by Penny Jordan
‘Why does he not love you? Has he told you?’
Jodi found herself starting to smile.
‘Sort of... He has indicated that...’
‘But you are lovers?’ the woman pressed Jodi with a shrewdness and perspicacity that took Jodi’s breath away.
She could feel her colour starting to rise as she admitted, ‘Yes, but...but he didn’t... It was at my instigation... I...’ She stopped and bit her lip again. There were some things she could just not bring herself to put into words, but her companion, it seemed, had no such hang-ups.
‘You seduced him!’
She sounded more amused than shocked, and when Jodi looked at her she could actually see that there was laughter in the other woman’s dark eyes.
‘Well...I...sort of took him by surprise. I’d fallen asleep in his bed, you see, and he didn’t know I was there, and when I woke up and realised that he was and...’ Jodi paused. There was something cathartic about what she was doing, about being able to confide in another person, being able to explain for the first time just what she had felt and why she had felt it.
‘I’d seen him earlier in the hotel foyer,’ she began in a low voice. ‘I didn’t know who he was, not then, but I...’
She stopped.
‘You were attracted to him?’ the other woman offered helpfully.
Gratefully Jodi nodded.
‘Yes,’ she agreed vehemently. ‘He affected me in a way that no other man had ever done. I just sort of looked at him and...’ Her voice became low and strained. ‘I know it sounds foolish, but I believe I fell in love with him there and then at first sight...and I suppose when I woke up and found myself in bed with him my...my body must have remembered how I’d felt then, earlier, and.... But he...well, he thought that I was there because... And then later, when he realised the truth, he told me... He asked me...’ Her voice tailed off. ‘I should never have done what I did, and I felt so ashamed.’
‘For falling in love?’ the older woman asked her, giving a small shrug. ‘Why should you be ashamed of that? It is the most natural thing in the world.’
‘Falling in love might be,’ Jodi agreed, ‘but my behaviour, the way I...’ Jodi shook her head primly and had to swallow hard as she tried to blink away her threatening tears.
Her companion, though, was not deterred by her silence and demanded determinedly, ‘So, you have met a man with whom you have fallen in love. You say he does not love you, but are you so sure?’
‘Positive,’ Jodi insisted equally determinedly.
‘And now you sit here weeping because you cannot bear the thought of your life without him,’ the older woman guessed.
‘Yes, because of that, and...and for other reasons,’ Jodi admitted.
‘Other reasons?’
Jodi drew an unsteady breath.
‘When...after...after he had realised that I was not as he had first imagined, well, when he realised the truth about me he warned me that if...if by some mischance I...there should be...repercussions from our intimacy then he would expect me to...to...’
Jodi bit down on her lip and looked away as fresh tears welled in her eyes.
‘I told myself that it was impossible for me to love a man like that, a man who would callously destroy the life of his child. How could I love him?’
She shook her head in bewilderment, whilst her companion demanded in a disbelieving voice, ‘I cannot believe what you are saying. It is impossible; unthinkable...’
‘I can assure you that it is the truth,’ Jodi insisted shakily. ‘I didn’t want to believe it myself, but he told me. He said categorically that something would have to be arranged. Of course, then I really did believe that it was impossible that I could be—but now...’
As Jodi wrapped her arms protectively around her still slender body her companion questioned sharply, ‘You are pregnant? You are to have...this man’s child?’
Numbly Jodi nodded. ‘Yes. And I am also facing an enquiry because I was seen leaving his hotel suite, and other things. And, as a head teacher, it is of course expected that I should... That was why he said we should get engaged, because of the gossip and to protect me.’
As she spoke Jodi raised her left hand, where Leo’s diamond glistened in the sunlight nearly as brightly as Jodi’s own falling tears. ‘But how can he offer to protect me and yet want to destroy his own child?’
‘What will you do?’ the other woman was asking her quietly.
Jodi drew a deep breath.
‘I plan to move away and start a fresh life somewhere else.’
‘Without telling your lover about his child?’
After everything she, Jodi, had told her, how could she sound so disapproving? Jodi wondered.
‘How can I tell him when he has already told me that he doesn’t want it? “Something will have to be arranged”—that is what he said to me, and I can imagine what kind of arrangement he meant. But I would rather die myself than do anything to hurt my baby.’ Jodi was getting angry now, all her protective maternal instincts coming to the fore.
She had no idea how long she had been sitting on the bench confiding in this stranger, but now she felt so tired and drained that she longed to go home and lie down.
As she got up she gave her unknown companion a tired smile.
‘Thank you for listening to me.’ She turned to go, but as she did so the other woman stood up too, and to Jodi’s shock took hold of her in a warm embrace, hugging her almost tenderly.
‘Have courage,’ she told her. ‘All will be well. I am sure of it.’
As she smiled comfortingly at her, Jodi had the oddest feeling that there was something about the woman that was somehow familiar, but that, of course, was ridiculous. Jodi knew that she had never seen her before.
CHAPTER TEN
‘LEONARDO, YOU ARE to drive back to Frampton right now.’
‘Mamma,’ Leo protested.
