‘Ian, of course,’ Sara said, shocked.
‘Because he has no mother? Do you feel sorry for me, then? I had no mother nor a father,’ he told her succinctly. ‘Does that make you want to take me in your arms and cradle me against your breast? Well, does it?’
Sara didn’t know what had got into him.
‘You’re a man, not a child,’ she told him indignantly.
‘Oh, yes, of course! And a man doesn’t need the comfort of a woman’s arms, is that it?’
He left her before she could retaliate, and she told herself it was just his anxiety over her grandmother that was making him react so violently. They were both on edge, both tense and frightened. She had been feeling queasy all day; for a couple of days in fact, and she knew that her nausea must be caused by nerves over her grandmother’s operation.
Neither of them slept. Lying tense and awake through the darkness, Sara was equally conscious of Luke’s inability to sleep.
In a normal marriage, a happy marriage, they could have found comfort in one another’s arms. She shuddered slightly, aching to turn to Luke and burrow against him, but knowing that that solace was denied her.
By mid-morning the tension was a living thing, filling every room in the house. Even Tom was affected by it, asking anxiously every few minutes how soon the operation would be over.
The telephone rang just after eleven. Sara raced towards it, but Luke got there first. He frowned as he listened to whoever was on the other end, and Sara felt her heart plummet downwards. Unthinkingly, she clasped her hands together in an attitude of prayer. ‘Yes. Well, thanks for ringing.’ Luke replaced the receiver and turned to face her. ‘That was Alan Jessop ringing to thank us for helping Ian.’
Her relief caused a physical reaction that had Sara rushing upstairs to the bathroom.
These bouts with nausea were beginning to drain her, and she knew without looking at her pinched face that she was losing weight.
They rang the hospital as soon as they dared, and to Sara’s relief they learned that the operation was successfully over and that her grandmother was now in recovery.
Anna cried openly when they gave her the news. Sara wished she, too, could find relief in tears, but her fear had been so great that her mind still could not accept that the danger was well and truly past.
They left for the hospital later in the afternoon. Sara hadn’t eaten all day, and she was feeling shaky and sick. An odd dizzy feeling came over her as she hurried out to the car, and she would have fallen if Luke hadn’t seen her stumble and grabbed hold of her.
Held against the protection of his chest, she couldn’t stop herself from sagging weakly against him. It felt so good to lean on him like this, to draw strength from his body and from the physical contact with him.
‘Sara.’ His voice was slightly rough. As she looked up at him, his fingers touched her hair almost gently, pushing it away from her face, as though he wanted to see her as he spoke.
‘I don’t know why you ignored all your grandparents’ pleas for you to get in touch with them. I thought it was because you were so damn selfish that you didn’t give a damn about them, but I’ve seen you with Alice. I know how much you love her. I’ve seen you with Tom… even with that wretched child we picked up out of the road, dammit,’ he added grimly. ‘As soon as Alice is well enough to hear it, I think we should tell her the truth about our marriage. I thought… well, never mind what I thought,’ he said harshly.
‘You married me to punish me, didn’t you?’ Sara asked huskily.
‘Yes.’ His unequivocal acceptance of her accusation destroyed the last remnant of her hope that somehow she might be wrong; that somehow, during the brief weeks of their marriage, she had come to mean something to him.
‘I set myself up as your judge and jury, and I convicted you because…’
‘Because you thought I didn’t care about Gran, and because Cressy lied to you,’ Sara supplied emotionlessly for him.
Explanations weren’t important any more. Nothing was important since he had told her that their marriage was over.
‘I’m afraid we have to continue as we are until Alice is well enough to hear the truth. I’ll renounce any claim I might have on the house. It should be yours, and I’ll make that clear to her.’
‘She’ll be so hurt.’
His mouth compressed, and the way he was looking at her made Sara colour painfully. How odd it was that of all the conversations she had envisaged taking place between them, this had never been one of them.
She had wondered occasionally, when she saw him studying her, if he was beginning to doubt his original assessment of her. More than wondered, she admitted bleakly, as she stepped away from him and got into the car. Foolishly, she had actually hoped that he was. But of course, then she had never dreamed that his acknowledgement of his misjudgement of her would lead to him taking such drastic action.
To put an end to their marriage.
He got into the car beside her, and she couldn’t bear to look at him, terrified that if she did so she would lose control completely.
‘You were meant for marriage and motherhood, Sara.’
His quiet statement caught her off guard. She turned to look at him, and could make no response when she saw the bleakness in his eyes.
‘But not with me.’
She shuddered as he set the car in motion. So now she knew, she thought numbly. Had he guessed that she had fallen in love with him, or was it simply that, having married her, he was now discovering that he couldn’t live with the parody of their marriage, having already been married to the woman he loved? She must be a constant reminder to him of all that he had lost: his wife, his child. Sara blinked away her tears. She wasn’t going to plead with him, and perhaps this was, after all, the sensible solution; the cut clean and sharp rather than a lingering, festering pain of being married to him and yet knowing that he could never love her.
‘Christ, I should have learned by now, surely, not to try to play God!’
