‘It’s just a house, Annie,’ Dominic had tried to reassure her. ‘Bricks and mortar, that’s all. Only with you to share it with me it can truly become a home.’
A home. Her home. The first real home she had ever known. And Dominic had gone out of his way to make sure she had felt that it was her home.
He had taken her shopping, insisting that she was to choose new decor for their shared bedroom, encouraging her to trust her own instincts and taste. She smiled wryly, remembering the hours she had spent poring over books she had bought, trying to find out what style of decor would be right for the house.
‘The Chinese silk would have been wonderful, but I was afraid because it was so expensive,’ she said now.
Both of them looked at one another, and then, without any kind of hesitation, Dominic said easily, ‘You mean for the bedroom curtains? Yes, it would have looked good. Especially if you’d given in and let me buy that four-poster bed.’
Annie closed her eyes in despair.
‘What’s wrong with me?’ she demanded in a guarded voice. ‘Why can I remember something as unimportant as the curtain fabric I didn’t choose when I can’t remember the most vital thing of all?’
There was a brief pause before Dominic replied somberly, ‘Perhaps it’s less painful to remember why you rejected the silk.’
He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t need to, Annie recognised. What he had implied was that her rejection of him was something too traumatic for her to allow herself to recall, and she knew that he was probably right.
Out of all the questions she had asked him, she acknowledged, there was one she still had not been able to bring herself to ask, but now, suddenly, she felt she had to do so. Touching his arm tentatively, she asked huskily, ‘Why do you think I left?’
At first she thought he wasn’t going to answer her. The bleak expression hardening his mouth made her shiver a little.
‘How many times have I asked myself that question?’ he said, half under his breath. ‘And not been able to give myself an answer. I can’t think of any logical explanation. You were upset because I was going away. We had rowed about it. We’d been having a series of petty rows brought on by the tension of our imminent parting.’
‘But I knew right from the start that you had to go.’
Annie had surprised herself by defending him. A wry smile touched his mouth. ‘You’re playing devil’s advocate with a vengeance,’ he told her. ‘I had told you, yes, but that didn’t stop me from feeling guilty about leaving you.’
‘But you had no choice,’ Annie insisted.
His mouth turned down at the corners.
‘There are always choices. I could have broken the contract. I could have put you first…shown you…You were too young for the pressure of that kind of separation and…’ Dominic paused, carefully searching for words that would not anger or offend her. ‘Your background being as it was meant that you had more need to feel secure…wanted…loved. Perhaps more than I had made allowance for. Perhaps…’
‘Perhaps that made me run away like a sulky child?’ Annie supplied grimly for him, adding before he could stop her, ‘A sulky child demanding attention and playing up to get it…Is that what I was like, Dominic?’
‘No. Not at all,’ he tried to reassure her.
‘But that is what you think, isn’t it?’ she guessed. ‘You think I did leave because you were going away, to punish you for leaving me. But that’s so childish.’
‘It’s a possibility,’ he allowed. ‘You were very young, and at that age it’s dangerously easy to mistake a crush for love.’
Annie frowned. Although his explanation sounded feasible, for some reason she couldn’t accept it. It jarred on her, rubbed against her own inner knowledge of herself.
‘Come on,’ Dominic reiterated. ‘You’re exhausted. What you need is a hot bath and then bed. I’ll bring you some supper up on a tray and—’
‘Read me a bedtime story?’ Annie finished dryly. ‘I’m not a child now, Dominic.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘You’re not. And anyway, aren’t bedtime stories supposed to have happy endings?’ he asked, in a sharply bleak voice that wrenched at her own emotions so painfully she caught her breath.
There could be no happy ending to their own story. Not unless—Not unless what? Not unless Dominic told her that he didn’t care what had happened in the past, that he loved her far too much in the here and now to ever let her go? Was that what she really wanted? What she wanted was him, Dominic—her lover, her husband, her fate, she recognised achingly.
‘I’ve got to go into the office and the chances are that I’m going to have to work late,’ Dominic told Annie as he finished his breakfast.
Annie averted her face. The sight and smell of his coffee was making her feel acutely nauseous, and her stomach heaved protestingly, just as it had heaved for the last three mornings in a row. ‘Will you be all right here on your own?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ she assured him. The scald wounds on her arm had healed cleanly, without any problems, and even Dominic was forced to agree with her doctor that she was now fully recovered.
Dominic looked across the table at her.
‘There’s something I want you to promise me,’ he told her quietly.
Annie gave a small sigh.
‘If I remember anything I promise you I’ll tell you about it—’ she began, but he stopped her with a shake of his head.
‘No, that isn’t what I was going to ask.’ He made a movement as though he was going to reach for her, and then stopped himself, getting up to go and stand with his back to her in front of the window. ‘I want you to promise me, Annie, that there won’t be another disappearing act. Promise me,’ he demanded harshly when she made no immediate response.
He was afraid that she was going to leave whilst he was gone. Bemusedly Annie stared at his dark-suited back. His shoulders were so broad, his stance so upright, his air so authoritative and male that it was almost impossible for her to believe that he was vulnerable in any kind of way, but his words were telling her a different story.
‘If I don’t promise?’ she asked him huskily.
He turned round.
‘Then I don’t go,’ he told her unequivocally.
Annie blinked in surprise. If it mattered so much to him that she stayed, then—she was letting her imagination and her own feelings run away with her, she warned herself. The reason he wanted her to stay was because he still wanted to get to the bottom of why she had left him.
‘I…I’ll stay,’ she told him unsteadily. As she glanced towards the calendar on the kitchen wall she recognised absently that she had already been here with him for over a month. Over a month! Her stomach started to churn like a washing machine on full spin. Over a month! That meant…
Somehow Annie managed to make herself wait until after Dominic had gone before going over to the calendar and frantically counting backwards. Her stomach was heaving, panic and nausea vying for supremacy as the truth hit her in a sweat-drenched sheet of shock. Blindly she turned away from the calendar, her hands shaking as she reached for the telephone and started to dial Helena’s telephone number. But then, before she had completed dialling, she quickly hung up.
No…No! She couldn’t share her fears with anyone else yet…not yet…not until she was sure. She could walk down into the town. It wasn’t very far and there was a chemist’s shop at the bottom of the hill. It would have what she needed. Because Helena’s car was off the road Annie had insisted that she borrow her own Mercedes, which meant that she herself was temporarily without any means of transport.
Three hours later she stood numbly in the bathroom as she stared in sick disbelief at the pregnancy test she had just done. Her second…and both of them were showing a positive result. She was pregnant. Dominic would be—Dominic! Suddenly the bathroom started to sway ominously round her. Instinctively she reached for the shower door to support herself, whispering a husky, ‘No.’
A confused
jumble of images were forming themselves inside her head: sounds, pictures, memories.
Somehow she managed to make her way to Dominic’s bedroom before she collapsed across the bed. The shutter which had closed her off from the past, protected her from it, had suddenly lifted, and she knew now the answer to Dominic’s question. Oh, yes, she knew!
She was pregnant with Dominic’s child. Just as she had thought, feared she might be all those years ago. Then she had been wrong. But now…