‘Right now, Leonardo!’ Luisa Jefferson insisted. ‘And before you do, could you please explain to me how it is that poor Jodi believes that you wish not only to deny yourself as a father the child you have created with her, but that you wish to deny it the right to life as well?’
‘What...what child? Jodi told me there would be no child.’
‘And she told me that there will be, not that I needed telling; I could see it in her eyes...her face. You have hurt her very badly. She truly believes that you do not love her and she is hurting because she thinks she loves a man who would destroy her child.’
‘I cannot understand how she could possibly think that!’ Leo protested. ‘I would never—’
‘I know that, of course,’ his mother interrupted him, ‘but your Jodi, it seems, does not. “Something will have to be arranged”, is apparently what you told her.’
‘What...? Yes...of course...but I meant...I meant that if she was pregnant we would have to get married,’ Leo told his mother grimly. ‘How on earth could she interpret that as...?’
‘She is the one you should be speaking to, Leonardo, and not me. And you had better be quick. She plans to leave, and once she does...’
‘I’m on my way,’ Leo announced. ‘If you dare to say anything to her until I get there you will be banned from seeing your grandchild until he or she is at least a day old.’
When she replaced her telephone receiver Luisa Jefferson was smiling beatifically.
Picking it up again, she dialled the number of her home in Italy. When her husband, Leo’s father, answered she greeted him, ‘Hello, Grandpapa!’
* * *
‘Oh, come on, Jodi, I’m starving and I hate going out for dinner on my own.’
‘But, Nigel, I’m tired,’ Jodi had protested when Nigel had rung her unexpectedly, demanding that she go out to eat with him, ‘and surely you could
ask one of your many girlfriends.’
But in the end she had given in and she had even managed not to protest when, having picked her up in his car, he had suddenly realised that he must have dropped his wallet on her footpath and gone back to pick it up.
Now, though, at barely ten o’clock, she was exhausted, and yawning, and she couldn’t blame Nigel for glancing surreptitiously at his watch.
She hadn’t been the most entertaining of companions.
Even so, his brisk, ‘Right, let’s go,’ after he had checked his watch a second time made her blink a little.
‘Don’t you want to finish your coffee?’ she asked him.
‘What? Oh, no...I can see you’re tired,’ he offered.
He had been in an odd mood all evening, Jodi recognised, on edge and avoiding looking directly at her. But she was too tired to ask him what was wrong, instead allowing him to bustle her out into the car park and into his car.
Once they reached her house, Jodi asked him if he wanted to come in, but rather to her surprise he shook his head.
As she heard him drive away Jodi decided that she might as well go straight upstairs to bed.
In Jodi’s sitting room the light from her computer screen lit up the small space around it, but Jodi was too exhausted to bother glancing into the room, and so she didn’t see the smiling babies tumbling in somersaults all over her computer screen around the large typed message that read, ‘I love ya, baby, and your mamma too!’
Once upstairs, she went straight to the bathroom, cleaning off her make-up and showering before padding naked into the darkened bedroom she was too familiar with to need to switch on the light.
She was already virtually asleep before she even pulled back the duvet and crawled into the longed-for comfort of her bed—the good old-fashioned king-size bed that almost filled the room and which Nigel had wickedly insisted on buying her as a cousinly moving-in gift. It was a bed that no one other than her had ever slept in—though someone was quite definitely sleeping in it now!
It was a someone she would have known anywhere, even without the benefit of being able to see his face. She would have known him simply by his scent, by the subtle air of Leo-ness that enfolded her whenever she was in his presence.
Leo! Leo was here, fast asleep in her bed! No, that just wasn’t possible! She was going mad. She was daydreaming...fantasising!
‘Mmm.’ Jodi gasped as a decidedly realistic pair of warm arms wrapped themselves firmly around her body, imprisoning it against their owner’s wonderfully familiar maleness.
‘Leo!’ Jodi whispered his name weakly, her voice shot through with the rainbow colours of what she was feeling.
‘How could you possibly believe that I don’t love you?’ she heard him demanding thickly. ‘I’m mad about you! Crazily, insanely, irredeemably and forever in love with you. I thought you were the one who didn’t love me. But then they do say that pregnancy affects a woman’s ability to reason logically...’
‘Leo!’ Jodi protested, her voice even weaker. She couldn’t take in what was happening and, even more importantly, had no idea how it had come about. ‘How? What?’ she began, but Leo was in no mood to answer questions.
His lips were feathering distracting little kisses all along her jaw, her throat, her neck. He was whispering words of love and praise in her ear; he was smoothing a tender hand over the still flat plane of her belly, whilst his voice thickened openly with emotion as he whispered to her, ‘How could you think I didn’t want our child, Jodi?’
She tried to answer him but the seeking urgency of his mouth on hers prevented her, and, anyway, what did questions, words matter when there was this, and Leo, and the wonderful private world of tender loving they were creating between them?
