The Secret Sinclair

by Cathy Williams

  ‘Why are you only now coming clean on that score?’

  ‘What difference does it make whether they know or not? It’s true, isn’t it? One chance meeting,’ she said bitterly, ‘and both our lives changed for ever. What’s that they say about the butterfly effect? Half an hour later and I would have finished cleaning that part of the office. Half an hour later and you would have left without even knowing that I was only metres away from you, in another part of the building …’

  ‘I prefer not to dwell on pointless what if? scenarios.’

  Sarah gazed down at her interlinked fingers. Raoul’s reappearance in her life might have turned her world upside down, but for Oliver it had been nothing but the best possible outcome.

  Her heart was beating so furiously inside her that she could scarcely breathe.

  ‘That bracelet …’

  Sarah looked up at him quickly, so aggressively dominant in the small bedroom. ‘What about it?’

  ‘Gold rope? With some kind of inscription on the outside? Your mother was wearing it. Looks like the gardening accident wasn’t quite as terminal for the piece of jewellery as you imagined.’

  ‘I … I … Maybe I was mistaken …’

  ‘No,’ Raoul told her coldly, ‘maybe I was mistaken. I stupidly thought that you were willing to give this marriage a try, but you’re not.’

  His lack of anger was terrifying.

  ‘I am giving it a try …’

  ‘Really? Because you’re sleeping with me?’

  Sarah felt the slow boil of anger thread its way through her panic and confusion. Suddenly he was dismissive of the fact that they were sleeping together? What a noble guy! Anyone would have thought that making love was way down on his agenda, when it was the only thing he had placed any value on! The only thing he had ever placed any value on. How dared he stand there, like a headmaster in front of a disappointing and rebellious student, and preach to her that he wasn’t satisfied?

  ‘Weren’t you the one who made such a great big deal about our mutual attraction? Our sexual chemistry?’ she flung at him. ‘Didn’t you tell me that we had unfinished business and the only way we could possibly sort that out was by jumping into bed together? You have a very convenient memory when it comes to things you don’t want to remember, Raoul!’

  ‘Am I to be forever punished for being honest when we first reconnected, Sarah?’

  ‘And am I to be punished for being honest now?’ she returned just as quickly. ‘You made it clear what this marriage was going to be all about, didn’t you?’

  She hated the shard of hope inside her that still wanted to give him the chance to say something—to tell her that she was wrong, that it wasn’t just about the fact that they had a child together.

  His silence shattered her.

  ‘I’m playing by your rules, Raoul, and I’m finding that they suit me just fine! In fact, I think you were right all along! Having sex and lots of it is really working wonders at getting you out of my system!’

  She sensed his stillness and wanted to snatch the words back. But they were out in the open now, and she didn’t know what to do with his continuing lack of response. She tried to recapture some of her anger but it was disappearing fast, leaving in its wake regret and dismay.

  ‘So the sex is all that matters to you, I take it?’

  ‘Yes, of—of course it is …’ she stammered, bewildered by that remark. ‘Just like it is to you. And responsibility too, of course … We’re doing this for Oliver, because it’s always better for a child to have both parents at home. We’re being sensible … practical …’

  ‘What story are you going to spin your mother when it comes to the heirloom bracelet?’

  ‘Wha …?’

  ‘I one hundred percent agree with you. Heirlooms to be handed over are for brides who actually want to be married.’

  ‘You’re not being fair, Raoul.’

  ‘I’m being perfectly fair. I had actually thought we had more going for us than just physical attraction, but I was wrong.’ He began walking towards the door.

  Sarah watched him, frantically trying to process what he had said.

  His voice was flat and composed and as cold as ice. ‘I’ve got your message loud and clear, Sarah. It’s always good to have the rules laid bare …’

  CHAPTER NINE

  SARAH lay frozen for a few minutes. Now that she wanted to recall everything he had said, so that she could sift through his words and get them to make sense, she found that her thoughts were in a jumble. Her heart was beating so furiously that she could scarcely catch her breath, and she had broken out in a film of perspiration. Her nakedness was a cruel reminder of how she had attempted to drown her misery in making love.

  She could get herself worked up at the thought of Raoul using her, but only now was she appreciating that she had been equally guilty of using him—even if she had tried to tell herself that that couldn’t possibly be the case, because wasn’t sex all he had wanted from her from the very start?

  Where had he gone?

  His self-control was such a part and parcel of his personality that to see him stripped of it had shaken her to her core.

  Or had she been mistaken? Was he just angry with her?

  With a little cry of horror and shaky panic, Sarah flung the covers off her and scrambled around the room to fling on a pair of jogging bottoms and an old long-sleeved jumper—a left-over reminder of her teenage years, when she had been in the school hockey team.

  The house was dark and quiet as she tiptoed into the hall. Her parents had never been ones to burn the midnight oil, and they would be fast asleep in their bedroom at the far end of the corridor. Oliver’s door was ajar, and she peeped in, through habit, to see him spread flat on the bed, having kicked off his quilt, a perfect X-shape, lightly snoring.

