Man of Stone

by Frances Roding

  And what of their child? How would he or she grow up in such a traumatic background?

  No matter how much she thought, how much she counselled herself, there was no easy way out, and in the end her final desperate option of running away was cancelled when Luke returned unexpectedly one hot September afternoon.

  She was in the garden, weeding, while Alice had her nap. She had heard a car, but had assumed that it was Anna leaving for her afternoon off, until she turned round and saw Luke standing watching her.

  She stood up awkwardly, all the blood leaving her face, her body swaying as she was caught up in the shock of seeing him.

  She felt his arms reach for her and clung desperately to his strength. When her dizziness cleared, she saw that he was looking tired and thinner… much thinner. He released her bleakly, and motioned to the flowerbed.

  ‘I thought Alice employed a gardener to do that.’

  ‘She does, but I enjoy it. She’ll be pleased to see you…’

  His mouth twisted, as though something she had said had left a sour taste in his mouth. He was wearing a dark suit with the shirt undone at the top, and she was overwhelmed with a terrible need to reach out and touch him.

  To stop herself, she rushed into hasty speech, ‘You’re back sooner than we thought. Did… did you manage to get through everything you needed to do?’

  In her mind was the knowledge that, so far, she had received nothing to signal that he had started proceedings for their divorce.

  ‘Yes. I’ve sold off my remaining Australian holdings. From now on, most of my work will be based in this country.’

  Sara stared at him, almost missing a step. This was the last thing she had expected to hear. She had felt so sure that his first words to her would have been on the subject of their divorce, and yet it seemed as though it was the furthest thing from his mind.

  No doubt because, as far as he was concerned, it was just a formality, she decided bitterly. In his mind, their marriage was already over.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ His eyebrow lifted as she touched her stomach protectively, an instinctive gesture she hadn’t realised she had made until she saw him looking at her.

  Angrily, she snapped, ‘I should have thought you’d have wanted to retain all your connections with Australia.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of your wife.’

  There was a pause and then he said quietly, ‘You are my wife, Sara.’

  Was that really a questioning, almost pleading note she could hear in his voice? Hardly, she acknowledged, tensing her body against the longing invading her.

  ‘But not for much longer.’

  She saw his face tighten, his eyes going hard and opaque. ‘Have you told Alice?’

  So he hadn’t changed his mind. How on earth had she ever thought he might?

  ‘Did you expect me to? I’d better go in. It’s Anna’s day off, and I’m going to prepare dinner. Oh—’ she turned and looked at him ‘—while you’ve been away, I’ve… I’ve moved back into my old room. I… I thought it was best.’

  She had told Anna and Alice that the double bed in Luke’s room hurt her back, and that she preferred the single bed in the guest room she had previously occupied. And, because she was pregnant, both of them had accepted her excuse at face value.

  She had expected Luke to be relieved, but instead he was looking at her almost as though he hated her. Perhaps he did hate her, she thought dully. Perhaps he hated her because every time he looked at her he must wish she was Louise. And when he knew she was carrying his child, it would be even worse.

  She almost ran into the house, not bothering to look and see if Luke was following her.

  It was true that she had to prepare the evening meal, but most of the work was already done.

  She had burned slightly outside in the hot sun, and her skin felt tight and hot. She was also very tired and irritable, she admitted as she changed for dinner.

  Alice was having her meals in the dining-room now, instead of on a tray in her room. She was coming out of her room just as Sara went downstairs.

  ‘What a lovely surprise for you, Sara,’ she exclaimed. ‘Having Luke home early. I expect he was worried about you…’

  Worried that she might try and hold him to their marriage, possibly, Sara thought bitterly.

  She was glad of Alice and Tom’s company over dinner. Without it, it would have been a nightmare. Luke barely spoke to her, and every mouthful of food she ate felt as though it would choke her.

  ‘I’m going swimming with Ian tomorrow,’ Tom announced for Luke’s benefit halfway through the meal. ‘His dad came round to see us, didn’t he, Sara?’

  ‘Yes.’ She said it briefly. After all, Alan Jessop’s visit was hardly of importance to her. He had come round solely to thank her again for taking care of Ian, and they had spent a little more than five minutes together. He had been on his way to Chester at the time, and had also issued the invitation to Tom to join Ian and himself at a local leisure centre for an afternoon.

