Читать книгу Michelle Reid Collection - Michelle Reid - Страница 53

IT WAS very late by the time his car swung back into the driveway. Huddled inside a warm winter coat, Claire was sitting on one of the pale blue upholstered chairs on the front terrace, where she had been waiting for him for what seemed like hours now.

He had to have seen her sitting there because his car headlights had picked her out as he’d driven by on his way to the garages. Yet long, long minutes went by before his tall, dark figure loomed up at her from the inky darkness.

And her first response when she looked up at him was a cold little shiver. ‘Still here, I see,’ he drawled.

‘I needed to ask you a question before I left,’ she explained. ‘So I decided to wait until you got back.’

‘You mean there is a lie we forgot to rake over?’ he mocked.

‘Maybe.’ She smiled a little sadly. ‘I’m not sure…Will you at least sit down and listen?’ she then requested. ‘Only it’s very difficult to talk to someone who is bent on cutting you to ribbons with their eyes while you speak.’

He smiled that smile she hated so much, and for a moment she thought he was going to tell her to go to hell. The tension soared, filling the cool winter night with a hostility that clutched at her throat.

Maybe it did something similar to him, because he released a taut sigh as if attempting to dispel the feeling, then in the next moment was reluctantly dropping down into the chair next to her.

‘Fire away,’ he grimly invited.

But now that she had his attention she found she’d lost the courage to say what she wanted to say. Ironic, really, she mused, when you think how many hours I’ve waited so patiently for this moment.

‘Nice evening?’ she asked, merely as a cover while she got her courage back.

His dark head turned to look at her delicately drawn profile. She looked so pale, her skin seemed to glow ghost-like in the darkness. ‘Is that the question?’ he enquired. ‘Or just an extra one you decided to throw in?’

In other words, he was not going to make this easier for her, Claire noted. ‘I am not naturally a cruel or vindictive person, Andreas,’ she murmured soberly. ‘I did not set out to deliberately hurt you today.’

‘Now that definitely was not a question,’ he clipped.

And he definitely was not going to make this easy. At which point she decided to just hit him with it and wait to see what he did.

‘Have you been making love to me for all of these weeks just for the hell of it because I was there and so obviously willing?’ she asked. ‘Or did you actually let yourself care something for me before you allowed things to go that far?’

He shifted restlessly, so his chair creaked on the tiled terrace floor. From the way his jaw clenched, he didn’t like the question and liked even less having to offer an answer.

‘I did not make love to you for the hell of it,’ he said.

Claire sat there beside him and smothered the urge to sigh loudly in relief as she felt a huge weight lift from her shoulders because, if he had not done it for the hell of it, then he must care—even if he never actually said that he did.

‘Then may I stay?’ she requested huskily. ‘Please?’

He made a jerky movement with his head that made her feel as if she’d hit him again. ‘You said one question,’ he gritted. ‘That makes two.’

So she rephrased it. ‘I’ll go if you want me to, but I prefer to stay. I need to stay here with you.’

‘And Melanie, of course,’ he cynically mocked.

Claire’s blue eyes flashed, glinting a warning at his hard profile. ‘Don’t bring Melanie into this,’ she admonished. ‘What is best for Melanie is a separate issue. I am talking about me here. My needs.’ She tersely pressed the point. ‘What I am going to do!’

‘And you want to stay,’ he drawled with crushing derision. ‘How very—saintly of you, considering who you would be staying with.’

‘Do you think that by mocking both me and yourself in the same sentence you will force me to hate you enough to leave without you having to tell me to go?’ she demanded.

‘I thought I had already done that,’ he remarked, saw her wince, and with a sigh relented in his acid tone a little. ‘Listen to me, Claire,’ he prompted heavily. ‘You are generous and loving and selflessly kind,’ he told her. ‘But you are also young and extremely beautiful. If you leave here now, you will soon pick up the threads of your own life, eventually meet a lucky man one day who will fulfil your heart’s desire in every single way. But I am not that man,’ he stated gruffly. ‘I am too old for you, too—flawed, and just too cynical for someone as fresh and perfect as you.’