  Just in case, though, she made sure not to turn on the lights, and so had to grope her way down the stairs until her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she could move more quickly, checking first the kitchen, then the sitting room.

  It wasn’t a big house, so there was a limited number of rooms she could check, and her anxiety increased with each empty room. After twenty minutes, she acknowledged that Raoul just wasn’t in the house.

  The temperature had dropped, and she hugged herself as she quietly let herself outside.

  At least his car was still there. She hurried down to the road and glanced in both directions. Then, as she headed back towards the house, a faint noise caught her ears and she stealthily made her way to the back of the house.

  The garden wasn’t huge, but it backed onto fields so there was an illusion of size. To one side was her mother’s vegetable plot, and towards the back, through a wooden archway that had been planted with creeping wisteria, was a gazebo. Her father’s potting shed was right at the very bottom of the garden. Trees and shrubbery formed a thick perimeter.

  Walking tentatively through the archway, she spotted Raoul immediately. He was in the gazebo, sitting with his head in his hands. She paused, and then walked quietly towards him, feeling him stiffen as she got nearer although he didn’t look up at her.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said helplessly.

  Just when she thought that he wasn’t going to reply at all, he looked up and shrugged his broad shoulders.

  ‘What for? You were being honest.’

  ‘I was just trying to be mature about the whole thing …’

  Raoul flung his head back and stared up, away from her, and in the fierce, proud, stubborn set of his features she could see the little boy who’d grown up in a foster home, learning young how to hide himself away and build a fortress around his emotions.

  She rested her hand on his forearm and felt him flinch, but he didn’t pull it away and for some reason that seemed like a good sign.

  ‘I gave you what you wanted,’ Raoul said, his eyes still averted. ‘At least I gave you what I thought you wanted. Don’t you like the house?’

  ‘I love it. You kno
w I do. I’ve told you so a million times.’

  ‘I’ve never done that before, you know. I’ve never let myself be personal when it comes to choosing things for another person, but I made it personal this time.’

  ‘I know. You wanted Oliver to have the very best.’

  ‘I very much doubt whether Oliver cares that there’s a bottle-green Aga in the kitchen or not.’

  Her heart skipped a beat. ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘Trying? I thought it had been obvious all along.’ He glanced across at her and her breath caught painfully in her throat. ‘I wanted you to marry me. Maybe at the beginning I didn’t think it was necessary. Maybe at the beginning I was still clinging to the notion that I was a free, independent guy who happened to have found himself with a child. It took me a while to realise that the freedom I’d spent my life acquiring wasn’t the kind of freedom I wanted after all.’

  ‘I don’t want to tie you down,’ Sarah said quietly. ‘I did. Once. When we were out there. I thought you were just the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life. I built all sorts of castles in the air, and then when you dumped me my whole world fell to pieces.’

  ‘I did what I thought was right at the time.’

  ‘And I understand that now.’

  ‘Do you? Really? I look at the way you are with your family, Sarah, and I see how badly you must have been affected by our break-up. You’ve grown up with security and a sense of your own place in the world. I grew up without either. I never allowed myself to get too close to anyone, and even when we met again, even after I found out that I was a father, I kept holding on to that. It was different with Oliver. Oliver is my own flesh and blood. But I still kept holding on to the belief that I wasn’t to let anyone else in.’

  ‘I know. Why do you think it’s been so hard for me, Raoul? You’ve no idea what it’s been like, standing on the side, wondering if the time will ever come when I can just get inside that wall you’ve spent a lifetime building around yourself.’ She sighed and dragged her eyes away from him. The moon was almost full and it was a cloudless night. ‘Look, you’re not the only one who was afraid of getting hurt.’

  Raoul opened his mouth to protest that he wasn’t scared of anything, and then closed it.

  ‘I know you hate the thought of anyone being able to hurt you.’

  ‘God, it’s ridiculous how well you seem to know me.’

  There was wry, accepting amusement in his voice and, heartened by that, Sarah carried on.

  ‘I spent so many years thinking of you as the guy who broke my heart that when we met again I still wanted to think of you as the guy who broke my heart. Yes, there was Oliver, and there was never any question that I would tell you about him and accept the consequences, but it was so important for me to keep you at a distance. And you kept looking at me and reminding me how much I still wanted you.’

  ‘And yet you could never come right out and say it,’ Raoul inserted gruffly. ‘You were driving me crazy. I wanted to sleep with you and I knew you wanted to sleep with me, and you carried on fighting it. Every time I looked at you it was as though we had never been separated by five years. I didn’t even know it at the time, but I let you into my life five years ago, Sarah, and you shut the door behind you and never left. I only thought you did.’ He groped for her hand and linked her fingers through his. ‘Asking you to marry me was a very big deal for me, Sarah.’

  ‘You said that we were unfinished business …’

  ‘If that’s all you were to me I would never have asked you to marry me, because it wouldn’t have bothered me if eventually you found another man.’

  ‘You were worried about losing Oliver.’

  ‘I think I knew, deep down, that that wouldn’t happen. You would have allowed me all the access I wanted—and, let’s face it, it’s not as though children of parents who don’t live together end up forgetting who the absent parent is. No, I asked you to marry me because I wanted you in my life and I couldn’t envisage life without you in it.’

