The Dutiful Wife

by Penny Jordan

  ‘You should have told me all of this before. It should have been something we dealt with together.’

  ‘It isn’t your problem or your responsibility.’

  ‘Of course it is. You are the woman I love. Do you really think I would want you to go through this on your own? What kind of man do you think I am, Giselle? I thought you knew me.’

  ‘I do know you. I know that you don’t want children and that I must not have them. I know where my duty and my responsibility lie, Saul. I’ve got an appointment in a few days’ time at a clinic here in London. It was the first one I rang and I decided to go to them.’

  Saul held her even more tightly. Her grief and despair touched his own emotions so forcibly that it was as though he felt her pain with her. ‘It needn’t be like this,’ he told her. ‘Yes, I know what I said, and what we agreed, but that was before…I can’t pretend that I wanted you to become pregnant, but now you are. Why don’t we seek proper expert medical advice about your mother’s postnatal depression?’

  ‘There’s no point. I know what she did. I know what I might do myself. Don’t you see that, Saul?’ Giselle could feel her panic growing, and with it her fear. She felt as though she was incapable of thinking logically already, and their child hadn’t even been born yet. Their child. Pain wrenched at her heart.

  ‘All right, we won’t talk about it right now,’ Saul soothed her.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Giselle demanded frantically, when he released her and moved away from her.

  ‘I want to ring Moira to tell her that I won’t be in for the rest of the day. I’ll make us both a cup of coffee, and then if you want to we can talk some more.’

  ‘There’s nothing else to say,’ Giselle told him. ‘You know it all now.’ She closed her eyes and said despairingly, ‘I just wish so much that this hadn’t happened.’

  No more than he wished the same, Saul acknowledged. Not for his own sake now, but for hers.

  In the end Saul decided that it would do Giselle good to get out of the house, so he drove her to Richmond Park, relieved to see a faint smile touch her lips when she recognised when they were heading. She’d always loved the park, and they’d often come here to walk and talk together when they were in London.

  At first Saul thought that he had done the right thing. He had forgotten, though, that the schools had closed for the half-term holiday, and watching Giselle wince at the sound of children’s voices made him wish that he had chosen somewhere else, child-free.

  When he looked at Giselle her eyes were filled with tears.

  Children. She ached so badly to be able to hold her own child. She felt so torn, so afraid. It was all very well for Saul to talk of consulting experts. They couldn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. She had seen what severe postnatal depression could do. She had experienced its horror at first hand.

  Saul pulled her in to his side, his arm round her waist. He loved her so much, and he felt guilty for not having sensed that she was withholding something from him that was hurting her so badly.

  The panic inside Giselle was like a physical pain. And when, engrossed in her own thoughts, she slipped and lost her footing, her first instinct as Saul grabbed her and held her steady before she fell was to place her hand protectively against her body, in defence of the life she was carrying within her. Fresh tears filled her eyes and spilled down onto her cheeks.

  Giselle wasn’t really hungry, but Saul insisted on driving down into Richmond so that they could eat at a small restaurant overlooking the river. He was going to cancel all his appointments and stay with Giselle until it was time to return to Arezzio, he told himself as he watched her toying with her food, her face white with despair and grief. He was desperately afraid for her, having seen the state she was in, but he dared not say so in case it made her feel worse.

  More than anything else he believed that they needed to get some expert medical opinions from those best qualified to help them.

  It was gone ten o’clock when they got back, and Saul told Giselle, ‘You look tired. Why don’t you turn in? I won’t disturb you if you want to get off to sleep. I’ve got some work I can do.’

  He was saying that to her because of last night, Giselle knew. But right now she had never needed him more.

  ‘No,’ she told him. ‘I want you to come with me. I want you, Saul. I need you.’

  There was a pleading note in her voice that tore at his heart. Giselle, his Giselle, had no need to beg him to love her or to hold her.

  They showered together, and Saul’s touch on Giselle’s body was both careful and watchful. When Giselle saw him glance down at her still flat stomach she shook her head. ‘There’s nothing to see. If anything, I’ve actually lost weight.’

  Because she’d been worrying, Saul recognised. But she was wrong. There was something to see. Her breasts felt different to his touch, filling his hands when he cupped them. Saul closed his eyes against the savagely sharp sense of grief that surged through him out of nowhere.

  When he kissed her she clung to him almost in desperation, burying her face against his shoulder, her warm wet flesh slick against his own.

  ‘If you’d rather not—’ he began. His concern was for her, not for his own arousal or his own need, but immediately she shook her head almost violently and clung tightly to him.

  ‘I do want to, Saul. I need to. I need you.’

  It was true, Giselle knew. She needed to drive out the demons inside her by taking back to herself the intimacy and closeness that she had thought lost. She needed to re-establish their relationship, to barricade herself away from the pain she knew was waiting for her. She needed the release that their lovemaking would bring from all the dark bonds that imprisoned her. She needed Saul and his love—more, she felt, than she had ever needed them before.