‘But you aren’t saying that you wouldn’t like to be that lucky man,’ she said. ‘Only that you don’t think you can be him.’

His laugh was soft and rueful. ‘I forgot to say stubborn, too,’ he murmured—only to tag on harshly, ‘Why can’t you make this easier on both of us and accept that I am not going to let you stay with me?’

‘Because I love you,’ she replied. ‘Though I don’t think you deserve it. Or you couldn’t be trying to hurt me like this. And if you dare to quote the cruel to be kind thing at me,’ she added warningly, ‘I will probably hit you again—old man.’

‘Then I won’t say it,’ he promised. ‘But neither will I change my mind.’

He sounded so strong, so—resolved, her heart gave a painful little lurch in response to it. ‘So, if I get up right now and walk off into that darkness leaving Melanie behind—which is what you only ever really wanted—will that make you happy, Andreas? Will it?’

He didn’t answer, but she could feel the sharp increase in his tension. On impulse she stood up—could have wept when his hand snaked out to capture hers and he muttered, ‘No,’ so rawly that it rasped over his throat like sandpaper, and his grip was intense.

In a flurry of shaking limbs she spun around to come and squat down in front of him. Her hair had grown longer over the last couple of months, grown thicker and glossier so that even here, in the darkness of the terrace, it shone like golden syrup around the tense pallor of her face as she tried to capture his eyes. Only he wouldn’t let her do that—hadn’t, in fact, since he’d appeared in front of her tonight. And that made her hurt for him, because she understood why he would not meet her gaze.

It was wretched—utterly wretched.

‘OK,’ she murmured shakily. ‘New scenario—right?’ Her free hand went up, ice-cold and trembling fingertips touching the white ring of tension circling his mouth. ‘You meet a girl, you fall in love with her. You ask her to marry you. She turns round and tells you that she can’t have children. Do you just walk away, Andreas?’ she asked him gently. ‘Does the fact that she can’t give you children suddenly make her less worthy of your love?’

‘This is a senseless exercise,’ he gritted, dislodging her fingers with a tense movement of his head. ‘Simply because it is not the case here.’

‘How do you know?’ Claire challenged. ‘How can either you or I know whether I don’t have my own flaw that will stop me from conceiving? When it has never been put to the test?’

‘And never will be by me,’ he uttered grimly.

‘But that isn’t the point I was trying to make,’ she pressed. ‘Are you saying that when this fantastic new man comes along to sweep me off my feet I have to have him checked out to see if he’s fertile before I fall in love with him? And that he has to do the same with me?’

‘Don’t be foolish.’ He began to scowl. ‘And stop this line of argument right now. For I refuse to play mind games with ifs, buts and maybes. Why can’t you simply accept that I am not going to let you stay here with me?’

‘Then why are you holding so tightly to my hand?’ Claire countered softly.

His hand snapped away from her, his hard face darkening with a sudden loss of patience. ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he muttered, going to get up.

But Claire beat him to it. ‘So have I,’ she agreed, straightening away from him before he could stand up. ‘So I am going to go to my lonely bed to dream of wildly exciting men with very high sperm counts,’ she bitterly informed him. ‘And you never know—if I dream hard enough, by the time morning comes around, I may have managed to purge my love for you right out of me! Then leaving here tomorrow could well turn out to be a pleasure!’

With that she stalked into the house, leaving him sitting there alone with only his stubborn pride to help him mull over what she had just said.

On reaching her room, she stripped off her clothes and climbed into bed, closed her eyes and, with gritted teeth, waited to see if her angry words managed to shock a reaction out of him.

Sure enough, a couple of minutes later, the door to his own room slammed shut, and a few more minutes after that the connecting door flew open. Claire refused to open her eyes.