  ‘Oh, Raoul.’ Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes and she smiled at him, a smile of pure joy.

  ‘I love you, Sarah. That’s why I asked you to marry me. Like a fool, I’m only now admitting it to myself. I loved you five years ago and I never stopped. I love you and want you and need you, and when you retreated into that shell of yours and only came out at night when we were making love, it was as though the bottom of my world had dropped out.’

  Sarah flung her arms around him, almost sending them both toppling off the narrow seat, and buried her head in the crook of neck.

  ‘Are you telling me that you love me too?’

  She heard the broken quality of his voice and knew that underneath the self-assurance there was still uncertainty–a legacy that he hadn’t yet left behind.

  ‘Of course I love you, Raoul!’ She kissed his cheeks, his eyes, and her hands fluttered across his harshly beautiful face until he captured them and kissed the tips of each of her fingers. ‘I was so scared of getting hurt all over again,’ she admitted, with a catch in her voice. ‘I thought I’d be able to handle our relationship, us, without getting involved. I mean, I was so shocked when I saw you again. But I told myself that I’d grown up and learnt lessons from the way things had turned out between us. I told myself that I was free of whatever influence you had over me …’

  She thought back to those many weeks when he had infiltrated her life and shown her flimsy notions up for the nonsense they had been from the very beginning.

  She lay back against him and stared up at the bright constellations. ‘When Oliver met you and the two of you didn’t … um …’

  ‘Exactly hit it off?’ It seemed like a very distant memory now.

  ‘Yes … Well, I realised that the two of you would have to learn to interact, and I knew that the only way that would happen would be if I intervened. I just didn’t take into account how devastating it would be to have you back in my life, virtually full-time … We were both older … somehow it felt like I’d started seeing the real you … and I fell in love with you all over again.’

  ‘Was that why you broke my heart by pushing me away?’

  ‘Stop teasing. I didn’t really break your heart …’

  ‘You did. Into a thousand pieces. I came here intending to give you everything. I wasn’t going to let you get away with being my woman by night and a person I barely recognised by day.’

  ‘And you thought I’d rejected you …’

  ‘Somehow just wanting me for my body didn’t work.’ He laughed with incredulity. ‘I can’t believe I’ve just said that.’

  ‘Of course,’ Sarah breathed, in a lingering, seductive voice, ‘wanting you for your body isn’t such a terrible thing … especially now that you know that I want you for so much more …’

  They were married a month later, at the little village church. It was a quiet affair, with friends and family mingling easily and getting to know one another, and Sarah had never felt happier than when Raoul slipped that ring on her finger and whispered how much he loved her.

  And then her parents had Oliver for ten days while they had a blissful honeymoon in Kenya. For their last three days they went back to the compound in Mozambique where they had first met, so that they could both see the changes that had taken place over the five years. And there were many changes, thanks to Raoul’s generous contributions over the years, although the house with all the steps, which they had shared along with the other gap year students, was still there, and a moving reminder of where it had all begun.

  Even the log was still there—the very same log she had sat on, filled with misery and despair. It had survived the punishing weather, and she wondered who else had sat on it and thought about their loved ones.

  The new batch of students working there seemed so young that it made her laugh.

  They finally returned to London, and the very first thing Raoul said, on walking through the front door, was that they n
eeded a house in the country.

  ‘I never thought I’d step outside London again,’ he confessed as they lay in bed on their first night back. ‘But I’m beginning to think that there’s something quite appealing about all that open space …’

  He gently smoothed her hair back from her face, and she smiled at him with such tenderness and love that he felt, once again, that feeling of safety and a sense of completion.

  ‘We could go there on weekends … somewhere in Devon … it’s not that far …’

  ‘Yes,’ Sarah replied seriously, ‘that might not be a bad idea. I mean, it would be great to see more of Mum and Dad—especially now that you’ve managed to convince Dad that he should take up the bee-keeping thing, with lots of help from you—and the children would like it …’

  ‘Already planning an extension to our family?’ Raoul laughed softly, and slipped his hand underneath her lacy top.

  They had made love less than an hour ago, but just the feel of her swollen nipple between his fingers was sufficient to rouse him to an instant erection. He pushed the top up, licked the valley between her breasts, which was still salty and damp with perspiration, and settled himself to suckle on the sweet pink crests.

  ‘I thought we were talking,’ Sarah laughed.

  ‘Fire away. I’m all ears.’

  ‘I can’t talk … when …’ She gave up, arching her body to greet his eager mouth as he sucked and teased her breasts, then moved lower down to torment the little bud already swollen in anticipation.

  The flicking of his tongue stifled all hope of conversation, and it was a long time before she whispered drowsily, ‘Not so much planning an extension to our family as thinking there might be one arriving in the next few months or so …’

  Raoul propped himself up and looked at her with urgent interest.

  ‘You’re pregnant?’

  ‘I was going to tell you as soon as I did a test—but, yes, I think I am. I recognise all the signs …’

  And she was pregnant.