The Pregnancy Bond

by Lucy Gordon

  She wondered how long he would stand there, letting her work on him, and she soon had her answer. With a groan that showed her that she’d got the better of him, he twisted swiftly around and claimed the initiative.

  ‘Ready for anything?’ he muttered against her lips.

  ‘I think I could give you a surprise or two.’

  But just now he was surprising her, and she was loving it. In their marriage Jake had always been a tender, considerate lover. But now there was nothing tender in his grasp, and not much that was considerate as he pulled her down onto the bed in a way that brooked no argument. He parted her legs and was inside her swiftly, sending fierce waves of piercing heat and light through her. After the first shock she wrapped her legs about him and drove back, as hot and wild as he, and as demanding. She had been made for this, and it was only now that she knew.

  After the first fierce drive he made his movements slower, and so did she, so that they teased each other with delay. Kelly was astonished at her own control. It seemed to come from an unexplored region in her, perhaps the same place where grief had lived and endured until finally endurance was too much.

  She’d thought she knew her own nature-sedate, modest, long-suffering, but not sparky or adventurous. Now she was astonished to discover a tiny imp of resentment, almost revenge, as though her searing sexuality was telling him, So there!

  If so it was reprehensible, but there was no doubt it was giving him something to think about.

  When they’d fought each other to a standstill, and he was breathing heavily, he reached swiftly over and switched on the bedside lamp.

  ‘I want to look at you,’ he said.

  At once she rose and knelt on the bed, stretching her arms high so that her small, firm breasts were shown for his delectation. Those lost pounds were a godsend, she thought, as she swayed this way and that, displaying herself to him, as shameless as a wood nymph.

  ‘Is that what you wanted to see?’ she asked wickedly.

  ‘It’s more than my best hope. Woman, do you know that you’re not safe?’

  She laughed. ‘It’s too late now to be worrying about that!’

  ‘That is sheer provocation,’ he declared, clasping his hands about her waist, where they almost met.

  There was a glint in his eye that was intriguing her more every moment. Glancing down his length, she saw that she’d done him an injustice. Resisting his attempts to toss her onto her back, she moved over him.

  ‘There’s more than one new experience,’ she teased, easing herself into position and enjoying the shock on his face. ‘Relax, enjoy.’

  ‘I’d like to know where you learned to do this,’ he growled, gasping a little between words.

  She leaned down and whispered softly in his ear. ‘That’s none of your business.’

  It was incredible what you could learn from books these days, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. How good it was to feel him inside her in a different way, newly thrilling, an unexpected kind of excitement. And, most wonderful of all, to gaze down on his face, and see by its thunderstruck look that, for once, the ‘little woman’ hadn’t done just as he would have predicted.

  At last it was over and she flung herself down beside him, feeling as though she could laugh with the gods.

  One thought pervaded her. He might think he’d reclaimed her, but in truth she had reclaimed him, and with him, her freedom.

  Now she could let him go.

  The room was brilliant with the light of morning, and she sat up sharply, awake, cold, clear-headed and exasperated with herself. The sight of Jake’s sleeping form beside her made her groan.

  What had she done? She might have guessed he’d try a trick like this. He was piqued that she’d divorced him, so he’d set out to prove he could carry her back to bed anyway. Now she was a scalp on his belt.

  It didn’t matter that she’d just enjoyed the best sex with him that she’d ever known. It had been blinding, ecstatic, wonderful. Of course it had. Last night he’d seen her as a new woman, in demand among men, and the predator in him had jumped to the head of the queue.

  She slipped out of bed, put on a robe and went into the kitchen, seemingly occupied, but actually straining her ears for the sound of him, and at last she heard him pad barefoot across her front room. She looked around, smiling brightly.

  ‘Breakfast coming up,’ she sang out. ‘Have this to be going on with.’ She pressed a mug of coffee into his hand.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked, watching her carefully.

  ‘Wonderful, considering that party. I thought I might have a hangover, but I’m fine.’

