CHAPTER EIGHT
THE RING WAS a glittering band of diamonds and the silvery shoes which matched her wedding dress had racy scarlet soles. Ellie touched her fingertips to her professionally styled hair, which had been snipped and blow-dried. She looked like a bride, all right, but a magazine version of a bride—untraditional and slightly edgy. The silver dress and scarlet pashmina gave her a sophisticated patina she wasn’t used to and projected an image which wasn’t really her. But the unfamiliar sleekness of her appearance did nothing to subdue the butterflies which were swarming in her stomach. They’d been building in numbers ever since she and Alek had said their vows earlier, with Vasos and another Sarantos employee standing as their only witnesses.
Strange to believe they were now man and wife—and that fifty of Alek’s closest friends were assembling at the upmarket restaurant they’d chosen to stage their wedding party. And if it felt like a sham, that’s because it was.
And yet...
Yet...
She stared down at her sparkling wedding band. When he’d kissed her so passionately in Bond Street—hadn’t that felt like something? Even though she’d tried telling herself that he’d only done it to make a point, that hadn’t been enough to dull her reaction to him. She had nearly gone up in flames as sexual hunger had overpowered her and a wave of emotion had crashed over her with such force that she’d felt positively weak afterwards. It was as if the rest of the world hadn’t existed in those few minutes afterwards, and wasn’t that...dangerous?
The peremptory knock on her bedroom door broke into her thoughts and she opened it to find Alek standing there—broodingly handsome in his beautifully cut wedding suit, with a tie the colour of storm clouds.
‘Ready?’ he questioned.
She told herself she wasn’t waiting for him to comment on her appearance—but what else would account for the sudden plummeting of her heart? She’d blamed pre-wedding jitters for his failure to compliment her the first time he’d seen her in her wedding dress. But now that they were man and wife, surely he could have said something. Had she secretly been longing for his eyes to light up and him to tell her that she made a halfway passable bride? Or was she hoping he’d make another pass at her, only this time she might not get so angry with him? She might just let him carry on...and they could consummate their marriage and satisfy the law, as well as their hungry bodies.
She swallowed. Yes. If the truth be known, she had wanted exactly that. From the time they’d returned from that shopping trip right up to the brief civil ceremony this morning, she’d been like a cat on a hot tin roof. She’d been convinced he would try to renegotiate the separate bedrooms rule, but she had been wrong. Despite her feisty words, he must have known from the way she’d responded to his kiss that she’d changed her mind. That all he needed to do was to kiss her one more time and she would be his. But Alek wasn’t a man whose behaviour you could predict. It felt as if he had been deliberately keeping his distance from her ever since. Skirting around her as if she were some unexploded device he didn’t dare approach. Even when he’d put the ring on her finger this morning in front of the registrar, she had received nothing more than a cool and perfunctory kiss on each cheek.
She gave him her best waitress smile. ‘Yes, I’m ready.’
‘Then let’s go.’
She felt sick with nerves at the thought of meeting all his friends, especially since the only person she’d invited was Bridget, who wasn’t able to attend because the new assistant still wasn’t confident enough to be left on her own. Ellie picked up her handbag. She’d thought about inviting some of her New Forest friends, but how to go about explaining why she was marrying a man who was little more than a stranger to her? Wouldn’t one of her girlfriends quickly suss that it was odd not to be giggling and cuddling up to a man you were planning to spend the rest of your life with? No. She didn’t want pity or a well-meaning mate trying to talk her out of what was the only sensible solution to her predicament. She was going to have to go it alone. To be at her sparkling best and not let any of her insecurities show. She was going to have to make the marriage look as real as possible to his friends—and surely that wasn’t beyond her capabilities to play a convincing part in front of people who didn’t know her?
‘Remind me again who’s going,’ she said as their car began to slip through the early evening traffic.
‘Niccolò and Alannah—property tycoon and interior designer,’ he said. ‘Luis and Carly—he’s the ex world champion racing driver and she’s his medic wife. Oh, and Murat.’
Ellie forced a smile. Didn’t he know any normal people? ‘The Sultan?’
‘That’s right. And because of that, security will be tight.’
‘You mean, I’ll be frisked going into my own wedding party?’
He’d been staring out of the window and drumming his fingertips over one taut thigh and Ellie wished he’d say something equally flippant—anything to dispel this weird atmosphere between them. But when he spoke it was merely to resume a clipped tally of the guest list. ‘There are people flying in from Paris, New York, Rome, Sicily—’
‘And Greece, of course?’ she prompted.
He shook his head. ‘No. Not Greece.’
‘But...that’s where you come from.’
‘So what? I left there a long time ago, and rarely visit these days.’
‘But—’
‘Look, can we just dispense with the interrogation, Ellie?’ he interrupted coolly. ‘I’m not really inclined to answer any more questions and, anyway, we’re here.’
‘Of course,’ she said, quickly turning her head to look out of the window.
Alek felt a pang of guilt as he saw her silvery shoulders tense up. Okay, maybe he had been short with her but she needed to realise that being questioned like that wasn’t his idea of fun. His mouth flattened. But what had he expected? Wasn’t this what happened when you spent prolonged time with a woman? They felt it gave them the right to chip away at things. To quiz you about stuff you didn’t want to talk about, even when you made it clear that a subject was deliberately off limits.
He’d never lived with anyone before Ellie. He’d never given a home to a second toothbrush, nor had to clear out space in his closet. Even though they had their own rooms, sometimes it felt as if it were impossible to get away from her. And the stupid thing was that he didn’t want to get away from her. He wanted to get closer, even though instinct was telling him that was a bad idea. She was a constant temptation. She made him want her all the time, even though she didn’t flirt with him. And wasn’t even that a turn on? She was there in the morning before he left for work, all bright-eyed and smiling as she sat drinking her ginger tea. Just as she was there at night when he got home, offering to pour him a drink, telling him that she’d started experimenting with cooking and would he like to try some? She’d asked him for tips on how to cook the aubergine dish and he had found himself leaning dangerously close to her while she stirred something in a pot, tempted to kiss the bare neck which was a few tempting inches away from him. Slowly and very subtly her presence was driving him mad. Mostly, it was driving him mad because he wanted her—and he had no one to blame but himself.
That hot-headed kiss outside the jewellers had been intended as
