She’d turned in his arms then, pushing herself against him, holding him to her heart, closing her eyes on a ragged breath as she’d felt his body stir with desire. ‘I want to give you babies,’ she’d told him, her voice ferocious with love. ‘Dozens of them!’
And now this big-hearted man of hers was winding the hose back on its reel, and the play of muscles across his powerful back and shoulders mesmerised her, making her throat tighten with emotion. He was so beautiful.
And he would be hungry. He’d worked hard in the garden all afternoon, wanting her with him but not allowing her to do more than idly dead-head the blossoms. He was very determinedly taking care of her.
She finished tossing the salad as he straightened up from his task. He’d be with her in a matter of seconds. All the ingredients were ready; she could cook the clams while he had his shower.
The phone rang. She dried her hands and took the receiver from the wall-mount, and Liam said aggressively, ‘You got it?’
Her heart stopped, then punched at her savagely. ‘Where are you?’ She’d gone cold all over, shaking. Everything had been so wonderful, Jed had been so perfect, so understanding, and she had put Liam and his demands to the back of her mind.
Now he was filling her head with panic. She wanted to put the receiver down, go on pretending he didn’t exist.
‘Close.’ He answered her question. ‘I’m looking at the front of your property right now. Nice place. Must be worth a bomb. So when and where do we meet?’
Her stomach was churning sickly, her brain in a tumult. But she had to think. And quickly. Jed would walk in at any moment.
She cast a wide-eyed, frantic glance at the door and said tightly, ‘Then you will be able to see the big door in the wall. The package will be outside it tomorrow at dawn.’ And she hooked the receiver back just as Jed walked through, and felt her face flood with guilty colour.
‘You OK?’ His eyes narrowed with concern. ‘Who was on the phone—not bad news?’
She had to get herself together. Stop shaking. Look normal. She pulled in a deep breath, willed herself to carry this off.
‘No, of course not. Just my agent reminding me I’m due to give my publishers a synopsis of my next book any time now,’ she invented, hating having to do this, reminding herself that she was doing it for his sake, trying to feel better about it and failing miserably.
‘Sweetheart...’ He came closer, his easy smile making her want to weep. ‘Don’t let them pressure you.’ He folded his arms around her and her head dropped gratefully against the wide span of his chest. His skin was warm, slick with sweat. She parted her lips, tasting him.
‘You never need write another word,’ he said firmly. ‘Not unless you want to. And if you do, then you tell them you do it on your own time, at your own pace. That clear?’
He was making a stand for her, taking her side as she knew he always would. That it was inappropriate didn’t matter a damn. He would shoulder her problems, deal with them fairly and firmly, always on her side.
She wound her arms around his neck and said fiercely, ‘I love you!’
‘Hey! You think I don’t know that? That’s why I’m here. That’s why I married you, remember.’ He was smiling as his lips took hers.
Very gently, Elena moved Jed’s arm, holding her breath, afraid he would wake.
She hadn’t slept, increasingly edgy as the hours of night slipped past her. Constantly reminding herself that she was doing this for his sake alone was the only way she could stop herself from breaking down and confessing everything.
He had slept, wrapped around her. His conscience hadn’t been stinging, keeping him awake. Tomorrow—today, actually—they were going to Seville.
Over supper Jed had told her he was due to meet the designer he’d contracted to gut the present building and turn it into something discreetly impressive, glamorous yet restrained, the international hallmark of a Nolan’s showroom.
‘I’d like you to be involved—if only to give your opinions. Besides—’ his eyes had glinted at her ‘—I want you with me. I can’t bear to be away from you for a second, let alone the best part of a day.’
‘You think I’d let you go without me!’ She’d smiled for him, hanging onto the thought of the trip to Seville. By then the business with Liam would be over. He’d have taken his bundle of crisp notes and run. And she could put him out of her mind and get on with her wonderful life with Jed.
