by Penny Jordan
‘You can stop thinking about it,’ his curt voice told her grittily. ‘There isn’t a choice, Sara, and believe me I don’t intend to let you out of my sight until you’re safely married to me. I’m not going to take the risk of you…’
‘We can’t get married just like that,’ Sara protested, ignoring the last part of his speech. ‘What will Sam and Vanessa say…?’
‘What can they say?’ he half jeered. ‘Especially when they find out about the baby. Okay, so they might be surprised, but they’re hardly going to be shocked.’
‘It isn’t that. I’m not concerned about them knowing about the baby. At least…’ She bit her lip and looked away from him. ‘If Sam thinks I’m marrying you because I’m pregnant…’
She was unprepared for the look of anger that flashed across his face.
‘He won’t know, because you’re not going to say one word that will give him that impression,’ he told her bitingly. ‘As far as Vanessa and Sam are concerned, we’re quite desperately in love with one another, and I’m so frightened of losing you that I intend to marry you just as soon as it can be arranged. In fact, I don’t think we’ll bother telling them; we’ll just present them with a fait accompli.’
There were a hundred protests she ought to have made, but somehow they all remained unvoiced. It was rather shocking to discover how much she had changed, how much she craved the security and protection that Jonas gave her. Somehow it was easier to give in and let him take control than it was to protest.
‘I’d like to chain you to my side from now until we get married,’ he told her after they had visited the registrar and fixed up the details of the wedding, ‘but since that’s impossible I’m going to ask you to give me your word…’
‘That I won’t destroy your child?’ she finished shakily for him. It was unnerving to realise how jealous she felt already of her unborn child, secure in its father’s love in a way that she never could be. ‘I want to keep my baby, Jonas,’ she told him fiercely, ‘and because of that…’
‘You’ll marry me. I’m not under any illusions that you’d marry me for any other reason,’ he interrupted sardonically. ‘But if the baby turns out to be a boy, I promise you one thing; he isn’t going to be called Rick.’
Sara turned away, not wanting him to see the pain in her eyes.
Having insisted that she was in no fit condition to drive herself home, Jonas bundled her into his car, silencing her protests by saying that he would get his garage to pick hers up and drive it back for her later in the day.
Outside the cottage he cautioned her abruptly when she would have opened the door and left him the moment he stopped his car.
‘Remember, by the end of the week we’ll be married. If you want to convince Sam and Vanessa that it’s a love match you’ll have to do your bit too. I’ll come in with you.’
‘But my car. Sam…’
‘We’ll tell him you’ve got engine trouble and that having bumped into you in town I offered to bring you home. I also think we should have dinner together tonight. Oh, it’s all right,’ he assured her sardonically, seeing her face, ‘I won’t inflict my presence on you for any longer than necessary. We can eat at the house. I’ve got some paperwork to do, so I suggest you bring a book with you or something else to occupy your time. If we’re going to be at all convincing about this marriage we have to create at least an illusion of intimacy.’
She knew that he was right, but that didn’t make it any easier to endure the sensation of his fingers against her skin as they walked towards the cottage with his arm draped casually across her shoulder.
She could see the questioning surprise in Sam’s eyes when they walked in, as well she might, she thought wryly, remembering their earlier conversation.
Even so, Sam managed to hide his surprise as he chatted easily to Jonas, although he did glance rather curiously at Sara’s purposefully averted face when Jonas anounced that they were having dinner together.
Sam wasn’t given an opportunity to question her. Almost as though he did, in reality, not intend to let her out of his sight, Jonas insisted on taking her back to the house with him, claiming that in view of Vanessa’s defection to Sam, he needed Sara’s help in watering the plants in the greenhouses.
There was nothing she could do to protest effectively. There was no excuse she could give for not going with him.
They were married less than a week later. That neither Sam nor Vanessa evinced the shock she had expected was a little unnerving, and Sara was thankful that Jonas did not share her awareness of the reason behind the amused and knowledgeable smile with which Sam greeted his announcement.
They had gone straight from the register office to the cottage, and Sara now sat in silence as she listened to Jonas explaining that, because of pressure of business, they were not going to be able to go on honeymoon.
‘Why on earth was there all the rush, then?’ Vanessa demanded, grimacing faintly at her stepbrother. ‘Poor Sara, she didn’t even have time to look for a wedding dress, not to mention what the parents will say.’
‘They already know. I rang them the day Sara accepted my proposal and told them. As to the rush—well, apart from the obvious reason,’ he gave Sara a long, contemplative look that made her skin colour and Vanessa exclaim, ‘For heaven’s sake, Jonas, you’re embarrassing Sara to death, not to mention what you’re doing to me!’
‘And me,’ Sam interrupted with a grin. ‘Suddenly a whole fortnight seems far too long to wait to get you all to myself, Van,’ he teased his bride-to-be.
‘There is another reason.’
The seriousness of his tone alerted Sara to what he intended to do. In a fever of panic she reached out towards him, but he simply captured her hand in his, caressing the backs of her fingers in an almost absent-minded way.