‘You asked for this,’ he growled, coming to lean over her. ‘You wanted to make me angry—well, I’m angry,’ he confirmed as his naked body slid between the sheets. ‘You wanted to make me jealous,’ he added as he reached out for her. ‘Well, I am damned well jealous!’

‘Of my dreams?’ she taunted, opening her eyes.

‘Of everything to do with you!’ he rasped, and imprisoned her very willing mouth.

It became a battle of wills as to who could arouse the other more. He kissed and licked and teased her, and shrouded her in the heaviest kind of sensuality. And she returned everything with interest, driving him out of control with the touch of her mouth and the caress of her fingers and the soft urgency with which she whispered her desire to him. ‘Will my other men make me feel as good as this?’ she dared to question curiously.

Her innocence before he came along added immense power to the question. But it was dangerous, it was reckless. He responded by entering her like a man who had lost touch with his sanity.

And as he drove her before him into the same wild place she thought she heard an anguished whimper, and realised with a sense of wretched guilt that the sound had come from him.

‘I don’t leave tomorrow, then?’ she murmured when it was all over and she was lying curled close up against him, his arms still wrapped around her as if they couldn’t let go.

‘You stay until you are ready to go,’ he replied. ‘I refuse to accept more than that from you.’

Very magnanimous, Claire thought, and broke herself free from his arms to walk off to her own bathroom. When she came back she had something hidden in the palm of her hand—though he didn’t notice that because he was too busy absorbing every nuance of her slender shape as she came back to him.

Straddling his lean waist, she sat looking thoughtfully down at his dark face. His eyes were hooded again—but lazily, their dark depths gleaming with a deliciously greedy possessiveness as they looked at her body.

‘I have something to tell you,’ she confessed. ‘But I need you to promise me that you won’t get angry.’

‘Strange request, that,’ he drawled, lifting up his arms to fold them beneath his head. ‘I feel myself growing angry at the mere suggestion.’

‘I thought you might.’ She grimaced, sighed and then began. ‘I’ve had a very bad day today,’ she informed him. ‘Almost the worst of my life.’

‘My fault, I presume.’

‘Hmm…Yes and no,’ she replied. ‘Meeting my aunt didn’t help. Then you and I rowed and you took off like a maniac. I was feeling pretty miserable by then, I can tell you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he sighed.

She shrugged the apology away. ‘Then something really frightening happened,’ she told him. ‘So I got Nikos to take me back to Rafina so I could visit a doctor.’

His eyes sharpened, his arms dropped down so his hands could clasp her around her waist. ‘Why?’ he raked at her. ‘What happened to you?’

‘He examined me,’ she explained as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘Confirmed my worst fears…You do trust me, don’t you, Andreas, not to have ever been unfaithful to you?’ she then asked carefully.

‘Of course.’ He frowned, impatient with what he saw as an irrelevance, coming as it did right in the middle of what she was telling him. ‘Stop making a meal of this,’ he rasped. ‘And tell me what the hell is wrong with you!’

‘M-my uterus is enlarged,’ she said, not finding this as easy as she’d expected it to be. ‘H-he did some tests.’ She took a deep breath, then let it out again. ‘I’m—I’m pregnant,’ she announced.

It took a moment, while Claire sat there across him and waited with bated breath. Then he uttered a very rude word, and in an act of blind fury he toppled her off his chest and launched himself out of the bed. ‘I thought you had agreed not to do this!’ he bit out as he paced angrily away from her.

‘S-six weeks to be exact,’ Claire continued unsteadily. ‘Andreas—I need you to—’

‘How many times do I have to go through this hell?’ he raged right over the top of whatever she’d been going to say. ‘You cannot be pregnant!’ he turned to blast at her. ‘I am infertile, for goodness’ sake! I am infertile!’

Trembling too much to dare try to stand up and go to him, Claire drew up her knees and hugged them to her chest. ‘The doctor explained that,’ she murmured shakily.

He went off in a fury of Greek.

