‘Because I had no other choice.’
‘There is always a choice.’
‘Not for a mother. She will always put her children first.’
Her voice held a conviction that Sander told himself had to be false, and the cynical look he gave her said as much, causing Ruby’s face to burn as she remembered how she had fallen asleep, leaving the twins unprotected.
Looking away from her, Sander thought angrily that Ruby might think she had deceived him by claiming her reason for insisting he married her was that she wanted to protect her sons, but he knew perfectly well that it was the fact that she believed marriage to him would give her a share in his wealth. That was what she really wanted to protect.
But she had signed a prenuptial agreement that barred her from making any claim on his money should they ever divorce, an inner voice defended her unexpectedly. She probably thought she co
uld have the prenup set aside, Sander argued against it. Her children loved her, the inner voice pointed out. They would not exhibit the love and trust they did if she was a bad mother. He had loved his mother at their age, Sander pointed out. But he had hardly seen his mother or spent much time with her. She had been an exotic stranger, someone he had longed to see, and yet when he had seen her she had made him feel anxious to please her, and wary of her sudden petulant outbursts if he accidentally touched her expensive clothes. Anna, who was now in charge of the villa’s household, had been more of a true mother—not just to him, but to all of them.
As Anna had been with them, Ruby was with the twins all the time. Logically he had to admit that it simply wasn’t possible for anyone to carry out the pretence of being a caring parent twenty-four seven if it was just an act. A woman who loved both money and her children? Was that possible? It galled Sander that he should even be asking himself that question. What was the matter with him? He knew exactly what she was—why should he now be finding reasons to think better of her?
Sander looked away from Ruby and out into the darkness beyond the car window. The boys were soft warm weights against his body. His sons, and he loved them utterly and completely, no matter who or what their mother was. It was for their sakes that he wanted to find some good in her, for their sakes that his inner voice was trying to insist she was a good mother—for what caring father would not want that for his children, especially when that father knew what it was to have a mother who did not care.
Was it her imagination, or were the twins already turning more to Sander than they did to her? Miserably Ruby stared through the car window next to her. Whilst they had been talking they had left the city behind and were now travelling along another coastal road, with the sea to one side of them. But where previously there had been steep cliffs now the land rolled more gently away from the road.
It was far too late and far too selfish of her to wish that Sander had not come back into her life, Ruby admitted as the silence between them grew, filled by Sander’s contempt for her and entrapping her in her own ever-present guilt. It was that guilt for having conceived the twins so carelessly and thoughtlessly that had in part brought her here, Ruby recognised. Guilt and her overwhelming desire to give her sons the same kind of happy, unshadowed, secure childhood in a family protected by two loving parents that she herself had enjoyed until her parents’ death. But that security had been ripped from her. Her heart started to thud in a mixture of remembered pain and fierce hope that her sons would never experience what she had.
On his side of the luxurious leather upholstered car Sander stared out into the darkness—a darkness that for him was populated by the ghosts of his own past. In his grandfather’s day the family had lived in the palace, unable to speak to either their parents or their grandfather unless those adults chose to seek them out. Yet despite maintaining his own distance from Sander and his siblings, their grandfather had somehow managed to know every detail of his grandchildren’s lives, regularly sending for them so that he could list their flaws and faults and petty childhood crimes.
His sister and brother had been afraid of their grandfather, but Sander, the eldest child and ultimately the heir to his grandfather’s shipping empire, had quickly learned that the best way to deal with his grandparent was to stand up to him. Sander’s pride had been honed on the whetstone of his grandfather’s mockery and baiting, as he’d constantly challenged Sander to prove himself to him whilst at the same time having no compunction about seeking to destroy his pride in himself to maintain his own superiority.
An English boarding school followed by university had given him a welcome respite from his grandfather’s overbearing and bullying ways, but it had been after Sander had left university and started work in the family business that the real clashes between them had begun.
The continuation of the family and the business had been all that really mattered to his grandfather. His son and his grandchildren had been merely pawns to be used to further that cause. Sander had grown up hearing his grandfather discussing the various merits of young heiresses whom Sander might be wise to marry, but what he had learned from his mother, allied to his own naturally alpha personality and the time he had spent away from the island whilst he was at school and university, had made Sander determined not to allow his grandfather to bully him into marriage as he had done his father.
There had been many arguments between them on the subject, with his grandfather constantly trying to manipulate and bully Sander into meeting one or other of the young women he’d deemed suitable to be the mother of the next heir. In the end, infuriated and sickened by his grandfather’s attempts at manipulation and coercion, Sander had announced to his grandfather that he was wasting his time as he never intended to marry, since he already had an heir in his brother.
