Jared's Love-Child

by Sandra Field

  A car was waiting for them; they drove only a few minutes, pulling up in front of a low bungalow separated from the rest of the resort complex by a stretch of palm trees, a tall gate and stone walls tumbling with vivid bougainvillea. As the driver carried their bags in, Devon hurried indoors; she didn’t want Jared to carry her over the threshold, as if, indeed, a true marriage was about to begin. She didn’t think she could bear that.

  The floor was a cool, pale tile, the walls a delicate green, the furniture an attractive mix of bamboo and teak. Jared said levelly, “Make yourself at home, Devon. I’ve got a couple of calls to make, then why don’t we eat outside? Marisha said she’d leave something for us in the refrigerator.”

  His mind, she could tell, was elsewhere. Not on her at all. Feeling as though she was bleeding inside, Devon replied without a trace of sarcasm, “Whatever you say.”

  Jared gave her a sharp look. “I have to clear this up,” he said brusquely. “It won’t keep. But it won’t take long.”

  “Just so long as you have your priorities straight.”

  She hadn’t meant to say that. A frown dug furrows into his brow. “What are you getting at, Devon?” he said with menacing softness.

  “Hadn’t you better make your call? I wouldn’t want our first marital dispute to get in the way of Holt Incorporated.”

  “Holt Incorporated pays for everything around you…or had you forgotten that?”

  “You can’t buy me, Jared!”

  “You’re spoiling for a fight, aren’t you? I’ll be glad to oblige—once I’ve made my calls. They’re important.”

  And I’m not.

  “Fine,” she said and kicked off her white pumps. “Barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen—that’s where I belong. How very traditional of you.”

  “Maybe it’s time I clarify something,” Jared said with deadly precision. “One of my unbreakable rules is never to allow a woman to come between me and business. Nobody—but nobody—does that. Do you understand?”

  “It would be difficult not to, wouldn’t it?” she retorted. Then she stalked out of the room on her stockinged feet. Jared didn’t come after her.

  The refrigerator had enough food for a dozen honeymoons, and Devon wasn’t the least bit hungry. She’d wondered in the few moments before she’d gone to sleep on the plane if Jared would fall on her as soon as they were alone, as he had in New York. Obviously not, she thought, marching from room to room. The bathroom had a Jacuzzi and heaps of thick, fluffy towels, the bedroom was bigger than her living room at home and the bed was enormous.

  Devon averted her eyes and scurried into the dining area, which opened onto a patio that led into an enclosed garden. The garden furniture was also teak, sheltered under a trellis laden with vines. She could hear Jared talking to someone on the phone.

  He sounded a million miles away. He probably wanted to be a million miles away. For sure, he didn’t want to be here, with her. Her brief spurt of anger fizzled away, leaving a pain that frightened her with its intensity. She stumbled outside, leaving the doors open. The sky glittered with stars, points of light as far away and impersonal as Jared. The air was saturated with the sweetness of frangipani and the salt tang of the ocean, whose waves she could hear gently laving the shore.

  A swimming pool, smooth as silk, reflected the tiny stars and the shimmer of a new moon. A froth of white bougainvillea cascaded down the walls at the back of the garden. And then Devon saw the gate.

  It must be a gate to the beach. She could, even if only for a while, escape.

  It wasn’t until then that she realized how claustrophobic she was finding this beautiful walled garden. How like a prison. She padded the length of the pool and grabbed the big iron handle. But it turned only so far, and the gate stayed shut.

  Devon turned the handle again and again, shoving against the thick wood boards with all her strength, suddenly desperate to get out. She thumped her shoulder against the unyielding panels. And only then did she notice the iron key hole set higher in the door.

  The door was locked. But there was no key.

  She pounded her fists on the wood in helpless frustration, dimly aware that tears were streaming down her face. Then, slowly, she sank to the ground, her forehead resting against the boards, and wept as though her heart would break.

