‘We need to clear the air about your brother,’ Apollo announced, urging her into a room fitted out like an office with built-in cabinets, shelves and a very large desk.
‘I will only tell you this one more time…’ Pixie framed quite shakily but loudly in her rage. ‘My brother is none of your business!’
Once again, Apollo ignored that statement. He extracted a slim file from a drawer in the desk and tossed it across the desk. ‘Patrick is still gambling. Small card games with low stakes but he has a problem and it needs to be dealt with.’
‘That’s a complete lie and very unjust!’ Pixie exclaimed.
‘Pixie, there’s sibling loyalty and then there’s complete stupidity. Show me that you understand the difference and read the file.’
Her face flaming red with angry embarrassment, Pixie grabbed the file and retreated to a chair.
Apollo studied her with an air of exasperation. Why couldn’t she understand that it was his job as a husband to protect her? That was all he was doing, as well as sorting out a problem that would only get worse if it was ignored. He had no personal axe to grind when it came to his brother-in-law. But it was obvious that Patrick was weak and in need of firm guidance. That had to be sorted out before Pixie’s brother got himself into an even bigger mess because Apollo would refuse to settle the younger man’s gambling losses if he got into trouble again.
Pixie’s shoulders hunched as she read the investigation report, which stated that Patrick often played card games in the evening after he finished work. Her heart sank to her toes, the colour draining from her face to leave her stiff and pale. Her brother had lied to her and she was hugely hurt by that reality. He had sworn he would never gamble again, he had sworn he was not addicted but the evidence in the file proved otherwise and it was a total slap in the face for her to have to learn that fact from Apollo, who had all the sensitivity of a hammer blow.
‘I had him investigated only as a precaution. I will not allow Patrick’s difficulties to cause trouble between us. I tackled him today—in a private location, by the way—for your benefit and that of his partner,’ Apollo informed her on a pious note that made his bride’s teeth grit. ‘Your brother has agreed to see an addiction counsellor and after her assessment he will follow the advice he receives. Otherwise his gambling debts will come back to haunt him—’
Pixie leapt upright in consternation. ‘No, but you promised me!’
‘The carrot and the stick approach work, Pixie,’ Apollo cut in very drily. ‘He needs a reason to reform and the child on the way is an excellent source of pressure on him to change his ways.’
‘Holding that debt over him is so cruel, Apollo,’ Pixie framed unevenly, grey eyes wide with stinging tears and accusation.
‘He needs professional treatment and support. You are his sister, not his mother,’ Apollo pronounced with finality. ‘I won’t change my mind about this, so don’t waste your energy arguing about it.’
But Pixie already knew that she was unlikely to get anywhere arguing. Apollo was a steamroller, who travelled in a dead straight line and it was simply your bad luck if you lay in his path because he wouldn’t deviate from his course.
Unhappily, his comment about her being Patrick’s sister and not his mother lingered longest with Pixie, stirring up memories she would have sooner left buried. From an early age Pixie had been urged to look after her little brother. Her mother had loved Patrick in a way she had not seemed able to love her older child and that had stayed true right to the end of the older woman’s life when she’d begged her daughter to always support her younger sibling.
As a child, Patrick had got treats, praise, affection and smiles from their mother while Pixie had been denied all of those things and left wondering what it was about her that made her less loveable. As she’d matured, however, she had come to suspect that her mother had been one of those women who would always have idolised her son in preference to her daughter, indeed who saw something almost magical in the mother-son bond from which she jealously excluded everyone else.
A knock on the door sounded and Apollo yanked it open and four little furry feet surged across the floor to boisterously attack Pixie’s ankles. Damp-eyed, she bent down and lifted Hector, who was crazy happy to be reunited with her after a twenty-four-hour absence. He planted excited doggy kisses over her chin and made her reluctantly laugh as she petted him to calm him down.
