Almost immediately the front door to the villa was opened to reveal a tall, well-built woman with dark hair streaked with grey and a serene expression.
It gave Ruby a fierce pang of emotion to see the way the twins automatically put their hands in Sander’s and not her own as they walked with their father towards her. Her smile of welcome for Sander was one of love and delight, and Ruby watched in amazement as Sander returned her warm hug with obvious affection. Somehow it was not what she had expected. Anna—Ruby assumed the woman was Anna—was plainly far more to Sander than merely the person who was in charge of his household.
Now she was bending down to greet the boys, not overwhelming them by hugging them as she had Sander, Ruby noted approvingly, but instead waiting for them to go to her.
Sander gave them a little push and told them, ‘This is Anna. She looked after me when I was a boy, and now she will look after you.’
Immediately Ruby’s maternal hackles rose. Her sons did not need Anna or anyone else to look after them. They had her. She stepped forward herself, placing one hand on each of her son’s shoulders, and then was completely disarmed when Anna smiled warmly and approvingly at her, as though welcoming what she had done rather than seeing it as either a challenge or a warning.
When Sander introduced her to Anna as his wife, it was obvious that Anna had been expecting them. What had Sander said to his family and those who knew him about the twins? How had he explained away the fact that he was suddenly producing them—and her? Ruby didn’t know but she did know that Anna at least was delighted to welcome the twins as Sander’s sons. It was plain she was ready to adore and spoil them, and was going to end up completely under their thumbs.
‘Anna will show you round the villa and provide you and the boys with something to eat,’ Sander informed Ruby.
He said something in Greek to Anna, who beamed at him and nodded her head vigorously, and then he was gone, striding across the white limestone floor of the entrance hall and disappearing through one of the dark wooden doors set into the white walls.
That feeling gripping her wasn’t a sense of loss, was it? A feeling of being abandoned? A longing for Sander to return, because without him their small family was incomplete? Because without him she was incomplete?
As soon as the treacherous words whispered across her mind Ruby stiffened in denial of them. But they had left an echo that wasn’t easily silenced, reminding her of all that she had suffered when she had first been foolish enough to think that he cared about her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘I’LL show you your rooms first,’ Anna told Ruby, ‘and then perhaps you would like a cup of tea before you see the rest of the villa?’
There was something genuinely warm and kind and, well, motherly about Anna that had Ruby’s initial wary hostility melting away as they walked together up the marble stairs, the twins in between them.
When they reached the top and saw the long wide landing stretching out ahead of them the twins looked at Ruby hopefully.
Shaking her head, she began, ‘No—no running inside—’ Only to have Anna smile broadly at her.
‘This is their home now, they may run if you permit it,’ she told her.
‘Very well,’ Ruby told them, relieved by Anna’s understanding of the need of two young children to let off steam, and both women watched as the boys ran down the corridor.
‘Looking at them is like looking at Sander when he was a similar age, except that—’ Anna stopped, her smile fading.
‘Except that what?’ Ruby asked her, sensitively defensive of any possible criticism being lodged against her precious sons.
As though she had guessed what Ruby was thinking, Anna patted Ruby on the arm.
‘You are a good mother—anyone can see that. Your goodness and your love for them is reflected in your sons’ smiles. Sander’s mother was not like that. Her children were a duty she resented, and they all, especially Sander, learned young not to turn to their mother for love and comfort.’
Anna’s quiet words formed an image inside Ruby’s head she didn’t want to see—an image of a young and vulnerable Sander, a child with sadness in his eyes, standing alone and hurt by his mother’s lack of love for him.
The boys raced back to them, putting an end to any more confidences from Anna about Sander’s childhood, and Ruby’s sympathy for the child that Sander had been was swiftly pushed to one side when she discovered that the two of them were going to be sharing a bedroom and a bed.
Why did she feel so unnerved and apprehensive? Ruby asked herself later, after Anna had helped her put the twins to bed and she was in the kitchen, drinking the fresh cup of tea Anna had insisted on making for her. Sander had already made it plain that she must accept that their marriage would include sexual intimacy. They both already knew that she wanted him, and she had already suffered the humiliation that had brought her, so what was there left for her to fear?
There was emotional vulnerability, Ruby admitted. With her sexual vulnerability to Sander there was already a danger that she could become sexually dependent on him, and that was bad enough. If she also became emotionally vulnerable to him might she not then become emotionally dependent on him? Where had that thought come from? She was a million miles from feeling anything emotional for Sander, wasn’t she?
Excusing herself to Anna, Ruby explained that she wanted to go up and check the twins were still sleeping as they had left them, not wanting them to wake alone in such new surroundings.
The twins’ bedroom, like the one she was to share with Sander, looked out onto a courtyard and an infinity pool with the sea beyond it. But whilst Sander’s bedroom had glass doors that opened out onto the patio area that surrounded the pool, the boys’ room merely had a window—a safety feature for which she was extremely grateful. Glass bedroom doors, a swimming pool, and two adventurous five-year-olds were a mix that would arouse anxiety in any protective mother.
She needn’t have worried about the twins. They were both sleeping soundly, their faces turned toward one another. Love for them filled her. But as she bent towards them to kiss them it wasn’t their faces she could see but that of another young child, a child whose dark eyes, so like those of her sons, were shadowed with pain and angry pride. Sander’s eyes. They still held that angry pride now, as an adult, when he looked at her. And the pain? Her question furrowed Ruby’s brow. Emotional pain was not something she had previously equated with Sander. But the circumstances a child experienced growing up affected it all its life. She believed that wholeheartedly. If she hadn’t done so then she would not feel as strongly as she did about Sander being a part of the twins’ lives. So what had happened to Sander’s pain? Was it buried somewhere deep inside him? A sad, sore place that could never heal? A wound that was the cruellest wound of all to a child—the lack of its mother’s love?
Confused by her own thoughts, Ruby left her sleeping sons. She was tired and ready for bed herself. Her heart started beating unsteadily. Tired and ready for bed? Ready to share Sander’s bed?
The villa was beautifully decorated. The guest suite Anna had shown Ruby, and in which she would have preferred to be sleeping, was elegantly modern, the clean lines of its furniture softened by gauzy drapes, the cool white and taupe of the colour scheme broken up with touches of Mediterranean blues and greens in the artwork adorning the walls.