by Abby Green
Aneesa followed Sebastian into a bright airy hallway and then into a sitting room where she saw a beautifully preserved woman looking out the window. She couldn’t have been more than about mid-fifties, Aneesa guessed, and could have passed for even younger. The resemblance was striking even from her profile; it was clear where Sebastian got his patrician features from, and his blue eyes. His mother.
She turned as they came in, her whole face lighting up with joy. ‘Nathaniel, darling!’
Sebastian squeezed Aneesa’s hand as if to say, Go along with it. He let her go then to greet his mother. After a couple of minutes he pulled Aneesa around to introduce her, and to Aneesa’s utter shock his mother took in her small bump which was revealed by the tight-fitting top and declared, ‘You’re pregnant! But how wonderful, my dear. Come and sit and tell me all about it. I do so love being pregnant too!’
Aneesa’s head was reeling after a very bizarre conversation with Carrie where she’d constantly referred to Sebastian as Nathaniel, and seemed to believe she was pregnant as well. Eventually Sebastian said he’d take her out for a walk, and Aneesa took the hint and left them alone. The friendly Irish housekeeper came up to Aneesa and they watched Sebastian and his mother in the distance through the window.
The woman explained, ‘I’m actually a psychiatric nurse, but she thinks I’m a housekeeper. I don’t know how Sebastian does it, but every two weeks like clockwork he comes, and not once has she ever recognised him. He and his brother bought this old Gate Lodge for her so that she would feel as if it were her home. They thought it would be better for her than staying in the main psychiatric facility at the house. Also, here she’s more protected, less chance of staff leaking stories to the press. She has full-time round-the-clock care….’
Aneesa asked hesitantly, ‘Why does she think she’s pregnant?’
The woman shrugged her shoulders and smiled sadly. ‘We don’t know for sure but it’s obviously linked to when being pregnant was a happy time for her, so it’s as if she’s stuck there—in the past.’
After a few more minutes of polite conversation, the woman excused herself and Aneesa went outside. She told the driver where she was going, and started to wander back up to the main house, going in the opposite direction to the one Sebastian had taken with his mother. Her mind was buzzing, so many things falling into place.
It was time for Aneesa to face facts. It was glaringly obvious now where Sebastian’s antipathy to becoming a parent stemmed from. He’d had no role model to speak of, and his brother, who had assumed both parental roles, had abandoned him at a vulnerable age. Her instinct that he would be a good father would hardly be enough to entice him to take on the role.
She and Sebastian might share an explosive chemistry, but clearly he resented it. Just as he resented the fact that she was seeing a side to him that he kept well hidden from everyone else. His cagey and secretive behaviour this morning was because he’d had no intention of telling her about his mother. But she, as usual, had lumbered in with two left feet and forced the issue into the open.
She recalled the tortured sound of his voice when he’d declared she was a thorn in his side. It was becoming very clear to Aneesa that the longer she stayed with him, the more resentful he would become. Eventually despising her for upsetting his life beyond recognition. For seeing more than he’d ever wanted anyone to see. She didn’t doubt that his desire for her would wane once she was gone, and he could get on with his free and independent lifestyle.
The logical thing would be to take him up on his suggestion of moving into her own place, but she couldn’t do that. London wasn’t her home, and she couldn’t bear to see Sebastian get on with his life right under her nose, checking up on her out of a sense of duty and because she happened to be having his baby.
This visit to his mother told her how deeply ingrained a sense of duty was to him and she didn’t want to become his duty.
Aneesa was sitting on a bench in the sunshine when Sebastian found her a while later. She still felt a little numb inside at the decision she’d made. He sat down beside her. She looked at him and saw the lines around his mouth and could only imagine the untold pain of visiting a mother who didn’t even recognise who you were.
‘I’m sorry for assuming you were visiting a mistress, but I’m not sorry I met your mother.’
