‘I’ll marry you,’ she agreed, daring to steal a look at his face.
Raoul smiled, and realised that he had been panicked at the thought that she might turn him down. He never panicked! Even when he had been confronted with a child he hadn’t known existed, when he had realised that his life was about to be changed irrevocably for ever, he hadn’t panicked. He had assessed the situation and dealt with it. But watching her, eyes half closed, he had been aware of a weird, suffocating feeling—as if he had stepped off the edge of a precipice in the hope that there would be a trampoline waiting underneath to break his fall.
He stood up, thinking it wise to cover the basics and then leave—before she could revert to her previous stance, reconsider his offer and tell him that it was off, after all. She could be bewilderingly inconsistent.
‘I’m thinking soon,’ he said, feeling on a strange high. ‘As soon as it can be arranged, to be perfectly honest. I’ll start working on that straight away. Something small …’ He paused to look at her pinkened cheeks. Her hair was tumbling over her shoulders and he wanted nothing more than to tangle his fingers into it and pull her towards him.
‘Although you are the one who factored marriage into your dreams of the future,’ he murmured drily, ‘so it’s up to you what sort of affair you want. You can have a thousand people and St Paul’s Cathedral if you like …’
Sarah opened her mouth to tell him that anything would do, because it wouldn’t really be a true marriage, would it? Yes, they had known each other once. Yes, they had been lovers, and she had been crazy enough to think that he had loved her as much as she had loved him, even if he had never said so. But he hadn’t intended marrying her then, or even setting eyes on her again once he had left the country. He hadn’t wanted her then and he didn’t want her now, but marriage, for him, was the only way he could be a permanent and daily feature in his son’s life. Because she had rejected the first offer on the table, which had been to be his mistress.
Approaching the whole concept of their union in the way he might a business arrangement, maybe he had thought that living together would be the lesser of two evils. They would have learned to compromise without the necessity of having to take that final, psychologically big step and commit to a bond sealed in the eyes of the law. Or maybe he had just thought that if what they had fizzled out it would just be a whole lot easier to part company if they had merely been living together. And by then he would have had a much stronger foothold in the door—might even have been able to fight for custody if he’d chosen to.
Racked with a hornets’ nest of anxieties, she still knew that it would be stupid to open up a debate on the worth of a marriage that had yet to happen. What would that get her? Certainly not the words she wanted to hear.
‘Something small,’ she said faintly.
‘And traditional,’ Raoul agreed. ‘I expect you would like that, and so would your parents. I remember you saying something about a bracelet that your grandmother had given your mother, which she had kept to be passed on to you when you got married? You laughed and said that it wasn’t exactly the most expensive trousseau in the world, but that it meant a lot to both of you.’
‘Isn’t there anything that you’ve forgotten?’ Sarah asked in a tetchy voice. All her dreams and hopes were being agonisingly brought back home to her on a painful tide of self-pity. She thought that she might actually have been hinting to him at the time when she had said that. ‘Anyway, I think she lost that bracelet.’
‘She lost it?’
‘Gardening. She took it off, to … er … dig, and it must have got all mixed up with soil and leaves …’ Sarah shrugged in a suitably vague and rueful manner. ‘So, no bracelet to pass on,’ she finished mournfully.
‘That’s a shame.’
‘Isn’t it?’ She suddenly frowned. ‘So … we get married and live here …’
‘In this house, yes.’
‘And what will you do with your apartment?’
Raoul shrugged. His apartment no longer seemed to have any appeal. The cool, modern soullessness of the décor, the striking artwork that had been given the nod by him but bought as an investment, the expensive and largely unused gadgets in the kitchen, the imposing plasma screen television in the den—all of it now seemed to belong to a person with whom he could no longer identify.
‘I’ll keep it, I expect. I don’t need to sell it or rent it, after all.’
‘Keep it for what?’
‘What does it matter?’
‘It doesn’t. I was just curious.’
They were going to be married. It wouldn’t be a marriage made in heaven, and Sarah knew that her own suspicious nature would torpedo any hope of it being successful. As soon as Raoul had told her that he would keep the apartment she had foreseen an unpalatable explanation. An empty apartment would be very handy should he ever decide to stray.
She tried her utmost to kill any further development on that train of thought. ‘I suppose you have some sort of sentimental attachment to it?’ she prompted.
Raoul shook his head. ‘Absolutely none. Yes, it was the place I bought when I’d made my first few million, but believe it or not it’s been irritating me lately. I think I’ve become accustomed to a little more chaos.’ He grinned, very relaxed now that he could see a definite way forward and liked what he saw.
Suddenly the reality of Raoul actually living with them made her giddy with apprehension. Would there be parameters to their marriage? It wouldn’t be a normal one, so of course there must be, but was this something she should talk about now? Were there things she should be getting straight before she entered into this binding contract?
‘Er … we should really talk about … you know …’
He paused and looked down at her. She had one small hand resting on his arm.
