by Lynne Graham
‘She’ll run to fat in a few years,’ Gina said nastily.
Kelda was looking, although she had tried so hard not to. But there was this terrible, wicked craving inside her. She had not seen Angelo in the flesh since that night at the cottage. His partner was slender, blonde, impeccably dressed and distinctly beautiful. And Angelo? The air locked in her throat. A shudder ran through her. Angelo was Angelo. Striking, vital, magnificent. She could not dredge her hungry gaze from him.
‘Care to dance?’ Russ demanded.
‘Yes, go ahead.’ Gina gave her a determined push. ‘Don’t be a wallflower with him around!’
Kelda found herself out on the floor without knowing how she had arrived there. As Russ whirled her around with more enthusiasm than rhythm, she caught flickering glimpses of Angelo. His hard-edged profile...the uncompromising set of his jawline...the sheen of his ebony hair beneath the lights. Had he lost weight or was that only her imagination? Maybe it was the shadows which carved those dark features into leaner, older lines.
Suddenly, she was filled with self-loathing. She was not some lovesick teenager, still longing for some arrogant young male, who had treated her badly! Where was her pride? While she struggled to survive, Angelo had been breaking all known records with a constant stream of other women. And a sixth sense warned her that he might well be announcing his marital plans soon. Angelo, married, introducing her to his wife...she broke out in nervous perspiration.
The imagery summoned up made her feel sick and dizzy. Would Tomaso retain his silence when Angelo brought home a wife-to-be? She was painfully aware that her stepfather was finding that silence harder and harder to maintain. Five months ago he had perhaps hoped that his son and his stepdaughter might reconcile without any interference from him and then all constraint would be at an end within the family circle. But after this length of time Tomaso could no longer sustain such a hope.
‘Could we sit down?’ she gasped breathlessly.
‘Too energetic?’ Russ grimaced. ‘Sorry, I keep on forgetting...’
I don’t, Kelda reflected miserably. Russ curved a supportive arm to her spine and by the worst possible misfortune chose the path back to their table that went closest to Angelo’s. They came face to face in the aisle.
‘Kelda...’ Angelo stilled. Tension thickened the atmosphere but he stared at her with impassive dark eyes, cold as charity. ‘What a pleasant surprise,’ he drawled. ‘Let me introduce you to Isabel...Isabel, this is my stepsister, Kelda—’
‘I’m delighted to meet you.’ Isabel extended a polite hand.
Stepsister...the term, the very word shattered Kelda. Angelo had never used it before. Like a robot, she forced her arm up to meet Isabel’s fingers, briefly, loosely connecting and dropping away again.
‘And Russ.’ Russ’s arm tightened round Kelda’s rigid back.
‘Perhaps Kelda and Russ would like to join us.’ As Isabel turned to address Angelo, she rested her left hand on his sleeve and the elegant diamond solitaire on her engagement finger caught the light. ‘The more the merrier when one’s celebrating, don’t you think?’ she said with a teasing smile.
‘Sorry, we’re with a party of our own,’ Russ retorted with a distinctly forced smile.
A moment later, Kelda dropped heavily down into her chair, white as a sheet.
‘What’s wrong?’ Gina asked of Russ.
‘The bastard just introduced her to his fiancée.’
* * *
‘Men!’ Gina snorted, unlocking the door of her docklands apartment where Kelda was to spend the night. Russ was staying the night with his best man. Gina stalked over to the drinks cabinet. ‘You need a brandy. You look like a corpse!’
‘No,’ Kelda shook her head.
‘Not even this once?’ Gina wheedled.
‘Sorry.’
‘Well then, I insist you get straight into bed and I’ll bring supper in.’
‘Gina, it’s only ten—’
‘We should have had a hen-night and stayed home,’ her friend muttered crossly. ‘That club was Russ’s idea.’
‘I was bound to run into Angelo sooner or later.’ With a very real effort, Kelda tilted her chin and managed to smile. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Do you think I came down with the last shower of rain?’ Gina enquired very drily. ‘You are abso-lutely devastated!’