‘She liked you.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Very possibly because she thinks you both have a lot in common, being pregnant.’
‘Why does she think you’re Nathaniel?’
His mouth tightened. ‘Because he’s the one she chose to take into the lake when she tried to kill herself. He’s the one my father didn’t want.’ He looked at her and she shivered at the bleak look in his eyes. ‘The fact that she recognised him as little as me over the years was no consolation. She was still obsessed by him. Do you know that for a long time I felt jealous of Nathaniel—because she’d chosen to try and kill herself with him instead of me?’
Aneesa couldn’t stop herself from reaching out to touch Sebastian’s hand briefly. ‘I think that sounds entirely normal. And I think on some level she knows exactly who you are. You’re doing a wonderful thing not to challenge her beliefs.’
They sat in silence for a few minutes and then Aneesa blurted out what she had to say, afraid that if she didn’t say it now, she’d be too weak later.
‘I need to go home, Sebastian. I want to be with my family.’ She couldn’t look at him, too afraid of the relief she might see on his face. The thorn in his side would finally be gone.
‘I’m ready to go back, and be a mother on my own—I have no problem with that, but I will need my family around me. I was going to return sooner or later, it might as well be now.’
Sebastian turned and, compelled, she glanced at him. She couldn’t read his enigmatic expression.
When Sebastian had woken that morning, and the previous day’s and night’s events had come back to him—along with the intensity of what he’d shared with Aneesa both physically and emotionally—he’d shut down. Curled away inside. He’d gone into his default self-protection mode. But Aneesa hadn’t allowed him to hide away. She’d come along for the ride, again.
Her words impacted him now like a punch in the gut. She wanted to go home. Coming on the back of just being with his mother, who didn’t even recognise him, he felt flayed inside, but recovered quickly. Why should he care either way that Aneesa wanted to go home? It had always been on the cards. He had to repress a cynical smile. Why wouldn’t she want to run back to normalcy after witnessing the freak show that was the Wolfe family saga?
And yet … he knew plenty of women who would happily deal with such skeletons and bask in the glory of unlimited wealth and status. Hadn’t his own mother done that when she’d taken on William Wolfe and his brood of children? Aneesa was pregnant with his child. She had him over a barrel, yet clearly wanted nothing of his fortune, so by declaring she wanted to go home, nothing here was attractive enough to hold her. Including him.
She was proving once and for all that she was nothing like his mother and nothing like any other woman he’d ever encountered.
Her big eyes were looking at him now, making something inarticulate rise up within him. He smiled. ‘Of course you want to go home.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
He looked away and shrugged, cursing himself for showing that it bothered him on any level. ‘You always said you would want to go home.’
He could feel her penetrating look and tensed. She sighed. ‘Yes, I did. And I think the time to go is before I turn into a total caricature of some kind of jealous lover.’
Her honesty surprised him. He was so used to women being vague, indirect.
Before he could dwell on the significance of that, she stood and said breezily, ‘You made it very clear what would happen here. What you wanted. So I really don’t see the point in prolonging my stay. Things should have died down at home, and I need to get prepared for the baby coming.
‘That is—’ her voice suddenly became more hesitant ‘—unless things have changed for you …?’
Sebastian looked up at her. The sun was behind her and all he could see was her narrow framed silhouette. She had to be referring to the fact that he seemed to turn into a walking human emotional confessional around her. Was she asking him if he wanted her to stay because he might need her? Did she feel pity for him? Was she feeling a sense of responsibility to stay because he might have come to depend on her? Everything within him rejected that.
He stood, too, in an abrupt move and said curtly, ‘No. Why would anything have changed?’ He flipped out his mobile phone and called his car around.
When they were in the car, Aneesa tried not to let Sebastian see how she was trembling. It had cost her a lot to ask him if things had changed. She’d held her breath, hoping against hope that the past few days and all their revelations might have opened up a new intimacy. She hadn’t wanted to admit to being jealous, but obviously he just saw it as sexual jealousy, and not the corrosive emotional kind when you loved someone.
