h another man—naturally I lost my temper.”
“Some day you might do it with me…”
“No!” He roared it at her in fierce rebuttal. “Whatever you did, I would not touch you. I am not a violent man.”
But his passions were. They ran at gale-force turbulence with her. Everywhere else in Alex’s life control and restraint ruled the roost. He was punctual, tidy, organised, immaculate in appearance. He carried enormous responsibility. He was a rock for his dependent and less able brothers and sisters to lean upon. He was in every other field a strong, principled and honourable man, worthy of respect. She was the fatal flaw that rocked Alex dangerously off balance.
“You’ve got to let me go,” she repeated wretchedly.
The mattress gave under his weight. He leant over her. “These are teething problems. You are over-sensitive. All you can think about is running away. I do not run away from trouble. I face it,” he said hardily. “And you will face it with me.”
“We’re poison for each other.”
“Dio, such melodrama!” he growled. “And stop lying there as if I am about to attack you!”
Helplessly, she turned her head away. It was a mistake. His fingers laced into her hair and his mouth covered hers in hungry retribution. He found no answer in her. She was as inanimate and as empty as a waxen doll. He flung his dark head back, his ruptured breathing pattern breaking the stillness. “You can never be there for me when I need you,” he condemned raggedly. “Why should I curse myself with a wife who has no love for me? Forgive me for forgetting that you are only here on sufferance. I will not disturb you again.”
She knew then that the same process was working within him. Alienation. It would only be a matter of time before Alex let her go. He was too proud to hang on to a wife who could not respond to him in bed. It was the ultimate offence, and what a pity it was that she had not contrived the miracle sooner. Since she was seeing the hope of freedom again, she could not understand why tears should wet her cheek and why she should ache at Alex’s roughened belief that she turned her back on him when he most needed her. He had never talked about needing her before. Why did he have to talk about it now?
* * *
THREE DAYS LATER, she was uncompromisingly sick the instant she got out of bed. One of the maids heard her retching in the bathroom and fetched Sofia. Sofia arrived to beam meaningfully at her while she clung to the sink, trying to subdue a second debilitating bout of nausea. Her pinched face had a greenish pallor and her eyes were haunted. She had woken up feeling sick, the last two mornings. She hadn’t wanted to think about the fact. She had suppressed the awareness that there had been no comforting physical proof as yet that she was not pregnant.
Oh, God, please, no, was all she could think now. They were leaving for Rome this morning. Alex had been distant and civil for the past forty-eight hours. All the portents were that he was withdrawing from her, slowly but surely, with the rigid control of a reformed addict staving off the need for another fix. Steeling herself to kill Sofia’s hopeful smile, she said, “Is there something wrong?”
The housekeeper frowned. “Is the Kyrie ill?”
“I don’t think last night’s fish agreed with me. I’ve been feeling unwell all night.” Kerry tilted her chin.
Sofia retreated. Kerry splashed her face with unsteady hands. It couldn’t happen, it just couldn’t happen now. Her system could be upset by travel, the change in climate, the alteration in diet…by sheer nerves. But that night in London was all she could think about. One reckless night at the wrong time. The nausea, the dizziness and the lassitude were all horribly familiar. Alex had impregnated her and she wanted to scream blue murder. It wasn’t fair, it just wasn’t fair when she was already practically at her last gasp.
“Are you feeling well?” Carina enquired over breakfast. “You seem very pale.”
“I had a restless night.” She studied the table. She felt like a plague carrier. She felt as if someone had painted a cross on her forehead. She was too self-conscious, too petrified to look anywhere near Alex. But in another sense she wanted to rage at him for his rotten potency. All she could think about was the horrendous misery of her months carrying Nicky, memories inextricably interwoven with what had been going on in her life simultaneously. The mere threat of repetition bereft her of all rationality, and if he found out he would never let her go.
How she got through the helicopter trip she never knew afterwards. It was mind over matter. She had suffered dreadfully from travel sickness, even in a car, when she was pregnant with Nicky. But air travel was the worst of all. On the flight to Rome, mind over matter was no longer sufficient to subdue the churning in her stomach. She spent most of the flight in the washroom, or so it seemed. Concealment had become impossible.
Carina hovered, muttering worriedly about food poisoning. Alex was pale and suspiciously silent after the receipt of one single glance of burning reproach from Kerry. The whole event might have been masterminded by fate to reveal her secret. The only time Alex had ever seen her airsick she had been pregnant. It did not take a lightning bolt of amazing perception for him to suspect the cause.
