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CHAPTER NINE

HOW WAS RAOUL?

‘I don’t know,’ Lara admitted. ‘It wasn’t really unexpected, but no one expected it to happen so soon. Raoul has been busy with arrangements...with the funeral.’ The event, which was being attended by more than one state leader, required a lot of planning, yet another excuse for her to delay telling him about the pregnancy. And anyway it seemed to Lara that he was avoiding her.

Maybe as far as he was concerned the contract between them was already over?

‘Ring me tomorrow when it’s over...?’

It’s already over! ‘Sure,’ she managed dully, suddenly feeling more alone than ever before.

‘Look, you know I’d really like to come, to support you if I could, and so would Mum...’

Lara closed her eyes and fought back tears. ‘It’s fine.’

‘It’s not. It’s just that I have a hospital appointment tomorrow and Mum is coming with me.’

Lara’s stomach muscles tightened. ‘You’re ill?’

‘No, the thing is, I’m pregnant.’

‘Pregnant!’

‘Yep, and at the moment I’m as sick as hell.’

Tell me about it!

Lara just stopped herself, biting her tongue hard enough to make her wince. It was so tempting to offload, to share something she had in common with her twin, but she couldn’t tell Lily before she told Raoul. She would tell him...when the right time came.

‘I thought it was supposed to end after three months.’

The implication of the comment hit Lara. ‘Three months...so how far along are you?’

‘Twenty weeks...it’s not just you I haven’t told, Lara. I’ve not told anyone. I think I was pretty much in denial, but now I’ve kind of exploded overnight.’

Lara barely registered the forced humour in her sister’s voice. ‘You’re five months pregnant.’ She pressed a hand over her own still-flat stomach. ‘You were pregnant at the wedding?’ There had never been any psychic connection but shouldn’t she have sensed it? How could she have, when she’d been too busy keeping her own secrets to guess her twin might also have something to hide?

‘It was your day, Lara.’

My day... She stared at her hands, feeling the tears that flowed too easily well hotly beneath her eyelids. She blinked them back and focused on the gold band that encircled her finger, suddenly aware her sister had been talking and she didn’t have a clue what she’d said.

She lifted the gold band to her lips, remembering him sliding it on and how right it had felt. Without warning, the protective shield she had been hiding behind slid away, revealing a truth she could no longer run away from. She was staring at the truth...the glaringly obvious truth.

She’d told herself she was acting, that it wasn’t real, but it was real. She was in love with Raoul—he had warned her not to but she had anyway.

He was everything she’d been determined to avoid in a man and yet he was everything she needed, she craved... She closed her eyes, wishing herself back to a time when she had imagined you could control who you fell in love with, that you could choose safe love, when in reality you had no more control over love than the colour of your eyes.

The level of her blind stupidity seemed incredible. Love had nothing to do with self-control or common sense; she had no choice whether to love Raoul and it didn’t matter if he wanted that love, if he rejected it and her.

She loved him with a soul-deep passion and would carry on loving him even after he broke her heart.

The rest of the phone conversation was stilted and awkward but Lara barely noticed. It wasn’t until she put the phone down with a shaking hand that Lara realised she hadn’t even asked her twin who the father of her baby was!

* * *

The day of the funeral was warm, thunder rumbled in the distance but the rain waited until after Sergio had been laid to rest in the family vault.

The afternoon sun hit the study at the palazzo, and it was still uncomfortably warm as Raoul entered, putting his glass on the desk littered untidily with papers. He pulled open the French doors and stood there, eyes closed, breathing in the cool evening air before taking a seat in the padded leather chair beside the desk.

The mourners who had come back to the house after the service were gone...and so was his grandfather. His eyes went to the open door. Even now, he half expected to see the old man framed in the doorway.

But he wasn’t.

Raoul had stood up and told the mourners that for Sergio Di Vittorio family came first.

He could with equal honesty have added that the old fox had also been a master manipulator who could be utterly ruthless when it came to getting his own way.

He had died thinking he had got his way one final time, Raoul thought as he lifted his glass in a silent salute.

The twisted smile on his face vanished as he put down the glass, his thoughts sliding back to earlier when she had told him that they needed to talk. It was obvious what that would be about.

Her future, the one she would have without him. It would be a good one. She had talent, though he doubted she recognised yet how much. She deserved good things, he told himself, ignoring the sinking feeling inside. If he analysed it he’d have to admit that he wanted her to stay—not for ever, obviously, because there was no for ever, but just for a while, just so that he could carry on enjoying her.

