by Penny Jordan
She had been dreading meeting Jonas’s parents, feeling sure that they must think that her pregnancy had forced Jonas into marrying her.
But if those were their feelings they certainly didn’t betray them when Vanessa opened the door to them and urged them inside.
Oliver Chesney was amazingly like his son; older of course, and rather stooped, his hair silver and not black. His eyes weren’t like Jonas’s. They were a faded blue, and very kind, if somewhat vague. He acknowledged Vanessa with a smile and shook hands warmly with Sara—she was to learn later that he was not a demonstrative man—and then almost straight away started to comment on the ducks he had noticed swimming on the village pond.
‘Unusual that, to see them here at this time off year. They should be in Iceland. Of course, we did have some bad spring gales which could have blown them of course.’
‘Oliver, we’ve come to see Vanessa getting married, not birdwatch,’ his wife reminded him with patient firmness.
‘Of course. Of course…’ The blue eyes focused and he smiled charmingly at Sara. ‘Forgive me, Sara, I do tend to get rather carried away with my hobby at times, I’m afraid, as Vanessa already knows.’
‘Too true,’ groaned Vanessa ruefully. ‘While all my schoolfriends were holidaying in Spain and Greece, we were chasing off after birds or plants, invariably somewhere cold and wet.’
‘You’re exaggerating, darling,’ her mother protested. ‘What about that lovely holiday we had in Switzerland?’
‘You mean the one when Oliver got stuck half-way up a mountain trying to photograph a rare flower?’
Her mother laughed, and then turned to Sara. ‘We’re being very rude, reminiscing like this, Sara. I’m sorry we couldn’t make it to your wedding, but Oliver was just putting the final touches to his latest book, and his publishers were screaming out for it.’
Vanessa had already told her that in retirement Jonas’s father had turned to writing about his favourite subjects, and had already had two books published.
‘What time are we due at the church?’ Jennifer Chesney asked, automatically taking charge.
When Vanessa told her, she said calmly, ‘Good, that leaves us time to have a cup of coffee. No, Oliver, you are not to go out and lose yourself in the garden,’ she checked her husband, seeing him wandering in the direction of the French window. ‘Vanessa, you go and make us all a drink while I get acquainted with my new daughter-in-law.’
‘We weren’t totally surprised by Jonas’s news,’ she announced. ‘Vanessa had already told us about you, and hinted that Jonas was showing a far more than neighbourly interest in you. I must say that I’m delighted that he’s finally fallen in love and married. Both of us have been worried about him for some time,’ she added, glancing affectionately across at her husband who was still looking wistfully out into the garden. ‘As Oliver would be the first one to admit, he isn’t the best person in the world at personal relationships. He was brought up by a bachelor uncle and went through the traditional public school system, so when Jonas’s mother died, poor Oliver didn’t really have the faintest idea of how to comfort or bring up his son.
‘Jonas was at a particularly vulnerable age when he lost his mother, and naturally he wasn’t able to turn to me. I was the intruder who had taken his mother’s place. We’ve talked about it since, and he says that the hardest thing was not coming to terms with the fact that his father had found a second wife, but that he himself actually liked me. He said that made him feel doubly guilty, as though he were in some way betraying the memory of his mother. Those are very strong emotions for a boy of fourteen to try to handle, and although everything has resolved itself now, they have left scars. I’ve noticed how very withdrawn he’s always been with his girl-friends—and there have been plenty of them,’ she added drily. ‘He’s a very attractive man, but I could sense that he was always holding something back, and I must confess I’d begun to worry that he’d never let himself fall in love.’
As Vanessa came in with the coffee, Jennifer Chesney changed the subject to ask her daughter about her wedding dress, and Sara tactfully suggested that she stay and keep her father-in-law company while Jennifer went upstairs to help Vanessa get ready.
The silence that fell after they had gone was not an uncomfortable one. In fact, Oliver Chesney was one of the most restful and placid people Sara had ever been with. He had a sweet naïveté about him that Sara couldn’t help contrasting with Jonas’s far harder exterior.
