'I—' Oh, lordy, how could she answer that? 'When I'd got used to the idea myself,' she temporised after a frantic search through her scrambled brain.
But all he said, his voice dark, was, 'I wonder.' He gave her a tight cynical smile before he got to his feet, removing her glass of wine. 'In your condition, you don't drink,' he told her in a hard, accusatory tone. 'Eat. I'll make the coffee.'
Although he had left the greater part of his own meal, she saw the sense in what he had said. She had eaten nothing all day and mixing alcohol with pregnancy wasn't the best of ideas. But already he was taking over and she dragged her mind together and began using it furiously while she ate as much as she could, the food she had been so ravenous for now tasting like so much sawdust.
And she knew she had been right to concentrate on working things through when he carried their coffee-mugs through to the sitting-room, gestured her to the only comfortable chair the cottage boasted, and straddled the hearth.
'There is no question now of a divorce, a trial separation, whatever.' His eyes were harder than she'd ever seen them. 'No matter how little it seems to mean to you, you are my wife, and you are carrying my child. And you are coming home to South Park with me, tomorrow, where you will be watched over with merciless attention by the best consultant I can find. And if you have any irresponsible notions about bringing up our child on your own, forget them. I would apply for custody. Make no mistake about that. Do you understand?'
Perfectly. It was what she had expected, the reason she had kept her secret. There was no way he would let her go now. And yes, he would have no hesitation in applying for custody, and with his financial clout, his standing, her own seemingly flighty desertion of him, he might just win. In any case, she dared not take that risk.
Zanna had done another of her disappearing acts, taking Harry with her. And although he could demand access to his son, it could be tricky. But she, as his legal wife, would be allowed no such freedom. The coming child was his legitimate offspring. And what he had, he kept.
His reason for marrying her in the first place had hinged upon his desire for a family to inherit the newly affluent Savage dynasty, to enjoy the fruits of his hard labour, his clever brain, to carry on the line.
So she said, 'Yes, I understand you,' her voice emerging rustily as she mentally injected a dose of stiffening into her backbone. He might have her neatly trapped, but there was no way he was going to make her feel trapped, no more than by the bounds of her living space, anyway.
At one time she would have agreed to anything and everything he asked of her, because of the love she bore him. But not now. Not any more. She would wean herself away from the dependency of her love for him. And she said crisply, 'I agree to go back to South Park with you, to run your home as you expect me to, entertain your guests. But, in return, I have stipulations of my own to make.'
Uncrossing her slender legs, she got to her feet, moving restlessly over the tiny room to put her coffee-mug down on a table. The dark intensity of his unwavering regard was making her feel overwhelmed. And that, the disturbing sexual magnetism that was such an intrinsic part of his makeup as far as she was concerned, was something she was going to have to get to grips with, fight, emerge, if not exactly a winner, not a victim either.
'And those are?' His cool, almost indifferent tone made her shudder. She knew him well enough to recognise the concealed threat. Tilting her chin, she disregarded it, pacing the room with a swirl of soft skirts, aware of the way his guarded eyes followed every movement she made, yet desperately pretending she wasn't.
'I need to work. To achieve something in my own right. I need to be more than your appendage.' Needed something to hold on to, something to take her mind off the empty sham of their relationship. Something to blunt the pain of knowing that her old dream of teaching him to love her was completely hopeless.
'I see. And just how will that be achieved?'
'No hassle.' Stoically, she ignored the patronising tone. He had only ever seen her as someone who could be useful to him. Run his lovely home, entertain his weekend guests, bear him the sons and daughters he had decided he needed. He had never seen her as a woman who had needs that could not be satisfied by a gracious home to live in, beautiful clothes to wear, his attention in the bedroom when he felt so inclined.
Ignoring the knot of pain that had so annoyingly planted itself behind her breastbone, she continued coolly, 'Allie has often asked me to go back into partnership with her. We made a good team. And she wants to expand the area of the agency's activities. It's the sort of challenge I'd enjoy.'
Enough of a challenge to take her outside the closed and unsatisfactory arena of their marriage. True, she would have their child, and she would love him or her to distraction. But she would need something more, something outside the sterile boundaries of her marriage, if she were to keep her self-respect, her sanity.
'And the child?' He had finished his coffee and was pouring more of the wine for himself, the unspoken tension in him translating itself into the terse rattle of the neck of the bottle against the glass. 'If you are harbouring any delusions of putting on your business suit and prancing out to the office each day, leaving our child to the mercies of a hired nanny, then you can forget them.'
Which pulled her mouth into a straight line, made her eyes glitter like bright green glass, equalling the hardness she saw in his.
'I have no delusions,' she spat. None at all, not now. Not a single one was left to cloud the issue, which, she reminded herself, just in time, just before she lost her temper, was all to the good, wasn't it? 'I would be working purely in an administrative capacity and could do that from South Park. You worked from home often enough. Or used to,' she tacked on snidely, unwisely, she saw, recognising the slight upwards drift of one dark male brow. He wasn't a fool and would ferret out all her hang-ups if she didn't keep a more careful watch over her tongue.
