Читать книгу 12 Gifts for Christmas - Джулия Кеннер, Джулия Кеннер - Страница 12

THE snow fell all through the night, and into the next day. It cocooned them, Lucy thought sometime the next morning, gazing out at the drifts of white. It softened the reality of their fractured marriage, let them concentrate instead on what they had at that moment.

This connection. This fire. The insatiable wildness of their passion that nothing seemed to dim.

She shut off her mind and pushed away all the darkness of the past months, choosing to bask in Rafi as she had so long ago on that trip to Paris.

Through the day, they fed each other in the great four-poster bed. They tasted each other again and again. And they talked. About the world, about the small, inconsequential things that made up their lives. He was funny, intriguing. And so impossibly sensual.

If she had not already been in love with him, Lucy knew, this little interlude would have sent her head over heels.

But there was so much left unsaid, so much pain and heartbreak, that even a stolen day or two surrounded by the snow could not keep it all at bay. Perhaps it was her knowledge that this bliss could not—would not—last that made the idyll that much sweeter.

It was Christmas Eve, though Lucy had not dared mention it, aware of Rafi’s dislike of all things Christmas.

That evening, they sat before the great fireplace that dominated one wall in the master suite, both of them exhausted in the most delicious way. She leaned back against his bare chest as he toyed with her curls, twining them around his fingers.

I will always remember this instant, this feeling, she thought. No matter what happens.

“I wish we could be like this forever,” she said on a happy sigh, caught up in the joy of the moment—in the sense of rightness that moved through her.

She regretted the words immediately.

He stiffened behind her, then set her away from him. She closed her eyes as all the pain and hurt she’d been ignoring came rushing back, full force.

“I do, too,” he said in a low, bitter voice. “But I am not the one who made this impossible.”

Her hands curled into fists, and she turned to look at him. His gray eyes were so troubled, his mouth so grim. And he still glared at her as if he had every reason to hate her. And did.

It was too much.

Everything she’d been through, everything she’d struggled to survive—all of it rolled through her, incinerating her, scalding her.

“No. You did this, Rafi.” She threw the words at him, letting her anger show, letting him see what he’d done to her. “You destroyed this marriage, not me!”

“I’m not going to play your games,” Rafi said roughly, but he was shaken by what he saw in her eyes. The condemnation. The deep, abiding pain, as if he’d wounded her. But how was that possible? She was the one who’d betrayed him … hadn’t she?

He should never have touched her again. He should have crawled through the snow to stay away from her.

“Listen to me,” she said in a low, serious voice. Her eyes locked on his. “I am only going to say it once. I was pregnant.

I never lied about that—why would I? Did you think it was my life’s ambition to marry a man I hardly knew? To move to the other side of the world to a place where I’d be scrutinized, judged and found wanting every time? But I did it because I loved you and I thought it was the right thing to do for our child.”

“Our child,” he repeated, hearing the fury in his own voice, feeling it surge through him. “How dare you pretend—”

“I lost the baby,” she hissed at him, her brown eyes filling with tears. She jabbed a finger in the direction of the vast bathroom. “In that room. On that floor. It was horrible, and do you know what was worse, Rafi? Being told that you believed I’d made the whole thing up.”

“You said it yourself!” he snapped, his temper blazing as his mind reeled. But he remembered it vividly. “I was in Sydney. I’d had back-to-back meetings for weeks on end in Singapore, New Zealand, Australia. But I called you the second I could get away. I asked after your pregnancy and you said, as clear as day, ‘There is no baby.’ You admitted it.”

“I was grieving!” she protested. “There was no baby because I’d lost it!”

The tears were moving down her cheeks now and she did nothing to check them. She reached for the blanket they’d kicked aside in their last round of passion, and Rafi noticed that her delicate hands were shaking.

“Lucy—” he began, but she made a slashing gesture through the air, cutting him off.

“You made it plain from the start that I was marrying far above my station,” she said, each word like a bullet, each one slamming into him. “You made no secret of the fact that I was beneath you—that sleeping with me was all right for an illicit week in Paris, but should never have gone beyond that. That I should be grateful that you were so honorable, so good, that you would condescend to do the right thing by a trashy little nobody like me.”

“I never said that,” he bit out, as a deep shame moved through him. “Not any of it.”

“You didn’t need to say it.” Lucy gathered the blanket around her and rose to her feet, looking down at him as if she were some kind of goddess. “Everything you did made your position perfectly, painfully obvious.” She waved her hand at the room around them, encompassing the gleaming lights in the ancient sconces on the walls, the historic tapestries. “You hid me away in your family’s country house where I could gaze out at the capital city from afar but never embarrass you by setting foot near your exalted social circles. But I didn’t care, because I was in love with you and I was having your baby.”

