The Unexpected Baby Page 7

  Trying to retaliate had been an unworthy idea, serving only to inflict further hurt on both of them. Jed no longer loved her, so it was better to let it go with as much dignity as possible. The way she’d flirted and flaunted hadn’t been dignified at all.

  A sound at the head of the path she was working from brought her head round, her colour coming and going, her heart racing as Jed walked down the short flight of stone steps.

  His face wore the closed look she had come to dread, but as he drew nearer she could see the pain in his eyes, pain he was trying to hide.

  As her heart flooded with sudden compassion she despised herself anew for what she had set out to do today, and wondered if she had enough courage to tell him so. She felt as if she’d reached an important crossroads in their relationship. If she could apologise and make him believe her sincerity—

  ‘Catherine says to say goodnight. And while I was in your study I found these.’ He spoke tonelessly, cutting through her thoughts, and for the first time she noted the papers he held in his hands. ‘Another came through today. Your agent is beginning to sound hysterical. Perhaps you should deal with them.’

  Those neglected faxes. She shrugged, pulling in a long breath. ‘I guess,’ she agreed listlessly. ‘Whatever it is she needs to discuss just hasn’t seemed important.’

  He gave her a level look. ‘No? Not even something that could set the final seal of approval on your work?’

  Twilight deepened the lines at either side of his mouth, shadowed his eyes, making them an enigma. She shrugged his question away. ‘Look—can we talk?’

  She might have imagined it, but suddenly he seemed slightly more approachable. There was so much she wanted to say to him, so much to explain. She didn’t know where to begin. She could understand why he was so bitter, so angry. Putting herself in his position, she knew she would have felt the same. But it needn’t be this bad for him. If only he’d allow a chink in that rock-solid armour of pride and listen to the truth!

  ‘That’s what I had in mind.’ He closed the space between them. ‘Shall we find somewhere to sit?’ Reaching round her, he tucked the folded faxes into the back pocket of her jeans. The brush of the backs of his fingers against her buttock sent fragments of fire skittering through her veins, and all she could do was try to ignore them, rein in this helpless, hopeless yearning and follow him blindly, her sandalled feet scuffing the path, until they reached the secret rose-covered arbour, tucked away behind a bank of oleanders.

  Her heart tightened in pain. She could understand his need to get well away from the house. He was probably expecting their conversation to get heated, involve raised voices. He wouldn’t want Catherine to overhear. But here? Didn’t he remember the evenings when they’d chosen to wander down to this lovely secluded place, sitting close together, the scent of roses perfuming the air, sharing a bottle of wine, murmuring words of love, unable to keep their hands off each other?

  Or had he wiped those memories from his mind because, like her, they no longer had any meaningful place in his life?

  Elena wanted to turn and head straight back for the house, to avoid hurting any more than she already was. But they had to talk, and this was the first time he’d displayed any willingness to properly discuss their situation instead of issuing untenable orders and walking away.

  ‘I want to apologise for the way I behaved today,’ she told him breathlessly, getting the words out before her courage deserted her. She sat on the far corner of the bench, knowing before he actually did it that he would sit as far away from her as he could. She knotted her hands in her lap. He wasn’t making this easy. ‘What I did was childish.’

  ‘Hardly that. You came on to me like a totally adult woman. A woman who wanted sex. Like the woman who would have lapped it up early this morning, even though she knew she was carrying another man’s child.’

  Elena closed her eyes, locking her jaws together, taking the insult that had been delivered in a cold, hard voice. From where he stood, she deserved that. She leaned her head against the supporting pillar, her voice barely audible. ‘It’s not as simple as that’ How could she begin to explain the complexities of what she felt?

  ‘No? You surprise me. But don’t waste your breath apologising. The damage is done.’

  She wasn’t going to ask what he meant by that bald statement. She just hoped and prayed he didn’t mean he was intending to give her what he believed she’d been practically begging for.

