He didn’t answer. He gave the door a shove with his shoulder and she stepped back, alarmed and panicstricken. He wouldn’t really break it down, she thought, he was bluffing. But he wasn’t. He gave another shove, this time with his shoulder, and the chain snapped as though it was made of papier mache. He swept into the room, a tall, forbidding force, and she turned to run, not getting anywhere because his hand clamped on to her arm, biting into her.
‘You bloody little fool,’ he snarled. ‘What do you mean by running out like that? I should throttle you.’
‘Throttle me! Take your hand off me this instant or I’ll scream the place down! I’ll have everyone running here from a fifty-mile radius to see what’s going on! I don’t want you here; I want you to leave me alone!’
He pulled her, protesting, to the sofa and gave her a little push on to it.
‘I’ve been out of my mind looking for you,’ he bit out, ‘and now that I’ve found you there’s no way that you’re running out.’
‘Who told you where I was?’
‘I had to crawl to that Hancock bastard,’ he said, ‘crawl! I was at my wit’s end to get your sister’s address. I knew you’d be here, hiding!’
She looked up at him stubbornly. ‘So you found me, Sherlock Holmes. Big deal. We still have nothing to say to each other.’
‘You’re having my baby! And we have nothing to say to each other?’ His voice was savage.
‘That’s right!’ she shouted. ‘Nothing! Which is about all you had to say on the subject first time round! So why the change of heart, James? Have you come trooping along here to persuade me to get rid of it? The whole world knows that the last thing you want in your life is a baby!’
‘Well, the whole damn world’s wrong!’
The silence after that was resounding. He sat down heavily next to her and raked his fingers through his hair. His anger had vanished, he looked like a man standing in front of a two-thousand-strong audience, about to give a speech on a subject he knew nothing about.
‘You little fool,’ he murmured, looking at her from under lowered lashes. ‘No, I’m the fool. I can’t blame you for running away, not when I acted the way I did. When you told me that you were pregnant, I was shocked, I admit it. Dammit, woman, what could you expect?’
‘I wonder,’ Claire said bitterly and he frowned.
‘Don’t say that. Not in that tone of voice. I don’t want to hear that disillusionment there, even though, if it is, I have no one but myself to blame.’ He reached out to cup her face. ‘Please, marry me, Claire. That’s what I should have said to you a long time ago.’
‘I can’t,’ she replied, not meeting his green-eyed stare. ‘I can’t spend my life living in your wife’s shadow and I can’t many you thinking that the only reason you proposed was for the sake of the baby.’
‘Listen to me,’ he murmured roughly, ‘and don’t interrupt until I’m finished. I know I gave you the impression that no one could replace my wife, but I was protecting myself. I’d spent so long not wanting involvement, steering clear of it in fact, that it had become a habit that I couldn’t break. When you came along, something about you fascinated me, excited me, and I never stopped to question whether what I was feeling was anything more than passion. You see, I thought I was damn well unassailable, that I’d learnt from my marriage to Olivia…’
‘…not to trust anyone,’ Claire whispered, and he silenced her by placing his hand over her mouth.
‘Yes, not to trust anyone,’ he agreed, letting his hand drop to hers, stroking her wrist with his thumb, an absent-minded gesture that made her head spin. ‘You see, I never loved my wife. In fact, in the end, I didn’t even like her. I married her because she was pregnant and I couldn’t bring myself to walk out on my own flesh and blood.’
Claire looked at him in shock and she would have spoken, but he carried on. The release of pent-up emotion, feelings buried for too long, could be cathartic, and the burden of his past was one which he was lifting from his shoulders.
‘We’d been casually seeing each other for a few months, but I knew her for long enough to realise that I didn’t love her and I never would. It was a fling that should never have been started in the first place and I very quickly realised that, but once we had slept together she became obsessed with me. She began discussing marriage, even though I told her that I wasn’t interested, and when I refused to back down, she broke the bombshell. She was pregnant, and if I didn’t marry her she would make sure that every scandal sheet in the country knew that I was running out on my responsibilities. I didn’t give a damn about what the newspapers had to say about me, but I wasn’t about to run out on my child, even though a child was the last thing I’d wanted when I started seeing her. Of course, she realised almost immediately that the whole thing was going to be a disaster and in the weeks before her death, she became reckless, she started seeing other men. You see, she realised that she hadn’t loved me at all. We were totally imcompatible and we both knew it.’ He sighed heavily. ‘After that I made sure that no woman ever got close. Then you came along, with your glorious innocence and faith in human nature, and I found my principles being gradually eaten away at the edges, until all that carefully nurtured cynicism was a pile of ashes.’
‘You could have fooled me,’ Claire said wryly.