  He was careful and gentle with her, his love for her shining though the restraint he was placing on his passion. But his care for her was not what Giselle wanted. She didn’t want to be treated as someone who was vulnerable and fragile. She didn’t want to be humoured or cosseted or indulged. That was the way her father had treated her mother, as weak and in need of careful treatment, the lesser partner in their marriage. And she was not her mother. Not yet…

  She wanted Saul to treat her as he had always done, as a woman whose sensuality and desire for him matched his for her. She wanted them to be two perfect halves of a complete whole, so perfectly matched that it was impossible to tell where one of them ended and the other began.

  Saul’s tender kiss, as gentle as his careful hold on her body, had her pressing herself fiercely against him, lifting her hands to hold his head so that she could show him how she wanted him to kiss her. Her tongue stroked over his lips and then prised them apart, darting quickly and hotly into the sensual intimacy of his mouth, flicking against his tongue, curling round it, stroking it with short, quick movements and then longer, slower ones, until she could feel his heartbeat accelerating to match the frantic thud of her own.

  She reached for his hand, placing it against her naked breast, whispering against his mouth, ‘Touch me, Saul. Want me, and show me how strong that wanting is.’ When he hesitated, she told him urgently, ‘It isn’t your pity that I need. It’s your passion. I need its fire to burn away everything but this—us, now. So close together that nothing and no one can come between us.’

  Her voice was ragged with emotion, her eyes liquid with it, and the way she was revealing her need to him stripped Saul’s own defences down to the bone, leaving him feeling as raw as though someone had ripped off a layer of his skin. He felt her pain for her.

  When Saul lifted the hand that wasn’t cupping her breast, his fingers wide and spread, his palm facing her, Giselle placed her own hand against it, finger to finger, palm to palm, her eyes closing on the surge of love that swept through her. Saul moved his hand slightly so that her fingers slid between his, and both of them closed their fingers into a shared closed fist.

  ‘I love you mor
e than life itself,’ he told her thickly, and meant it.

  ‘You are my life, my whole, my all,’ Giselle whispered jaggedly back to him.

  This time when she leaned towards him he was the one to kiss her, until control of the kiss was wrested from them both by the passion twisting, roiling and burning inside them. They were a single bonded unit of intense arousal and desire, their shared need one single fierce force that linked their bodies together, dissolving flesh, muscle and bone.

  When Giselle touched and caressed Saul’s body she felt the response of his flesh as though it was her own. When Saul took the tight pucker of Giselle’s nipple into his mouth and suckled on it he felt the waves of close to unbearable pleasure that racked and galvanised her body into shudders pulsing through his own.

  There was no need for him to ask Giselle when she was ready. His own body told him—just as his senses told him as clearly as though she had spoken the words to him that her need couldn’t wait. Lifting her now, he pillowed her against the shower wall and she wrapped her legs tightly round him, exactly the way she wanted it to be.

  His thrust into her, slowly, drawing out the pleasure, half withdrawing from her before sliding himself deeper against the slick, wet, firmly muscled warmth that gripped and caressed him was, Saul knew, her desire and her need every bit as much as it was his own.

  Giselle came first, and Saul’s harsh wrenched cry of almost agonised release mingled with her low keening moan of satisfaction within seconds.

  Later, with Giselle sleeping in his arms, Saul looked down at her and tightened his hold on her. What she had told him today had only deepened his love for her, made his wish that he could have protected her from all that she had suffered all the stronger. When the darkness of now was over their relationship would emerge even stronger. He intended to make sure of that.

  In her sleep Giselle heard the sound of a child crying—the sharp, helpless, heart-piercing cry of a newborn in need. In her dream she could see the baby, so small and defenceless. She reached for it, to take it in her arms, but it wasn’t there any more even though she could still hear its cry. She woke up in the dark, her face wet with tears, her body aching with longing and pain. Her baby. She wanted it so much. She wanted to hold it and protect it. She wanted to give it her love, and most of all she wanted to give it life.

  Chapter Nine

  SAUL LOOKED AT HIS WATCH. An hour to go before his meeting with Hans de Kyper. Following his discovery that Giselle was pregnant, and his new awareness of her vulnerability, he had cancelled all his appointments apart from the one with the Dutch businessman responsible for the hugely successful growing programme he and Giselle wanted to replicate in Arezzio. It had been impossible for another appointment to be made.

  He had tried to persuade Giselle to attend the meeting with him, reminding her of how enthusiastic she had been about the project, but she had simply shaken her head. Saul was desperately worried about her. She seemed to be growing thinner by the day, her weight decreasing as the misery and despair he could see in her eyes grew.

  Soon she would be going to the clinic, and even though she had said that she would go alone Saul fully intended to go with her. He doodled automatically on his notepad whilst he thought about the previous night, when he had woken up to find Giselle crying in her sleep. When he had woken her she had seemed confused, telling him that she had heard a baby crying.

  Saul closed his eyes and then opened them again. Giselle had made it clear that had she not had the fear that she might inherit her mother’s vulnerability to severe postnatal depression she would have wanted to have children, a child…his child. Saul glanced absently at the doodle he had drawn and then tensed. On the notepad he liked to use when he was working at his desk was an unmistakable sketch of a stork carrying a baby.