  Jared said goodbye with complete civility and banged the receiver back into its cradle. As he’d half expected, Michaels had fouled up on the commodity transfers. Michaels, he thought grimly, was very soon going to find himself demoted. Jared didn’t believe in carrying dead wood.

  He shoved his papers in his leather briefcase, threw his jacket and tie over the chair, and decided he needed a drink. Abruptly aware of the silence, he called out Devon’s name.

  She didn’t answer. Sulking, he thought irritably. He couldn’t stand being interrupted when business was on his mind, the sooner she learned that, the better. But before he could leave the room, he noticed from the corner of his eye the rosebud dangling from the lapel of his jacket. Moved by an impulse he didn’t understand, he unpinned it, poured water into a glass on the bureau, and stuck the rose in it. Then he strode into the kitchen.

  The refrigerator door was firmly shut, and the kitchen was empty. Swiftly he went into the bedroom. Devon’s cases were exactly where the driver had left them; there was no other sign of her occupancy.

  Jared felt the first twinge of alarm. She wouldn’t have gone swimming. Not without getting changed. “Devon!” he called, and listened to the silence echo in his ears.

  The garden. Of course. She’d been cooped up all day; she’d gone into the garden. The patio doors were open, the pool an unbroken sheen under the stars. The water looked depthless, sinister; for a moment sheer terror flicked through him. And then, with a jolt in his gut, he saw the white figure slumped, ghostlike, on the ground by the gate.

  Was she hurt? What was wrong?

  He ran the length of the pool and hunkered down beside her, in one swift glance taking in the desolate hunch of her shoulders and the defeated curve of her nape. Only then did he realize that she was weeping, silently, in utter despair.

  For a moment Jared was paralyzed, unable to think of anything to do or say. Devon wasn’t a woman who wept for effect, he knew that already. Her tears were real, from the heart; they smote him in a place deep inside, a place he’d kept so well-protected for so many years that no one ever reached him there.

  Until now.

  Clumsily he took her by the shoulders, trying to see into her face. She resisted him, beating at his chest with her fists, her hair falling forward to hide her features. “Go away,” she sobbed. “Go away and leave me alone…”

  “Devon, what’s wrong?” Brilliant question, Jared. No wonder you’re the president of the company.

  She twisted away from him. “I wish I’d never met you, never gone to bed with you… Oh, God, what have we done? We should never have got married.”

  Her words were as deadly sharp as the spines on the sea urchins near the reef, spines that were filled with poison. She didn’t want to be married to him. Less than eight hours after the wedding and she was crying her eyes out because she’d made a terrible mistake.

  He was the one who’d forced the marriage. Who’d made mincemeat out of all her objections and her doubts, and overridden any possibility of alternate solutions. He’d gotten her on his terms. He always got women on his terms. His whole life was on his terms. Yet for the very first time in his life, victory tasted like ashes on Jared’s tongue.

  What was the use of being married to Devon if she was like a bird battering its wings against the bars of the cage, frantic to escape?

  So what if the cage was gilded? Devon didn’t want his money. She was too independent, too gutsy, too…too much Devon, he thought with painful honesty. Except that right now she didn’t look either independent or gutsy. She looked broken.

  Broken. He’d done that. His responsibility. He’d tamed her, just as he’d threatened to do.


  What are you going to do for an encore, Jared? Hide behind the fax machine? Invent an international crisis and fly off to New York? Or are you going to tell her everything’ll be fine? Here, Devon, take two aspirins and go to bed.

  Bed. He couldn’t afford to think about Devon in bed. Not now. But equally he couldn’t afford to retreat behind his famous self-control. Control was out if he wanted Devon to stop that terrible, silent weeping. Useless to him and to her.

  Then Jared’s thoughts made another leap. Hadn’t he wished, more than once, that just one woman would take him for himself, regardless of his money? Take him for the man he was, not for a rich man. Devon didn’t care about his money. So now it was up to him to show her the man behind the money, the man who’d been in hiding for as long as he could remember.

  New territory. A whole new venture.

  Did he really want to do that?

