CHAPTER TWO
TANSYAVERTEDHERgaze from her reflection in the mirrored lift wafting her up to the penthouse apartment. She was still a little shaken by the elaborate security checks she had had to undergo to prove her identity on the ground floor and gain access to the building. She was now in a special lift that travelled only to the penthouse apartment, a luxury that impressed her to death with its sheer exclusivity. In truth, getting permission to even enter the presence of Jude Alexandris felt like an achievement of no mean order.
Maybe she didn’t look quite fancy enough to impress, she conceded ruefully. Maybe she should have tailored her appearance to exactly what Calvin had advised and trowelled on the make-up and used every beautician trick known to her to ensure the ultimate polished finish. Unfortunately, that extremely groomed look wasn’t Tansy and never had been. Although her mother had ensured that her vanity-resistant daughter was taught every cosmetic skill available, Tansy had never enjoyed the artificial aspect of presenting herself as someone she felt she was not.
For that reason, Tansy was only wearing light make-up, but she was also, at Calvin’s behest, wearing a dress and shoes she felt would have been more suitable for clubbing than a supposed interview. The last time she had worn the short green dress and perilously high heels had been to dance at her friend Laura’s wedding and she had been a different girl back then, she thought sadly.
Only eighteen months ago, she had still been at university studying radiography and looking forward to the hospital career she had planned. And then without warning everything had gone pear-shaped. Her mother’s pregnancy had been problematic from the outset and when Rosie had found herself struggling to run her beauty salon it had been her daughter she had turned to for help and support. At the time, Tansy had assumed she would only need a couple of months out of her course and that once her sibling was born she would be free to return to her studies. Yet even now, when she accepted that that miscalculation had concluded her education, nothing could make her regret her sister’s birth, she conceded fondly. Sometimes life demanded sudden changes of direction and she had simply had to come to terms with the different path that had opened up ahead of her. And if that meant marrying some weird, rich foreigner, she would cope if it was for Posy’s essential benefit.
With a soft bell tone, the lift doors whirred back and exposed a vast expanse of marble floor flooded by light from the glass roof overhead. A single metal sculpture took pride of place to one side of a glass hall table. It was very stark décor, but it also struck a highly sophisticated note. Tansy stepped out of the lift just as an older woman in a severe black dress appeared from a doorway.
‘Miss Browne, please come this way,’ she urged, leading the way into a breathtaking reception area flooded with light and surrounded by fabulous panoramic views of London.
Indeed, so spectacular was that space that Tansy didn’t even notice that the older woman had abandoned her or that, as she pirouetted round on one high heel to better appreciate what lay beyond the wall of window glass, a tall man had strolled in off the roof terrace behind her.
Jude studied his visitor with appreciative eyes. She was a beauty and a surprisingly unusual one, distinctly different from the common herd. Broadly speaking, she had blond hair, but it was streaked in shades that ran from light brown to gold to pale honey and it looked as natural as her delicately pointed features. Her hair fell halfway down her back in a thick mass of rather messy waves. She wore a raincoat over a dress that revealed legs that in shape and length would not have shamed a Las Vegas showgirl. Slender in build, she was of medium height. Against her creamy skin, her almond-shaped green eyes glowed as clear as emeralds above her full soft pink mouth.
‘Jude Alexandris…’ Jude murmured, thinking, yes, she would fit his purpose, more than match and make possible that extra dimension to the marriage that he had originally planned with Althea.
After all, why go to all the trouble of getting married to satisfy and silence his grandfather’s demands and not take advantage of that legal union? It would make sense to try to have a child with the woman he married and, in so doing, shift his cantankerous grandfather into long-overdue retirement, which would leave Jude free to live his life and run the Alexandris empire exactly as he liked without interference from anyone. When Althea had bowed out, he had given up on the idea of a child but why should he do that? A woman prepared to marry for money would probably have little compunction about providing him with a child in return for an even richer payday.
At the unexpected sound of another voice, Tansy flinched and jumped and spun round, her coat flying out to catch on the small table beside her and toppling it. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ she began in incredulous embarrassment, wobbling on the high heels that she had not worn in well over a year, one foot semiskidding on the tiled floor, making her lurch clumsily to one side.
Jude caught her upper arm with a powerful hand to steady her before she could fall and picked up the table with the other. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,’ he drawled.
