‘Sorry, what’s happening?’ she whispered apologetically to Isidore.
‘I’ve announced my retirement. Jude will now be taking over control of the Alexandris empire. It’s time for me to step down,’ his grandfather told her with satisfaction.
That announcement had made Jude even more the centre of attention. Tansy listened to him talk in Greek with apparent calm, but she remained conscious of the dazed light in his dark eyes that suggested that his grandfather’s retirement had come as a complete surprise to him. She wanted to ask him why that was so, but Jude had been plunged into talking business with various guests and it was some time before they were finally free to head upstairs to bed and talk. It was two in the morning and Tansy was smothering a yawn, wondering if her bone deep exhaustion could be another sign of pregnancy, because usually she could take one late night without it being a problem.
‘You’re very tired,’ Jude noted.
‘Yes. Are you going to tell me why Isidore’s announcement shocked you so much?’
‘I had no idea that that was his plan. In fact, I thought he wouldn’t even consider it until I was married with a child,’ Jude admitted tautly.
Tansy stopped in the doorway of their bedroom and stared back at him. ‘That’s why you needed a wife and wanted a child,’ she guessed.
‘That possibility only added an inducement, but it’s not why I needed a wife or chose to marry. Ever have the feeling that you’ve been played?’ Jude breathed in a raw undertone as he doffed his tuxedo and poured himself a whiskey from the bar in the sitting room, kicking off his shoes, unbuttoning his shirt, the seething tension in his big, powerful frame blatant ‘That’s how I feel right now. Isidore played me—’
Tansy gave him a bemused look. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘My mother, Clio, lives in an Alexandris property in Italy. She’s lived there ever since the divorce. She got virtually no money when she left my father and Isidore allowed her to move into the Villa Bardani because initially she still had custody of me. He did offer to buy her a house in Greece, but she refused to come back here. A couple of centuries ago the gardens at the villa were a showpiece but over the years they were allowed to fall into ruin. After she lost custody of me, Clio became obsessed with restoring the villa’s gardens. She had nothing else in her life to focus on.’
‘Why did she lose custody of you?’
‘She had a nervous breakdown and slashed her wrists when she was alone in the house with me,’ Jude offered flatly. ‘For that reason, she was deemed mentally unfit by the courts to look after a young child.’
Shock engulfed Tansy, for she had never dreamt that something so distressing lay behind Clio’s loss of custody of Jude. His parents had had a dreadful marriage and it made Tansy wonder how much that truth had influenced Jude in his desire for a more practical union, shorn of emotion. After all, powerful emotions had proved destructive in his parents’ marriage and must have damaged Jude’s faith in them as well. How could he ever approve of love or even want it when some kind of love had originally brought his parents together? And Althea had claimed to love Jude as well, even after betraying his trust.
‘Oh, my word…that’s a horrible story,’ she whispered in a pained tone of sympathy. ‘Divorce, then a breakdown, followed by the loss of her son into the bargain. Your mother suffered.’
‘Exactly,’ Jude incised, his lean, strong face grim and taut. ‘This family destroyed Clio. I have a difficult relationship with her as well. She can’t seem to separate me from my father inside her head. But I still care about her and believe that she deserves happiness. The gardens she restored over the past twenty years are now world-renowned and she’s out there labouring in them from dawn to dusk with the gardeners. Those gardens mean everything to her…and Isidore threatened to send her an eviction notice.’
Tansy blinked rapidly. ‘He…what?’
‘She has never had a legal right to live there or even be on the property because it belongs to my family. My grandfather said he would throw her out and refuse her access to the gardens which belong to the villa unless I was married by my thirtieth birthday. I believed he would do it too, because he loathes her,’ Jude admitted curtly.
‘And that’s why you needed a wife,’ Tansy whispered, sinking down into the nearest seat before her wobbly legs could betray how much shock she was in. She had simply assumed that he had some business or inheritance reason for requiring a wife and it had not seemed worth her while to dig any deeper. She had never dreamt that his motive might be so personal or so family-oriented. And that he had gone to such extremes to protect a woman whom he rarely even saw impressed her even more.
‘Isidore was playing me,’ Jude bit out harshly. ‘He wanted to see me married and settled before he retired, but I suspect that he never had any serious intention of evicting Clio from her home.’
‘Perhaps not.’
‘Because it would have alienated me for ever,’ Jude delivered with a bitter edge to his intonation. ‘I assumed the worst of him, and he encouraged me to do so.’
Isidore had fooled him, Jude acknowledged, but, even worse, Isidore had known that his grandson would believe the very worst of him and that fact bothered Jude. Had he shown his distrust to his grandfather so clearly? Evidently he had and Jude’s lack of faith would only have increased Isidore’s resentment of his daughter-in-law. A tangled mixture of shame and guilt and resentment infiltrated Jude. Somewhere during the years of his childhood, he had discarded the ability to stand back and clearly read those closest to him. He had believed blindly in everything Clio told him, had judged his grandfather to be a cruel, hard man. Yet that same cruel, hard man had proved to be a loving grandparent, indeed a much more caring and supportive parental figure than Jude’s distinctly distant father.
‘Well, you may be married but I wouldn’t say you’re settled with a divorce already organised as a happy ending,’ Tansy pointed out in consolation.
‘I’m so comforted,’ Jude bit out with a razor-edged smile, jolted more than he liked by that unwelcome reminder.
‘I’m off to bed,’ Tansy said, surrendering to the tense atmosphere, reminding herself that the perplexing rights and wrongs of Jude’s family were not really any of her business because she wasn’t a true wife. Not that Isidore appeared to appreciate that fact, she conceded ruefully. She saw that just as Jude had not realised his grandfather was wielding an empty threat as a weapon, Isidore had not realised that Jude might choose to make a fake marriage rather than a real one. Two tricky, too clever, too stubborn personalities from the same family, she acknowledged, well, fancy that. Jude and his grandfather were chips off the very same block.
Freshened up and sheathed in a silk nightie, she climbed into bed. Jude paced the sitting room, initially outraged that Isidore had duped him and unable to get past that fact. He had raced off like a knight in shining armour to come to his mother’s rescue, but it hadn’t been necessary. That was a galling footnote to the sacrifices he had made and yet hadn’t Isidore created a better outcome for all of them? Clio was safe, Jude was, to all intents and purposes, happily married and newly conscious that he had a grandfather who appeared to love him.
Not a grandfather who viewed him solely as a necessary heir, but a man who had seen and possibly understood Jude’s reluctance to risk his emotions in any close relationship. After all, emotions were messy and made you vulnerable, and Jude had perfectly grasped that fact after his mother, distraught over Dion’s many infidelities, had tried to take her own life. Jude had been prepared to marry only if emotion could be removed from the equation.
And his marriage of convenience with Tansy had scarcely proved a punishment, he reflected with a sudden grin at his own melodramatic frame of mind. Tansy was wonderfully straightforward, and hadn’t he ultimately received everything that he had once craved? His freedom in business from Isidore’s interference? The right to steer the Alexandris empire in a more innovative direction? It had taken the wife he had never thought to have to persuade him that his grandfather was not the callous monster Clio had once depicted. Jude had finally seen his grandfather’s love for him as clear as day and it had shaken him almost as much as Isidore’s retirement plans.
Naturally, his mother had had a confrontational relationship with his grandfather, who had remained loyal to his only son. There was more than one side to his parents’ broken marriage and the divisions in his family were not as black and white as Jude had once believed. In a much better mood at having faced that truth, Jude went for a shower.
Gentle fingertips smoothed down Tansy’s thigh, trailing against silk, piercing through her drowsiness. ‘Jude,’ she muttered.