‘Mother kept us apart,’ she forced herself to continue, staring wide-eyed into the empty fireplace. ‘We didn’t even know where she was. She was determined that we wouldn’t have any contact with each other—or Ciara with my father. It was her way of getting back at my father, of carrying on the civil war between them.’
‘To keep sisters from knowing each other?’ His disgust showed through the question, sharpening the bitterness of memory so that she had to swallow hard as she nodded her answer.
‘We only found each other again a couple of years ago. We’d both been searching, but Mother had changed her name, and she gave Ciara no reference to the past—she only had the vaguest memories of a young child. It was just after we…’
The childhood memories had been bad enough but the way her reunion with her sister had coincided with the end of her time with Raoul threatened to destroy her. Lifting her head to look into his face, she saw the shadows of memory shift across his face, watched that sexy mouth tighten, as if to hold something back.
‘I’d been trying to find Ciara for ages, but got nowhere.’
Focusing on that aspect of the time after she’d left Corsica gave her enough strength to tell the story without going back over more difficult memories. It had been as a reprieve from the worries of the situation at home, the frustration of finding nothing about her missing sister, that she had treated herself to the short holiday in Corsica. If only she had known she had been jumping out of the frying pan and deep into the heart of the fire when she’d done that.
‘But when the financial settlement was finalised, there was no more war to fight, so my mother finally put us in contact with each other.’
She had barely been back home from Corsica before a wary Ciara had contacted her. She had barely realised she was pregnant before she had made that trip to London to meet with her long-lost sister; barely started to discover the new and wonderful experience of having a family before the tiny seed of what could have been her family for the future had been lost in the most horrific circumstances.
Recalling the shock and the pain, both emotional and physical, of those days, Imogen folded her arms around herself, cradling her lower abdomen where the minute beginnings of her baby—hers and Raoul’s child—had once nestled, safe and secure. At least, it was supposed to have been safe, but fate had dealt them a brutal blow, dragging her baby from her womb and almost killing its mother in the process.
‘Imogen…’
It was only when she heard Raoul’s voice, the note of surprise and shock roughening its edges, that she realised that she hadn’t been able to hold back the tears her memories had stirred. They were spilling down her cheeks in a silent declaration of the misery she couldn’t even begin to voice aloud.
‘Here.’
When had he moved? She hadn’t heard a sound, or noticed any change in his position, but suddenly he was beside her, perched on the arm of the chair, reaching out to her. If he touched her then she would collapse. But no, he was holding something out to her. A blur of white through tear-strained eyes—the handkerchief with which he had wiped the wine from the chair.
‘It’s a little marked—not exactly the crisp white handkerchief of a regency novel.’
His voice had a surprising shake to it. Was that because he was laughing at the image—at himself?
‘No problem,’ she managed, breaking off as the soft cotton touched her face, pressing gently, mopping up the trails of tears down her cheeks. Her heart thudded once, hard and high up under her breastbone, making her catch her breath, and she could find no way to say anything more.
The white handkerchief smelled of his skin after it had been crushed in his hand, the traces of his personal scent still lingering. It was all she could do not to turn her face further into it, inhale that scent, take it deep into her. She wanted to lift her hand, press it against the fingers that held the cotton, crush them against her face so she could remember how it had felt to have him hold her, comfort her.
She could feel the warmth of his body next to hers, the weight of his arm around her shoulder. She’d longed for him to hold her like this in the long, dark days after she’d lost their baby. She’d even thought about contacting him again, or perhaps daring to travel to Corsica to find him and tell him what had happened. Surely at least sharing the loss and the sorrow with him would have helped.