by Penny Jordan
She would also, no doubt, have to make arrangements to retain enough of the income from her share of the business to support herself and the baby, and perhaps even go back to teaching as well, instead of working full-time for the shelter.
At least there would be one advantage to her returning to Rio: her son or daughter would be bilingual. And yet for some reason, instead of making her smile, this recognition made her eyes fill with hot, acid tears.
It was nearly time to check in. Automatically she picked up her bag, and then realised that she needed to visit the ladies’ cloakroom—a small side-effect of her pregnancy.
There was a little girl leaving the cloakroom at the same time as Imogen; blonde-haired and dressed in trendy denims, she appeared to be on her own, and instinctively Imogen kept a protective eye on her.
As they emerged onto the concourse the little girl ran towards a man who was standing several yards away.
Imogen could hear the love in her voice as she exclaimed, ’Daddy!’ And she could see too the answering love in the man’s eyes as he held tightly on to her, swinging her up into his arms.
‘Come on, we’d better get you on your flight. If you miss it your mother will never let you come and see me again.’
Now Imogen could hear pain and anger in his voice and, transfixed, she stood where she was watching them anxiously.
‘I don’t want to go back. I want to stay here with you,’ the little girl was saying, and Imogen could hear the tears in her voice and see more in her father’s eyes as he shook his head and started to carry her towards the departure gate.
Imogen felt as though she had been struck a mortal blow. One day would her child be like that little girl? Less than half a dozen yards away from her she could see another small family group, two adults—a man and a woman—and two children this time, two children with parents who loved them. Did she really want any less than that for her child?
If she went back to Rio now, and brought her child up alone, denying him or her to Dracco and denying him to them in return, what would her child ultimately think of her? Would he or she understand or would they blame her? Or, even worse in Imogen’s eyes, would they simply suffer in silence, longing for the father they did not have?
She thought about the relationship she had had with her own parents, especially with her father. There was no way she could deny her child the right to have that magical, wonderful bond, to experience the love she had experienced. Dracco would love their child, his child; Imogen knew that instinctively. She took one step and then another, slowly at first, and then more quickly until she was almost running. She stopped only when the stitch in her side commanded her to, and her lungs were full of the sharp, acrid smell of the diesel fumes of the taxis outside the airport building.
* * *
It normally took two hours for Dracco to drive home from London—less when he did so late at night, but on this occasion he was unlucky. On this particular night an extra-wide load of dangerous chemicals was travelling along the motorway ahead of him at a speed which meant that it took Dracco over three hours to reach home.
When he did so he found the house in darkness and Imogen gone. Gone without any kind of explanation, any note.
Her hairbrush and a bottle of the perfume she always wore were still on her dressing-table. The perfume bottle had fallen over and Dracco could smell Imogen’s familiar scent all around him.
He closed his eyes, his throat tight with emotion, raw with helpless anguish and fear. He could still see the look in her eyes when she had accused him of loving Lisa. Dear God, how could any woman be so blind? And how could any man be so stupid?
Why? Why hadn’t he stopped to tell her the truth? Why the hell had he gone off like that, leaving her alone and vulnerable?
She believed him to be guilty of the worst kind of disloyalty, to her and to her father. And there were other issues at stake, such as the way he had treated her, the things he had said to her—and the things he hadn’t said.
CHAPTER NINE
IMOGEN FELT HER heart starting to thump nervously as her taxi pulled into the drive. It was one in the morning, but all the house lights were on and Dracco’s car was parked outside.
He had come back. He wasn’t spending the night in London with Lisa!
As she got out of the taxi she had to fight against the feeling of dizziness filling her.
She was becoming used now to that disconcerting feeling of giddiness she sometimes experienced, especially when she first got up. But at least she wasn’t actually being sick.
‘You’re a very good baby,’ she whispered unsteadily to her stomach as she paid off the taxi and fought to hold on to her courage, ‘a very good baby, and your mummy and your daddy are going to love you so very much.’
Had she been a fool to come back? From her own point of view, probably, she acknowledged as she opened the front door. But if Dracco dared to think that he could supplant her in her baby’s life with Lisa then she was going to make sure he soon learned otherwise. She and the baby came as a package...a twosome, and if he wanted to make that a threesome then he had to take the pair of them together.
It was amazing, the strength and determination that being a mother could give you, she acknowledged wryly as she came to an unsteady halt in the hallway, her heart pounding.
The study door started to open and Dracco came out. He looked as though he had undergone the most soul-destroying trauma. Dracco, whom she had never seen looking less than totally in control. His shirt was crumpled, and he needed a shave. His eyes were even slightly bloodshot!
Refusing to give in to the longing weakening her body, Imogen reminded herself of the decision she had just made and, drawing herself up, she fixed him with a look of angry distaste before demanding accusingly, ‘I don’t suppose I need to ask who you went to London to see?’
Dracco was looking at her with the kind of blank-eyed shock more appropriate, surely, to a man who had seen a ghost than one who had returned home from a rendezvous with his lover.
‘Imo! You’ve come back. Oh, thank God, thank God!’
