‘You could invite your sisters to your wedding,’ Iola suggested.
Lucy grimaced. ‘No. I don’t know them and I don’t think Polly knows I’m a mother as well either. It would all be too awkward for a first meeting and in any case they would need more warning than a few days to attend. I’ll call her as soon as we get back from our honeymoon. But my goodness, this is exciting,’ she muttered abstractedly. ‘I wonder what Polly and Ellie are like. Do I look like them? Do you think they have the same father?’
Kreon walked in and Lucy handed him the letter straight away to read. He stared down at the ring on the table and then he lifted it. ‘I gave this to Annabel as an engagement ring. It’s not a real ruby, you know, but it looks well. It was all I could afford at the time—’
Lucy laughed and removed it from his hand. ‘I will still wear it with pride, Dad.’
‘You have your mother’s bright and beautiful smile,’ Kreon told her fondly. ‘But you have a kindness as well, which she never had.’
‘Maybe I inherited that from you,’ Lucy replied, watching her daughter hug her grandfather’s knees and raise her arms to be lifted with all the confidence of a child who knew she could always expect a welcome.
Lucy couldn’t sleep that night. Jax phoned and she told him about Polly’s letter. It shook her that her most driving instinct was to share that very private news with Jax even when he wasn’t around. But then Jax knew better than most about complex family divisions, she reasoned, shying away from the inner awareness that she trusted Jax more and wanted to share everything with him more than she was willing to admit.
Jax urged her to do nothing until he had checked out her sisters and she got cross with him then and told him to mind his own business. Not that he could do anything else, she conceded, when there wasn’t enough personal information in that letter to allow Lucy or indeed Jax to identify either of her sisters or even work out where they lived. Polly had kept the letter short and sweet as a first approach and Lucy’s mind buzzed with conjecture about the siblings she had never met.
Some of her excitement gradually subsided, however, when she thought about Ellie being an actual doctor. Ellie was obviously very well-educated and clever and possibly Polly was as well. Lucy could well be the odd one out, the lesser sister, the oddball who didn’t fit in. That idea troubled Lucy because it seemed to her that that was the story of her entire life: never quite fitting in anywhere. Not with her mother, not in the foster homes, not even in the short-lived adoption she had enjoyed until her adoptive parents died in a car crash and she was sent back into care. And she hadn’t fitted in with Jax either, had she? He had dumped her and walked away without a backward glance. Yet now, he was marrying her. How did that make sense?
He was only marrying her for Bella’s benefit, she reminded herself, feeling her pride sting and her heart sink at that awareness. Could their desire to do well by their daughter be enough to sustain a marriage? Lucy didn’t want make-believe and she didn’t believe in perfect. She believed that she had realistic expectations. But she did desperately want to have a real marriage and be part of a proper family. It was what she had dreamt of all her life and never managed to achieve. Now that Jax was offering her that opportunity she planned to make the most of it.
The morning of the wedding dawned bright and sunny and, having done her hair and her make-up for herself, Lucy donned her gown. It was a perfect fit, swirling round her in delicate shimmering white lace. As a mother she had felt self-conscious about wearing white but she hadn’t felt the need to make a statement either by choosing another colour. In any case she was marrying the man who had become her first lover and the father of her daughter and she wasn’t ashamed of either fact.
A heaving bunch of paparazzi waited behind crash barriers outside the vast Metropolitan Cathedral in the city where the Greek Orthodox ceremony was being held. Lucy was unnerved by the questions shouted and the flash of cameras and she gripped her father’s arm tightly as they negotiated the shallow steps and moved below the arches into the church.
‘Royalty once got married here,’ Kreon murmured with satisfaction. ‘I never dreamt that one day I would see my own child taking her vows below this roof.’
The comment lightened Lucy’s tension as nothing else could have done. ‘Glad I’ve finally done something to make you proud but why are the paparazzi so interested?’
‘You are about to become a member of one of the foremost families in Greece. Naturally, the public want to know who has captured the notorious playboy, Jax Antonakos—’
‘I wouldn’t say captured is the right word,’ Lucy muttered uncomfortably as they paused at the end of the aisle and her father shook out her small train for her and offered his arm to her again with a proud smile.
‘He’s a very fortunate man. I hope he appreciates that. You look really beautiful,’ the older man declared with satisfaction.
Tears stung the backs of Lucy’s eyes because she was touched by her father’s faith in her. She watched Jax turn his handsome dark head and look at her and the ability to breathe died in her throat. The closer she drew to him on their slow walk down the aisle, the more gorgeous he appeared, his dramatic green eyes welded to her approach. Colour warmed her cheeks and tingling heat surged low in her pelvis. She felt as if all her dreams were coming true in that moment and she scolded herself for being too emotional and sentimental. Jax was neither sentimental nor romantic. He didn’t love her and she didn’t love him, she reminded herself firmly, but they had Bella to bind them and, in time, maybe they would find that more than their daughter kept them together.
Jax studied Lucy with heavily lidded eyes, his attention roaming over every exquisite shapely inch of her petite body. The gown was a triumph, a delicate lace affair of simple design that enhanced her slight stature and gave her elegance. He didn’t look to see how his father was reacting. Only minutes earlier he had noticed his father’s absorption in Bella where she sat on Iola’s knee across the aisle. Heracles longed for grandchildren, and the knowledge that he had a little granddaughter he had yet to meet had at the very last minute made him decide to attend the wedding. True, Jax wasn’t expecting his father to be in a party mood because Heracles hated Kreon Thiarkis and hated that his son was marrying Kreon’s daughter, but Jax was relieved that Heracles had put family first and shelved his reservations to share their day.
Some of the ceremony went over Lucy’s head, for which she blamed Jax, who had said he was too busy to attend a rehearsal at the cathedral when the services of an interpreter had been available. She concentrated on the simple Greek words that she knew and smiled nervously up at Jax when he slid the ring onto her finger. Their eyes met and the burn inside her spread like wild fire. It was utterly inappropriate but she had never wanted so badly to be kissed. Jax angled his arrogant dark head back and gave her a teasing smile of naked challenge and she went for it as she had always gone for it when he egged her on. She stretched up awkwardly in her very high heels, her hands clutching at his arms to steady herself, and still she wasn’t tall enough.
With a husky sound of sensual amusement, Jax gathered her up and raised her to his level to taste her lush parted lips for himself. And for a split second, Lucy forgot everything. She forgot that she was in public, she forgot the guests shifting in their seats and the imposing robed Archbishop who had conducted the service. The taste of Jax’s mouth was like a shaft of sunlight bursting inside her after a long winter. It charged her up, rendered her helpless with longing, and the plunge of his tongue into the moist interior of her mouth only multiplied the explosive effect of that kiss on her body. Her heart hammered, her pulses raced as Jax slowly slid her down his lean, powerful frame to stand on her own feet again.
She
