The Constantin Marriage

She subsided, then looked frustrated. ‘You may be able to twist your mother around your little finger but I can’t. She…she just flatly insisted on a party.’

‘My dear, if I could twist my mother around my little finger, not to mention your mother, neither of us would be in this mess. Since we are, however, I intend to put a good face on it and so should you. Turn around, Tattie.’

She stared at him with her lips parted and confusion in her eyes for a long moment, then did as she was bid.

‘There,’ he said, and felt her tremble as his fingers touched the skin of her neck. ‘Mmm.’ He turned her back. ‘Perfect,’ he murmured. ‘Have I told you about strand synergy, Tattie?’

He traced the lie of the pearls down her skin and across the top of her breasts beneath the blue material of her dress and back up to her neck, and he saw her take an unexpected breath.

Then she began to recite, as if it was a lesson she’d learned, ‘The art of choosing the right pearls to put together and drilling and knotting them so the strand drapes like a piece of silk rather than dangling around the wearer’s neck.’

‘You’ve done your homework,’ he said humorously, and turned her again, this time in the direction of her dressing-table mirror. ‘What do you think?’

Tattie took another breath as she studied the pearls in the mirror, but he thought that the whole picture was absorbing her more than the pearls themselves, the two of them close together in the mirror.

She closed her eyes suddenly and said, ‘Yes, quite perfect. Thank you so much.’

But, as her lashes fluttered up, their gazes caught in the mirror. And he saw the surprise in her eyes as he said softly, ‘You’re quite perfect too, Mrs Constantin, and your skin is a perfect background for these pearls, it has its own beautiful lustre.’

This time he traced the outline of her oval face and looked down her figure in the lovely dress and thought that she really was exquisite in her own way. Like a delicate figurine, smooth and softly curved but at the same time full of life and laughter.

‘Give me ten minutes to shower and change,’ he said then, wresting his mind from his wife’s physical perfections, and went to turn away but paused. ‘Tattie, there’s one other unfortunate aspect to tonight’s party.’

She was standing quite still, as he’d left her, and she blinked a couple of times as if she was having trouble redirecting her attention. ‘There is?’ she asked a little blankly.

He grimaced. ‘I only saw the guest list today when my mother dropped it into the office. Leonie Falconer is on it.’

He stopped and studied her narrowly but perceived no reaction—at first. Then a dawning look of comprehension came to Tatiana.

‘You mean…you mean your mistress?’ she stammered.

‘My ex-mistress,’ he replied harshly. ‘How that bit of information escaped my mother I’ll never know, but—’

‘Perhaps she took it for granted that you had reformed since you married me?’

‘Quick thinking, Tattie,’ he parried swiftly, ‘but you yourself gave me to understand you didn’t expect me to live like a monk while you made up your mind about this marriage.’

Tatiana flushed and closed her mouth.

‘Even so,’ Alex went on, after a tense little moment, ‘whatever else I am—’ he looked fleetingly amused ‘—parading my mistresses in front of my wife is not one of my vices. But Leonie has chosen to make herself unavailable today—she’s not at her office, she’s not home and she’s not answering her mobile phone—so I felt…honour bound to warn you that I haven’t been able to warn her off.’

Tatiana drew herself up to her full five feet two. ‘How kind of you, Alex,’ she said with all the famed Beaufort hauteur she was capable of but hadn’t allowed him to see until after she’d married him, ‘but Ms Falconer is welcome to do her damnedest!’

He raised a wry eyebrow. ‘Bravo, Tattie! See you in ten minutes.’

CHAPTER TWO

DARWIN, the northernmost city in Australia and named after Charles Darwin, had only two seasons—the wet and the dry. The wet season coincided with spring and summer on the rest of the continent and the dry with autumn and winter, but, since the temperature rarely fell below thirty degrees Celsius during the day, winter was an inappropriate term.

It was early in the dry season as Tatiana Constantin rode beside her husband to her first wedding-anniversary party, reflecting as she sat in the plush cream leather comfort of his blue Jaguar that things could have been worse. It could have been the height of the wet season when the humidity was legendary, flooding and violent storms were common and cyclones often a threat.

How would she have coped, she wondered irrationally, with that kind of weather on top of the cyclone-like disturbance of mind she was experiencing at the moment? With the kind of weather that, in the few short steps from an air-conditioned car to air-conditioned premises, left you bathed in sweat with your make-up melted and your hair limp?

