by Penny Jordan
Both of them looked at one another, and then, without any kind of hesitation, Dominic said easily, ‘You mean for the bedroom curtains? Yes, it would have looked good. Especially if you’d given in and let me buy that four-poster bed.’
Annie closed her eyes in despair.
‘What’s wrong with me?’ she demanded in a guarded voice. ‘Why can I remember something as unimportant as the curtain fabric I didn’t choose when I can’t remember the most vital thing of all?’
There was a brief pause before Dominic replied somberly, ‘Perhaps it’s less painful to remember why you rejected the silk.’
He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t need to, Annie recognised. What he had implied was that her rejection of him was something too traumatic for her to allow herself to recall, and she knew that he was probably right.
Out of all the questions she had asked him, she acknowledged, there was one she still had not been able to bring herself to ask, but now, suddenly, she felt she had to do so. Touching his arm tentatively, she asked huskily, ‘Why do you think I left?’
At first she thought he wasn’t going to answer her. The bleak expression hardening his mouth made her shiver a little.
‘How many times have I asked myself that question?’ he said, half under his breath. ‘And not been able to give myself an answer. I can’t think of any logical explanation. You were upset because I was going away. We had rowed about it. We’d been having a series of petty rows brought on by the tension of our imminent parting.’
‘But I knew right from the start that you had to go.’
Annie had surprised herself by defending him. A wry smile touched his mouth. ‘You’re playing devil’s advocate with a vengeance,’ he told her. ‘I had told you, yes, but that didn’t stop me from feeling guilty about leaving you.’
‘But you had no choice,’ Annie insisted.
His mouth turned down at the corners.
‘There are always choices. I could have broken the contract. I could have put you first…shown you…You were too young for the pressure of that kind of separation and…’ Dominic paused, carefully searching for words that would not anger or offend her. ‘Your background being as it was meant that you had more need to feel secure…wanted…loved. Perhaps more than I had made allowance for. Perhaps…’
‘Perhaps that made me run away like a sulky child?’ Annie supplied grimly for him, adding before he could stop her, ‘A sulky child demanding attention and playing up to get it…Is that what I was like, Dominic?’
‘No. Not at all,’ he tried to reassure her.
‘But that is what you think, isn’t it?’ she guessed. ‘You think I did leave because you were going away, to punish you for leaving me. But that’s so childish.’
‘It’s a possibility,’ he allowed. ‘You were very young, and at that age it’s dangerously easy to mistake a crush for love.’
Annie frowned. Although his explanation sounded feasible, for some reason she couldn’t accept it. It jarred on her, rubbed against her own inner knowledge of herself.
‘Come on,’ Dominic reiterated. ‘You’re exhausted. What you need is a hot bath and then bed. I’ll bring you some supper up on a tray and—’
‘Read me a bedtime story?’ Annie finished dryly. ‘I’m not a child now, Dominic.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘You’re not. And anyway, aren’t bedtime stories supposed to have happy endings?’ he asked, in a sharply bleak voice that wrenched at her own emotions so painfully she caught her breath.
There could be no happy ending to their own story. Not unless—Not unless what? Not unless Dominic told her that he didn’t care what had happened in the past, that he loved her far too much in the here and now to ever let her go? Was that what she really wanted? What she wanted was him, Dominic—her lover, her husband, her fate, she recognised achingly.
‘I’ve got to go into the office and the chances are that I’m going to have to work late,’ Dominic told Annie as he finished his breakfast.
Annie averted her face. The sight and smell of his coffee was making her feel acutely nauseous, and her stomach heaved protestingly, just as it had heaved for the last three mornings in a row. ‘Will you be all right here on your own?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ she assured him. The scald wounds on her arm had healed cleanly, without any problems, and even Dominic was forced to agree with her doctor that she was now fully recovered.
Dominic looked across the table at her.
‘There’s something I want you to promise me,’ he told her quietly.
Annie gave a small sigh.
‘If I remember anything I promise you I’ll tell you about it—’ she began, but he stopped her with a shake of his head.
‘No, that isn’t what I was going to ask.’ He made a movement as though he was going to reach for her, and then stopped himself, getting up to go and stand with his back to her in front of the window. ‘I want you to promise me, Annie, that there won’t be another disappearing act. Promise me,’ he demanded harshly when she made no immediate response.
He was afraid that she was going to leave whilst he was gone. Bemusedly Annie stared at his dark-suited back. His shoulders were so broad, his stance so upright, his air so authoritative and male that it was almost impossible for her to believe that he was vulnerable in any kind of way, but his words were telling her a different story.
‘If I don’t promise?’ she asked him huskily.
He turned round.
‘Then I don’t go,’ he told her unequivocally.
Annie blinked in surprise. If it mattered so much to him that she stayed, then—she was letting her imagination and her own feelings run away with her, she warned herself. The reason he wanted her to stay was because he still wanted to get to the bottom of why she had left him.
