands knotting into fists, her teeth grinding together in angry frustration. There were times she wanted to throw him into the sea from a great height. She had thought she was the nosy one but he didn’t quit once he was on a trail either. Even worse, he was a domineering perfectionist. Although he wasn’t planning to spend the rest of his life with her and Amber, he still wanted to persuade her that she should have the tattoo removed and he was as relentless as a steam roller running down a hill. At breakfast he had asked her if she would be happy for Amber to get something similar done, and Tabby had been betrayed into looking in dismay at Amber’s smooth soft forearm and Acheron, being Acheron, had noticed that revealing appraisal.

‘So, you do regret getting it done,’ he had exclaimed with satisfaction.

Yes, Acheron had some infuriating traits, she acknowledged, but over the past month in Sardinia he had also been a highly entertaining companion, a very sexy lover and a patient and caring father figure for Amber. At that moment, Tabby couldn’t begin to work out how an entire four weeks had flashed past faster than the speed of light. The first week had been a challenge while she was still hobbling round with a stick and pretty much sentenced to passing her time at the beach house. But once her ankle had healed, they had begun to go out and about.

Snapshots of special moments they had shared filled her memory with more comforting images. They had climbed the massive staircase to the Bastione terrace to see the amazing panoramic view of the rooftops of Calgiari. While she was still wheezing from the climb and overheated from the sun, he had told her that there was actually a lift but that he had assumed that she would enjoy the full tourist experience more. It had taken several cocktails and the cooling effect of the lovely breeze on the terrace before she had forgiven him, and if she was truthful her resistance had only truly melted when he slid long brown fingers into hers in the lift on the way down again.

They had made an evening visit to Castelsardo, a beautiful village dominated by a magical citadel all lit up at night, to enjoy live music in the piazza. Amber had adored all the noise and bustle going on around her and Acheron had enjoyed the baby’s bright-eyed fascination.

The following night, however, they had sought out more adult fun, dancing until dawn at the Billionaire club where Tabby had felt distinctly overshadowed by the number of gorgeous women, sleek and deadly as sharks, cruising for a wealthy hook-up. That Ash had acted as if he only had eyes for her and had kissed her passionately on the dance floor had done much to lift her self-esteem.

Memory after memory was now tumbling inside Tabby’s head. For forty-eight hours they had sailed a yacht round the national park of La Maddalena, a group of protected and largely uninhabited islands teeming with flora and wildlife. The last night they had skinny dipped in a deserted cove and made love until the sun went down. Exhausted, she had wakened to find Acheron barbecuing their evening meal, stunning dark golden eyes smiling lazily at her and making her heart somersault like a trapeze artist.

Of course, they had done all the usual things as well, like strolling round the famous boutiques on the Costa Smeralda, an activity or a lack of activity that Acheron was astounded to discover bored his bride to tears.

‘But you must want me to buy you something,’ he had protested. ‘You must have seen something you liked. You do realise that the only thing I’ve bought you since we arrived is that bed linen?’

Tabby had seen the exquisite bed linen in an upmarket handicrafts shop and her childhood memories of being clumsy with a needle and thread had given her a true appreciation of the amount of skill involved in producing such beautiful embroidery. That had been a purchase to treasure, a gift she truly loved, and only later had it occurred to her that she would never see that winter-weight linen spread across a bed that she shared with Acheron and that it would inevitably adorn a bed she slept in alone. Once the summer was over, their marriage would be history.

But then while she had known they would be faking their honeymoon and had dutifully posed with him for a persistent paparazzo, who had followed them round Porto Cervo, she had not appreciated the lengths Acheron might go to in making their relationship look genuine from the inside and the outside. So, if occasionally she got a little confused and thought about him as if he were her real husband, who could blame her for making that mistake?

Or for falling madly and irrevocably in love with him during the process, she reasoned wretchedly. After all, no man had ever treated her as well as he did, no man had ever made her so happy either, and only he had ever made love to her several times a day, every day, as if she were indeed the hottest, sexiest woman on the planet. Naturally her emotions had got involved and she suppressed them as best she could, knowing that the last thing Acheron required from her was angst and a broken heart, which would make him feel guilty and uncomfortable.

It wasn’t his fault she had fallen for him either. It certainly wasn’t as though he had misled her with promises about the future. In fact, right from the outset she had known that there was no future for them. He had never made any bones about that. Once they had succeeded to legally adopt Amber, their supposed marriage would be left to wither and die. Tabby would make a new life with the little girl she loved while she assumed Acheron would return to his workaholic, womanising existence. Would she ever see him again after the divorce? As she confronted that bleak prospect an agonising shard of pain slivered through Tabby and left a deep anguished ache in its wake. Would Acheron want to retain even the most distant relationship with Amber? Or would he decide on a clean break and act as if Amber didn’t exist?

