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‘Or even the right idea,’ Tawny muttered half under her breath, not being that easy to silence. ‘Just promise me that if he’s awful to live with you’ll divorce him.’
Bee nodded instant agreement to soothe her half-sibling’s concerns and descended the stairs with care in her high heels. She was in her mother’s house for she had spent the last night of her single life there at the older woman’s request. Tawny was not acting as a bridesmaid because Bee had drawn the line at taking the masquerade of her wedding that far.
‘But I know you, you won’t do it if it means leaving those cute kids behind.’ Tawny sighed. ‘You’ll be like faithful Penelope, stuck with him for ever, and I bet he plays on it when he realises what a softy you are.’
Bee had no intention of being a pushover, convinced as she was that Sergios would happily tread a softy right into the ground and walk on without a backward glance. He was tough, so she had to be even tougher. She reminded herself of that fact when her scowling father extended his arm to her at the mouth of the church aisle and fixed a social smile to his face. Monty Blake had recently been trodden on by Sergios and his ego and his pockets were still stinging from the encounter. She thought it said even more about Sergios’s intimidating influence that her father was still willing, however, to play his part at their wedding.
Full of impatience, Sergios wheeled round at the altar to watch his bride approach. His face unreadable, he studied her and started to frown. She had had her long hair cut back to her shoulders. Whose very stupid idea had that been? But aside from that, Beatriz looked…luscious, he finally selected after a long mental pause while he ran his brooding dark gaze from the sultry peach-tinted fullness of her mouth down to the generous curves he never failed to admire. He wondered absently if men developed a taste for larger breasts when they reached a certain age. He was thirty-two, not fifty-two though. But as he saw the burgeoning swell of those plump creamy mounds so beautifully displayed in that neckline there was no denying that he was spellbound. The model on the catwalk in Milan had had nothing to show off but an expanse of flat bony chest. In her place, however, Beatriz would have been a show-stopper. He frowned at that thought.
Determined not to be cowed by the fact her bridegroom was glowering at her, Bee lifted her chin. Even the most critical woman would have had to admit that Sergios did look spectacularly handsome in a beautifully cut morning suit. Encountering those hard eyes trained on her, she felt briefly dizzy and breathless. The minister of her church was inclined to ramble a little, but he soon controlled the tendency after Sergios urged him in an impatient undertone to ‘speed it up’. Affronted by her bridegroom’s intervention, Bee reddened to the roots of her hair. Had Sergios no idea how to behave in church? Well, it was never too late for a man to learn, although she suspected he would fight learning anything from her every step of the way. He thrust
the wedding ring onto her finger with scant ceremony. She rubbed her hand as though he had hurt her, although he had not.
‘You were rude to the minister,’ she said on the way down the aisle again.
A brow lifted. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You heard me. There are some occasions when you just have to be patient for the sake of good manners and a wedding service is one of those occasions.’
In the thunderous silence that now enfolded the bridal couple, Milo wriggled like an eel off his nanny’s lap and rushed to Bee’s side to clutch her skirt. She patted his curly head to quieten him and took his hand in hers.
‘He was repeating himself,’ Sergios breathed harshly, but, watching the toddler beam his big trusting smile up at Bee, he restrained the outrage her impertinence had sent hurtling through him. After little more than two weeks abroad he had returned to his London home and noticed a distinct change for the better in his cousin Timon’s children. All the kids had calmed down. Milo had become less frantic in his need for attention, the little girl was smiling and even Paris was occasionally venturing into shy speech.
Sergios had never had a best friend but had he done so Timon would have come the closest, although on the surface serious, steady and quiet Timon would have appeared to have had little in common with Sergios’s altogether more aggressive extrovert nature. But the bond had been there all the same and it was a matter of honour to Sergios to see Timon’s children thrive in his care. Beatriz, it seemed, had the magic touch in that department.
A line of cameras greeted their emergence from the church. As Bee’s eyes widened and she froze with the dismay of someone unaccustomed to media attention Sergios took immediate advantage of the moment. He swung her round into the circle of his arms and, with one hand braced to the shallow indentation of her spine to draw her close, he bent his head and kissed her, instinctively righting the status quo in the only way available to him.