  ‘Talking of sex,’ he remarked, almost conversationally, ‘and what I have reason to know is your huge appetite for it, I can’t understand why you didn’t invite me into your bed shortly after we met. Heaven knows, twenty-four hours after meeting you I was besotted. All I could think of was making love to you. We even discussed it,’ he said drily. ‘Remember? And decided the circumstances weren’t right. Sam’s death was still very recent. Then you had to come back here to work, because you had a deadline to meet, and I had a lot on my plate back home.

  ‘And the days we both spent back at Netherhaye again, prior to the wedding, were hectic. So, all in all, we decided to wait until our wedding night. So romantic.’ His voice levelled out with scorn. ‘It would have been a damn sight more practical from your point of view if you’d dragged your willing victim into bed. That way you could have fooled me into thinking the child was mine—due to be born a little prematurely, perhaps, but nothing to get my knickers in a twist about. But perhaps you simply didn’t care? After all, I was a poor second choice.’

  God, but he hated her! Could love die as quickly and completely as his had, be born again in the guise of implacable, unbending hatred? She balled her hands into fists and pressed her knuckles against her temples, her head falling forwards.

  If she told him what had really happened, and he actually believed she was telling the truth, would it make a scrap of difference? She didn’t know, but she had to try.

  She looked at him with stark appeal, took a shaky breath and told him, ‘I want to tell you how Sam’s baby was conceived—’

  ‘You think I actually want to hear the sordid details?’ His voice was harsh enough to raise goosebumps on every inch of her skin. He thrust himself to his feet. ‘Lady, you are unreal!’

  ‘Jed! Wait!’

  But he was already striding back towards the house, finding his way through the narrow, winding paths, and much as she would have liked to stay out here, nursing wounds, she knew she had to follow.

  It was almost fully dark now, the only signposts the darker undersides of the crowded plants where they encroached on the edges of the paths. Angry frustration beat through her veins, making her temples throb. It wasn’t the fact that she was carrying another man’s child that was responsible for this unholy mess, it was his own damned intransigence, his refusal to listen, his uncompromising hostility!

  She caught up with him in the kitchen. He was pouring whisky into a tumbler. He had his back to her, and when he turned she could see he was calmer, back in control of himself and his emotions.

  Well, bully for him! She wasn’t. No way! Flooded with adrenalin, she stared at him, rigid with strain, seagreen eyes clashing with the cool, slightly contemptuous grey of his.

  ‘Instead of trying to bend my ear with the details of your affair with my brother, why don’t you tell me something about your first husband?’

  ‘Liam?’ Her brows pulled down in a frown. ‘Why? You never wanted me to talk about him before.’

  ‘His existence in your life wasn’t important when I believed you were perfection on two legs. The past didn’t matter—only our present and our future. But now we don’t have a future worth the name.’ He pulled a chair out from the central table and straddled it, arms leaning across the back-rest, beautifully crafted hands holding his glass loosely. He looked set for an hour or two of relaxed conversation.

  Elena knew better. She brushed past him to get to the fridge to pour orange juice, to ease the tense muscles of her parched throat. She wanted to scream and shout, bu
t knew she couldn’t risk waking Catherine.

  He took a mouthful of whisky. ‘Well? Given the drastic alteration in my opinion of you, I’m asking now. You divorced him, you said. Why was that? Didn’t he look right? Wasn’t he good enough in bed? Rich enough?’

  She wanted to toss her juice in his face, but her hands were shaking so badly with reined-in temper she could barely hold the glass. She slid it onto a work surface and Jed lobbed at her. ‘Or was it the other way around? Did he divorce you because he, too, found out you weren’t what you seemed?’

  She felt her face flare with redoubled anger. Perhaps he wanted to discuss Liam because he couldn’t bear to hear about her relationship with Sam. Suddenly she was too enraged to care. And what had possessed her to fall in love with someone so bitter and twisted she would never know!

