Mutely Mattie shook her head. How should she know? He probably wanted to bawl her out some more, and she simply couldn’t take it.
‘I’ve had months to look at the facts, and that’s what I’m good at,’ he said flatly. ‘I came up with two possible explanations. One, you were financially secure—the trust fund Edward set up for you years ago, the shares in the business, your earning capability—you didn’t need me to provide for you. You’d entered into a marriage of convenience, which had changed. The change meant that you conceived a child. So you left, having got what you now knew you wanted—the baby I’d let you believe you would never have.’
He impaled her with steely eyes. ‘Or two, Fiona had something to do with it. Her name kept cropping up. Out there common sense told me that anger wouldn’t solve anything. I’ve known you long enough to be certain you don’t have a mean or self-serving bone in your body. You don’t make practical, hard-headed decisions unless you’re forced to. Your behaviour was driven by emotion. And my guess is it had a lot to do with your low self-esteem and Fiona.’
His matter-of-fact tone hit a raw nerve. Several raw nerves! He thought he was so darned clever, so superior. Patronising beast!
‘Too right, it did! I don’t know how you dare to think anything else!’ Anger injected her with bristling life, put hectic spots of colour on her pale cheeks. ‘You’ve never stopped loving her and don’t try to tell me any different. And you’d throw me out like a shot the minute she told you she’d thought things over and didn’t mind being childless because you were still crazy about each other. Especially with me being pregnant—you’d do what you’d threatened to do to her. Throw me out! And there the two of you were—laughing and smiling—it made me ill just to look at you!’
She was incoherent, and knew it. There were tears pouring down her face. She wasn’t crying, though, of course she wasn’t! It was outrage, and anger, and a warped kind of relief to be getting it all off her chest. ‘And there she was, the very next morning, wearing something disgustingly small, telling me to go away, I wasn’t wanted around the place—and you’d told her to say that, say that our solicitors would deal with everything!’
She gave a huge, inelegant sniff. ‘Something to do with Fiona?’ she parroted. ‘Go right to the top of the class!’
‘Mattie, shut up.’ He took the mug she was in danger of grinding to dust from her clenched fists, moved it out of harm’s way. ‘You’re not making a whole lot of sense. Just when did this enlightening conversation take place between the two of you?’
His voice had softened. It didn’t make the slightest bit of difference. She ground out crossly, ‘Where do you think? That charity thing. The one I hadn’t wanted to go to because I’d found out I was pregnant and was going to have to tell you, and she comes wiggling up and tells me—’
His finger across her lips was a highly effective silencer. Just the touch of his finger and the wild anger drained right out of her. She was reduced to a quivering mass of near idiocy. She would never get over him. Never!
‘I think I’m beginning to get the drift. So straight after that, you saw us together? Sure I was laughing. In her face, right? She was obviously determined to flirt, making the sort of immoral suggestions I won’t sully your ears with. And I took enormous pleasure telling her she was wasting her time. I had a wife who satisfied every possible need.’
One straight dark brow quirked upwards. ‘And because of what she’d said, you felt bound to ask me if I’d told her I didn’t want a family, yes? And because of your inexplicable low self-esteem you frightened yourself into believing that everything she’d said was gospel truth. She’d been trying to break us up, surely you can see that? And she succeeded. You left me and gave me the worst six months of my entire life.’
She gave him a stricken look. ‘Do you mean that? Have you really stopped loving her?’ Every nerve in her body was as tense as piano wire. She so desperately wanted him to answer in the affirmative, but didn’t know if she could believe him if he did.
‘I never loved her, Mattie,’ he answered soberly. ‘It doesn’t reflect well on me, but try to understand. I’d reached the conclusion that it was time I settled down, took a wife, someone who would fit in with my lifestyle, a social asset, if you like. I didn’t fancy the idea of being completely alone in the years to come. Fiona fitted the bill, or so I thought. I proposed to her with my head, Mattie, not my heart. I told her I wasn’t interested in having a family, but she said she had no problem with that. She said she didn’t have a maternal bone in her body.’