  CHAPTER TEN

  JARED took a deep breath, rested one hand on Devon’s shoulder and muttered, “Devon, I hate seeing you cry…tell me what to do.”

  She banged her palm against the gate. “There’s nothing you can do. It’s too late, don’t you see?”

  The wedding band he’d given her shone coldly on her finger. Praying for wisdom, Jared said, “I’m going to carry you into the house. You can have a hot bath and then I’m going to feed you oatmeal. With raisins and cream and lots of sugar. Comfort food. It’s never too late for oatmeal, Devon.”

  She scrubbed at her face with her other hand and for the first time looked right at him. “Oatmeal?” she cried. “I’m telling you we’ve just made the worst mistake in our whole lives and you’re talking about oatmeal?”

  Feeling the words like stones in his throat, knowing he was going somewhere he’d never gone before, Jared said, “Whenever Beatrice punished me for doing something I hadn’t even realized was wrong—this was before I was sent to boarding school—the housekeeper, Mrs. Baxter, used to feed me oatmeal and cream in the kitchen of her cottage, and let me pet her cat.” Briefly he looked beyond Devon into the secluded darkness of the garden. “He was a spectacularly ugly orange tomcat called Turnip, and I loved him. Beatrice ran over him one day, in the driveway. An accident, she said.”

  “Oh, Jared…”

  “I can’t stand seeing you weep,” he repeated with suppressed vehemence.

  “Have you ever told anyone else about the tomcat?” Devon whispered.

  “Of course not. What would I do that for?”

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  He rubbed his jaw; it was tight with tension. “Oatmeal, Devon. My best offer.”

  “In that case,” she said unsteadily, “I’d better take it.”

  She was smiling, Jared saw with a lurch of his heart. Very gently he rubbed the tears from her cheeks. “I make very good oatmeal. My one claim to culinary fame.”

  “I like lots of raisins.”

  They were using the words as a bridge, he thought, to carry them from a place of too much emotion back to the mundane. That was okay with him. Telling her all that stuff about Beatrice…what had possessed him? Beatrice was long gone. Nothing to do with Devon. He braced himself and gathered her in his arms, then lifted her. “You’re no lightweight,” he grumbled. Anything to hide the effect of her scent, her arm so soft around his neck, her closeness after what felt like months of deprivation.

  “You’re no romantic,” she teased.

  “That’s because you scare me half to death,” he said, not joking.

  Devon stared up at him. “Would you mind repeating that?”

  “I would mind.” He walked through the dining room and put her down in the bathroom. “I’ll bring your case in,” he said, not looking at her because if he did he’d start kissing her and he wouldn’t be able to stop.

  “Thank you,” Devon said uncertainly, and watched him go. She had no idea what was going on. She did know her frantic need for escape had vanished. Jared had feelings, she thought. But he’d shoved them all underground years ago because of a woman called Beatrice. If he hadn’t found her, Devon, weeping like that, he’d never have told her about Turnip the tomcat and the oatmeal.

  Jared put her case down on the bathroom floor, turned on his heel and smartly shut the door. Scared of her? Jared? Could it possibly be true?

  Frowning in thought, Devon walked over to the mirror. She looked a fright, she thought dispassionately. She was too fair-skinned to cry with any pretensions to beauty: her nose was red and her cheeks splotchy. A shower. A very fast shower. Maybe she’d put on that sexy nightdress she’d bought in a boutique in the Lanes. If she had the nerve.

  Five minutes later, her heart in her mouth, Devon padded barefoot into the kitchen.

  Jared looked up. The saucepan, full of dried oatmeal and raisins, slipped from his hand and clattered onto the tile floor. Devon was standing in the doorway as naked as the day she was born, her eyes wide-held. “Devon…” he croaked.

  “We could have oatmeal afterward.”

  Her voice was high-pitched with nervousness. In the light from the two wall lamps the curves of her body flowed one into the other; there were faint shadows under her breasts, and beneath her collarbones. She wasn’t posing, or trying to be seductive, Jared thought. In fact, the exact opposite. She looked as if she was on her way to the stake.