He looked at her and she prayed her eyes weren’t giving her away when she felt like crying. She steeled herself.
‘I’ll come with you to India, of course. I need to meet your family. And attend to business in the hotel.’
Aneesa somehow got out, ‘Please don’t feel like you should. They’d be perfectly happy to meet you when the baby is born. Believe me, they’ve gone beyond shock and despair at this stage.’
‘Nonetheless, I’ll come.’
Aneesa bit her lip so hard she could feel blood. This was it. The line had been drawn. The affair was over. And she knew by going to India now that would be the end. Because he would return to Europe and she wouldn’t. Because she would have no reason to.
The following day Sebastian sat in his office. He had any number of things clamouring for his attention, a veritable pile of paperwork that needed to be signed. But he was distracted. Last night, he hadn’t slept with Aneesa. She’d been all but monosyllabic on their return from the Grange and had bid him goodnight with definite hands-off signals.
And yet what had he expected? She was going home. He was going to be getting on with his life. It wouldn’t be fair to keep sleeping with her, when patently she didn’t want it.
He’d just got off the phone to Jacob, who had been telling him some of his plans for Wolfe Manor, and curiously Sebastian felt a measure of peace. Which he’d never expected. It was as if a huge weight had been taken off his shoulders, and his chest. He’d always felt weighed down when he’d thought about his family, especially Jacob, but seeing them at the wedding, he’d realised that they, too, had their preoccupations, their demons. They really weren’t as disparate as he’d always imagined.
He thought of the wedding …. It had been such a relief to go upstairs and find Aneesa in his bed … even just knowing that she’d been there—Sebastian stood so quickly in reaction to that unbidden thought his chair went back onto the floor. He heard his assistant ask hesitantly through the phone intercom, ‘Is everything all right, Mr Wolfe?’
He smiled grimly. ‘Fine, Meredith. Just fine.’ He righted the chair and his hand shook slightly.
Everything wasn’t just fine. Panic clutched at his gut; everything within him rejected the direction his thoughts had been going in. The last person he’d depended on had been Jacob, and when Jacob had disappeared a fundamental part of Sebastian had been annihilated. And a large part of his trust and faith in mankind had died too.
Depending on anyone was anathema to him and yet somehow Aneesa had infiltrated into that deep secret part of him that he’d vowed would always be invulnerable.
And it still was, he assured himself.
He was losing perspective. He would go to India with Aneesa, meet her family and walk away. She knew the score; at least she and the baby would be provided for.
He told himself that he would be glad, relieved, to see the back of her, at least for a while. She’d witnessed him at his most vulnerable too many times for him to even contemplate now. He didn’t need that, he’d never asked for that. And he didn’t like it. It was why he’d always kept his relationships so impersonal, but from day one Aneesa had come at him like an emotional bulldozer … and just kept coming.
He suddenly felt the urge to go to India that day, and not tomorrow, and had to curb the slightly panicked impulse. He told himself he’d stay at the Mumbai Grand Wolfe Hotel, and limit his time with her family as much as possible. And then get out, and get on with his life….
Sebastian couldn’t be making it any clearer that he was already over their relationship and now it was all about the baby, meeting her family and leaving her in India. Every time she felt like crying Aneesa cursed herself—she’d known exactly what to expect all along, from the moment she’d made the masochistic decision to stay in England.
They were in the first-class cabin of a commercial flight and even though Sebastian was beside her, he might as well have been a million miles away. He’d been brusque to the point of rudeness with her for the past couple of days, had made no attempt to come to her bed and was utterly engrossed in his laptop—as if it held all the secrets to life itself.
Aneesa wondered slightly hysterically if she just opened the emergency door and parachuted out would he even notice. Instead she reclined her seat and pulled a blanket over herself and tried to sleep.