Sara winced beneath the harshly self-critical exclamation. She wanted to reach out to him, but she knew that her touch would not be welcomed.
It seemed to take for ever to get to the hospital. As the sister had predicted, her grandmother was conscious, although extremely drowsy.
She greeted them both with a smile, and Sara was astounded to see how well she looked, her skin pink and healthy.
They didn’t stay long, and on their way out they were stopped by the surgeon who had performed the operation. When Sara commented on how remarkably well her grandmother looked, he smiled at her.
‘Yes, it’s quite amazing, isn’t it? The body has tremendous recuperative powers, and your grandmother is a very strong woman.’
‘How long before she’s allowed home?’ Luke interrupted tersely. What he meant was, how long before he could end their marriage? Sara acknowledged.
‘Well, that depends on her progress, but it shouldn’t be very long. She’ll have to take things easy for some time to come, of course.’
In the event, she was home with them within a very short space of time indeed, chastising Luke for wanting to employ a full-time nurse for her, and surprising Sara with her energy and vigour.
Three days after she returned home, Luke announced that he had to leave for Australia on business.
An excuse to get away from her? Sara wondered, absorbing the pain the thought brought and using all her self-control to smile calmly at the news.
Only that morning she had received a letter from Cressy, announcing that she had landed the much-coveted soap part and that she would be staying in California indefinitely. Sara felt sad about the relief her stepsister’s letter brought. She and Cressy had never been close, but they were stepsisters, and surely with a little charity and give and take from both of them, they could have found some middle road, if only for Tom’s sake? It was noticeable that never once in her letter did Cressy refer to her half-brother.
Luke was leaving first thing in t
he morning. She had offered to pack for him, and her offer had been brusquely rejected. It was almost as though, having made the decision to end their marriage, he now could not bear her anywhere near him. They still shared the same bedroom, but Luke came later and later to bed, and for the last two evenings she had lain awake beside him, her body stiff with loneliness and pain. There must be no greater gulf than that which yawned between two people who shared a double bed and yet remained on opposite sides of it.
The sickness which had dogged her since her grandmother’s operation persisted. It worried her slightly, because she had never been a person who was particularly nauseous, but she put it down to the fact that she had never before experienced the emotional turmoil she was enduring now.
She also felt extremely tired. So much so that, even knowing that Luke would be gone before she got up in the morning, she could still not stop herself from going up to bed at just gone nine.
In their bedroom, his cases were packed and closed, a mournful reminder of the end of their marriage.
He had told her that he had misjudged her, but it had brought her no pleasure. It hadn’t brought her anything, Sara thought miserably—at least, not anything other than pain.
CHAPTER TEN
SARA MUST HAVE been asleep when Luke came to bed, because the first awareness she had of him was the whisky scent of his breath as he bent over her.
She opened her eyes and stared at him.
‘Sara…’
He wasn’t drunk, his movements were too steady for that, but he wasn’t completely sober, either.
‘Luke, what is it? What do you want?’ she asked him sleepily.
‘This… Just this…’
And then she was in his arms, with his mouth on hers, and he was kissing her with a wild hunger that pushed aside any thought of resisting him.
She could feel the fierce thud of his heart as it slammed into her. His body shuddered as he pushed her back against the pillows, his fingers tugging on the straps of her nightgown to reveal the perfection of her breasts.
He groaned as he touched them, caressing their tight peaks with fingers that trembled. She felt his mouth against her throat, hot and open as it slid over her skin, and she knew instinctively that he was going completely out of control.
The knowledge should have sobered her, but instead it gave her a wild sense of excitement, a feeling that this one time in his arms she could release all her own inhibitions.
She moved and, as though he thought she was trying to escape from him, he held on to her, baring her breasts to his gaze as he lifted away from her.
‘No… Let me look at you.’
He captured her hands as she tried to cover herself, gently forcing them back on to the pillow either side of her head.
‘Oh God, Sara…’
His hand actually trembled as he released her wrist to caress her rounded flesh.
‘Sweet Sara, so generous… so tender. You even feel and taste tender, too, do you know that?’ he demanded thickly.
And then he bent his head and kissed her with such sweet savagery that Sara felt as though he was drawing her heart itself out of her body.
It was an intimacy she had never expected to share with him, an intimacy that went beyond the physical joining of their bodies, because it was an intimacy that revealed, for the first time, a vulnerability in him, a need that he openly invited and begged her to appease.
It made her feel more powerful, more strong, more womanly than she had ever felt in her life. It brought to the final explosion of their rapturous bodies an intensity and meaning that held her wrapped in dazed disbelief long after the act of love itself was over.
And he stayed pillowed within the circle of her arms, his head resting against her breasts. Too sleepy to question his motives in coming to her, in wanting her so, so almost despairingly, Sara simply gave thanks for the unique gift his lovemaking had brought.
And yet, somehow, when she woke up in the morning and found that he had gone, she was not surprised.
There was a note beside the bed, on top of her carefully folded nightgown. She opened and read the contents. It said quite simply, ‘Forgive me.’
