Playing the Dutiful WifeExpecting His Love-Child

by Carol Marinelli

  ‘You bought this for me?’

  ‘It is big enough for a bed and breakfast…’ He shrugged. ‘If that is what you want to do with it. I knew you would probably sell it…’

  He had known he was about to be arrested and go to prison and yet he had still looked after her—had come to this place and chosen it. It was more than she could take in.

  ‘Why are you crying?’

  ‘Because of this.’

  ‘I said I would take care of you.’

  ‘And you have…’

  He had kept every promise he had made, had listened to all her dreams.

  They walked through the house and he showed her every room before he took her into the kitchen, with its massive ovens and benches, and huge glass doors that opened to let in the sound and the breeze of the mountains. He had chosen the perfect home—except he hadn’t factored that he might live in it.

  ‘I might have to stay here a while,’ Niklas said. ‘You can be my landlady.’

  He came over for a kiss, because that was what he always did.

  ‘I’ll send you the rent I owe when I get it.’

  ‘Send it?’ Meg said.

  ‘You need to go back.’

  He did care about her. She knew it then—knew why he was sending her away. ‘And you can’t come with me.’ It wasn’t a question, she was telling him that she knew why.

  He tried to hush her with a kiss.

  ‘You can’t come to Sydney even for a little while because you’re still on bail.’

  ‘Meg…’

  When that didn’t work, she was more specific. ‘And you won’t let me stay because you think you might go back to jail.’

  ‘More than might,’ Niklas said. ‘Miguel is the best legal mind I have met…’ He smiled. ‘No offence meant.’

  Always he made her smile, and always, Meg knew then, he had loved her—even if he didn’t know it, even if he refused to see it. Rosa was right. He had always been taking care of her and he was trying to take care of her now.

  ‘I’m on bail,’ he said, ‘and I doubt the charges will be dropped. Miguel will not simply admit his guilt. There will be a trial, there could be years of doubt, and then I might be put away again. You need to go back to your family.’

  ‘You’re my family.’

  ‘No…’ He just would not accept it. ‘Because as much as I might want you here, as much as I thought of you here in this home while I was in that place, as much as a three-weekly visit might keep me sane, I will not do that to you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No,’ Niklas said. ‘We will have a couple of nights here and then, as I promised your father, I will make sure you get home. By the time you are there I will have divorced you.’

  He was adamant.

  And she both loved and loathed that word now. She wanted to kiss the man she was certain now loved her, yet she wanted to know the man she loved. He kissed her as if he would never let her go, yet he had told her that she must.

  ‘You’re so bloody selfish…’ She could have slapped him. She pulled her head back, would not be hushed with sex. ‘Why don’t I get a say?’ She was furious now, and shouting. ‘You’re as bad as my parents—telling me what I want and how I should live my life…’

  ‘What?’ he demanded. ‘You want to be up here, living in the mountains, coming to prison for a screw every three weeks?’

  ‘Your mouth can be foul.’

  ‘Your life could be,’ Niklas retorted. ‘Barefoot and pregnant, with your husband—’

  She didn’t hear the next bit. It was then that Meg remembered—only then that she remembered what she had been preparing to find out before Emilios had come to her door. He watched her anger change to panic, and in turn she watched the fear that darted in his eyes when she told him that she might already be.

  It was not how it should be. Meg knew that.

  He just stood there as she walked off, as she walked into the bedroom and went through her things. Yes, there was her toiletry bag and, yes, Rosa had packed everything. The pregnancy testing kit was there.

  She kicked off her shoes when she returned to the kitchen, because barefoot and pregnant she was.

  ‘You need to go home to your family.’

  ‘That’s all you have to say?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  She couldn’t believe his detachment, that he could simply turn away.

  ‘You’d let us both go, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘You’ll have a far better life…’

  ‘I probably would,’ Meg said. ‘Because I am sick of being married to a man who can’t even talk to me, who sorts everything out with sex. Who, even if he won’t admit it, does actually love me. I’m tired of trying to prise it out of you.’

  ‘Go, then.’

  ‘Is that what you want?’ Meg persisted. ‘Or are you telling me again what I should want?’

  ‘I could come out of this with nothing!’

  And if Meg thought she had glimpsed fear before, then she had no idea—because now that gorgeous mouth was strung by taut tendons. His black eyes flashed in terror as he saw himself searching bins for food—not just for himself but for the family she was asking him to provide for. Meg knew then that she had never known real fear…would never know the depth of his terror.

  She would not die hungry.

  She would not leave the earth unnoticed.

  She would be missed.

  ‘I might not be able to give you anything…’

  She glimpsed the magnitude of his words.

  ‘We might have nothing.’

  ‘We wouldn’t have nothing,’ Meg argued, with this man who had no comprehension of family. ‘We’d have each other.’

  ‘You don’t know what nothing is.’

  ‘So tell me.’

  ‘I don’t want to discuss it.’

  ‘Then I will leave, Niklas, and I will divorce you. And don’t you dare come looking for me when the charges are dropped. Don’t you dare try to get back in my life when you think the going can only be good.’

