CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SIX
T HE WEDDING CEREMONY was formal and relatively brief.
‘You look very beautiful,’ Nic murmured in the sunlight on the steps afterwards while the photographer snapped pictures.
‘You don’t need to fake it in private,’ she assured him out of the corner of her smiling lips.
‘You can’t accept a compliment like any other woman?’
‘Not when I’m wracked with nerves, no,’ she conceded in apologetic afterthought.
He steered her through the crush into the beribboned car that would take them back to the house and the reception. ‘I don’t say stuff I don’t mean, not even to fake it,’ Nic censured.
Lexy breathed in deep and slow and scrutinised the platinum wedding ring on her finger because she still felt as though she were figuring in a daydream and that she couldn’t possibly be legally wed to the tall, absolutely gorgeous and very wealthy man beside her.
‘Nothing feels real to me today,’ she said truthfully. ‘I’ve lived a very quiet life and all this—the hype, the fuss, the glitz—it’s totally alien to me.’
‘I only want you to feel comfortable. I can promise you that after today, there will be no hype, no fuss.’
Calming down then, she allowed him to guide her into the house where they had dined the night before, where they greeted guests as they arrived before entering a room the size of a ballroom where the meal was being staged. Caterers were everywhere.
‘Did you invite your father?’ Nic enquired over the first course of their meal.
Lexy froze. ‘No. I contacted him shortly after I had the triplets and he wasn’t interested. In fact, he gave me a lecture about irresponsibility and even though Ezra was still in the special care baby unit, he didn’t want to visit him or even meet his first grandchildren. So, no, I didn’t want to invite him...even though he would probably be very impressed by you because you have status and wealth,’ she completed uncomfortably.
Lean, strong features taut, Nic nodded. ‘I agree with your decision.’
Relieved by that response, she relaxed more. ‘I’ve only got Mel here as a guest and I asked her parents if they wanted to come, but her father doesn’t have any leave left. Really, over the past couple of years, there’s been nobody else close enough to warrant a wedding invitation.’
Nic breathed in deep, carefully choosing his words, although there was a storm brewing inside him that he was holding back. ‘You’ve had a tough time without backup.’
The silence simmered and screamed between them and neither of them attempted to break it with adverse comments. Lexy wanted to ask him what had possessed him when he’d chosen to ignore and deny her situation. Nic wanted to ask her why she hadn’t given him a chance to help her and, even worse, had chosen to lie about having given him that chance when he knew for a fact that she had not.
The wedding speeches were short and soon over. The cake was cut and served and the dancing began. They spent ages socialising before Nic closed his hand over hers and whirled her onto the floor to dance. Initially Lexy was as stiff as a tree trunk in his arms, but he eased her closer until the warmth and strength of him bled through the layers of their clothing and melted the cold knot of indecision inside her. Heat pooled at the heart of her as he moved against her, powerful thighs and narrow hips flexing. Her nipples prickled and tightened and she swallowed hard as her body went off on a wonderland of rediscovery about Nic’s body without any prompting from her. In embarrassment, she tried to suppress her natural reaction to his proximity.
‘Relax,’ he urged huskily as she tensed again. ‘This performance is almost over.’
Yes, it was a performance, she reminded herself grimly, not a real wedding day and she shouldn’t be responding to Nic as if he were a genuine husband or as if they were a couple in love.
Angeliki Bouras slid with a subtle sidewise movement between them. ‘I need a word with you in private,’ she informed Nic without embarrassment, as if it weren’t the slightest bit strange to part the bride and groom on the dance floor.
Irritation assailed Nic. Sometimes, Angeliki had the worst sense of timing, he thought as she urged him out of the ballroom and into Jace’s library across the hall.
‘What is it?’ Nic asked with an impatience he tried to mask out of politeness.
Angeliki smiled wide and bright, tossing her long blonde tresses back over one slim shoulder, dark eyes intent. ‘I felt it was time to give you some advice...now that you’re married without having wanted to get married.’
