by Penny Jordan
Had she done the right thing in marrying Sean? Or had she given in to her emotions? Hadn’t there been somewhere deeply buried inside her a small, desperate hope that somehow Sean would come to recognise that Oliver was his son and that in doing so he would...?
He would what?
She could hear Oliver and Sean making their way back. Quickly she pushed her anxiety to one side.
The moment they walked onto the patio Oliver ran towards her, shouting excitedly, ‘Mummy—Mummy, I was swimming.’
As he launched himself at her Kate caught him up in her arms, closing her eyes as she savoured the echoes of his babyhood in the smell of his skin and its softness.
‘I can’t believe you haven’t taught him to swim,’ she heard Sean commenting grimly, and he reached out and took Oliver from her arms with the automatic action of a man who knew it was his right to hold his child.
Kate held her breath, telling herself fiercely that it wasn’t disappointment that filled her when Oliver went happily to Sean.
‘I tried.’ She answered Sean’s criticism defensively. ‘But right from being a baby Ollie has been frightened of water...’
‘Well, he isn’t frightened now,’ Sean announced. ‘Shower now, Ollie, and then breakfast,’ Kate heard him saying firmly as he put Ollie down.
Once he was out of earshot Sean said, ‘Perhaps he could sense that you were afraid for him? Children need to feel that they are safe.’
‘Thanks for the child guidance lecture,’ Kate snapped furiously. ‘But I’d just like to remind you, Sean, that I’ve been Oliver’s mother from the moment he was conceived.’
‘And I am now his father,’ Sean replied fiercely.
* * *
They were words which were constantly inside her thoughts and her heart over the following few days of their brief ‘honeymoon’, as Sean and Oliver formed a close male bond from which she felt totally excluded.
And now, with their holiday over, Kate couldn’t help observing as they walked towards Sean’s parked car that Oliver was even beginning to talk like his father.
Mrs Hargreaves was waiting to welcome them when they arrived home, and although Kate was vaguely aware of the conspiratorial look the housekeeper exchanged with Sean, she didn’t pay very much regard to it, or to the few private words she hurried to have with Sean.
Upstairs, she was turning to head for her bedroom when Sean stopped her.
‘I’ve asked Mrs Hargreaves to move your things into the master bedroom.’
Kate’s stomach muscles quivered. Angry with herself for the fierce stab of pleasure the thought of sleeping with Sean again caused her, she forced herself to object. ‘But that’s your bedroom.’
‘It was my bedroom,’ Sean agreed coolly. ‘But it’s now our bedroom.’
Their bedroom. The unwanted feeling intensified and spread. Kate knew that she was perilously close to giving in to her renewed love for Sean. He might want her sexually, but he had told her himself that he had remarried her for Oliver’s sake.
She wasn’t going to humiliate herself by offering him a love he didn’t want!
How long, though, would she be able to keep her feelings to herself if she was sleeping with him every night and all night?
‘I don’t—’ she began.
‘Not in front of Oliver,’ Sean checked her firmly, leaving her to wait to resume their conversation once Oliver had been introduced to and safely established in his own new bedroom.
‘That was ridiculously extravagant, Sean, buying him a computer games console,’ Kate protested when Sean had finished showing Oliver how to operate his new toy and they were back on the landing outside his room.
‘It will be good for his spatial dexterity,’ Sean told her without a glimmer of contrition. ‘Come and see how the master bedroom looks,’ he added, guiding her to the door.
The first thing Kate saw when he opened it was the huge new bed. And her concentration remained stuck on it.
‘It’s a double bed!’ she pronounced foolishly.
‘King-size, actually,’ Sean corrected her dryly.
Panic filled her. Double or king-size, it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that she would be sharing it with Sean and she knew, just knew, it would be impossible for her to stop herself from snuggling up to him and allowing herself the luxury of behaving as though they still were the loving couple they had once been.
Blindly she swung round, and then found that her exit from the room was blocked by Sean’s arm, Sean’s hand holding the door—a door which he promptly closed and leaned against, folding his arms as he watched her furious agitation.
‘I can’t sleep in that bed with you!’ Kate burst out.
‘Why not? We shared a room when we were away!’
‘That was different!’ Kate insisted, wishing he wouldn’t give her that look of slow, deliberate scrutiny that made her feel he could see right into her head.
‘We are married, after all,’ Sean reminded her. ‘And besides, the bed’s plenty big enough for us to keep our distance from one another, if that’s what you want!’
‘Of course that’s what I want,’ Kate lied quickly. He couldn’t have guessed how much it affected her to think of sleeping in the same bed with him, could he?
‘We’ve got to think of Oliver,’ Sean told her firmly. ‘What kind of impression is it going to give him if we have separate rooms?’
She had been outmanoeuvred, Kate recognised, unable to do anything other than retaliate furiously, ‘I saw the look Mrs Hargreaves gave you when we arrived, and now I realise why,’ she accused him wildly.
To her surprise her comment seemed to have a more powerful effect on Sean than she had anticipated, because he suddenly started to frown, and a look she couldn’t translate shadowed his eyes.