‘You need to get changed for dinner now,’ Apollo informed her, gratified to have scored a coup by reintroducing the dog at the optimum moment. But then Apollo very rarely left anything to chance. He had planned that reunion as a soother almost as soon as he’d discovered that Patrick Robinson was still gambling because he had known that he had to confront his bride-to-be with the realities of the situation.
If you knew how to handle women, you could avoid conflict. Apollo had been smoothly and cleverly handling women since he was a child because his comfort had depended on the relationship he had established with his stepmothers. He avoided dramas with lovers in much the same style. An expensive piece of jewellery or a new wardrobe could work a miracle with an angry, resentful woman. Pixie, however, so far seemed infuriatingly indifferent to her new clothes and lifestyle but he had not yet had the chance to test her in that line. She could simply be faking her lack of interest, striving to impress him. He studied her tear-streaked face, the grey eyes soft now as she petted the tatty little dog she undoubtedly loved. He liked that she liked animals. It was the first time in a very long time that Apollo had actively liked anything about a woman and it shook him.
‘You deliberately let me think that Hector and I were going to be apart for weeks,’ Pixie condemned. ‘Why did you do that? The carrot and the stick approach with me as well?’
Apollo shrugged. ‘I dislike arguments. I knew you would be upset about your brother. Hector’s your reward for accepting that I’m doing right by Patrick.’
Pixie’s delicate frame went rigid. ‘Stop trying to manipulate me, Apollo. If you want me to do something just face me with it. Try being honest for a change.’
Even barefoot she contrived to stalk out of the office to join the yacht steward waiting outside for her to show her to the master suite. On the trek there she was shown the gym, the medical centre, the sauna and steam room and the cinema. Circe was a massive vessel with four decks and seemed to contain everything Apollo might require to live on it on a permanent basis. He hadn’t offered to give her a grand tour as she had somehow expected and now she scolded herself for imagining he might want to do something that normal. He didn’t care what she thought of his yacht. He had to know that she had never been on a yacht before and was already utterly overwhelmed by the sheer opulence of her surroundings.
The huge stateroom with the massive bed, private deck and en-suite intimidated her but not as much as the stewardess who greeted her in perfect English as ‘Mrs Metraxis’ and asked her what she intended to wear. From the closets, Pixie picked out a black silky catsuit. So, she had to change for dinner now. Strange the traditions Apollo took for granted, she reflected helplessly as she tried not to let her gaze linger on the giant bed.
She was a bag of nerves but a couple of drinks would steady her, she told herself urgently. This was not the time to fall apart. Apollo wasn’t going to hurt her. He wasn’t going to attack her. In addition, he might be detached and she might only be a means to an end but he wasn’t tactless enough to wrestle her out of her bra and then ask in a disappointed tone where her boobs had gone, as had once happened to Pixie. That experience, added to the guy who had told her that her lack of curves just didn’t rev his engine, had been sufficient to kill Pixie’s desire to get naked with a man simply to experiment. If truth be known she had envied Holly for the greater sexual confidence that had allowed her friend to sleep with Vito the first day she met him because Pixie knew that in the same circumstances she would have panicked and ended up saying no.
Only no wasn’t quite an option with a wedding ring
on her finger on their wedding night, particularly not with a male programmed to try and get her pregnant as fast as possible. She practised smiling in the mirror as she renewed her make-up and straightened her hair. She breathed in deep and strong as she dressed and tried not to fret at the trailing hems of the pant legs, which she had expected to wear with six-inch heels. The stewardess provided her with deck shoes and she thrust her feet moodily into them to be escorted to the dining saloon.
And there was Apollo awaiting her, resplendent in a tailored white dinner jacket and narrow black trousers that moulded long, powerful thighs, long black hair flaring round his lean, darkly handsome bronzed face. Gorgeous as a movie star and very, very sexy, she told herself bracingly, but complex as an algebraic equation to someone who had never got the hang of algebra.