  ‘I don’t think you drank very much.’

  ‘Just a little bit tipsy,’ she said untruthfully.

  ‘Then you’ve changed. You never used to drink much.’

  ‘I never used to go in for one-night stands either, but for you I made an exception, for old times’ sake.’

  ‘That was nice of you,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Well, you owed me some fun after sending Carl and Frank away before I made up my mind about them.’

  Jake took a swift breath. ‘Don’t talk like that.’

  ‘Hey, lighten up,’ she chided. ‘It was great. And it was the perfect way to end our marriage. No hard feelings and a good time was had by all.’ A horrid thought seemed to strike her. ‘Jake, you did have a good time, didn’t you?’

  ‘I had an incredible time,’ he said quietly. ‘I hadn’t realised you’d grown so-skilled.’

  He seemed to be trying to read her face, but Kelly blocked his enquiring eyes with a bland smile that concealed how hard her heart was beating.

  ‘You’re right, Kelly,’ he said at last. ‘You’re a new woman. I hadn’t quite understood that. I suppose I still saw you in the old way, but not any more. Your life’s your own now. You took it back, and you’re going to make it whatever you want.’

  ‘Best for both of us,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah! Best for both of us. It’s just that I-’

  She held herself tense for what he would say next. Almost as though it mattered. He seemed to be struggling with the words, but soon he would say them, and she would know…

  Then his face changed as he saw something over her shoulder, and everything vanished from his expression but horror. ‘Oh, ye gods!’ he yelled, his eyes on the clock. ‘The time! Look at the time.’

  ‘It’s just past ten. Why?’

  ‘I need a cab ten minutes ago. Who can I call?’

  ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘I have to catch the midday flight or my name will be mud.’

  She would never know now what he might have said. The next few minutes were taken up with calling the cab, while he dressed frantically. He finished just as her doorbell rang.

  ‘’Bye,’ he said, kissing her cheek on the run. ‘There’s a present for you on the bed. Combined Christmas and house-warming.’

  The gift was a watch, made of platinum and studded with tiny diamonds. It was the sort of thing a man might buy in the duty free shop at an airport when he was running out of time. Kelly was an expert in that sort of gift because Jake had always bought her one when he returned home from the other side of the world, and she’d never told him how lonely she was when he was away, because it would have been churlish to complain to a man who’d bought her a costly gift. Besides, she’d been almost as lonely when he was there.

  But this was different. There was no need for him to have bought her anything, and the gesture touched her. Smiling, she looked around at the room where he’d so lately been.

  Then her smile faded as she saw how empty it was, a bleak emptiness that seeped into her heart until it felt like a stone crushing her.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  K ELLY had approached college prepared to discover that her brain was rusty, and she’d been fooling herself for years. Instead she found the course fascinating and easy to follow. The tutors praised her work and she was popular with them and her fellow students. In many ways
this was the ideal college life of her dreams.

  The only fly in the ointment was the need to work to make ends meet. She’d taken a bank loan to cover most of the fees, and worked three evenings a week in a small café. It was proving more tiring than she’d thought. At the end of the day she longed to return to her little home instead of spending the evening inhaling greasy odours and being rushed off her feet.

  Perhaps she should have taken up Jake’s offer of financial help so that she could leave the job and never again have to smell cooking oil, which was making her nauseous these days. Working at the café hadn’t been so terrible before, but meeting Jake again seemed to have left her in a strange mood. Her normally equable temper had been replaced by an irritability that could flare into annoyance without warning.

  She’d heard no more from him after he’d rushed away that morning, and she was glad of that because it made it easier to draw a line under the business. Once more for old times’ sake, and no sentimentality on either side.

  But it wasn’t that easy. What had happened between them in her bed had felt less like a goodbye than a hello. That was how people enjoyed each other at the start of something, seeking out and conquering new territory, putting down markers for the future. It was absurd to make love like that at the end.