* * *
‘I’ve told Mrs Hargreaves that from tomorrow we’ll both have a light tea with Oliver at five o’clock, and then our own dinner later on, when he’s in bed. I think it’s important that we share his mealtimes with him. And I thought I’d take him over to the farm tomorrow—the pups are almost ready to leave their mother, and Mrs Hargreaves has told them we’re going to have one. Ollie can choose his own.’
It was nine o’clock at night. Oliver was already tucked up and fast asleep in his new bed, and she and Sean were eating the delicious meal Mrs Hargreaves had left ready for them before going home. Suddenly the last thing Kate felt like was eating.
‘Since when did you and Mrs Hargreaves make arrangements concerning Oliver without me being informed?’ Kate demanded ominously. As she spoke she stood up, throwing down her linen napkin and gripping the table in her fury.
‘He’s desperate to have a dog of his own,’ Sean told her. ‘You know that!’
‘I also know that I said I didn’t want him to have a puppy yet.’
‘Because he would be at nursery and you would be working. That doesn’t apply any longer,’ Sean pointed out firmly.
Kate was shaking with a mixture of anger and misery without really knowing why—other than that it had something to do with that large master bedroom and its huge bed, in which she and Sean were going to sleep—with most the bed between them...
‘I’m not listening to any more of this,’ she told Sean angrily, pushing back her chair and almost running out of the room, ignoring his pleas to return.
‘Kate! Come back!’
Idiotically, it was the master bedroom she headed to for refuge, swinging round white-faced as Sean followed her into it, shutting the door.
‘What’s got into you?’ he demanded.
‘I’ve managed to spend five years bringing Oliver up without your assistance and without your interference, Sean. I am his mother...and I—’
‘And you what?’ Sean challenged her savagely. ‘And you sh
ared another man’s bed in order to conceive him?’
The raw emotion in his voice shocked through her. She had never seen him so out of control, and the intensity of his unexpected outburst paralysed her.
‘Do you think I don’t think about that every single day, every damned hour? Hell, Kate, do you think that because I can’t father a child, because I’m not man enough to father a child, I’m not man enough to think about you and him and this?’ Silently they stared at one another.
Kate drew a ragged breath and demanded shakily, ‘What do you mean, you can’t father a child?’
Her mouth had gone dry and her heart was thudding in heavy, erratic hammer-blows. Even through her own shock she was aware of the look of sick, anguished despair in Sean’s eyes, and she could feel the intensity of his pent-up emotions.
When he started to turn away from her she reached out and took hold of his arm.
‘You are Oliver’s father, Sean,’ she said quietly.
‘No, I’m not. I can’t be,’ Sean denied bitterly. ‘I can’t father a child. It isn’t medically possible.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Kate said in a dry whisper as she struggled to take in what he was telling her.
It was too late for him to backtrack now; Sean knew that. Behind the shock he could see in Kate’s eyes he could also see a growing determination. He knew she would insist on being told the truth—and what point was there in hiding it now, after what he had just said?
He took a deep breath.
‘At a routine annual check-up for my private medical insurance the doctor suggested that I might as well have the full works.’ He gave a small bitter shrug. ‘It was just a formality, or so I thought—just a means of putting on paper what I believed I already knew. That I was a healthy, fully functioning man. When the results came back there was a problem...’
He paused and Kate waited, aching with compassion for him, but with the sure knowledge that, no matter what he had been told, the experts had got it wrong. He had fathered Oliver.
‘It seemed—he said... He told me that my sperm count was so low it would be impossible for me to father children,’ he said bleakly. ‘I refused to believe him at first. In fact I was so convinced he must be wrong that I demanded that they run the tests again. They weren’t wrong!’ He closed his eyes. ‘Shall I try to explain to you, Kate, how savagely humiliating I found it to have to stand there and listen to the doctor telling me that I wasn’t capable of giving you a child? How I wished I hadn’t heaped fresh humiliation on myself by demanding they re-run the tests?’
‘Why didn’t you tell me...say something?’ Kate demanded in a dry whisper.
‘I couldn’t,’ Sean said bleakly. ‘I couldn’t bear to see your face when I told you that I couldn’t give you the children I knew you wanted so much.’
So much, Kate wanted to tell him. But never, ever more than I wanted you, Sean. She knew what he was like, though. She knew how deeply such news would have cut into him, into everything he’d believed about himself.
‘I had a right to know, Sean,’ she told him quietly.
‘And I had a right to protect you from knowing,’ he countered.
‘To protect me?’
Sean’s mouth compressed. ‘I knew if I told you you would insist on...on accepting that there could never be any children for us and...and sacrificing your own chance to be a mother because of that. I decided there and then that I wasn’t going to let you do that, and that I...I had to set you free to find another man to...to give you what I could not.’
‘To set me free?’ Now that she was over her initial shock Kate was beginning to get angry. ‘You were unfaithful to me, Sean, and—’
‘No!’
‘No?’