‘I…I’ll stay,’ she told him unsteadily. As she glanced towards the calendar on the kitchen wall she recognised absently that she had already been here with him for over a month. Over a month! Her stomach started to churn like a washing machine on full spin. Over a month! That meant…
Somehow Annie managed to make herself wait until after Dominic had gone before going over to the calendar and frantically counting backwards. Her stomach was heaving, panic and nausea vying for supremacy as the truth hit her in a sweat-drenched sheet of shock. Blindly she turned away from the calendar, her hands shaking as she reached for the telephone and started to dial Helena’s telephone number. But then, before she had completed dialling, she quickly hung up.
No…No! She couldn’t share her fears with anyone else yet…not yet…not until she was sure. She could walk down into the town. It wasn’t very far and there was a chemist’s shop at the bottom of the hill. It would have what she needed. Because Helena’s car was off the road Annie had insisted that she borrow her own Mercedes, which meant that she herself was temporarily without any means of transport.
Three hours later she stood numbly in the bathroom as she stared in sick disbelief at the pregnancy test she had just done. Her second…and both of them were showing a positive result. She was pregnant. Dominic would be—Dominic! Suddenly the bathroom started to sway ominously round her. Instinctively she reached for the shower door to support herself, whispering a husky, ‘No.’
A confused jumble of images were forming themselves inside her head: sounds, pictures, memories.
Somehow she managed to make her way to Dominic’s bedroom before she collapsed across the bed. The shutter which had closed her off from the past, protected her from it, had suddenly lifted, and she knew now the answer to Dominic’s question. Oh, yes, she knew!
She was pregnant with Dominic’s child. Just as she had thought, feared she might be all those years ago. Then she had been wrong. But now…
Dominic’s belief was that she had left him as the result of an immature desire to punish him for his having to leave her…that the love she had claimed to have for him had, in reality, been little more than a youthful crush, incapable of withstanding the pressure of adult
emotions. But he was wrong.
Tormentedly Annie closed her eyes.
‘You don’t want children?’ she had asked him then, in shocked fear.
‘No, I don’t,’ he answered with cold emphasis.
She was so shocked, so afraid. For days she had been worrying about inadvertently missing one day of taking the Pill, knowing that a baby so soon in their marriage wasn’t something they had planned, feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of everything that having a baby would mean and desperately needing Dominic’s love and support. Instead the reaction she was getting from him threatened to destroy her—it was certainly destroying her trust in him.
‘But why not?’ she forced herself to ask him, never imagining for one minute just what she was going to hear.
‘Parenthood isn’t just about having a baby, Annie,’ he told her. ‘It’s a very big responsibility. When we create a child we aren’t just giving it life, we are giving it…burdening it, if you like, with ourselves…with our own personal history. And at the moment I feel that just isn’t something I would want to burden a child with.’
Their own personal history. She knew what he meant, of course. He was referring to the fact that they—she—knew nothing of her own parentage, of what kind of inheritance, both genetically and emotionally, she might be passing on to her own child. Contaminating it with bad blood…That was what Dominic meant. He was afraid of giving his child…their child…her bad blood.
Annie felt as though a part of her had died. As though a part of her had been broken and destroyed. She had believed Dominic totally when he told her that it was her he loved…that her history didn’t matter to him. But he had lied to her.
But worse was to follow. When she tried stumblingly to tell him of her fear that it could already be too late, that she might already be carrying his child, his reaction made her feel literally sick with fear.
‘An abortion! You mean you would want me to destroy our baby?’ she demanded, white-faced.
‘Anne, for God’s sake stop being so emotional,’ Dominic replied angrily.
Annie moistened her dry lips. She couldn’t take in properly what had happened. How, within the space of less than twenty-four hours, with a few short, sharp words, her love, her life, her future, her trust, had all been destroyed—as Dominic would insist on her destroying their child.
Numbly she tried to come to terms with what had happened. Dominic was talking to her, trying to reason with her, coax her, but it was as though there was an invisible barrier between them. She no longer wanted even to breathe the same air as him, never mind be physically close to him. He had claimed that he loved her but he had been lying. He didn’t want his child…his children…to have her as their mother. He was worried about the inheritance she might give them. He was worried that she would contaminate them with the bad blood she carried.
Suddenly he was a stranger to her. A stranger who threatened the life of her child—a child she knew she would fight to protect to the last breath of life left in her.
There was no way she could abandon her child in the way her own mother had done her. Poor baby. Why should it suffer because she was its mother? She couldn’t stay with Dominic now. For her baby’s sake, she had to leave him. Round and round her thoughts circled, causing a whirlpool of fear and pain that sucked her down into its black centre.
That night in bed, she couldn’t sleep. Dominic had taken some medication for a headache. Logic told her that her wisest course would be to wait until he had left the country before she disappeared from his life, but his departure was still more than two weeks away and she feared that there was no way she could continue to live with him for that length of time without betraying herself.
