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‘We should meet for dinner some evening,’ Sander murmured silkily.
‘You’ve got to be joking!’ Tally slung, turning on her heel to walk away without even a hint of hesitation.
‘You don’t know what you’re missing, glikia mou.’
‘Don’t I? I told you how I felt about you!’ she tossed back sharply. ‘And don’t call me your sweetheart. I’m not your sweet anything!’
‘These are absolutely beautiful!’ Binkie exclaimed, burying her nose in the fragrant bouquet of roses that had just been delivered.
‘My goodness,’ Tally remarked, joining her in the kitchen. ‘Does one of Mum’s men think she’s home from Portugal?’
‘They’re not for your mother, they’re for you!’ Binkie proclaimed, turning eyes that positively shone with satisfaction onto Tally.
‘Me?’ Tally was satisfyingly thunderstruck by that announcement and she plucked the card from between the older woman’s fingertips. Literally tearing off the envelope enclosing the tiny card, she stared down at just two words and a phone number.
Dinner? Sander
‘Oh,’ she muttered tightly, dropping the card as though it had burned her, while wondering why Sander Volakis handed out such conflicting messages. And did he seriously think that he could just toss her some flowers and she would phone him like an obedient little girl grateful for his attention and eager to forget how he had offended her?
Only five days earlier, Sander had made it painfully clear that he wanted nothing more to do with her and his insinuation that she had slept with him because he was rich had deeply insulted her. Yet he had offered her a dinner date a mere hour later when he dropped her at the train she had caught back to London. She had made it plain that she wasn’t interested, so why was he now sending her flowers? An extravagant bunch of very expensive and truly lovely roses, as well.
Binkie wanted to know everything about the sender of the flowers and Tally had to belatedly admit to meeting Sander at Westgrave Manor and share what she knew about him. Reluctant to upset Binkie, she did not tell the disheartening tale of Cosima’s antics during that weekend. Her colour fluctuating wildly beneath the older woman’s speculative scrutiny, Tally leant heavily on Sander’s allegedly bad reputation with women as she spoke. The heady glow of romantic hope in Binkie’s eyes slowly began to recede.
While Tally enjoyed arranging the roses and setting the vase in her bedroom she had no intention of making use of Sander Volakis’ mobile phone number. In a weak moment she did a search on his name on the Internet and was immediately rewarded with even more good reasons to keep him at a distance. Sander evidently specialised in leggy, famous blondes of the model, entertainment industry celebrity or socialite brand. He dated ladies who wore very small dresses or bikinis and who were papped leaving nightclubs and posing on yachts. And she was quick to remind herself that she hadn’t liked him, indeed, had wanted very badly to slap him that morning at Westgrave and had only resisted the urge in a futile effort to reclaim her lost dignity.
Bearing those important facts in mind, Tally accepted that it was very perverse of her to lie awake every night thinking about the volatile Greek and the lean hard-boned lineaments of that unforgettable face of his. Her intelligence put Sander squarely in the incompatible category, but something infinitely less rational and more contrary kept him alive and vibrant in her thoughts. Yet he had put her off sex, she conceded in rueful mortification. All very exciting up to a point and then a rather painful disappointment, she recalled with a grimace, wondering if it would have got better had he continued and then scolding herself for her lingering curiosity. She had learnt a good lesson, she told herself instead.
Getting intimate with a stranger was a very bad idea. Sander had assumed that she had sacrificed her virginity in an effort to impress him in some way. So why hadn’t he got the message when she refused to see him again?
Cosima phoned her that same morning and confided that Sander had called her to ask for Tally’s address. ‘Are you seeing him?’
‘No, but he sent me flowers,’ Tally admitted to satisfy the younger woman’s curiosity.
‘Dad was very impressed when I told him—’
‘You shouldn’t have mentioned it,’ Tally cut in. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’
‘Maybe Sander did it for a bet or something,’ her sibling suggested. ‘Why else would he be chasing you?’
‘I don’t know, but you seem to have more ideas on that score than I do,’ Tally said drily.
Crystal returned that evening from a month-long stay at her current boyfriend’s Portuguese villa. Deeply tanned and wearing a lot of gold jewellery, Crystal watched her daughter work on her latest interior design project for college at the dining room table and sighed. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of being so sensible, Tally?’
‘Meaning?’ Tally prompted, wondering what had etched shadows like bruises below her mother’s fine eyes.
‘Peter has decided that he wants a break from me,’ she revealed with a shrug that was clearly intended to be careless but which didn’t quite pull off the feat. ‘Thinks we’re getting too serious. Well, we have been practically living together for the past six months …’
Tally picked up on the brittle shaken note in her mother’s admission and scrambled out of her seat to wrap her arms round the thin, attractive blonde. Crystal might have a messy love life and be foolish with money, but Tally loved her mother and hated to see her hurting. ‘Oh, Mum, I’m sorry!’
‘I’ve been dumped,’ Crystal confided thickly, tears glazing her eyes. ‘I’m the one who usually does the dumping but I didn’t see it coming. I was a fool, I thought Peter was with me for the long haul …’
Tally gave the taller woman a comforting hug. ‘Never mind. You’ll meet someone else.’
