Guess what! I’m married! And if you think yours was a disgustingly rushed affair, well, wait till you hear about mine!
Jemma grinned, settling herself back to enjoy a good read. Frew, it seemed, had taken Trina off to Barbados and married her on a beach! They had been away a week, and been back in London a week. Trina was now madly trying to find a house for them.
Frew’s flat is just too small for us both, what with all my office stuff littering up the place and the work he brings home piled everywhere. We should have thought more about it before deciding to live at his place. It may be nearer to his office than our flat was, but at least ours had your bedroom free to turn into an office. Still, it’s too late now. I closed the lease on our old place, so now we’ve just got to find something bigger.
The flat was gone. Jemma felt the tiniest bit of disturbance within her bubble—as if some of the air was trying to escape. No home, she realised. Nothing in London to go back to if she ever felt she needed to. It felt a bit strange, realising just how totally she was now dependent on Leon.
The sound of approaching footsteps almost had her falling off her lounger in an effort to snatch her straw sunhat up off the deck and quickly stuff it on her head. Leon appeared, just as she had settled herself back on her lounger looking as though she hadn’t moved in hours.
He came to stand beside her, silently offering her a tall glass of iced water and two small pills. Making heavy weather of it, she pulled herself into a sitting position, exchanged the glass and pills with him for the letter, then found herself studying him covertly from beneath the shadowed brim of her hat.
He was wearing nothing more than a faded old pair of dark grey shorts—his usual attire when aboard the yacht—and he looked big and lean and brown, the dark cluster of crisp black hair on his broad chest curling downwards over the flat planes of his stomach to disappear beneath the elasticated waist of his shorts.
Her senses leapt and she looked quickly dow
n and away. It never had done her any good to feed her weak love of simply looking at him, she noted drily. Her senses always ended up spoiling it.
And her senses were not allowed to ignite, she drily reminded herself. Because this was a ‘no sex’ marriage. Ironic really, when before it had been a ‘no marriage’ sexual relationship! He had kissed her only once since the day they married when he’d turned her into his arms and placed his cool lips against her own in what she could only describe as a civil seal to their civil marriage!
Since then—well, the matter of sharing a bed had never arisen again. And, other than the fact that she sunbathed in next to nothing, for most of the time they were both scrupulously respectful of the other’s privacy.
Quite a change from those long lazy weekends they’d used to spend invading each other’s privacy as if it were their right!
Still, she mused, it had its benefits. Without the added ingredient of sex to complicate their relationship, she and Leon had actually become quite good friends. And although she sometimes awoke in the middle of the night, her body tight and hot with a need which could sometimes hold her tense in desperation, she had never so much as considered giving in to the feelings and creeping into the room next door and Leon’s bed. Mainly, she acknowledged ruefully, because Leon had not shown any inclination that he still wanted her physically. He flirted and teased in that light-hearted way friends did with each other, but she had never glimpsed, even once, any hint that he could still desire her as a lover.
Not that she blamed him. With a small grimace, she glanced down her reclining body where their child thumped rhythmically against the tightly drawn walls of its home. She had to be about as undesirable as she could get!
‘This is from Trina?’ he asked, breaking into her thoughts to wave the letter at her.
‘Oh, yes,’ she confirmed. ‘You can read it if you want,’ she invited, popping the pills into her mouth and swallowing them down with the water. She did it all without really thinking about it now. It had become a ritual she had grown used to over the weeks. If it wasn’t Leon following her around making sure she took her daily dose of iron, it was one of his stewards.
‘You do not mind?’
Jemma just shrugged. ‘There’s nothing in it I wouldn’t want you to read. Just Trina going on about weddings and flats that are too small...’ She fell into contemplative silence, unaware that Leon studied her clouded face for a few moments before hitching his hips on to the nearby table and bending his dark head to read.
‘Your friend sounds happy, agape mou,’ Leon muttered quietly after reading the letter.
‘Mmm,’ Jemma replied absently, sitting up to hug her arms around her bent knees.
‘So, what has she said to—upset you?’
‘Upset?’ she echoed. ‘I’m not upset,’ she denied. ‘Just...’ A sigh broke from her and she went silent.
Leon frowned, his dark eyes fixed thoughtfully on her. ‘You wished you had attended her wedding?’ he persisted despite her denial.
Jemma shook her head. ‘It wasn’t that kind of wedding, was it?’ A romantic beach wedding in the Caribbean was not the kind you invited all your friends to!
Leon glanced at the hurriedly written sheet of paper in his hand, his puzzled frown darkening his face as he quickly scanned the chatty but pretty innocuous sentences searching for a clue to what had put that gloomy expression on her face.
‘She closed the lease on our flat,’ Jemma murmured suddenly. ‘I spent four of the happiest years of my life there. It was my home, and I know it sounds silly, but it’s suddenly hit me that I no longer have one. No home. No place in England I can actually call my own.’
‘But we have a home in London,’ Leon pointed out. ‘I don’t see the problem.’
‘Your home.’ She glanced at him over the top of her knees. ‘Yes, I know. But it isn’t—’ The same, she had been going to say, but could see from his expression that he didn’t understand. Couldn’t understand what it felt like to be made suddenly aware that you had nothing—nothing you could call your absolute own, even if it was only a silly little flat on the cheap side of London with draughty windows and a bath-tap that leaked. She didn’t even have a best friend any more. Trina belonged to Frew now, just, she supposed heavily, as she belonged to Leon.
Glancing thoughtfully at him, she wondered if he would understand if she tried to explain, then decided it was at least worth a try. ‘I spent most of my younger years moving from house to house, town to town with two parents who were constantly unfaithful to each other. One would find him or herself a lover and go off for a month or two then they would come back and the other would be off.’ She shrugged, knowing that really did not explain anything more than that she had two faithless parents. ‘I never knew from one week to the next which one of them I would be living with. And I never got a chance to develop long-term friendships with any children of my own age because I was constantly being shunted around. Fresh starts, they called it,’ she mocked. ‘Which meant different towns, different schools, different parents—different homes.’ She shrugged again, her blue eyes bleak. ‘When they died and I moved to London to work I answered an advert in the paper for a flatmate, which was how I met Trina. She, and that little flat, gave me the first taste of real stability I had ever known. Four years,’ she murmured softly. ‘Belonging to someone and somewhere. And now it’s gone again.’
‘And you do not believe that I can give you all of that and for much longer?’