She looked like a kid in the trailing pantsuit, Apollo reflected with hidden amusement. Why hadn’t it occurred to her to wear something short? Her starlight eyes flickered with nervous tension over him and moved away hurriedly and he wondered why she was on edge because a woman expecting to share his bed had never been on edge with Apollo before. In fact most were enthusiastic, sparkling and downright impatient because he had a reputation for never sending a woman away dissatisfied.
He could see her nipples through the fine fabric because she wasn’t wearing a bra and the tiny pouting shape of her breasts made him unexpectedly so hard that he ached, and he was forced to shift position to ease his discomfort while the wine was poured.
‘How long will we be on the yacht for?’ Pixie asked tautly.
Apollo shrugged, striking green eyes veiled. ‘For as long as it takes us to get bored. I set up Circe to enable me to work wherever I am. We’ll go to Nexos when we leave the yacht.’
‘Nexos?’
‘The Greek island my grandfather bought for the Metraxis family,’ he extended. ‘Of course, he had six children, of whom my father was the eldest, and the family was much bigger in his day. My father only had me. I have hundreds of cousins.’
‘Didn’t your father want any more children?’
‘It wasn’t an option. He eventually discovered that cancer treatment he had in his thirties had left him sterile. Had he had a check sooner, all his wives wouldn’t have wasted their time pursuing fertility treatment,’ Apollo admitted wryly. ‘That’s why I had the check.’
Pixie finished her first glass of wine and watched it being refilled by the silent waiter attending them. It unnerved her having a conversation with staff around but Apollo contrived to act as though they were alone.
The food was out of this world but Pixie felt that for all the enjoyment it was giving her she might as well have been eating sawdust. As the waiter left the saloon to fetch the dessert course, Apollo dealt her a frown. ‘That’s your fourth glass of wine.’
‘You’re counting?’ she gasped in dismay.
‘Should you be drinking at all with the project we have in mind?’
‘I didn’t think of that.’ Pixie set her glass down. ‘I don’t know.’
‘We have a doctor on board. I’ll ask him. Aside of that aspect, I’m not having sex with you if you’re drunk. That’s something I would never ever do, regardless of whether or not we are married,’ Apollo declared grimly.
Pixie reddened as if she had been slapped. ‘I’m just a little nervous.’
Apollo stared at her with clear incomprehension. ‘Why would you be?’
And Pixie knew that it was her moment to tell him the truth. After all, hadn’t she urged him simply to be honest with her? Yet here she was covering up something very basic about her. But how could she tell a legendary womaniser that she was a virgin? He would think she was a freak or that no man had ever asked. It would be horribly humiliating. But worst of all, it would give Apollo a glimpse of her most intimate insecurities about herself and that was what Pixie couldn’t bear. He would see her fear, her weakness, and he was ruthless and cold and he would use it against her, she thought wretchedly.
‘Are you still hungry?’ Apollo prompted softly.
‘No,’ she told him truthfully.
In a split second, Apollo rose from his chair and strode down to scoop her up out of hers, depriving her so thoroughly of breath and brain power that she merely stared up at him in astonishment. ‘Time to make a start on that project, koukla mou,’ he teased.
‘You can put me down to walk.’
‘I don’t want you tripping and breaking a leg.’
‘Of course…that would interfere with the project,’ Pixie voiced for herself.
‘I’m not that cold-blooded,’ Apollo parried with a sudden husky laugh, glancing down at her with brilliantly striking green eyes. ‘At this moment all I’m thinking about is that you’re my wife and I want you.’
Pixie didn’t believe that and an edge of panic infiltrated her. ‘I’m not that experienced,’ she told him abruptly.
Apollo smiled down at her, his wide sensual mouth tilting. ‘How many guys?’
‘A few,’ she lied hastily, her face colouring, eyes veiling. ‘I’m kind of fussy.’
Apollo liked being told that and rationalised that far from liberated thought with the reminder that she was his wife and naturally he didn’t want a wife who had anything like his own track record. He knew that was sexist but it was the way he felt and it was a knee-jerk reaction that took him by surprise.
