For Revenge or Redemption? (14 page)

‘Perhaps something a little less…obvious,’ she suggested, which sounded more gracious than calling the homes ‘ostentatious’ or ‘depressing’. And, to put him more on the right track next time, she added a little coyly, ‘If it helps, I prefer…simpler things.’

Surprisingly, to Seth it came as a revelation. But why
should it surprise him? it struck him now. There was the quiet, unfussy wedding she had readily agreed to. He’d thought it was because it had been something she merely wanted to get through for the sake of the baby. But would she still have wanted all that simplicity if they had been a love-struck couple? he wondered, because there were other things, too.

Most of the women he’d met in his life had been shopaholics, and he’d imagined she’d be the greatest, but in that he’d been proven wrong. She didn’t particularly like shopping, not for clothes at any rate…and as for those artificial, glitzy parties they were constantly being invited to, amazingly she seemed to spurn them with a passion almost as strong as his own.

‘Quite a woman of hidden depths, aren’t you?’ he commented dryly, joining her on the sofa.

‘Does that surprise you?’ Her eyes, instantly guarded as he came down beside her, had a rather wounded look about them. ‘You thought you were marrying an inveterate snob.’

‘Have I ever called you that?’ Surely he hadn’t? Even if at times, in view of how she had treated him in the past, he might have thought it.

‘You didn’t have to,’ she murmured, adding to his sense of guilt.

‘We all make mistakes,’ he conceded.

‘You?’ That familiar scorn heightened the healthy colour in her cheeks. Now that her morning sickness had eased, she was really beginning to blossom. ‘Surely not!’

In reply he merely lifted her hand, healthily golden against the darker bronze of his, and pressed it to his lips. Her skin was scented and soft.

Dark-blonde lashes came down as though she couldn’t bear it—or what he could do to her, he decided with ruthless satisfaction, aware of her pulse beating frantically against the heel of his hand.

‘I thought you were always right.’ An edge had crept into
her voice, a tension caused by the sexual undercurrent that dominated everything they said and did. Would it destroy them eventually? he wondered. Because, when it was gone, what would there be left?

‘Sometimes it isn’t a bad thing to be wrong.’

A question darkened the blue around her dilated pupils, but he glanced down at the hand he still held to avoid a conversation he didn’t want to get involved in, studying the simple arrangement of stones that formed her engagement ring.

Not for her the high-carat diamond he’d thought she might pick to cement their hurried betrothal. Or the extortionately priced yellow sapphires that the jeweller had tried to tempt her with in that exclusive goldsmith’s in the West End.

Now his thumb brushed lightly over the modest cluster of tiny rubies and emeralds surrounding that single tiny diamond she had selected over all the rest.

Once again, he found himself silently admitting, this lovely girl whom circumstances had virtually forced him into a union with had, without even knowing it, tossed his preconceived ideas about her right back in his face. She was a mixture of simplicity and complexity and he could never tell which one of those facets of her character was going to reveal itself to him each day. The one who stayed reserved and distant from him while they were here like this or alone together in the office, or the one who staved off any suggestion of anything intimate with him for as long as she was able to, then turned into a tigress the instant he took matters into his own hands when they were in bed.

Then no words could deny that what they did together was meant to be—and what both of them wanted. They were from totally different worlds, universes, and yet in bed they spoke the same language, one that consisted only of touch and feel and the most basic of instincts, where only the most exclusively sensual phrases played any part.

He felt the need to speak that language with her now, and
knew that was something he could have fulfilled within seconds if he had taken it upon himself to do so. Because she always responded to him; because she couldn’t deny herself the pleasure she craved from him any more than he could resist the scent, taste and feel of her eager body beneath his hands, the hypnotising sweetness of her incredible mouth.

An emotion, more complex and far less primal than the need to have her, stirred inside him, threatening to make him vulnerable to this beautiful woman who had once slain him with just one look. He wasn’t prepared to let that happen. Not ever again.

‘I’m sure we can find something to please you eventually,’ he said dismissively, getting up, his voice sounding strained and distinctly cold from the control he was having to exercise in not tugging off those stuffy office clothes of hers and whisking her off to bed to make love to her until she was sobbing to take him into her. ‘Until then we’ll just have to manage—if it’s not too difficult for you.’

And on that note he turned and strode out of the room.

