The Marriage Surrender

Joanna didn’t answer. Her mind was boggling, her natural defensive system grinding into full action simply because she did not understand what was going on here. Yesterday he had implied that they were coming here to start their marriage properly, which meant sex, of course. But to enjoy the kind of sex Sandro had to be thinking about, there first had to be a bed, and this place did not look as if it had one stick of furniture anywhere in it

In a daze, she moved off towards the nearest door and pushed it open to find yet another empty room darkened by wooden shutters covering the windows. ‘What was this?’ she enquired as he came up behind her.

His hands slid around her waist, long fingers easily spanning her. Sensation whipped like electrically charged wire in a tight coil around her whole body, and it took every ounce of self-control she possessed not to jump away from

him like a severely scalded cat.

‘A sitting room,’ he replied. ‘There are two of them—one either side of the front door...’

She nodded, unable to say another word, while he was still holding her. She didn’t even dare breathe in case Sandro realised just how desperately aware she was of him.

‘Shall I throw open the shutters?’

‘Please,’ she said, and almost wilted with relief as his hands left her so he could move past her and throw the room into dust-dancing light.

After that, she was careful to keep her distance from him as they walked from room to room, throwing open shutters and staring round the empty spaces while he described to her what they had been used for by the last owners.

The house was big—bigger than it looked on the outside. Four reception rooms in all, two office-cum-studies and a huge kitchen with quaint old-fashioned fittings that she liked on sight. Upstairs were six large bedrooms but only two bathrooms, which, Sandro informed her, would have to be put right before they could move in here permanently.

There had to be a catch to all of this, she told herself again. There just had to be—or why bring this beautiful place into the conflict at all? After all, he didn’t need it to keep the pressure on her, because he was managing to do that very successfully without it!

So, she held herself tense and silent as they moved from room to room, letting him do the talking, waiting for him to get to the point and finally tell her what the catch was.

They had looked over the whole house and had come back to the hallway before he actually asked her a direct question. ‘So?’ he prompted. ‘Do you like it?’

‘I think it’s delightful,’ she replied. ‘But I don’t understand why you think I should want to live in a place like this?’

He didn’t answer immediately. Instead he walked over to one of the windows and stood gazing outside for a while. He looked sombre suddenly, as though he was considering uttering something he wasn’t sure was the right thing to say. Accordingly Joanna felt the muscles encasing her spine contract with tension.

‘Molly told me that you used to live on a farm once,’ he revealed. ‘Until your grandfather died and your mother decided she did not want to take over his tenancy, and so she moved you all up to London to live.’

Molly had told Sandro that? Joanna was shocked. She hadn’t been aware that Sandro and her sister had ever been close enough to talk about things like that!

‘She said you used to love it there,’ he continued, turning to watch the different expressions as they flickered across her face. ‘She said you loved the clean air and wide-open spaces and the sense of freedom to come and go as you please. Apparently you had a horse of your own and used to ride him everywhere. She told me how much you missed it all once you were stuck in London...’

Silence. Joanna stood there in a dusty sunbeam while she came to terms with the disturbing fact that Sandro knew a lot more about her than she’d ever suspected he knew.

‘Say something,’ he prompted.

‘Molly said an awful lot to you, by the sound of it,’ was the only remark she could come up with.

He grimaced, hands doing their usual thing by sliding into his trouser pockets in a way that was supposed to be relaxed but which Joanna suspected meant he was the complete opposite.

‘We used to meet,’ he confessed. ‘For lunch—perhaps once a month after you left me. I needed to know how you were coping and she was more than willing to talk about you...’

Tears washed across her eyes and stayed there, blurring out the dusty brown floor at her feet; a pain she couldn’t quite interpret was tugging at her heartstrings. Grief for a much-missed Molly? Probably. Hurt for all those secret meetings she hadn’t known had been going on between her sister and Sandro? Definitely. But, most of all, she felt dreadfully exposed again, as though nothing about her was sacred where Sandro and his obsession with her were concerned.

‘Then...’ he went on, and his voice sounded constrained now, enough to set Joanna moving restlessly, her arms wrapping themselves around her body so her fingers could pick tensely at the soft sleeves of her creamy top. ‘A couple of days before I was due to fly out here to spend some time with my mother, because she had been ill and she seemed to need me more at that moment than you seemed ever likely to need me...’

He paused, she presumed it was to grimace at his own honesty, but she couldn’t look at him to check that out, and, anyway, the tears were still blurring her vision.

‘Molly called me up and asked me to meet her. She sounded—distressed,’ he said. ‘We met for lunch, and it was then that she told me what you had apparently only just told her, about what had happened to you and why you couldn’t live with me. She asked me if it made a difference to how I felt about you,’ he said, and then went on gruffly, ‘I said, Of course it made a damned difference, but, for once, you were going to have to wait until I had given my mother the few weeks I had put aside for her to oversee her convalescence!’

Defiance, Joanna recognised. Oh, there had been a lot of angry defiance in those words just then.

‘When I got back to London—’ He had to stop a moment because his voice had broken, and Joanna squeezed her eyes tight shut because she knew what he was going to say next. ‘You had both left the flat,’ he continued. ‘I could not bring myself to believe it at first, then I assumed that Molly must have told you what she had told me, and you had, predictably, made a run for it, because you couldn’t stand the idea of my pursuing you again. In fact,’ he concluded, ‘I was so sure that was the case that I did not even bother checking any further than your flat, which is why I never got to hear about what happened to Molly.’

In other words he’d presumed the worst about her, Joanna noted hollowly. Just as she had presumed the worst about him.