by Penny Jordan
Carrie was still contemplating the consequences of what she had just learned when she saw the Countess walking towards her.
‘Where is Luc?’ she demanded imperiously. ‘I need to speak with him immediately.’
Carrie looked coolly back at her, her chin lifting determinedly.
‘I’m afraid I don’t know, and even if I did—’ Carrie took a deep breath, reminding herself that she wasn’t eighteen any more. Calmly and pointedly she went on, asking Maria’s grandmother, ‘Has anyone ever told you, I wonder, how very unpleasant and overbearing towards other people you are? Or, like all bullies, do you rely on the fact that people are too afraid of you to stand up to you?’
For several seconds all the Countess could do was stare at Carrie in disbelieving fury.
‘I knew it!’ she exclaimed at last, when she had mastered her shock. ‘I knew all along just what you were. No decent, well brought up young woman would ever speak to one of her elders as you have just spoken to me! You obviously think that your position as Luc’s fiancée is unassailable, but let me tell you that when Luc learns what I have to tell him about you he will never make you his wife!’
She gave Carrie a tight-lipped look of triumph. ‘You cannot know how much satisfaction it gives me to know that my suspicions about you have proved to be correct! It has taken a lot of persistence and a lot of money to unearth the truth. No doubt you thought it was safely buried, and that no one would ever know what you had done, but I have found you out!’
A tiny, icy finger of dread stroked a deathly chill along Carrie’s spine.
‘Nothing to say?’ the Countess taunted her. ‘Well, I am sure that Luc will have plenty of things he wants to say once I have apprised him of certain facts about you!’
The older woman’s eyes were glittering with triumph and a malice that caused Carrie to feel acutely sick as the full horror of what she was going to have to face hit her.
Feigning an indifference she was fighting to protect herself behind, Carrie made her voice sound as dismissive as she could as she shrugged and told her, ‘You may tell him whatever you choose. It is of no importance to me.’
‘What? That you can even make such a comment shows you to be the unworthy, immoral creature that I always suspected you were,’ the Countess told her imperiously. ‘In your shoes—not that I would ever descend to such depths—I would hang my head in very shame and hide myself away from the world…’ she announced theatrically.
‘I wish,’ Carrie muttered grimly, just under her breath, causing the Countess’s face to burn scarlet with anger.
‘You are a disgrace to our sex,’ the older woman hissed. ‘And totally unfit to—’
Both of them turned towards the door as it opened and Luc strode in.
‘Carrie—Godmother…’
‘Luc, there is something I must tell you,’ the Countess announced, hurrying to him and giving Carrie a malevolent look. ‘You can’t marry this wretched creature!’ she told him. ‘I have always known her for what she was right from the start, when you…And now I have proof of it.’ Turning away from Luc, she looked triumphantly at Carrie. ‘No doubt you thought that what you had done was safely in the past, but the private investigation firm I hired were very thorough.’
Carrie knew what was coming, but she clung fiercely to her pride and refused to show any emotion.
The Countess was right about one thing. She had believed that what was in the past had already hurt her in all the ways it possibly could and that she had fought those demons—and won. Won the freedom to acknowledge her mistakes and lay them gently to rest. Won the right to peace of mind. Won the right to have her self-respect. And now here was the Countess, about to tear those rights from her…’
To her chagrin her self-control suddenly deserted her, and her voice was cracking with emotion as she was forced to beg, ‘No. No…you must not.’
‘You see?’ the Countess told Luc exultantly. ‘She knows what it is I have to reveal to you, Luc. She condemns herself out of her own mouth!’
‘No…you mustn’t,’ Carrie repeated, but her voice was stronger now, and so was her purpose. Her glance met the Countess’s with steely intent.
However, the Countess ignored her, announcing to Luc, ‘This woman conceived another man’s child and had it aborted. You cannot possibly marry her, Luc.’
A peculiar silence fell on the room. But instead of hanging her head in shame Carrie lifted it proudly and said quietly, ‘That is not true.’
Inside she felt as though she was being torn apart—as though all her most private and sensitive feelings were being exposed—but she was not going to give either of her onlookers the satisfaction of seeing her pain.
‘I have seen copies of all the medical documents,’ the Countess revealed. ‘They state quite plainly that you were pregnant and that the pregnancy was terminated! We all heard about the kind of life she led after she left here, Luc. Why, she even wrote to her father boasting about it. I remember how concerned he was. I don’t suppose she even knows who the child’s father was!’
‘No,’ Carrie repeated vehemently. ‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘Then what was it like?’ Luc asked her harshly.
It was the first time he had spoken, and Carrie turned to look at him, her eyes dark and haunted.
‘Do you really want to know? Do you?’ she challenged him wildly. ‘Very well, then. I shall tell you. It was your child, Luc…yours!’ She barely registered his indrawn breath or the look of shock in his eyes as she continued bitterly, lost in the pain of her own past. ‘I did not have it aborted. At least…there were complications…it was an ectopic pregnancy…I didn’t even know…I just…When the doctors diagnosed—when they told me—they said then that…that I had no option but to have the pregnancy terminated.’
