Sold for the Greek's Heir(27)

Talked? Well, she hadn’t really talked, he acknowledged tardily, indeed had been remarkably quiet for a chatterbox. With hindsight it became clear to Jax that she had been upset, seriously upset. And he hadn’t picked up on that. How could he not have picked up on that?

Still locked in the mindset he had had for two long years, Jax had continued to feel like the victim of her treachery. But what if there had been no betrayal in the first place? What if that ridiculous story about sharing clothes was genuine? What if he had abandoned her in Spain two years earlier without any excuse for doing so? And what if he had blown up his marriage over a stupid red dress and a mindless need to finally confront Lucy?

Jax paced, feeling in dire need of another drink but knowing he shouldn’t have one when his brain was already leapfrogging all over the place. Lucy and Bella were gone and he could live with that, couldn’t he? A divorce, shared custody, parental access...?

Suddenly feeling very short of breath, Jax froze. There was a tightness in his chest and a dryness in his throat and his heart was thundering in his ears. No, he couldn’t live with that option, he decided with dizzy abruptness.

And as so often before when life challenged Jax, anger came to his rescue. He wasn’t letting the queen of some tinpot country steal his wife and child! Lucy had been lured away from him and misled and he was going to get her back pronto where she belonged, which was in Greece with him.


‘By the sound of it, Jax really doesn’t know how to deal with the emotional stuff,’ Ellie remarked with a wry smile on her lips.

‘That’s an understatement,’ Polly inputted with a sniff. ‘That alley business...accusing her of that—’

Ellie laughed and Lucy looked at her red-headed sister in surprise. ‘But don’t you see? It was all still as fresh as yesterday for Jax, which tells you that he never got over it. Two years on he’s still agonising over that alley...yet he still decides to stay married to you, he takes you on a honeymoon, acts happy, treats you decently in every other way. It took the equivalent of torture to get the story about the alley out of him because he’s ashamed that he still wants you, regardless of what he supposedly thinks you did. No, really, Lucy...you can learn a lot from reading between the lines.’

Lucy smiled at that more optimistic viewpoint even if she didn’t quite believe in it. She coiled back into her comfortable corner of the sofa in the beautiful room with its impossibly high domed ceiling and wished that she could see what Ellie appeared to see in Jax’s behaviour. Her two sisters were so different. Polly was warm and caring, almost motherly, while Ellie was very clever and sympathetic and their children, her nephews and nieces, she noted with pleasure, were simply gorgeous.

Polly’s boys, Karim and Hassan and Ellie’s daughter, Teresina were playing out in the shaded courtyard on trikes. Ellie was feeding her baby boy, Olly, with a bottle while Polly was nursing her newborn daughter, Haifa. Bella was watching the older children scoot around on their bikes while chasing a ball. Karim got off his bike simply to move Bella back a little with her toys, looking out for the toddler in the most considerate way for a small boy.

Lucy was shaken to admit that she would have been crazily happy in her sister’s gorgeous royal palace were it not for Jax’s absence. The discovery that her eldest sister was a ruling queen with her husband, Rashad, and that Ellie was the working wife of a fabulously wealthy Italian had certainly helped to take Lucy’s mind off her own problems. The three women had sat up into the early hours the first night they were all together, exchanging histories, talking about the three rings they had inherited and catching up on a lifetime of different experiences.

Talking about Jax had come later and had sent Lucy’s mood plummeting again because, even though she still felt that walking out on Jax had been the only thing she could do, there was a hollow place inside her where her heart had been ripped out.

In the back of her mind lurked the conviction that Jax had been hurt so much in life just like herself yet they dealt with emotions in very different ways. Jax buried his, hid troubling issues and lived in virtual denial of his feelings. Lucy wore everything on the surface and picked herself up again emotionally no matter how often she was kicked. But she hadn’t reacted that way at her last encounter with Jax, she acknowledged. He had hurt her too much and for the first time ever with Jax she had hidden her feelings as well.

