The Faithful Wife

CHAPTER TWELVE

HE WOULD be gatecrashing, but Jake didn’t give a damn!

When he’d phoned from his hotel near Regent’s Park he’d got Evie. He’d missed Bella by about half an hour.

Evie had started to apologise for tricking him, and putting his hired car out of commission, but he’d cut her short. After that getting information on Bella’s whereabouts had been like pulling hen’s teeth.

The information had come reluctantly. She didn’t know when her sister would be back. Late, probably. It was New Year’s Eve.

She had gone to a party.

A party in Hampstead.

And—this came most reluctantly of all—a party at the home of Guy and Ruth Maclaine.

The address had had to be forced out of her, and then she’d gone on to say something else, something rushed and breathless which he had cut short, telling her thanks and goodbye.

When he’d put down the receiver his heart had been pounding, the hatefully familiar shaft of jealousy which he’d believed he had conquered twisting his gut.

But he wouldn’t let all that concentrated hard work go to waste. Not without a bloody hard fight.

He’d spent the last five days on the phone, setting up meetings and dragging people from family celebrations, pulling rank and generally mak

ing himself unpopular, fitting in a flight to Brussels, where he’d worked into the small hours consolidating deals, and then back to London to appoint key personnel.

He hadn’t borrowed precious time from other people’s family Christmases and worked himself to the point where exhaustion felt like a distinct possibility to get stymied at this last moment—particularly not by his own possessive streak where Bella alone was concerned.

He pushed any unwelcome doubts roughly aside and strode through the foyer, past the elaborately uniformed doorman, into the flurries of sleet that came on the back of a biting wind.

He didn’t notice the cold or the damp flakes of wet snow that settled on the shoulders of his dark-grey suit jacket and drifted amongst the soft strands of his black hair, or the glittering Christmas decorations strung overhead as he flagged down a cruising taxi and gave the Hampstead address in a hard, tight voice.

Back at the cottage, when she’d told him Maclaine had never been her lover, he hadn’t believed her. He had believed what his old friend Alex had said all those years ago because he had no reason not to. But, more importantly, he had believed the evidence of his own eyes.

Mercifully, he’d come to terms with it. He’d made too many wrong assumptions in the past—about Bella’s resumption of her modelling career, the set-up back at the holiday cottage. Had he been wrong to assume she’d been unfaithful? Could what he had seen that dreadful night have a perfectly innocent explanation?

He didn’t know, not for sure. How could he?

He pushed that thought roughly aside. He had to build on the future and not brood negatively on the past.

When she’d talked to him of trust, and his lack of it within their marriage, sincerity had been exhaled with every breath, had shone steadfastly in those fantastic eyes.

Against all the evidence he had instinctively accepted her innocence. What he had seen could be explained away. He had to believe that. He only had to ask.

He remembered his decision not to ask her there and then to resume their marriage, not to plead with her. And wondered for the first time if it had been the right one to make. Self-doubt was a stranger to him, though, and he knew what he wanted. Knew that what he wanted would be the right thing to do.

When he gave her the gift of the rest of his life, his entire future, his complete and infinitely loving attention, he wanted it to be whole, accomplished, not vague promises which—and with hindsight he couldn’t blame her—she very probably wouldn’t take seriously.

That was what he had now—the gift of his total commitment. He prayed to God it wasn’t too late.

When she’d mentioned divorce, spoken so tonelessly of that mutual eruption of need—the wild desire, the fulfilment they’d both ached for twelve long months—the temptation to take her in his arms, kiss her until she was unable to think of anything but him, had been almost unbearable.

But he’d stuck to his original decision, and all he had been able to do was promise to contact her as soon as he was able, ask her to give him what he’d been unable to give her. Trust.

But what if he’d been wrong? Had she decided that an affair with Maclaine was the better option?

If rumour was correct, the Maclaine marriage had been on the rocks. But they were obviously together now. Was that a so-called civilised arrangement? Was Maclaine presenting a façade of a contented marriage but unable to let go of his creation—the exquisitely beautiful face and body of La Donna?

And was Bella clinging to him because he was a constant in her life? Her father sure as hell hadn’t been, and he, although he hadn’t realised it at the time, hadn’t been much better.