Everything was going as it should, Grace thought two or three weeks later. At least with her pregnancy. The baby was developing normally, despite her initial fears, and the doctor had said that, although they needed to keep an eye on her because of her mother’s and her own medical history, she was a prime example of a healthy mother-to-be.

Everything would be perfect, she decided painfully, if the man she had picked to fall in love with had been in love with her. But he wasn’t, and the knowledge that he might never love her, coupled with the strain that that was putting on their marriage, was making her snappy and irritable.

Only this week she had had two migraines and had had to leave the office early. Seth had been away, and as she’d been fine by the time he’d come back she hadn’t bothered mentioning it to him.

Now, though, sitting at her desk with another headache coming on, a pain in her lower abdomen and feeling decidedly yucky, Grace wound up the conversation she was having with a customer who was far too chatty and made a merciful escape to the bathroom.

There she made a discovery that left her trembling with shock and fear.

She was bleeding!

She was nearly five months pregnant and she had started a miscarriage!

S
ETH’S
face was flushed and he was breathing heavily as he burst into Grace’s office.

He had been in a board meeting when Simone’s call had come through and, too impatient and worried to wait for the lift, he had taken the stairs, flying down them like his life depended upon it.

With a nod at Simone who was just coming out, he crossed over to Grace, who was sitting with her feet up on the couch that stood against the far wall.

There was a deathly pallor to her face that concerned him immensely and her eyes as she looked up at him were dark with something closely akin to desperation. When he took her hand and dropped to his haunches beside her, he could feel how much she was shaking.

‘What is it?’ It was an anxious whisper as he closed both hands around the cool trembling one he was holding. ‘Are you going to be all right for me?’

She looked at him as though she was almost surprised to hear him say that. ‘Oh
Seth…
I think I’m losing our baby.’ Tears mingled with the desperate emotion in her eyes, an emotion that tugged at him so much that he had to remind himself that it was purely maternal instinct that was making her look like that. They said it kicked in at some point of the
pregnancy, however unwanted the child might have been to begin with.

‘Hush. Don’t upset yourself,’ he breathed. He even managed a sort of watery smile. ‘You need to conserve all your energy to help that little one hold on. And, anyway, it might not be a miscarriage.’

‘It is. It’s happening again!’

‘Again?’ Puzzlement joined the anxious lines scoring his face.

‘Just like before.’

‘Before when? What are you talking about, Grace? What do you mean? When has this happened before?’

Now she wished she hadn’t kept it from him. ‘I was pregnant, ’ she admitted, her shoulders drooping.

‘When?’ There was so much he didn’t know about her, that he had only begun to find out since they were married. But this? When had she been pregnant? Whose child had she been carrying before his? He wanted to know all the answers—but now wasn’t the time. Also, Simone was just coming back in.

‘Is there anything else I can do for you both, Seth?’ Over the weeks, since the brief engagement, Simone Phillips had become as firm a friend and colleague to him as she was to Grace.

Getting to his feet, Seth inhaled heavily. He had already had Simone send for a friend of his, a top gynaecologist with whom he played squash sometimes during the office lunch-breaks.

‘Yes, you can put anything that needs handling urgently and which you aren’t able to deal with yourself through to my PA’s office. She’ll know what to do.’ Simone had already made Grace a cup of tea, he noticed. ‘And perhaps you could see that we aren’t disturbed.’

‘Of course.’

When she had gone he pulled up a hard chair and sat astride
it, facing Grace. ‘Now…’ There was a marked hesitancy in his voice. ‘Perhaps it’s something you didn’t want to tell me about, Grace, but in view of the circumstances…’ His gaze dropped to the tell-tale mound of her abdomen beneath the overlap of her blouse which she was absently stroking, as though to protect the child she was so afraid of losing.

Their child.

But whose child had she carried and lost before? Had she loved him? Who before him had had such an important claim on her affections?

‘It isn’t what you think.’ As she turned her face to his, he thought he had never seen anyone look more miserable.

His impenetrable gaze caused Grace to lower hers. She could tell what he was thinking and she couldn’t bear it. It was enough that she might lose him if she lost the baby, but she couldn’t bear to lose what precious little respect he had for her as well.

‘It was eight years ago…after I came back to London. Neither of us had taken any precautions.’

‘What are you saying?’ His voice had dropped to a whisper and all the colour seemed to have seeped out of his olive skin. ‘You mean, after we made love down there…?’ He was shaking his head sharply as though trying to clear a blinding fog from in front of his eyes—eyes that were dark with disbelief. ‘You
conceived
? You were pregnant with
my
child?’