In a sense that had been cruel of her and hitting him over the head with something large and heavy might have been kinder. Feelings had to be shoved in Jax’s face like placards for him to read them. He had probably been very shocked by her departure and he was probably furious that she had taken their daughter with her. But he still wouldn’t understand why she had left, which bothered her. The truth was all that had mattered to Jax and he had finally told it without grasping the damage he was doing. He had expected her to excuse him for past events soured by their fathers’ machinations. He had not been capable of realising that she had been devastated because everything he had said had spelled out the message that he had never loved, respected or even understood her. How could she possibly love someone like that?

‘He’s a man. He might as well be from another planet,’ Ellie mocked quietly. ‘Rio was exactly the same, hiding things, holding onto the past—’

‘Rashad too,’ Polly admitted ruefully. ‘So, perhaps Jax could be rehabilitated...’

Lucy studied her linked hands, unable to imagine Jax budging a stubborn inch from his own convictions.

The door opened, framing Rashad, the King of Dharia. Tall and very handsome, he flashed a smile at his wife. ‘Polly...we have a visitor. He thinks we kidnapped his wife. What would you have to say to that?’

‘Lucy’s my sister and I didn’t kidnap her... I offered her sanctuary,’ Polly declared loftily.

‘Sanctuary?’ Rashad echoed, visibly appreciating that choice of word. ‘I don’t think I would employ that particular word with Jax, Lucy.’

‘Jax is here?’ Lucy flew off the sofa as though jet-propelled and then stilled, colour rising in her cheeks below her sisters’ interested scrutiny.

‘Let the rehabilitation commence,’ Ellie remarked softly.

‘Have I been interfering?’ Polly asked worriedly.

‘No, I was hugely grateful for the support,’ Lucy told her warmly.

Lucy couldn’t think straight. It had taken Jax less than forty-eight hours to come out to Dharia and she was sharply disconcerted. In the back of her mind, she had feared that he would let her go and write off their marriage as a mistake. After all, how could he possibly want to stay married to a woman whom he had such a low opinion of? But then letting her go could well be what he had arrived to discuss, she reasoned unhappily.

Jax was in no better mood after his long flight to find himself in a room decorated like something out of an Arabian Nights’ fantasy, which dovetailed beautifully with the royal palace of Dharia. Rashad, the King, had seemed fairly normal though, acknowledging that he too would have been very ‘put out’ to find his wife and child had staged a vanishing act.

And then Rashad had murmured, ‘But now that you’re part of the family I should warn you that when the sisters get together, they plot and plan. You’re either with them or against them.’

‘You’re my brother-in-law...well, half-brother-in-law,’ Jax adjusted, recognising that the three sisters had all had different fathers.

‘They don’t think of each other as half anything,’ Rashad cautioned him.

‘Catching up?’ another voice interposed, a voice that Jax recognised and he tensed, slowly turning round to arrange his thoughts before meeting the eyes of his former business partner, Rio Benedetti. ‘Well, isn’t this a small world?’ he breathed uncomfortably.

‘Relax,’ the Italian billionaire urged. ‘I ran into Franca last year and she brought me up to speed on past events. No disrespect to Franca intended, but I had the lucky escape and you had—?’

Jax winced. ‘I owe you a wholehearted apology for what happened but let’s not talk about it,’ he retorted wryly of that sobering experience.

‘Let’s not,’ Rio agreed, leaning closer. ‘A word of advice though,’ he added in a rueful undertone. ‘The word “alley” will be etched on your gravestone...’

Momentarily, Jax froze as if a gun had been angled at him and faint colour rose over his sculpted cheekbones. ‘Is that so?’

‘The sisters don’t keep secrets,’ Rio imparted. ‘Nothing is too sacred to be discussed. Cross one and you cross all three and none of them are batting for you.’

That was information that Jax could well have done without. He knew he had messed up but everyone else knowing how badly he had messed up made him feel worse. He had had forty-eight hours in which to think and he had done more thinking within that forty-eight hours than he had done in all his twenty-nine years. And having reached obvious conclusions, had even decided what to say.

But Jax’s prepared speech flew right out of his head when Lucy walked into the suite he was wafted off to. Lucy was wearing a long flowing dress in shades of blue and it fluttered round her as she moved and just seeing her again, just looking at her again, made Jax feel stuff he couldn’t suppress any longer.