‘Sara is carrying my child.’ Before anyone could make any comment he went on calmly, ‘We had intended to wait to make our announcement until after your wedding, but in the circumstances…’ He let his voice trail away and then turned to Sara, lifting her fingers to his mouth and lightly kissing them. Her response was totally out of proportion to the brevity of his caress. ‘We both decided it was better to be completely open about the situation. After all, you’d know soon enough anyway, and I must admit I can’t pretend to be anything other than delighted at the thought of becoming a father.’
Of course Sam insisted that they must all have a drink, and it was some time before Jonas exclaimed that they would have to leave. Sara had already packed a suitcase in anticipation, and when she came downstairs with it she found Sam waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs.
‘Jonas has gone with Vanessa to pick Carly up from playschool,’ he announced. ‘They won’t be very long. How long have you known you were pregnant?’ he asked quietly.
Sara’s silence betrayed her.
‘You didn’t have to marry him, you know, Sara; you could have come to me.’
‘I love him,’ she responded truthfully. ‘And this is the only way I could keep the baby.’
She saw Sam’s face and said huskily, ‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking, Sam, but how could I have told you? The first thing you’d have asked me would have been the name of the father. Can’t you see how embarrassing it would have been? Me pregnant by your brother-in-law. I was going to have an abortion,’ she added, feeling that having told him so much he might as well hear the rest. ‘I couldn’t go through with it in the end, and when Jonas found out and insisted we get married it seemed the right thing to do. Oddly enough, loving him made it that much harder.’
‘Does he know how you feel?’
She shook her head. ‘No…nor will he do. Like I said before, he doesn’t love me, he just…’ She broke off as she heard the car. ‘Please don’t repeat any of this to Vanessa, Sam,’ she begged her brother. ‘I didn’t want you to know, and there’s no reason…’
‘No, I won’t tell her. You didn’t expect him to say anything to us about the baby, did you?’
>
Sara shook her head.
‘Well, we would have had to know sooner or later, he was right about that, and if you hadn’t told me how you felt beforehand, after his performance today I’d have been totally convinced that the pair of you were deeply in love. Are you sure that…’
He broke off as Sara shook her head desperately. Vanessa, Carly and Jonas were already coming up the path towards them, and Sam, correctly interpreting her gesture, adroitly changed the subject before they were close enough to hear.
* * *
Sara’s initial relief that she wasn’t going to be called upon to endure the torment of a honeymoon alone with Jonas was abruptly terminated when they reached the house and he coolly announced that he would take her case up to his room. ‘Forgive me, I should have said our room,’ he amended wryly.
Sara couldn’t move. She stood at the bottom of the stairs too shocked to edit her thoughts as she blurted out, ‘Do you mean we’ll be sharing a bedroom?’
One dark eyebrow lifted satirically. ‘It is the custom, and bearing in mind the fact that we’re supposed to be wildly in love, Vanessa would be rather surprised, to say the least, if we deviated from it. Of course I suppose we could always improvise—suggest to her that we enjoy the romantic folly of creeping secretly from bedroom to bedroom in the small hours of the night,’ he added with fine sarcasm.
‘All right, you’ve made your point. But I don’t want to share a room with you.’
‘No… I can see that,’ he agreed suavely, and then mocked dulcetly, ‘as I remember it, you said you didn’t want to make love with me either…’
‘You know the reason for that.’ She was so frantic that he might guess the truth that her voice was unusually sharp with tension. ‘I told you, I pretended you were Rick.’
‘Good heavens, not quarrelling already, are you?’
Neither of them had heard Vanessa come in, and she laughed at their expressions. ‘It’s all right; I’m not staying. Sam has suggested that I use your room tonight, Sara, so that you can have a token honeymoon at least. I’ve just come back to collect a few things. Are you taking her somewhere special tonight, Jonas?’
He recovered far faster than she could, smiling at his sister with a lazy mockery that made shivers of unwanted pleasure curl down Sara’s spine.
‘Yes,’ he agreed softly. ‘In fact I was just taking her there when you interrupted.’
Vanessa’s eyes widened and then she laughed. ‘I’m not sure which of us it is you’re trying to shock, me or Sara,’ she complained, her eyes drawn from Sara’s flushed face to the flight of stairs leading up to the bedrooms. ‘Take her into the drawing-room and give her a glass of champagne instead,’ she suggested with a grin. ‘I promise I’ll be gone in ten minutes.’
In fact it was fifteen minutes before Sara heard Vanessa’s small car drive away, and for every one of them she had sat in a grimly tense silence, refusing the drink Jonas offered and hating him more than she had ever thought it possible to hate a man she also loved.
She waited until the car had disappeared before attempting to speak her anger, which was so intense that she could barely get the words out.
‘How dare you humiliate me like that?’ she demanded bitterly. ‘How could you humiliate me in front of Vanessa by intimating…’
‘That I couldn’t wait to take you to bed?’
He was watching her face like a cat at a mousehole, she saw, and she was fearfully conscious that the room was filled with an anger that didn’t emanate only from her.