Acheron crossed the beach, noting how Tabby’s figure had rounded out once she was eating decent food, recalling with quiet satisfaction that she no longer bit her nails—small changes that he valued.

‘How did you get the scar concealed by the tattoo?’ he demanded obstinately, interrupting Tabby’s reverie and shooting her back to the present by wrapping both arms round her from behind, carefully preventing her from storming off again. ‘Were you involved in an accident?’

‘No...it wasn’t an accident,’ Tabby admitted, past recollections making her skin turn suddenly cold and clammy in spite of the heat of the sun.

He was being supportive, she reminded herself doggedly, guilt biting into her former annoyance with him. When Amber had cried half the night because she was teething and her gums were sore, Acheron had been right there beside her, helping to distract the little girl and calm her down enough to sleep again. She had not expected supportiveness from Acheron but his interest in Amber was anything but half-hearted. When it came to childcare, he took the rough with the smooth, serenely accepting that children weren’t always sunny and smiling.

The new nanny currently working with Melinda was called Teresa, a warm, chattering Italian woman whose main source of interest was her charge. Within a week the English nanny would be leaving to take up a permanent position with a family in London.

‘Tabby...I asked you a question,’ Acheron reminded her with deeply unwelcome persistence. ‘You said you didn’t get the scar in an accident, so—’

Dredged from the teeming tumult of her frantic attempt to think about just about anything other than the past he was trying to dig up, Tabby lifted her head high and looked out to sea. ‘My mother burned me with a hot iron because I knocked over a carton of milk,’ she confessed without any expression at all.

‘Thee mou...’ Acheron growled in stricken disbelief, spinning her round to look at her pale set face and the yawning hurt still lingering in her violet eyes.

‘I was never allowed to be with either of my parents unsupervised again after that,’ she explained woodenly. ‘My mother went to prison for burning me and I never saw either of them again.’

Bewildered by the great surge of ferocious anger welling up inside him, Acheron crushed her slight body to his, both arms wrapping tightly round her. For some reason he registered that he was feeling sick and his hands weren’t quite steady, and in that instant some inexplicable deep need that disturbed him was making it impossible for him not to touch her. ‘That must’ve been a relief.’

‘No, it wasn’t. I loved them. They weren’t very lovable people but they were all I had,’ Tabby admitted thickly, her dry throat scratching over the words as if she was reluctant to voice them. She had learned as a young child that loving gestures would be rejected but now more than anything in the world she wanted to wrap her arms round Acheron and take full advantage of the comfort he was clumsily trying to offer her, only that pattern of early rejection and knowledge of how abandonment felt kept her body rigid and uninviting in the circle of his arms.

‘I understand that,’ Acheron breathed in a raw driven undertone. ‘I rarely saw my mother but I still idolised her—’

‘What a pair we are!’ Tabby sniffed, her tension suddenly giving way as tears stung her eyes and overflowed, her overloaded reaction to having had to explain and indeed relive what she never, ever talked about to anyone.

Acheron stared down at her tear-stained visage, pale below his bronzed skin, his strong facial bones forbiddingly set. ‘I can’t bear to think of you being hurt like that, yineka mou—’

‘Don’t...don’t talk about it!’ Tabby urged feverishly. ‘I try never to think about it but every time I saw the scar in the mirror as a teenager, I remembered it, and sometimes people asked what had happened to me. That’s why I got the tattoo...to cover it up, hide it.’

‘Then wear that tattoo with pride. It’s a survival badge,’ Acheron informed her with hard satisfaction. ‘I wish you’d explained weeks ago but I understand now why you didn’t.’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, let’s talk about something more cheerful!’ Tabby pleaded. ‘Tell me something about you. I mean, you must have some happy childhood memories of your mother?’

Acheron closed an arm round her slight shoulders to press her back across the beach towards Amber. ‘The night before my first day at school she presented me with a fantastically expensive pen engraved with my name. Of course, I was only allowed to use a pencil in class but naturally that didn’t occur to her. She was very fond of flamboyant gestures, always telling me that only the very best was good enough for a Dimitrakos—’

‘Maybe that was how she was brought up,’ Tabby suggested quietly. ‘But you still haven’t explained why that pen made you happy.’

‘Because generally she ignored me but that particular week she was fresh out of rehab and engaged in turning over a new leaf and it was the one and only time she made me feel that I genuinely mattered to her. She even gave me a whole speech about education being the most important thing in my life...that from a woman who dropped out of school as a teenager and couldn’t read anything more challenging than a magazine,’ he told her wryly.