Kelda contrived a jerky shrug. ‘It was on the cards. So, he’s getting married...so what?’
‘You should have told him the truth months ago!’
‘Gina!’ Kelda was shaken.
Her friend sighed. ‘You deliberately drove him away by letting him think that Russ and you were involved—’
‘I didn’t know I was pregnant—’
‘And then you tell him it’s not his baby!’ Gina recounted.
‘Do you really think that he wanted to hear that it was?’
Presented with that angle, Gina winced.
Kelda managed to produce a wry laugh. ‘I did the right thing, Gina, and I’m over him. I’m really not martyr material. Plenty more fish in the sea.’
Gina frowned. ‘Is that really how you feel?’
‘Yes.’ Kelda walked into the kitchen. ‘Now where is this fancy no-cook supper you promised me, and all the gossip?’
‘Have you found out yet who is sending you those luscious hampers every week?’
Kelda smiled. For months she had been receiving luxury hampers of fabulous food from Harrods. ‘Tomaso, of course.’
‘Your stepfather?’ Gina exclaimed in comical disappointment. ‘I thought you had a secret admirer!’
‘Chance would be a fine thing, the shape I’m in.’
‘Are you sure it’s him?’
‘Who else?’ Kelda said wryly. ‘I taxed him with it and of course he denied it, but he hates being thanked for anything. It has to be him. He was really quite put out with me when I told him I wouldn’t accept any financial help from him and Mum.’
Later, as she lay sleepless in Russ and Gina’s guest-room, the tears trickled silently down her cheeks into her hair, making her skin burn. As fast as they came, she scrubbed them away. Angelo was getting married. That was not the end of her world. She could get by without Angelo...hadn’t she been doing so for months? Angelo’s marriage was merely the last act in a grotesque black comedy.
Why should it upset her? Even if she had told the truth and Angelo had accepted that he was the father of her child...even if he had asked her to marry him, she would have turned him down. She had no doubts about that reality. She might love Angelo in that insane, unreasoning way that women sometimes loved, but she did not like Angelo, and literally cringed from the idea of living with him as an unwilling and no doubt unfaithful husband. No, much as it might hurt, Kelda was convinced that her future was far safer solely in her own hands.
The pain in her abdomen came back midway through Russ and Gina’s wedding breakfast the following morning. She had to leave the table to be ignominiously sick but she managed to conceal her pallor with judicious use of cosmetics before she returned.
‘I think you should go home to bed,’ Gina scolded none the less when she was changing out of her unconventional scarlet designer wedding-gown. ‘All that standing around for the photos has exhausted you.’
By then, Kelda was feeling pretty awful and just a little scared. The pain was worse. She knew she needed to see a doctor but she was determined not to cloud her friends’ wedding-day. Half an hour later, she waved them off and walked back into the hotel, intending to call a cab, but without warning a sliver of absolute agony pierced her. With a stifled cry, she pressed a hand to her stomach. A red mist rose in front of her eyes. She took a staggering step in the direction of a chair but she didn’t make it. She collapsed in the foyer.
* * *
‘If she dies, I’ll never forgive you!’ Daisy launched across the waiting-room, her pretty face swollen and distraught with tears. ‘Have you any idea how dangerous acute appendicitis is at this sta
ge of her pregnancy? They have to operate but she might lose the baby! And if she loses that baby, Angelo, I’ll never forgive you for that either!’
‘Daisy...Daisy,’ Tomaso soothed, tugging his almost hysterical wife into his arms. ‘Angelo didn’t come here for this—’
‘Why did he come?’ Daisy sobbed into his shoulder. ‘What’s he doing here now?’
‘Today Kelda’s two closest friends got married,’ Angelo informed her tightly. ‘That’s why I’m here.’
Daisy surveyed him with blank incredulity. ‘What has that got to do with anything?’
* * *
Kelda came back to consciousness in a strange room. Her throat was unbearably dry and her head ached and she was dully aware that she could feel a different kind of pain now. Thankfully no longer severe, the pain had been reduced to throbbing discomfort instead. There was a nurse bending over her. She focused on her with difficulty. ‘Where am I?’