When he’d met Lara his life had been disintegrating around him. He had lost or been losing everyone he’d ever cared for, but she had kept him afloat. Of course, having her around was going to make the next few weeks easier, but after that what...?

After that, nothing, because Raoul knew he had nothing to give. He was disgusted with himself for it, but he knew that what he was good at was taking. He knew it would be easy to persuade Lara to stay longer; he knew he was good at manipulating her feelings. But for once he was not going to put his own selfish needs first.

And then he could get back to life as usual.

I thought you’d fallen off the planet, darling!

At first he hadn’t even recognised the woman who had virtually collided with him in the street. Her name had continued to elude him as she’d pressed a kiss to his mouth. Just in time to save embarrassment it had come to him, along with the location of their fling a year or so ago.

She’d looked at his wedding ring and aimed a speculative look at his face. ‘Married, but how married?’

He’d made an excuse and left without responding to the question or the unspoken invitation in her carefully made-up eyes.

That was his life, the one he had chosen, the one he would go back to, just as soon as he was done with Lara.

Refusing to acknowledge the feeling that gathered strength inside him until it came perilously close to icy panic, he clenched his jaw and slowly rebuilt the barriers he had put up in order to survive his first marriage.

He was better off alone.

Not yet though; for the moment Lara was still here.

Was she still asleep? It had been three when she had finally confessed to not feeling well and then only after a lot of prompting.

Naomi had offered to help her to her bedroom and Raoul had looked in on her later, after the last of the mourners was gone. She had been fast asleep.

A sound made him turn his head. Framed in the doorway where he had just imagined his grandfather was Lara, her hair long and loose, glowing against the black fabric of the simple shift dress she still wore. She didn’t move as their eyes connected.

‘Are you feeling better?’ he asked, refusing to acknowledge the tightening in his chest as anything other than a natural protectiveness. She nodded and walked into the study, her bare feet silent on the wood. Her eyes looked enormous in her pale face and the milky pallor of her smooth skin emphasised the delicate purity of her cleanly drawn features.

‘I’m fine,’ she lied, struggling to throw off the lethargy that seemed to weigh down her limbs. ‘I slept.’

She had fallen into a deep sleep only to wake and find Naomi standing beside her bed, causing her to let out a startled squeal of alarm.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you, but Raoul was worried and he asked me to look in.’

If Raoul was so worried why couldn’t he look in himself? Even acknowledging the thought made her feel guilty; Raoul had buried his grandfather today and she was acting like an attention-seeking brat.

‘Thank you, I’m fine.’

To her dismay the other woman sat down. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she began hesitantly, ‘but I’ve noticed... Well, I’ve got the impression,’ she corrected, ‘that you feel you’re living in Lucy’s shadow.’

Lara was simply too astonished to respond.

‘You have nothing to live up to. Lucy was a bitch,’ she said simply.

Lara thought she had misheard. ‘Pardon? I thought—’

‘She was a bitch.’

‘I thought she was your friend?’

‘She didn’t have friends, just people she used. She made Raoul’s life a misery, and she knew all along that he loved someone else, but they cannot be together. I am so happy to see that Raoul has someone to make him happy now. I’ll let you rest.’

Lara watched her go, not knowing what to make of the one-sided conversation. It wasn’t just what she had said, it was the way she had said it...the secret little smile... She shivered, very much unsettled by the woman’s manner.

Naomi hadn’t actually meant that she was the person Raoul couldn’t be with...had she? Lara thought about all the occasions she had seen them together or at least in the same room. There would have been signs, she’d have picked up the signals, wouldn’t she...?

On the other hand, she had managed not to know she was in love with him for months. Maybe signals weren’t her thing. Did any of this even matter? She’d be out of his life soon...except that there would always be the baby... Would he even want to be part of the baby’s life?

Just what she needed—another unanswered question to add to all the others!

With a deep sigh she sat up and propped a pillow behind her head, running over Naomi’s words in her head again and again. The more she thought about it, the more it felt off somehow. As was the idea that Raoul’s marriage had not been happy, that his perfect wife had not been quite so, well, perfect.

It seemed much more likely that Naomi had a thing for Raoul and was making up stories about a poor woman who couldn’t defend herself. The only way she’d know for sure was to ask him.

‘Now there’s a revolutionary thought, Lara,’ she whispered mockingly to herself, and made her way downstairs to find Raoul.

* * *

‘Sorry I skipped out like that.’