His voice sounded cracked, hoarse, and the look in his eyes as he strode towards her suddenly made her heart flip over inside her chest. Instinctively she backed away from him.
‘I’m tired, Dracco,’ she told him. ‘I want to go to bed.’
‘We need to talk.’ He was insistent but Imogen shook her head. She knew she was far closer to emotional exhaustion than she dared to admit. If they started to talk now, to argue, she knew she wouldn’t have the strength to say the things she wanted to say.
‘No, not now,’ she refused sharply. ‘Not now, Dracco. Tomorrow.’
As much as he ached to beg her to listen to him, to find out where she had gone and why she had returned, to tell her how much he loved her and plead with her never, ever to leave him again, Dracco could see how vulnerable she was, and he wanted to protect her, to put her needs before his own.
‘Very well,’ he agreed heavily. ‘But,’ he told her, and, even though he gave her a wry smile, Imogen sensed that he meant it, ‘I shall be locking all the doors and keeping the keys, Imo. So no more running away. I want you to promise me that.’
‘I promise,’ Imogen conceded tiredly as she headed for the stairs, praying that Dracco wouldn’t make any attempt to follow her.
When he didn’t, and when she finally closed the door of her old childhood bedroom behind her a part of her was weakly disappointed that he hadn’t followed her. That he hadn’t taken her in his arms and...and what? Face facts, she told herself wearily as she prepared for bed. Grow up, Imo. He doesn’t love you. He loves Lisa.
* * *
‘Can you answer that?’ Imogen asked Dracco. ‘I’m going to put the kettle on.’
Imogen had just arrived downstairs in the kitchen, having overslept, to find
Dracco already there.
As he had said himself, they needed to talk, and the most important thing they had to talk about was the fact that she was carrying his child. Their baby!
Did she have the strength to concentrate on that all-important fact and to negotiate an acknowledgement from Dracco that their child had to come first—with both of them?
As he answered the phone Dracco kept on looking at Imogen, greedily, hungrily, absorbing the reality of her presence. He loved her so much!
What had happened? Why had she come back? Absorbed in his own thoughts, he took several seconds to realise what the caller on the other end of the telephone line was saying to him.
‘Yes, I’ll pass that message on to her,’ he agreed quietly, his gaze still fixed on Imogen, who had turned away from the kettle to look at him.
He was watching her as though he had never seen her before, as though he was... Dizzy with the implausibility, the impossibility, surely, of what she seemed to be seeing in his eyes, Imogen stood still.
Silently Dracco replaced the receiver.
‘What is it?’ Imogen asked him uncertainly.
‘That was the doctor’s surgery,’ Dracco announced with heavy quietness. ‘They wanted to tell you that they’ve made an appointment for you at the hospital for your first antenatal clinic. You’re pregnant with my child, and you didn’t tell me!’
For the first time in her life Imogen did something she didn’t think women did except in novels—she fainted!
* * *
When she came round she was lying on the sofa in the study, with Dracco leaning over her.
In the few seconds it had taken him to assimilate the information that Imogen was pregnant he had come from hope to despair as he recognised the reason why she had decided not to leave him. Imogen had her father’s old-fashioned morals. She would not be able to leave him and take from him the child he had bargained with her to have. He had known that all along, and believed too that it would be impossible for her to leave her child either, which would mean that she would have to stay with him.
But now suddenly the realisation that she was here because she had conceived his child, rather than because she wanted to be, left a sour taste in his mouth.
Imogen shivered slightly, nervously aware of the way that Dracco was watching her and of the brooding, almost despairing look in his eyes. Because he had changed his mind? He didn’t want a child by her any more?
‘You’re pregnant.’ Dracco’s voice was flat and empty of any expression for her to read.
‘Yes,’ she acknowledged. Please, God, don’t let her cry, but this wasn’t how such news should be broken—or received. So what had she expected, she challenged herself as her senses started to clear, a fanfare of trumpets proclaiming an ode to joy? Dracco gathering her up in his arms, his eyes full of tender worship and adoration?
Maybe that was unrealistic, but some expression of pleasure wouldn’t have gone amiss, for their baby’s sake if not for her own.
‘Is that why you didn’t leave—why you came back?’
‘Yes,’ she conceded as she swung her feet to the floor and then stood up. There was no way she intended to have this discussion with Dracco whilst in the disadvantageous position of lying down as he stood over her.
She intended to ensure that from now on whenever they met in the arena of conflict that she suspected wearily was going to be their marriage it was going to be on equal terms.
‘I wanted to leave you, Dracco. You’re having an affair with...with Lisa.’ She stopped, her voice unsteady. ‘But there was this little girl with her father, and suddenly I couldn’t!’
Imogen turned away, but not before Dracco had seen the sheen of her tears in her eyes.
‘Imo.’
Imogen tensed as Dracco grasped her hands in his, refusing to let her go, even though she tried desperately to pull away from him. She could feel his thumbs caressing the vulnerable undersides of her wrists in a way that sent hot shivers of pleasure racing up her arms.
‘I don’t know where you’ve got the idea that I’m having an affair with Lisa, but I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.’