Tansy froze as his hand dropped from her arm again and he backed off several feet. ‘I got lost in the view. I was picking out landmarks like a total tourist,’ she confessed unevenly, because in reality even contriving to breathe that close to such a perfect vision of masculinity challenged her.
She had looked him up on the Internet, of course, she had, and could hardly have failed to notice his classic good looks. In the flesh, however, he fell into another category entirely, she thought helplessly, ensnared as she was by stunning dark eyes surrounded by a spectacular fringe of black lashes. In real life, he was as visually dazzling as a golden angel springing to sudden life from a printed page. Quite literally, Jude Alexandris took her breath away. His lean, darkly handsome features were as flawless as his bronzed skin tone, his incredible height as striking as his lean, muscular physique. She had felt his strength when he’d grabbed her before she could tumble over in her stupid heels and even that strength of his had made her go weak at the knees, burying every brain cell she possessed…
And that swiftly, Tansy burned with mortification because if there was one thing she never allowed herself to be with a man it was gullible. Being weak and impressionable had got her heart broken and her trust in the opposite sex smashed when she was only nineteen. The experience had hurt like hell and she had never quite recovered from it or regained her youthful confidence. Ever since then, though, she had been careful to avoid the attention of the kind of good-looking man who was a promiscuous sleaze beneath the superficial charm. And she knew Jude Alexandris was a legendary womaniser because not one of the photos she had seen of him online in female company had featured the same woman twice. He changed his bed partners as often as other men changed their socks and, naturally, so experienced a guy was fully aware of the pulling power of his extraordinary physical attraction.
‘Mr Alexandris,’ Tansy pronounced rather stiffly.
‘Come and sit down,’ he invited lazily. ‘Tea or coffee?’
‘Coffee, please,’ Tansy said, following him round a sectional room divider into a rather more intimate space furnished with sumptuous sofas, and sinking down into the comfortable depths of one, her tense spine rigorously protesting that amount of relaxation.
She was fighting to get a grip on her composure again, but nothing about Jude Alexandris in the flesh matched the formal online images she had viewed. He wasn’t wearing a sharply cut business suit, he was wearing faded, ripped and worn jeans that outlined long powerful thighs and narrow hips and accentuated the prowling natural grace of his every movement. An equally casual dark grey cotton top complemented the jeans. One sleeve was partially pushed up to reveal a strong brown forearm and a small tattoo that appeared to be printed letters of some sort. His garb reminded her that, although he might be older than her, he was still only in his late twenties and that, unlike her, he had felt no need to dress to impress.
Her pride stung at the knowledge that she was little more than a commodity on Alexandris’s terms. Either he would choose her, or he wouldn’t. She had put herself on the market to be bought though, she thought with sudden self-loathing. How could she blame Jude Alexandris for her stepfather’s use of virtual blackmail to get her agreement? Everything she was doing was for Posy, she reminded herself squarely, and the end would justify the means…wouldn’t it?
‘So…’ Tansy remarked in a stilted tone because she was determined not to sit there acting like the powerless person she knew herself to be in his presence. ‘You require a fake wife…’
Jude shifted a broad shoulder in a very slight shrug. ‘Only we would know it was fake. It would have to seem real to everyone else from the start to the very end,’ he advanced calmly. ‘Everything between us would have to remain confidential.’
‘I’m not a gossip, Mr Alexandris.’ In fact Tansy almost laughed at the idea of even having anyone close enough to confide in, because she had left her friends behind at university and certainly none of them had seemed to understand her decision to make herself responsible for her baby sister rather than return to the freedom of student life.
‘I trust no one,’ Jude countered without apology. ‘You would be legally required to sign a non-disclosure agreement before I married you.’
‘Understood. My stepfather explained that to me,’ Tansy acknowledged, her attention reluctantly drawn to his careless sprawl on the opposite sofa, the long, muscular line of a masculine thigh straining against well-washed denim. Her head tipped back, her colour rising as she made herself look at his face instead, encountering glittering dark eyes that made the breath hitch in her throat.
‘I find you attractive too,’ Jude Alexandris murmured as though she had spoken.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Tansy protested, the faint pink in her cheeks heating exponentially as her tummy flipped while she wondered if she truly could be read that easily by a man.
‘For this to work, we would need that physical attraction. Nobody is likely to be fooled by two strangers pretending what they don’t feel, least of all my family, some of whom are shrewd judges of character.’
Tansy had paled. ‘Why would we need attraction? I assumed this was to be a marriage on paper, nothing more.’