  Absurd. Cling to the thought. Laughable. Ridiculous. Idiotic. Words like that would help deaden what threatened to be an ache in her breast.

  She knew that Jake had returned from wherever he’d dashed off to because she’d opened a newspaper to see a photograph of him, leaving a glamorous media party. Olympia was on his arm, smiling and looking impossibly gorgeous. Apart from that, if she wanted to see him she watched the television news, which was pretty much what she’d been doing for the last few years.

  One evening she was just catching up with the headlines before going to bed, and there he was, looking out of the screen, while a voice-over intoned, ‘Jake Lindley talks to us, live, from war-torn-’

  Kelly yawned sleepily, not hearing the rest. Wherever Jake was reporting from, it was fairly sure to be ‘war-torn’. He’d always been happiest in the thick of the action, and she’d sat at home terrified for him, and keeping her worries to herself when he returned. It bored him to talk about dangers he regarded as nonexistent.

  ‘It’s all hype, darling,’ he’d often said. ‘I never actually get hurt, do I?’

  And it was true, he didn’t. It was pleasant not to have to worry because he was nothing to do with her any more.

  She had to admit that he looked good on camera, his bronzed skin suggesting a man of action, and his shaggy hair slightly lifted by the breeze as he made his report in a brisk voice.

  ‘Tonight the two sides seem as far apart as ever-accusations-fierce denials-nobody quite knows-’

  She barely heard. All her attention was fixed on Jake’s face. When had that little frownline appeared between his eyes? She tried to remember if it had been there last time, but his face as it had been then refused to come into focus. There were too many impressions pulling in different directions.

  ‘The sound of gunfire never ceases-there behind me, and all around-’

  Jake’s voice stopped suddenly and Kelly came out of her reverie to realise that he’d vanished from the screen. The camera was swinging around wildly, somebody was shouting, and there was Jake on the ground, with people running towards him and an ugly red stain seeping between his fingers, which were clutched to his stomach. Only then did she realise that he’d been shot.

  He was still talking to camera, and incredibly managed a painful smile. ‘I guess they were closer than I realised-’ He went on talking, grimacing with pain as people lifted him and raced away from the gunfire, refusing to stop doing his job, until he fainted.

  The broadcast returned to the studio. Nobody seemed to know exactly what had happened. Kelly could have screamed.

  She snatched up the phone, then dropped it again. She was no longer Jake’s wife, and had no more right to information than anyone else. But she could feel her whole body going cold with shock as she stared at the set, willing it to tell her something.

  She tried the text pages, but the broadcast had been live and it was too soon for anything to be posted. She changed channels, hoping one of the others had picked it up. For an hour she sat there, flicking from place to place, feeling as though she was going mad.

  When she couldn’t stand it any longer she dialled the studio and asked for Dave Hadway, who worked in the newsroom and whom she knew slightly. But Dave had left the company, and instead Kelly found herself talking to Olympia Statton.

  ‘This is Kelly,’ she said, forcing herself to speak calmly. ‘Is there any news of Jake?’

  ‘He’s been taken to the local hospital out there,’ Olympia said.

  ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘I’m sorry, we’re not releasing that information to the public.’

  Kelly lost her temper. ‘What do you mean, “the public”?’ she raged. ‘I used to be married to him, as you very well know.’

  ‘I do indeed, but you went your separate ways,’ came Olympia’s self-satisfied voice. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Harmon, I’m afraid I can only discuss Jake’s condition with his family.’

  ‘But he has no family,’ Kelly cried.

  ‘He has people who care for him.’ The line clicked dead.

  Kelly replaced the receiver forcefully. Then she did something she’d never done before in the whole of her well-regulated life. She picked up a vase and hurled it at the far wall with all the force she could manage. It disintegrated into a hundred pieces. Cleaning them up gave her something to do.

