Trophy Husband

by Lynne Graham

  'I couldn't do that. Ladymead is yours.'

  'Mine?' she said blankly. • 'It's in your name. Think of it as a wedding present.'

  'Are you selling this place?' she mumbled in a daze. 'Why? It's useful when I want to entertain.' Abandoned wives always got the marital home... Was she getting hers in advance? And Alex was retaining the town house for his own use, ensuring that if they broke up he would suffer minimal inconvenience. Was it crazy of her to think like that? While she was wondering, Alex bent his dark head and exacted a long, lingering kiss that made her toes curl in wild anticipation.

  Much later, lying in a wonderful tangle of peaceful satiation, Sara rubbed her cheek lovingly against a smooth brown shoulder and thought about the chaotic, insecure childhood Alex must have had. 'You're really close to your brother and sisters, aren't you?'

  'It astonishes me when I think of what a whiny little brat Marco was, always throwing tantrums and telling tales,' he mused lazily. 'Donatella, now.. .she was very quiet and serious. She used to follow me everywhere. The twins... they were born shortly before I opted out of my father's tangled love life. Their mother was convinced I had to be pathologically jealous of them. Dio... she panicked if I went near them!'

  'Bitch,' Sara said feelingly.

  Alex vented a wry laugh. 'She's not like that now. She hasn't remarried and she hates Francine, so if there's a problem with Cara or Lucilla it lands in my lap.'

  'Why not their father's?'

  'Sandro will use any excuse not to get involved, and his excuse is generally Francine. She rules him with a rod of iron. She's very conscious that she's survived longer than any of her predecessors. She's hard as nails but occasionally I feel a little sorry for her. She's thirty-seven and I strongly suspect she would like a child but she's convinced that a baby would land her in the divorce court, and, going on previous form, she's very probably right,' Alex conceded. 'Like me, Francine worked out a long time ago that Sandro finds a wife who is also a mother a decided turn-off.'

  Sara had tensed. 'But you're not like that.'

  'I'd be very stupid to tell you if I was,' Alex mocked.

  'Alex... be serious.'

  'Why? Any prospect of us having a child is a very long way off,' he returned flatly.

  Sara frowned, astonished that he could think that she had no right to the smallest input on the subject. 'How long... is very long?'

  Alex exhaled on an impatient hiss. 'Let me put it this way, cara—I have no plans to compete with your former fiance in the fertility stakes!'

  'I beg your pardon?' Sara gasped, thoroughly disconcerted by that response as she lifted herself up to look at him.

  'Nor have I any intention of changing my mind in the near future.' Alex surveyed her with hard dark eyes. 'It's not a topic open to debate. Why do you think I take responsibility for birth control? I saw this threat clouding my horizon weeks ago!'

  Threat? Her cheeks flamed. 'Did you indeed?'

  'Si...the same second you told me that your cousin was pregnant,' Alex drawled softly. 'You are not in competition with her.'

  'What on earth are you talking about? I asked a simple question,' Sara gritted defensively.

  'And I gave you a simple answer. No,' Alex said emphatically. 'Sublimate your maternal urges in cats and dogs.'

  Sara shifted across the bed as if she had been bitten by a rattlesnake. 'I have no idea why you had to drag Antonia into this!' Her voice shook with angry incomprehension and hurt.

  Alex dimmed the lights. 'Go to sleep.'

  'Don't treat me like a child!' she protested incredulously.

  'I refuse to argue with you about this.'

  'You're like your father, aren't you?' she condemned wildly.

  'Madre di Dio...it I'd been like Sandra, cara, you would have been dumped before the ink was dry on the marriage licence!'

  In the darkness Sara went rigid with shocked disbelief. He played really dirty in a fight... And you're surprised! an inner voice carolled drily. 'So why didn't you just do that?' she demanded.

  'Don't ask me in the mood I'm in.'

  'I want to know!'

  'It's like there's a piece of elastic which keeps on hauling me back... but at this moment, bella mia, it's stretched very taut!' And the fact that he didn't like the feeling at all lanced clear as a bell through every splintering syllable.