That he could lie to her so uncaringly infuriated Imogen. Did he really think she was that much of a fool?
‘No?’ she challenged him. ‘Then why did you go to London last night?’
Dracco shook his head, mentally cursing beneath his breath. Until everything was finally legalised, every ‘i’ dotted, every ‘t’ crossed, he didn’t want to tell her what had been going on, just in case something should go wrong.
‘I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid, Imo, but I can promise you that it wasn’t to see Lisa.’
Imogen curled her lip in acid contempt as she pulled herself free of him.
‘I don’t believe you. Lisa told me on the morning of our wedding that you loved her. She challenged me to ask you about it. And she’s confirmed her relationship with you to me since. I don’t know which of you I despise the most. I suppose it must be you, if only because I never liked Lisa, whilst you...’
Imogen paused and then swallowed. What did it matter what she admitted to Dracco now about her past feelings for him? After all, she was pretty sure he must have known all about her foolish teenage crush on him.
Determinedly she looked up into his eyes and told him as calmly as she could, ‘I adored you, Dracco. I put you up on a pedestal. I believed in you and I...’ She stopped, appalled to discover how emotional she was becoming. ‘After losing my parents, discovering how wrong I was about you was the most hurtful and traumatic thing I have ever experienced.’
She wasn’t being totally honest with him, Imogen acknowledged as she looked away from him. The deaths of her mother and father had hurt, but after the immediacy of her shock and loss had worn off she had been left with the comforting knowledge that they had loved her.
In recognising Dracco’s treachery she had been left with no such comfort whatsoever!
Dracco surveyed Imogen’s downbent head for several seconds whilst he struggled to control the urgency of his longing to take her in his arms and hold her there until he had convinced her just how wrong she was.
‘Do you really think I would have betrayed your father’s trust like that?’ he asked Imogen quietly.
‘When love is involved other loyalties can sometimes cease to matter,’ Imogen responded emptily.
Talking like this was stirring up so many painful memories inside her; too many.
‘What I can’t understand or forgive, Dracco, is that you were willing to marry me just for the sake of the business, even though you loved Lisa. And the way you lied to me about it... You did lie to me, didn’t you?’ she challenged him.
Dracco turned to stare out of the study window.
‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘I did. But not in the way that you think, Imo.’ He heard her gasp and turned round just in time to see her almost running out of the room.
Oh, she was such a fool, Imogen derided herself as she hurried into the garden. She had to be to allow herself to still feel so much hurt over Dracco’s behaviour towards her.
Instinctively she headed for her mother’s rose garden, seeking its solace and comfort.
How could she possibly love a man who could so easily lie, and not just to her? Look at the way he had denied Lisa! Her hand stilled on the rose she had been touching.
What did she mean, love? She did not love Dracco.
Liar, a knowing inner voice taunted her. Of course you do; you’ve never stopped loving him and you never will!
‘No!’ A sharp pain slid through her heart. No, it couldn’t be true. But of course she knew that it was.
* * *
Dracco frowned. Should he go after Imogen, make her listen whilst he tried to explain just how wrong she was and wh
y? If he did, would she listen? He might have got what he had wanted for so long, Dracco acknowledged, but there was no real satisfaction in knowing that he was forcing Imogen to stay with him. Her presence in his life through force was not what he wanted; not in his life, or his bed. No, what he wanted was for her to be with him because she wanted to be, because she loved him.
His telephone rang and he went automatically to answer it, forcing himself to concentrate on what the client on the other end of the line was saying to him.
* * *
An unfamiliar car was coming up the drive, and Imogen shaded her eyes from the sun as it stopped and the driver got out. She smiled as she recognised David Bryant, Dracco’s solicitor.
He was smiling back at her.
‘How is your wife?’ she asked him.
‘Very pregnant and very hot.’ He laughed. ‘She hasn’t got very long to go now, though. She wants Dracco to be one of the baby’s godparents: she thinks the story of his love for you is very romantic.’
Imogen looked at him.
‘I hope you don’t mind me telling her,’ he added uncertainly. ‘My mother told me about it; she had heard it from my uncle. He thought a lot of Dracco, and of course Dracco consulted him after your father’s death about what he should do. My uncle knew that your father made Dracco promise not to tell you about his feelings for you until you were over twenty-one. But he could see that your father’s untimely death had changed things, and that you desperately needed someone in your life to protect you. According to my mother, my uncle fully endorsed Dracco’s decision to ask you to marry him so that he could protect you and your inheritance.’
He avoided looking at Imogen as he continued, looking embarrassed, ‘Of course, I don’t know the whole situation—my mother has always maintained that you ran away because you were young and afraid, and suffering from young girl’s wedding nerves—but it must have been hard for Dracco to lose you like that when he loved you so much.’
There was just the faintest hint of a gentle accusation in his voice.
‘Still, at least it’s all worked out well for you both now. My mother claims that she always knew that you’d be reconciled. Is Dracco in, by the way? I’ve got some papers for him to sign.’ He was looking a bit self-conscious now, as though aware he’d said too much.