‘What your expectations are …’ Sarah said stoutly.
Raoul’s brows knitted into a frown. ‘You want a list?’
‘Obviously not in writing. That would be silly. But this isn’t a simple situation …’
‘It’s as simple or as difficult as we choose to make it, Sarah.’
‘I don’t think it’s as easy as that, Raoul. I’m just trying to be sensible and practical. I mean, for starters, I expect you’d like to draw up some kind of pre-nup document?’ That had only just occurred to her on the spur of the moment—as had the notion that laying down guidelines might confer upon her some sort of protection, at least psychologically. The mind was capable of anything, and maybe—just maybe—she could train hers to operate on a less emotional level. At least to outward appearances. Besides, he would be mightily relieved. Although, looking at his veiled expression now, it was hard to tell.
‘Is that what you want?’ Raoul asked tonelessly—which had the instant effect of making Sarah feel truly horrible for having raised the subject in the first place.
In turn that made her angry, because why should he be the only one capable of viewing this marriage with impartial detachment? What was so wrong if she tried as well? He didn’t know what her driving motivation for doing so was because he wasn’t in love with her, but why should that matter? He didn’t have the monopoly on good sense, which was his pithy reason for their marriage in the first place!
‘It might be a good idea,’ she told him, in the gentle voice of someone committed to being absolutely fair. ‘We don’t want to get in a muddle over finances later on down the road. And also …’ She paused fractionally, giving him an opportunity for encouragement which failed to materialize. ‘I think we should both acknowledge that the most we can strive for is a really good, solid friendship …’
Her heart constricted as she said that, but she knew that she needed to bury all signs of her love. On the one hand, if he knew how she really felt about him the equality of their relationship would be severely compromised. On the other—and this would be almost worse—he would pity her. He might even choose to remind her that at no point, ever, had he led her to believe that lust shoul
d be confused with something else.
It would be a sympathetic let-down, during which he might even produce a hankie, all the better to mop up her overflowing tears. She would never live down the humiliation. In short, she would become a guilty burden which he would consider himself condemned to bear for the rest of his life. Whereas if she feigned efficiency she could at least avert that potential disaster waiting in the wings.
That thought gave her sufficient impetus to maintain her brisk, cheery façade and battle on through his continuing unreadable silence.
‘If you think that we’re embarking on a sexless marriage …’ Raoul growled, increasingly outraged by every thing she said, and critical of her infuriating practicality—although he really shouldn’t have been, considering it was a character trait he firmly believed in.
Sarah held up one hand to stop him in mid-flow. This would be her trump card—if it could be called such.
‘That’s not what I’m saying …’ Released from at least that particular burden—of just not knowing what to do with this overpowering attraction she felt for him—Sarah felt a whoosh of light-headed relief race through her. ‘We won’t take the one big thing between us away …’
The hand on his arm softened into a caress, moved to rest against his hard chest, and she stepped closer into him, arching up to him, glad that she no longer had to try and fight the sizzling attraction between them.
Raoul caught her hand and held it as he stared down at her upturned face,
‘So tell me,’ he drawled softly, ‘why didn’t you just agree to be my lover? It amounts to the same thing now, doesn’t it?’
‘Except,’ Sarah told him with heartfelt honesty, ‘maybe I just didn’t like the notion of being your mistress until I went past my sell-by date. Maybe that’s something I’ve only just realised.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you … do you want to reconsider your proposal?’
‘Oh, no …’ Raoul told her with a slow, slashing smile, ‘this is exactly what I want …’
CHAPTER EIGHT
A WEEK and a half later and Raoul wasn’t sure that he had got quite what he had wanted—although he was hard pressed to put a finger on the reason why.
Sarah’s histrionics were over. She no longer vacillated between wanting him and turning him away. She had stopped agonising about the rights and wrongs of their sleeping together.
In fact, on the surface, everything appeared to be going to plan. He had moved in precisely one week previously. For one day the house had been awash with a variety of people, doing everything it took to instal the fastest possible broadband connection and set up all the various technologies so that he could function from the cosy library, which had been converted into a study complete with desk, printer, television screens to monitor the stock markets around the world and two independent telephone lines. Through the window he could look out at the perfectly landscaped garden, with its twin apple trees at the bottom. It was a far more inspiring view than the one he had had from his apartment, and he discovered that he liked it.
The wedding would be taking place in a month’s time.
‘I don’t really care when it happens,’ Sarah had told him with a casual shrug, ‘but Mum’s set her heart on something more than a quick register affair, and I don’t like to disappoint her.’
Thinking about it, that attitude seemed to characterise the intangible change Raoul had uneasily noticed ever since she had accepted his marriage proposal.
True to her word, they were now lovers, and between the sheets everything was as it should be. Better. He touched her and she responded with fierce, uninhibited urgency. She was meltingly, erotically willing. With the lights turned off and the moonlight dipping into the room through a chink in the curtains they made love with the hunger of true sexual passion.