‘It’s not that easy any more.’ Crystal sighed. ‘I’m forty-three next birthday, not twenty-three. Men my age want much younger women, and they get them too.’
Navel-gazing wasn’t Crystal’s thing, however, and within a couple of days Tally’s mother had regained her spirits and her extensive net of contacts and busy social calendar played their part in that revival. That weekend, Crystal headed off with a female friend to spend a week in a swanky Scottish castle. Tally, who tried to keep her mother’s financial affairs in order, stayed home to be dismayed by the size of the older woman’s credit-card bills when they arrived in the post. Crystal could spend as if there were no tomorrow and Peter, a wealthy retiree, was no longer around to support her taste for the high life. Tally resolved to make yet another attempt to persuade her mother to live more within her means. At the start of the following week, she saw Binkie off on her annual summer trip home to Poland where she stayed with her relatives.
The following evening the bell buzzed at seven. Local children had been playing the annoying game of ringing the bell and running away and Tally answered the door with a frown because she expected to find the doorstep empty. But when she found Sander Volakis there instead, his tall, beautifully built body elegantly attired in a charcoal-grey suit teamed with a gold silk tie, she was totally thrown off balance.
One part of her wanted to slam the door and double-lock it, but it was an urge mainly fostered by the awareness that she hadn’t combed her hair since lunchtime and was wearing very little make-up. As a young woman who prided herself on her common sense, she was dismayed by her sudden attack of vanity, while the other, more dominant part of her response to his appearance was to simply stare at him and enjoy the view. And when Sander, his jaw line roughened by a five o’clock shadow of stubble that only enhanced his classic masculine features and wide sensual mouth, settled his stunning night-dark eyes on her, he was very much a sight to be savoured.
‘Tally,’ he purred like a jungle cat on the prowl, studying her from beneath heavy black lashes and very much liking what he saw.
Tally didn’t do fussy fashion and her denim miniskirt and white cotton top could not have been plainer. Yet rarely had Sander been so aware of a woman’s lush curves at breast and hip or her shapely legs. As self-conscious colour stained her creamy cheeks and her green eyes widened and then veiled to conceal their expression an unfamiliar stab of possessiveness gripped him.
‘Ask me in,’ he urged.
‘No,’ Tally mumbled, her hand clinging to the door and pushing it a little more closed in rebellion.
‘Are you that scared of what might happen?’ Sander quipped with a husky sound of amusement.
‘Nothing would happen,’ Tally fielded stiffly. ‘Been there, done that.’
‘But you haven’t. We’ve barely begun,’ Sander countered forcefully, frustrated by her blank refusal to accept that reality.
‘Your choice, then,’ Tally traded, her face warm as she made that blunt reminder of the manner in which he had withdrawn from their short-lived intimacy. ‘My choice now is not to take it any further.’
‘But you’re making the wrong choice,’ Sander told her with impregnable confidence.
‘You only think that because it’s not what you want and I’m pretty sure that you only ever do what you want,’ Tally rattled off at equal speed.
‘Women don’t usually argue with me.’
‘Well, you definitely don’t want to be spending time with me, Sander,’ Tally declared. ‘I think I’d always be arguing with you.’
That quip provoked a spontaneous laugh from Sander that lightened the intensity on his lean, dark, brooding features. ‘You challenge me—’
‘Which you would enjoy for what … all of five minutes?’ Tally cut in unimpressed. ‘You know what your problem is? You’re bored. That’s the only reason you’re wasting your time sending me flowers and turning up where you’re not welcome.’
For a split second, Sander was stunned by the realisation that she was spot on with that assessment. Of late, the women he took to bed had become very predictable and unexciting. In fact, he could not recall when a woman had last stirred this amount of interest in him and he wondered if it was possible that Tally’s resistance was the greatest part of her attraction. Just for once, a woman was not falling into his arms like an overripe plum or making a huge effort to please and flatter him. Indeed Tally Spencer didn’t think much of him and had no reservations about letting him know the fact.
‘I spoke too frankly and offended you. Is that all you’ve got against me?’
‘No, it’s not. You’re rich and spoilt and you think you deserve special treatment. We’ve got nothing in common, Sander.’
‘Except this, which you can’t deny …’ And before Tally could even guess his own intention, he had stepped forward to lower his handsome dark head and seal his mouth to hers in a kiss that hurtled through her unprepared body like a depth charge primed to explode on contact. Shivering, her lips swollen and tingling from the drugging pressure of his, Tally experienced a tugging ache at the very heart of her that left her literally weak at the knees.
Sander slowly lifted his head again, his brilliant gaze glittering gold enticement. ‘Dinner tomorrow night. I’ll pick you up at eight.’
And with that intense assurance that was so integral a part of him, Sander strode off without awaiting her response. Tally blinked, leant back against the door to dizzily close it and knew that he had played a blinder. That one scorching kiss, which her heart was still racing from, had nothing to do with intellect and had contrived to kill all rational thought within seconds. She thought of not being there when he called to collect her but that struck her as cowardice. Later, she fell into bed in a daze, her brain at war with an overriding but indefensible desire to see him again …
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