His grandfather had then threatened to disinherit him, and Sander had challenged him to go ahead, telling him that he would find employment with one of their rivals. There the matter had rested for several weeks, giving Sander the impression that finally his grandfather had realised that he was not going to be controlled as his own parents had been controlled. But then, virtually on the eve of a long planned visit by Sander to the UK, to meet with some important clients in Manchester, he had discovered that his grandfather was planning to use his absence to advise the press of an impending engagement between Sander and the young widow of another ship-owner. Apart from anything else Sander knew that the young widow in question had a string of lovers and a serious drug habit, but neither of those potential drawbacks had been of any interest to his grandfather.
Of course Sander had confronted his grandfather, and both of them had been equally angry with the other. His grandfather had refused to back down, and Sander had warned him that if he went ahead with a public announcement then he would refute that announcement equally publicly.
By the time he had reached Manchester Sander’s anger hadn’t cooled and his resolve to live his own life had actively hardened—to the extent that he had decided that on his return to Greece he was going to cut all ties with his grandfather and set up his own rival business from scratch.
And it had been in that frame of mind, filled with a dangerous mix of emotions, that he had met Ruby. He could see her now, eyeing him up from the other side of the crowded club, her blonde hair as carefully tousled as her lipglossed mouth had been deliberately pouted. The short skirt she’d worn had revealed slender legs, her tight top had been pulled in to display her tiny waist, and the soft rounded upper curves of her breasts had been openly on display. In short she had looked no different from the dozens of other eager, willing and easily available young women who came to the club specifically because it was known to be a haunt for louche young footballers and their entourages.
The only reason Sander had been in the club had been to meet a contact who knew people Sander thought might be prepared to give his proposed new venture some business. Whilst he was there Sander had received a phone call from a friend, urging him not to act against his own best interests. Immediately Sander had known that somehow his grandfather had got wind of what he was planning, and that someone had betrayed him. Fury—against his grandfather, against all those people in his life he had trusted but who had betrayed him—had overwhelmed him, exploding through his veins, pulsing against all constraints like the molten heat of a volcano building up inside him until it could not be contained any longer, the force of it erupting to spew its dangerous contents over everything in its path. And Ruby had been in the path of that fury, a readymade sacrifice to his anger, all too willing to allow him to use her for whatever purpose he chose.
All it had taken to bring her to his side had been one cynical and deliberately lingering glance. She had leaned close to him in the crush of the club, her breath smelling of vodka and her skin of soap. He remembered how that realisation had momentarily checked him. The other girls around her had reeked of cheap scent. He had offered to buy her a drink and she had
shaken her head, looking at him with such openly hungry eyes that her lack of self-respect had further inflamed his fury. He had questioned to himself why girls like her preferred to use their bodies to support themselves instead of their brains, giving themselves to men not directly for money but in the hope that they would end up as the girlfriend of a wealthy man.
Well, there had been no place in his life for a ‘girlfriend’, but right then there had been a rage, a tension inside him that he knew the use of her body in the most basic way there was would do much to alleviate. He had reached for his drink—not his first of the evening—finished it with one swallow, before turning to her and saying brusquely, ‘Come on.’
A bump in the road woke the twins up, and Harry’s ‘Are we there yet?’ dragged Sander’s thoughts from the past to the present.
‘Nearly,’ he answered him. ‘We’re turning into the drive to the villa now.’
As he spoke the car swung off the road at such a sharp angle that Ruby slid along the leather seat, almost bumping her head on the side of the car. Unlike her, though, the twins were safe, protected by the arms Sander had tightened around them the minute the car had started to turn. Sander loved the twins, but he did not love her.
The pain that gripped her caught Ruby off guard. She wasn’t jealous of her own sons, was she? Of course not. The last thing she wanted was Sander’s arms around her, she told herself angrily as they drove through a pair of ornate wrought-iron gates and then down a long straight drive bordered with Cypress trees and illuminated by lights set into the ground.
At the end of the drive was a gravelled rectangle, and beyond that the villa itself, discreetly floodlit to reveal its elegant modern lines and proportions.
‘Anna, who is in charge of the household, will have everything ready for you and the twins. She and Georgiou, her husband, who has driven us here, look after the villa and its gardens between them. They have their own private quarters over the garage block, which is separate from the villa itself,’ Sander informed Ruby as the car crunched to a halt over the gravel.