He insisted on carrying her off the plane. He had recovered his colour, but he looked guilty as hell. It gave her a malicious pleasure that he should understand exactly how she felt. A doctor was waiting for her at the townhouse. Carina helped her into bed. By then, the penny had dropped with her, too.
“I was never like this. No wonder you are miserable,” she soothed sympathetically. “It is very hard to be pleased when you feel so ill.”
“One swallow does not make a summer,” said the doctor glibly. “No pregnancy is a blueprint of another. There may well be small similarities, but with rest and calm you could enjoy excellent health this time.”
Kerry saw nothing but misery ahead. As soon as he had gone and Alex’s sisters and Athene had given up offering advice, she turned over in bed and wept inconsolably. The axe had fallen. Her body wasn’t her own any more. How easy it was for the uninitiated to talk about the redeeming joys of motherhood when they did not have eight months of purgatory stretching in front of them, and a marriage that had already stopped being a marriage beforehand.
CHAPTER NINE
“THE DOCTOR wants you to stay in bed for a few days.”
Kerry emerged from beneath her hair. “I hate you!” she screamed.
Alex’s black hair was ruffled, his tie was loose and his strain was palpable. She went back under her hair again, racked by the cruel injustice of it all. He didn’t love her, she was going to be dumped in Florence again and left to suffer well out of Alex’s radius. That doctor didn’t know what he was talking about when he told her that things would be different this time around.
“You realise—you must realise that I cannot agree to an abortion,” Alex delivered, knotting the rope, did he but know it, round his own throat. “I…I couldn’t live with that. I wish I could, but I couldn’t. Perhaps it will be a false alarm.” He sounded very much as if he hoped it was.
What sort of man was he to even think of such a solution? Horror darted through her in wrathful rejection. But desperate straits demanded desperate measures, she decided. When Alex was adapting to a strategic retreat from the battlefield of their marriage, fate had sprung a rear attack on him. Once again he was being condemned to fatherhood with a woman he didn’t love, couldn’t respect and couldn’t live with.
“I’ll never forgive you for even mentioning the possibility,” she mumbled feverishly. “How could you even think about it for a moment? How could you even say that?”
“I?” Alex unleashed, suddenly springing free of his unusually quiet manner and doing so loudly enough to make her look up in dismay. “I…” He pointed to himself in raw, flaring Latinate emphasis. “Not want my own child? Dio, I am jubilant!” He slung the assurance at her, stressing each syllable so that the words rolled off his tongue in fluid provocation. “And I’m not about to apologise for it, either. This time I will be able to watc
h my child grow. This time I will not be on the outside!”
It was eleven that evening before Alex reappeared. Having run the gamut of her emotions and vaguely appreciated that, no matter what stance Alex took, she would still be unreasonable, she was very quiet.
“I am taking time off to see that you look after yourself,” he announced aggressively in the darkness. “If I could suffer for you I would, but I can’t. I just don’t want you to think that I am leaving you alone.”
He gathered her resistant body close with determined hands. His fingers spread protectively over her flat stomach in a movement which was uniquely revealing. “How soon will we know?” he prompted impatiently.
He was holding her, at last he was simply holding her. But the baby had inspired the warm attitude of concern. He really was pleased, she realised. He had switched his possessiveness from her to the life inside her womb. So might he have patted an incubator. All of a sudden, everything else took second place. She sniffed. The numbness had faded again. Of course it had. Loving Alex was a life sentence. It really didn’t matter what he did. It would always be the same.
Over the next three days he drove her scatty. She was deluged with fancy nightwear and the latest books, and adjured not to move a muscle. He seemed to be stocking her up to spend the next twenty years flat on her back. One of his sisters did him the cruel disservice of presenting him with a book on pregnancy. By the time Alex emerged, much stricken from its overly informative depths, a headache would have had him rushing her to the nearest hospital.
“Are you dying?” Nicky whispered from under her arm one afternoon. “I heard Nonna say Daddy thought you were dying?”
He rocked her with laughter. He made her see the funny aspect to Alex’s over-zealous attitude. When the doctor called, she asked him to speak to Alex. Otherwise Alex was never going to believe that she was fit to travel to Florence.
It was an hour before Alex appeared. “You don’t look healthy to me. Have I been making a fuss?” he prompted tautly.