That latter statement was truer than he wished and Angeliki actually voicing the fact set his teeth on edge. ‘I don’t need advice.’
‘Obviously you got married to secure your children. Three of them— Theos mou , couldn’t she have been less productive?’ Angeliki mocked with a wince of distaste as though fertility were a vulgar topic. ‘So what now? If you’re wondering, I can help.’
‘I’m not in need of any help,’ Nic cut in firmly.
‘If you live with your bride, you’ll be stuck with her,’ Angeliki pointed out. ‘That’s not what you want.’
‘You don’t know what I want,’ Nic sliced in with finality, already swinging round to return to the door and leave her.
‘I’m thinking of what will make you happy,’ Angeliki declared, impressively enough that he turned his head back, warm dark eyes seeking his with sympathy. ‘I advise you to stash your unwanted bride in one of your many houses—say that lovely chateau in France—and leave her there to be Mrs Diamandis on her own. And then you continue with your life just as you like it, your freedom reclaimed.’
Nic frowned, exasperated by her interfering advice. ‘My plans with my wife and children are none of your business, Angeliki. However, your outlook is ridiculously limited. For a start, I have three children who will always be my children and I must act as their father. That’s my role in life. My father didn’t do it for me, but I will not be found lacking in the parental role when it comes to my children,’ he asserted grimly, ignoring her angry glower of dissatisfaction. ‘Excuse me... I should be with my bride.’
Nic appeared beside Lexy again and drew her straight back onto the dance floor. ‘Sorry about that. Angeliki was being a drama queen.’
‘Does she make a habit of that?’
‘More often than I find comfortable. I can still recall her screaming tantrums when we were kids,’ he confided with a chuckle. ‘She prefers to be the centre of attention.’
‘And she’s not likely to get that at our wedding,’ Lexy remarked, wishing he weren’t quite so fond of the beautiful blonde, who could only treat his bride like wallpaper.
Nic drew her close and the ripples of heat filtered through her, relaxing her body again. No matter how hard she tried to stifle her response, it deepened in strength. She stole a glance up at him and his dark eyes were a stunning blaze of gold between dense black lashes and her mouth ran dry, her breath shortening in her tight throat.
With a muttered phrase that could have been an imprecation in his own language, Nic lowered his head. ‘When you look at me like this...’
With scant warning, his mouth crushed hers and she quivered in the shelter of his arms, instinctively pressing closer, shaken to appreciate that he appeared to be as aroused as she was. The press of his long thickness against her abdomen sent a faint shiver rippling through her because it had been so long since she had been touched, so long since that night when she had discovered that she was a much more sexual being than she had ever dreamt. Recollections lingered no matter how hard she tried to shut them down and forget them.
Nic steered her off the floor into the shelter of one of pillars that edged the big room, providing quieter seating areas and shadowy spaces. He spread her back against the pillar and kissed her with a depth of hunger that she was utterly unprepared to meet. Desire melted her like a hot pool of honey spreading in her pelvis.
Nic lifted his head, black hair messily tousled by her roaming fingers. ‘I want you,’ he admitted thickly.
The tension and insecurity she had fought off all day took fire from that blunt admission. It felt really good that he wanted her to such an extent. At that moment, it seemed as though it validated her, made their marriage truly human and more real. The connection that had linked them the night that she had conceived their children was still there in spades and she couldn’t fight it off.
‘Escape is only twenty feet away,’ a familiar voice murmured without any expression at all.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Lexy almost whispered as she jerked her mouth free of Nic’s addictive taste.
From a couple of feet away, his brother, Jace, dealt her a wide smile. ‘You two can leave. You’ve ticked every box. The bride and groom are free to slip away now.’
Her face now hot as hellfire, Lexy swallowed hard.
‘ Seriously , Jace?’ Nic quipped.
‘Rear staircase behind that door at the foot,’ Jace informed his brother. ‘Thought you might not be aware of that exit as you didn’t spend much time here as a boy.’
