The Volakis Vows: The Marriage Betrayal / Bride for Real. LYNNE GRAHAM

lose control. He might as well have tossed a hand grenade into the once tranquil pool of her mood, for all of a sudden she was on edge and ready to fight to defend her pride.

      ‘You’re incredibly vain,’ Tally condemned furiously, watching him move closer with the same wariness with which she might have watched a lion strolling free of a cage. That lithe long-limbed grace of his simply enhanced his sex appeal so that in spite of her annoyance she found herself trapped into staring at him, studying his every move with an appetite for the visual that was new to her. ‘I don’t even like you.’

      ‘I don’t need you to like me,’ Sander murmured, his perceptive dark scrutiny welded to her wide green eyes as he basked in the unwilling hunger he saw etched there. ‘I only need you to want me.’

      A prickling sensation touched the skin at the nape of Tally’s neck as if that keen look of his had actually touched her. Part of her wanted to run away, but an even greater part wanted to see the moment out and cap his every comment. She had the vague spooky suspicion that someone was walking over her grave and that she was getting a wake-up call to finally experience that something she had waited so very long to find. She might want to slap him, she might want to shout at him and punish him for his exceedingly arrogant assumptions, but all of those very basic promptings were outrageously entangled with a very powerful desire for him to kiss her … and for her to taste him. He exuded a masculine strength that drew her even as it awakened her hostility. A pool of heat was forming low in her stomach while her bra was starting to feel like a metal restraint over the straining curves of her breasts.

      ‘And you do want me,’ Sander Volakis pronounced with confidence, dark eyes flaring to hot gold as he searched her heart-shaped face because, for a moment while she sparred with him, he had wondered if just for once he could have got it wrong. She had, after all, turned him down when he’d asked her out earlier but now, seeing that familiar look of desire in her gaze, he was already wondering if that refusal could’ve been a feminine ploy to spur his interest with a false show of indifference. ‘Just as I want you, glikia mou.’

      It was that roughened masculine admission that slashed through Tally’s angry defences like a cruelly efficient steel blade since, until that moment, no man had ever contrived to make Tally feel insanely attractive and sexy. But Sander Volakis achieved that miracle at one stroke. While he studied her with scorching intensity and with a hunger he couldn’t hide, excitement was lighting her up inside like a fantastic firework display and she smiled in delighted acknowledgement of an appeal she had not known she had.

      In receipt of that encouraging smile he pulled her up against his lean, strongly built frame and brought his wide sensual mouth down on hers with demanding fervour. The skilled slide of his tongue between her parted lips sent a jolt of excruciating pleasure roaring through Tally like an electric shock but that initial sweetness was swiftly followed up by a fierce sense of unbearable craving. The kiss wasn’t enough, nowhere near enough to meet the hunger that had fired her every skin cell with yearning. As she made an unconscious sound of dissatisfaction, her fingers dug tautly into his broad shoulders and she strained against the hard muscular contours of his broad chest and long, powerful thighs, urgently needing that physical contact to satisfy the tingling sensitivity of her nipples and the gnawing ache stirring between her legs.

      In answer, Sander wrapped his arms round her and crushed her ripe mouth beneath his again, revelling in the taste of her and the lush firm softness of her shapely body against him. He wanted to gather her up and carry her off to bed to sate the fierce hunger she roused in him. He laced long fingers into the mass of her blonde curls and tipped her head back, meshing with glorious green eyes enhanced by skin the colour of clotted cream. Once again he attempted to pinpoint the source of her powerful attraction. Was it the fearless honesty of those eyes, which met his with no hint of the coy suggestiveness and secrecy he was more accustomed to seeing? Or the wild sensuality with which she surrendered to his mouth and gave him back kiss for fiery kiss, stoking his desire to ever greater heights? In bed, he suspected, her passion would be a perfect spontaneous match for his own.

      A mobile phone buzzed. Tally blinked like someone who having been hypnotised, was now being called back to awareness and immediately raised her hands to break free of his hold and step back from him, her sudden rigidity an instant rejection of the new intimacy they had established.

      Perfectly attuned to her, Sander frowned as he switched his phone off. ‘Don’t be like that,’ he groaned.

      Tally was hot and dizzy. Dismayed to see that her robe was hanging open, she wrapped it more securely round her and reknotted the sash. Her hands were trembling and she was breathing rapidly, her bemused thoughts in freefall but that fast she understood that what he had just made her feel was the biggest temptation she had ever withstood. And she knew that what they had both felt was almost frighteningly powerful. Her nipples were tight, hard and almost stinging in response and at the heart of her she was uncomfortably hot and damp with a desire that clawed at her every sense. The taste of him? He tasted so unbelievably good that she could only want more …

      Sander extended a lean brown hand. ‘Come …’

      ‘No, don’t say it!’ Tally urged, backing off another defensive step, feeling ridiculously like a woman in danger of losing her immortal soul. ‘Goodnight, Sander.’

      ‘You’re not serious?’ Sander breathed incredulously as she reached the door.

      ‘Very serious.’ Her hand closed tightly round the door knob and she refused to take the chance to turn her head and look at him again. ‘I don’t want anything else to happen.’

      As the door swung shut on her quick exit Sander swore in raw and angry disbelief below his breath. What was the matter with her? Was the cut and run response her concept of flirtation? He had never ever got so hot with a woman only to have her walk away from him, leaving him unsatisfied. Nor had he ever been so surprised by the power of a woman to attract him. The prospect of a cold shower to cool his urgently aroused body had zero attraction.

      Tally went to check on Cosima and found her sound asleep on top of the bed. Slipping off her half-sister’s shoes, she arranged a throw over the younger girl and suppressed a sigh. She would not hold spite: tomorrow she would try harder to win Cosima’s trust and perhaps she would get the chance to persuade her sibling that she was not sharing her weekend with some kind of prison warder.

      But as Tally crept into the room she was sharing and slid back below the duvet on her bed, she was most troubled on her own behalf. When it came to the male sex she had always believed that she was intelligent and sensible and she had, if she was honest, looked down on several of the impulsive romantic choices her mother, Crystal, had made over the years. Yes, she acknowledged shamefacedly, she had felt quite superior in that field, convinced that she would never do anything half so foolish, so possibly she had deserved to be shot down in flames for being smug and short-sighted.

      She had thought she knew it all and learned that in truth she was no more sophisticated than a toddler when it came to men. One salient fact had escaped her. Until she had actually experienced a genuinely powerful attraction to a man, she had not known what she was talking about. In the space of twenty-four hours, Sander Volakis had taught her things about herself that she really hadn’t wanted to find out. Meeting Sander had proved to be a horribly humbling experience, she reflected ruefully. She had learned that just being near him could make her as giddy, hot and incapable of rational thought as an empty-headed adolescent. She had learned that she was human and fallible and capable of doing foolish things. She had also learned that refusing to give way to so strong a desire and practising self-denial could actually hurt.

      Little wonder, then, that her mother had wrecked so many of her relationships by being unfaithful. Crystal Spencer had never said no to such an attraction when it came her way, had never put her current lover or indeed her child’s stability ahead of sexual temptation. Crystal had done as she liked, when she liked, and had often paid the price for it. But Tally had also paid a high price too.

      On more than one occasion, a young Tally had become attached to one of her mother’s live-in boyfriends and that man’s subsequent sudden disappearance from her life had distressed and confused her.