‘Where the hell is the rest of your family?’ That sister—her father?
Her soft mouth actually twisted into a sort of wry amusement.
‘My father will still be sleeping off his hangover or…’
A quick glance at the watch and another wry smile.
‘Starting on a new one. And Ciara? You tell me. Ciara is wherever Adnan can be found, but Adnan seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. He’s not answering his phone; no one at the Hall has seen him. Not even his mother.’
‘She spoke to you?’ Raoul let his surprise show.
‘Not for long,’ Imogen admitted. ‘Just to say that she had seen or heard nothing of Adnan—then she took great delight in shutting the door in my face.’ Her shrug was one of resigned acceptance. ‘And who could blame her? She’d been looking forward to being mother of the groom at the perfect society wedding. Watching her son make a brilliant dynastic union …’
She couldn’t finish the sentence. Couldn’t add the other parts of the bargain she and Adnan had come up with between them. Geraldine Al Makthabi had also been hoping to become a grandmother—and her future father-in-law to achieving his dream of becoming a great-grandfather. Under the cover of the piles of food containers stacked up on the tables, she slipped a hand over her lower belly, remembering how it had felt to think that a new life was forming there, nestling deep inside…
A new life fathered by the man who now stood beside her, amongst the ashes of her hopes. The man who had sent her dreams toppling down into ruins.
‘What am I going to do with all this?’ she said again, sharper now, the fight against the bitterness of her memories making her tone harsher than she had planned.
Obviously Raoul thought so too because he shot her a quick, assessing glance from under hooded lids, then those golden eyes slid away from her and a frown creased the space between his brows as he considered the food problem thoughtfully.
‘Do you have an old people’s care home nearby? Disabled living? A children’s home?’
Impossibly, now, when she had coped with everything else that had gone before—had coped without a single tear—the introduction of a very practical solution almost demolished the walls she had built around herself. The room blurred, her eyes stung and roughly she rubbed her hands against them to dash away any tears before they even had the chance to fall.
‘Great idea,’ she managed gruffly. ‘Perfect.’
‘Leave it to me,’ Raoul said and helplessly she found that she was capable of nothing more than nodding as she handed the responsibility over to him.
CHAPTER NINE
‘COME AND SIT DOWN. You’ve been on your feet all day.’
Raoul’s voice caught Imogen by surprise as she wandered into the shabby, old-fashioned sitting room where the glow of the setting sun gilded the windows and made the cream-painted walls look as if they were blazing red and gold.
‘I thought you’d gone.’
She hesitated on the threshold of the room as she tried to decide whether to go in or to make some hastily concocted excuse to take her away from there, away from him.
‘Not yet,’ Raoul said now. ‘Only just got everything sorted and finished. I helped myself to a drink. I hope you don’t mind.’
He lifted a glass of white wine, so much paler than the rich, red liquid from the previous night. But still, the memory of that time in his room, the way it had trapped her with him, destroying all her plans and hopes for the future, kept her frozen, not knowing which way to move. To turn and walk away seemed impossibly rude after he had spent so much of the day helping her sort out the results of the disaster that was supposed to have been her wedding day, but to walk into the golden shadows of the room where he sprawled comfortably in a huge armchair seemed to bring an intimacy that she shied away from nervously.
‘Of course not,’ she managed unevenly. ‘A drink’s the least I owe you after the help you’ve given me today.’
Whenever she had needed help, whatever had wanted doing, he’d been there, silent, strong and disturbingly reliable. So now, if it wasn’t for the fact that the downstairs part of the house still looked like a display for the Chelsea flower show, one might almost believe that today had never been planned as anything special.