Driven by the desperation of her own emotions, she left their bed, packed a few necessities and left the house.
CHAPTER NINE
IT WAS over two weeks since she had left Dominic. In a very short space of time now he would be leaving the country, and once he did…Once he did it was unlikely that they would ever meet again.
She didn’t know why she had come back here, to the town where she had been born. She had booked herself into the cheapest bed and breakfast she could find—after all, she was financially responsible for herself now. She had been to the library and re-read the newspaper story written when she had been found abandoned. The old lady who had found her had died many years before, and as Annie already knew there was no way back for her into the past to discover exactly who and what she was. Neither was there any way forward into the future for her now, as Dominic’s wife.
She shivered beneath the thin cover on her bed.
Dominic!
She missed him desperately, longed for him despairingly, despite the hurt he had inflicted on her.
It was well past midnight. What was he doing? Was he thinking of her…wondering…worrying…? Was it possible for him to love her as a woman even whilst rejecting her as a mother for his children?
She was still awake when daylight came creeping across the sky.
In another few hours Dominic would be gone. Hot, heart-wrenching tears seeped between her closed eyelids. The thought of never seeing him again made her want to crawl away somewhere and die, but she couldn’t. She had her baby…their baby to think of.
She had to see him…just one last time…Just see him, that was all…She wouldn’t say anything to him—she couldn’t. She would just go home and watch him leave—watch him as he walked out of their lives…hers and his baby’s…the baby he thought she wasn’t good enough to mother.
She was on the first commuter train to leave town, making her slow journey back across the country. In Dominic’s car, with Dominic’s hands on the wheel, she could have been there in a couple of hours. But there was no direct rail service from her home town, only a series of complicated connections.
She was waiting for the train that would take her on the final lap of her journey back when she made the discovery that her flight had been for nothing, that there was to be no baby.
By the time she had dealt with the emergency of her unexpected period and dried the tears she had cried for the life that wasn’t to be she had missed her connecting train.
Numbly she boarded the next one to arrive. There was no baby now to keep her and Dominic apart, but there was still her awareness, her realisation of the fact that he didn’t consider her good enough to have his children. If she could catch him before he left she could tell him that their marriage was over, that he was free to find a woman whom he did consider good enough.
The journey took longer than she had expected. The train she had missed had been an express, and the one she was on was a much slower one, stopping at every station. By the time she eventually got off Annie knew that Dominic would be on his way to Heathrow for his flight.
Not knowing what to do, she started to cross the road via the pedestrian crossing…and walked straight into the path of a speeding car.
Shakily Annie wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand.
There was no point in weeping for the sorrows of the girl she had once been. Crying wouldn’t do anything to help her—nor to help herself now, she recognised.
Her body felt stiff and cold, and when she looked at her watch she was shocked to see how many hours had passed since she had first walked into Dominic’s bedroom.
Now, as she looked around it, she knew exactly how it had felt to lie here in Dominic’s arms. Exactly how it had felt to be loved by him and to have loved him in return. To have loved him? She could still taste the bitterness of her own weak tears. No wonder she had found it impossible to destroy the feelings of love she had increasingly begun to feel for him. The reality was that she had never stopped loving him…not for one moment.
‘You left me,’ he had accused her, but the truth was that he had abandoned her.
She would have to tell him just what she had discovered, of course. He had a right to know…About the past, yes, but not about the present and the baby she knew
for sure she was carrying this time. No, that was her concern and hers alone, and she intended it to remain that way. He had been right then, in calling her immature and a child, but she wasn’t either of those things any more. She was an adult, a woman and as such she had no need of any man to help her bear the responsibility of the new life growing inside her.
She closed her eyes, determined not to allow herself to cry any more tears. What was the point?
Logically, she knew she should wait until Dominic returned home to tell him what she had remembered, but anxiety, and a certain instinct that if she was alone with him too long he might somehow discern that she was keeping something vital from him, urged her to get the whole thing over and done with as quickly as she could.
She would pack her things, get a taxi to take her to Dominic’s office and then go straight on to her own home.
Grimly Dominic stared out of his office window. For all the good he was doing at work he might as well have stayed at home, because that was where his thoughts were—at home with Annie. Annie…His wife…His woman…The woman who had left him…His love…
It was no use. Grittily Dominic forced himself to face the self-knowledge he had been trying to avoid. He still loved Annie. Loved her even more as a woman than he had done as a girl—if that was possible.
In maturity she had become so much more of everything she had already been. He had to see her, talk to her…tell her how he felt and if, after that, she still wanted her freedom…
Quickly he strode out of his office, heading for the exit.
Leaving the taxi driver waiting for her in the car park, nervously Annie started to make her way across it, heading for the main office of the building. It was five o’clock, and staff were already starting to leave, streaming out of the building. Suddenly Annie froze as she saw Dominic amongst them.
‘Dominic!’ She said his name under her breath, so totally fixated on him that her senses couldn’t register anything else. ‘Dominic…’