He shrugged, dismissing her apology as he dragged a hand across the dark stubble that already dusted his jaw and lean cheeks. He closed the laptop that had been sitting open on the desk. It was all for show—he hadn’t been able to focus on work or even read his emails or any of the messages of condolence.

‘I coped.’

‘It’s been a hard day for you.’ Her heart ached for him; he looked so tired, so sad.

After a pause he acknowledged this with a tiny tip of his dark head, while privately acknowledging the fact that she had made it easier. Her quiet presence beside him, support expressed with a touch and a look.

‘I should have been there.’

‘Naomi was only too happy to stand in.’

He felt ungrateful but he’d found it impossible not to compare Naomi’s practised social skills with Lara’s more instinctive ones... Oh, there was no doubt that the woman could work a room and she never said the wrong thing, but then her smile was never genuine either and her laugh never uninhibited or too loud.

Not that there had been much to laugh about today, he thought sombrely, but Lara had not just given the impression of listening to the long-winded reminiscences of the elderly friends of his grandfather’s, she had listened. It didn’t matter who had been talking; he was pretty sure that mostly she didn’t have a clue who they were—or how important. At one point he had seen her spontaneously grab his godfather and hug the man!

Just after Lara had slipped away the elderly but still-influential Greek shipping magnate had taken Raoul to one side and shaken his hand, telling him that he was lucky indeed in his wife: ‘A keeper, my boy, but if I was thirty years younger you’d need to watch your back!’ he’d chortled.

For a man who would have preferred to walk in front of a bus than get married again, this arrangement with Lara was actually suiting him. Plus, the sex was incredible.

He wished they could extend the arrangement, but he had come to see the real Lara, to know her, and she deserved more...

Lara deserved better than him.

Closing the open French doors on a breeze that had sprung up, he missed Lara’s flinch at the mention of the other woman’s name.

‘Has she gone?’

‘Who?’

‘Naomi.’

He nodded, making a mental note to have a tactful word—she had been dropping around a little too much lately.

‘You should have stayed in bed.’

‘Were you happy?’

There was a hushed, husky vehemence in the abrupt question that made him look at her sharply, sensing suppressed emotions that showed their physical presence in the restless twisting of her long fingers. Something was going on in that beautiful head and he didn’t have a clue what it was. He allowed frustration to mask the protectiveness that made him want to take her in his arms.

‘Was I happy when?’

‘People say that you had a perfect marriage.’

‘Do they?’

‘Did you love her...your wife? Were you happy?’

In a voice edged with steel he cut across her. ‘You’re my wife.’ The word had always carried with it negative connotations...yet there had been times when he had said it recently when he had felt...proud...?

The interruption didn’t stop her; she’d gone too far and she had to know. ‘You know what I mean.’

He turned his head and directed a flat stare at her face. ‘No.’

‘I was asking—’

‘I know what you were asking.’ He gave a twisted smile. ‘I was answering. No, I was not happy, well, for about five minutes, but once I woke up, or grew up, or both, I was not.’

‘If you were unhappy why didn’t you just get a divorce?’ And marry the woman you apparently love so much but can’t have?

His mouth twisted into a parody of a smile as he turned to face her, dragging off the tie that was still looped around his neck as he did so. ‘In a perfect world I would have, but the world...’ he let the tie slip through his fingers and fall to the floor ‘...and life,’ he continued harshly, ‘are not.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Of course you don’t.’

How could she? There were no dark depths to Lara—she was the diametric opposite to Lucy, who on the surface had seemed so wholesome and sweet but the moment she was crossed revealed herself to be spiteful and vindictive, a person who thought the world revolved around her.

‘Then explain.’

Well, he certainly hadn’t learnt from his mistakes with Lucy—he had taken Lara at face value, and ignored the sweet, vulnerable angel beneath the beautiful but hard shell.

He’d clung stubbornly to the image, but each day together had eaten away at it until he couldn’t pretend any more.

Understand... How could she? Lara had a conscience and empathy; she had no desire to see those who thwarted her suffer; she didn’t need a constant, exhausting supply of attention and admiration or react with vicious spite when she didn’t receive the praise she felt she was entitled to.

‘Please, Raoul, I want to understand.’

The court-enforced appointments with the therapist following the hushed-up ‘incident’ that had left Lucy’s hairdresser with a black eye had been illuminating but not in themselves helpful.

At the end he’d known all about borderline personality disorders and malignant narcissists, but as Lucy had refused to accept she had a problem it had meant little in reality.