Nic said something in Greek and grinned wickedly down at her. He bent down and, before she could even guess what he intended to do, he scooped her up into his arms.
‘So discreet,’ Jace teased with sincere amusement.
‘He doesn’t know we’re fake,’ Lexy muttered helplessly as Jace strode down the room like a man on a mission.
‘Doesn’t need to know. He only knows that we’ve had enough of the festivities. And possibly that we can’t keep our hands off each other.’
Speak for yourself, she almost said in disagreement, but he set her down on her feet again on a small landing up a narrow staircase, and while she was striving to muster a sensible thought with which to prop up her sinking dignity, Nic dragged her back into his arms for another hungry, driving kiss that splintered through her trembling length like a bolt of lightning, burning and racing through every nerve ending in her body. His long fingers, his big strong hands ranged over her curves as he bent down to her, and her heart was hammering so hard she was scared that it might pound right out of her chest.
‘Do you want me?’ he breathed raggedly.
And there it was: the opportunity to call a halt. But Lexy was no hypocrite, no liar. ‘I want you,’ she muttered unsteadily, wondering how she could still be that vulnerable, questioning whether a retreat into cold dignity would somehow magically persuade her otherwise. Unfortunately for her, a stronger urge was warring for dominance inside her. It was a crazy what the hell? feeling, absolutely new to her sane and sensible self.
Unmistakeable satisfaction slashed Nic’s wide sensual mouth and his dark golden eyes glimmered bright with admiration. ‘You didn’t lie, play games—’
‘I don’t ,’ she cut in as he urged her up the stairs.
As she paused at the top of the steps to catch her breath, he captured her parted lips afresh and her temperature rocketed, desire coiled up tight within her, urging her to reach up and frame his lean, dark face with her hands. He lifted her off her feet and into his arms again, striding down a wide, imposing hallway full of paintings. ‘Yaya’s art gallery,’ he proffered with humorous brevity as he thrust wide a door into a bedroom.
It contained a massive bed decked out in pristine white sheets. Rice and almonds and flower buds were scattered across it.
‘Rice and almonds for happiness and prosperity,’ Nic informed her as he shook the sheet clear of the offerings. ‘Yaya likes the ancient traditions.’
‘Well, you don’t really need to be hoping for the prosperity,’ Lexy pointed out.
Nic flung back his darkly handsome head and laughed outright at that truth. Heavens, he was breathtaking in that moment, so gorgeous, she couldn’t credit that he was now her husband. But her husband for how long? Lexy squashed that thought, all of a quiver with conflicting emotions and feelings, her body taut. There was a little voice in the back of her head warning her that, married or otherwise, she should not be even considering sharing a bed again with the father of her children. Lifting her chin, she glanced across the room at him, and common sense wasn’t worth anything when he was still her fantasy, she conceded ruefully.
There had been little to celebrate beyond the health and happiness of her children in the months since they had last been together. All that time she had felt as though she were simply running to keep up and by the end of it, after infinite months empty of the smallest adult fun, she had felt as old as the hills. And there Nic Diamandis stood, jerking loose his bow tie, toeing off his shoes, with the kind of confident insouciance that should have set her on fire with rage and resentment...only it didn’t. Everything about Nic Diamandis set her on fire sexually. That calm, innate assurance, that cool, sophisticated edge, that deep-pitched sonorous drawl of his, the devastating good looks, not even to mention the unexpected kindness and understanding he could give. She told herself that she was doing something for her , not for him, not for the children, something just purely for her.
After all, why would she care about how he felt? This guy who had used her to provide him with entertainment on a snowy, forgotten night in Yorkshire? That was all ‘they’ had been, no matter how hard she had tried to believe otherwise in the disillusioning months that had followed. She could use him as well to fill the emptiness inside her chest, the loneliness that sometimes bit very deep. He didn’t need to know that she needed more, cared more than that. And in addition, she was far from stupid, well aware that an unconsummated marriage could be legally deemed to be no marriage at all when it came to severing those ties. Lawyers for rich people were paid to be very clever and only a foolish woman would ignore that reality with a divorce on the horizon.