‘The recovery-room.’
‘Am I recovered?’ she mumbled ungrammatically.
‘We hope so.’
‘My baby?’ Kelda whispered shakily, suddenly terrified.
‘Hanging in there like a Trojan.’ The nurse smiled and blurred again.
The next time Kelda surfaced, she felt a little less removed from the world. Her mother was holding her hand and a nurse was taking her blood-pressure. ‘What happened to me?’ she whispered.
In a voice thickened by tears, her mother explained. ‘Why didn’t you go to the doctor?’ Daisy scolded finally.
‘I meant to.’
‘Tomaso wants you to see Angelo,’ her mother volunteered reluctantly.
‘A-Angelo?’ Kelda echoed, attempting to sit up and being firmly pressed back down again by the clucking nurse. ‘What’s he doing here?’
‘Do you want to see him?’
Kelda shut her eyes tightly, an expression of weary pain crossing her drawn features. ‘No...please, no.’
Kelda turned her face to the wall when she was alone again. Angelo? The very last person she had any desire to see when she was weak and in pain and quite frankly at the end of her tether. What was he doing here? And how dared Tomaso ask her to see him! In the cause of family unity, she supposed and she could see the point of that, even agree with his motivation but now was not the time to expect her to rise gracefully above selfish human feelings.
Later, she promised herself, later when she was feeling better and she could congratulate Angelo on his engagement and hopefully mean it. Right now, she needed time, time to adjust to that new set of circumstances and detach herself from the milling turmoil of her own confused emotions. And there was no doubt that she was desperately confused. She had honestly believed that she had her emotions under control...she had believed that she had come to terms with the complete impossibility of any relationship with Angelo...she had believed in that acceptance right up until the moment she saw that diamond on Isabel Dunning’s hand.
Then her self-deception had been smashed. She had not merely been shocked, she had been agonised by the extent of her own pain and an unexpectedly fierce sense of rejection. And she had to learn how to handle those feelings. Her pregnancy had divided the family circle in two. For the past five months Angelo had smoothly avoided her, and their parents had made that relatively easy for them. But that could not go on for much longer without imposing intolerable strain upon Tomaso and Daisy. Somehow, some way, Kelda knew she had to face up to the situation and finally settle it.
In the middle of the night, the staff allowed her to have a cup of tea and a small piece of toast. When the door on her private room widened, she barely glanced up because the nurses had been in and out constantly throughout the night, checking up on her. She focused on a pair of male trousered legs and slowly angled her head back against the pillow. Her heart jumped into her mouth.
‘I persuaded them to let me in,’ Angelo revealed in a taut, uncharacteristic rush as though he was determined to get in first vocally. ‘I’ve been here all day.’
He was poised just inside the door and, if she stared, it was because she didn’t know Angelo like this. Badly in need of a shave, crumpled, tousled and very pale. Harsh lines of strain were grooved between his nose and mouth. His lustrous dark eyes were curiously unguarded as they rested on her. He released his breath in an audible hiss and his dark gaze wandered slowly and almost carefully over her.
‘I don’t want you here,’ she whispered, and closed her eyes, shutting him out.
‘I needed to see you...’ The admission was rough-edged.
‘Why?’ she sighed.
‘How can you ask me that?’ he demanded in an incredulous undertone, abruptly sounding more like himself. ‘The child you carry is mine—’
Kelda’s lashes lifted. She studied him in sudden sharp distress, her every muscle tensing as though she was under attack. ‘Where did you get that idea?’
‘Well, certainly not from you,’ Angelo responded with fierce emphasis.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said weakly, playing for time, wondering in despair if in the heat of her collapse Tomaso and Daisy had betrayed their knowledge.
‘How could you think you could get away with a lie like that?’ Angelo demanded in a low-pitched growl. ‘Sooner or later, I would have found out. Russ Seadon and Gina Delfont are your two closest friends. You have never been involved with Seadon. Your name has never been linked with his and yesterday you played a starring role in their wedding.’
‘And where did you get all this information?’ she prompted unsteadily.