Through the raw despair of the pain she had thought over and done with long, long ago, Carrie heard Luc saying curtly, ‘Leave us, please, Godmother.’
‘Luc, do not listen to her. She is lying…’ the Countess was insisting, but Luc, ignoring her protests, was already walking her to the door, which he opened and then closed again behind her.
‘Why was I never informed of any of this?’ he demanded flatly as he came back to Carrie.
She couldn’t bring herself to look at him—couldn’t bear to go any further into the past to the torment that lay there.
‘Why? Why do you think? After the way you treated me,’ Carrie began wildly, ‘are you surprised that I didn’t feel—?’
‘You were carrying my child.’ Luc stopped her curtly. ‘Surely you must have realised that that changed everything?’
‘I must have realised?’ Carrie forced back a wild sob. ‘Of course I realised. How could my life ever be the same? How could I ever be the same?’
She looked away from him, remembering how the doctor had urged her to get in touch with both her father and the father of her child.
‘You will need their support,’ she had been told.
‘My father cannot give it and the baby’s father will not,’ she had replied.
In the end she had wept alone for the tiny life that might have been, and at the insistence of her tutor had gone, unwillingly at first but later gratefully, to see a counsellor at the university who had helped her come to terms with what had happened and to understand and accept the necessity of the medical steps that had been taken. Forgiving Luc had been hard, but forgiving herself had been far far harder.
‘What I meant was that you must have realised that, had I been told you were carrying my child, then…’
‘Then what? Then you would have married me?’ Carrie challenged him wildly, shaking her head as she did so. ‘Oh, I don’t think so, Luc! You couldn’t wait to be rid of me!’
Carrie took a deep breath. Here was her opportunity to tell him that he could no longer blackmail her, that Harry no longer needed his City job, and that if Luc needed a wife then he could find himself another one—because she was not going to marry him!
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But before she could do so Luc burst out passionately, ‘I should have been told! I should have been there. You should never have been allowed to go through such an ordeal alone.’
Carrie stared at him in disbelief. Was this Luc she was listening to? Luc who was pacing the floor, his voice raw with fury and anguish?
‘Or was someone with you, Carrie?’ he suddenly demanded savagely. ‘Was another man comforting you, supporting you? Another lover who—?’
Carrie had had enough.
‘Another man? Another lover? After what you’d done to me? Do you honestly think I would ever be stupid enough to allow myself to be hurt like that again? Since you I have never—’
Abruptly Carrie stopped speaking. In the thick silence of the room she and Luc looked at one another.
‘Never?’ Luc was frowning. ‘Never?’ he repeated. ‘If that is the truth, Carrie, then that’s all the more reason why—’
‘Highness—Oh, I am sorry…’
As the door burst open and a courtier came rushing in Carrie seized her opportunity and hurried out of the salon.
Why on earth had she made such a foolish and self-betraying admission? Just because she had been momentarily caught off guard by Luc’s unexpected outburst of emotion, that was no reason for her to start behaving as though…
‘Oh, miss—there you are…The hairstylist has arrived, and the make-up artist. They are waiting for you in your suite. Oh, and the housekeeper wishes to take you on an inspection tour of the royal bedchambers, to ensure that your room is to your liking.’
Automatically, Carrie started to hurry towards her suite.
Carrie lifted her head from her pillow and looked at her watch. It was just gone one o’clock in the morning.
It had been almost seven in the evening before she had finally been free of the last-minute wedding preparations. Luc, she had learned, had had some important meetings, so she had had dinner on her own.
Quite why she was here now, in bed in the castle instead of on her way home, she couldn’t really explain.
Or could she? Sadly she touched her face, still damp from the tears she had cried in her sleep.
She had come to accept years ago that the child she and Luc had created between them was not meant to be, and the doctors had reassured her that there was no reason why she should not go on to have further healthy and normal pregnancies. She had even learned to tell herself, and believe that what had happened had been fate. After all, she could not have completed her education as a single mother, and—more importantly—she would never have wanted any child of hers to grow up with the kind of burdens that an illegitimate child of Luc’s would have had, with a mother who had been rejected by its father. She had assured herself that one day she would meet a man with whom she would feel safe enough, loved enough, to create other children, and that when she did she would recognise just how facile and worthless the feelings she had had for Luc truly had been.
And she had believed what she had told herself. Until today. Until the door of her prison had swung open and she had realised that a part of her did not want to walk free—that, shamingly, a part of her still ached and yearned for Luc, that a part of her still stupidly believed in the ultimate fairy tale. The one that had the Prince falling in love with the peasant girl.
Pushing back the bedclothes, Carrie got out of bed and pulled on her robe. A full moon silvered the courtyard garden, and Carrie pushed open the doors onto her private balcony and went outside.
The Countess’s cruelty had lanced a wound still unexpectedly filled with poison and not entirely healed.
Absently she walked down the narrow flight of stairs that led from her balcony into the garden below, and started to pace the gravel walkways, swept up in freshly painful memories.
