Free The Marriage Betrayal by Lynne Graham

entertainment industry celebrity or socialite brand. He dated ladies who wore very small dresses or bikinis and who were papped leaving nightclubs and posing on yachts. And she was quick to remind herself that she hadn’t liked him, indeed, had wanted very badly to slap him that morning at Westgrave and had only resisted the urge in a futile effort to reclaim her lost dignity.
    Bearing those important facts in mind, Tally accepted that it was very perverse of her to lie awake every night thinking about the volatile Greek and the lean hard-boned lineaments of that unforgettable face of his. Her intelligence put Sander squarely in the incompatible category, but something infinitely less rational and more contrary kept him alive and vibrant in her thoughts. Yet he had put her off sex, she conceded in rueful mortification. All very exciting up to a point and then a rather painful disappointment, she recalled with a grimace, wondering if it would have got better had he continued and then scolding herself for her lingering curiosity. She had learnt a good lesson, she toldherself instead.
    Getting intimate with a stranger was a very bad idea. Sander had assumed that she had sacrificed her virginity in an effort to impress him in some way. So why hadn’t he got the message when she refused to see him again?
    Cosima phoned her that same morning and confided that Sander had called her to ask for Tally’s address. ‘Are you seeing him?’
    ‘No, but he sent me flowers,’ Tally admitted to satisfy the younger woman’s curiosity.
    ‘Dad was very impressed when I told him—’
    ‘You shouldn’t have mentioned it,’ Tally cut in. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’
    ‘Maybe Sander did it for a bet or something,’ her sibling suggested. ‘Why else would he be chasing you?’
    ‘I don’t know, but you seem to have more ideas on that score than I do,’ Tally said drily.
    Crystal returned that evening from a month-long stay at her current boyfriend’s Portuguese villa. Deeply tanned and wearing a lot of gold jewellery, Crystal watched her daughter work on her latest interior design project for college at the dining room table and sighed. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of being so sensible, Tally?’
    ‘Meaning?’ Tally prompted, wondering what had etched shadows like bruises below her mother’s fine eyes.
    ‘Peter has decided that he wants a break from me,’ she revealed with a shrug that was clearly intended to be careless but which didn’t quite pull off the feat. ‘Thinks we’re getting too serious. Well, we have been practically living together for the past six months …’
    Tally picked up on the brittle shaken note in her mother’s admission and scrambled out of her seat towrap her arms round the thin, attractive blonde. Crystalmight have a messy love life and be foolish with money, but Tally loved her mother and hated to see her hurting. ‘Oh, Mum, I’m sorry!’
    ‘I’ve been dumped,’ Crystal confided thickly, tears glazing her eyes. ‘I’m the one who usually does the dumping but I didn’t see it coming. I was a fool, I thought Peter was with me for the long haul …’
    Tally gave the taller woman a comforting hug. ‘Never mind. You’ll meet someone else.’
    ‘It’s not that easy any more.’ Crystal sighed. ‘I’m forty-three next birthday, not twenty-three. Men my age want much younger women, and they get them too.’
    Navel-gazing wasn’t Crystal’s thing, however, and within a couple of days Tally’s mother had regained her spirits and her extensive net of contacts and busy social calendar played their part in that revival. That weekend, Crystal headed off with a female friend to spend a week in a swanky Scottish castle. Tally, who tried to keep her mother’s financial affairs in order, stayed home to be dismayed by the size of the older woman’s credit-card bills when they arrived in the post. Crystal could spend as if there were no tomorrow and Peter, a wealthy retiree, was no