‘No!’ he commanded fiercely, his voice softening as he told her, ‘I want you here with me, Annie. I need you here…please stay.’
Please stay! In the darkness Annie fought against her own emotions. He was only being like this because of the drugs he was on, because he felt vulnerable. She waited until she was sure he was asleep before sliding out from beneath his restraining arm and picking up her discarded robe. Her own bed felt cold and lonely…empty. Every time she closed her eyes she could see him…feel him…
Dominic frowned as he watched Annie through his study window. She was outside in the garden, where she had gone to get some mint for the lamb they were having for their meal. He had been home a number of days now, and she had still made no mention to him of her pregnancy. Since the first night he had been home and he had made love with her the atmosphere between them had been distant and strained. He couldn’t blame her for that. She had every reason to feel angry that he had taken advantage of her kind-heartedness—of her. As he watched her walk slowly, reluctantly, back to the house and him, he made up his mind that if she wasn’t going to broach the subject of the baby then he would have to do so.
‘You aren’t eating your lamb,’ Annie protested as Dominic pushed away his meal without finishing it.
‘No,’ he agreed curtly. ‘I’m not particularly hungry. Annie, there’s something—’
‘But lamb always used to be your favourite,’ Annie interrupted him anxiously, and then stopped, ashen-faced, as she realised what she had said. She could see the way Dominic was looking at her—the anger in his eyes.
There was a long sharp silence before he demanded, ‘You’ve remembered?’
‘Yes,’ she was forced to concede.
‘When?’ Dominic questioned her insistently, repeating the demand with even harsher emphasis when Annie turned her head away before answering him.
‘It was…it was before your accident,’ she admitted unwillingly, insisting, when he made no response, ‘I would have told you…I was going to tell you, but…’
‘But you preferred to keep it to yourself,’ Dominic finished angrily for her. ‘I wonder why?’ he asked sarcastically. ‘Or do I? Why did you walk out on me, Annie? Was it just because of a childish tantrum, or because you realised you didn’t really love me?’
‘No,’ she told him quietly.
‘No?’ He continued to look at her before repeating harshly, ‘No? Is that it? I want to know everything, Annie.’
The flash of anger in his eyes made her quail a little, but she refused to let him see it.
‘Everything? Very well, I shall tell you “everything”,’ she agreed proudly, her own eyes darkening with her own reciprocal emotions.
Now that it was here—the moment she had been dreading, the confrontation she knew they would have, the final hurdle she had to clear before she could finally draw a line under the part of her life that included him and walk away—the relief she had expected and hoped to feel was lost, submerged beneath the pressure of her other emotions.
It had been a mistake to give in to that wanton need she had had for him the first night he had been home. Making love with him had aroused all manner of needs, feelings—thoughts she simply didn’t have the spare capacity to deal with.
‘Well?’ Dominic pressed through gritted teeth.
He wanted an explanation for why she had left him? Well, he should have one. She took a deep breath, and then, to her own dismay, she heard herself blurting out emotionally, ‘I’m leaving you, Dominic. I can’t stay here any longer. I don’t owe you any explanations. There’s no reason…no need for us to be together any more.’
‘What?’ Dominic demanded harshly, leaning across the table and placing his palms down on it, either side of her. ‘I should have thought you and I had an excellent reason for being together. The baby,’ he elaborated when Annie remained stubbornly silent. ‘Our baby.’
Annie gasped. He knew. How? When?
‘They told me at the hospital,’ he informed her, reading her mind.
‘It isn’t your baby,’ Annie told him stiffly, looking away from him. ‘It’s mine.’ She gave him a tight little smile. ‘You see, I haven’t forgotten.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’ve remembered exactly why we quarrelled, Dominic, and what you said to me…about…about not wanting me to have your child—about wanting me to abort it.’