  He wanted a run-down on her relationship with Liam. So she’d give him one. And if it wasn’t what he wanted to hear he had only himself to blame. She forced her mouth into a defiant parody of a smile. ‘Liam was very good to look at’ Slightly brash, though, she could see now, from her vantage point of maturity, but she wasn’t telling Jed that. ‘All the girls were crazy about him and Mum thought he was God’s gift—and for a woman who’s as embittered as she is about the whole male sex, that’s some accolade!’ Her mouth gave another defiant twist. ‘One of my friends threw a birthday party at some fancy club and that’s where we met. He swept me off my feet, as the saying goes.’

  Because she’d been desperate to be loved. Her parents had given her little of that precious commodity. Her father’s job had taken him away a lot, and, in any case, he’d been too busy chasing anything in skirts to have time for his daughter. And her mother had been too busy wallowing in self-pity over the miserable state of her marriage to have time to think of her child’s very real needs.

  Unconsciously, she placed a hand over her tummy. Her child wouldn’t suffer because of its mother’s wrecked marriage!

  ‘And I had no complaints about his performance in bed, either,’ she told him toughly. She’d been a virgin when she’d met Liam, so she’d had no experience to draw on. Only when making love with Jed had she discovered the ecstasy, the almost terrifying rapture. But she wouldn’t think about that. If she did it would remind her of the love they’d found together, and lost, and she’d start crying again.

  She saw his hard mouth twist, and knew she’d pierced the veneer of calm indifference. She ignored it because she couldn’t afford to feel any empathy with him and stated bluntly, ‘There was plenty of money, too. I kept my job on as a dogsbody in a local newspaper office, and he managed one of the city’s betting shops. He drove a fast Japanese car and we spent our evenings in the best clubs. He liked me to look glamorous for him. He spent money like there was a bottomless pit of the stuff. I found out where that pit was when I came down with flu one day and left work early. I discovered his lucrative sideline in criminal activities by chance—he cloned credit cards.’ She lifted her chin. ‘Believe it, or not, I despise dishonesty. I despised him for the web of deceit he’d spun around me. I left him.’

  ‘Is this true?’ Jed demanded, any pretence of indifference sliding away.

  ‘You think I’d make it up?’ she asked scornfully. ‘I can put grim storylines down on paper, but, whether you like it or not, I’m straightforward in my personal life.’ So think on that, she tacked on silently, meeting the sudden brooding gaze with a hard, challenging stare.

  ‘So what did you do?’ he asked.

  ‘Do?’ She shook her head slowly, a slight frown pulling her brows together. It had been years since she’d thought of any of this, of Liam. She’d put it all behind her and got on with her life. She’d seen what dwelling miserably on the past had done to her mother and had wanted no part of it. ‘I went to the police, of course.’

  And if that made her sound hard, so be it. By then their marriage had been on the rocks. She’d been sick of the round of nightclubs, fancy restaurants, the fast crowd he belonged to, suspicious of where the stream of money was coming from, worried when he told her he’d hit a lucky gambling streak because luck didn’t last.

  ‘Mum was dead against it. She said I should simply leave him and let him get on with it. She said dirt stuck. No one would believe I hadn’t been a part of it.’

  ‘And did they?’ His eyes probed her, carefully assessing her expression.

  Elena lifted her shoulders wearily, reclaiming her glass of juice and swallowing it thirstily. The fire of anger had burned out and now she felt fit for nothing, mentally capitulating beneath the weight of the present situation, which was even more traumatic than the one she’d had to endure all those years ago.

  She said flatly, ‘After some tough questioning, yes. After the trial I came out to Spain, with little more than the clothes I stood up in—no way would I touch any of the things bought with stolen money—reverted to my maiden name and divorced him when he was two years into his prison sentence.’

  It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. They’d been so in love, so close until recently, they’d been able to read each other’s minds.

  Not now. Not any more.

  Only by the merest flicker of those darkly shadowed eyes as they touched her now wilting body did he indicate that he was aware of her presence at all.