Sitting there like that, Claire closed her eyes tightly and waited for the furious stream to stop before grimly forcing herself to continue. ‘He said that research into male infertility is relatively new. That they are only just discovering that a man’s sperm count can change virtually by the m-month.’

‘I’m not listening to this.’ Reeling almost drunkenly, he made for his own room.

‘H-he said if you only did the test once,’ she stammered after him, ‘then you could have just chosen an unlucky day!’

‘An unlucky day?’ he repeated, coming to a taut standstill. Then he twisted his dark head to look at her. What she saw written on his face made her insides shrivel. ‘I had five years of unlucky days, Claire,’ he reminded her bitterly. ‘Try talking your way around that.’

She nodded, and swallowed, her blue eyes determined even while they swam with tears. ‘Ap-apparently he used to be Sofia’s family doctor,’ she explained. ‘He…’

‘No.’ Andreas immediately denied that. ‘Our family doctor is in Athens—’

‘And this doctor was Sofia’s family practitioner before she married you!’ Claire inserted. ‘He—he w-wants to talk to you—confidentially,’ she told him. ‘H-he says he has some information y-you may like to hear ab-about Sofia…’

Something happened, Claire wasn’t sure exactly what, but something most certainly cracked that death mask he was wearing clamped over his face—before he turned and walked into his own room without a word.

She wilted like a dying swan, her long neck folding over her knees. Her heart was pounding heavily, her lungs almost completely locked inside the tension surrounding them. And her brain seemed to have closed itself down altogether, because she could not think of a single thing beyond that expression on his wretched face as he’d walked away.

Something landed on the bed beside her. Her head shot up, blue eyes despairingly vulnerable as they searched out his. But Andreas had shut off completely. ‘Ring him,’ he commanded.

‘Ring who?’ She frowned in confusion.

‘This—doctor.’ A long, taut finger pointed stabbingly at something beside her on the bed; glancing dazedly down, Claire saw it was a mobile telephone.

‘But it’s the middle of the night,’ she protested.

‘Then wake him up,’ he insisted.

When she still didn’t make a move to do his bidding, he bent to snatch the telephone back again. ‘What’s the bloody number?’ he grated.

‘I d-don’t know,’ she confessed. ‘All I did was ask Nikos to take me to see a doctor and he drove me there…’

‘His name, then,’ he flicked tightly at her. ‘You do at least know the name of this doctor you allowed to make an intimate examination of you?’

‘An appointment card,’ she suddenly remembered. ‘Over there on the dressing table.’

Grimly he went to find it with hard fingers scattering things anywhere they fell. In that kind of tight, staccato way, he read the Greek symbols printed on the card, and stabbed them into his mobile.

Claire couldn’t sit there and take any more. She climbed off the bed and escaped into her bathroom, where she sat on the toilet seat and shivered while she listened to his deep voice firing questions at the poor doctor in Greek.

Then the silence came back. She continued to sit there, not sure what to do, until her flesh grew so cold she had to get up and pull on her bathrobe. Shoving her hands into the cavernous pockets, she allowed herself a couple of deep breaths for courage, then let herself into the bedroom again.

Andreas was sitting on the end of her bed, slumped over with his face buried in his hands. In all her life she had never seen anything so wretched as this proud Greek man reduced to this.

Without a second thought, she went over there, climbed onto the bed behind him then simply wrapped her arms around him as tightly as she could.

‘She lied to me,’ he murmured hoarsely.

‘I know,’ Claire softly replied.

‘She knew even before she married me that she was not able to conceive, yet she put me through all of that—torment. Month after month.’ He laboured the point, dragging his hands away from his face so he could use them to help him. ‘She made me feel useless and helpless and…’

It all came pouring out then. While Claire knelt behind him and held onto him tightly, Andreas drew a vivid picture of what it had been like to live with a woman whose obsessive need to bear a child had turned both their lives into a living nightmare. Not once had Sofia suggested the fault could be hers. Loving him and living in fear of losing him, she had created a web of deceit that involved cruel tricks and lies which kept him balanced on a knife-edge of failure and despair. By the time he had been driven into taking a fertility test himself, the sheer stress of it all must have lowered his count.