‘Since when has that been humiliation?’ he demanded bitingly. ‘Most brides would consider it perfectly normal, not to say flattering, that their new husbands were so eager to make love to them, but since we’re talking of humiliation, I could point out to you that I find it less than pleasant to be constantly reminded that in your eyes my child was fathered by a ghost. You’re very quick to tell me you won’t share my bed, Sara, but as I remember it you didn’t need much persuasion the last time.’
What he said was all too sickeningly true, and Sara blenched at what he must think of her. In his eyes she must figure no better than a cheat and a fraud, a woman who claimed to love another man, but who was willing to accept his embraces instead.
‘I’m tired, Jonas,’ she protested huskily and not untruthfully, unwilling to pursue her own thoughts to their conclusion and suddenly exhausted by the antipathy between them that kept her nerves in such a constant state of tension.
‘You look it,’ he replied. ‘I’ll take you upstairs and show you the room, then I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you for a while.’ The look he gave her was mockingly derisory. ‘The greenhouses will need watering.’ He glanced at his watch as he opened the door for her to precede him, and even that simple economic movement, that brief glimpse of tanned sinewy skin, was enough to make her pulses hammer.
His bedroom was larger than the one she had occupied during her overnight stay, its décor in keeping with the elegance of the room, the furniture antique and the colour scheme quite obviously chosen to blend in with the lovely faded Aubusson carpet on the floor. The bed was huge and very high, complete with solid mahogany top and tail boards. In a smaller room it would have looked ridiculous, but in here it looked exactly right.
The sheets were linen and monogrammed. Sara touched them reverently. ‘They belonged to my great-grandmother,’ Jonas told her. ‘They were part of her trousseau, apparently. I got Mrs Lyons to make up the bed with them this morning. They seemed rather more bridal than the easy-care ones Vanessa seems to favour.’
For some reason his words hurt—perhaps because they brought home to her all that she would never have. In that one brief action she had seen an agonising glimpse of the lover Jonas would be if he really was in love. She had had another the day he had tried to tell her what he was beginning to feel for her, but she had recklessly destroyed those feelings like a small child destroying a longed-for toy in a fit of rebellious pique, and now it was too late. She shivered, and instantly he frowned.
‘You’re cold. Go downstairs and I’ll light the fire in the sitting-room before I go out. Mrs Lyons has left us something to eat…’
Like a wooden doll, Sara let him guide her back downstairs. She had entered this marriage willingly; she could hardly complain now because Jonas didn’t love her.
CHAPTER TEN
AFTER the first week of their marriage, Sara told herself that she had lived through the worst and she could scarcely get any more unhappy. She had learned painfully what it was like to sleep in the same bed as a man who seemed completely unaware of her presence—and equally undesirous of it, while she… For the first couple of nights she told herself her restlessness came from the fact that she was not used to sharing a bed with someone else, but by the end of the week she knew she was wrong. The reason she was sleeping so badly, the reason she kept on waking through the night, was that part of her still hoped that one time she would wake and find herself in Jonas’s arms.
Why on earth even one part of her should be under such an illusion Sara had no idea. Since their marriage, Jonas had made it more than plain that he did not want her.
Now they had been married for two weeks, and today Vanessa and Sam were to be married.
Jonas’s father and Vanessa’s mother were both to attend the ceremony, and then they were all coming back here to the house for a celebratory meal. Sara had spent the past few days carefully checking with Mrs Lyons that everything would go well. Jonas was someone she had barely seen; he was up early in the morning and in late at night—often after she was in bed and asleep. Her pregnancy was making her feel very tired, although as yet it did not show.
She had bought a new outfit for the wedding. A peach-coloured suit in a slub-effect straw silk. The skirt, although straight, was a size larger than she normally wore and slightly tucked at the waist, which meant it discreetly concealed the very small swell of her stomach. It had a matching sleeveless top, but it was the jacket that had caught Sara’s eye
.
Loosely styled, it had long batwing sleeves ending in tight cuffs. The shoulders were cleverly padded, the jacket falling from stitched-down pleats in an attractive unstructured fashion, the bottom slightly curved like a man’s shirt-tail. She had found a hat in a deeper shade of peach edged with white, which luckily meant that she could use her existing white shoes and handbag.
The wedding was to take place in the small local church. Jonas was going to be Sam’s best man, while Vanessa, purely to please Carly, had decided to have the little girl as her one bridesmaid.
Sara was just putting the finishing touches to her appearance when she heard a car draw up outside. Jonas was already over at the cottage. Because of the circumstances, he was to drive both Sam and Carly to the church, while she would take Vanessa.
She looked out of the window and saw an unfamiliar car.
The parents,’ Vanessa breathed behind her. ‘Bang on time. That will be Ma, of course. Oliver is hopeless about time.’ She gave a small chuckle. ‘Come on, we’d better go and let them in.’
For a bride-to-be, Vanessa was amazingly calm, much calmer than Sara herself had been, but then Vanessa was marrying a man who she knew beyond any doubt loved her, Sara acknowledged miserably.
