Her heart was turning over in pain for him but she was wise enough not to show it. In all the months they had been together his past life had been a closed book to her, apart from the bare essential facts he had told her in the first weeks they’d met. Any approach by herself to discuss his childhood had always met with a firm rebuff and change of subject. ‘How old were you when the first adoption attempt failed?’ she asked softly.
‘Six and a half.’
There wasn’t a trace of emotion in his voice, but she now knew that meant nothing. Inside there was still a small hurt boy, and she’d been a fool, such a fool, not to see it. Perhaps if she’d been older, more experienced, when they had met she would have understood better, even persuaded him to show the festering wound the clean, healing light of day? But she hadn’t understood. And he hadn’t said a word.
‘That must have been hard for you,’ she said steadily.
‘It wasn’t too easy on the prospective parents either,’ he said with a touch of bitter amusement. ‘They had chosen a cute little boy with black curls and a serious face—their description, by the way, not mine—who virtually wrecked their house and turned their neat, orderly way of life upside down. We all made mistakes—I was crying out for help—’ she thought it indicative of how damaged he was that he couldn’t, even now, say love ‘—and they reacted in all the wrong ways.’
He glanced at her then, one swift glance, as he said, ‘Not that it was their fault. They were just nice middle-class people who didn’t have a clue what had hit them. They should have had a sweet little Shirley Temple type girl, not a ferocious little boy with a chip on his shoulder as big as him.’
‘And the second time?’ she asked carefully.
‘That was a year later. I was placed in another foster home after the first adoption attempt failed, and I think I was happier there than I’d ever been or ever was again. They were good folk, kind, and they understood kids. They’d got two boys of their own with learning difficulties but they still took on a couple of foster children and gave them as much time and attention as their own kids. Anyway, I was taken away from them and placed with a couple of virtual strangers who I’d visited a few times on “little tea-parties”, and I went ape.’
Marianne nodded. She could imagine, and she was filled with burning anger that someone in charge hadn’t understood how things really were.
‘I think I thought if I played up enough they’d send me back to Marlene and Jim, but of course it didn’t work out like that. I was sent to a children’s home and told Marlene and Jim had another child living with them and didn’t have room for me. I don’t think the matron who told me meant to be unkind,’ he said flatly, his face hard, ‘but it did something to me. Something died, Marianne. Call it the ability to reach out, to be normal. I don’t know. But from that point on I stopped needing anyone. I became ungovernable and totally opportunistic; if it wasn’t for the fact that I found I enjoyed school and proving I was better than everyone else I’d have probably ended up in Borstal.’
She had been so wrapped up in what he was saying that she hadn’t noticed where they were going, but now, as the car pulled up in a small side street, she saw they were close to Rochelle’s. ‘I don’t want to eat at Rochelle’s,’ she said hastily, without considering her words.
‘What?’ As he cut the engine he turned to her, the grey eyes narrowed and very dark. ‘Why not?’
Because in Rochelle’s everyone knows who you are and how much you are worth, she thought with absolute clarity. They’ll fawn over us and you’ll be Zeke Buchanan, multimillionaire and tycoon. I won’t get another word out of you that means anything. She shrugged carefully. ‘Myriad reasons,’ she said lightly. ‘There’s a couple of pubs and various eating places all round here; let’s leave the car and walk.’
The narrowed gaze moved to the window, where the odd desultory snowflake was beginning to whirl in the wind.
‘Not far,’ she said quickly. ‘Just a little way.’
They found a small bistro on the first corner, and once they had ordered the food and a bottle of wine Marianne leant across the table and said softly, ‘Were you telling me in the car that you don’t need me, Zeke? Is that what you were saying?’ He would never know how much it hurt.
He stared at her, his black hair ruffled from the biting wind outside the warm confines of the restaurant and his grey eyes reflecting the light just above their heads, which turned them almost silver. He had never looked more handsome, or more unapproachable.
She waited, not daring to breathe, for his answer, wondering how everything could appear so normal and mundane when she was crying, screaming inside. She had opened a can of worms that day she had run from the apartment and she didn’t know if she was strong enough to bear what he might say. She loved him, she would die loving him, and yet he was a stranger to her. She had lived with him, eaten with him, laughed with him and slept with him, they had shared physical intimacies she had never imagined in her wildest dreams, and yet all the time there had been a huge great chunk of him he had kept all to himself.
Suddenly she was angry, too. He should have told her some of this before; it had been her right as his wife to at least know what she was battling against. He had cheated her.
And then, almost as though he had read her mind, he said the exact same thing himself. But suddenly Zeke—her Zeke—was back, and the relief was overwhelming for a moment. ‘I’m saying I cheated you, Marianne,’ he said heavily, ‘but as for needing you…’ He looked at her with agonised eyes. ‘You’ll never know. Not in a million years.’
He shook his head, and then as her hand reached out and gripped one of his he looked down at it for a moment, before raising his head and saying wearily, ‘I’ll destroy you if you stay with me and I’ve no right to inflict any of this on you. Don’t you understand? I am what I am; I can’t change. I knew what I was doing, deep down, when I kept you from finding a job. I wanted to keep you locked away. But then you know that, don’t you?’
‘Why? Why, Zeke?’ she pressed urgently.
‘Because I needed to know you were mine, totally, that you weren’t seeing or talking to other men,’ he said with shocking matter-of-factness. And then his gaze gripped hers as he said grimly, ‘And how does that add up with the rest of what I’ve been saying, eh? If I could have locked you away, I would have. That’s how I felt.’
And until he had met her he had never been plagued by that emotion before, she thought intuitively. He had liked his other women to be independent and self-sufficient, living their own lives and making no claims on him, and then with her a whole new set of feelings had come into play, and it had made him feel weak, confused, vulnerable.
Because of his upbringing he hadn’t gone through the normal family ups and downs to knock off the edges and round him off as a person. All the punches life had thrown at him had been knock-out blows aimed straight for the jugular—annihilation and being crushed, or retaliation and militant aggression; that was how he had seen it. Get the other fellow before he gets you. Life on his own terms and damn the rest. And then she had happened.
‘Don’t you trust me, Zeke?’ she asked shakily.
He made a sound deep in his throat and removed his hand from under hers, leaning back in his chair and surveying her broodingly. And then he smiled bitterly. ‘My honest little wife,’ he said mordantly. ‘Nothing swept under the carpet.’ He straightened slightly, and then, as the waiter brought their bottle of wine, took it from him with a nod of thanks as he said, ‘I’ll see to it.’
She waited until he had poured two glasses of the deep red wine, and then she said again, ‘Do you, Zeke? Do you trust me?’
‘No.’
She had been expecting it, but it still hit her like a blow in the solar plexus. ‘Thanks.’ She couldn’t quite keep the bitterness from showing through.