‘Her bloody dress featured on the lunchtime news!’ Angelo launched at her with sardonic bite. ‘I was already trying to get hold of you yesterday when my father called me to tell me that you were in hospital. Don’t try to tell me that you were sleeping with Seadon five months ago behind your best friend’s back...I wouldn’t believe you!’
‘I never said that Russ was the father of my child,’ Kelda muttered shakily.
‘But you repeatedly denied that I was,’ he reminded her doggedly. ‘And that night at your apartment when he came out of the bedroom, you made no attempt to explain the situation—’
Kelda turned her face to the wall, filled by sudden expected guilt for the scene she had sprung on him. Apparently he had as yet no suspicion that she had deliberately manufactured that scene. That knowledge would have told him just how vulnerable she had felt herself to be all those months ago. But how long would it take for him to recall Russ’s exact behaviour that night? Russ had not acted like a platonic friend.
‘Why should I have tried to explain the situation?’ she enquired, still unable to meet his eyes.
‘If you cannot answer that, I refuse to answer it for you,’ Angelo responded with a dark, driven bitterness that burned. ‘The night I came to the cottage—’
‘You came through the door in a rage!’ Kelda condemned with equal bitterness. ‘And you wanted me to deny that I was pregnant—’
‘I did not behave rationally that night,’ Angelo breathed tautly.
‘Actually I think you were very rational,’ Kelda muttered flatly, unable to look at him although she could feel his enervating presence with every fibre of her body. ‘The very idea of my being pregnant with your child was your worst nightmare come true. You accused me of deliberately trying to set you up—’
‘In the heat of temper,’ Angelo inserted with raw emphasis. ‘Try to put yourself in my position!’
‘No, thank you. I’m more concerned with my own,’ she said honestly. ‘It would have saved everyone a lot of trouble if I’d been able to stick to the stranger-at-a-party fiction. I’m afraid I just wasn’t prepared to be faced with the fact that your father knew we had been in Italy together.’
‘The idea of your being pregnant with my child would not have been my worst nightmare come true...’ Angelo stated flatly, unemotionally, as if he had all his feelings under strict lock and key.
The silence stretched. Kelda made
no comment. She didn’t believe him. Now that he knew the truth, he felt that he had to defend himself from such a charge.
‘I find it very hard to accept that all these months everyone but me has known the truth,’ Angelo continued grimly. ‘How did you prevail upon my own father to keep quiet?’
‘He saw you in the conservatory with Fiona and, being slightly more sensitive than you are capable of being, understood why I had no wish for you to know.’ As she spoke, she rolled her head on the pillow, fixing huge shadowed green eyes on him with unhidden scorn.
Dark colour had sprung up in a line over his striking cheekbones. He had the rail at the foot of the bed between his lean hands and so fierce was the grip that she could see the whiteness of his knuckles shining through his brown skin. ‘How could I have known you were pregnant?’ It was a rare plea for understanding.
‘You didn’t much care either way,’ Kelda retorted, fighting against the tremendous tiredness sweeping over her.
‘That isn’t true,’ he argued rawly.
‘It really doesn’t matter now.’ Her weary voice slurred the syllables, her eyelids lowering without her volition. ‘All water under the bridge, not worth tussling about—’
‘Not worth—?’ Angelo bit off whatever he had intended to say with visible difficulty. ‘How can you say that? If you had been alone at the cottage today, you would have died and my child with you!’ he said with restrained ferocity, incandescent golden eyes flaming over her pale but now intent face. ‘It was the merest good fortune that you collapsed in a public place. So don’t tell me that what I feel now doesn’t matter!’
He had shaken her, but still her long feathery lashes drifted down. She shifted uncomfortably on the pillows, her hair trapped below her shoulders. Somebody gently slid a hand beneath her spine and tugged the recalcitrant strands of red-gold across her slight shoulders. ‘Thanks,’ she mumbled, and slept.
After breakfast the next morning, the flowers were delivered. Great drifts of headily scented blooms that filled half a dozen vases and brightened her smart but serviceable surroundings. Her first visitor was her mother.