It was beginning to bother him that Pixie inspired such uncharacteristic urges. She was his wife but not a proper wife, he reasoned, merely the wife he had never thought he would have in the matrimonial step he had sworn never to take. And she was only with him in the first place because he had saved Patrick from the thugs her cowardly little brother had chosen to tangle with. It was a timely reminder but something visceral inside him denied that reminder because all of a sudden he discovered that he didn’t like that either. He liked it much more when he looked down into Pixie’s luminous grey eyes and read the same hunger that he was experiencing.
As he settled her down on the huge bed Pixie studied him, loving the strong angle of his jaw line, the starkness of his well-defined cheekbones and the classic jut of his nose, not to mention the lush black velvet sweep of his lashes shadowing those riveting emerald-green eyes. Looking at Apollo had the strangest intoxicating effect on her and her lips tingled as if in recollection of the kiss they had shared earlier.
He backed off a step and shed his jacket, embarked on his shirt and her heart started beating very, very fast inside her ribcage as he exposed the hard slab of his stomach and the incredibly defined muscles indenting his broad chest. He was drop-dead beautiful to her wide gaze. The shirt went flying. There was nothing inhibited about the speed with which he was stripping and she tried and failed to swallow as the trousers were unzipped and Apollo got down to boxers that revealed almost more than they concealed. He was already aroused, which shook and surprised her, indicating as it did that he did want her as he had declared he did.
But then, he clearly suffered from a high libido, she reminded herself, and possibly he was merely in the mood for sex and she was the only woman available. Yes, that made more sense to her. She would just be another nick on a bedpost already so full of nicks that hers would vanish into the woodwork. She tugged at the sleeves of her catsuit but he forestalled her, lifting her up in an infuriatingly controlling way to turn her round and unzip the garment, sliding it off her stiff shoulders, tugging it down with all the smooth expertise of a male who could have stripped a woman out of the most intricate clothing in the dark without breaking a sweat.
Pixie trembled. He had even blocked her attempt to get a little tipsy. She was way more sober than she had planned to be, having assumed that the alcohol would make her less nervous. As it was she only felt the very slightest buzz from the wine she had imbibed before he made sobriety sound like her bounden duty.
Apollo was both disconcerted and enthralled by her sudden silence and submissive attitude for it was not at all what he had dimly expected from her. ‘
I’m not remotely kinky in bed if that’s what you’re worrying about,’ he told her with amusement.
Pixie gulped. ‘I’m not the slightest bit worried,’ she assured him.
‘Then why can’t you relax and trust me?’ Apollo enquired lazily, his dark deep drawl having already dropped in pitch and the vowel sounds roughened.
In mortification, Pixie closed her eyes. ‘I’d really prefer the lights out…’
‘Not my preference but if that’s what it takes, koukla mou.’ Apollo reached up to stab a button above the headboard and the stateroom was plunged into darkness although soft light emanated from the lights still illuminating the private deck beyond the windows.
His wicked mouth descended on the slope of her neck and she shivered, a different kind of tension entering her now that he no longer had an alarmingly bright view of her physical deficiencies. She quivered as long fingers expertly teased her straining nipples.
‘I’m very small there,’ she pointed out, unable to resist a ridiculous urge to draw his attention to the obvious.
‘I like it,’ Apollo growled next to her ear, nipping at her ear lobe, sending another shot of uncontrolled response darting through her.
‘Men always want more, not less.’
Apollo arched his hips and ground his pelvis against her thigh. ‘Does that feel like I’m low on sexual interest?’ he asked silkily. ‘Now, be quiet.’
And Pixie shut her mouth because she was embarrassed by the inappropriate comments spilling from her lips. He rested her against the soft pillows and employed his mouth on her breasts, sending increasingly powerful streams of sensation down into her pelvis. Her hips rocked of their own volition and that shocked her. She could feel herself getting hot and damp there and that shocked her almost as much as her sudden desire to join in and explore him. Of course, she didn’t have the nerve. She lay there like a felled statue, settling for being hugely grateful not to be on the edge of a panic attack.