Forgive him for what? For marrying her, for misjudging her, for making love to her? Yes, she could forgive him all those things, but what she could not do was forgive herself for falling in love with him.
It was hard to get up as normal and pretend that nothing had happened. She knew that last night had been the last night they would spend together. She even suspected that Luke might actually institute divorce proceedings while he was in Australia.
Her grandmother, who could be so astute, must not be worried or upset, and Sara was glad that another bout of sickness, even before she got downstairs for breakfast, gave her a genuine excuse for the pallid colour of her skin.
Alice Fitton eyed her granddaughter thoughtfully, wondering if Sara herself was aware of how much she had changed.
There was a new strength of purpose about her, a selfas-surance that showed in the way she held her head and moved. And yet she was not happy.
Alice frowned and motioned to Sara to sit down beside her.
‘I know something’s wrong,’ she said without preamble. ‘What is it? Is it the baby?’
Sara’s shocked eyes met hers. ‘The baby? What baby?’
‘My dear, you’ve been so sick, and tired… I… well, I naturally assumed that you and Luke… I thought perhaps you weren’t happy to have conceived a child so quickly. Most newly married couples want to have some time to themselves before they start a family, and what with Tom and myself, you and Luke had barely any real privacy at all.’
‘I…’ I’m not pregnant, she had been about to say, but suddenly she wasn’t so sure. A sick feeling of realisation swept over her. She could be pregnant—all too easily—and then into her mind slid Luke’s words about never allowing her to have his child, and fresh panic set in. Luke was going to divorce her… If he knew she was having his child, he might try to persuade her to have a termination, give up her baby. Instinctively, her hand went to her stomach, the stomach she wasn’t even sure yet did conceal a growing embryo, and she knew then, in that second, that there was nothing on earth that would make her part with her child. Nothing and no one.
She took a steadying breath and marshalled a smile, her brain working frantically.
‘It’s true, I might be pregnant,’ she agreed, ‘and you’re right… Luke and I had hoped for a little more time together. I was going to make an appointment with the doctor this week.’
‘I think you should,’ Alice told her gently. ‘You’re looking very peaky, and it isn’t wise to take any chances.’
She was thinking of her mother, Sara recognised. And she knew she couldn’t add to the burden of her grandmother’s worries by telling her that her child was very unlikely ever to know its father.
‘Luke must be so pleased,’ Alice Fitton told her gently, almost in fact, as though she had known what was in her mind, Sara thought wryly. ‘Having lost one child…’
‘This baby will never replace the child he would have had with Louise,’ Sara told her quietly. ‘I…’
She wasn’t allowed to go any further, her grandmother looked quite shocked.
‘Oh, my dear, I wasn’t suggesting that! No, yours and Luke’s marriage is very different to his first marriage, and as for Louise’s child…’ Sara didn’t want to hear about Luke’s first marriage. It hurt far too much.
‘I must go,’ she fibbed. ‘I promised to help Anna…’
Luke hadn’t said how long he would be gone, other than that it would be a matter of weeks, but he telephoned every night to check on her grandmother’s progress, and Sara was obliged to talk to him.
It was a bitter-sweet experience, hearing the cool remoteness of his voice over the telephone and contrasting it with the husky passionate endearments he had whispered against her skin the night before he had left.
Sara lost weight. She felt listless and tired,
and it was a constant effort to hide from her grandmother the fact that she was not blooming with love and happiness.
She had been to see the doctor and had her pregnancy confirmed. She must have conceived the first time they had made love, and her doctor had told her to expect an early spring baby. So far, only her grandmother knew, and she thought that Sara had already announced the fact of Luke’s impending fatherhood to him before he left.
‘Sara, you must try to eat a little more,’ she expostulated one lunch time when Sara pushed away a barely touched plateful of food. ‘When Luke comes home, he’s going to think we’ve been beating you. Darling, you’re so thin and pale… I know it’s hard to eat when you’re feeling so poorly, but you must.’
For the baby’s sake, she meant, Sara acknowledged. Never once since she had first known she was pregnant had she even considered not going through with the pregnancy, and to hear her grandmother warning her, however gently, that she might be endangering her child brought weak tears to her eyes.
She ached for Luke. She lay awake at night, trying desperately to recapture those last hours with him, when the intensity of his passion had for the first time allowed them to meet as true equals. And yet, at the same time, she dreaded his return.
Wild schemes of simply leaving, of finding herself a job and accommodation in London, tormented her as the days dragged by. She couldn’t bear to see his face when he realised that she was carrying his child. They should be divorced before it was born, but Luke would feel responsible. He was that sort of man.
And what of their baby, growing up without its father?
It was all such a mess, and with no way out.
The thing she dreaded most was a horrid suspicion growing at the back of her mind that, once Luke knew about the child, he would not divorce her, but would stay with her out of a sense of duty and respect. She didn’t want that. It had been hard enough before, but how much harder it would be now if he were to stay with her after already telling her that their marriage was over!
He was very much a man, and there would be times when sheer sexual need would make him turn to her. Gradually, he must realise how she felt about him, and with that knowledge was bound to come contempt for her.
Man of Stone Page 13