And yet Jonas had known pain and loss, just as she had herself. Had, if she was to believe Jennifer, experienced feelings about his relationship with his stepmother that were very close to her own emotional turmoil when she intially met him.
Surely, in the circumstances, he would understand if she tried to explain to him exactly why she had so determinedly clung to her memories of Rick? But why should she explain? What was the point?
The point was that within a very short space of time she and Jonas would be the parents of a child—a child who had a right to expect love and security from them. The love she sensed their child already had—from Jonas as well as herself—but the security? Being honest with Jonas would not change his lack of love for her, but surely it might at least open the way to a better understanding between them? To a relationship at least founded on something more solid than their present precariously vulnerable foundations.
But did she have the courage to do it? Could she actually find the words to admit to him that she had clung so desperately to the protection of Rick because she had been frightened by her response to him; that she had hated and resented him because paradoxically she had known even then how much she could love him?
She must tell him, Sara decided an hour later as she set her car in motion. She would have to wait until after the wedding now, but once it was over and they were alone… Now that the decision had been made, she felt curiously better, as though a terrible burden had slid from her shoulders.
Vanessa had chosen a very simple wedding dress, but one which suited her slender figure perfectly. The way Sam looked at his bride as they left the church together made Sara’s throat ache with suppressed longing for Jonas to look at her with such tender love. What a foolish, impossible dream, she recognised a little later as she studied his cool, slightly forbidding features. Today he seemed to have retreated even further away from her than ever.
The meal after the wedding was a very evident success. Sara watched Jonas and his father chatting with a tiny ache in her heart. They got on very well together, and she couldn’t help wondering how Jonas would react to his own child. They hadn’t even discussed the baby since their marriage. In fact they hadn’t even discussed anything at all. Did Jonas now resent the fact that he had married her? It had, after all, been by his own choice.
Because she was carrying his child, because he was the sort of man who took his responsibilities seriously. A man who would show the degree of concern for an old woman who was no relative that he had shown for Miss Betts would never be able to turn his back on his own child.
Now, when it was too late, Sara wondered if she had let Jonas persuade her into marriage too easily, but if she had refused…
‘Are you feeling all right?’
Lost in her own unhappy thoughts, she hadn’t seen him come over to her. The light pressure of his hand on her shoulder and the concern in his voice both combined to bring her perilously close to tears.
‘Just a bit tired,’ she told him, not untruthfully. It was bliss—heaven, in fact—to be the recipient of his concern.
‘Why don’t you go upstairs and rest for a while?’ he suggested. ‘Everyone will be leaving pretty soon.’
Nodding her head, Sara made her excuses to everyone and went upstairs. Undressing down to her underwear, she lay on the bed, drifting in and out of a restless sleep, finally waking when she heard goodbyes being called and car doors slamming.
Several minutes later Jonas came upstairs.
‘I’ll have to go and chec
k up on the greenhouses shortly, but I’d thought I’d come up and see if you wanted a cup of tea or anything first.’
Sara shook her head. Her throat felt dry, and she was as tense as a finely coiled spring, but she might never get an opportunity like this again.
‘I don’t want anything to drink, Jonas,’ she told him huskily, ‘but I would like to talk to you.’
He approached the bed warily, sitting down on the edge of it, almost as far away from her as he could possibly get, she noticed wryly.
Slowly, haltingly, she started to explain to him the trauma of her inner battle against herself almost from the moment they met.
He listened to her in silence, his face grave and unreadable, and then said emotionlessly, ‘I can understand what you’re saying, Sara—I went through much the same thing when my father remarried—but what I don’t understand is how any of this relates to me. I already knew how you felt about Rick. I knew you couldn’t bear the thought of putting someone else in his place…’
He had missed the point completely, or perhaps she hadn’t put it clearly enough, Sara thought desperately, anxiety making her tongue clumsy and her throat tight as she shook her head and said frantically, ‘No…no, you don’t understand. What I’m trying to tell you, Jonas, is that I love you.’