  Sara wanted Tom to have friends of his own age, and so she had agreed, but now Luke was looking at her with a thunderous expression that made Alice chuckle.

  ‘Oh, dear, now I’m afraid you’ve made Luke jealous, darling! You needn’t worry, Luke,’ she teased. ‘Poor Sara hasn’t been well enough to do anything to make even the most possessive husband jealous. This pregnancy…’

  Horrified, Sara stood up, clattering plates and talking desperately, looking everywhere but at Luke. She rushed out to the kitchen, shaking violently as she put down the dirty plates. Oh, God, of all the ways for him to find out!

  She heard the door open behind her and knew that it was him.

  ‘Is this true?’ he demanded quietly.

  ‘What?’ She tried to make her voice light and disinterested. ‘That I haven’t done anything to make you jealous?’

  ‘Sara…’ The ominous warning in his voice silenced her. ‘Are you carrying my child?’

  ‘I am carrying a child,’ she told him quietly, keeping her back to him.

  ‘My child?’ He took hold of her and swung her round so that he could look into her eyes. ‘My child…’

  This was getting out of hand. She had to do something, and fast.

  ‘Luke, I know you don’t want this. It won’t make any difference to our divorce, I promise you.’

  ‘Oh, my God!’

  She ignored his muttered curse and went on doggedly, ‘I know when you married me it was to punish me… I know how much you loved your first wife… I know my child can never…’

  A horrid shaft of weakness struck her, and she clutched at the worktop with a small moan. She was going to faint. She shouldn’t have rushed up from the table like that.

  In the distance she heard Luke curse, his voice hoarse and strained, and then he was picking her up and it felt so lovely to be in his arms again that she gave a soft sigh and curled trustingly against him.

  When she came round, she was lying on a bed. No, on Luke’s bed, she realised, struggling to sit up, and finding she couldn’t because of the hard arm imprisoning her.

  ‘Sara, we have to talk.’

  ‘About the divorce?’ She couldn’t look at him.

  ‘No,’ Luke told her slowly, ‘about my first marriage. You never knew Louise. She was nothing like you, not in looks nor in personality. I met her in Melbourne. She was a city girl through and through. She did part-time modelling.’

  Sara could picture her, a slim, willowy, blonde beauty with the sophistication and poise she herself could never have.

  ‘We dated several times. We made love.’ He shrugged. ‘She was a very beautiful woman, and I was only human. And then I didn’t see her for some time. I was away on business. When I came back, she got in touch with me. She told me she was pregnant and the child was mine.’

  He wasn’t looking at her, but Sara could feel the tension building inside him.

  ‘You’re a very sensitive woman, and I think you can possibl
y understand what it meant to me—a man who’d lost his parents at a very young age and then been passed from one set of foster parents to another, to know he’d fathered a child. We were married a week later.’ He caught her face in his hands, and tilted it so that he could look into her eyes.

  ‘I didn’t love Louise and she didn’t love me, but I thought that didn’t matter. I thought my responsibility for the child I had fathered was more important than our mutual lack of love.

  ‘And then Louise was offered a big modelling contract. She was waiting for me one night when I came home from a trip up country. She told me she was accepting the contract and that she’d had a termination. “Got rid of it,” that was how she put it, while I’d been out of the city on business. I wanted to kill her.’

  He said it emotionlessly, but Sara could see the way his hands opened and closed, and her stomach tightened unbearably. What he was telling her had no bearing at all on the life she had thought he and her cousin had lived, none at all.

  ‘I told her she had no right to get rid of my child.’ He grimaced suddenly, a tired, defeated man, Sara recognised. ‘That was when she told me that the child wasn’t even mine, but that its father was a photographer she had known for some time. Another free spirit like herself.

  ‘We had the most God-almighty row. She left… I discovered later that she’d gone back to her parents. She was killed three days after in a car accident with her father. At the time, I thought it was divine justice. I felt no pity for her… no regrets. I was like a man turned to stone, and I’ve remained like a man turned to stone ever since. At least until… Oh, God, Sara,’ he begged harshly. ‘Don’t leave me! I need you too much. I need you… I need our child. Stay with me.’

