Dominic’s belief was that she had left him as the result of an immature desire to punish him for his having to leave her…that the love she had claimed to have for him had, in reality, been little more than a youthful crush, incapable of withstanding the pressure of adult emotions. But he was wrong.
Tormentedly Annie closed her eyes.
‘You don’t want children?’ she had asked him then, in shocked fear.
‘No, I don’t,’ he answered with cold emphasis.
She was so shocked, so afraid. For days she had been worrying about inadvertently missing one day of taking the Pill, knowing that a baby so soon in their marriage wasn’t something they had planned, feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of everything that having a baby would mean and desperately needing Dominic’s love and support. Instead the reaction she was getting from him threatened to destroy her—it was certainly destroying her trust in him.
‘But why not?’ she forced herself to ask him, never imagining for one minute just what she was going to hear.
‘Parenthood isn’t just about having a baby, Annie,’ he told her. ‘It’s a very big responsibility. When we create a child we aren’t just giving it life, we are giving it…burdening it, if you like, with ourselves…with our own personal history. And at the moment I feel that just isn’t something I would want to burden a child with.’
Their own personal history. She knew what he meant, of course. He was referring to the fact that they—she—knew nothing of her own parentage, of what kind of inheritance, both genetically and emotionally, she might be passing on to her own child. Contaminating it with bad blood…That was what Dominic meant. He was afraid of giving his child…their child…her bad blood.
Annie felt as though a part of her had died. As though a part of her had been broken and destroyed. She had believed Dominic totally when he told her that it was her he loved…that her history didn’t matter to him. But he had lied to her.
But worse was to follow. When she tried stumblingly to tell him of her fear that it could already be too late, that she might already be carrying his child, his reaction made her feel literally sick with fear.
‘An abortion! You mean you would want me to destroy our baby?’ she demanded, white-faced.
‘Anne, for God’s sake stop being so emotional,’ Dominic replied angrily.
Annie moistened her dry lips. She couldn’t take in properly what had happened. How, within the space of less than twenty-four hours, with a few short, sharp words, her love, her life, her future, her trust, had all been destroyed—as Dominic would insist on her destroying their child.
Numbly she tried to come to terms with what had happened. Dominic was talking to her, trying to reason with her, coax her, but it was as though there was an invisible barrier between them. She no longer wanted even to breathe the same air as him, never mind be physically close to him. He had claimed that he loved her but he had been lying. He didn’t want his child…his children…to have her as their mother. He was worried about the inheritance she might give them. He was worried that she would contaminate them with the bad blood she carried.
Suddenly he was a stranger to her. A stranger who threatened the life of her child—a child she knew she would fight to protect to the last breath of life left in her.
There was no way she could abandon her child in the way her own mother had done her. Poor baby. Why should it suffer because she was its mother? She couldn’t stay with Dominic now. For her baby’s sake, she had to leave him. Round and round her thoughts circled, causing a whirlpool of fear and pain that sucked her down into its black centre.
That night in bed, she couldn’t sleep. Dominic had taken some medication for a headache. Logic told her that her wisest course would be to wait until he had left the country before she disappeared from his life, but his departure was still more than two weeks away and she feared that there was no way she could continue to live with him for that length of time without betraying herself.
Driven by the desperation of her own emotions, she left their bed, packed a few necessities and left the house.
CHAPTER NINE
IT WAS over two weeks since she had left Dominic. In a very short space of time now he would be leaving the country, and once he did…Once he did it was unlikely that they would ever meet again.
She didn’t know why she had come back here, to the town where she had been born. She had booked herself into the cheapest bed and breakfast she could find—after all, she was financially responsible for herself now. She had been to the library and re-read the newspaper story written when she had been found abandoned. The old lady who had found her had died many years before, and as Annie already knew there was no way back for her into the past to discover exactly who and what she was. Neither was there any way forward into the future for her now, as Dominic’s wife.
She shivered beneath the thin cover on her bed.
Dominic!
She missed him desperately, longed for him despairingly, despite the hurt he had inflicted on her.
It was well past midnight. What was he doing? Was he thinking of her…wondering…worrying…? Was it possible for him to love her as a woman even whilst rejecting her as a mother for his children?
She was still awake when daylight came creeping across the sky.
In another few hours Dominic would be gone. Hot, heart-wrenching tears seeped between her closed eyelids. The thought of never seeing him again made her want to crawl away somewhere and die, but she couldn’t. She had her baby…their baby to think of.
She had to see him…just one last time…Just see him, that was all…She wouldn’t say anything to him—she couldn’t. She would just go home and watch him leave—watch him as he walked out of their lives…hers and his baby’s…the baby he thought she wasn’t good enough to mother.
She was on the first commuter train to leave town, making her slow journey back across the country. In Dominic’s car, with Dominic’s hands on the wheel, she could have been there in a couple of hours. But there was no direct rail service from her home town, only a series of complicated connections.
She was waiting for the train that would take her on the final lap of her journey back when she made the discovery that her flight had been for nothing, that there was to be no baby.
By the time she had dealt with the emergency of her unexpected period and dried the tears she had cried for the life that wasn’t to be she had missed her connecting train.
Numbly she boarded the next one to arrive. There was no baby now to keep her and Dominic apart, but there was still her awareness, her realisation of the fact that he didn’t consider her good enough to have his children. If she could catch him before he left she could tell him that their marriage was over, that he was free to find a woman whom he did consider good enough.
The journey took longer than she had expected. The train she had missed had been an express, and the one she was on was a much slower one, stopping at every station. By the time she eventually got off Annie knew that Dominic would be on his way to Heathrow for his flight.
Not knowing what to do, she started to cross the road via the pedestrian crossing…and walked straight into the path of a speeding car.
Shakily Annie wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand.
There was no point in weeping for the sorrows of the girl she had once been. Crying wouldn’t do anything to help her—nor to help herself now, she recognised.
Her body felt stiff and cold, and when she looked at her watch she was shocked to se
e how many hours had passed since she had first walked into Dominic’s bedroom.
Now, as she looked around it, she knew exactly how it had felt to lie here in Dominic’s arms. Exactly how it had felt to be loved by him and to have loved him in return. To have loved him? She could still taste the bitterness of her own weak tears. No wonder she had found it impossible to destroy the feelings of love she had increasingly begun to feel for him. The reality was that she had never stopped loving him…not for one moment.
‘You left me,’ he had accused her, but the truth was that he had abandoned her.
She would have to tell him just what she had discovered, of course. He had a right to know…About the past, yes, but not about the present and the baby she knew for sure she was carrying this time. No, that was her concern and hers alone, and she intended it to remain that way. He had been right then, in calling her immature and a child, but she wasn’t either of those things any more. She was an adult, a woman and as such she had no need of any man to help her bear the responsibility of the new life growing inside her.
She closed her eyes, determined not to allow herself to cry any more tears. What was the point?
Logically, she knew she should wait until Dominic returned home to tell him what she had remembered, but anxiety, and a certain instinct that if she was alone with him too long he might somehow discern that she was keeping something vital from him, urged her to get the whole thing over and done with as quickly as she could.
She would pack her things, get a taxi to take her to Dominic’s office and then go straight on to her own home.
Grimly Dominic stared out of his office window. For all the good he was doing at work he might as well have stayed at home, because that was where his thoughts were—at home with Annie. Annie…His wife…His woman…The woman who had left him…His love…
It was no use. Grittily Dominic forced himself to face the self-knowledge he had been trying to avoid. He still loved Annie. Loved her even more as a woman than he had done as a girl—if that was possible.