Gingerly sliding out of bed, she wondered if she’d be too sleepy to make any contribution to today’s business meeting. And then told herself of course she wouldn’t. Relief that this was all over would carry her through, make her bubble and bounce with sheer happiness.
The louvres were open, and she found her silk robe by the grey pre-dawn light, slipped it on, the fine fabric cool against her naked skin, and tied the belt with shaky fingers.
She was hardly daring to breathe, and her heart felt as if it had swollen to twice its normal size, bumping about inside her chest. But Jed was still sleeping. She slipped like a shadow from the room.
It would take no longer than three minutes—four at the most—to slip out with the package and get back into bed. And if he did wake during that time, find her missing, he’d assume she’d gone to the bathroom.
She’d deliberately left her handbag on top of the counter just inside the kitchen door, so she didn’t need to put a light on to find it Quickly, she reached for it, and knocked the salt and pepper grinders to the tiled floor. She cursed herself for forgetting they were there.
The noise sounded horrendous. Her fingers clutched the soft leather of her bag and her heart stopped beating, then thundered on as quietness settled around her.
He hadn’t woken. She delved for the package and padded through the house, taking care not to bump into furniture. The main door was heavy, wide and ancient. Jed had shot the bolts home before going to bed. She reached for the top one, remembering the grinding noise it made. They both needed oiling.
She was sweating, rivers of panic rushing through her veins, when she finally pulled the door open and stepped outside into the enclosed courtyard at the front of the house.
All she had to do now was put the package outside the big arched doorway.
In contrast, those doors swung open easily, and she was on the stony track, the rosy fingers of dawn already touching the tops of the crumpled mountains. She bent to put the package down—and Liam stepped out of the shadows.
She slapped her hand across her mouth to push back her cry of fright, and dropped the package. Liam picked it up, weighing it in his hands. She hadn’t expected him to be waiting. She hadn’t wanted him to be waiting. She had never wanted to see him or speak to him again.
‘Thanks, doll.’ He grinned at her. ‘You know it makes sense.’
He looked more respectable than when he’d appeared at Netherhaye. The dark grey denims and matching battle jacket looked new. And she could see a fancy truck parked a little way down the track. Had he borrowed it? Or stolen it? Either way, she didn’t care. She wanted him off her property.
‘Just go,’ she hissed through her teeth, shivering now in the chilly dawn air.
‘Only when I’ve checked this isn’t a wad of newspaper.’ He opened the package, pulling out the crisp notes. He leered at her. ‘I’m not au fait with the exchange rate, but it looks about right to me. I don’t think you’d be stupid enough to do the dirty on me again. It will do nicely, for starters.’
‘There won’t be any seconds,’ she told him decisively, refusing to give in to the desire to have hysterics. ‘So take it and go, and just be thankful I didn’t go to the police and have you put behind bars again!’
She heard the opening of the door in the wall behind her and went weak with a totally unexpected surge of relief. She had tried, for his sake, to keep him ignorant of this vile business, but he had woken and followed her out so she had failed.
But this failure was sweetly welcome. She no longer had the need to deceive h
im. If Liam did go to the tabloids when she refused to make more payments—and Jed would insist she did nothing of the kind—then at least he would be forewarned, prepared when those smears against her character—and, by association, his—came to light.
‘Get off this property, Forrester.’ Jed’s voice was hard and flat. ‘If I see your face around here again I’ll personally rearrange it for you.’ The lack of emotion in his tone made the threat very real. Even Liam blinked as he hurriedly stuffed the paper money back into the package, as if he was afraid the other man would take it from him.
Turning swiftly, Elena hurried to Jed’s side. He hadn’t bothered to dress, just pulled on the cut-offs he’d worn the day before. She reached out a hand, her fingers light and cool on the firm, warm skin of his arm. ‘Thank you,’ she said huskily, and really, really meant it.
‘Get back inside before you get a chill.’ His eyes swept the inadequate silk that skimmed her naked body. He turned and walked through the arched doorway, waiting for her, then re-secured the double doors. He strode back to the house, straight to the bathroom. She stood outside the door, listening to the gushing of hot water, her heart quailing.
