Married for Real (Harlequin Presents)

by Lindsay Armstrong

  ‘Don’t ever have me followed again, Declan,’ she said clearly, her anger refuelling itself, ‘in case I’m tempted to embarrass you even more. And while we’re on the subject, I might as well tell you, we’re finished, you and I, nor is there any way you can stop me leaving you, and don’t even mention the children because I have it on good authority this time that they’re well aware our marriage is a sham and I can only see it hurting them now if I stay to fight on. But let me tell you, perhaps most importantly, since I know how you doubt me on these matters, that I went to see a solicitor this morning and I signed a waiver to all your worldly goods, or even half of them.’ And she stripped her shoulder purse off, opened it to extract a document from it, which she dropped on the floor between them. ‘I want nothing from you, Declan,’ she added proudly.

  ‘Not a single thing. Nor does my mother, because, since she’s a nun in a closed order these days, you see, there’s not a lot she could do with a single cent.’

  But if she’d hoped to shock him, he merely narrowed his eyes and didn’t even glance at the paper on the floor. And he said, ‘Why did you wait to leave me to tell me all this, Arizona?’

  She took a breath, turned away abruptly and strode over to the French window overlooking the pool, to see with some surprise that the day had clouded over heavily and that there was lightning in the sky. Then she said in a suddenly toneless, weary voice, ‘You married me, not my mother. Anyway, I did tell you about her. Why didn’t you believe me, Declan?’

  The room was very quiet, apart from the rumble of thunder in the distance. Until he said, ‘Arizona, have you any idea what simply the sheen of your hair, the curve of your cheek, the line of your lips have done to me over the past nearly three years?’

  She turned slowly, as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing, and her lips parted. Then she shook her head, dazed, as if to say, No, this can’t be for real—

  And he hadn’t moved from the door and it seemed to her as if there was an acre of pewter blue velvet carpet between them. ‘I…’ She licked her lips. ‘I don’t know what you mean. You don’t trust me, you—’

  ‘Do you trust me?’ he broke in. ‘But no, I haven’t been able to trust—or rather believe that you love me. For one thing, you’ve never told me, never reversed those views you told me you held of yourself nor told me I might have restored your faith in men—or even just one man. To this day,’ he said very quietly, ‘I have no idea whether I mean more to you than Pete, who you married for the sake of convenience.’

  To her horror, Arizona discovered that her legs were no longer steady and she sank to the carpet on her knees then sat back on her heels. ‘But I showed you, I must have shown you that,’ she said hoarsely.

  ‘Did you?’

  She had to tilt her head back as he towered over her for a moment then sat down on the end of the bed beside her.

  ‘Did you sleep with him the way you sleep with me, for instance?’ he went on. ‘I have no way of knowing how to differentiate.’

  ‘You do—you know I’d never—that it had never happened that way for me before… Didn’t that tell you…anything?’

  He shrugged slightly. ‘It gave me hope at times. And there were times when you indicated you weren’t happy with the way things were, but on every last opportunity I presented you with to tell me why, you—slipped away from me.’

  ‘And it means so much to you?’ she whispered, shaken suddenly to her core.

  ‘It means,’ he said quietly, ‘that until you tell me these things, I can’t know whether you love me.’

  ‘And it’s never occurred to you,’ she said barely, ‘that I might have the same problem?’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Declan,’ she whispered, ‘I have no way of knowing whether you love me. In fact I have a lot of evidence to the contrary. You’re hardly ever with me, you…force me to do everything your way, you use the kids to hold me—’

  ‘Did you never stop to wonder why?’

  ‘Because you mistrust me,’ she said distraughtly. ‘Because you can’t ever forget Pete—’

  ‘Only you can do that for me, Arizona.’

  Their eyes locked then he added, ‘If it means anything to you, the fact that I will never let you go, if it means anything that possibly the worst year of my life was the year you were married to Pete, but it has to be closely followed by these months when I’ve waited to hear you say just three words, or at least explain better why you couldn’t. If it means anything that the reason I’ve stayed away from you as much as I have was that I was seeking a form of protection against falling more and more in love with you, if that was possible.’

