‘Why?’ Zac demanded baldly.
‘Cosier that way,’ his wife mumbled, her arm clamping round him like a chain. ‘And if you can shag Miss World chalet girls in Klosters and break their hearts without a blush, you can manage to share a bed with your wife...’
Zac froze and gazed down at her in complete consternation.
‘Wasn’t going to mention that...it just slipped out.’ Freddie sighed regretfully as she snuggled up against him, impervious to all loaded hints.
‘I don’t want to break your heart,’ Zac told her levelly, rather than demanding to know her source.
Freddie opened her eyes and looked languorously up at him. ‘I don’t fall for players, so you’re safe. Anyway, my heart’s fully wrapped up in the children.’
‘Que bom...that’s good,’ Zac assured her, wondering why he should almost feel affronted by that comforting assurance. ‘Love’s a complication we definitely don’t need when we’re not staying together.’
Not staying together.
That reminder rocked through Freddie like an earthquake and sliced into her heart. Too proud to show any reaction, she fell still, instructing herself firmly to go to sleep. She had got too comfortable with him for a moment and had forgotten about the limits of their relationship. Perhaps she shouldn’t have asked him to share the bed with her. Now she had plunged them into an intimacy that he had plainly told her was inappropriate. Of course, it was, she told herself uncomfortably. Their marriage was a sham because it was temporary and she had agreed to that condition, hadn’t she?
Zac let most of his tension bleed out of him again. The innate urge to push her away had receded. She wasn’t doing him any harm. She was just overly affectionate, which was a good trait for a mother of three to have, he conceded reflectively. He could share the bed, of course he could, but he still believed it would have been wiser to keep some constraint between them. After all, what they had wasn’t permanent and the less they shared now, the easier it would be to part.
On the other hand, he could wake her up slowly in a few hours and revel in the benefits of sharing space, he thought with reluctant amusement. In a week or so, she might be happy to throw him into a room of his own.
CHAPTER NINE
‘NO, JACK!’ ZAC thundered as the toddler’s fingers wandered too close to an electric socket.
Startled, Jack fell back on his bottom and burst into floods of tears. Zac scooped him up to comfort him while Freddie traced a piece of carving on the wooden panelling with awe-inspired admiration.
‘That was dangerous,’ Zac told Jack ruefully as the little boy gazed at him with hurt dark eyes and a trembling lower lip. ‘And drop the pathetic look, you little chancer!’
‘So, what do you think of this house?’ Freddie asked with fake casualness.
Zac had been with Freddie long enough to recognise a trick question. Indeed, house-hunting with Freddie was an education. For such a practical woman, Freddie was very impractical when it came to houses. Only belatedly had he worked out that Freddie’s dream house was ancient, in need of a great deal of tender loving care and somewhere buried in the country. He had the penthouse suite for convenience and business meetings in the City but it was anything but a comfortable base for raising two young children.
He had given Freddie brochures for houses that were immediately available for occupation but not a single ‘wow’ had escaped her lips until she had gone browsing on her own and discovered Mouldy Manor in Surrey. It was actually Molderstone Manor, he conceded grudgingly, but he preferred his own label for a property built on a shoestring in the Middle Ages and having since benefitted from a long line of penniless owners, who had been unable to afford restoration or modernisation.
‘This house...it’s different,’ Zac selected tactfully. ‘But it would be months before we could move into it.’
‘But the north wing is liveable because it was rented out,’ Freddie pointed out cheerfully. ‘And we’d have plenty of bedroom space there. Jen and Izzy need their own space too.’
Their nannies had become Jen and Izzy, very much part of the family. Zac gritted his teeth at the reminder. He had forgotten about them. They needed more bedrooms than he had initially calculated and he didn’t want to share their living space with staff round the clock. He watched Freddie caress the carved newel post of the staircase and almost groaned. ‘We’ll take another look at the north wing and see if it could be made habitable.’
‘You realise that eventually you’ll be living here alone?’ Zac remarked, trudging round the two-storey north wing a second time, seeing every flaw in the tired décor and the paucity of bathrooms while Freddie waxed poetical about how quickly new bathrooms could be installed and how truly wonderful it was that the splendid plasterwork in the ceilings and walls had been preserved.
A sharp little silence fell and Freddie paled at that careless comment, that unwelcome reminder of the future that lay ahead in which Zac would walk away from her and the children. When he came back it would only be to maintain contact with the children. She wouldn’t be his wife any more. She would only be the ex-wife in charge of the children and everything would be so very different. The reflection sobered her.
Only when he entered the extensive rear courtyard did Zac appreciate that Mouldy Manor could have unexpected possibilities. The stable block was enormous and the outbuildings were very good condition. ‘I could ship over horses from the ranch and set up a breeding operation here,’ he said then with surprising enthusiasm. ‘We sell most of our most prized stallions to the Middle East.’
It was a gloriously sunny day and, determined not to spoil the day with anxious thoughts, Freddie unveiled the picnic she had brought in the overgrown garden, spreading a rug below a gnarled oak tree. At that point, Zac recognised that a brutal opinion of Mouldy Manor would be deeply unwelcome. The children were running wild in the garden with Izzy following patiently in their wake, and Freddie was beaming as she cast long languishing looks back in the direction of the house every chance she got.
‘It just says family to me,’ she told him with enthusiasm. ‘Even though it’s big, it’s got cosy spaces and I could do so much with those rooms. And look at Eloise and Jack enjoying the freedom to run wild outdoors...’
Zac duly looked, to discover that unsurprisingly the kids were doing their best to resemble storybook-perfect kids passing through a flower-strewn meadow in aid of Freddie’s arguments. ‘And we won’t be tripping over staff here,’ she pointed out, having already accepted that Zac would not live without, at the very least, a housekeeper and a cook.
Raised with domestic staff, Zac could im
agine no other way of living. He didn’t want his wife preoccupied with the necessities of life when he or the children wanted her attention. But Freddie found live-in staff intrusive and was only slowly adapting to her new luxury lifestyle.
‘You could breed horses here,’ she reminded him, relieved that he had found something to be positive about on the property.
They had been married for exactly eight weeks, having flown back from France on three separate occasions to attend adoption assessment sessions with the children. After the initial ructions, those seven weeks at the Villa Antonella had been blissfully happy. Zac had settled down and he hadn’t shown any disappointment when her period had arrived within days of their wedding, confirming that she hadn’t yet conceived.
That he wasn’t impatient on that score was a plus, she reflected fondly. Yes, she was fond of him, she conceded, but fondness and love were two different things. She was fond of vanilla ice cream and even fonder of being wakened in the early hours by an insanely sexy masculine presence in her bed, but love she kept strictly focussed on the children. Zac was gorgeous and great company and many, many things she admired in a man.
He was amazingly patient with Eloise and Jack and, when Freddie had come down with a two-day virus, he had been kind in a way she had not expected him to be because those who rarely got ill usually weren’t very sympathetic towards those who did. She had definitely made the right decision when she married him, she told herself happily. Of course, it would be a wrench when the time came for Zac to walk away, particularly if she didn’t manage to give him a child and uphold her side of their bargain, but, knowing what lay ahead, she could prepare herself for that development. Practicality, not sentiment, she reminded herself resolutely, and there was no reason why she shouldn’t enjoy their time together as a family, although sometimes she felt guilty at just how much she was enjoying being married to him.