The Ultimate Surrender

With appalling clarity Polly could see the minefield she had dropped herself into, the emptiness of the life that now lay ahead of her, the deceit, the lies she would have to tell. And for what? A brief taste of heaven which was going to leave her with an aftertaste of the worst kind of hell. How was she going to endure seeing Marcus with Suzi now, after what she herself had just experienced in his arms? How was she ever going to be able to look at Marcus again without thinking…remembering…?

‘Polly?’ Marcus was demanding.

Resolutely she closed her eyes, holding her body stiff and wooden as she heard him curse under his breath and then release her. The moment he did she turned away from him. She didn’t want to stay here in bed with him but her exhausted body was refusing to allow her to move. Tiredly she closed her eyes. Behind her she could feel Marcus’s warmth.

Why the hell hadn’t she answered him when he had said that they were both free agents? Was there, after all, something between her and Bernstein? Could she be in love with the other man? Had she been using Marcus simply to assuage the desire she felt for him? Marcus was tempted to wake her up and demand to know the truth.

Polly gave a small sob in her sleep. Frowning, Marcus leaned over her. In the dim light he could see her tears and his anger melted. He loved her so much, had loved her for so long, virtually from the very first moment he had seen her—but she had been Richard’s then and he had forced down his own feelings for her. He had strong views about loyalty and about commitment, and Richard had been his cousin and there had been a close bond between them.

But it hadn’t been either loyalty or concern for his cousin that had prompted his suggestion to Richard that they keep Fraser House and that he finance its upkeep whilst Richard and Polly—or, more realistically, Polly acted as its housekeeper and his hostess. Just the sight of her small, too worried, too pale face as she had shivered with cold in that wretched flat of theirs had been enough to make him feel positively murderous towards his impractical cousin. Polly had so obviously needed cherishing and cosseting, and had she been his wife and not carrying his cousin’s baby…

But at least he had managed to bring some measure of comfort and order to her life—hers and Briony’s.

Briony…Marcus blinked fiercely as he remembered Briony’s birth. At the hospital they had mistaken him for Polly’s husband, allowing him into the delivery room with her.

She had clung so hard to his arm during the most intense of her labour pains that at one point his arm had gone heavy and his fingers had gone white and numb.

He had been so afraid for her and so angry with Richard, demanding that the doctor do something to ease her pain, but Polly herself had shaken her head, insisting that she was all right, so absorbed in what she was doing that she’d hardly seemed to know he was there. And then had come the wonderful, miraculous moment of Briony’s birth.

Over the years he had often asked himself whether it was because he had witnessed her arrival into the world that Briony meant so much to him, as though she were his own child.

Perhaps, but that could not explain Briony’s own closeness to him; the bond which they shared was a very close one and very special to him.

After Richard’s death he had begun to allow himself to hope, just a little, but that hope had died a swift, merciless death when Polly herself had made it plain on more than one occasion that Richard was the only man she ever could or ever would love.

He had tried to conceal his own feelings by adopting a manner of cool indifference towards her, but sometimes just being with her was so painful for him that he had to distance himself from her, which was the main reason he had decided to move out of Fraser House.

Perhaps at his age his emotions ought to be different, less easily aroused, his need for her tamed and subdued, but if anything the years had only increased his love for her, and with it the sense of anger and helplessness he felt at the waste of her womanhood and his love. But those feelings were nothing to what he was experiencing now at the thought that she might have given another man what she had resolutely always insisted she could never give any man other than Richard—her love.

When he thought of all the times he had held himself back, pulled himself back from telling her how he felt, and of all the times when she had vehemently insisted that there was no room in her life for a man who was not Richard, all the years she had clung so fiercely to her love for her late husband…and yet now, within days of meeting Phil Bernstein…

Marcus thought he had accustomed himself to the fact that Polly was so wedded to her widowhood and her memories of her late husband that all she would ever see him as was Richard’s cousin.