  Arizona stared at him with stunned eyes. Then she said uncertainly, as if she couldn’t trust her voice, ‘Can I…can I start at the beginning?’

  He nodded.

  It took her a few minutes to compose her thoughts, and she plucked at the carpet before lifting her eyes to his. ‘I’ve told you about my mother already, or most of it, but it was only when she began to see, in my late teens, how much I despised her for the way she was that she, I suppose, stopped and tried to take stock. It was too late for me, though, I—’ she paused and sighed ‘—rejected her. By that time I’d left school and was living on campus at teacher’s college. She hung on for a year or so, trying to make a home for me that I didn’t want, trying to show me that she’d not reformed so much but was a different person now, but I didn’t believe it, and then one day she came and told me that she was going into this convent. I…I’m afraid I laughed. I can only say in my defence that I’d never known my father, that I’d been to twelve schools in every state of the country and I’d lived through four…men, none of them bad men particularly, none of them who didn’t try at times to treat me like a daughter, but all the same, all of them walking out on her. I…now know I can never forgive myself for laughing at her, for not trying to support her because she is my mother, and she went into every last one of those relationships believing this was it. Even believing, I think, that it would create a better life for me.’

  ‘Go on,’ Declan said gently after a long pause.

  ‘But the truth of the matter was that I felt betrayed even though I’d done all that rejecting. Strange, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not in the circumstances, and if you were only nineteen or so,’ he said quietly.

  Arizona shrugged. ‘I also, at nineteen, wondered if I might have fallen in love with a fellow student. He, well, at times he used to make my heart go bang and make me feel quite breathless and weak at the knees.’ She grimaced. ‘But, although everyone else seeemd to be experimenting with sex, I began to dislike the proprietorial way he started to treat me and I couldn’t be persuaded to go to bed with him, probably because I had my mother at the back of my mind all the time, and it turned into a rather unpleasant fiasco.’

  ‘He got nasty?’ Declan suggested.

  ‘He—’ Arizona paused and sighed. ‘I gained a reputation for being—well, there were two versions, a tease or frigid.’

  Declan smiled slightly and said, ‘We men have very fragile egos, I’m afraid. But if nothing else, didn’t that convince you you weren’t about to follow in your mother’s footsteps?’

  It was Arizona’s turn to smile, unamused. ‘Yes although I came to doubt that later,’ she said barely audibly. ‘Uh…what it did leave me with was the feeling that I might have inherited her…poor judgment, but there was something else, I began to sympathise with her then, in a mostly subconscious way, but I did think, well, I convinced myself I’d be better leaving the whole tribe of men alone. It just…wasn’t that easy, though,’ she said with a sigh.

  ‘Not with your looks and your figure, I imagine it wasn’t.’

  She looked at him suddenly. ‘The funny thing was the more I froze them off the more…’ She stopped and bit her lip.

  ‘That’s something you don’t have to tell me about, Arizona,’ he said, not without irony.

  ‘Anyway,’ she continued after a momen
t, ‘then I got the job at Scawfell. And it was a revelation,’ she said with a little, oddly helpless gesture.

  ‘Tell me why.’

  ‘I fell in love with the house, with the country, with the kids. I felt for the first time as if I had a place in, well, in the scheme of things. I discovered talents I didn’t know I possessed. I was needed, really needed—and I knew by then that my mother only needed God. I went up to see her once, you see, and she was a different person, serene, confident, loving yes, but…’ She shrugged. ‘So that’s how it was, Declan.’ She studied her hands then looked into his eyes to see if he understood.

  ‘My dear, I think I’ve always understood that,’ he said and reached out a hand. She put hers into it after a moment. ‘One only had to see you with the kids, to see that. So, tell me about Pete now.’

  She swallowed. ‘Pete…put a proposition to me after I’d been there for nearly a year. He told me he’d fallen in love with me but he knew I didn’t reciprocate. He told me, no, he asked me to tell him a little of why I was the way I was and I did. He then…Declan…’ She stopped.

