“Then I met Antoinette. We spent every possible moment together and I knew I wanted to marry her as soon as we could. Before we could let her parents know, I received a call from Sabine whom I hadn’t seen for over a month.” He grimaced. “To my horror she told me she was expecting our baby. I couldn’t believe it, knowing I’d taken precautions. But the doctor confirmed it.”
“You had a baby with her?” A groan escaped her lips. He knew he’d shocked her. “I had no idea and can’t imagine what a nightmare that must have been.”
“You’ll never know. I had to give up the only love of my life and marry Sabine who moved in my apartment at the château. I never saw Antoinette again, though I tried calling her to talk. She refused, knowing we couldn’t have a future. It was agony.
“From that point on I concentrated on the pregnancy and birth of our little girl, Celine. She brought me my only happiness, but she was born early and died of a bad heart within the month.”
* * *
“What?” The shock of hearing Raoul had a baby with Sabine was one thing, but the revelation that it had died of heart problems was almost too much for Cami to bear.
Raoul eyed her soulfully with those black eyes. “I was in despair over losing her. When I asked the doctor if the baby’s heart condition was the reason for her being premature, he shook his head and said Celine had been full-term.”
“I don’t understand. You didn’t know that?”
He took a deep breath. “I’m afraid not. Those words meant the baby wasn’t mine.”
“No—” Cami blurted as the truth of it sank in. “She lied to you?” He nodded. “I can’t imagine it.” Tears filled her eyes. “The pain you must have suffered.”
“Celine was someone else’s,” his voice grated, “though at the time it never occurred to me she wasn’t mine. Worse, I suffered horribly to realize no surgical procedure could save the baby. Her heart was too damaged.”
A shudder ran through Cami. Her greatest fear was that the surgeon would find that her own heart was too damaged to fix. Throughout their dinner she’d been on the verge of telling Raoul the truth about the operation coming up, but she couldn’t do that now. He’d been through too much. It would be better to go through the surgery without him knowing anything in order to spare him.
“I’m so desperately sorry for you, Raoul. I don’t know how you’ve lived through all this.”
“It wasn’t the best of times. Sabine pretended the baby was mine so I’d marry her. She didn’t love the man who’d made her pregnant.”
“I don’t know how she could have done that to you.”
“She’d been determined to marry me from the beginning and hold on to me. I wanted to divorce her, but the psychiatrist Sabine’s family had brought in told me to put it off. He explained she was so grief-stricken over the loss and burial, he advised me to wait until she’d recovered enough to deal with the breakup of our marriage.
“I waited as long as I could stand before filing. We’d lived apart for over two months. During that time I visited Celine’s grave several times, but I only became a free man the day before my grandfather died.”
While he’d been telling his tragic story, Cami’s mind reeled. Not only had the baby been born with a heart problem like hers, Raoul wasn’t the man she’d believed went through women like water whenever he needed a diversion. He hadn’t had an affair on Sabine. Cami had judged him without knowing the truth.
“It was during that waiting period Sabine’s family wanted us to go in for marriage counseling. She demanded more money from me if I refused, but I couldn’t do it. Nothing could fix what was wrong between us when I wasn’t in love with her.”
“I hear what you’re saying,” Cami murmured. “When love dies, that’s it.”
“Amen,” he said in a gravelly tone.
“Raoul? How did you and Alain find each other?”
He finished his coffee. “During that desolate time, Nathalie came to the vineyard looking for the stranger who had impregnated her deceased stepsister Antoinette. She posed as a grape picker and met my cousin Dominic. They fell in love, which is an amazing story in itself.”
“You mean she actually helped with the harvest?”
“Yes, for several weeks. They became enamored right away. In time he found out her real reason for coming to the vineyard. It turned out she thought Dominic or his brother Etienne might be Alain’s father because they all look so much alike. But neither one claimed to know Antoinette.
“Then she met me and wondered if I could be the one because of the strong family resemblance.”
“You and Alain are clones of each other,” she cried.
“Don’t I know it. We looked so much alike I was in shock. When she showed me Antoinette’s picture, the puzzle was solved and I was united with the son I’d had no knowledge of. The whole thing was miraculous.”
“I’ll say it was,” Cami murmured in amazement. “Antoinette never told her family your name?”
“No. We’d wanted to keep everything quiet until our announcement. When I had to tell her about Sabine’s pregnancy, she didn’t want her parents to know anything.”