‘Do you still have the pen?’

‘I think it was stolen.’ He sent her a rueful charismatic smile that tilted her heart inside her chest and interfered with her breathing. ‘But at least I have that one perfect moment to remember her by.’

* * *

Acheron could not relax until he had commissioned a special piece of jewellery for Tabby’s upcoming birthday, which surprisingly fell in the same week as his own. That achieved, he worried about having taken that much trouble over a gift. What was wrong with him? What sort of man went to such lengths for a wife he was planning to divorce? Keep it cool, a little voice chimed in the back of his uneasy mind. But it had proved impossible to play it cool when confronted with the harsh reality of Tabby’s childhood experiences, which had had the unexpected effect of showing Acheron that he had a good deal less to be bitter about with regard to his own. His mother had been a neglectful, selfish and inadequate parent but even at her worst he had never doubted that she loved him. And possibly, but for the malicious machinations of a third party, his father might have learned to love and appreciate him as well...

The constant flow of such unfamiliar thoughts assailing him kept him quiet over dinner. Aware of Tabby’s anxious gaze, he was maddened by the knowledge that he wasn’t feeling like himself any more and that, even in the midst of that disorientating experience, withdrawing his attention from her could make him feel guilty. Never a fan of great inner debates, or even in the habit of staging them, he was exasperated and bewildered by the emotions Tabby constantly churned up inside him. She was too intense, too rich for his blood. He needed to take a step back, he decided abruptly; he needed some distance, and the instant he made that decision he felt better and back in control again.

‘I have to go away on business for a couple of days,’ Acheron volunteered as he strode out of the bathroom, a towel negligently wrapped round his lean, muscular body. His black hair tousled and damp, his lean, devastatingly handsome face clean-shaven, he looked amazing and Tabby’s mouth ran dry before she could even process what he had said.

Realising that he was leaving her, Tabby went rigid and then scolded herself because he had done very little work in recent weeks and could hardly be expected to maintain that lifestyle indefinitely. No, she had been spoilt by his constant company and had to learn fast how to adapt to his absence. Was that why he had been so quiet and distant over dinner? Had he worried about her reaction? Well, it was time to show him that she was strong and not the complaining type.

‘I’ll miss you, but we’ll be fine,’ she responded lightly.

Acheron ground his teeth together, having expected her to object or even offer to travel with him. This was definitely a moment when he had believed she would cling and make him feel suffocated. He watched her clamber into bed, slender as a willow wand, the modest nightdress concealing the hot, secret places he loved, and lust kicked in so fast he felt dizzy with it. Lustrous dark eyes veiling, he discarded the towel, doused the lights and joined her. Not tonight, he thought grimly, as though he was fighting a battle; tonight he could get by without her.

Eyes sparkling in the moonlight, Tabby rolled over to Acheron’s side of the bed and ran delicate fingers hungrily across a hair-roughened thigh while her hair trailed over his pelvis.

Acheron closed his eyes in despair. He could always lie back and think of Greece. If he said no like a frightened virgin, he would probably upset her, and there was no point doing that, was there? Why risk upsetting her? She found his swelling shaft with her mouth, and his hips shifted upward in helpless encouragement. It crossed his mind that the divorce might upset her because she acted as if she was fond of him, looked at him as if he was special, dived on him in bed if he didn’t dive on her first, never missed a chance to put her arms round him...although strangely not this afternoon on the beach when he had put his arms round her in an effort to offer sympathy for what his thoughtless questions had made her cruelly relive. A particularly strong wave of pleasure blanked out the subsequent thought about why she might not have responded, yet another thought he didn’t want to have. All that sentimental stuff, he thought grimly—he never had been any good at that. He had probably been clumsy.

Afterwards, Acheron didn’t hold her the way he usually did, and Tabby felt cold inside and abandoned. She curled up on her side, hating him, loving him, wanting him, fretting and reckoning that love was the worst torture in existence for a woman. There was no point always wanting what he wouldn’t give her, didn’t even want to give her, she reflected painfully. Their divorce was not only written in the stars but also written into a pre-nuptial contract from which there would be no escape.

And maybe he still had feelings for Kasma, whom he would not discuss although she had on several occasions worked the conversation helpfully round in that direction to give him an easy opening. But trying to get Acheron to talk about something he didn’t want to talk about was like trying to get blood out of a stone. In her experience though, people only avoided topics that embarrassed or troubled them, so his failed relationship with Kasma must have gone deep indeed to leave behind such conspicuous and quite uncharacteristic sensitivity...