  ‘Go on.’ The pressure of his hand on hers increased, but as if to give her courage.

  ‘He told me he had a disability, quite a complicated rare condition.’ She paused. ‘One… of the side effects of it was that he was impotent, and he told me that apart from losing his wife, it was the most shattering thing that had ever happened to him. That it had knocked his self-esteem about to the extent that it had seriously affected his creativity. It amazed and horrified him, he said, to discover that although it was a side effect of his condition, that although no-one need know other than himself and his doctor, yet he was getting around like half a man and couldn’t help living his life as if it was written all over him. And so, he said, while he couldn’t consummate a marriage, if I needed a home and security, if I needed some respite from my own problems, it was possible that we could help each other out. That it would be a way for him no longer to feel as if everyone could guess that he had this awful problem, a way for him to get back to work, he hoped.’

  ‘And you believed that?’ Declan said after a long silence.

  She glanced at him but couldn’t tell much from his expression. ‘I had lots of doubts,’ she confessed. ‘But I had seen him all but tearing his hair out trying to get the genius that had made him such a wonderful architect flowing. He was, by then, a friend I trusted and a confidante and we were—comfortable with each other. On the other hand, I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if he got better and I said that to him. He said it would always be up to me. So I looked at the options, which seemed to me to be pretty bleak, and I took the plunge.’ She stopped and swallowed.

  ‘Did he ever get better, Arizona?’

  ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘At least, I don’t think so. Because he never tried to sleep with me, he never even brought the subject up in the year we were married. But if I did do one thing for him, if I was ever able to repay him for all that I gained, it was to see him working again with all his old flair and to know that I must have been able to alter his perception of his self-esteem as seen through the eyes of others. Nor would I ever have told a soul this, Declan, I would have kept faith with him, for everything he did for me, for ever, if it hadn’t been for you.’

  ‘My dear,’ Declan said, in curiously strained voice, ‘forgive me.’ And then he stood up and pulled her to her feet and was cupping her face gently, kissing the tears that had at last started to flow. ‘There’s only one thing I need to know now,’ he said at last. ‘If I’ve been able to alter your perception of yourself, the one that told you you couldn’t fall in love, and never with me.’

  ‘Oh, that.’ The tears fell faster and she kissed the inside of his wrist and tasted them salty on her lips. ‘If only you knew how many times I wanted to say it, or knew how lonely and miserable I’ve felt without you, and wondered and tormented myself with the thought that the rest of our lives were going to be like this, and tortured myself wondering if I did tell you, whether I’d be like my mother, so…somehow vulnerable so as to invite desertion and all the rest, but if it means anything to you, Declan, I love you so much that every time you leave me, every time I wake up without you beside me from the very first time we made love, all the time I haven’t known how you felt, I’ve died and die a little inside. Sorry…’

  ‘Don’t,’ he said harshly and held her in his arms so that she could barely breathe. ‘Don’t apologize for loving me. I should be the one—’

  ‘No,’ she said softly. ‘Perhaps we should concentrate on how much we love each other?’

  ‘Where were you going today?’ he said later.

  They were still clothed but lying on the bed in each other’s arms.

  ‘Oh!’ Arizona started guiltily as memories of the earlier part of the day came back to her. ‘Oh, no. I feel terrible.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked quizzically and kissed her hair.

  ‘I … the things I did. And said, in front of heaven knows who, but your receptionist for one, and the gardener. I feel really terrible now. On top of which—’ she sat up with real perturbation ‘—my car has probably been clamped or towed away—’

  ‘Come back here,’ Declan interposed with a laugh in his voice and took her in his arms again. ‘You were magnificent,’ he added.

  ‘I was awful—Do you mean that? How—’

  He put a finger to her lips. ‘My dear Arizona, don’t you know that that’s why I love you so much? For your total refusal ever to be intimidated by me. For fighting me every inch of the way—’

  ‘That’s not quite true.’