‘You’re a thousand miles away...’ Nic’s reflection appeared behind her in the cheval mirror she had moved towards and he looked like a tall, strong, shirt-clad monolith in the dimness of the shaded windows. Tall enough to touch the sky, she would’ve thought as a child. But she was no longer a child and the sheer size and breadth, the inherent strength of him sent a sensual shiver through her taut frame. ‘Do you need help to get out of the dress?’
‘What do you think?’ Lexy almost whispered, her mouth drying up again as he glanced back at the complex lacing and hook arrangements that had fitted her into her fantasy gown. She didn’t know whether it was a curse or a blessing that it had not crossed her mind once that her bridegroom would have to help her get out of her dress again. It was that platonic arrangement they had agreed and where was that now?
Nic laughed again. ‘I think you’d have to be a contortionist to get out of it alone.’
The first few hooks began to loosen the fit of the gown. He might have big hands, but he had precise fingers, she recognised as the lacing tightness round her ribcage eased, fingertips swiped smoothly across her shoulders, and without warning the whole dress was dropping, pooling round her feet like a statement, leaving her clad in the tasteful bits of nothing much that were all the dress design had allowed.
‘A garter.’
Nic knelt down behind her, making her ludicrously aware of her wispy lace strapless bra and knickers and the pull-up pale stockings, over one of which was layered a ‘something blue garter’, a gift from Mel, even though her friend was aware that she was not a real bride. Mel, as Lexy had become, was a cynic and had agreed that this might be Lexy’s only ever wedding.
‘I didn’t think you’d even be wearing one.’
‘You don’t know that much about me,’ Lexy said, enjoying that truth, enjoying that he didn’t know how much tougher she had got, how much she had changed from that gentle, forgiving person she had once been.
‘I’m willing to learn,’ Nic husked, trailing the garter down to a dainty ankle, freeing her foot from her shoe to thread it off, pausing only to gently extract her other foot from its shoe. Had she been the kind of woman who still believed in her fairy-tale prince she would have been swooning, weak at the knees from his aplomb and smooth words. Only now she wasn’t that na?ve.
He vaulted upright again, snapped loose her bra and it fell away. His hands rose to cup her breasts, her nipples straining in the cooler air...and from his touch. She realised that as she had stood there thinking ever more bitter thoughts, on one level she had been trying to talk herself out of getting intimate with him again. He filled her with indecision and she was not an indecisive woman. Yet still her body hummed and throbbed that close to him, pulsing with a hunger she could not suppress, and that was a humbling acknowledgement.
Slowly, very slowly, as though he knew what was inside her head, Nic turned her round and claimed her parted lips again, swallowing what she might have said, utterly silencing whatever indecisive thoughts she might still have been feeling in his radius. When he kissed her, when he held her close, there was only him and the wild, insane attraction of him, and he drew her down on the bed with gentle hands. In that instant she was lost because he didn’t push, he didn’t demand, he was everything that she remembered...the guy who cared about how she felt.
The span of his hands over her breasts, which were fuller and rather less pert than they had once been, turned her inside out with anticipation. She was all woman, all in the control of desire in an instant, wanting, needing what he could offer. Her nipples tingled and prickled, hunger like a dam burst threatening to break penned up within her, so that her spine arched to deepen that pressure and a faint moan escaped her.
‘I’ve never wanted any woman the way I’ve wanted you,’ Nic husked.
And she didn’t believe him, didn’t care because she wanted him more than her next meal, which in times gone by, when she had gone hungry for her children, meant more than he could ever have appreciated in his gilded world of privilege and excess. He was laying her down on the bed and she almost felt like telling him that subtlety of the type he was offering was unnecessary because she was definitely a sure thing. He was the guy that had taught her, that very first night they had been together, that even when she was sore and exhausted, she could still want him with the fire of a thousand suns. And he hadn’t been careful and, fool that she had been in her innocence of what a disaster an unplanned pregnancy could be, she had acquiesced. In reality, Nic Diamandis was only reaping the seeds he had sown.