  'Help yourself to a pair of scissors!' Sara suggested painfully, sick and tired of the frequency with which Alex implied that their marriage might not have a future. Every time she stood up to him, he unleashed that threat.

  Alex bit out a raw, exasperated imprecation in Italian. Sara pinned her tremulous mouth shut with enormous effort. There was a volcano of injustice boiling up inside her. One little question, casually asked, innocently meant—for, believe it or not, she was not gasping to become pregnant right at this moment—and she wouldn't have minded if Alex had merely said he would prefer to wait a year or two. Yes, she wanted Alex's baby but only when she felt secure in their relationship and only when he felt the same way. So what on earth did Antonia have to do with it? Did he really think that she would try to keep up with her cousin in such an utterly stupid way?

  Or was Alex being almost too clever for his own good? she wondered painfully. Throwing up a red herring to conceal the fact that he didn't want children and certainly wouldn't risk an accidental pregnancy when he couldn't see their marriage lasting very long... was that what he had been doing? And she remembered, with bitter clarity, thinking that a woman in love with a man who did not love her might well become insecure, oversensitive and anxious. And now she knew it to be the case, Sara reflected with stricken insight.

  CHAPTER NINE

  'I’M SORRY,' the polite female voice responded when Sara reached for the phone at almost the same moment that she woke up in bed alone. ' Rossini is in conference.'

  'I'm sorry,' the same infuriatingly detached tone told her an hour later. ' Rossini is not presently available.

  'I am so sorry,' Sara was informed shortly before lunchtime and this time the voice sounded reprovingly weary. ' Rossini is airborne.'

  Airborne? Staving off a ludicrous image of Alex in free flight round the office, Sara cast aside the phone. It had finally dawned on her that he hadn't put his wife's name on the shortlist of approved callers allowed instant access to him...surely a deliberate oversight? How much enough was enough?.A slow, steady anger was escalating inside Sara. She had done nothing to deserve such treatment.

  He phoned from Paris at eight that evening. 'Things are hotting up here. I won't be back tonight,' he imparted. 'Everything OK?'

  'Great,' Sara said in a stifled tone, for her anger had turned cold and heavy inside her.

  'It might take me a couple of days to tie the loose ends up.'

  'I understand.'

  'I need a copy of a document on my desk in the library. Could you fax it to me?' He passed on the details in exactly the same tone that he had always utilised when she had been a humble employee. And she made a discovery there and then. Alex fell back behind that detachment instinctively when anything was wrong between them. He held her at a distance, forestalling argument or indeed any form of intimacy. No longer did she wonder why she had felt so damnably awkward with Alex on the phone before their marriage. That chill, silent disapproval could come down the line like a blast of polar snow.

  Early the next morning Sara reached a very tough decision. No, Alex wasn't going to do this to her—blowing hot, blowing cold, making her feel that the smallest disagreement or displeasure might lead to the breakdown of their marriage. It was like being forced to live on a knife-edge. The more she took of it, the worse it would get. She packed a case with casual clothing. It would mean roughing it but she intended to stay at Ladymead. All she really needed for tonight was food... and a bed. So she would go shopping on the way down.

  She faxed a message to Alex before she climbed into the limousine.

  'Dear Alex,' it ran, 'waiting to be abandoned is bad for my ner
ves, so I've taken care of the problem for you. I am abandoning you.'

  The builders' foreman greeted her at the door of the manor house. "The phone has been ringing off the hook for you for the past two hours, Rossini. Somebody called Pete.'

  'So, you are there,' Pete muttered frantically when she answered the next time the phone rang. 'What the heck was in that fax? Alex went through the roof and he was in a bad enough mood even before it arrived!'

  'Did he tell you to track me down?'

  'Obviously. This bid is at a crucial stage. He's very busy with the French negotiators,' Pete stressed with audible incredulity, that she should require such an explanation. 'Have you had bad news or something? Can't you handle it on your own? You know Alex doesn't like to be disturbed when he's—'

  'I don't work for Alex any mote,' she reminded him. 'Just tell him I was too busy to come to the phone.'