* * *

‘When I was married Jamie was never officially out. When he was still a student Jamie fell for a man who was...in a position of power, a married man, and they had a long-term affair. If the truth had emerged this man’s career, his marriage, his life would have been over. One night Jamie started to talk. We’d been to dinner, had a few drinks... Lucy was very sympathetic.

‘So when I told her that it was over she told me that if I filed for divorce she would out Jamie and his lover, that she would give interviews to every scandal sheet and tabloid she could find.’

Lara was appalled. She simply couldn’t get her head around anyone who wanted to hurt other people. ‘Your brother...’

‘Didn’t know.’ He rubbed a hand across his forehead. ‘The irony was, a month after she was killed in the crash he and his lover broke up; the next month he met Roberto.

‘Lucy was the heroine in her own life story. Every story heroine needs a villain and for her that was me. To understand Lucy you have to realise that she did not just need to win, she needed to take everything away from everyone else, turn their friends against them, strip them of pride; her lust for revenge was utterly insatiable.’

Lara shook her head, finding it impossible to reconcile the angelic image in her head with the...evil he spoke of.

‘The deal,’ he explained in the same flat voice, ‘was that we stay together...the public act was part of her punishment; she liked to see me helpless. She enjoyed flaunting her affairs, telling me she had aborted my child...laughing...’

Lara had sat dry-eyed and composed through the remembrance service; even when Raoul had paid his moving tribute to his grandfather she had kept the tears at bay. But now they flowed. ‘Oh, God!’ she sobbed. ‘How could she, how could anyone...be so...? A baby...’

‘She sent me a scan photo for my birthday, inside a daddy card.’

Lara pressed a hand to her mouth to hold the cry of horror inside. Like everyone else, she had looked at Raoul and seen the aura of power that he wore like a second skin, the cynicism, the edge of ruthless determination.

Now she saw the idealistic young man he had been before his first wife, the man he had been before he had been subjected to emotional torture by the person he had thought he loved. Her heart ached for him, the man he was and the man he could have been, had the evil woman not torn away his belief in goodness and love.

Would he ever heal?

Raoul felt an unfamiliar helplessness as he watched the silent tears fall down her face.

‘It is in the past and gone,’ he said abruptly. ‘I am the man I am now, and it’s better that I stay alone. I know not every woman is like Lucy, but I can’t trust anyone, and even if I could I have nothing to give that sort of woman, not the things she needs.’ His dark eyes held hers for a long moment. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying, Lara?’

‘You want to be alone. Doesn’t that mean she has won?’ He said nothing and she gave an angry sniff, choking out another gruff, ‘I’m sorry,’ while wiping away the moisture from her face with the back of both hands. ‘I would like to tear her hair out... She’s dead, that probably sounds terrible, but I don’t care!’ she cried.

‘I know terrible, and, trust me, that is not.’ He studied her pale face. ‘You look like you could do with a drink,’ he said, losing the battle to hide his concern.

‘You should have told me.’

‘Why? You think I want to advertise the fact I was a fool? I’ve never told anyone before—the whole world but you swallows the party line.’

The contempt in his voice made her wince. It was clearly aimed at himself. She didn’t say anything because there was nothing she could say. Instead, she watched him pour brandy, wondering how she could refuse without it seeming odd.

‘No, thanks, I won’t. Actually I think Naomi knows.’

‘Naomi?’ He thought about it and nodded. ‘I suppose she might know some—she and Lucy were close at one time, though I think she dropped her before the end,’ he recalled with an uninterested shrug. ‘And Lucy liked to boast about her triumphs.’

‘I know now is not the right time, but I really don’t think there’s ever going to be a good time.’

‘You want to make arrangements to leave.’ Eyes dark and bleak turned her way but his shrug was casual. ‘There’s no hurry.’

‘Good, no, I mean...’ She took a deep breath and thought, It’s now or never. ‘That is not what I wanted to say. I’ve been trying to speak to you for a while... You see... Actually there’s a...complication.’ She swallowed. ‘Oh, Raoul,’ she husked out. ‘I’m so sorry.’

His jaw clenched. ‘Will you stop saying sorry?’

‘Sorry.’ She bit her lip to stop another sorry falling out. At least sorry was better than I’ve fallen in love with you. The words were so clear that for a moment she thought she’d spoken them out loud.

He arched a brow.

‘I didn’t lie to your grandfather.’

Comprehension spread across his face—how like the Lara he had come to know to get hung up over a lie. ‘You lied for the right reasons.’ He reached for her hand but she didn’t take it; instead she brushed a few fiery, silken strands of hair from her brow.