She glanced at Alex through her lashes. Unlike her, he had been born and bred in Darwin and the ravages of the wet season never seemed to bother him. But men, she reminded herself, didn’t have to worry about looking limp and bedraggled. Indeed, men, she added bitterly to herself, had more powers than were altogether good for them. Such as being able to command a mistress to do this or that.

Mind you, always assuming the mistress hadn’t gone to ground, she reminded herself with a touch of black humour!

Tattie had never met Leonie Falconer, design jeweller with her own business who did quite a bit of work for Constantin, although she’d had her pointed out a couple of times. There had to be an element of luck in this, Tattie had reasoned, because, although she didn’t think Alex would parade his mistresses in front of her, Darwin was not a big city.

And, although she couldn’t think favourably of his mistress, a small part of her applauded the woman’s bravado. She had obviously accepted the invitation, then put herself out of Alex’s reach at least on this the last day that he might have been able to ‘warn her off’. But why accept it in the first place? Tattie was forced to ponder. And why would Alex’s mother invite her? Not to mention—how lately had Leonie become an ex-mistress?

So many imponderables, she thought wistfully, but the greatest of them all was sitting right beside her, driving his beautiful car with such ease and flair towards his parents’ Fannie Bay mansion.

Of course he had always been a huge imponderable, if not to say the biggest challenge of her admittedly young life. And she’d cautioned herself from the moment she’d known what was going on to keep her wits about her. Right up until about half an hour ago she’d thought she’d succeeded in this ambition.

A pearl necklace, the feel of his fingers on her skin and her breasts and the shocking discovery that the mere mention of the word mistress, ex or otherwise, had caused all her careful strategies to come tumbling down. To the extent that she wasn’t sure whether she loved Alex Constantin to distraction or hated him exceedingly.

She clenched her fists in her lap and wondered how much she’d given away this evening. Twelve months of such self-control, she marvelled, quite possibly lost in a matter of minutes. She visualised again the picture they’d made in the mirror, he with his dark head bent towards her, she still stunned beneath the impact of his personality, and all that usually leashed masculinity in his tall frame flowing through to her.

Had it been her imagination, she mused a little painfully, or wishful thinking? Because he normally kept that side of him very much leashed in all his dealings with her but she had the feeling tonight had been different. If only, she went on to think, the subject of his mistress had not come up in almost the same breath she would have been more sure…

But really—she glanced at him covertly again—there was only so much of the masculine impact of Alex Constantin he could leash from her. Just to be sitting beside him in his austere dark suit and blue shirt, watching him drive his car, was a bit like a body blow.

Not especially good-looking, he was nevertheless vitally attractive. He was tall, fit and athletic, he could be wickedly amused and amusing, he could be quite kind yet devastatingly scornful when the mood was on him. Above all, he could be the quintessential enigma, so that the reason he’d agreed to an arranged marriage with her when he could have had any woman he chose remained a mystery to her.

Unless, his reason had been her reason—two vast cattle stations that went by the name of Beaufort and Carnarvon…

‘We’re here, Tattie.’

She came back to the present with a little jump, to see that her husband had made his statement with false gravity.

‘So I see,’ she commented, looking at the house blazing with lights and the stream of cars parked in the street.

‘Oh, well, what do they say? “Onward, Christian soldiers”! “Fight the good fight”—or, something along those lines.’

He laughed and put his fist beneath the point of her chin. ‘You are a character, Tattie,’ he said affectionately, and added, ‘If it’s at all possible, just be yourself and have a good time.’

With your mistress in attendance, your mother, who never fails to drop delicate little hints and tips about how to fall pregnant, and my mother there, and you treating me like a kid you pat on the head—of course!

She didn’t say it, but only by the narrowest of margins. She couldn’t prevent the serious irony of her fronded blue gaze as it rested on him fleetingly, however. But before he got the chance to remark on it she opened her door and slipped out of the car.

‘That is quite a statement, Tatiana,’ Natalie Beaufort said to her daughter when they found themselves alone in the powder room together after the fabulous seafood buffet.

Tattie squinted down at her pearls. ‘It is lovely, isn’t it?’

‘It is, but I was thinking more along the lines of the comment it makes on the success of your marriage.’

Tattie observed her mother and spoke without thinking. ‘How do you know it’s not conscience money?’