  'I can't tell Alex that!' he spluttered in horror.

  'But then Alex shouldn't have asked you to deal with this.'

  In the background, she heard a deeper masculine voice intrude. There was a short silence and then, without warning, her eardrums were seared. 'What the bloody hell are you playing at?' Alex launched down the line at her full volume. 'How dare you send me a message like that?'

  'That kind of blackmail doesn't exactly make your day, does it?' Sara pointed out gently.

  Alex wasn't listening. 'I want you back in London by tonight!'

  'No, Alex-'

  'If you don't stop this insanity right now, I'll—'

  'Save your breath. I know the options. Either you make a commitment to our marriage or you let me go, and since I really don't think you have the guts to do the first I'm placing my bets on the second,' Sara murmured tightly.

  She replaced the receiver, her face white and stiff with strain. Then she straightened her shoulders and slowly released her breath. Now she had to wait. The next move was his to make. What she really needed, she conceded tautly, was nerves of steel, and what nerve she did have was petering out fast. She was risking so much... but not for so little. Would Alex come down to Ladymead? How long would it take him to come? Was she mad to have thrown down the gauntlet so blatantly?

  She had taken Alex by surprise. You had to knock him off balance to make him listen. And if he left her here, chose to take her at her word—well, she was only ending what would have ended anyway, she told herself unhappily. She had to know whether or not he intended to give their marriage a chance. From the outside it didn't look as though he did. If she crossed him, he closed her out and put as much distance between them as he could. And maybe if he had loved her she could have handled that better, practised patience and hoped that time would take care of the problem.

  But Alex didn't love her. Even worse he disliked the idea that she had any sort of power over him, even if it was only the far from cerebral power of sex. All the control had to be on his side...just as it had been in Venice. The expert lover and the amateur. Alex had controlled everything they'd shared. She sensed that it had always been like that for him with women. He had to call every shot. He didn't compromise. And he didn't trust her either.

  By mid-afternoon the bed that she had purchased had been delivered. For the first time in her life, Sara had employed cash as an inducement to better service. She couldn't say that she was proud of herself but she could live with it when the alternative was sleeping on the floor. Ladymead was empty by four. The workforce downed tools and took off. Sara was left alone, free to wander silent rooms and wonder how she would furnish them, but the moment she appreciated that Alex might never share the house with her any interest she might have had drained away.

  Almost as quickly she began to doubt and question her own actions. Wasn't it very probable that Alex would see her behaviour as a selfish, immature demand for attention? Suddenly she could not picture him responding to her change of abode with anything other than exasperated silence. Give her enough rope and let her hang herself with it—she could imagine Alex thinking like that. She had been the one to walk out; let her be the one to dig herself out of the tight corner she had put herself in. And that was assuming that Alex didn't decide just to let her go...

  Suddenly she saw that, while she had very real concerns about their relationship, challenging Alex to such a degree had been needlessly provocative. Shouldn't she have tried harder to cut across those barriers of his to tell him without anger that they had to talk openly and honestly?

  It was getting dark when she made herself sandwiches and then looked at them without appetite. The rain had come on slowly in a soft mist that dampened and blurred the windows. Now hailstones were lashing the panes. The electricity was only on in part of the house. As the shadows lengthened, she negotiated the magnificent main staircase with care, grateful that she had bought a torch. She crossed creaking floorboards in the bedroom that she had selected because it was next to the one functioning bathroom. Eventually she stopped pacing and wished that she had brought something to read with her. Shortly after ten she climbed into bed to keep warm while she listened to the rain and the wind battering the house.

  A distant thumping noise woke her up at some timeless stage of the night. For a minute she was completely disorientated and then recall returned, making her spring out of her bed, breathlessly locate the light switch and lift the torch. It was almost two in the morning. From the top of the stairs, she could see the sturdy front door shuddering in complaint on its wrought-iron hinges and hurried down.

  'What did I do in my last life to deserve this?' Alex splintered savagely as he rammed the door back in his eagerness to get over the threshold and out of the howling wind and rain.

