Free The Society Wife by India Grey Page A

school. And then I’d probably look out the window to check for flying pigs and ask myself if it was April the first.’ Throwing an arm round Tristan, he slapped him affectionately on the back before moving away to rejoin his other guests. ‘The day you get married I’ll swim naked around the moat,’ he added with a grin.
    Tristan didn’t smile.
    â€˜Deal.’
    At that moment he wished very fervently that there were vodka in his glass. And no orange juice. He wanted nothing more than to have something to slow the incessant, ruthless progress of his thoughts and bring warmth back to the frozen places inside him.
    A baby.
    His gaze moved inexorably back to Lily. She was sitting on the window seat now, deep in conversation with Scarlet’s mother. Or rather, he noticed, Scarlet’s mother was deep in conversation with her. Lily’s head was bent slightly as she listened, her face thoughtful. The gentle, sleepy quality he had noticedthe first time he met her struck him again as he watched the graceful movement of her hand as she smoothed a strand of hair back from her forehead.
    He felt as if something were crushing his chest.
    But it wasn’t her beauty that caught him by the throat and squeezed. It was her goodness. Tom was right. She needed a decent man, a kind husband who would love her as she deserved to be loved.
    Tristan Romero de Losada Montalvo knew with a cold, bleak certainty that he could never be that man.
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    He was the kind of man who was effortlessly good at everything he did, she knew that. So it came as no surprise to Lily to discover that Tristan’s acting ability was excellent.
    It wasn’t a surprise. But it was still shocking.
    She was acutely aware of his presence, as if some internal satellite navigation system were constantly signalling his whereabouts to her, inexorably pulling her towards him and making it impossible not to keep looking at him. Every time she did she found he was looking back, smiling a little, his eyes dark and glittering with obvious desire.
    Acting the part.
    And, of course, she was acting too. Standing with Scarlet’s brother Jamie, as she smiled and talked and put her glass to her lips she was acting that everything was normal. Acting as if she weren’t in the grip of raging pregnancy hormones, that she hadn’t just agreed to enter into a loveless marriage with a notorious playboy, and—most challenging of all—that she weren’t feeling as if her husband-to-be were slowly stripping her naked with his eyes from the other side of the room.
    Husband?
    The word was too domestic, too tame to be applied to the man who could make her squirm with guilty longing simply by looking at her from twenty feet away in a room full of people. Married life was going to be extremely uncomfortable if this was the effect he had on her.
    Oh, God, what was she doing?
    Scarlet’s brother Jamie was talking about the band he was in at university. Making vague, encouraging noises, Lily tentatively turned her head to where Tristan was leaning against the huge stone fireplace talking to Tom’s gorgeous teenage cousin. The cousin had her back to Lily, but Lily could imagine the expression of slavish adoration on her face from the way her head was tilted up, her whole body arched towards Tristan.
    At that moment he looked up, his eyes meeting hers as if she had just pulled on some invisible wire stretching between them. The look was of such smouldering sensuality that Lily felt as if he had slammed her against the silk-covered wall and were holding her by the throat.
    And then he smiled.
    It was like sunrise. A slow warming, a delicious golden promise of the scorching heat to come. Lily was dimly aware of the cousin looking round, following the direction of his gaze, visibly wilting as she saw that it was directed at someone else.
    â€˜Get your coat, Ms Alexander, I think you’ve pulled a billionaire.’
    Jamie’s low,