Abby could feel her resistance fading but she clung on, not prepared to concede just yet. ‘Isn’t a scandal the thing you want to avoid?’ If their desert marriage was revealed there was going to be one and she was going to be at the centre of it. Saying yes would mean saying goodbye to any semblance of a private life for the next year and a half...could she cope with that? ‘Or are you suggesting people aren’t going to notice my sudden appearance?’
His eyes moved from her vivid face to her auburn hair. ‘These situations can be managed,’ he assured her smoothly. ‘There are people whose job it is to put a positive spin on anything.’
An image of her future life of endless ceremony and presence flashed before her eyes, and it was followed immediately by an equally vivid picture of her grandparents pottering around the garden of their bungalow with a front door that didn’t have six bolts on it.
‘I wish—’ she began.
He cut across her, his tone sardonic. ‘I’m sure that his wife wishes my brother were not dead.’
Abby felt a stab of guilty contrition—she’d been so self-absorbed that she hadn’t even considered how he must be feeling—and her mouth twisted in a grimace of self-condemnation.
‘I am truly sorry.’ Belated but better than not at all, she gave her condolences, not that he seemed to recognise them as such.
‘Sorry?’ he echoed, his dark eyes drawn into an interrogative line above his nose.
‘About your brother,’ she explained awkwardly.
‘Oh...’ he grunted as he eased one long leg onto the bed and then the other, murmuring a soft word of thanks when she pushed a couple of pillows under his head, her tummy quivering in sympathy at the sight of the bruises on the golden expanse of his stomach.
His eyes were closed and for a moment she thought he’d fallen asleep, and she was thinking about creeping away when he opened them again; the electric-blue had a febrile quality.
‘We weren’t close,’ he revealed.
‘But he was your brother.’ She’d always wanted a sibling and had envied the big, noisy family who lived next to her grandparents.
‘Half-brother,’ he corrected, closing his eyes again. ‘So do we have a deal?’
She glanced up from her contemplation of her clenched fists. ‘I need to think.’
‘Fine.’ He closed his eyes.
The tension had barely begun to leave her bunched shoulders when he spoke again.
‘Let me know what you decide in two minutes.’
His eyes opened, the glazed glow in the blue depths doing nothing to ease her stress levels.
‘I didn’t come here to...to...stay married, I came here to disentangle our—’
‘Past, present, future?’
‘We don’t have a future.’ They both heard the questioning upward inflection in the last word.
‘Eighteen months. That’s all I ask.’
Abby, the conflict clearly written on her face, shook her head in a slow negative motion. ‘No... I can’t.’ An image of her grandparents floated into her head with their brave smiles, noisy neighbours and no garden. Pops had so loved his garden.
Her shoulders dropped in defeat as she took the step that sent her over the cliff edge she had been balancing on.
‘Yes, all right, I’ll do it.’ The moment she spoke she knew it was the right, the only response she could have given, but it didn’t stop her feeling sick, literally.
Hand pressed to her mouth, she turned away, in her haste stumbling over the trailing wires that must at some point have been attached to Zain.
That was when the bells started ringing!