  Sara fell back, momentarily astonished by his appearance. He was soaked to the skin, his suit plastered to every muscular line of his powerful frame. He looked as if he had been swimming fully clothed, but he was not only very wet, he was also very dirty: mud was caked on his shoes and trousers and the front of a once pristine white shirt where he had clearly wiped his hands.

  'If this is country life, you can bloody well keep it!' he blistered, fixing outraged golden eyes on her. 'The Bugatti died in a flood down that hellish mud track!'

  'Oh, dear...' Sara said in a wobbly undertone, watching him rake a shaking hand through his wet, curling hair, pushing it back off his forehead as he stood there dripping, and she had a truly terrifying urge to put both arms round him and soothe him as if he were a furious, frustrated little boy who had just discovered the awful truth that life didn't always go his way.

  'I need a bath and a drink.'

  'Oh, dear...' Sara said again helplessly, knowing that neither was available and not quite sure how to break such bad news.

  'My case is still in the car!' Alex delivered between clenched teeth.

  'Oh, dear...' It was hard to think of anything more positive to say.

  'Madre di Dio.. .if you say that once more...!' he exploded, but at the same time he shivered convulsively.

  And it was the shiver that unfroze Sara. 'You need to get out of those clothes. Come upstairs.'

  'The helicopter couldn't fly in the storm,' Alex grated, still boiling with rage as he followed her up the stairs. 'The jet was delayed. And there's not even electric light here. Have you any idea how long I've been banging at that door?'

  Sara threw open the door of the bathroom, switching on the mercifully working light with a flourish. "There's no hot water but everything else functions,' she told him encouragingly.

  'No hot water?' Alex whispered in stunned disbelief.

  Sara gave him a gentle push over the threshold and closed the door on him. Then she thought fast. In minutes she was fully dressed again. Lifting the torch and pulling on a jacket, she left the house.

  It was a wild night and the sky was as black as pitch. The drive, with its potholes the size of craters, was a disaster zone for anyone forced to negotiate it without light. Alex's car had died near the very foot where the drive disappeared altogether as it dipped sudde
nly beneath a large, dark, uninviting expanse of water. Thankfully, Alex hadn't locked his car as he should have done. She waded in and located his leather case, searched for the keys and assumed that he had taken them with him. It was a good half-mile trudge back to the house but the rain was slackening off and the wind was dying down.

  Alex had come. Alex had actually made a big effort to come. She hadn't expected him tonight, not so soon. And she certainly hadn't expected him to show up in the early hours, wet and filthy, a far cry from his usual immaculately groomed self. She had wanted very badly to laugh once the shock had worn off but amusement would have been cruel when Alex was so clearly at the end of his tether. A lukewarm shower would be equally cruel, she reflected. Maybe she should have offered to boil the kettle for him... What a shame she had switched the heater off earlier when she couldn't quite work out how to set the time switch.

  When she found the bathroom deserted, she thrust the case through the bedroom door like a sneak thief. She didn't look in. 'I'll make you some coffee!' she called winningly, and hurriedly escaped again.

  She carefully washed the beaker that she had used earlier and wished that she hadn't been quite so ridiculously sparing in what she had brought for her own needs. She could offer him a biscuit, a cup of instant coffee and banana sandwiches—not exactly a feast for a male with a healthy appetite.

  'You shouldn't have gone back to the car for me...but thanks. The gesture was appreciated.'

  Sara spun round. Alex was standing in the doorway wearing a black Armani sweater and well-cut linen trousers. He looked heart-stoppingly gorgeous. Her ribcage felt constrained. 'It was the least I could do. Anyway I had a torch.'

  'This place is a hell-hole. And it's a judgement on me,' Alex mused fatalistically, scanning the vast, comfortless kitchen with a barely concealed shudder. 'I knew what I was doing. I disobeyed my own instincts—'

  'Coffee?' Sara suggested, setting the beaker on the long, scrubbed table. 'Banana sandwiches are all I can offer in the way of food, I'm afraid.'