She gave a sort of half-nod.

Now he could see why she had been so livid at finding out she was pregnant for a second time—and by him, a man she couldn’t help surrendering to and yet for whom she had never entertained a moment’s real feeling.

‘We must be one hell of a fertile couple,’ he remarked savagely. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you let me know?’

‘At the time?’ She sounded and looked sadly cynical. ‘What
would you have done, married me? A girl you thought was only out for a good time?’

‘Which was why I thought you’d be protected.’ He was still shaking his head. ‘I never dreamt you wouldn’t be.’

‘You seem to have made a habit of that.’ And, in case he was thinking she’d been totally loose as well as irresponsible, she admitted, laying herself bare, ‘It was my first time.’

To say he looked shocked would be an understatement, she thought, as those steely eyes widened and a flush washed up over those strong cheekbones.

He had been her first lover?

While he was still trying to get over one piece of unbelievable news, he was hit smack between the eyes with another.

Grace Tyler, the good-time girl—willing and eager for him without any inhibitions whatsoever—had been a virgin? Beneath the worry, his rampant concern for her, he knew a warming and very misplaced sense of macho pride.

‘It wasn’t obvious.’

She gave a pained little shrug. ‘No. I’ve read it isn’t always, if a girl’s athletic or has done a lot of horse riding, which I had.’

‘What happened?’ he prompted, his eyes searching hers for enlightenment.

‘I lost it.’

‘How far into…?’

She swallowed. She didn’t want to relive it—the pain and the misery, the feelings of isolation. And afterwards the months of depression and self-blame.

‘Nearly five months.’

He swore under his breath, while his eyes closed from some inner frustration. With himself? she wondered. With her?

‘Why didn’t you tell me before? I mean…since?’ His deep voice trembled with exasperation. ‘We’re man and wife, for goodness’ sake!’

‘I don’t know. I treated you badly and I paid for it. It was
a bad time in my life. I just wanted to put it behind me.’ And, knowing now that it would be wrong to hold anything else back from him, because he was her husband, because he had a right to know and because—heaven help her!—because she loved him, she tagged on reluctantly, ‘I was ill for quite some time.’

‘Dear…!’ He raised his eyes skywards, emitting some unrepeatable oath. ‘All the more reason why, in view of your mother losing her life in childbirth, you should have told me,’ he rebuked softly. ‘And yet, knowing this, you kept it from me. Why?’

‘I don’t know.’ Because it was all in the past. It couldn’t happen again.
Dear heaven!
she prayed.
Don’t let it happen again.
‘I was shocked and angry when I realised I was pregnant again. I couldn’t believe it was happening to me. I’m sorry.’ It had been stupid of her; she knew that now.

Turning to him, squeezing the strong hand clasping hers like it was a lifeline, she breathed, ‘Oh Seth! What am I going to do?’

There was real fear in her eyes, and for once in his life Seth felt totally helpless. If anything happened to her, or to the baby, or both…

He looked away so she wouldn’t guess at the depth of anxiety that was gripping him. He wouldn’t let himself think about any of that now.

The consultant arrived then and, after examining his patient, arranged for her to be checked over by the maternity unit, who insisted on keeping her in overnight.

Late the following day, when the initial scare was over, they released her with the firm instruction that in view of her earlier miscarriage she was to take things very carefully for the rest of her pregnancy.

‘Which means giving up anything at all stressful,’ Seth remarked as he was driving her back to the apartment. ‘Like that high-powered job of yours, for a start.’

‘But I can’t!’ Grace wailed in protest. Because then he would have achieved his ultimate objective, wouldn’t he? she thought miserably—seeing her give up her position at Culverwells, the thing he had probably most wanted from the beginning. And because she’d let him get her pregnant with his child!

‘You can and you will!’ There was no arguing against his decision, because, of course, he could take steps to see that she was removed from the board if she didn’t comply.

But he was right in any case, she accepted, praying that this pregnancy would go to its full term. If it didn’t, she would lose not only this baby, that she craved to hold in her arms, but Seth as well. Because there would be no reason for him to remain in a loveless marriage—loveless where he was concerned, at any rate, she thought wretchedly—if he no longer felt any responsibility towards her and a non-existent child.