  Saul stared at the doodle for several seconds whilst his mind went into overdrive. Then abruptly he pushed back his chair and got up, calling out to his PA as he opened the connecting door to her office. ‘I’ve got to go out.’

  ‘But what about Mr de Kyper?’ Moira protested.

  ‘I’ll be back in time to see him. If I’m not keep him talking. I need to see him.’

  Before she could say anything more he was opening the outer door to his office, pulling on his suit jacket as he did so.

  Once outside on the street he reached for his mobile phone. He had come outside because he didn’t want anyone else—not even Moira, who was the soul of discretion—to hear what he knew he had to say.

  When he had got the number he wanted and made his call he asked to be put through to whoever was in charge of the clinic.

  The doctor to whom he eventually spoke introduced herself as Dr Smithers. She seemed to think that Saul was trying to prevent Giselle from having a termination against her will, and insisted that the appointment could only be cancelled by Giselle herself.

  ‘My wife is merely coming to see you for pre-termination counselling,’ Saul pointed out. ‘I feel she needs to speak to other medical experts first.’

  ‘Then I suggest it is your wife you should be speaking to right now and not me,’ Dr Smithers told him crisply.

  Saul sighed as he ended the call. He had tried to coax Giselle into agreeing that they should at least seek proper medical advice on the subject of postnatal depression, but every time he raised the subject she became so emotional and filled with panic that he had felt obliged to drop the matter. Giselle was totally convinced that she would behave as her mother had done, but Saul could not imagine her doing any such thing. Now, having spoken to the clinic’s director, he was even more determined to accompany Giselle on her appointment—even though she kept insisting that she did not want him to do so.

  Saul headed back to his office. He might not have had any desire for them to have a child—he would certainly have argued firmly against them doing so if Giselle had approached him with a view that they should rethink their original agreement—but the situation they were now in had taken them many steps beyond that scenario. Giselle was already pregnant—by accident, by an act of fate. And an act of fate was what had brought them together. Could he in all good consciousness reject one act of fate whilst accepting the other as a gift he hadn’t been able to refuse?

  Giselle was concerned about the effect having a child might have on her mentally. After listening to her crying in her sleep, and remembering everything that she had said to him, Saul was now equally concerned about the effect that having to terminate her pregnancy was already having on her.

  He looked at his watch. He’d now got less than an hour before his meeting.

  As soon as he got back to his office Saul switched on his laptop. Half an hour later he had the name of a London-based professor who was one of the world’s foremost experts in the field of postnatal depression.

  Giselle was in turmoil—torment, in fact. He knew that without her having to say so. Her grief and despair spoke far more clearly to him of her real feelings than any words could have done. And, since he loved her so much that he could not bear to see her in pain, he was going to make sure that no stone was left unturned in his efforts to help her.

  The professor was currently in America, giving a lecture tour, but would be back in London within twenty-four hours. If necessary Saul was prepared to hire a private jet and fly Giselle to America so that she could speak to him. That was how much he loved her. There was nothing he would not do for her. Nothing. And that included becoming a father.

  Becoming a father. As the shocking realisation hit, Saul knew that deep within himself, even though he had sworn to Giselle that he never wanted children, there was something—an urge, a powerful need—that wanted to protect the vulnerable new life Giselle was carrying.

  Chapter Ten

  HANS DE KYPER WAS A skilled businessman, and on any other occasion Saul would have enjoyed crossing swords with him as they discussed the terms on which they might possibly do business, negotiating into the early hours of the morning if necessary. But not today. To
day, when their meeting stretched from one to nearly three hours, Saul knew he had to bring it to an end. But before he could say anything the Dutchman himself was suggesting that they continue their discussions in two days’ time.

  ‘But why do you want me to see this professor? My decision has already been made.’

  ‘Has it?’ Saul challenged Giselle softly. ‘Have you really made the decision you want to make, Giselle? Or have you made the one you feel you have to make?’

  ‘I know what he will say, Saul. I know he will tell me that I’ve made the right decision.’

  Saul shook his head. ‘No, you don’t know that, Giselle. You can’t know it without speaking with him. You simply believe it. I want us to go and see him, hear what he has to say.’

  Saul hated to put pressure on Giselle when she was already so distraught. Tears were pouring over the now too-sharp prominence of her cheekbones as she paced the floor of their sitting room. She was gaunt and thin, her eyes huge and luminous with tears and emotion as she shook her head in denial of his suggestion that they consult the professor. But Saul wasn’t going to give up.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he begged her. ‘You were six years old when your mother died. That’s nearly twenty years ago—just think of the leaps and bounds there have been in medical science since then.’

  ‘Science, yes. But this is more complex than that. There isn’t a formula that can be applied to put things right. It’s a mental problem—a…a form of madness.’

  ‘Giselle, please—do it for me. See him for me—if you won’t see him for yourself.’

  Saul watched as her eyes widened and then became shadowed.

  ‘You’d do that to me?’ she demanded in disbelief. ‘You’d use that kind of emotional pressure against me?’