  He was probably weighing every word she’d said and deciding that her former husband had taken to crime to satisfy her ever increasing demands, that she’d coolly handed him over to the authorities before they caught up with him, foreseeing a humiliating end to the glitzy roller-coaster ride. He’d be grouping himself with Liam as the injured party. He believed that badly of her.

  And he confirmed it when he said drily, ‘How moral you make yourself sound. But then you’re good with words. You have to be, the job you do. But there’s one thing even you can’t lie about, or gloss over—the fact that you married me in the full knowledge that you could be pregnant by another man.’

  Anger blistered her. ‘Stop this!’ Her hands flew up to her head, as if to hold it on her shoulders before frustrated rage blew it away. ‘Listen to yourself! I’m carrying Sam’s child—nothing as vague as another man’s! Sam’s! Why can’t you bring yourself to say his name?’

  From the odd comments he’d made she was beginning to think she knew. She wasn’t sure, but if she was right it would answer a whole heap of questions about his total and absolute refusal to listen to her.

  ‘Because the thought of you and him together infuriates me,’ he came back quickly, rawly.

  ‘Infuriates?’ She questioned his choice of word sharply. ‘Until just now you weren’t interested in my first marriage. As far as you were concerned it was unimportant. And you didn’t ask if there’d been any other men in my life since my divorce. You appeared not to have a jealous bone in your body.’

  Carefully, she kept her voice calm, refusing to believe there was nothing but hatred behind that stony façade, hoping, almost against hope, that she could find a way to get through to him. ‘Just as I didn’t want, or need, to know who you might have shared a bed with before we met. I believed our future was all that mattered, not what might or might not have happened in the past. I’m sure you felt that way, too.’

  He shrugged, impatience highlighting his eyes now. ‘I see no point in rehashing this.’

  ‘Probably not,’ she conceded, ‘but there is one. Ask yourself if you’d have felt so badly—so betrayed,’ she granted him, ‘if this baby had been an accident, fathered by any other man. Some man, say, I’d had a brief and meaningless affair with before I met you. And then ask yourself why you categorically refuse to let me tell you what really happened between me and Sam.’

  ‘I would have thought that was glaringly obvious.’ He spoke drily but there was a frown-line between his eyes now. Was he thinking about what she’d said? Really thinking instead of letting his emotions get in the way of logic?

  ‘This tortured conversation is getting us nowhere.’ He put his empty glass down on
the drainer, and she knew that if she let him go she would have lost this last opportunity to get through to him. He would never again stand still long enough to have a meaningful discussion about anything.

  As he walked to the door she said firmly, ‘Sam wasn’t my lover. He was my friend, nothing more. I wanted a child; Sam donated the sperm. A completely clinical happening. Check with the clinic in London if you don’t believe me!’

  He went very still, as if her words had frozen him. And then he turned, slowly. Something like ridicule looked out of his eyes. ‘I applaud your inventive imagination. It gets you into the bestseller lists but it won’t get you anywhere with me.’

  Although the hope of finally getting through to him had been slender almost to the point of invisibility, it hurt like hell now she’d lost it. She pushed past him, out of the room, before he could see the desolation on her face, went to her room and closed the door.

  Sleepless hours later she heard him go into the second guest room, and something hard and dark clawed at her heart. Not even for the look of things where Catherine was concerned could he bring himself to share the air she breathed, let alone this bed.

  Finally she’d been able to tell him the truth about her baby’s conception. But he didn’t believe her.

  She turned her face to the pillow. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, did it?

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘CONGRATULATIONS, Elena! What a clever little duck you are!’ Catherine cried as Elena ventured out onto the terrace at ten-thirty the next morning. ‘Jed’s been telling me all about it.’

  Elena pushed her hands into the deep pockets of her common or garden cotton skirt and tried to look as if she knew what her mother-in-law was talking about. She’d overslept, woken feeling queasy as usual, and dressed down, dowdily even.

  She glanced across the terrace to where Jed was sprawled out on a lounger, yesterday’s newspaper over his face to protect it from the fierce rays of the sun, wearing frayed denim shorts and nothing else.