‘If you haven’t the sense to look after yourself while you’re in your condition, someone has to,’ he told her with strengthening determination. Which was how, the following afternoon, Grace found herself being whizzed along the motorway in the sleek, dark elegance of his Aston Martin.

‘Where are we going?’ she enquired as he crossed a myriad fast-moving lanes of traffic that would have made her mind boggle to negotiate, bringing the car deftly and safely onto the carriageway headed west.

‘Somewhere where I can keep a closer eye on what you’re up to until after our baby’s been delivered safely,’ he informed her, which was the most information she had managed to get out of him ever since he had instructed her last night on what she should pack.

A couple of hours later, and it all became clear.

Oh, no…

Grace sucked in her breath, recognising the all-too-familiar signs for the little seaside retreat, and sat stiff and tense as
the car wound its way onto the quieter road that fringed the rugged coast.

She hadn’t been here for over seven long years. Not since her grandfather had sold their holiday home up there in the hills the summer after she had met Seth.

‘Relax,’ he advised, keenly aware of the tension that was gripping her even as he pulled round a slow farm vehicle. ‘I know it’s the last place you probably imagined—or wanted—me to bring you, but I promise you’ll be comfortable. It’s the one place in the world where I come when I want to totally unwind.’

Not a lot had changed over the years, Grace noted as he brought the car down through the town and past the same familiar shops. The little cottage library was still there, and the garage with its one petrol pump, although there was a supermarket now, she noticed, where the general store had been.

‘It’s scarcely changed,’ she breathed aloud, thankful that they had taken a route well away from the boatyard as they came onto the outskirts of the town, because she was battling with so many memories and conflicting emotions that she wasn’t sure how to deal with them all at that moment.

‘Hasn’t it?’ Scepticism laced Seth’s voice as he put his foot down to take the hill road following the coast and brought the car onto a plot of scrubland at its summit, sending dust and gravel spinning beneath the vehicle’s powerful wheels.

Now, sitting there with him high above the sea, as he turned off the ignition she understood why he’d sounded amused, and why he had stopped the car at that particular vantage point.

‘I don’t believe it!’ Grace laughed in shocked surprise.

In the distance, eastwards towards the far side of town, where once acres of derelict industrial wasteland had been, luxury high-rise apartments and prestigiously designed houses stood cheek by jowl around the glistening waters of a new marina graced by cabin cruisers, dinghies and shimmering
yachts, whose majestic white masts seemed to pierce the sky. ‘What an amazing concept…What foresight someone must have had to create all that…’

‘I take it you approve?’

‘Who wouldn’t?’ She exhaled, unable to tear her gaze from the spectacular view. ‘So often new developments only ever seem to spoil the environment, but it’s been done so sympathetically that I can’t see—’ She broke off suddenly, aware of the way he was looking at her so intently, of the significance of what he had just said. ‘You mean…?’ Her eyes were wide with incredulity. ‘That whole development—it’s one of yours?’

His mouth compressed wryly. ‘It was the first.’ Though there was pride in his voice as he sat there surveying the result of all that had been conceived out of that brilliant brain, Grace could see the genuine satisfaction in him too. ‘But I thought I told you what I was intending to do.’

He had, eight years ago. Shamefully now she remembered how she had laughed, even what she had said in response:
Dreams are for people who crave things they haven’t a hope of ever attaining.
How naïve she’d been!

As her disconcerted blue eyes clashed uncomfortably with his, she knew that he was remembering it too.

‘It wasn’t a dream,’ he said softly. ‘It was a plan.’

And now he would drive her there, she thought, as the Aston Martin fired into life again. Make her eat humble pie by depositing her in one of those luxury penthouses—which would be a close cousin, no doubt, of the one they shared in London. She could look out at that beautiful marina, at all the boats, houses and everything she had made fun of, unaware then of how much she would wish, every day of her life, that she had never said those things, never treated him as she had. And it would just serve her right! she thought.

Only he didn’t.

They were following the coast now, travelling westward,
the road ahead wooded and dropping in a steep gradient into deeper countryside. Below them the water reflected a sky that was a very pale, almost icy blue. Rippling waves left the curve of a shingle beach darkened by the receding tide, while across the estuary, on a road running parallel to theirs, the sun bouncing off a car’s windscreen was almost dazzling for a second before the road angled away, climbing upward into the distant hills.

‘Did you buy your mother one of those houses back there on the marina?’ she enquired, remembering that that had all been part of his long-term plan.