She must tell him, Sara decided an hour later as she set her car in motion. She would have to wait until after the wedding now, but once it was over and they were alone… Now that the decision had been made, she felt curiously better, as though a terrible burden had slid from her shoulders.
Vanessa had chosen a very simple wedding dress, but one which suited her slender figure perfectly. The way Sam looked at his bride as they left the church together made Sara’s throat ache with suppressed longing for Jonas to look at her with such tender love. What a foolish, impossible dream, she recognised a little later as she studied his cool, slightly forbidding features. Today he seemed to have retreated even further away from her than ever.
The meal after the wedding was a very evident success. Sara watched Jonas and his father chatting with a tiny ache in her heart. They got on very well together, and she couldn’t help wondering how Jonas would react to his own child. They hadn’t even discussed the baby since their marriage. In fact they hadn’t even discussed anything at all. Did Jonas now resent the fact that he had married her? It had, after all, been by his own choice.
Because she was carrying his child, because he was the sort of man who took his responsibilities seriously. A man who would show the degree of concern for an old woman who was no relative that he had shown for Miss Betts would never be able to turn his back on his own child.
Now, when it was too late, Sara wondered if she had let Jonas persuade her into marriage too easily, but if she had refused…
‘Are you feeling all right?’
Lost in her own unhappy thoughts, she hadn’t seen him come over to her. The light pressure of his hand on her shoulder and the concern in his voice both combined to bring her perilously close to tears.
‘Just a bit tired,’ she told him, not untruthfully. It was bliss—heaven, in fact—to be the recipient of his concern.
‘Why don’t you go upstairs and rest for a while?’ he suggested. ‘Everyone will be leaving pretty soon.’
Nodding her head, Sara made her excuses to everyone and went upstairs. Undressing down to her underwear, she lay on the bed, drifting in and out of a restless sleep, finally waking when she heard goodbyes being called and car doors slamming.
Several minutes later Jonas came upstairs.
‘I’ll have to go and chec
k up on the greenhouses shortly, but I’d thought I’d come up and see if you wanted a cup of tea or anything first.’
Sara shook her head. Her throat felt dry, and she was as tense as a finely coiled spring, but she might never get an opportunity like this again.
‘I don’t want anything to drink, Jonas,’ she told him huskily, ‘but I would like to talk to you.’
He approached the bed warily, sitting down on the edge of it, almost as far away from her as he could possibly get, she noticed wryly.
Slowly, haltingly, she started to explain to him the trauma of her inner battle against herself almost from the moment they met.
He listened to her in silence, his face grave and unreadable, and then said emotionlessly, ‘I can understand what you’re saying, Sara—I went through much the same thing when my father remarried—but what I don’t understand is how any of this relates to me. I already knew how you felt about Rick. I knew you couldn’t bear the thought of putting someone else in his place…’
He had missed the point completely, or perhaps she hadn’t put it clearly enough, Sara thought desperately, anxiety making her tongue clumsy and her throat tight as she shook her head and said frantically, ‘No…no, you don’t understand. What I’m trying to tell you, Jonas, is that I love you.’
Instantly his face became a mask of rejection. He got up and walked over to the window, standing with his back to her. An icy wave of humiliation overwhelmed her as Sara stared at his tensed back.
‘What is it exactly that you hope to achieve by telling me this now, Sara?’ He had turned to face her, his face hard, his eyes a cold implacable grey. ‘Oh, I can guess,’ he suggested softly. ‘Sexual frustration plays the very devil with one’s principles, doesn’t it?’ He stood watching her with his hands in his pockets, his stance relaxed and yet at the same time curiously tense and watchful. ‘There was no need to go to these lengths, you know,’ he mocked her. ‘A simple and far more direct request for physical satisfaction would have done equally well. In fact, I thought we’d already agreed that sex was all there was or could be between us.’
His words were like blows, beating her to the ground, causing her such unimaginable pain that she couldn’t stay and endure them. She had to escape.
She got off the bed and ran to the door, but before she reached it she tripped on a tuck in the Aubusson carpet. As she lost her balance she saw a blur as Jonas moved, but it was too late and she heard herself cry out as she caught the side of her head on the edge of the door.
* * *
The smell struck her first, vaguely familiar and for some reason very frightening. The smell was associated with something she wanted to escape from, something she had to prevent. She tried to move and found that she was somehow constrained. Someone was holding her down, or so it seemed. Panic built up inside her and she knew what it was she feared. The smell she recognised was clinical and clean—a hospital smell. She wanted to cry out that she had changed her mind, that she wanted to keep her baby, but somehow the words wouldn’t form. She struggled to open her eyes and then closed them quickly as the sharp brightness struck them.
‘It’s all right, Mrs Chesney. You’re perfectly safe.’ A nurse was leaning over her, smiling warmly. ‘You had a nasty fall, but you’re all right now.’
‘A fall…her heartbeat steadied slightly. So she hadn’t come in to get rid of her baby. Her baby. Her hand touched her stomach protectively. A fall, the nurse had said. Suddenly it all came back. She lifted her aching head off the pillow to call out to the nurse, but she had gone.
She was in a private room, Sara recognised, staring at the massed flowers and the television set.
The door opened and she looked up eagerly, anticipating the return of the nurse, but it wasn’t she who stood there, it was Jonas.
He looked grey and ill, a different man almost, and fear clutched at her again. She tried to sit up, but the effort was too much for her.