There was something in her voice that was making the fine hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention. He was all too afraid that it was the ring of truth.

“Lucy,” he said again. “Please …”

But she ignored him.

“You left me here,” she continued in that same way, as if it cost her, as if speaking to him like this required her to be brave. The thought made something in him ache. “And I saw it as a perfect opportunity to get to know your world. To transform myself into the kind of wife you wouldn’t have to hide away or be ashamed of.”

He remembered, suddenly, what she’d been wearing when he’d arrived—how elegant he’d thought her. How much of a change it had been from the louder, trendier clothes she’d worn before.

“But then I lost the baby,” she said, her voice shaking. “And I had to live through that, Rafi. Alone. And still you left me here, as if I was something undeserving of even the barest compassion.”

Her face crumpled for a moment, as if she might break down into sobs, but she controlled herself.

“Lucy,” he began again, but she shook her head, warding him off.

“I don’t care if the Qaderis don’t do divorce,” she said then, with a quiet dignity that shook him almost more than her earlier show of emotion. “I’m leaving you. Not because I don’t love you—because I do, for my sins. But it doesn’t matter. You may be descended from a hundred centuries of greatness, Rafi, but I deserve better than this. I deserve better than you.”

Rafi sat in silence, unmoving, for a long time after Lucy had left the room, more regal than any queen. He stared into the fire but he did not see the flames. He only saw the past, his tangled history with Lucy and all the conclusions he’d jumped to far too easily. That she’d been using him. That he had been enchanted by a beautiful woman, as any man could be. That she had set out to avail herself of his name and fortune. That the passion between them was not—could not be—real. That what he felt could not be real.

All along, the people around him had whispered poison in his ears—and he had listened. Safir. The country elders. He had wanted to believe them, he realized now. When she had told him there was no baby he had jumped on it, had clung to the evidence that she was as false as all in his circle wanted him to believe she was.

Because then he wouldn’t have had to admit that he was weak. That he was afraid of the power she held over him. Of what she made him feel.

What a despicable piece of work he was, he thought then, an acid taste in his mouth.

He remembered all the snide and nasty things he’d let Safir say about her, all the times he’d never stood up for her. What kind of man allowed such things? And then, unbidden, something else occurred to him. The repeated calls from the family doctor, which Safir had waved away, saying it could wait until Rafi returned home, all the while never encouraging him to do so. But what if it had been something else? Would Safir have told Rafi about something that would show Lucy in a better light?

He knew the answer. But he had to confirm the suspicion that bloomed to life inside of him. He had to know the full extent of his own betrayal of Lucy, who had never done anything save love him. Far more than he deserved.

Rafi moved across the room and picked up the sleek phone on the desk. Gruffly, not even apologizing to his housekeeper, he asked to be connected to the doctor, regardless of the late hour.

The kindly old man had attended his own birth and had kept any number of Qaderi family secrets in his time. And he had never lied about anything.

It was a brief, appalling conversation.

“I’m so glad you called,” the old man said, as if he had not noticed the time. “I’ve been trying to speak with you for months about that night. I wanted to assure you that I made every attempt to convince your wife to go to the hospital but she refused. She was too concerned about your reputation.” He sighed. “So I made her as comfortable as I could and made sure there were no complications. Please, I do not want you to think that her care was substandard, or that I did not do my level best to convince her to go to the hospital. She simply would not go. I thought perhaps you could convince her, but then I could not reach you… .”

“I don’t blame you for anything,” Rafi said through a mouth that felt made of broken glass. And it was no more than the truth. He blamed only himself.

“Sometimes these things happen,” the doctor said, the wisdom and calm of years in his voice. “She has been healthy since, and I’m sure you will have another child, in time. This is but a hiccup. I have every faith, both medically and personally.”

He had never hated himself more, Rafi thought as he hung up the phone in a daze. He could only stand there, alone with the shame of what he’d done to her.

Lucy was not lying. She never had been.

Had he known that all along, on some level? Had he wanted to believe that he’d never had a child at all so that he would not have to deal with the crushing sense of loss? Was he that small, that cowardly, that he would sacrifice Lucy to prevent himself from feeling his own pain?

But he knew that he was. That he had.

Rafi sank down on the side of the great bed, buried his head in his hands and gave in, finally, to the grief that he’d staved off for three long months.