‘There wasn’t anyone else. I...I just made it up because...because I knew how you would feel and how you would react. I didn’t want to keep you trapped in our marriage, sacrificing yourself to it for my sake, pitying me and eventually hating me for what you were being denied. I must say, though, that I didn’t expect you to find someone else quite so quickly. Was that why it didn’t last?’
A lump had lodged in her throat and she could only shake her head in helpless denial. She didn’t know what was hurting her the most—her pain for Sean or her pain for herself.
‘Sean, I don’t care what the medical reports said. Oliver is your child,’ she told him passionately. ‘Sometimes such things are possible and—’
‘No!’ His harsh, haunted cry made her flinch.
‘Don’t offer me that kind of temptation, Kate. You are worthy of so much more than deception, and so is Oliver.’
Kate went white, but before she could defend herself he was continuing rawly.
‘Can’t you understand how I feel? How much I wish that Oliver could be mine? How much it hurts me that he isn’t? I only have to look at him, never mind hold him, to feel my lo—something here inside me that... Having children with you, giving you our children, was so deeply rooted in me, so instinctive, that I thought I could never endure knowing that another man had given you what I couldn’t. I thought it would drive me quite literally mad to see you with another man’s child. But—’
‘Oliver is your child,’ Kate protested emotionally. ‘He is yours, Sean—ours...’
‘Don’t do this to me, please, Kate. I can’t bear it! What do I have to do to stop you lying to me? This?’
Kate couldn’t move when he took hold of her, the fierce pressure of his mouth on hers bending her head backwards against the hard strength of his arm. The heat of their emotions, anger on anger, welded them together, and sent a shaft of pure molten reaction speeding through Kate.
How could it be that such a fierce primeval desire could be born out of anger? Her whole body shook in recognition of her vulnerable naïveté. She hadn’t recognised her danger and tried to evade it. It was too late now.
She was held in thrall, emotionally and sexually, as much to the intensity of her own surging need as she was physically to Sean’s iron-armed imprisonment of her.
When he broke the kiss, lifting his mouth from hers, his chest rising and falling quickly, Kate tried to pull away from him. But Sean refused to let her go.
‘Perhaps the only way I can stop thinking about it is to put my own sexual imprint on you, for ever.’
‘You were the one who divorced me, Sean,’ Kate reminded him, trying to free her senses from the effect his hot, turbulent gaze was having on them, and at the same time fighting frantically to stem the excited surge of liquid sexual longing that was pulsing through her.
‘I may have divorced you but I didn’t replace you in my bed, Kate,’ he answered her bitterly. ‘How much did you want him?’ he demanded rawly.
‘Sean! No!’ Kate protested, torn between shock and pain—shock that he could actually believe she had given herself to someone else when he knew how much she had loved him, and pain for him, for herself, because he did.
‘No? You didn’t say no to him, did you?’ he challenged her thickly. ‘I’m going to make you forget that you ever knew him, Kate. I’m going to make you want me so much that you’ll forget he ever existed.’
Sean was already caressing the side of her neck with his lips, deliberately seeking the special place where, she had once confessed shyly to him, feeling his mouth made her melt with longing for him.
‘Did he do this?’
The words muffled against her skin made her throat ache with agonised suppressed tears, her only response a mute shake of her head.
‘You didn’t tell him how much it turns you on?’
There was an ugly note in Sean’s voice that spiked her heart with angry pain. To her own shock, despite her anger, she ached to be able to reassure him, to convince him that no man ever had or ever could take his place in her life. In either her life, her heart, or her body
. But the words wouldn’t come, despite Sean’s angry assault on her senses.
‘Did he touch you like this, Kate? And like this?’
The angry, destructive words hammered into her like blows, numbing her body and freezing her emotions. A cold emptiness was spreading inside her, squeezing the life out of her love with icy binding tentacles of rage that stiffened her body into furious rejection.
‘Oh, God, Kate.’
The groaned, anguished words were expelled with so much force that she could feel their pressure against her skin.
Releasing her, Sean went over to the bed and sat down on it, his elbows on his knees as he dropped his head into his hands.
‘What the hell am I doing?’
The suffocating anguish of his pain filled the space between them.
With his head bent over his hands, she could see how exactly like Oliver’s his hair grew, Kate noticed. For some reason that knowledge made her take a tentative step towards him.
‘What the hell’s happening to me? I know I’ve always been a jealous bastard where you’re concerned, but—’
The muffled words bled shocked despair.
Kate lifted her hand and placed it on his head.
Immediately his whole body froze.
‘For God’s sake, Kate, don’t touch me. How can you touch me?’ he demanded savagely.
As his hand moved Kate saw the telltale moisture on his face and her heart turned over with love and compassion. An extraordinary feeling of strength and understanding filled her. Reaching out, she placed her hand over his.
Immediately Sean pushed her hand away and stood up, in rejection of her touch.
‘I’ll sleep in one of the other rooms tonight,’ he said stiffly.
As he started to walk away from her Kate saw the way the light falling against his thigh revealed the swell of his arousal, and something inside her, something elemental and untamed, reacted to it.