Instantly his face became a mask of rejection. He got up and walked over to the window, standing with his back to her. An icy wave of humiliation overwhelmed her as Sara stared at his tensed back.
‘What is it exactly that you hope to achieve by telling me this now, Sara?’ He had turned to face her, his face hard, his eyes a cold implacable grey. ‘Oh, I can guess,’ he suggested softly. ‘Sexual frustration plays the very devil with one’s principles, doesn’t it?’ He stood watching her with his hands in his pockets, his stance relaxed and yet at the same time curiously tense and watchful. ‘There was no need to go to these lengths, you know,’ he mocked her. ‘A simple and far more direct request for physical satisfaction would have done equally well. In fact, I thought we’d already agreed that sex was all there was or could be between us.’
His words were like blows, beating her to the ground, causing her such unimaginable pain that she couldn’t stay and endure them. She had to escape.
She got off the bed and ran to the door, but before she reached it she tripped on a tuck in the Aubusson carpet. As she lost her balance she saw a blur as Jonas moved, but it was too late and she heard herself cry out as she caught the side of her head on the edge of the door.
* * *
The smell struck her first, vaguely familiar and for some reason very frightening. The smell was associated with something she wanted to escape from, something she had to prevent. She tried to move and found that she was somehow constrained. Someone was holding her down, or so it seemed. Panic built up inside her and she knew what it was she feared. The smell she recognised was clinical and clean—a hospital smell. She wanted to cry out that she had changed her mind, that she wanted to keep her baby, but somehow the words wouldn’t form. She struggled to open her eyes and then closed them quickly as the sharp brightness struck them.
‘It’s all right, Mrs Chesney. You’re perfectly safe.’ A nurse was leaning over her, smiling warmly. ‘You had a nasty fall, but you’re all right now.’
‘A fall…her heartbeat steadied slightly. So she hadn’t come in to get rid of her baby. Her baby. Her hand touched her stomach protectively. A fall, the nurse had said. Suddenly it all came back. She lifted her aching head off the pillow to call out to the nurse, but she had gone.
She was in a private room, Sara recognised, staring at the massed flowers and the television set.
The door opened and she looked up eagerly, anticipating the return of the nurse, but it wasn’t she who stood there, it was Jonas.
He looked grey and ill, a different man almost, and fear clutched at her again. She tried to sit up, but the effort was too much for her.
‘My baby?’
How weak and hesitant her voice sounded, when she felt as though she had all but screamed the words at him!
Watching Jonas, Sara saw his expression lighten immediately and knew that whatever it was that had brought that drawn quality to his face, it had not been a miscarriage.
‘He or she is fine,’ he told her with a small smile. ‘In fact you’re both fine, luckily. Dr Heathers was very worried when you first came in—that was some crack you gave your head—but apart from mild concussion it seems you’re OK. You’ll have a nasty collection of bruises for a while, and possibly even a black eye.’
‘I thought when I woke up that I’d come in for the abortion.’ Sara spoke slowly, saying the words more for her own benefit than for his. ‘I wanted to tell them that I’d changed my mind, but I couldn’t speak.’ She shivered, her eyes unknowingly agonised. ‘It was terrible…awful…’
She was stunned when Jonas came across to the bed and sat on the edge of it, facing her, taking her in his arms.
He was wearing one of his soft woollen checked shirts, and the fabric felt good against her face. Through it she could smell his skin and she wanted to bury her head against him and go on breathing in the essence of him for the rest of her life. She could feel his heartbeat, surely highly accelerated. One of his hands stroked her hair. It must be a dream, she thought hazily, and hadn’t realised she had said the words out loud until he released her rather abruptly and said curtly, ‘Doctor Heathers says you’re well enough to go home, but of course if you’d prefer to stay in for another day or so.’
‘Another day? How long have I been here?’
