‘Such as what?’ Meg demanded rallyingly. ‘Come home—Campion is pregnant?’ She shook her head and clung to his arm, demanding, ‘Oh, Guy, you do love her, don’t you? I was so sure you must, and I wanted desperately to tell her. She looked so forlorn, so…unhappy, but I dared not, just in case I was wrong. And then, after her fall—’ she added artlessly, ignoring the warning look her husband gave her.
‘Her fall! What fall?’ Guy demanded. ‘Is she all right? Is she…’
‘Guy, she’s fine,’ Tait told him calmly. ‘She fainted rather badly some time ago, but since then she’s been fine. At least, physically.’
‘She misses you dreadfully,’ Meg intervened.
‘That’s enough, Meg.’ Tait told her crisply. ‘I don’t think Campion would be too happy if she knew you were betraying her confidences like this…’
She turned from her husband to her brother and demanded ‘Guy, what are you going to do?’
‘That, my dear wife, is none of your business,’ Tait told her firmly.
* * *
Campion couldn’t remember such a perfect day. The sun shone, the air was balmy, bees hummed in the long grass she was too lazy to cut. The house was hers and, despite all her protests, she loved its pastel-washed walls and soft chintzes. And the nursery. She smiled and patted the mound of her stomach. Two and a half more months, and she could quite easily spend them all here in the orchard, lazing in the sun.
Nature had given her a gift she had not expected, over and above her two unborn children. She had given her peace…sanctuary from her heartache, a breathing space in which normal emotions were suspended to allow her to concentrate solely on the new lives she carried.
Above her, high in the sky, a plane droned. She closed her eyes, lulled to sleep by the sound. She slept a lot these days. A sign of depression, an inner voice nagged, but she didn’t listen to it. She stretched out on the blanket and sighed softly.
* * *
It was the shadow coming between her and the warmth of the sun that woke her. She looked up and saw the shape of a man; the sun dazzled her eyes, and she struggled clumsily into a sitting position.
‘Guy…’
‘Why in God’s name didn’t you tell me?’
No preamble, no skirting round the subject, just that fierce, angry question.
It threw her off guard, making it impossible for her to pretend she didn’t know what he meant.
He was dressed in a suit, and he looked hot and uncomfortable, but his skin was tanned. A legacy from his stay in the States? As he looked at her, he tugged at his tie and released the top buttons of his shirt.
A familiar sensation curled through her body. Desperately she looked away from him. She didn’t want to feel like this, to want him, to love him…
‘How did you know?’
‘Meg,’ he told her tautly, his nostrils flaring slightly as he bit out, ‘God, can you imagine how I felt, learning that you were carrying my… children, right out of the blue, when I thought…’
‘It must have been a shock,’ Campion agreed coolly. She was feeling slightly dizzy, probably because she had been lying in the sun. She tried to stand up, and winced as she felt the pins and needles attack her ankle.
‘What’s wrong?’ Guy demanded sharply, dropping to the ground beside her. One hand touched her shoulder, the other her foot. She could smell the hot male scent of him, and it made her catch her breath, bringing back memories of what it had been like to be able to touch him, to caress him.
‘Campion!’ His voice was roughly urgent, forcing her to look into her eyes. They were dark and strained. ‘Why…why didn’t you say something?’
His hand moved from her foot to her stomach, splaying across its swollen bulge. She was only wearing a thin cotton dress, and the heat from his skin was so intimate that she might have been naked. She felt the twins move, and in other circumstances she might almost have laughed at the expression on his face as one of them kicked hard against his palm. Dark red patches of colour burned high up on his cheekbones. He released her immediately, and she tried to quell her instinctive feeling of rejection.
‘What was there to say?’ she said in answer to his question. ‘You’d made it plain that our relationship was over.’
‘I…I what? What the hell are you talking about? I loved you. I thought I’d made that more than clear.’ He shook his head, as though he couldn’t grasp what she was saying. ‘I loved you, but I didn’t want to trap you into a commitment given in a haze of sexual ecstasy.’ She saw him grimace. ‘I wanted to give you time…time to experiment a little, to find yourself, to explore your sexuality. I told myself that, if you did love me, I had nothing to lose, and that, if you didn’t, trying to tie you to me wouldn’t work anyway. I didn’t want to treat you like Craig did.’
‘You loved me?’ Campion couldn’t believe it. ‘You’re lying! You took me to bed, as part of your job as my agent.’
‘So that you would re-write the book? How dare you believe that, after what we had together? How could you credit such arrant nonsense with any shred of reality?’
He had taken hold of her and was practically shaking her. He was furious with her, Campion recognised.