He sighed, hearing the self-defence behind the attack. ‘And we all have our limits of endurance,’ he pointed out. ‘You almost reached yours after Michael was born and he gave you hell for four months solid. And the twins developed a severe strain of measles.’
‘And I found out about your affair with Lydia,’ she added coolly.
But Daniel shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That was the result of my reaching my limits of endurance, Rachel. I almost lost everything in the ugliest hostile take-over attempt I’ve ever heard of. Harveys—a bigger holding company than mine—decided it wanted me out of the running, and it went for me with every weapon it had. Including trying to slap a fraud charge on me.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘THE Harvey take-over?’
But she’d always assumed that it had been Daniel taking them over—not the other way round!
He nodded, unaware how new comprehension was holding her still with shock.
‘It was bitter and it was bloody,’ he said. ‘And I had to take risks that made my mind boggle when I thought about them after it was all over. And where, at any other difficult period, I’d always had you to turn to for some blessed relief from it all, you were out of reach—tired and weak, and run off your feet trying to share yourself between two sick children and a very demanding baby and, selfish as I know it sounds,’ he sighed out heavily, ‘I resented the whole bloody lot of them! I needed you, Rachel! But you couldn’t be reached! And—God forgive me—Lydia could.’ He sucked in an anguished breath and let it out again. ‘With Lydia’s frankly brilliant help,’ he conceded, ‘I won the battle with Harveys. But for some reason that same God only knows, because I know I can’t work it out, the relief of it sent me staggering over those limits of endurance I mentioned, and right into her arms.’
‘How long?’
He glanced at her, his brows pulled into a puzzled frown. ‘How long, what?’
‘Did you have her as your mistress—how long?’ she repeated rawly.
He shook his head, an odd expression twisting at the corners of his mouth. ‘She never was,’ he admitted. ‘Not in the sense you’re implying anyway. I have tried to tell you that once or twice,’ he added wryly, ‘but you refused so much as to listen, never mind believe, and— God knows,’ he sighed, scraping his fingers through his dark hair, ‘
I didn’t blame you. After all, I’d been unfaithful to you in every way but the ultimate act, indulging in my own light relief from all the pressures by taking Lydia out instead of coming home to you. Wining her, dining her…’ His shoulders hunched as if the memory clenched at something vicious inside him.
‘Mandy told me you were seen coming out of Lydia’s flat,’ Rachel put in huskily.
He nodded. ‘After my battle with Harveys, I went a little crazy,’ he confessed. She could see he didn’t like admitting that; the self-contempt was etched into his rigid jaw. ‘I just sat here and drank myself stupid until I wasn’t fit to drive myself home. Lydia coaxed me into her car and drove me to her flat to sober up. Oh,’ he added with a cynical twist to his mouth, ‘don’t get me wrong. She knew what she was doing and I knew what she was expecting of me when I let her take me there but—’ he stopped to smile bleakly. ‘In the end, I couldn’t. She wasn’t you and, drunk or not, the very thought of laying a hand on her made my skin crawl. She must have seen it,’ he grimaced, ‘because she just walked out of the room. I fell into a drunken stupor and awoke in a strange bed the next morning. Where she slept that night I have no idea, but she came back into the room just as I was struggling to pull myself together and trying to remember just what the hell I had done, already horrified and disgusted with my own behaviour even before she smiled and told me that I wasn’t bad for a man with as much alcohol inside me as I’d had.’
He stopped to swallow and Rachel went pale, her heart dropping with a sickening thump to her stomach. ‘She kept me wallowing in my own self-disgust for months before she told me the truth. It was her way of getting revenge on me, I think,’ he said, ‘because I took my business away from her and gave it to one of her partners. The night she spoke to you on the telephone was a vindictive attempt to hurt me through you. And the last straw as far as I was concerned. When I called her back I informed her that I was going to remove my business right out of her sphere. Now I’m talking real money here, Rachel,’ he inserted grimly, ‘a very lucrative account. And the fact that she had now managed to lose it completely was not going to sit well with her co-partners, which frightened her—so much so that she lost control of her tongue. The insults which flew between the two of us then were so vile they were unrepeatable, but one thing she did let slip, which went at least some way to making me feel better about myself—she told me I never touched her. Oh,’ he added deridingly, ‘not in those words exactly. She was out to slay and used the kind of insults gauged to cut a man’s ego in half. But to me they were like music to my ears! I never touched her and, oddly, I knew suddenly that she was telling the truth at last. Knew because my own instincts had been telling me the self-same thing through all the weeks she kept me dangling on that tormenting string.
‘And that—’ he turned to look her directly in the eye for the first time ‘—is the full unvarnished truth of it—if you can bring yourself to believe it, of course, and I wouldn’t blame you in the least if you couldn’t.’
Rachel lowered her eyes, staring at her hands where they twisted tensely together on her lap. She wanted to believe him, needed to believe him, but…
‘Money, power—you can keep them,’ he ordained huskily. ‘If I can have your forgiveness in return.’
‘You already have that,’ she told him irritably. But the doubts still clouded her eyes.
‘Then what else do you want me to say?’ he sighed in frustration. ‘I cannot make your mind forget! Only you can do that.’
Impatiently she got up, angry suddenly that he was laying the problem their marriage had become on her. He had said a lot—revealed a lot—about himself, how he thought and felt. But none of it helped how she thought and felt; none of it revealed anything about the inner Rachel.
And maybe that was her problem, she conceded, feeling his eyes following her as she moved restlessly about the office. She, like Daniel, had always kept a part of herself hidden away. Dreams, he’d called them. But how was he supposed to know her dreams were fulfilled in him, in being his wife, the mother of his children, when she’d never actually said it?
Could she say it now? With all the hurt and misery she had carried around with her over the last months, could she afford to be as open and as honest with him as he had just been with her? To save what was left of their marriage, could she do it? Could—dared—she put her love on the line for him again?
Sighing into the heavy silence, she turned back to face him. Then she saw them, hanging in a neat row on the wall above Daniel’s head. And her heart stopped beating.
Sam, Kate, Michael and herself. All professionally mounted and framed. Her very own sketches looking down at her from the wall of Daniel’s office.
‘I stole them,’ he confessed, coming to his feet as she walked slowly towards them. ‘I wanted them to look at whenever I needed Do you mind?’ he asked anxiously.
Rachel was amazed she hadn’t missed them! Then she remembered the turmoil still waiting for her at home and smiled to herself. She wouldn’t miss a three-piece suite in that chaos! ‘You’ve managed to get the cross removed,’ she noted, staring at her own face and feeling oddly exposed by what it revealed. ‘It isn’t a good likeness of me.’ She dismissed what her own eyes were telling her.
‘It is you,’ Daniel insisted. ‘The real you. They all are to me,’ he added, with a quiet pride which warmed her right through. ‘Quite a family gallery, when you think about it.’ He smiled wryly.
‘Except you’re not there.’