  If he was scared of her, so was she of him, he realized in a flash of insight. And finally Jared knew what to do. The time was right for what he’d been craving all day; he closed the distance between them, took her naked body in his arms, and kissed her with all the force of his pent-up desire. To his enormous relief, Devon kissed him back.

  Nibbling at her lips, he muttered, “You’re covered in goosebumps. Come to bed, Devon.”

  “Just because I’m cold?”

  “Because my heart’s cold and I need you to warm it.”

  A muscle tightened in Jared’s jaw. Where had those words come from? They weren’t true, of course. Hyperbolic nonsense. It was just that she was so goddamned brave, walking into the kitchen without a stitch of clothing on.

  Devon’s smile went right through him. “Now that’s a lot more persuasive than talk about goosebumps,” she said. “I’d love to go to bed with you, Jared…if you’re really sure you want to.”

  His blood had thickened in his veins with desire for her. “If…are you kidding?”

  “You haven’t touched me for days!”

  “You’re pregnant—I thought if we made love the way we did in New York I might hurt you,” he said with at least partial truth, kissing her soundly between each phrase.

  “Is that for real?” she demanded incredulously.

  “Why else do you think I’ve been treating you like a nun?”

  “Because you didn’t want me any more! I’m the one who trapped you into marriage, remember?”

  “Devon, it takes two people to make a baby. The first time we made love, birth control was the last thing on my mind…I’m just as responsible as you are.” He cupped her buttocks in his hands, pressing her to his arousal. “I’ll be gentle, I promise.”

  She shivered with longing. “Make love to me, Jared…oh, please, make love to me.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

  The first time, in the big bed with its window open to the velvet tropical night, Devon was aware of Jared holding back, treating her as though she were breakable china. The second time, with outright provocation, she seduced him into losing his control. As he shuddered to a climax in her arms, Devon held him close, his dark head against her breast. I love you, she thought in a burst of joy, and with inner shock, heard the words echo in her mind. Had she really fallen in love with her husband on the first night of their honeymoon?

  She longed to say the words, to try them out on her tongue. Maybe that way she’d know if they were true. But an inner wisdom told her not to tell Jared. Not yet.

  His heart was still hammering against her ribcage. She whispered, “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah…you�
��re like a wildcat, Devon.” Then, without any pre-planning, the sentences fell from his lips. “That night in New York…yeah, it was a set-up to bring you down a peg or two. But once we were in bed, I forgot all about that—there was only the incredible intimacy of you and me together. It wasn’t until morning, when I woke up, that I remembered I’d had a plan.” His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “And that was when I told you about it. As though it had been uppermost in my mind all night.”

  “Oh,” said Devon. “Oh.”

  She was frowning. He added hoarsely, “Do you believe me?”

  “Yes. Yes, I believe you.”

  He wanted to ask her if she forgave him. But the words wouldn’t push themselves past the tightness in his throat. Very gently he stroked the slope of her shoulder, his arm brushing her breast, the contact rippling along his limbs.

  “Thank you for telling me,” Devon whispered.

  When he looked up, her eyes were shining with unshed tears, and the soft curve of her mouth tightened his throat one more notch, touching him in a place so deep inside he hadn’t known it existed. He said, not at all accurately, but he had to say something, “You look kind of like Turnip when he caught a mouse.”

  “There’s not a romantic bone in your body,” she said, her voice almost steady.

  “So you’re complaining already, Mrs. Holt?”

  This time her smile was radiant. “No. Definitely not.”

  He laughed outright. “I’ve got a present for you.”

  “Another one?” she said saucily.

  Still laughing, Jared got out of bed and crossed the room, unselfconscious in his nudity. Devon watched him, glorying in the smooth interplay of his muscles, the taut planes of his back and his ridged shoulderblades. She must love him. His body entranced her, along with everything he did to her with that body. And each time some small fraction of his feelings escaped him, he bound himself to her more tightly.