In silence they watched the transparent fiery liquid spill onto the dark carpet.
‘Anna,’ he said quietly, ‘why did you say you needed me?’
Her face rose to meet his gaze. Her eyes were stark, her bottom lip trembling.
All these weeks he’d been determined to think the worst. Anna had made assumptions but he had too. He could admit that.
She swallowed a number of times before saying in a voice so small he had to strain to hear, ‘I lost our baby.’
‘What...?’ The question died on his lips as the cold mist in his head froze to ice.
The devastation on her face was so complete that he knew with gut-wrenching certainty that he hadn’t misheard her.
He could no longer speak. His tongue felt alien in his mouth.
He gazed at his wife’s white face and huge pain-filled eyes and the room began to spin around them. His heart roaring in his ears, he reached out blindly for her but then his knees buckled beneath him and he groped the arm of the nearest chair before they gave way completely.
Dio, what had he done?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ANNA, HER STOMACH CHURNING, bile rising inside her, clenched her hand into a fist and shoved it against her mouth to stop herself from screaming.
How she’d prevented the screams from ripping out of her when it had all come back to her that evening she didn’t know, could only guess it had been iron determination not to let the liar she’d married see her misery or the avid curious faces of their peers that had made her succeed. But now the words were out and there was no putting them back and it hit her like a tsunami that had been gathering into a peak and now came crashing down on her.
That last piece of her memory had come when she’d glanced at the menu in the hotel and read that their first course was smoked duck.
She’d been eating smoked duck in their Parisian hotel when she’d confessed to Melissa that her period was three days late.
She’d never seen Stefano lost for words before, never seen him be anything but arrogantly self-possessed. Seeing the colour drain from his horror-struck face sliced through the protective shield she’d been clinging to and her whole frame collapsed.
She fell onto her side and brought her knees up to her chin, wrapping her arms around them, and wept as she hadn’t done since she was fourteen years old and she’d woken to the realisation that she would never see her father again.
The pain was unbearable, carving through her like a white-hot knife.
Through the sobs racking her body, she was aware of movement. Stefano had shifted to sit beside her on the floor.
It only made her sob harder. It was as if she were purging herself of all the pain in one huge tidal wave of grief. The loss of her father, her mother’s desertion, her sister’s betrayal and, fresher and more acute than all this, the loss of the man she loved and the child she’d so badly wanted.
That was something else her amnesia had anaesthetised her against: her increasingly desperate need for a child. Stefano’s child. She’d sensed her marriage fragmenting around her and had tried to push the need aside, knowing theirs wasn’t the stable marriage one should bring a child into. It hadn’t stopped her craving one and when she’d discovered she was pregnant her joy had been so pure and true that for a few magical hours she’d allowed herself to believe that everything would work out between them and that Stefano would stop pushing her away and let her into his heart.
Now, with her memories acutely fresh, she had to accept what she’d been unable to accept in the month before she’d hit her head and slipped into blissful ignorance: that their relationship was over and all her dreams were dead.
It was a long time before the tears stopped flowing and her shuddering frame stilled enough for her to think clearly again. Her chest and throat sore, she dried her eyes with the hem of her dress and hauled herself into a sitting position with her legs crossed as she’d sat when she had been a child.
Stefano, who hadn’t said a word, stretched his legs out beside her and gave a long sigh. ‘You were pregnant?’ he asked in a tone of voice she’d never heard before. He sounded...defeated.
She gulped for air, wishing with all her might that she could lapse back into ignorant bliss. ‘Do you remember I switched the contraceptive injection I was using?’
He nodded jerkily.
‘I forgot it was an eight-week course and not a twelve-week like the old one.’ She sucked in more air, remembering how all over the place she’d been emotionally at that time, how her fears about her marriage had come to cloud everything. ‘When I told Melissa I was three days late she couldn’t believe I hadn’t done a pr
egnancy test. She dragged me around Paris looking for a chemist so we could buy one.’ She almost smiled at the memory. It was pretty much the first time in a long while that she had been happy and the last time she and Melissa had been comfortable with each other. ‘I didn’t think I was. I thought it was the kind of thing women knew instinctively.’
‘But you were?’
She nodded and swallowed back the choking feeling in her throat. ‘I was going to wait until the morning before I did the test but I couldn’t resist doing it when we got back to the hotel. I was so distrustful of the result that I dragged Melissa back out to get another one and that came out positive too. That’s why I called you. I was so happy I couldn’t wait to tell you.’ She cast him a rueful stare. ‘And I was feeling a bit guilty for not taking the test with you.’