* * *

The following morning, Tabby drifted out of sleep to discover that Acheron had made an early departure and without leaving even a note. She spent a quiet day with Amber and it was the next day before the silence from Acheron began to niggle at her. He didn’t have to stay in touch when he was only planning to be away forty-eight hours, she conceded ruefully, and she was not so needy that she required him to check in with her every day. But as she lay in the bed that felt empty without him the day stretched before Tabby like a blank slate, shorn of anticipation, excitement and happiness.

Thoroughly exasperated with her mood, she went for a shower and got dressed in the bathroom, emerging to catch a glimpse of her reflection in the tall cheval mirror across the bedroom and wonder why she couldn’t see it properly. As she automatically moved closer to see what was amiss with the mirror she realised that someone had written something on it, and she frowned at it in bewilderment.

He’s using you! Tabby was gobsmacked. Why would anyone write that on their mirror for her to see? Clearly it was meant to be personal, and presumably Acheron was the ‘he’ being referred to. What on earth did it mean? Whatever, it really spooked her that someone had come into their bedroom while she was in the bathroom and left a message presumably intended to shock and insult her. After all, only someone in the house could have had access to their room and that knowledge made gooseflesh blossom on her exposed skin.

Without hesitation she lifted the house phone and asked to speak to Ash’s security chief, Dmitri. Almost before she had finished speaking, Dmitri joined her in the room to see the mirror for himself. If his forbidding expression was anything to go by, he took the matter very seriously. Dmitri, however, was a man of few words and she left him to it and went downstairs for breakfast.

CHAPTER TEN

‘CAN I ASK you where you’re planning to go?’ Melinda asked with a sunny smile, joining her at the breakfast table, which she never dared to do when Acheron was around.

‘Into Porto Cervo to shop,’ Tabby admitted. ‘I’m looking for a birthday present.’

‘There’s some great jewellery boutiques...try the Piazzetta delle Chiacchere,’ Melinda advised helpfully.

Tabby nodded, feeling guilty about how much she disliked the curvaceous blonde who would, by the end of the week, mercifully be gone from the household to take up her new appointment. Since Teresa’s arrival and increasing involvement with Amber, Melinda seemed to spend a lot of time hovering unnecessarily and watching their comings and goings. Once, Tabby had even suspected that the blonde was eavesdropping on her and Acheron. No doubt the nanny had now registered that their detached marriage had developed into something closer. Or was that only her own wishful thinking at work? Tabby wondered heavily.

Acheron had been gone only one day and she felt bereft. That was a pretty poor show for a strong, independent woman, she conceded shamefacedly. She missed him so much, and her outlook wasn’t improved by her recollection of his unusual behaviour on that last night they had spent together. He had been silent and moody, extraordinarily uninvolved when she had made love to him, saying nothing, doing nothing, in fact, acting like a right—

‘Miss Barnes?’ Dmitri appeared in the doorway. ‘Could I have a word with you?’

‘Right now?’ Melinda prompted with a sparkling smile that seemed wasted on the granite-faced older man.

‘Now would be a good time,’ Dmitri responded evenly.

Tabby left Teresa in charge of Amber, having decided that dragging the little girl out to trail round the shops during the hottest part of the day would be unwise. The message was still on the mirror when she walked past into the bathroom to renew her lipstick and it made her shiver. He’s using you. Well, as far as their marriage was concerned they were using each other, she told herself doggedly. Although things had changed drastically once they began sharing a bed in reality. Was Acheron only sleeping with her because that intimacy added to the illusion of their having a normal marriage? After all, if he was seen out by the paparazzi with another woman while he was supposed to be a happily married new husband, it wouldn’t look good. So, was she being used on that basis? But how could she call it using when she was in love with him and wanted him to make love to her? Did that make her a silly lovelorn fool? Or was she taking equal advantage of him?

From the instant Dmitri phoned him and broke the news, Acheron hadn’t been able to stay still or think with his usual logic. Gripped by insane impatience and mounting concern, he just wanted to get back to Sardinia and stand watch over Tabby and Amber. Unfortunately for him, getting a last-minute slot for the jet to take off in Athens and jumping the queue took longer than he had envisaged. He cursed the fact that he had left them behind in the first place, cursed his conviction that he should protect Tabby at all costs from what Kasma might do next.

Why had he chosen to leave Tabby when he actually wanted to be with her? What did that say about him? That he couldn’t recognise his own emotions and was prone to running away from what he couldn’t understand? Feelings had never been so intense for him before and he had been torn between a kind of intoxication at the fire of them and a kind of panic at knowing he was out of control. He had never allowed that to happen to him before but he’d had no choice. He had jumped on the panic as an excuse and now he was paying the price. Thee mou, if anything was to happen to them, he brooded darkly, his fists clenching aggressively just as his pilot signalled him from across the VIP lounge that they were good to go.