‘She took a terrible risk, allowing you to take that test,’ Claire pointed out soberly.

‘Not really,’ Andreas contended. ‘Either way, the torment would have continued. With a strong count she would have merely increased her efforts to conceive. A low count gave her a similar excuse to—be lucky one day—as she loved to say to me.’ A shudder ripped through him; Claire tightened her hold on him. ‘In the end I couldn’t bring myself to touch her, I felt such a pitiful failure,’ he admitted. ‘I think my withdrawal from her bed was what finally tipped her over the edge.’

And left him with yet another sense of failure he had to learn to live with, Claire realised sadly.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she murmured.

His shoulders flexed. ‘What have you got to be sorry for?’ he demanded. ‘It should be me apologising to you for the way I behaved before!’

‘I understood.’

‘You’re pregnant…’ he husked suddenly.

‘Mmm,’ she softly confirmed. ‘Are you pleased?’

He rubbed his hands over his face. ‘Shell-shocked, I think,’ he admitted, but some of the tension began to ease out of him.

‘I have something for you,’ she said, and, taking the pen-shaped tester out of her pocket, she gravely handed it to him over his shoulder. ‘Our baby,’ she confided. ‘What do you think—boy or girl?’

She tried to keep it light, but she could feel the emotion come roaring up inside him as he sat there staring down at that silly little indicator that had been such a source of pain to him before now.

When he moved, he did it with a throaty growl as he twisted around and tumbled her onto the bed. ‘From the moment you opened your lovely blue eyes on a dusty road back in London, I knew you were going to mean something special to me,’ he told her deeply. ‘But I never dared to so much as dream of anything this special.’

‘Here,’ Claire invited. ‘Feel for yourself just how special…’ And, taking hold of his hand, she fed it between their bodies so she could press his palm against her womb. There was nothing to show for the miracle taking place inside her, of course—it was much too soon—but the gesture itself was enough to have her drowning in the intense darkness of his wonderful eyes.

‘I am going to love you until the day I die,’ he vowed. ‘And I am never going to let you go.’

‘I’ve been trying very hard not to get away, please note,’ she pointed out gently.

‘Stubborn,’ he accused her softly.

‘In love,’ she amended.

For that, he kissed her. Kissed her long and deep and with a heart-stirring tenderness that told her more than anything else could do just how much he loved to hear her say that.

Timo Markopoulou arrived in the world very early on a bright and hot summer morning.

His mother was exhausted, but she couldn’t allow herself to fall asleep. She was too busy observing the way Andreas was sitting in the chair by her bed, with Melanie seated on one half of his lap while his small son occupied the other.

He was introducing them to each other, his voice softly reassuring though both babies were too young to understand. Yet, sitting there on his lap, gazing solemnly at her new brother who looked remarkably like herself when she was born, Melanie seemed to understand something of what her papa was saying, because she reached out with a small hand and touched the baby’s cheek in just the same way Claire had always done to her.

The incredibly gentle act from one so young had a lump forming in Claire’s throat. It affected Andreas too; she saw the waves of love and pride go washing through him as he caught the little girl’s hand and carried it to his lips.

Lifting his head, he caught her watching them, and Claire sent him a soft, understanding smile, but he didn’t smile back. There was just too much emotion at work inside him for him to smile right now.

‘My cup runneth over,’ he murmured deeply.

That was all; his feelings at that moment required no further explanation. Needing to make a physical link with those feelings, Claire reached out to rest a hand on one of his wide shoulders. He acknowledged it by brushing it with his cheek as his attention returned to his children.

And that was the image Claire took with her as she drifted into slumber. Her love. Her life, encapsulated in that one special moment. Her own cup of happiness was overflowing too.