Angel of Darkness

Kelda studied her tightly linked hands. That aspect of the future hadn’t occurred to her. Angelo was not disclaiming responsibility. Angelo was telling her up-front that he intended to be there in their lives. Shakenly, she attempted to envisage a purely platonic and civilised relationship with Angelo, the eventual introduction of his lovers into their child’s life. Thousands of women had to endure similar situations for the sake of their children’s security. But she loved Angelo. And Angelo had given her a choice. He had asked her to marry him.

‘Couldn’t you try being married to me?’ Angelo proffered smoothly. ‘Couldn’t we at least give marriage a chance?’

‘I don’t want to get married because our parents think we should!’ Kelda said.

Incredulity blazed in his eyes. ‘What the hell do they have to do with it?’ he demanded.

Kelda flinched. ‘They want—’

‘I’m talking about what I want,’ Angelo emphasised drily. ‘And I am long past the age of being influenced by what my father wants. Six years ago, he wanted me to marry you and I refused—’

‘That night...’ she registered with sudden understanding.

‘Yes. All would have been instantly forgiven had I been willing to do what he saw as the “decent thing”,’ Angelo told her. ‘But nobody makes me do anything I don’t want to do.’

The assurance hung there in the throbbing silence.

‘It wouldn’t work,’ she said tautly.

‘How can you say that without giving it a chance?’

‘Well, I can’t, but how could it?’

‘That doesn’t mean we can’t try. What does trying cost you?’

More pain, more hurt, but would it be any worse than watching him with other women, being forced to share her child with him whenever he made that demand? Wasn’t she simply running scared? Riven with raw tension and uncertainty, she cast him an involuntary glance and surprised the same tension in him. He wanted her and he wanted the baby. Marriages had survived on considerably less.

‘I am not going to beg,’ Angelo slung at her.

‘I’ll marry you.’ The instant she surrendered, doubts rushed in and her brow furrowed with anxious lines. ‘After the baby’s born—’

Angelo threw her a scorching look of anger. ‘No!’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m not prepared to wait. You might change your mind.’

Her teeth ground together but she was very tired. Angelo, she registered, had a lot in common with water dripping on stone. He was incredibly persistent. She rested her head back. ‘OK,’ she muttered finally.

It was three weeks before Kelda was discharged from hospital. Her blood-pressure had for a time given cause for concern. Forty-eight hours after Tomaso and Daisy took her home with them, Angelo and Kelda were married in the small local church with only family present.

She found the ceremony curiously unreal. Once she had agreed to marry him, Angelo had visited her every day. He had done all the things expected of him. He had brought her gifts, filled her room with flowers and entertained her when her spirits were low. But in spite of that she felt as though he had distanced himself from her. There were no intimacies, no kisses, no hot looks. Angelo held himself aloof and Kelda, ever sensitive to the threat of rejection, was incapable of attempting to bridge the gulf opening up between them.

On their wedding day, she realised that she couldn’t see her feet any more, but she told herself bracingly that that scarcely mattered. Angelo was clearly not attracted to very pregnant women. She could accept that, she could live with that, she assured herself. But the awareness that her sole attraction for Angelo was physical and that that sole attraction had vanished

along with her feet and her once tiny waist made her feel more insecure than ever.

She wanted to shrink behind Angelo when they emerged from the church and discovered a barrage of cameras awaiting them. The media had finally found out about them and there was no greater joy for a tabloid than to publish pictures of a groom with an eight-month-pregnant bride, especially when the groom had been very publically romancing other women for most of that same pregnancy.

Kelda was trembling when they drove off in a chauffeur-driven limo. For the first time in her life she had felt threatened by a camera lens. Angelo covered her tightly gripped hands soothingly. ‘A five-day wonder...they’ll forget about us soon enough.’

But Kelda was too proud to forget how their marriage must look to outsiders. A shotgun wedding. She was annoyed that she had let Angelo pressure her into marrying him before the baby was born. Instinct told her that she would not have felt so threatened by the cameras had she regained her once lithe shape instead of resembling a barrage balloon in a horribly cutesy little maternity suit.

‘Do you think so?’ she breathed sharply. ‘You’ve married down, not up. Working class girl makes good. The Press like that.’

‘I rather think that I’m the one who has...made good,’ Angelo countered.

Her teeth clenched. What did you do with a male who set your teeth on edge with exquisite courtesy and then refused to fight? Literally she gnashed her teeth.