ch an unlikely story? For starters,’ he bit out, when her only answer was a weary shrug, ‘if it had been the truth you’d have told me about it.’
Stung into speech by the unfairness of that, she retorted, ‘I tried to, remember? Several times. You flatly refused to listen. Then, when you had no option but to listen, you decided I was telling lies. You decided Sam and I had been having an affair and I’d married you knowing I was carrying his child.’
‘I mean before we married. You didn’t think to warn me we might be expecting the patter of tiny feet rather sooner than I might have expected.’
She let her head sag back against the smooth leather upholstery. She felt too wretched to speak. And what was the point in telling him anything? He would only accuse her of lying, whatever she said.
‘Well?’ he prompted coolly. ‘I do need to know, if you intend to spin this yarn for Catherine. We need to get our stories straight.’
Elena’s stomach knotted painfully. How could something that had been so beautiful have come to this? The death of love was a terrible, terrible thing. Couldn’t he see what tying them together with lies created for public consumption would do to them?
Outside the car the rolling countryside shimmered in the early summer heat; inside the air-conditioning made her shiver—or perhaps it was the icy wash of his voice. ‘If anyone asks I take it you intend to say I was fully aware of the situation all along? The truth—that I was completely in the dark until circumstances forced you to come clean—would point to a certain lack of common decency on your part.’
‘Accuse me of anything you like,’ she said thickly, pain tearing through her, ‘but not a lack of decency.’
She had made her decision not to tell him of what she and Sam had arranged until Jed had done his grieving for his brother. It might have been the wrong decision, but it had been made with the best of intentions.
She turned wretched eyes in his direction, then quickly looked away. The grim contempt on his hard profile was unbearable. ‘On the day of Sam’s funeral I started what I thought was a period and truly believed the treatment hadn’t worked,’ she whispered threadily. ‘Somehow, it made the sadness even worse. Over the years of our friendship he and I discussed many things—marriage and children amongst them. I longed for a child,’ she confessed. ‘But I’d had one taste of marriage and didn’t want a second. Sam said he wouldn’t marry because of the nature of his work, but he regretted not having a child because he believed that having a child was the only claim to immortality the human race could hope for.’
Talking about it now, she couldn’t hold the words back. They tumbled over each other, urgent, low, probably too low for him to hear everything she said. That wasn’t really important now, because he wouldn’t believe her in any case, but verbalising her memories gave her a tiny measure of reassurance.
‘We decided, for our own separate reasons, to try to make a baby. Sam had a friend in London—head of a private clinic—and pulled in a favour. But, like I said, I thought the treatment hadn’t worked. Looking at his grave that day, I knew he’d lost his claim to immortality, as he’d seen it. It added a heavier burden of sadness. I wasn’t prepared to put that on you at that time. I truly thought it best to wait.’
She leaned her head sideways on the back of the seat, staring through the window. Jed’s silence was like a heavy weight. Had he heard what she’d said? Was he sifting through it, looking for something he could use to prove she lied? Or did he consider the whole unlikely story unworthy of comment?
The latter, most probably, she decided with a wretchedly miserable mental shrug. There seemed no point in asking him. She was too emotionally drained to counter any further scornful accusations.
Another fifteen minutes would see them back at Netherhaye. Would the gods be kind? Would Catherine be in the cottage garden, making plans to transform it when she and Susan took up residence? Or would she be home, waiting to hear every last detail of last night’s ceremony, fully expecting her to be bubbling with happiness and excitement?
The thought of being plunged into pretending life was a ball, without a breathing space to get herself together, drained her already meagre supply of energy.
To take her mind off the prospect, and Jed’s continuing telling silence, she forced herself to concentrate on the passing scenery.
The lanes were narrower now, the verges a tangle of Queen Anne’s Lace, wild roses and honeysuckle, the overhanging trees heavy with new leaf. And every time her eyes dropped to the wing mirror she saw the dusty blue Escort that she was sure she’d seen close behind them way back in the city streets.
It was unlikely to be the same car, of course. That make was very common. But watching it, sometimes left behind as the Jaguar swept round a bend, sometimes coming up close, then dropping back to a safe distance, gave her something other than misery to occupy her mind.
When the Jaguar turned off into Netherhaye’s long, tree-lined drive the blue car went straight on towards the village, and all Elena’s dread of having to face Catherine and pretend came flooding back. But Jed cut the engine well before the house came into sight.
He turned to her in the green silence and softly put his hand over hers. She lifted bewildered eyes to him, his touch riveting her to her seat. She was incapable of movement. Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t tenderness. It altered everything. Instinctively, her fingers wound around his, his touch making her breathless.
He’d been looking at their entwined hands, and now he raised his eyes to lock with hers. She thought she saw a longing there in the smoky depths, some deep emotion that echoed the longing in her heart.
She trembled, tears shimmering in her eyes, and he held her hand more tightly, just for a moment, then pulled away, gripping the steering wheel, his knuckles showing white.
‘Elena—can we cool it?’ he asked flatly. ‘Give it more time—give me more time?’ His eyes swept her troubled face. ‘I’d like to think I did—do—mean something to you. It’s tough knowing what to believe, given the circumstances, but I’m working on it. The whole situation’s done my head in, and believe me, that’s not something I’m happy with. Will you give me more time to get to grips with this before you go along a path we’d both find difficult to retrace?’
She dipped her head in silent acknowledgement of his words, biting down hard on her lower lip, sucking it between her teeth, holding back dredging disappointment.
Stupid to have hoped he was ready to say he believed what she’d told him, was willing to go forward, build on the rebirth of trust and understanding.
Had he asked for more time just to stop her walking away? Making the breakdown of their marriage public, shattering Catherine’s happy illusions and making it difficult for him to have a say in his brother’s child’s future welfare—much less be the constant presence in his or her life he had always insisted on?
Or had he really had a change of heart? Had he been telling the truth when he’d implied he was trying to come to terms with everything that had happened, that he wanted to be able to believe she loved him?
She didn’t know. But she had to take the chance because it was the only one she had.
‘I’ll go along with that. Take all the time you need. I want you to believe me because, God knows, it’s the truth,’ she told him falteringly, and hoped to heaven she was doing the right thing in letting herself hope, not storing up more pain for the future, handing him a sharpened stake to thrust through her already bleeding heart.