Shock crashed through Bee and made her knees shake at that first breath-taking instant of physical contact. She had never been less prepared for anything and impressions hit her in a flood of overwhelming sensuality: the exotic tang of his designer cologne, the uncompromising strength and power of that lean, muscular body crushing her softer curves, the hard, demanding pressure of his erotic mouth on hers. And while at the back of her mind a voice was shrieking no and urging her to pull back her body was singing entirely another song. There was a wildly addictive fire to the taste of him. She wanted more, she wanted so much more she trembled with the astonishing force of that wanting. His raw masculine passion sliced through her every defence and roused a surge of naked hunger within her. The plunge of his tongue into the sensitive interior of her mouth made her body tremble, while heat pooled between her thighs and her breasts swelled, pushing against the lace of her bra so that it felt too tight for comfort.
‘You’re not supposed to taste that good, yineka mou,’ Sergios breathed in a roughened undertone, drawing back, his brilliant dark eyes cloaked and cool, his face taut.
Dragging her clinging hands from his broad shoulders, Bee was aghast and she turned blindly to pose for the cameras, her head swimming, her treacherous body torn by silent anguish as she struggled to suppress that monstrous hunger he had awakened. She had never felt like that in her life before, not even with Jon. It was as if Sergios had called up something she hadn’t known existed within her and that treacherous loss of control had embarrassed the hell out of her. My goodness, she had clung to him, pushed her breasts into his chest like a wanton hussy and kissed him back with far too much gusto. She could not bring herself to look at him again and inside she was dying of mortification. Obviously he had planned to give her a social kiss for the benefit of the cameras but she had flung herself into it as though she were sex-starved.
Teeth gritted behind his determined smile, Sergios willed his arousal into subjugation and reminded himself forcefully that sleeping with his wife would curtail his freedom and deprive him of the choices that any intelligent man would value. One woman was much like another; all cats were grey in the dark. He repeated that oft-considered mantra to himself with rigorous determination: he had no plans to bed his bride, no need to do so either. To think otherwise was to invite chaos into his head and home. Breaking the rules of his marriage would cost him and why take that risk? Unless he was very much mistaken, and when the subject was women Sergios was rarely mistaken, his mistress would push out every sexual stop to impress him on his next visit. Satisfaction could be had without complications and wasn’t that all that really mattered?
The reception was staged at an exclusive hotel where security staff vetted every arriving guest.
‘Zara was such a fool,’ Bee’s stepmother, Ingrid Blake, remarked in her brittle voice. ‘It could have been her standing here in your place today.’
Features austere, Sergios settled an arm to his bride’s rigid spine. ‘There can be no comparison. Beatriz is…special,’ he murmured huskily.
Bee went pink at the unexpected compliment, although the apparent slur on Zara embarrassed her and as the older woman moved out of earshot Bee muttered, ‘Ingrid has a wasp’s tongue but I could have managed her on my own.’
‘I will never stand in silence while my wife is being insulted,’ Sergios asserted. ‘But only the most foolish would risk incurring my wrath.’
‘Ingrid is a sourpuss but she’s my father’s wife and a member of the family,’ Bee reminded him gently.
Noting the anxious light in her gaze, Sergios laughed out loud. ‘You can’t protect everyone from me.’
His vital laugh, so full of his essential energy, ironically chilled her, reminding her how much ruthless power and influence he had in the world and how much he took it for granted. She thought of her father walking her down the aisle even though it would have been more in character for the older man to express his resentment by refusing to take part in the wedding. Monty Blake’s submission to her husband’s wishes had shaken Bee and shown her the meaning of true supremacy. She had no doubt that if she ever dared to cross Sergios he would become her most bitter enemy.
‘I understood that your grandfather was planning to come today,’ Bee admitted.
‘He has bronchitis and his doctor advised him to stay at home. You’ll meet him tomorrow when we arrive in Greece. I didn’t want him to take the risk of travelling.’
It was not a particularly large wedding: Sergios equated small with the privacy and discretion with which he liked to separate his private life from his public one. Although there were only fifty guests everybody on Sergios’s list was a somebody in the business world. He seemed to have very few actual relatives, explaining that his grandfather had had only two children, both of whom had died relatively young.
‘Was he looking for an heir when he discovered you?’