  He just stood there.

  ‘And don’t bother writing to find out what I have, because if I walk out now I will do everything I can to make sure you can’t find out. I will write “father unknown” on the birth certificate and you really will be nothing to your child.’

  And she was fighting for the baby she had only just found out about, and the family she knew they could be, and as she turned to go Niklas fought for them too.

  ‘Stay.’

  ‘For what?’ Meg asked. ‘Shall we go to bed?’ she demanded. ‘Or shall we just do it here? Or…’ she looked at him as if she’d had a sudden idea ‘…or we could talk.’

  ‘You talk too much.’

  He pulled her to him and kissed her mouth, running his hands over her, down her waist to her stomach. He pressed his hands into it for a second and then, as if it killed him to touch her there, he slid his hands between her thighs and moved to lift her skirt. He tried desperately to kiss her back to him, but she halted him and pulled her head away.

  ‘And you don’t talk enough.’

  She would not let him go this time, and he knew he could not kiss her back into his life. And she would walk—he knew it. She was a thousand times stronger than she thought, and so must he be—for without her and his baby he was back to nothing.

  ‘Don’t waste time in fear, Niklas,’ Meg said. ‘You told me that.’

  So he stood there and slowly and quietly told her what it had been like to be completely alone, to be moved on to yet another boys’ home when he caused too much trouble, to boys’ homes that had made living on the streets preferable.

  And she was stronger than she’d thought she was, because she didn’t cry or comment—just stood in his arms and listened. She’d asked for this, she reminded herself a few times at some of the harder parts.

  ‘You would make a friend and then you would move on. Or he would steal from you and you would decide to go it alone. Then you might make
another friend, and the same would happen again, or you would wake up and he would be lying dead beside you. But you keep on living, and you get a job, and it turns out you are clever—more clever than most—so you start to make money and you start to forget. Except you never do. But you make a good life for yourself, make new friends, and you would not change it, this new life, but still you taste the bitterness of your past. You make more money than you can spend because you’re scared of having nothing again and, yes, you’re happy—but it still tastes bitter.’

  He didn’t know how to explain it neatly, but he tried. He looked at her and could not fathom why she wanted to get inside his messed-up head.

  ‘You never forget—not for one minute. You remember eating from bins and beatings, and running away, and the smell of sleeping on the streets, and you trust no one. You remember how people will take from you the second your back is turned—would steal from a beggar who sleeps on the streets. So you relish each mouthful you take and you swear you will never go back to being nothing. But always you fear that you will.’

  And then he stopped.

  ‘You want to hear the rest?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He paused, took a deep breath before continuing. ‘Then you meet a woman on a plane, and this woman feels worried because in living her own life and following her dreams she might hurt her family, and you know then that there are people who do worry about others, who do care. And this woman changes your life.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘More than that—you saved my life. Because when I did go back to having nothing I survived. More than I should have, I thought of you. Every night I saw the sun, and it was the colour of your hair. Then last night I got to hold you, and look back, and I realised that it is a good world. There are people you cannot trust, but there are also people you can—people who help you even if you don’t know it at the time.’

  She didn’t understand.

  ‘That a woman you only dated for a while would put up her house…’ He hesitated. ‘Rosa and I…’

  ‘I worked that out.’

  ‘It was before she was married, and there has been nothing since, but her husband is still not pleased that she works for me. That she should go to him, that Silvio should trust her and me enough—that is real friendship,’ he said. ‘That does not let you taste bitterness.’

  And that part she understood.

  ‘Then you look back further and realise that the nun who taught you Spanish, the woman who named you, was the one good thing you can properly remember from your childhood and will end up saving the life of the woman you love—how can you not be grateful for that?’

  ‘You can’t not be.’

  ‘And that woman you met on the plane—who your gut told you was right—who you married and then hurt so badly—would fly into Congonhas Airport to come and have paid sex with me…’

  She thought of his anger in the prison, and the roughness of the sex, and then his tenderness afterwards, and she was so glad that he’d known he was loved, that she’d told him.

  ‘I’d have done it for nothing.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, and he was honest. ‘You loved me when I had nothing, and you will never properly appreciate what that means. But I might again have nothing, and I thought that was my worst nightmare, but to have nothing to give you or my child…’

  ‘We’ve got a home that you chose for us,’ Meg said. ‘And I can work, and I have parents who will help me. Your child—our child—will never have nothing, and neither will you, so long as we have each other.’

  He still could not really fathom it, but maybe he was starting to believe it.

  ‘It might not mean prison…the charges could be dropped…’ he said. ‘Rosa thinks they have enough already to prove I was not involved. They are going through the evidence now.’

  ‘And, unlike your wife, Rosa’s got a good legal brain!’ Meg said.

  He didn’t smile, but he gave a half-smirk.

  ‘Rosa thinks it was Miguel who suggested the plan to my brother.’ He tested this new thing called love. ‘I want him to have a proper funeral. I want to find out more about him. I want to know about his life. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I might not talk about it without you.’

