Free Marriage: To Claim His Twins by Penny Jordan Page A

struggles.
    Once they were back in their suite, in the privacy of her bathroom, Ruby tried to take two of the painkiller tablets she had bought from the chemist’s she had gone into on the pretext of needing some toothpaste. But her stomach heaved at the mere thought of attempting to swallow them, nausea overwhelming her.
    Still feeling sick, and weakened by her pounding headache, as soon as the twins had had something to eat she bathed them and put them to bed.
    They had only been asleep a few minutes when thejeweller Sander had summoned arrived, removing a roll of cloth from his briefcase, after Sander had introduced him to Ruby and they had all sat down.
    Placing the roll on the class coffee table, he unfolded it—and Ruby had to suppress a gasp of shock when she saw the glitter of the rings inside it.
    They were all beautiful, but something made Ruby recoil from them. It seemed somehow shabby and wrong to think of wearing something so precious. A ring should represent love and commitment that were equally precious and enduring instead of the hollow emptiness her marriage would be.
    â€˜You choose,’ she told Sander emptily, not wanting to look at them.
    Her lack of interest in the priceless gems glittering in front of her made Sander frown. His mother had loved jewellery. He could see her now, seated at her dressing table, dressed to go out for the evening, admiring the antique Cartier bangles glittering on her arms.
    â€˜Your birth paid for these,’ she had told him. ‘Your grandfather insisted that your father should only buy me one, so I had to remind him that I had given birth to his heir. Thank goodness you weren’t a girl. Your grandfather is so mean that he would have seen to it that I got nothing if you had been. Remember when you are a man, Sander, that the more expensive the piece of jewellery you give a woman, the more willing she will be, and thus the more you can demand of her.’ She had laughed then, pouting her glossy red lip-sticked lips at her own reflection and adding, ‘Ishouldn’t really give away the secrets of my sex to you, should I?’
    His beautiful, shallow, greedy mother—chosen as a bride for his father by his grandfather because of her aristocratic Greek ancestry, marrying his father because she hated her own family’s poverty. When he had grown old enough to recognise the way in which his gentle academic father had been humiliated and treated with contempt by the father who had forced the marriage on him, and the wife who thought of him only as an open bank account, Sander had sworn he would never follow in his father’s footsteps and allow the same thing to happen to him.
    What was Ruby hoping for by pretending a lack of interest? Something more expensive? Angrily Sander looked at the rings, his hand hovering over the smallest solitaire he could see. His intention was to punish her by choosing it for her—until his attention was drawn to another ring close to it, its two perfect diamonds shimmering in the light.
    Feeling too ill to care what kind of engagement ring she had, Ruby exhaled in relief when she saw Sander select one of the rings. All she wanted was for the whole distasteful charade to be over.
    â€˜We’ll have this one,’ Sander told the jeweller abruptly, his voice harsh with the irritation he felt against himself for his own sentimentality.
    It was the jeweller who handed the ring to Ruby, not Sander. She took it unwillingly, sliding the cold metal onto her finger, her eyes widening and her heart turningover inside her chest as she looked at it properly for the first time. Two perfect diamonds nestled together on a slender band, slightly offset from one another and yet touching—twin diamonds for their twin sons. Her throat closed up, her gaze seeking Sander’s despite her attempt to stop it doing so, her emotions clearly on display. But there was no answering warmth in Sander’s eyes, only a cold