He shrugged shoulders made even hunkier by the chunky sweater he was wearing. ‘She was already beginning to irritate and bore me by the time I overheard her telling some Hooray Henry at a party that she could put up with marrying someone like me providing the income had plenty of noughts behind it. Mattie, despite what she said in that interview she gave to the press, I broke the engagement, not the other way around. Do you believe me?’
She wanted to, she really did. But she had to ask, ‘Then what was she doing in our home? Delivering the Sunday papers?’ She glanced across at him, her mouth sulky, her eyes full of a misery she couldn’t hide. ‘I knew I’d overreacted, dashing out the way I had. Hormones acting up, I suppose. I came back the following morning so we could talk. She opened the door, with those hateful messages from you.’
His eyes fixed on her face, he reached out and took her hands. Her breath went. The lump of emotion that was stuck in her throat felt as big as Everest. ‘I didn’t give her any messages to pass on, and that’s God’s truth,’ he told her rawly. ‘I had no idea you’d been near the house. You must have arrived when I’d been through at the back. Mrs Briggs had come to me in a panic—the washing machine hose had got blocked and was flooding the place. And Fiona was there because I’d asked her to come—no, don’t flinch, Matts.’ His fingers tightened around hers. ‘Because you’d mentioned her the night before, just before you said you wanted a divorce, I thought the spiteful madam might have had something to do with it and I wanted to know what. I’d seen her talking to you, and after that everything changed. What had been wonderful for us became a nightmare.’
‘Was it a nightmare? For you, too?’ she asked softly, wondering if she could believe the evidence of her own ears, not quite daring to, not quite yet.
A sudden bleakness clouded his eyes. ‘You’d better believe it. I could get nothing out of Fiona and sent her packing. I phoned your father’s apartment, left messages—nothing. I had no idea where you were. I was nearly out of my mind when I finally got hold of Edward and he told me you’d been in touch, were safe and well.’ His eyes held hers firmly. ‘I want you to come back to me.’
There was a moment, just a moment, when elation flooded through her, leaving her dizzy with joy. Then reality moved in. It wasn’t enough, nowhere near enough, not any more.
She gently withdrew her hands from his and stood up. She was steadier now. Stronger. He had never been in love with Fiona, she believed him implicitly. He wasn’t capable of giving his heart to anyone. Their baby needed to be loved, and, dammit all, so did she!
She looked at him steadily, refusing to let the lines of strain around his compressed mouth touch her tender heart. She had always loved him and always would. But she couldn’t live with him, knowing her love would never be returned. She wouldn’t let herself be used again, the way she’d been used before.
‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘There would be too much missing.’ She turned away, swallowing hard.
Earlier, much earlier, before she’d come down, he’d put the turkey in a roasting tin ready for the oven. Not a big bird, and he’d put rashers of bacon over the breast. She was being practical and sensible. It was the only way to go forward. She put the bird in the oven. The backs of her eyes stung with unshed tears. She was capable of thinking logically, of doing the right thing.
Straightening, she felt his hands on her shoulders and forced herself to stay rigid, unyielding. She could do it; she knew she could.
He turned her, slowly, and she said woodenly, ‘I think we should try to make things as normal as possible, just for today.’
‘Explain yourself.’ He gave her a gentle shake, his eyes glittering into hers, his breathing shallow.
Briefly closing her eyes, she tried to gather her strength. Turning him down had been the hardest thing she’d ever had to do. But it had been the right thing. ‘It would be a pity to waste good food, we have to eat—’
His hands dropped away. ‘Don’t push it, Matts,’ he advised tersely. ‘You know what I mean. Tell me what you think would be missing that wasn’t there before.’
Her eyes clashed stubbornly with his before dropping away. She pulled in a raggedy breath. He did deserve to know exactly how she felt. It would draw a line under their relationship. Being all logic and no heart, he would appreciate that.