Surely he didn’t think...
She pushed open the door just as he turned the shower head off. He reached for a towel, his eyes flat. ‘I suggest you go back to bed. From the look of you, your furtive assignation obviously took it out of you. Funny thing is, if I hadn’t cared I would never have known you’d told him where you’d be, arranged for him to come to you. What did you do? Promise to give him that hand-out because you felt sorry for him? Or because you like to keep men dangling? Can’t you let him go?’
He was still using that flat, emotionless tone. That made it all so much worse. It couldn’t all be going so wrong, not for a second time!
He finished with the towel and tossed it in a corner. ‘As I said, if I hadn’t cared I wouldn’t have known. I heard noises, heard the bolts being drawn. I thought you couldn’t sleep. So I followed. I didn’t want you to be sleepless and alone. But you weren’t alone.’
She knew how it must look. But she wasn’t going to stand by and see their lives ruined, their future together blown out of the water. ‘Jed,’ she said firmly as he walked past her into the bedroom, careful not to touch her, ‘will you please listen to me?’
‘No, thanks, I’ve done more than my fair share of that.’ He was dressing. A pale grey suit in a lightweight fabric, pale grey silk shirt and a dark tie. ‘Trouble is, you’re too good with make-believe. I suddenly find I don’t know what’s truth and what’s fantasy.’ He settled his jacket on his shoulders and glanced at his watch. ‘I may get back from Seville tonight. And, there again, I may not.’
Elena sat on the edge of the bed and watched him walk out, her eyes defeated, brimming with a sudden rush of unstoppable tears.
This couldn’t be happening all over again. Surely it couldn’t? Hadn’t he learned from his earlier refusal to listen to what she had to say?
Yet he had worked it out in his own good time, weighing what seemed bad, very bad indeed, against what he knew of her, the love they shared, and had reached the truth.
On the other hand, perhaps seeing her with Liam again had completely turned his opinion of her around. That first meeting had been explained away, and he’d come to accept it. But the second—the wad of money that could only have come from her. The indisputable fact that she had arranged to sneak out and meet her ex-husband. Would he now see everything she’d said as a tissue of deceitful lies? Even the way Sam’s baby had been conceived?
She spent the day alternating between faint hope and bleak despair. He didn’t come that night, nor in the morning. But Pilar did.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ELENA knew she had to make herself eat something for her baby’s sake. She was uninterestedly slicing fruit when she heard the unmistakable sound of a noisy two-stroke engine pull into the courtyard.
Pilar on her moped, come to check on the practically invisible irrigation system that kept the pot plants alive. It saved having to drag the hose or watering cans up to the terrace that overlooked the garden and the courtyard at the front.
Pilar always came to check the system was working properly at least once a week when Elena was away. Now the Spanish woman would know she was back in residence, and would expect to take up her normal household duties.
But Elena didn’t want to see anyone. Only Jed. And Jed, it seemed, was in no hurry to come back.
Sighing, she resigned herself to the inevitable as the heavy slap of Pilar’s sandalled feet heralded her arrival in the kitchen. A huge woman, she was full of good humour and energy. Elena liked her very much, and vowed not to let her know how desperately she wanted to be left alone.
‘So you are having the baby—that is good! The little one will bring you much joy! I speak as I know from the five of my own!’ Pilar said in her exuberant, heavily accented English.
Her eyes widening, Elena glanced down at the front of her sundress. Another five months to go—was her pregnancy so obvious?
Pilar, taking a gaudy spotted pinafore from a plastic bag, tied it round her huge middle and disabused her. ‘Señor Nolan called to tell me the good news and say you are back here now and I am needed.’
‘When did he call? This morning?’ Had he been in the village below, that close to her, and not bothered to come up here? Was he coldly and unemotionally cutting her out of his life again?