‘Two days,’ Jonas told her. He had his back to her and his voice was muffled. The words sounded almost anguished, that could not possibly be—witness the way he had released her so quickly just now.
‘I should never have spoken to you the way I did.’ He said it under his breath, swinging round abruptly. The expression of anguish in his eyes shocked her. For a moment hope, golden with promise, floated through her, and then she was dashed back down to reality when he went on rawly, ‘You could have so easily lost the baby, and…’
‘And then you’d have married me for nothing,’ she supplied bitterly for him.
She watched him frown, but the anger she anticipated wasn’t there. If anything his expression was rather abstracted as he asked her slowly, ‘Why did you tell me you loved me?’
Why? Why had she? ‘I thought it might help to get our marriage on a better footing.’
‘A conciliatory lie, in other words?’
A lie? He was still watching her, and Sara felt her heart leap and lodge in her throat. Without knowing it, he was giving her an opportunity to retract, to pretend she had never really meant what she had said, or was he simply offering her a way out that would embarrass neither of them; was this his way of telling her that he didn’t want her love, either now or at any time in the future? For a second she toyed with the idea of telling him that she hadn’t lied, that she did love him, but what good would it do? With her mind growing clearer with every passing second, she could all too easily remember the anger and contempt with which he had greeted her admission of love.
Even so, she couldn’t bring herself to actually tell him yet another lie. Instead she shrugged and, avoiding his eyes, said listlessly, ‘If you like.’
The silence stretched on for so long that she was forced at last to look at him. He was frowning slightly, sharp grooves of pain scoring his skin. She wanted to go up to him and take him in her arms to tell him how much she loved him.
The door opened and a nurse came in.
‘All ready to get dressed, are we?’ she demanded brightly of Sara, starting to shoo Jonas out. ‘Doctor will be in to have a few words with you before you leave.’ Taking Jonas with her, she left Sara to get dressed.
Jonas seemed very preoccupied on the drive back to the house. Despite her protests, he insisted on carrying her inside the house and depositing her carefully on a settee in the sitting-room, saying that Mrs Lyons had be
en in and left them something to eat. ‘There was a card from Vanessa and Sam this morning.’
The newly married couple and Carly were still on honeymoon, and Sara tried to will her tensed muscles to relax as Jonas disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. He seemed different in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on; gentler somehow.
He wasn’t gone long, coming back with a loaded tea-trolley. Sara stared at the mounds of sandwiches and scones.
‘Mrs Lyons believes in ladies in your interesting condition eating for two,’ he told her with a grin.
‘There’s enough there to feed two hundred!’ exclaimed Sara wryly. In point of fact she wasn’t hungry at all; sitting here listening to his lazy drawl, having this brief glimpse of the relationship they might have had had things been different, was suddenly far too painful. She felt as though her throat was raw with the threat of tears. Her head ached and so did her heart. When she put down her sandwich untouched, she saw Jonas frown.
‘Are you feeling all right?’
He was at her side instantly, watching her, lifting his fingers to her face and touching the still tender flesh of her temple, pushing back her hair as his fingertips caressed her skin in what she could only assume must be an automatic reflex action. Whatever the origin of the caress, it was playing havoc with her self-control. She wanted him to go on; she wanted him to stop. She made a small sound of protest in her throat, her eyes meeting his for an unguarded second. Amazingly, he was smiling at her, a warm, teasing smile that held so much promise that for a moment her heart seemed to stop beating.
Dropping down beside her so that their heads were level, he took her wrists in a light grip and said huskily, ‘Sara, are you sure you were lying when you said you loved me?’
His question was so unexpected that she simply stared at him, while a betraying tide of colour swept up under her skin.
His grip on her wrists tightened; the warmth of his breath brushed against her skin as he muttered, more it seemed to himself than to her, ‘Silly question.’ And then his mouth was touching hers, moving against it with a heady languor that made her bones melt, clinging and caressing, moving so gradually from possession to passion that Sara was barely aware of how the transition took place.