Bittersweet Passion

Claire unwrapped the crab mousse in its individual soufflé dishes.

‘The problem won’t go away,’ he continued doggedly.

Her delicate profile washed with colour. ‘A baby isn’t a problem.’

‘It is when you act as if I had nothing to do with its conception.’

She studied her mousse with fading appetite and put an absent hand to the base of her spine to massage her sore back. ‘It was an accident.’

His jawline squared. ‘The baby’s going to love hearing that,’ he gibed coldly.

She rammed down a terrible jolt of pain. He didn’t have to be so literal. ‘You’ve spent months being more visible than you’ve been in years, having a good time, because three wretched weeks of marriage frightened you half to death.’

‘Four weeks,’ he corrected pleasantly. ‘It was your choice to leave.’

Yes, it had been. Without his love it had seemed the kindest and most fair decision to make. His gipsy life-style suited him and so did the Mei Lings who never demanded more than he was prepared to give. He didn’t need anyone. The kind of intense, aching pleasure-pain she endured just being close to him lay within a range of emotions that he was immune to. But in spite of that inviolability he still knew what he ought to feel and he was clever enough to say and do what he conceived to be the right things. She sighed. ‘I don’t want you to be unhappy, Dane.’

His wolfish smile was larded with cynicism. ‘What is happy, Claire? Oh, don’t look at me like that,’ he mocked. ‘You’re so innocent, sometimes I feel a hundred years old. A year ago you were happily planning your future with Max and I wasn’t planning mine with anybody. All that’s changed now. You can’t turn back the clock. I tried. The one decent thing I did in the last decade and it turned out to be the stupidest thing I ever did!’ Lush black lashes fanned up, throwing her into glancing contact with intensely blue eyes. ‘Don’t tell me you’re happy now because I wouldn’t believe you. You’ve got to shake this idea that marriages are made in heaven.’

‘Ours certainly wasn’t.’ She let him refill her glass, still flinching from his blunt statement about how stupid he had been to marry her in the first place.

He cast her a cool smile. ‘Neither was my parents’ and it survived,’ he stated with derisive challenge. ‘And our marriage hasn’t even had a proper trial yet. There’s a lot of things I like about you. If we didn’t crowd each other and develop too high expectations, we could survive too.’

He was staring down into her absorbed face and when he lazily angled his mouth down to capture her lips, one palm framing her cheekbone as he smoothly adjusted her weight against him, it seemed entirely natural. Her heart threatened to break free of her chest. The high voltage charge of sexual electricity she met sent her flat, boneless as a jellyfish and about as graceful as one stranded on the beach, she thought wretchedly as he lifted his head again. Eight months pregnant, too. She shrivelled with shame, certain it was her fault he had suddenly backed off.

He sat up, carefully distancing himself from her, she noted, and she was still all jittery and hot and cold with the hunger only he could ignite. He appeared cool, colour lying along his blunt cheekbones in a hard line, however, and a spasm of repudiation held her taut as the lovely taste of sensation faded, leaving only distaste in its place. She veiled her too-expressive eyes. Exactly who was waiting in the penthouse back in London for him? She was masochistically tempted to ask but knew he would answer truthfully and the pain would be hers, not his. And the pain away from him, she finally acknowledged, was even greater. It didn’t matter how many other women there had been over the past months, she still needed him, still wanted him in her life on any terms. So perhaps it was time to match his honesty.

‘I saw you kissing Mei Ling on Dominica,’ she said abruptly.

He looked forgivably surprised by her long memory. ‘I know,’ he confessed none the less.

Damp squib. An urge to thump him with the bottle of champagne struggled within her. ‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’

‘She launched herself at me!’ The animal brilliance of his jewelled eyes dared her to disbelieve him.

‘Oh.’ Claire delved back into the hamper for plates, too self-conscious to attack such a whisper-thin explanation. ‘You never said.’

‘You never asked,’ he answered craftily. ‘Here, let me put this stuff out. Just lie back and relax. I want an answer by the end of the afternoon.’

‘I thought you’d already made up my mind for me.’

Are you fooling him? You’re not fooling yourself. Your mind’s already made up and you cast up objections, praying he’ll tear them down again. She couldn’t keep on denying herself her own heart’s desire. She wasn’t that unselfish.

‘I’m not a staging post in a storm. If you come back, you stay,’ he assured her arrogantly. ‘And speaking as someone who had one father and three stepfathers, there’s no way you’ll ever get a divorce after the baby’s born.’

Unbeknown to him, that announcement had a reassuring flavour for Claire. Obviously he wasn’t regarding a reconciliation as a trial that he could walk away from again, and she saw how it would be. He would grant her a corner of his life. No more, no less and she would never get to crowd him. He wouldn’t be living in the country more than one week out of three. And Dane was a past master at ensuring his own comfort. In any case, the baby had to be considered. An occasional father was better than no father at all.

‘All right.’ She tried not to sound too enthusiastic, but some of it still crept out, for he searched her face suddenly. ‘I don’t like being on my own,’ she added brightly. ‘And I like the country.’

His eyes glittered. ‘I come with the package.’

‘Yes, well, you’d be rather difficult to overlook,’ she replied. ‘You and your ego. I hope it’s a big house.’ She pillowed her cheek on the shirt he had just discarded, loving the scent of his flesh that still clung to the fabric and stifling a yawn. ‘You know that if I clung to you and moaned and nagged and dogged your every footstep, you’d be in torment. You can’t have it all ways.’

Impervious to his hard scrutiny, she slid into sleep, able to wind down now that she had graciously agreed to exactly what she wanted. He didn’t let her sleep long, or so it seemed when he woke her up, for she still felt woozy.

‘Champagne.’ Dane advanced, helping her upright, finding her mules and practically putting her feet in them. ‘I wonder if it’s blitzed, too.’

‘I only had two glasses.’