  She started to trembled violently. ‘But you don’t love me.’

  He laughed savagely. ‘Oh, no? I loved you from the moment I saw you,’ he told her fiercely. ‘I loved you and I hated myself for it. I wanted to tear that love out of my heart and destroy it… I told myself there was no way I was going to let myself love any woman, but especially a woman like you—coldhearted, greedy, unfeeling.

  ‘And yet, with everything you did, everything you said, everything you are, you confounded me…’

  ‘You married me to punish me!’

  ‘And ended up punishing myself,’ he groaned. ‘I might have said I married you to punish you. I might even have believed it myself, but I didn’t make love to you to punish you. I made love to you because I couldn’t stop myself. Because I had to have the sweetness of you.’ He took a deep, steadying breath, and withdrew from her slightly. ‘I tried to do the right thing—to set you free by divorcing you—but I can’t—not now.

  ‘If a divorce is what you want, somehow I’ll have to resign myself to letting you go. I can’t hold you a prisoner to my love.’

  Her mouth started to quiver, and he lifted his hand and gently probed her bottom lip with his thumb. A shaft of pure sensation convulsed her, her eyes going wild with hunger and hope.

  ‘Oh, God, don’t look at me like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like you want me to take you in my arms and do this,’ he responded indistinctly, his arms closing round her, his mouth probing urgently at the trembling softness of her lips, parting them so that he could savour her sweetness.

  She clung blindly to him, welcoming the fierce heat of his kiss, the powerful force of his heartbeat, the heat and strength of him. The kiss lasted a long time. Long enough to make her head spin and her body go taut with desire.

  ‘Now say it,’ he demanded huskily as he released her.

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘That you’ll stay with me… You can’t respond to me the way you do and not feel something,’ he groaned. ‘Not my sweet Sara, you’re too honest… too… too womanly to respond to a man in that way without feeling something for him.’

  ‘I love you,’ Sara admitted huskily. ‘And there’s nothing more I want from life than to be your wife and bear your child—your children,’ she amended, laughing slightly in protest at the fierceness of his embrace.

  ‘Our child.’ He touched her stomach possessively. ‘It will be a girl, of course. Alice would be furious if it wasn’t. Tom will spoil her to death, and so will I…’

  ‘Are you sure it’s me you love?’ Sara dared to tease from the security of her new-found love. ‘Or is it just this?’

  She patted her stomach and looked at him.

  ‘It’s you,’ Luke told her soberly. ‘I can’t deny that I love knowing that you’ve conceived my child, Sara, but if there was no child, if there was never to be a child, it would still be you.’

  For the first time, she was the one to kiss him—holding his face in the cup of her hand while she tenderly drew her lips against the hardness of his, and gloried in the fierceness of his response to her.

  ‘Fitton? What sort of a name is that?’ Tom demanded staring down at the tiny pink and white occupant of the crib.

  ‘Exactly the right sort of name for my very first great-granddaughter,’ Alice told him firmly.

  They had crept into the nursery together to admire its new occupant. Sara had only been home from hospital a matter of hours. She was downstairs with Luke.

  ‘They’re in his study, kissing,’ Tom had reported to Alice in disgust, and without a word being said both of them had made their way up here to survey their new relative.

  ‘Fitton,’ Tom said the name again experimentally, and then announced with masculine superiority, ‘Well, I suppose it’s all right for a girl.’

  Fitton opened her blue eyes and stared solemnly at him, and then, having approved of what she saw, she yawned and went straight back to sleep.

  Downstairs in the study, Luke released Sara reluctantly. ‘You don’t know how much I’ve missed you…’

  ‘Luke, I’ve only been gone three days,’ she reminded him softly, and then added, ‘I’ve missed you, too.’

  Luke groaned as he took her back in his arms, kissing her gently.

  ‘Some day soon, I’m going to let you show me just how much.’

  And, some day soon, she did.

  ISBN: 9781408999257

  MAN OF STONE

  © Penny Jordan 2013

  First Published in Great Britain in 2013

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