Just thinking about it was enough to make Raoul half close his eyes and stiffen at the remembered pleasure.
But outside the bedroom she was amicable but restrained. He came through the front door by seven every evening, which was a considerable sacrifice for him, because he was a man accustomed to working until at least eight-thirty most days. Yes, she asked him how his day had been. Yes, she would have cooked something, and sure she had a smile on her face as she watched him go outside with Oliver for a few minutes, push him on the swing, then return to play some suitably childish game until his son’s bedtime beckoned. But it was almost as though she had manufactured an invisible screen around herself.
‘Right. Have you got everything?’ They were about to set off for Devon for their postponed visit to her parents. There was more luggage for this two-night stay than he would have taken for a three-week long-haul vacation. Favourite toys had had to be packed, including the oversized remote controlled car which had been his first and much ignored present for Oliver, but which had risen up the popularity ladder as the weeks had gone by. Drinks had had to be packed, because four-year-olds, he’d been assured, had little concept of timing when it came to long car journeys. Several CDs of stories and sing-a-long nursery rhymes had been bought in advance, and Sarah had drily informed him that he had no choice when it came to listening to them.
She had made a checklist, and now she recited things from it with a little frown.
‘Is it always this much of a production when you go to visit your parents?’ he asked, when they were finally tucked into his Range Rover and heading away from the house.
‘This is a walk in the park,’ Sarah told him, staring out of the window and watching the outskirts of London fly past. ‘In the past I’ve had to take the train, and you can’t believe what a battle that’s been with endless luggage and a small child in tow.’ She looked round to make sure that Oliver was comfortable, and not fiddling with his car seat as he was wont to do, and then stared out of the window.
Weirdly, she always felt worse when they were trapped in the confines of a car together. Something about not having any escape route handy, she supposed. With no door through which she could conveniently exit, she was forced to confront her own weakness. Her only salvation was that she was trying very hard, and hopefully succeeding, to instil boundaries without having to lay it on with a trowel.
She was friendly with him, even though under the façade her heart felt squeezed by the distance she knew she had to create. She couldn’t afford to throw herself heart and soul into what they had, because she knew that if she did she would quickly start believing that their marriage was real in every sense of the word—and then what protection would she have when the time came and his attention began to stray? He didn’t love her, so there would be no buffer against his boredom when their antics in the bedroom ran out of steam.
Daily she told herself that it was therefore important to get a solid friendship in place, because that would be the glue to hold things together. But at the back of her mind she toyed with the thought that friendship might prove more than just glue. Maybe, just maybe, he would become reliant on a relationship forged on the bedrock of circumstance. He had proposed marriage as a solution, and how much more he would respect her if she treated it in the same calm, sensible, practical way he did.
She was determined to starve her obsession with him and get a grip on emotions that would freewheel crazily given half a chance.
The only time she really felt liberated was when they were making love. Then, when he couldn’t see the expression on her face, she was free to look at him with all the love in her heart. Once she had woken up to go to the bathroom in the early hours of the morning, and she had taken the opportunity, on returning to bed, to stare. In sleep, the harsh, proud angles of his beautiful face were softened, and what she’d seen wasn’t a person who had the power to damage, but just her husband, the father of her child. She could almost have pretended that everything was perfect …
As they edged out of London, heading towards Devon along the scenic route rather than the motorway, Oliver became increasingly excited at the sight of fields and cows and sheep, and then at his favourite game of countin
g cars according to their colour, in which her participation was demanded.
After an hour and a half his energy was spent, and he fell asleep with the abruptness of a child, still clutching the glossy cardboard book which she had bought earlier in the week to occupy him on the journey down.
‘I expect you’re a bit nervous about meeting my parents …’ Sarah reluctantly embarked on conversation rather than deal with the silence, even though Raoul seemed perfectly content.
Raoul gritted his teeth at the ever-bland tone of voice which she had taken to using when the two of them conversed.
‘Should I be?’
‘I would be if I were in your shoes.’ Sarah’s eyes slid over to absorb the hard, perfect lines of his profile, and then she found it was a task to drag them away.
‘And that would be because …?’
‘I’m not sure what they’ll be expecting,’ she told him honestly. ‘I haven’t exactly blown your trumpet in the past. In fact when I found out that I was pregnant … Well, put it this way: wherever in world you might have been, you ears would have been burning.’
‘I’m sure that will be history now that I’m around and taking responsibility for the situation.’
‘But they’ll still remember all the things I said about you, Raoul. I could have held everything back, but finding out that I was pregnant was the last straw. I was hormonal, emotional, and a complete mess. I got a lot off my chest, and I doubt my mother, particularly, will have forgotten all of it.’
‘Then I’ll have to take my chances. But thank you for being concerned on my behalf. I’m touched.’ His mouth curved into a sardonic smile. ‘I didn’t think you had it in you.’
The Secret Sinclair Page 14