Making herself relax because she was fighting for the chance to make a life for herself, distance herself from him and destroy the soul-draining, all-consuming love he so unconsciously called from her, she slowly walked to the chair she had vacated and resumed her seat, tilting her head in his direction, her expression so very carefully bland, tossing the ball straight back at him. 'Well? You agree?'
He gave her a coolly sardonic look then took a hard-looking pinewood chair from the chimney corner, swivelled it round and straddled it, resting his arms along the back, his wine glass held loosely in one long-fingered hand. All this before he told her with soft scorn, 'We seem to be reaching the heart of the matter. You should have been honest about this before. Am I so much of a tyrant?'
He lifted one wide, hard-boned shoulder in a shrug so minimal as to make it practically nonexistent, the insouciant gesture clearly telling her that whether she regarded him as a tyrant or not was not of any particular interest to him. Then his hard, incredibly sexy mouth curved into a smile that held no humour at all as he stated, 'So you want to fly. You were so greedy for some sort of freedom outside our marriage that you used the grimy little pretext of a trial separation in order to stretch your wings. Our marriage, so it would seem, was not enough of a challenge.' He drained his glass, setting it down carefully at his feet, turning the cold scrutiny of his eyes back to her, his chilling assessment making her shake inside because she was sure he could see beneath the calmness of the relaxed front she presented to the mass of miseries deep inside.
Desperately, she bit back the scathing words of bitter condemnation that crowded on her tongue. How could she now explain that the conversation which he knew she'd overheard between him and Zanna had been the reason for the way she'd walked out on their marriage?
How could she, when she had been so determined to get in there first, leading him to believe—for the sake of her self-respect—that she had decided on a separation, pushing home that concept because she hadn't been able to bear the final humiliation of having him ask her to divorce him,
leaving him free to marry the mother of his son?
She had spiked her own guns in that respect and she was damned if she was going to tell him the truth now. And he said, 'Your pregnancy, of course, has put an end to all that. However, within the boundaries of what you have outlined, I agree.'
Was she supposed to curtsy, or genuflect? she asked herself acidly, trying to make herself hate him because her next stipulation, his agreement so necessary, was going to be far harder to make.
It was growing darker now, the forest trees cutting out the last of the evening sunlight, casting a dark green shade that made the small room like an underwater cavern. Charles got to his feet, going to light one of the oil-lamps, and she said quickly, before her already shaky resolve could desert her, 'There is one last thing. I want us to have separate rooms. I don't want to sleep with you again.' She saw him go very still, the honed features having a demonic quality in the orange flare of lamplight.
The eyes he turned on her as he straightened were deep in their shadowed sockets, unreadable, his mouth thinned, accentuating its fascinating cruelty, but his voice was casual to the point of boredom as he thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans and told her, 'You surprise me. Your response to my recent lovemaking has been, frankly, cataclysmic. Not to mention your avid initiation of the process on one or two quite memorable occasions earlier today. However, my dear, you can be assured that I would never waste my sexual energies on an unwilling woman.'
A furious scarlet stain covered her entire body at his calculatedly cold description of what had happened this morning, but she was shivering inside because she knew he would feel perfectly free to seek his sexual pleasures elsewhere. Preferably finding emotional and physical release with Zanna, who obviously still found him sexually exciting even if she balked at the constraints of marriage.
But it was a stipulation she had had to make. His lovemaking might be everything she craved, but for him it was meaningless, a mere assuaging of a natural appetite. And having him share her bed would only leave her feeling degraded, leaving her just as far away as ever from falling out of love with him, finding the self she had once lost in her unreasoning love for him and would be in danger of losing again.
'I'm tired.' Her small face was pale with the strain of knowing herself trapped by her own unthinking revelation of her pregnancy, of the sheer effort of determination that had led her to make the stipulations that would enable her to keep her self-respect.
She got to her feet, pushing the wings of dark hair away from her forehead, gesturing to the hideously unyielding sofa he had to have used last night. 'If you're not up to facing the rigours of that thing again, then I'm willing,' she said, making it clear that her insistence on separate sleeping arrangements was already in operation. And he lifted one straight black brow cynically.
'I'm flattered to hear that there's at least one area in our life where you're willing. I shall manage adequately; you take the bed.'
And then, before weak tears could betray her, she turned to the stairs, but his voice, cold and hard, stopped her, froze her in the ice of disgust.
'There is one thing, my dear wife—before we embark on the future of your choosing. I would like to be sure that the child you are carrying is mine, not Templeton's.'
CHAPTER NINE
For a moment Beth was too shocked and furious to move. Her heart beating like a drum, she felt a tide of angry colour flush over her face before it receded, leaving her feeling cold with a rage deeper than she had ever known before.
How dared he?
Hauling her shoulders back, scarcely knowing what she was doing, she marched rigidly back across the room, brought her hand up and cracked it across his hard mouth, using every last ounce of strength.
The harsh sound of the contact, emphasised by the silence of the room, gave her a small, momentary stab of satisfaction, but not enough to assuage the anger boiling inside her, not nearly enough.
