lower neckline than she liked, but undeniably elegant.
‘Wear your diamonds,’ Xan advised, emerging from the bathroom in all his naked glory, so tall and bronzed with powerful pectorals and taut ropes of muscle visible across his flat abdomen.
With difficulty, Elvi dragged her eyes from that view, her body uncomfortably warm despite the air conditioning. ‘They’re not my diamonds—’
‘I bought them for you.’
‘I don’t want them.’
‘But you can wear them when I tell you to,’ Xan cut in, flipping open the jewel case to extract the necklace and anchor it round her throat while she struggled to lift her hair out of his path.
She had sworn she would not do as she was told but here she was doing it like everyone else around Xan, Elvi reflected angrily. ‘I’m leaving them behind when we part—’
Xan shrugged an indifferent shoulder. ‘And when do you think that might be?’
‘A week?’ Elvi looked at him hopefully.
And without warning, Xan felt a surge of rage splinter through him. It was that hopeful look that implied that she could not wait to regain her freedom and escape him. A woman had never ever shown Xan that expression before.
‘No chance,’ he countered succinctly, his attention involuntarily lingering on the voluptuous display of her breasts in the dress. It wasn’t so much that the neckline was too low as that she had rather more than could be easily contained.
‘My face is at this level,’ Elvi told him thinly, all too well aware of where his scrutiny had strayed.
‘Obviously I’m going to look... I love your curves,’ Xan retorted squarely. ‘But I think you should change into another dress. I don’t want anyone else looking.’
Thoroughly irritated by being asked to change when she was fully dressed, but disliking even more having her chest on display, Elvi stepped back into the built-in closet where her clothing had been hung to rifle through the selection for another option. She yanked out the blue dress she had worn for the party he had taken her to and dug out a different bra to go with it, disappearing into the bathroom for the exchange, tossing over her shoulder, ‘I don’t see why it should bother you if anyone did look!’
Xan compressed his wide sensual mouth while he thought about that. He didn’t know why the idea bothered him, but it did. Her glorious hourglass shape was eye-catching and he didn’t want to share it. Fortunately, she was not one of those women, and he had met quite a few, who deliberately exposed as much flesh as possible in the hope of attracting more male attention.
‘Much better,’ Xan pronounced when she reappeared, flushed and slightly tumbled, to settle exasperated eyes on him. ‘I hope the swimwear you have isn’t too revealing—’
Elvi rolled her eyes as she stepped through the doorway into the corridor ahead of him. Even the most modestly cut swimwear made her look like an old-style pin-up girl, a fact that had put her off swimming sessions at a young age. ‘So, interestingly, you have a prudish streak too,’ she remarked snidely.
Still insulted by her enthusiasm for leaving him to return to her workaday, poverty-stricken existence, Xan refused to rise to the bait.
Downstairs, a crowd of guests were enjoying pre-dinner drinks and Elvi was introduced to Xan’s relations. The bride-to-be, Delphina, was a pretty brunette with a ridiculously shy version of Xan’s eyes while her mother was a brassy blonde, who loosed a sarcastic laugh of disbelief when Elvi, asked what she did for a living, mentioned her most recent employment in a craft shop.
‘You see, Callista,’ Xan murmured in the mildest of tones. ‘Some women do choose to work for a living.’
‘I would just have ignored her,’ Elvi whispered in reproof as they moved away.
‘I’m not a fan of turning the other cheek,’ Xan retorted crisply. ‘Callista lives off the rich men she sleeps with and she had no business sneering at you. It’s a wonder Delphina has turned out as well as she has.’
‘Sleeping with rich men to get by sounds very much like work to me,’ Elvi dared.
Xan froze and glanced down at her with a sudden frown.
‘Oh, I wasn’t getting at you,’ Elvi said with mock innocence. ‘After all, I did it to keep my mother out of prison and off drink, which is rather different.’
‘Skase!’ Xan shot down at her in a raw undertone.
‘Meaning?’
‘Shut up...drop the subject,’ Xan bit out furiously as he leant down to her level.
‘Well, you really can’t go around with that “one rule for me but a different rule for everyone else” take on everything,’ Elvi pointed out helplessly.
‘I can do whatever I like—’
‘And it’s thoroughly bad for you,’ Elvi told him firmly.
Xan swore under his breath, inflamed by her sheer nerve. Why didn’t she worry about offending him, as other women did? He stood by watching his mother introduce Elvi to his remaining sisters, noticing how animated the conversation between them all became. Of course, he should’ve expected that, he told himself calmingly. His sisters all lived in the real world, unlike his former stepmother, Callista. One sister was an engineer with her own company, another was a doctor, the third a happy housewife with four children, two of which were very cute five-year-old female twins. Another and stronger generation of his family, he labelled with satisfaction, for not one of his siblings exhibited the money-grabbing greed of his former stepmothers. Yes, he had bought them all houses and financed their business projects, but essentially his brothers and sisters were independent, falling back on his wealth only in times of misfortune.
They sat down to dinner. By that stage it was clear to Xan that Elvi had gone down like a prize trophy with his family because his mother was pumping her about her love of dogs, while the wretched untrained little beasts formed begging round their feet, and his sisters were chattering to Elvi as though she were one of the family. It was her friendly gene, Xan decided, only becoming perversely annoyed when Elvi disappeared off to see his mother’s latest craft project, which he knew would be an absolute disaster. Ariadne Ziakis might be the acclaimed author of several very weighty archaeology tomes and a professor in her university department, but she was not talented with her hands.
‘I was doing the stitch wrong!’ his mother proclaimed when she returned to the table to drink her coffee. ‘And this wonderful girl showed me how to do it and it was so easy when you know how...’
Ne...yes, Elvi went down with the family like award-winning chocolate.
Tobias, always timid, confided in Elvi about his latest relationship breakdown, when he could barely bring himself to acknowledge that he was gay to Xan’s face. Lukas pontificated happily about worldly indifference to the suffering of refugees and revealed that he had met the woman he hoped to marry. One sister revealed that she was pregnant again, another admitted to a serious boyfriend. Xan watched in silent astonishment while his family opened up to Elvi in a way they never did with him. Delphina related the entire story of her humdrum relationship with Takis in the kind of detail that would send most
