But then while she had known they would be faking their honeymoon and had dutifully posed with him for a persistent paparazzo, who had followed them round Porto Cervo, she had not appreciated the lengths Acheron might go to in making their relationship look genuine from the inside and the outside. So, if occasionally she got a little confused and thought about him as if he were her real husband, who could blame her for making that mistake?
Or for falling madly and irrevocably in love with him during the process, she reasoned wretchedly. After all, no man had ever treated her as well as he did, no man had ever made her so happy either, and only he had ever made love to her several times a day, every day, as if she were indeed the hottest, sexiest woman on the planet. Naturally her emotions had got involved and she suppressed them as best she could, knowing that the last thing Acheron required from her was angst and a broken heart, which would make him feel guilty and uncomfortable.
It wasn’t his fault she had fallen for him either. It certainly wasn’t as though he had misled her with promises about the future. In fact, right from the outset she had known that there was no future for them. He had never made any bones about that. Once they had succeeded to legally adopt Amber, their supposed marriage would be left to wither and die. Tabby would make a new life with the little girl she loved while she assumed Acheron would return to his workaholic, womanising existence. Would she ever see him again after the divorce? As she confronted that bleak prospect an agonising shard of pain slivered through Tabby and left a deep anguished ache in its wake. Would Acheron want to retain even the most distant relationship with Amber? Or would he decide on a clean break and act as if Amber didn’t exist?
Acheron crossed the beach, noting how Tabby’s figure had rounded out once she was eating decent food, recalling with quiet satisfaction that she no longer bit her nails—small changes that he valued.
‘How did you get the scar concealed by the tattoo?’ he demanded obstinately, interrupting Tabby’s reverie and shooting her back to the present by wrapping both arms round her from behind, carefully preventing her from storming off again. ‘Were you involved in an accident?’
‘No...it wasn’t an accident,’ Tabby admitted, past recollections making her skin turn suddenly cold and clammy in spite of the heat of the sun.
He was being supportive, she reminded herself doggedly, guilt biting into her former annoyance with him. When Amber had cried half the night because she was teething and her gums were sore, Acheron had been right there beside her, helping to distract the little girl and calm her down enough to sleep again. She had not expected supportiveness from Acheron but his interest in Amber was anything but half-hearted. When it came to childcare, he took the rough with the smooth, serenely accepting that children weren’t always sunny and smiling.
The new nanny currently working with Melinda was called Teresa, a warm, chattering Italian woman whose main source of interest was her charge. Within a week the English nanny would be leaving to take up a permanent position with a family in London.
‘Tabby...I asked you a question,’ Acheron reminded her with deeply unwelcome persistence. ‘You said you didn’t get the scar in an accident, so—’
Dredged from the teeming tumult of her frantic attempt to think about just about anything other than the past he was trying to dig up, Tabby lifted her head high and looked out to sea. ‘My mother burned me with a hot iron because I knocked over a carton of milk,’ she confessed without any expression at all.
‘Thee mou...’ Acheron growled in stricken disbelief, spinning her round to look at her pale set face and the yawning hurt still lingering in her violet eyes.
‘I was never allowed to be with either of my parents unsupervised again after that,’ she explained woodenly. ‘My mother went to prison for burning me and I never saw either of them again.’
Bewildered by the great surge of ferocious anger welling up inside him, Acheron crushed her slight body to his, both arms wrapping tightly round her. For some reason he registered that he was feeling sick and his hands weren’t quite steady, and in that instant some inexplicable deep need that disturbed him was making it impossible for him not to touch her. ‘That must’ve been a relief.’
‘No, it wasn’t. I loved them. They weren’t very lovable people but they were all I had,’ Tabby admitted thickly, her dry throat scratching over the words as if she was reluctant to voice them. She had learned as a young child that loving gestures would be rejected but now more than anything in the world she wanted to wrap her arms round Acheron and take full advantage of the comfort he was clumsily trying to offer her, only that pattern of early rejection and knowledge of how abandonment felt kept her body rigid a
nd uninviting in the circle of his arms.
‘I understand that,’ Acheron breathed in a raw driven undertone. ‘I rarely saw my mother but I still idolised her—’
‘What a pair we are!’ Tabby sniffed, her tension suddenly giving way as tears stung her eyes and overflowed, her overloaded reaction to having had to explain and indeed relive what she never, ever talked about to anyone.
Acheron stared down at her tear-stained visage, pale below his bronzed skin, his strong facial bones forbiddingly set. ‘I can’t bear to think of you being hurt like that, yineka mou—’
‘Don’t...don’t talk about it!’ Tabby urged feverishly. ‘I try never to think about it but every time I saw the scar in the mirror as a teenager, I remembered it, and sometimes people asked what had happened to me. That’s why I got the tattoo...to cover it up, hide it.’
‘Then wear that tattoo with pride. It’s a survival badge,’ Acheron informed her with hard satisfaction. ‘I wish you’d explained weeks ago but I understand now why you didn’t.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, let’s talk about something more cheerful!’ Tabby pleaded. ‘Tell me something about you. I mean, you must have some happy childhood memories of your mother?’
Acheron closed an arm round her slight shoulders to press her back across the beach towards Amber. ‘The night before my first day at school she presented me with a fantastically expensive pen engraved with my name. Of course, I was only allowed to use a pencil in class but naturally that didn’t occur to her. She was very fond of flamboyant gestures, always telling me that only the very best was good enough for a Dimitrakos—’
‘Maybe that was how she was brought up,’ Tabby suggested quietly. ‘But you still haven’t explained why that pen made you happy.’
‘Because generally she ignored me but that particular week she was fresh out of rehab and engaged in turning over a new leaf and it was the one and only time she made me feel that I genuinely mattered to her. She even gave me a whole speech about education being the most important thing in my life...that from a woman who dropped out of school as a teenager and couldn’t read anything more challenging than a magazine,’ he told her wryly.
‘Do you still have the pen?’
‘I think it was stolen.’ He sent her a rueful charismatic smile that tilted her heart inside her chest and interfered with her breathing. ‘But at least I have that one perfect moment to remember her by.’
* * *
Acheron could not relax until he had commissioned a special piece of jewellery for Tabby’s upcoming birthday, which surprisingly fell in the same week as his own. That achieved, he worried about having taken that much trouble over a gift. What was wrong with him? What sort of man went to such lengths for a wife he was planning to divorce? Keep it cool, a little voice chimed in the back of his uneasy mind. But it had proved impossible to play it cool when confronted with the harsh reality of Tabby’s childhood experiences, which had had the unexpected effect of showing Acheron that he had a good deal less to be bitter about with regard to his own. His mother had been a neglectful, selfish and inadequate parent but even at her worst he had never doubted that she loved him. And possibly, but for the malicious machinations of a third party, his father might have learned to love and appreciate him as well...
The constant flow of such unfamiliar thoughts assailing him kept him quiet over dinner. Aware of Tabby’s anxious gaze, he was maddened by the knowledge that he wasn’t feeling like himself any more and that, even in the midst of that disorientating experience, withdrawing his attention from her could make him feel guilty. Never a fan of great inner debates, or even in the habit of staging them, he was exasperated and bewildered by the emotions Tabby constantly churned up inside him. She was too intense, too rich for his blood. He needed to take a step back, he decided abruptly; he needed some distance, and the instant he made that decision he felt better and back in control again.
‘I have to go away on business for a couple of days,’ Acheron volunteered as he strode out of the bathroom, a towel negligently wrapped round his lean, muscular body. His black hair tousled and damp, his lean, devastatingly handsome face clean-shaven, he looked amazing and Tabby’s mouth ran dry before she could even process what he had said.