Charles didn't even flinch and the brief flare of something that looked, oddly, like triumph died quickly and left his eyes like stone, betraying nothing. She might not have touched him, let alone slapped him with all the energy she possessed, and she raised her hand again, her already stinging palm ready to deliver one more blow, and then another—until she had worked the torment of her anger, her passionate disgust of what he had said, right out of her system.
But, without even seeming to move, he captured her wrist in one of his hands and held it between them, the dark red stain already spreading over his face in stark contrast with the pinched whiteness of the skin around his nostrils.
'A wife is allowed to slap her husband just once in her life. That option is no longer open to you. Try it again and I'll hit you back.' He released her hand then, stepping back as if he couldn't bear to be this close, and the grey of his gunfighter's eyes had turned to black and she knew he meant what he said.
Her own head came up, her green eyes defiant in the small pale oval of her face. And the clamour of her heartbeats pushed the breath from her lungs as she realised how she would almost have welcomed his physical violence, because it would at least be contact, of a kind, an indication that his emotions were involved, and that—anything—would be better than the cool scorn with which he now regarded her, the light sarcasm he had used to her when discussing the future of their marriage.
And that thought, more than anything else, made her draw back, lose the taste for confrontation. It was sick, and she disgusted herself. Physical violence had always been loathsome to her and, as far as she knew—and she knew him well—to him.
And then, with a cold sarcasm that made her shiver, and go on shivering, he told her, 'I take it that your reaction means you haven't slept with him. You'll have to forgive me for asking, but I did hear him propose marriage. And, being a cynic, I assumed you had given him the necessary encouragement.'
Beth turned away, all her mental and physical reserves brought into play in her effort to cross the room and walk up the stairs without breaking down completely. And, this achieved, by some large miracle, she lay awake for most of the night wondering how she was going to cope with the rest of her life.
'Oh, it is nice to be home!' Molly Garner heaved a sigh of pure pleasure, took her teacup and saucer from the low table and leaned back in her armchair, sipping contentedly. 'I don't care what country you're in, you can't get a decent cup of tea. Not that we didn't have a lovely time, of course, but—'
'It is nice to be home!' Beth supplied with a wide and wicked grin as she gathered her parents' holiday photographs together and stacked them neatly.
The windows were open and the distant sound of a lawnmower was vaguely hypnotic in the somnolent late-summer afternoon and just outside the windows a bee buzzed drowsily in the voluptuous heart of a blowsy red rose.
For the first time in weeks Beth felt a layer of contentment close around her heart. And she said, meaning it more than her mother would ever know, 'It's nice to have you home. I've missed you both.'
In the few weeks she'd been back at South Park she had felt lonelier and emptier than she had ever done in her life. True, Allie had welcomed her suggestion of renewing their partnership with a whoop of delight and they'd been busy sorting out the legalities, future working procedure, and turning a little-used study which was tucked away behind the impressive library at South Park into an office for her use, complete with a computer linkup, filing cabinets and the like.
But nothing, not even starting back to work again, could ever make up for the cold sham of her marriage, and she shuddered involuntarily and her mother asked quickly, 'Cold, pet? Let me close that window.'
'I'm fine. Just a goose walking over my grave.' She found a smile for her spherical mother who was already struggling out of the depths of her chair, and went on smiling until her face felt stiff with the effort as Molly scoffed,
'It's nice of you to say it, but you wouldn't have had time to miss us, running around like that. France, wasn't it?'
<
br /> Her parents hadn't been back home for five minutes before the gossips had gone to work. Nothing could be kept a secret in this close-knit community. So Beth had little option but to bend the truth.
'Near Boulogne. Charles was so often away at that time and Allie had a client she couldn't fix. It was only a short-term temporary thing, so I stepped into the breach. Charles managed to visit a couple of times.'
'Well, he must have done, mustn't he?' Mrs Garner responded drily. 'Otherwise I wouldn't be looking forward to a grandchild.'
Beth summoned a shaky smile but inside she was giving a sigh of relief. She was back now, keeping up appearances as Charles's wife, and if her mother ever got to know that she was doing so only because he had threatened to apply for custody of their child, with all the attendant publicity the court case would create, doubts cast upon her daughter's fitness for bringing up a child—no doubt with salacious tales of her sojourn in France with a man who had ended up proposing to her—she would be more than horrified.
She had been against the marriage in the first place. Not because Charles Savage was so far above the doctor's daughter both financially and socially—she wasn't that old-fashioned—but because of Zanna. Only a week before the wedding she had said worriedly,
'Have you really thought it out, pet? I don't want to spoil things for you, but I don't want to see you unhappy, either. Don't you think it's a little soon? He could be marrying you on the rebound, you know. Have you thought about that? No one could miss seeing the way he was with that Zanna Hall woman. She'll be a hard act to follow.'
But Beth hadn't thought about it, or only inasmuch as to convince herself that although he had made no pretence of being in love with her, spouted no pretty words, she, with her own deep and long-developing love for him, could teach him to need her as much as she needed him. It had been the supreme self-confidence of untried youth, the supreme folly. And, in the circumstances, the less her mother knew about the present situation, the better.
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