  ‘Yes, it is. But also for—’ he paused and threaded his fingers through hers ‘—making love to me like no other, with a mixture of joy, honesty and rapture, making me aware of your likes and dislikes at times,’ he said gravely.

  ‘I haven’t done much of that.’

  ‘You have. You definitely ticked me off for treating you like an object once,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Well, was I wrong, though?’

  ‘No,’ he conceded. ‘What you may not have realized at the time was that I was nearly at the end of my tether. Because I’d almost convinced myself you’d come up from the beach that day after looking so lonely and somehow lost, and beg me not to leave you again because you couldn’t live without me.’

  Arizona caught her breath. ‘I…I’m doing that now, Declan,’ she said unsteadily. ‘I mean, I know you’ll have to go away from time to time but—’

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he said into her hair. ‘You won’t be able to prise me away with a crowbar now—’

  ‘But I’m trying to tell you I do understand that there will have to be times—’

  ‘Times, yes, but the absolute minimum now, my darling. You still haven’t told me, though. Where you were going today?’

  ‘Oh, that. I was coming to see you. I was going to try to tell you all this and then, if I couldn’t sort of prove it to you, I was also going to go… away, but I hadn’t worked out where, other than to see my mother first. That’s how I knew where to come,’ she added. ‘I had your card in my purse—do you remember giving it to me?’

  ‘Only too well, unfortunately. Arizona…’ He stopped, sighed and said simply, ‘Thank God.’

  ‘For coming to your office? And creating all that mayhem—your poor ex-naval friend must be…I don’t know.’

  ‘Wondering what he’s done to deserve being treated like a loose cannon between us?’ he supplied with a crooked little grin.

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled ruefully.

  ‘I love you,’ he said, his grin fading.

  ‘Would you like to know what I love about you?’ she answered huskily.

  ‘Yes…’

  She told him, and presently he helped her out of her dress and made love to her in a way that caused her to give thanks rather fervently.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said gently.

  ‘I wondered once, not so long ago,’ she said, ‘whether there was somethi
ng new between us, something incredibly lovely and tender that—made me want to die for you. Then I thought I must have imagined it.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now I know I didn’t imagine it.’

  He kissed her and held her very close. And later he said, ‘Would it be possible for us both to go and see your mother?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’ Arizona sighed with pure happiness.

  A year later, Christmas Day dawned bright and clear at Scawfell and began with a squabble. ‘It’s my turn to give him his bath,’ Daisy said. ‘I’m nearly seven and a half now, and I know all about babies, so you can just go away, Sarah!’

  ‘Daisy, darling—’

  ‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it, Arizona?’ Daisy turned to her heatedly. ‘You’ve shown me how, and anyway, I’m not the baby any longer, am I? He is.’

  ‘Oh, definitely. Why don’t you bath him and let Sarah dress him?’

  ‘And I’m taking him for a walk in his pram,’ Richard contributed. ‘It’s his first Christmas, after all, and we are both boys. There’ll probably be lots of times when he’ll need to get away from you two, not to mention Cloris!’ he added to his sisters.

  ‘Well, I’ll have to be content with taking his picture,’ Ben said wryly, looking interestedly at the new camera he’d just received. ‘I know—I’ll make a pictorial record of how baby mania has overtaken this family!’

  ‘Baby mania?’ Declan said some time later when he’d firmly closed the door of the green suite so that Arizona could rest before they embarked on the rigours of Christmas dinner. ‘How long is this going to last, do you think?’

  Arizona glanced down at her son, who was barely six weeks old but was appearing to thrive on all the attention. ‘I don’t know, but we do truly feel like a family now, and they’re really very sweet, aren’t they? But there’s something I wanted to tell you, Declan.’

  ‘Oh?’ He sat down on the bed beside her and also glanced at his sleeping son in the crib beside the bed. ‘That sounds a bit ominous. Have I done something to displease you, Mrs. Holmes? I must say it’s quite a while since you cast me that autocratic, do-your-damnedest-Declan, pure grey gaze.’