She had fled S’Antander in acute distress, driven to England by her pride, but barely able to function on anything but the most basic level as she forced herself to act as though nothing had happened. As though she were not in the most acute emotional pain.
Unable to eat or sleep, she had focused as best she could on her studies, shutting herself totally away from any kind of emotional contact with other people, writing letters back to S’Antander to her father claiming untruthfully that she was loving university life and that every night was a party and that every week brought a different admirer.
The reality could not have been more starkly different. She had virtually locked herself away in her room when she wasn’t studying in the library.
She had known almost immediately that she was pregnant, and had hugged the knowledge joyously to herself before the increasingly agonising abdominal pain she had been suffering had driven her to seek medical attention.
Sitting down at the side of the courtyard’s fountain, Carrie trailed her fingers in the water. Fat, lazy goldfish swam languorously past them.
Such a very few precious weeks—that was all she had had to imagine the dizzying joy of holding the child of the man she loved. Oh, how she had dreamed and planned. She could not have Luc but she would have his child…His son…She had so wanted her baby to be a boy. A boy who would look just like his father. A little Luc of her own. She would love him so…He would be the most precious thing in her life.
Her work had been forgotten as she’d daydreamed her way through the days, with hours at a time spent in rapt, awed and joyous anticipation. She had even begun to knit! Tiny little baby clothes! Practical plans, like how she would support herself or what she would tell her father, had had no place in her wonderful fantasy world.
But those plans and her happiness had all come crashing down the day the doctor had told her what he suspected.
How afraid she had been when she’d had to attend the hospital. She had gone there still a child, afraid for herself, afraid of losing the specialness that conceiving Luc’s child had given her, but she had left as a woman, beyond fear, filled with aching grief and the pain of losing the life so precious to her on top of losing the man she loved.
There was a small splash as a tear rolled down her cheek and fell into the fountain, followed by another. Helplessly Carrie pressed her palms to her face and closed her eyes. She could not, must not break down here.
‘Carrie?’
She froze as she heard Luc call her name, opening her eyes and jumping to her feet, desperate to escape. But Luc came after her, and moved far faster than she did, catching hold of her and pulling her into his arms.
‘Carrie…Carrie…It’s all right,’ she heard him whisper rawly.
He was holding her, rocking her—comforting her, Carrie recognised weakly in disbelief, and she felt the emotions she had dammed for so long burst past her self-control, shaking her body with their intensity, filling her eyes with tears, racking her whole body with sobs that tore at her throat as she finally grieved for the life never meant to be in the arms of the man she had shared its beginning with.
‘I had no idea,’ she wept. ‘I thought it was just something…a bad pain. I thought…I wanted our baby so much…I wanted to die when they told me that they were going to have to…’
‘Oh, God, Carrie. Don’t…please don’t.’
She could feel Luc’s arms tightening around her, could feel too the fierce, uneven thud of his heart beating against her, warming her, strengthening her. As suddenly as they had started her tears stopped, the brief violence of her grief leaving her finally fully released.
‘There can be other children, Carrie. I know that does not take away the pain of what you suffered. I had to send you away…to let you go…You do not know how much I regret—’
‘Allowing me to seduce you?’ Carrie suggested dryly.
‘So you acknowledge that you were the one to…?’
Carrie gave a small shrug.
‘I was naïve. And besotted with you, Luc. I made it obvious how I felt.’
‘You make it sound a very one-sided affair, Carrie, and it was by no means that. I have never denied and could never deny that I find you very, ver
y desirable…’
His voice had dropped and he was looking at her in a way…
Carrie caught her breath as her heart lurched and her stomach hollowed. Wasn’t there something she was going to say to him? she asked herself vaguely.
‘You cannot imagine how jealous I was of all those lovers I now know you pretended to have.’
‘You were?’ Her voice sounded breathless, softly liquid…inviting.
‘I was!’ Luc agreed.
She could feel the warmth of his breath fanning her forehead…her nose…her lips…
‘Luc!’
Was her soft murmur a protest or a plea? Had Luc even heard it? Or was he too busy tasting the warmth of her mouth?
‘Do you remember the first time I made love to you?’ Luc whispered.
‘Yes,’ Carrie whispered back.
‘You trembled so in my arms—your whole body was quivering.’
‘Because I wanted you so much…’
Just as she did now. Just as she was quivering now, Carrie recognised as he slowly rubbed his nose against her own and slid his hand beneath her robe to caress her body.
‘In two days’ time we shall be married…’
‘Yes…’ Carrie heard herself acknowledging meekly.
‘And in nine months’ time…’
Her whole body shuddered as he touched her intimately, and automatically she reached out for him, to him…
Silently Luc guided her back up the small staircase that led to her room, releasing her only to go and lock the bedroom door before returning to her side.
‘I have been thinking about you all evening,’ he whispered thickly to her as he cupped her face. ‘In fact, if I am honest, I have been thinking about you ever since I looked out of my office window and saw you standing in the square.’
‘I would never have come back to S’Antander to deliver Maria’s message if I had known you would be here.’ Carrie shivered as she spoke, her eyes darkening.