  She sat up into the small hours, gathering crumbs of information from the television. The shooting was shown again and again. She watched it obsessively. There was Jake, standing so assured before the camera, and she wanted to seize him and keep him safe. But she never could, and he always fell to the ground, still gamely talking.

  As the night wore on she learned that although the terrain was remote the local hospital was efficient and had managed to stabilise Jake, but his condition was still critical. Still in front of the set, she fell asleep from exhaustion, and awoke to find the morning half over.

  The central heating had gone off and she was stiff and cold, with an aching head that swam as she forced herself out of the chair. She sat down again at once, and stayed there until the world had settled back into place. When it was safe to move she rose and put on the heating, then staggered into the kitchen to make herself some hot tea. She needed food inside her after that upsetting night, she decided. But after cooking eggs and bacon she threw it away, untasted. She couldn’t face grease. In fact she couldn’t face anything until she knew that Jake was safe.

  She sank back into the chair, castigating herself for her weak will. What had happened to independence and putting him behind her? All gone for nothing, because he was hurt.

  And something else bothered her. Olympia had called her ‘Miss Harmon’. She not only knew that Kelly had resumed her maiden name, but she also knew what it was. And only one person could have told her. Kelly reckoned that said it all.

  The next day a flying ambulance conveyed Jake out of the country where he’d been wounded and to the nearest large hospital, in southern Italy, for an operation to remove the bullet. After that there was silence, and Kelly was forced to assume that no news was good news.

  Now her life was lived permanently on the rack. She tried some mutual friends, but they knew little more than she did herself. The only information came from Olympia, who gave an interview to a tabloid newspaper called, Jake Lindley, the man I know. The resulting piece put Olympia firmly in the spotlight, while hinting at the depth of her relationship with Jake, who, she was quick to state, had recently divorced. The only thing missing was an announcement of their coming wedding. Kelly wondered if they would dispense with that, since they were clearly lovers already.

  Finally Kelly struck lucky with a fellow journalist, who told her Jake h
ad called him and asked for some books to be brought to the London hospital where he would arrive at the end of the week. He was out of danger now, and was being sent home to complete his recovery.

  Kelly knew the hospital, which was only a few miles from where she lived. It was unnerving to have Jake so close and yet know nothing about him. She tried telephoning but found that all calls were being diverted to the television company’s press office.

  Well, it was none of her business anyway. They’d said goodbye, and that was it. Kelly told herself that very firmly, and was still telling herself as she set out, one afternoon, for the hospital.

  As she entered its doors she was expecting a rough passage, but her luck was in. The young woman on the desk beamed at the sight of her.

  ‘Don’t tell me, let me guess,’ she said. ‘Jake Lindley. You’re his wife. I saw you on the telly last year. You were sitting next to him when he collected that award for “TV newsman of the year”. It is you, isn’t it? I mean, your hair’s different, but-’

  ‘Yes, it’s me,’ Kelly said. ‘But we’re divorced now.’

  ‘I know. I read it in the paper. I don’t like that other one. She swans in here like Lady Muck, laying down the law.’ She became conspiratorial. ‘Third floor. Room 303.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Kelly said fervently, and sped off before anyone could stop her.

  On the third floor she almost lost her nerve. Olympia would be there, comforting and beautiful at the bedside. Jake’s ex-wife would be an unwelcome intruder. Then she set her jaw. If her presence embarrassed Jake she would leave, but she wasn’t going without seeing him. She reached Room 303, took a deep breath, and quietly opened the door.

  At first glance the room was a riot of cheerfulness. There were cards everywhere, some with funny pictures, some depicting flowers. There were real flowers too, of all kinds, with a large bouquet of red roses claiming centre stage. No prize for guessing who’d sent those, Kelly thought.

  But after the first moment her impression of gaiety died, partly because the room was eerily quiet. A man lay on the pillows, staring blankly ahead. There were no books on the bed, or anywhere near him. No radio or television broke the silence, and he seemed engulfed in a weariness so profound that it had blotted out the world. No way was this Jake, who was never happy unless active.