‘No, no.’ Pilar gave her a look that suggested she doubted her sanity. ‘While I was making lunch yesterday. He asked in the village for the house of Pilar Casals. Now you see I was right to make you talk to me in English all these years! Señor Nolan has no Spanish, but we were able to understand each other.’
Which was more than Elena did at this moment. Jed should have been in Seville by yesterday lunchtime. But Pilar gave her no time to ponder why he hadn’t been, telling her, ‘And Tomás is to come and water the garden and do other heavy work. That is good for all of us. He is on his way now, on his bicycle. I tell him my old motorbike won’t take my weight and his. Are you going to eat that fruit, or shall I make the good tortilla?’
‘Fruit,’ Elena said weakly, resuming her slicing before Pilar could make good her threat.
She could understand Pilar’s elation very well. Her husband, Tomás, only worked when Pilar forced him to, and would happily sit around all day at one of the pavement cafés down in the village, drinking strong coffee and smoking his evil-smelling cigarillos under the shade of an orange tree, reading the papers and talking to his friends, perfectly content to let his wife work to put food on the table for the family. She would be delighted to know he would be bringing in extra income.
When Pilar began clattering round with the mop and bucket Elena took her fruit to eat in the garden under the shade of a giant fig tree. Pilar would fetch her if Jed phoned. Though she had by now stopped hoping that he would.
Responsibly, he had arranged for her to have all the help around the house and garden she needed, and had probably told Pilar to see she ate properly. He had done his duty by her and his brother’s unborn child. He would want little or no further contact.
By the end of the afternoon the ache in her heart had become permanent, the feeling of loss so acute it was difficult to contain. Surely his business in Seville wasn’t keeping him away this long? If he’d meant to return he would have done so by now. She had a thumping headache from listening for the sound of his car.
Tomás had set off back to the village on his rusty old bicycle, and Pilar was heading through the courtyard, pushing her moped, on her way home, turning to call over her shoulder, ‘I have made you Polio con Tomate; be sure you eat it.’
Standing in the doorway, Elena made herself smile and promise to eat the chicken in tomato sauce. She didn’t want the Spanish woman to guess how despairingly unhappy she was.
Then she heard the sound of an approaching engine and her smile turned to one of wobbly relief. He had come back!
Her legs turned to something resembling water vapour and she sagged back against the doorframe, her stomach full of nervous flutters as she saw him appear in the arched doorway in the outer wall. Even though her eyes were misted with emotion she could see how drawn he looked, how tired. He stopped and exchanged a few words with Pilar, then walked towards her, the severity of his expression enclosing her rapidly beating heart in ice.
Nothing had changed in the last thirty-six hours.
He walked past her, into the coolness of the hall. She followed. At the entrance to the sitting room he made a curt after-you gesture with one hand. ‘Shall we talk?’
It was what she wanted, but her heart was somewhere under the soles of her feet, heavy and aching. The coldness of his voice, his eyes, everything about him, told her he was about to say something she couldn’t bear to hear.
She clung to the back of a chair for support. Her legs were shaking so badly. He put his briefcase down on a table and told her, ‘As you’ll have gathered, the Casalses will give you all the help you need around here. And I spoke to Catherine last night and told her you’d decided to wait here until the birth. It is your home, the place you’ll feel most comfortable in.’
He pushed his hands in his pockets and turned to stare out of the open windows, as if he’d seen enough of her. ‘I’ll be flying out to New York tomorrow and staying for four weeks, maybe five. I’ll let you know. After that I’ll check up on you from time to time, and nearer the birth I’ll be with you. We’ll book into a hotel in Cadiz. I’ve checked out a private maternity unit on the outskirts, and booked you in. I’m sure,’ he said coldly, ‘you went into the logistics of getting proper prenatal care when you first decided you wanted a child.’
She’d listened to him outlining his plans for their sterile future, the unemotional delivery of the words stunning her into silence. But now she blurted anguishedly, ‘Jed! Don’t do this to us!’
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