‘Like Vassilou.’
‘Did your mouth flatten like that in distaste, Leandros?’ she challenged the expression on his grim face. ‘If you can’t see the difference between “Do you really need to wear those terrible trousers, Isobel?” and “Ah, Kyria, you look so cool and fresh today!” well, I certainly can. Or—some babies are ill-judged and ill-timed, Isobel.’ Her eyes began to sting. She swallowed thickly. ‘Words like that when spoken by the mother of your husband rarely shore up an ailing marriage. They help to shatter it.’
‘My mother could not have said such a thing to you,’ he denied, but he’d gone pale. He knew she was telling the truth. ‘She would not be so—’
‘Cruel?’ she finished for him when the word became glued to his tight upper lip. ‘“Maybe it was for the best.”’ Hoarsely she quoted his own choice of words back at him. ‘“We were not ready for this.”’
He swung his back to her and walked over to stare out of the window. The desire to leap on that back and pummel it to the ground sang in her blood. If she shook any more fiercely she would have to sit down. He had lifted the lid on black memories, and now she was standing here being consumed by them.
‘I was ashamed of myself when I said that,’ he uttered.
‘Good,’ she commended. ‘I was ashamed of you too.’ With that she walked over to the chest of drawers and withdrew a fresh nightshirt then went into the bathroom. She didn’t shut the door because she was not running away this time. Not from this—not from anything ever again.
He came to stand in the doorway. With her back firmly to him she dropped the robe and replaced it with the clean nightshirt. ‘You were inconsolable and I did not know how to cope with your grief,’ he said huskily.
‘No, you were busy and had to be pulled out of an important meeting,’ she gave her own version of events. ‘And if it wasn’t bad enough that you didn’t want me to get pregnant in the first place, you then found yourself having to deal with an hysterical woman who didn’t appreciate ‘“Maybe it is for the best.”’
‘All right,’ he rasped. ‘So I did not want us to have a baby at that time!’
She swung round to look at his face as he dared to admit that! No wonder his skin looked grey!
‘We were both too young. Our marriage was in a mess! You were miserable; I was miserable! We had stopped communicating on any level—’
‘Especially between the sheets.’
‘Yes, between the bloody sheets!’ he grated, and suddenly he was swinging away from the door and gripping her upper arms. ‘I adored you. You fascinated me! You sparkled and sizzled and took on all-comers with a courage that took my breath away. When you were in my arms it was like holding something powerfully special. But our marriage had not had the time to grow beyond that all-consuming physical obsession before you were presenting me with a red stop light. I resented having to stop!’
‘I didn’t ask you to.’
‘You did not need to.’ His sigh took the anger out of him; dropping his hands, he moved away. ‘You did not see how fragile you looked, as if you would shatter if I so much as touched you.’
He walked back into the bedroom. This time it was Isobel that followed him. ‘Couldn’t you have just told me that instead of turning cold on me?’
‘Tell you that I was such a selfish swine that I did not want half a lover in my bed?’ He released a self-derogatory laugh. ‘Tell you that I did not want to share your body with anything?’ An oath was thrust out from the cavernous depths of his chest. ‘I despised myself. I did not know what was happening inside my own head! When you lost the baby I believed I had wished it to happen. I still believe that. My punishment was to lose you, and I was willing to take it. I was willing to take any punishment so long as I was not forced to face you with what I had done.’
‘So you let me walk away.’ She understood him now.
‘You tied me in so many knots I was relieved to see you go.’
‘And broke my heart all over again,’ she said with painful honesty. ‘Didn’t it occur to you that I needed you to come for me?’
His shook his head; his shoulders were hunched, his gaze grimly fixed on his bare feet. ‘I despised myself. It was easy, therefore, to convince myself that you despised me too.’
‘I did.’
Silence fell. It came with a heavy thud. Isobel looked at the spacious bedroom with its cool floors and lavender walls and purple accessories, and wondered how silence could hurt so much.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she murmured eventually. ‘The baby, I mean,’ she added, then had to swallow tears when he lifted his dark head to send her an agonisingly unprotected look. ‘The statistics for losing a first baby in the first three months of pregnancy are high. It was simply bad luck.’
She tried a shrug to punctuate her absolute belief in that, but it didn’t quite come off and she had to turn away in the end, wrapping her arms across her body and clutching at her shoulders with tense fingers that shook. A pair of arms arrived to cover her arms; long fingers threaded tensely with hers. It was so good to feel him hold her that she couldn’t hold back the small sob.
‘I had my own guilt to deal with,’ she thickly confided. ‘I felt I had failed in every way a woman could. I had to leave because I couldn’t stand everyone’s pitying expressions and the knowledge that they thought the loss of our baby more or less summed up our disaster of a marriage.’
He remained silent but his arms tightened, offering comfort instead of words. On a small whimper she broke the double arm-lock so she could turn and give back some comfort by placing her arms around his shoulders and pressing her face into the warm strength of his neck.
‘Tomorrow we begin making a better job of this second chance we have given ourselves,’ he ordained gruffly.
She nodded.