  And still he said all the wrong things, but they were the right things for them.

  ‘Whatever feels right for you.’ And now she understood him a little better. She didn’t have to know everything, didn’t have to have all of him—just the parts that he chose to give. They were more than enough. And when he did choose to share, she could be there for him.

  ‘Can you accept now that, even though I don’t tell you everything, there are no secrets that might hurt you between us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And then he did what Niklas did when he had to: he simply turned the pain of his past off. He smiled at her, held her, and then for the longest time he kissed her—a kiss that tasted deeper now, a kiss that had her burning.

  But, unusually for Niklas, he stopped.

  ‘And just to prove how much I love you,’ he said, ‘there will be no more sex for a while, so we can talk some more.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘No.’ He was insistent. ‘I can see what you were saying. We can go for a walk in the mountains.’ He smiled and it was wicked. ‘We can get some fresh air and we can talk some more…’

  ‘Stop it.’ His mouth had left her wanting.

  She tried to kiss him, tried to resume, but Niklas shrugged her off and found a basket, started loading it from the fridge.

  ‘We’re going to have a picnic,’ Niklas said. ‘Is that romantic?’

  He was the sexiest guy she had ever met, Meg realised, and she’d been complaining because they were having too much sex…

  ‘Niklas, please.’ She didn’t want a picnic in the mountains, didn’t want a sex strike from her Brazilian lover, and she told him so.

  ‘Husband,’ he corrected. ‘I married you, remember?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How can you say it was all about sex? I was nothing but a gentleman that day…I could have had you on the plane, but I married you first!’

  ‘Hardly a gentleman,’ she said. ‘But, yes, you did marry me, and I get it all now. So can you put the basket down and…?’

  ‘And what?’ Niklas said.

  Seemingly shallow, but impossibly deep, he was gorgeous and insatiable, and he was hers for ever.

  His sex strike lasted all of two minutes, because now he was lifting her onto the kitchen bench even as he kissed her. His hands were everywhere and his mouth was too, but so were her hands before he slapped them away. ‘I’m doing this.’

  He was the most horrible tease.

  He whistled when he lifted up her skirt. ‘What are you wearing?’

  She writhed in embarrassment at his scrutiny. ‘They’re new.’

  ‘You didn’t buy these, though.’ He smiled, because he couldn’t really imagine his seemingly uptight girl buying knickers you didn’t even have to take off.

  ‘I might have.’

  ‘Meg…’ He was very matter-of-fact as he pulled down his zipper. ‘You wore sensible knickers the day I met you. You even wore sensible knickers when you came to visit me in prison.’ And then carefully he positioned her. ‘Watch.’

  And when he slipped straight into her the outrageous knickers she was wearing seemed like a sensible choice now.

  ‘Never think I don’t love you.’ He would say it a hundred times a day if he had to. ‘Never think that this is not love.’

  And she knew then that he did love her, and that what they shared was much more than just sex. He was very slow and deliberate, and it was Meg who couldn’t stop. He kept going as the scream built within her, and she waited for his hand to cover her mouth, waited for him to hush her—except they were home now, as he told her, and he pushed harder into her.

  ‘We’re home,’ he said again, and moved faster,
and for the first time she could scream, could sob and scream as much as she wanted, could be whoever and however she pleased.

  And so too could he.

  He told her how much he loved her as he came, and over and over he told her that he would work something out, he would sort this out.

  And as he looked over her shoulder to the mountains he knew how lucky he was—how easily it could have been him lying dead on the pavement instead of his brother. His twin who must have tasted so much bitterness in his life too and been unable to escape as Niklas had done. When still he held her, when he buried his face in her hair and she heard his ragged breathing, for a moment she said nothing.

  And then, because it was Niklas, he switched off his pain and came to her, smiling. ‘Do you know what day it is today?’

  ‘The day we found out we—’ She stopped then, and blinked in realisation as her husband moved in to kiss her.

  ‘Happy anniversary.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SHE LOVED BRAZIL more and more every day she spent there, but it was the evenings she loved the most.

  Meg lay half dozing by the pool, then stretched and smelt the air, damp from the rain that often came in the afternoon, washing the mountains till they were gleaming, and thought about how happy she was.

  The charges had been dropped, but it had taken a couple of months for them to get back on their feet. They had paid Rosa back her money and lived off Meg’s savings, but only when the nightmare of his returning to prison had stopped looming over them and Meg’s pregnancy had started showing had Niklas really begun to think this was real.

  There were now regular trips into São Paulo, and Niklas came to each pre-natal visit, and she loved that her family adored Brazil as much as Niklas did Australia when they were there.

  She saw her parents often—they had only just left that day—and, thanks to a few suggestions and more than a little help from their new son-in-law, business was going well in Sydney.

  They had surprised her—after the shock of finding out had worn off, they’d been wonderful. Niklas had flown them over to Brazil and the first day he’d met them he’d begun to work out why sometimes you couldn’t just hang up the phone or shut someone out. He’d started to get used to both the complications and the rewards of family.