‘That was the object of the exercise.’ His eyes were ironic. ‘In some recess in my mind I thought that if I could fool you then I might succeed in fooling myself as well. When you walked out on me, I felt as though I’d been punched in the stomach. I never expected you to leave. I thought I’d explain about Olivia, what needed explaining at any rate, and things could continue as normal. Call it convenient blindness. When I found out that you were seeing someone I went berserk. You’d said you loved me but that seemed like a long time ago, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure of you. You’d gone, you were seeing that man, maybe even sleeping with him, and I couldn’t stand the thought of it. Worse than that, I couldn’t stand the thought of how much it meant to me. After Olivia’s death, I had decided that women were opportunists, and I’d spent years carefully constructing my life around that assumption. Yet here I was, going mad because of you.’ His voice was hoarse and she smiled, her eyes teasing.
‘Good.’
‘You witch,’ he said ruefully, ‘I suppose you know what I’m saying here, don’t you?’
‘Do I? Tell me, what are you saying?’
‘I love you, Claire,’ he murmured, and her ears sang. ‘I’ve always loved you, even when the possibility of that never crossed my mind. I love everything about you, dammit, and I want you back.’ She felt a fierce, wild exultation and it showed in her eyes as she looked up at him, no longer under pressure to try and hide her adoration.
‘Will you marry me?’ he repeated soberly, and she nodded.
‘But first,’ she said, ‘tell me about Gayle. I’ve spent hours agonising about her.’
‘Gayle? Oh, there’s nothing to tell there. We’re friends, believe it or not. Were you jealous?’
‘What do you think?’
‘You never showed it,’ he said, his eyes glinting. ‘And after all the trouble I went to arranging for her to have the cottage, knowing that you two would meet at some point in time, waiting for you to come running back to me.’
‘You beast!’
‘You only have yourself to blame. Mind you,’ he said, and he stroked her neck, ‘one good thing did come out of her presence. She warned me about Stephen Hancock, not that you paid a scrap of attention to me.’
‘I should have.’ She remembered that night in Paris with some distaste.
‘I guess I laid it on a bit thick. I was furious when you took no notice. I thought that exposing him to you would be the card up my sleeve, and instead you ignored me. I could have killed you, or him, or the whole damn world.’
She laughed and he made a husky sound, pulling her against him, seeking and finding her mouth with his, while his hand rested lightly on her stomach.
>
‘You have no idea what it does to me knowing that you’re carryng my child,’ he said in a low, unsteady voice. ‘I can’t imagine what ever possessed me to think that I wasn’t a family man. Do you know, when you told me over the phone that you were pregnant, I was speechless, but at the same time I felt an enormous, incredible joy. That,’ he said, looking right into her eyes, ‘was until you hung up and then took flight. When I discovered that you had gone and that wretched roommate of yours wouldn’t breathe a word, never mind giving me your sister’s telephone number, I was in a blind panic. I’d never felt anything like it before. I would have searched every single house, flat, bedsit, whatever, in London if it took me the rest of my life. I knew that I couldn’t live without you.’ He slipped his hand under her shirt and caressed her stomach. ‘It doesn’t show,’ he murmured.
‘It will soon.’
‘I can’t wait. I want the whole world to know that you’re mine and that you’re pregnant with our baby.’
He unzipped her trousers and slipped his hand underneath the lacy edge of her underwear, cupping her down there gently.
‘I need you so badly, woman,’ he groaned and she pulled his head to hers, sprinkling kisses on his face.
‘You don’t know how long I’ve waited to hear those words,’ she murmured breathlessly, moving against him. ‘I seem to have spent so long torn between hope and despair and in the end there was only the despair. When I came up here and I thought that that was it between us, that I was forever out of your reach, even if you bothered to look—well, it was a nightmare. I missed being mad at you, wondering what was going to become of us! Silly, isn’t it?’
‘I think it’s called love,’ he whispered, his eyes dark with passion, ‘something I find I can’t do without. Where, by the way, is your sister?’
‘In Australia.’
‘Good,’ he murmured with a crooked smile and an expression that left her in no doubt as to what he was thinking. ‘Because we have some catching up to do—’ he stroked her stomach lovingly ‘—my dearest wife to be and mother.’
eISBN 978-14592-7623-9
SHADOWS OF YESTERDAY
First North American Publication 1996.
Copyright © 1994 by Cathy Williams.
All rights reserved. Except for use In any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work In whole or In part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, Including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limlted, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
All characters In this book have no existence outside the Imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any Individual known or unknown to the author, and all Incidents are pure Invention.
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Table of Contents
Cover Page
Excerpt
About the Author
Books by Cathy Williams
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Copyright
Shadows of Yesterday Page 17