‘The first time we met you stole your way into my bed and my heart,’ Leo said to her as he touched her with gentle, adoring hands, the true extent of his passion only burning through when he kissed her mouth. ‘And there hasn’t been a single day, a single hour since then when I haven’t ached for you, longed for you,’ he groaned. ‘Not a single minute when my love for you hasn’t tormented and tortured me!’
Jodi could see as well as feel the tension pulsing through his nerve-endings as he reined in his sensual hunger for her.
‘Now it’s my turn,’ he told her. ‘Thanks to Nigel, I have stolen my way into your bed, and I warn you, Jodi, I do not intend to leave it until I have stolen my way into your heart as well, and heard from your own lips that you intend to let me stay there, in your heart, in your life and the life of our child—for ever!’
‘For ever,’ Jodi whispered back in wonder as she touched the damp stains on his face that betrayed the intensity of his emotions.
‘I might have thought that loving you was torture,’ Leo told her rawly, ‘but now I know that real torture would be to lose you. Do you know what it was like finding you in my bed, having you reach out and touch me, love me?’ Leo was groaning achingly. ‘Shall I show you?’
Hadn’t her mother always warned her against the danger of playing with fire?
Right now, did she care?
‘Show me!’ she encouraged him boldly.
She could hear the maleness in his voice as well as feel it in his body as he told her triumphantly, ‘Right.’
They made love softly and gently, aware of and awed by their role as new parents-to-be, and then fiercely and passionately as they claimed for themselves the right to be lovers for themselves.
They made love in all the ways Jodi had dreamed in her most private and secret thoughts—and then in some ways she had never imagined.
And then, as it started to become light, after Leo had told her over and over how much he loved her, how much he loved both of them, and insisted that she tell him that she returned his feelings, Jodi demanded, ‘Explain to me what has happened... How...?’ She stopped and shook her head in mute bewilderment. ‘It’s almost as though a fairy godmother has waved her wand and...’
Propping himself up one elbow, Leo looked tenderly down at her.
‘That was no fairy godmother,’ he quipped ruefully. ‘That was my mother!’
‘What?’ Jodi sat bolt upright in bed, taking the duvet with her, only momentarily diverted by the magnificent sight of Leo’s naked body. Long enough, though, to heave a blissful sigh of pleasure and run her fingertip lazily down the length of him, before finally playfully teasing it through the silky thickness of his body hair whilst watching with awed fascination as his body showed an unexpectedly vigorous response to her attentions.
‘Don’t go there,’ Leo warned her humorously. ‘Not unless you mean it.’
Hastily removing her hand, Jodi insisted, ‘I want to hear what’s been going on.’
Leo heaved a sigh of mock-disappointment.
‘My mother flew over from Italy to see me. She’d heard about our engagement from my new secretary and not unnaturally, I suppose, given the nature of mothers, she decided that she wanted to meet my fiancée—the girl who had answered her prayers and those of the village wise woman, whose skills she had commissioned on my behalf. No, don’t ask, not yet,’ he warned Jodi, shaking his head.
‘She wanted to know all about you, and I naturally obliged—well, up to a point. I told her that I’d fallen totally and completely in love with you,’ he admitted to Jodi, his voice and demeanour suddenly wholly serious. ‘And I told her too that you did not return my feelings. As you know, I had to go to London on business, so I invited her to go with me but she refused. She said she preferred to stay where she was until she was due to take up her return flight. I had my suspicions then, knowing her as I do, and so I made her promise that she would not under any circumstances attempt to seek you out—and she promised me that she wouldn’t, but it seems from what she has told me that fate intervened.
‘She had gone for a walk in
the village, when, as she put it, she saw a young woman in distress. Naturally she wanted to help, so she sat down beside you and—’
‘That was your mother?’ Jodi interrupted. Now she began to understand!
‘I felt that there was something familiar about her,’ she admitted, ‘but I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
‘Mmm.’ She smiled lovingly as Leo broke off from his explanations to kiss her with slow thoroughness. ‘Mmm...’ she repeated. ‘Go on.’
‘With what?’ Leo teased her. ‘The kisses or the explanation?’
‘Both!’ Jodi answered him promptly.
‘But the rest of the explanation first, please, otherwise...’
Laughing, Leo continued, ‘Just as soon as she had left you she rang me in London, demanding to know what on earth I had said to you to give you the impression that I wouldn’t want our child! Jodi...’ Gravely Leo looked at her, his eyes dark with pain. ‘How could you have thought that I...?’
‘You said something would have to be arranged,’ Jodi defended herself firmly.
‘Yes, but the arrangement I had in mind was not a visit to—’ He broke off, so patently unable to even say the words that Jodi instinctively wrapped her arms tightly around him, as filled with a desire to protect him as she had been to protect their unborn child.
‘The place I had in mind for you to visit was a church so that we could be married,’ Leo told her hoarsely. ‘That was what I was talking about. Even if I had not loved you I could never, would never... Thank heavens my mother knows me better than you seem to! Still, at least that puts us on an equal footing now. I originally misjudged you and now you have misjudged me, and, that being the case, I suggest that we draw a line beneath it and start again.’
He took a deep breath. ‘I love you, Jodi Marsh, and I want to marry you.’