When Aneesa curled up in a ball in her seat facing away from him, Sebastian finally looked over and sighed deeply. Her long black hair was spread out, making him want to run his fingers through its silkiness. The curve of her bottom under the blanket was an enticement to rest his hand there, caressing the tempting line. And her scent was a constant reminder of her innate sensuality which called to him like a homing beacon.
His hands curled into fists as he tried to curb his impulses around her. He put back his head and closed his eyes and wondered if he’d ever feel normal again. He smiled grimly—normal for him anyway. He valiantly blocked out the images that ran through his mind like movie stills of the life he’d always led. He also tried not to remember the way his perfectly unflappable and cool-as-a-cucumber housekeeper, Daniel, had been all but inconsolable saying goodbye to Aneesa, making her own huge brown eyes fill with tears too. Sebastian had felt like an absolute heel, when she was the one that wanted to go home!
He just had to endure a couple of days and then he would make his excuses and go home.
To Aneesa’s relief, the press in Mumbai hadn’t got wind of her return so their arrival went under the radar. She felt so brittle now that she couldn’t have handled the media intrusion along with the prospect of Sebastian leaving in a few days. He hadn’t said how long he’d stay but she could well imagine he was already itching to get back.
Mumbai greeted them in all its hot and steamy, chaotic glory. Horns beeping, traffic narrowly avoiding sacred cows and mopeds whizzing by carrying entire families with serene looks on their faces. A beautiful baby with black kohled eyes smiled up at its mother in an auto-rickshaw.
‘You really love it here, don’t you?’ Sebastian asked from the other side of the car. Aneesa nodded. She couldn’t look at him, she felt too emotional. So she just said, ‘It’s home.’ But she knew that as much as she loved Mumbai, the minute Sebastian left, it would be flat and empty. Her home was where he was now, and she would never be the same again. In that moment she hated him for doing that to her.
He asked then a little gruffly, ‘You should tell me a bit about your family …’
Sudden fire within her made her face him and for the first time she let her guard slip. ‘What’s the point? I’m sure you’ve just carved out the minimum time required to meet them to be polite and have made sure you’ve got plenty of time for business meetings.’
Aneesa flushed. Immediately feeling contrite and terrified that he would guess where her turmoil stemmed from Aneesa said, ‘Forget I said that. You didn’t deserve that….’
; She looked away for a moment and then back, and tried a smile even though it felt forced. Haltingly she started to tell him of her beloved indomitable grandmother who was now apparently clinging onto dear life to see her first grandchild born and had not a word of judgement about
Aneesa’s less than acceptable status as a single mother.
She told him about her beautiful younger sister who was determined to become a star just like Aneesa albeit without the scandal as she’d declared sunnily to Aneesa on the phone. And about her overweight younger brother who was determined to be a chef, much to their father’s chagrin; he just wanted him to love cricket and be a famous cricketer.
By the time her voice faded away she was smiling fondly in earnest, unaware of the tightening in Sebastian’s face.
‘You love them very much.’
She looked at him and tried not to let the intensity of his blue eyes distract her. ‘Yes. I do … But for a long time I took them for granted. I’m lucky that they have loved me so unconditionally.’
Just then she looked past Sebastian out the window and said excitedly, ‘We’re here!’
Sebastian felt an uncustomary sense of claustrophobia and trepidation crawl over his skin. As the car pulled into a neat driveway he saw a big house emerge, and lined up outside was a veritable welcoming party.
Aneesa jumped out and suddenly a smaller, younger version of herself with a streak of black hair launched herself at Aneesa with a squeal—her younger sister. Her younger brother who was indeed overweight was more nonchalant but one could see that he, too, loved his sister, hugging her with typical teenage awkwardness.
And then her parents … The emotion on their faces nearly made Sebastian want to climb back into the car and drive far, far away. He’d never seen so much naked love and affection beaming from anyone. And this was their disgraced daughter?