‘I want you too,’ she admitted without the smallest embarrassment, watching him peel off his shirt, revealing a chest that belonged in a sculpture gallery, lean, honed abs and tight, taut musculature of the type rarely seen in ordinary men. No, there was nothing ordinary about Nic Diamandis, he was absolutely the dream and the fantasy she remembered, and no longer did she marvel that she had succumbed to all that pure, bronzed temptation. So what if she was looking at him as a sex object? Hadn’t that only been how he must have viewed her that long ago night?
‘I wasn’t expecting you to be so...open,’ he muttered unevenly.
‘I’m not the same woman you met eighteen months ago,’ she warned him.
‘I see that,’ he conceded, an uneasiness to the admission that pulled at her, making her wonder what he was thinking until she reminded herself that she really shouldn’t care at all what he was thinking. After all, he was her husband now and where his thoughts or his heart went now was no business of hers because she wasn’t looking for him to love her or essentially care for her. She was expecting him only to help care for their children and ensure a secure future for her and the kids. All that romantic stuff? She was done with that. The romance stuff had burned her down to the bone because she had fallen in love with a guy who truly didn’t exist, not a guy who would have shied away from her and turned his back when she’d turned up inconveniently pregnant and desperate.
He unbelted his narrow-cut trousers and she rejoiced in his masculine beauty like a groupie, ashamed of herself and yet still wanting him so much. Bitterness and resentment didn’t provide the barrier she had expected, she conceded ruefully, heat pulsing at the heart of her, because surely no woman had ever reasonably wanted a man as much as she still wanted him? The trousers dropped, so did the boxers and she was enthralled, because these views were what she had not seen that first time in the shadows and the darkness of the bedroom.
‘I love the way you look at me,’ Nic confided hoarsely, his glittering golden eyes holding her fast. ‘Like you want me as much as I want you.’
‘I do ,’ she confided without self-consciousness, because that wasn’t a weakness, not the way she had learned to consider it. She was merely separating wanting from love and that was easy after the battles she had lived through.
‘It bridges our separation,’ he breathed, coming down to her, all husky, muscular, supremely aroused male, and she was mesmerised by him, no longer marvelling at the manner in which she had succumbed to him before. He was something else in terms of looks and charisma, the perfect ten if such a list of male attributes existed.
He claimed her mouth with erotic expertise, parting her lips, skating along them, only finally delving deep, and she fell into that kiss as if there were nothing beneath her, only a swirling, ever heightening world of pure sensuality. Yes, he was unbelievable in bed, she told herself, lying prone on the bed as he dallied over the swollen buds of her breasts, kissing a line down from that area to the next. Playboys didn’t get to be what they were without lots of practice, she reasoned absently, struggling now to stay in touch with her brain.
‘I dreamt of doing this again. Your body, it’s so perfect,’ he groaned.
‘It’s not perfect any more,’ she heard herself say, wondering if he hadn’t picked up on the stretchmarks on her abdomen and her breasts and even her thighs, because her body had behaved badly when she’d been pregnant with the triplets. There wasn’t a part of her that hadn’t swollen up way beyond perfection.
‘But it’s you ,’ he emphasised, as though she were still the hottest female on earth that had ever been seen.
‘And it’s you,’ she whispered, small hands lifting to frame his high cheekbones, fingertips drifting off into the lushness of his black hair. Heavens, he was gorgeous.
Skilled fingers traced the heart of her then, probing, exploring, and he followed with the heat and expertise of his mouth. Within seconds she was lost in what he was doing to her, lost in sensation and need. Hunger burned in her pelvis like a flaming torch and she was arching and gasping and moaning and racing into climax without any input of her own.
‘I want you to enjoy this,’ Nic husked thickly. ‘I want you to be like this with me... always .’