‘What?’ Dominic had gone white. He came round to her side of the table and grasped her upper arms, giving her a grimly emotional little shake as he demanded, ‘You were pregnant then? You—’
‘No,’ Annie had to admit. ‘No, I wasn’t. But I thought I might be, and I was afraid. You told me you didn’t want me to have your child because of my background, my bad blood. That’s why I…I tried to tell you but you wouldn’t listen. You…’
‘What? I said no such thing,’ Dominic objected, horrified. ‘Annie…’
‘You did,’ Annie insisted. ‘You said you didn’t want to burden a child with—’
‘With a father who couldn’t be there for it. A father who put his career before it, as my parents had done. I know how it feels to grow up realising that you’re not totally loved by your parents—that was the burden I was referring to, not…’
He stopped, white to the lips, shaking his head as he protested,
‘Annie, how could you have thought…believed…? I loved you. I…I didn’t think either of us was emotionally ready to be a good parent, it’s true, and perhaps I did overreact…But I never…If I’d thought for one moment you’d believed you were already pregnant…I simply thought you were in danger of succumbing to an impulse—that you wanted a baby because you were afraid of being alone. I never…’
Her revelations had stunned and appalled him. They had hurt him as well, he recognised, but he forced himself to set aside that feeling, to remember Annie as she had been then, to understand and remember how she had felt about her unknown parentage. He took a deep breath. Somehow he had to find a way of reassuring her, convincing her…showing her just how wrong she had been.
‘Whoever and whatever your parents were doesn’t matter, Annie. What matters is that you are you—a wonderful, special, individual person who logically must carry something of both of them within your genes.’
He reached out and cupped her face before she could move away, his eyes dark with the intensity of his emotions as he told her fiercely, ‘You may never have known them, Annie, but I know that I would be as proud to have them as my child’s grandparents as I am to have you as its mother. What you are, all that you are, shows in everything about you—your honesty, your compassion, your courage, your intelligence, and most of all your love.
‘I wish that I could say the same about my own genetic inheritance. My parents were thoughtless, selfish, stubborn, totally wrapped up in their own concerns. I was an encumbrance they didn’t really want, a nuisance farmed out into the care of my grandparents, who looked on me as a duty…a responsibility. That was the genetic inheritance I didn’t want my child to have.’
As she searched his face Annie knew that he was telling her the truth. Tears blurred her vision.
Dominic leaned forward. Sensing that he was about to kiss her, she panicked and pulled away. She needed time to absorb what he had told her, to accept it and to accept that she had misjudged him. That she had left him—destroyed their marriage and their love for nothing. Was there any way she could ever accept the enormity of that?
Silently Dominic let her go. It was symptomatic of everything that had gone wrong between them that even now they couldn’t share their feelings—that there were barriers between them.
Love might grow quickly but trust was another matter. Trust was a slow-growing plant that needed nurturing. His fault was that he had not seen and responded to Annie’s need for that careful nurturing—and hers…She owned no fault, he recognised. She had simply reacted out of fear to his crass thoughtlessness.
Annie didn’t know what hurt most—knowing that the love she and Domi
nic had once shared was lost to her for ever or knowing that her own lack of self-esteem, her own fear of the unknownness of her background, had led to its destruction. But what was worse, much worse, than her own pain was the pain she was going to inflict on her child, who would now have to grow up without the benefit of the loving closeness of both its parents.
She loved Dominic totally, completely, irreversibly, irretrievably. She knew that now. She knew, too, that he still found her desirable. But desire wasn’t love, and he had already told her quite plainly that his reason, his only reason, for wanting her back in his life was so that she could provide him with the answers he needed before he drew a line under their marriage and divorced her.
This morning he had walked downstairs unaided. It was time for her to go whilst she could still go with dignity and with pride.
She packed quietly and efficiently and then went to find him. He was in the kitchen.
‘It’s time for me to go,’ she told him calmly. ‘We both know the answer to your question now. The divorce should go through easily enough, and—’
‘The divorce? What divorce?’ Dominic demanded grimly. ‘You’re carrying my child, Annie. There’s no way I’m going to…we can’t divorce now.’
Annie’s face paled. Deep down inside she had feared he would react like this, but she had told herself she was strong enough to resist the temptation he was offering her.
‘Look,’ he said, more gently, ‘I know we’ve got some bridge-building to do. I know you need time. Trust isn’t something that grows overnight, but I know we can make it work.’
Annie could feel herself start to quake deep down inside with the effort of trying to hold onto reality, trying to remind herself of what reality was, and the fact that he no longer loved her whilst she…