And yet, instead of feeling resentment or irritation, it was almost a relief to open the sitting-room door and to slip off her shoes and curl up on the settee.
She was asleep when Lewis came back in with the tea-tray. He studied her broodingly for a time. This afternoon in his arms she had felt so…so right, as though she belonged there; as though she wanted to belong there, and then he had kissed her and she had aroused him so damn much. He put down the tea-tray quietly so as not to disturb her, and then walked over to her.
‘Lacey.’
The sound of Lewis’s voice brought Lacey out of her sleep. She blinked in confusion as she looked up at him, realising that he must have switched off the light when he came into the room because now it was only illuminated by the soft glow of a table-lamp.
‘I’m sorry to wake you, but if you stay curled up like that for much longer you’ll get cramp. I’ve made some tea.’
Lacey looked towards the tray on the coffeetable. She felt disorientated, tired, as though she had been asleep for much longer than a few minutes.
She struggled to sit up and put her feet down on the floor but, as she moved, Lewis’s prediction came true and agonising cramp shot through her leg.
She cried out automatically, reaching towards her calf, but Lewis beat her to it, his fingers curling firmly round her skin, massaging the cramped muscles.
Almost immediately the pain started to recede, relaxing its grip on her body.
‘It’s…it’s gone now,’ she told Lewis huskily, drawing herself away from him and trying to sit upright.
He had been leaning towards her while he massaged her leg, but now as he released her he sat down beside her on the settee, his body far too close to her own.
Had she thought about it she would have chosen one of the chairs to sit in, but it had never occurred to her that she might get cramp, nor that he would actually choose to sit beside her. Perhaps he was thinking of Jessica, she reflected painfully, although it was highly unlikely that their daughter would come downstairs, not after what she had said to them before going to bed.
‘It’s rather like being two teenagers again, knowing someone is upstairs, listening,’ Lewis commented ruefully as he reached across her to pour the tea. ‘Only in our case it’s not being caught out doing something we shouldn’t that’s the problem, but being caught out not doing something we should.’
‘I don’t think Jess will come down,’ Lacey told him, unable to stop her glance from straying to the clock on the video.
‘It’s too soon,’ Lewis told her, reading her mind. ‘I know we’re supposed to be impatient and in love, but I think that, no matter how impatiently I might be supposed to have made love to you, Jess would consider it less than romantic of me to leave so quickly. After all, as far as she’s concerned we have plans to make…a future to discuss.’
Lacey bent her head so that he wouldn’t see the emotion in her eyes. When he talked of their being lovers…of their having a future, no matter how hard she fought against it, she couldn’t help being emotionally affected by the difference between the fiction and the reality.
&nbs
p; Already, after so short a space of time, she had grown so dependent on his being there, on being able to see him…talk with him…so that, no matter how much pain his pretence caused her, once he was gone what she would have to endure would be even worse.
To try to distract herself and keep her mind off her emotional vulnerability, she said unsteadily, ‘It must have been very difficult for you when you discovered…when you learned about…about the disorder, especially since, like Jessica, you had had no idea when you were growing up.’
She looked across at him and saw the emotion flicker through his eyes.
‘Difficult. Yes, I suppose it was, although at the time there was almost too much to do…too many other things to think about. I didn’t really have time to dwell on it or…’
He stopped abruptly. His voice had been clipped, his words terse as though even speaking about the subject at all was something he would have preferred not to do.
Realising that he had most probably only discovered the truth at about the the time he had divorced her and was living with his new love, Lacey could well understand what he meant, although it still must have come as a terrible shock, to him and to the woman he loved.
She tried to imagine how she would have felt had he still been married to her when he made the discovery. How would she have reacted? How had that other woman reacted?
Not wanting to probe, and yet feeling that she had to ask, she enquired softly, ‘How did you find out, Lewis? You told me that you didn’t know about the inherited tendency when you and I married and…’
‘It was my father. He told me. Or, rather, he wrote to me.’
Lacey stared at him. ‘Your father?’
‘Yes. Remember how you encouraged me to contact him by making enquiries through Australia House? When eventually the authorities there managed to trace him, I wrote to him explaining who I was, telling him that Mother had died, telling him that I was m…that I would like to make contact with him.
‘Quite some time went by without any response, and then one day there was a letter. Not the letter I had hoped for,’ he told her bleakly.
‘In it, he, my father, told me that the reason, or one of the reasons, he had left my mother was because he had discovered that she was a carrier. Apparently she had known but had kept it a secret from him. When I was born there were complications, various tests had to be carried out, and the truth came to light.