Chance would be a fine thing, she thought, struggling to get her brain back because, really, he was that good in bed. Not that she had anyone to compare him with but, even so, honour where it was due. She was sure there were plenty of men who left women wanting and unsatisfied, because she had listened to Mel, a veteran of several failed relationships, and she knew that the brand of sexual joy she was receiving was not universal. She knew exactly why she was putty in his expert hands: Nic knew what he was doing in bed with a woman.
He slid over her and even her sated body reacted to that provocative move, the buds on her breasts tightening again, the burn at her core reawakening, because she already knew that he could deliver... Oh, boy, could he deliver.
He lifted her legs over his shoulders and a kind of blissful anticipation enfolded her, damp heat turning her inner spaces to liquid welcome. Her heart picked up pace, the blood in her veins racing in concert, and he entered her, and there was a slight burn and a stretch. Even so, he felt amazing. Her body gave way to his as though such an intrusion was welcomed and it was , it was everything she had recalled in the dark of the night in private, because nobody policed her dreams.
And the substance of her dreams only got better as he moved, withdrawing and then entering again, pushing hard to the very centre of her being. Delight encased her body, a slow roll of delight she couldn’t resist, no matter how hard she tried. Her hands closed over his shoulders, fingers digging in. When the next thrust came, she was so into it, she moaned, and he looked down at her with those glittering golden eyes and she was lost in the sensation, her hips shifting as though to accommodate him although he was managing fine without her input. He was going slow and she wanted more.
‘Speed up,’ she urged without thinking about it.
And he did and it was as amazing as everything else he had ever done with her. Mind-blowing pleasure engulfed her as her level of excitement built and built. With every fibre her body was surging to a peak, and he took her there with effortless perfection. She cried out at the height of a heart-stopping climax and he followed her with a raw male groan of completion.
‘You are so unbelievably sexy,’ he told her.
‘It’s you...as long as I don’t look for anything more,’ she mumbled, her body limp and sated in that aftermath of satisfaction, every defence down.
A moment after relieving Lexy of his weight, Nic slowly levered himself up and gazed down at her with scorching dark golden eyes. ‘And what does that mean...exactly?’ he prompted dangerously.
‘Well, you already know what it means,’ Lexy contributed, struggling to get her brain working again in the wake of that gigantic physical rush of pleasure. ‘You’re useless at the long haul. You’re more about the short, non-committal stuff.’
The gold in his dark eyes flared to a brilliant blaze. ‘That’s not really what you think about me,’ he assured her, seemingly impregnable in his ego.
Lexy leapt out of the bed, driven by pride and nothing else, for she could not abide allowing him to believe that, because he didn’t deserve it after what he had done to her: he had deserted her when she’d needed him most. She yanked the sheet off the bed with an almighty tug and wrapped it round her because she refused to stand there naked and seemingly vulnerable—she refused to be vulnerable around Nic Diamandis again.
She lifted her chin, eyes the colour of tropical seas striking back at him in challenge. ‘It is ,’ she confirmed with near pleasure, because in the moment after all that physical stuff she felt happy to be fighting him again. Indeed it felt good and made her feel better. ‘You let me down when I most needed your help. I had nobody but Mel and, eventually, her parents. But I was alone, struggling through a very difficult pregnancy and unable to work from quite early on. I needed support and you weren’t there for me in any way!’
‘You didn’t contact me,’ Nic informed her afresh, every syllable one of biting clarity. ‘You didn’t give me the chance! I was not aware that you had ever tried to contact me.’
Lexy’s teeth gritted. ‘That argument doesn’t wash,’ she told him frankly. ‘I phoned your office. I even tried to make appointments with you there and the closest I got to seeing you was getting out of the lift on the top floor before I was discreetly removed by your security guards and taken back downstairs and shown back onto the street. I was very pregnant at the time. It wasn’t the warmest welcome to your workplace.’
‘My security staff would not manhandle a pregnant woman,’ Nic declared with the utmost confidence.