‘Our marriage was a lie.’ On more levels than he knew.

Her use of the past tense deepened the frowning line between his dark brows.

‘At times a lie is the kindest thing.’

‘Not a kindness. You see, I am pregnant—not pretend, for real.’

The delivery was everything she had intended, measured, calm, but then she spoilt it all by bursting without warning into tears, loud sobs that seemed to be dragged from somewhere inside her. ‘I’m s-sorry!’ she managed between choking gasps.

Raoul didn’t move; he just stood there with the look of a man who could see a ten-ton truck approaching and couldn’t get out of the way.

Lara’s knees folded and she sank down into the nearest chair. ‘A shock, I know, and I’m sorry, but when you’ve had time to take it on you’ll realise as I have that it doesn’t have to change anything.’ He still didn’t love her.

Raoul, who had been standing silent, surged into motion, dropping down on his knees beside her chair.

‘It changes everything.’ He knew this, though the details of these changes remained beyond him at that moment. His brain just kept coming up against baby and stalling. ‘And will you stop saying sorry?’

The absent afterthought made Lara lift her head. ‘I can’t stand women who cry all the time,’ she sniffed, wiping the moisture off her face with the backs of her hands and missing the tender expression that momentarily broke through the shock on Raoul’s lean face.

‘Here.’

She took the laundered man-sized handkerchief and with a prosaic sniff she straightened her spine and looked into the face that was level with hers. She forgot what she had been about to say as a wave of love washed like a soul-deep sigh over her.

‘I know this is the last thing you need right now—I—’

‘We! It’s not as if you didn’t have a bit of help.’ When...? Raoul pushed away the thought. It didn’t really matter when it had happened; the way forward was to deal with this reality. He pushed against a crushing tide of guilt—he had done this to her.

‘It’s not really so terrible. I quite like the idea of being a young mother. If you like, I can keep you in touch with what is happening, milestones, you know, the birthdays and—’

‘Keep me in touch...?’

‘If you want?’ Was she assuming too much?

‘Where do you think I’m going to be?’

She made herself look at him, while struggling for a modicum of composure—better late than never!—and shook her head, not wanting to think about where he might be or, more specifically, with whom.

He dragged her to her feet then slowly but inexorably pulled her towards him until they stood thigh to thigh. ‘Has it not occurred to you that I might want this child too?’

‘To replace the one she took away?’

He didn’t say anything but the words hung between them.

It was Lara who broke the silence. ‘No, it hadn’t occurred to me,’ she admitted honestly. ‘How could it? You’ve just finished telling me that you want to live your life alone.’

‘This is about responsibility.’

‘Is that all it is to you?’ she flung back, wishing as much for him and their unborn child as for herself that it could be more.

‘I’m not going to lie to you, Lara, pretend things I do not feel, but I had a no-hope father who always put his own needs ahead of his children’s. I will not do that to any child of mine.’

‘And if that’s not enough...?’

‘For who...you?’

‘Yes,’ she admitted in a quiet voice.

‘It might turn out that way,’ he admitted. ‘But don’t you think we should try...for the baby?’

‘What do you mean by try? Do you mean that we should stay married? Because that was not part of the plan.’

‘Having a baby wasn’t part of the plan either,’ he retorted.

‘I thought you’d be angry.’ Weirdly it seemed to her he was recovering from the shock quicker than she had.

‘People get married because of babies, they don’t get unmarried.’

‘You wouldn’t be suggesting this if there wasn’t a baby, would you?’

‘No.’ She deserved a truthful answer, but she also deserved a man capable of love.

‘No.’

Lara tried to tell herself that if he’d lied she would have refused his offer, but she knew she wouldn’t. She simply didn’t have the strength.

‘I’ve actually come to appreciate what Grandfather meant when he spoke of continuity, of wanting to pass on the name, the genes...’

‘Oh, how convenient, now you suddenly want a baby? When did this happen? In the last five seconds?’

‘I would never have made the conscious choice to have a child.’ He would never have brought a child into the world merely to give his life meaning; the selfishness of the idea repelled him. ‘But now that I am going to be a father I will be the best one that I can.’ It would never be good enough, but luckily for their child he or she would have Lara for a mother to make up for it.

She gasped when, without warning, he placed a hand over her flat stomach.

Lara caught his wrist, felt a rush of emotion and hope. ‘You think this could work.’

‘We will make it work, cara.’