‘Oh, there was no manhandling involved,’ Lexy agreed. ‘The guards were respectful and polite and, I suspect, very embarrassed, but it was made quite clear to me that I must not return to the premises. And I didn’t . That was the day I gave up on you showing some spine.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ At that offensive charge, Nic vaulted out of bed in a colossal surge of temper, dark golden eyes now burning like flames, lean, dark features rigid with incredulity.
‘You heard me,’ Lexy said, her mouth running dry but that didn’t silence her. ‘I’m finally being honest with you about how I feel. I was six months pregnant and the size of a house. I was supposed to be on bedrest, but I gave it up that day to make one last attempt to reach you, and you know how that turned out, so please stop trying to pretend that the guy who rejected me and ignored me was a nice guy...because you’re not .’
Nic was studying her with fixed intensity. ‘I cannot believe I’m even listening to this nonsense.’
‘Right,’ Lexy murmured, noticeably unimpressed by that rejoinder. ‘You want me to put all that in the past and bury it because now you’ve changed your mind, but life doesn’t work like that, Nic. People don’t work like that either. You blocked my phone calls, and you ignored my letters and my requests to see you at work—because I didn’t know where you lived in London. You ghosted me, and, no matter how reasonable or kind you are now, it’ll take a long time for me to forget being treated like I was a nobody, a nuisance and a burden you couldn’t accept!’
Nic breathed in so deep in a visible effort to maintain self-control that she was frozen to the spot watching that struggle. Beneath her stressed-out gaze, he retrieved his boxers and his dress trousers, pulling them on in quick economic movements, lean bronzed muscles flexing as he dressed and reached for his shirt. ‘That’s not what happened and you know it,’ he told her flatly. ‘You didn’t try to contact me. If you’d come to my office even once, I would have been told about it.’
Silenced by that protest but unimpressed, Lexy shrugged a dismissive shoulder.
Nic’s mouth compressed. ‘I’ll use another room tonight,’ he spelt out in a raw undertone, fighting the incendiary urge to call her a liar again. ‘I refuse to exchange words with you when you’re in this mood.’
‘It’s not a mood. It’s an actual sense of bitterness and you made me like this,’ Lexy declared, wincing when her voice almost hit a note of apology because no way was she taking back anything that she had claimed. ‘But perhaps it’s best you sleep somewhere else... Won’t someone notice that the bridal couple are sleeping apart?’
‘What do you care?’ Nic fired back at her, bristling like a panther someone had had the nerve to try and stroke like a pet.
Lexy’s complexion switched from flushed to very pale and she straightened her already stiff spine even more. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been better at pretending to be a real bride,’ she muttered truthfully. ‘But I have feelings like everyone else and right now I’d prefer to be with my children.’
‘ My children as well!’ Nic exhaled audibly, surveying her with hard, dark eyes and a tight mouth, his jawline tight as a bowstring and as hard as a rock. ‘In half an hour a car will collect you at the rear exit. I will send a maid up to escort you there and you can make a discreet return to our children for what remains of the night. But be warned, we all have a very early start in the morning. We’re flying to South Korea for a week. I have business there.’
Thrown into disbelief by that sudden string of disclosures, Lexy merely watched as he departed. South Korea? Her birthplace and her home for years? What was that about?
Nic hadn’t said one word that she’d expected him to say, which both infuriated and frustrated her because she wanted him to frankly admit why he had behaved as he had during her pregnancy. But possibly she was being na?ve again. They might have just set the bed on fire together but theirs was not a real relationship. It was a marriage of convenience, not a marriage of true love. Why would he strip himself bare of his pride and admit that he had made mistakes and ignored her when she’d needed him?
Yet only honesty could bridge the gulf of bitter resentment between them. She knew he wasn’t a superhero, and she wasn’t hoping for him to turn into one either but, at the very least, she deserved better than what he had so far given her, she told herself heavily.
She began to look for clothing to put on beyond her discarded bridal regalia. With a grimace, she made use of one of the robes hanging in the sumptuous bathroom. It would do fine for sneaking out some rear exit late at night, she told herself ruefully.