The French Count's Pregnant Bride

When she was six, she’d fallen into the deep end of her family’s swimming pool and would have drowned if her father hadn’t been close by and promptly hauled her to safety. Even so, she’d never forgotten the soundless, suffocating sensation that had briefly possessed her. Twenty-two years later, it gripped her again.

Floundering to find a lifeline in a world suddenly turned upside-down, she blurted, “But it won’t last. These things never do. You’ll get over it, over her…and I’ll get past the hurt…I will, I promise! We’ll pick up the pieces and go on, because that’s what married people do. They honor their wedding vows.”

He reached across the table, took both her hands firmly in his and gave them a shake. “Listen to me, Diana! This isn’t a passing affair. Rita and I are deeply in love. I am committed to a future with her.”

“No…!” She struggled to pull herself free of his hold. To shut out his words, and the cool, clinical dispassion with which he uttered them. As if he were wielding a scalpel on a comatose patient. As if she were incapable of feeling the pain. “You’re in love with me. You’ve said so, a hundred times.”

“Not for a very long time now. Not for months.”

“Well, I don’t care!” Distress and shock sent her own voice rising half an octave. “I won’t let you throw us away. I deserve better than that…we both do.”

He released her hands and sat very erect in his chair, as though to put as much physical distance between himself and her as possible in that intimate little corner of that intimate little restaurant. “Stop making a spectacle of yourself!” he hissed.

She clamped her mouth shut, but inside, every part of her was weeping—every part but her eyes. For some reason, they remained dry and hot and disbelieving. Still clutching at straws, she said, “Then what’s all this about? The champagne and roses and bracelet?”

“It’s your birthday.” He shrugged. “I’m not completely without affection for you, you know. I wanted to give you something memorable to mark the occasion.”

“And you thought telling me our marriage is over wouldn’t do it?”

He regarded her pityingly. “Oh, come now, Diana! I can’t believe you’re entirely surprised. You must have realized things between us weren’t the same anymore—that something vital had died.”

“No. I sensed a change in you, but I put it down to stress at the hospital.” She looked at the roses, at the gleaming sterling cutlery, at the platinum wedding ring on her left hand, and finally, at the man she’d married almost eight years ago. Then she laughed again, a thin, hollow, scraping sound that clawed its way up from the depths of her lungs. “But then, they do say the wife’s always the last to know, don’t they?”

“I can see that you’re shocked, but in time you’ll realize that it’s better we make a clean break and end matters now, rather than wait until things deteriorate to the point that we can’t speak a civil word to one another.”

“Better for you, perhaps.”

“And for you, too, in the long run.” He drained his glass, and pushed back his chair. Again like the perfect gentleman he prided himself on being, he bent and kissed her cheek. “Enjoy your lobster, my dear. Dinner’s on me.”

Then he made his way across the restaurant to where the pregnant woman waited. She rose to meet him. He put his arms around her, gave her a lingering kiss full on the mouth, then ushered her out of the restaurant as carefully, as tenderly, as if she were made of blown glass.

Pregnant…

The woman he was leaving her for was having the baby he’d refused to give his wife. And at that, something really did die in Diana…

CHAPTER ONE

4:00 p.m., June 12

AIX-EN-PROVENCE was stirring from its afternoon siesta as Diana eased her ancient rental car onto the road that would take her to Bellevue-sur-Lac, fifty-three miles northeast of the town limits.

Aix-en-Provence: a beautiful city, rich in history, culture and art. The city where, twenty-nine years ago, a seventeen-year-old French girl allowed an American couple in their late forties to adopt her out-of-wedlock baby.

The city where Diana had been born…

Bellevue-sur-Lac, the village where she’d been conceived…

The names, the facts, the minute clues, were etched so clearly in her memory, she could recite verbatim the letter she’d found in her father’s study, after her parents’ death, two years previously.

Admittedly her husband’s desertion had pushed them to the back of her mind for a while. A thousand times or more in the weeks after he left, she questioned where she’d gone wrong. Asked herself what she could have done differently that might have saved her marriage. But in the end, she’d been forced to accept that there was nothing. Harvey had fallen out of love with her, made up his mind he wanted to spend the rest of his life with someone else and that was that. She was alone, and he was not.

Seven months, though, was long enough to mourn a man who’d proven himself unworthy of her tears, and just over a week ago, she’d awoken to the realization that, little by little, her despair had melted away. Without her quite knowing when or how, her resentment toward Harvey had lost its bitter edge and sunk into indifference. If anything, she was grateful to him because, in deserting her, he’d also set her free. For the first time in her life, she could do exactly as she pleased without worrying that she might upset the people closest to her.

Which was why she now found herself in the south of France, heading toward a tiny lakeside village surrounded by lavender fields, olive groves and vineyards; and where, if the gods were on her side, she’d rediscover herself, now that she’d been legally stripped of her title and status as Dr Harvey Reeves’s dutiful but dull little wife.

“You can’t possibly be serious!” Carol Brenner, one of the few friends who’d stuck by her after she found herself single again, had exclaimed, when she learned what Diana had planned.

“Why ever not?” she’d asked calmly.

“Because it’s crazy, that’s why! For Pete’s sake, haven’t you gone through enough in the last seven months, without adding this?”

Shrugging, she said, “Well, they do say that what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.”

Carol shoved aside her latte and leaned across the coffee shop’s marble tabletop, the better to make her point. “I’m not convinced you are stronger. Quite frankly, Diana, you look like hell.”

“Oh, please!” she said ruefully. “Stop beating about the bush and feel free to tell me what you really think!”

“I’m sorry, but it’s true. You’ve lost so much weight, you could pass for a refugee from some third world country.”

Diana could hardly argue with that. Once she no longer had to prepare elegant dinners for her husband, she sometimes hadn’t bothered preparing any dinner at all. As for breakfast, she’d skipped it more often than not, too. Which left lunch—a sandwich if she had any appetite, otherwise a piece of fruit and a slice of cheese.

“You’ve been like a ship without an anchor, the way you’ve drifted through this last winter and spring, not seeming to know what day it was, half the time,” Carol went on, really hitting her stride. “And now, out of the blue, you announce you’re off to France on some wild-goose chase to find your biological mother?” She rolled her eyes. “You’ll be telling me next, you’re joining a nunnery!”

“It’s not out of the blue,” Diana said softly. “This is something I’ve wanted to do for years.”

“Diana, the point I’m trying to make is that I’m one of your closest friends, and I didn’t even know you were adopted.”

“Because it’s always been a closely guarded secret. I didn’t know myself until I was eight, and even then, I found out by accident.”

Obviously taken aback, Carol said, “Good God, who decided it should be kept secret?”

“My mother.”

“Why? Adopting a child’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“It wasn’t shame, it was fear. Apparently mine was a private adoption, and although my father made sure the legalities were looked after, the arrangement wasn’t exactly…conventional. Once my mother realized the secret was a secret no longer, things at our house were never the same again.”

“How so?” Carol asked.

Diana had rested her elbow on the table and cupped her chin in her hand, the events of that long-ago day sufficiently softened by time that she’d been able to relate them quite composedly….

She’d raced home from school and gone straight to the sunroom where her mother always took afternoon tea. “Mommy,” she burst out breathlessly, “what does ‘adopted’ mean?”

Even before then, she’d understood that her mother was, as their cleaning lady once put it, “fragile and given to spells,” and she realized at once that in mentioning the word “adopted,” she’d inadvertently trodden on forbidden territory. The Lapsang Souchong tea her mother favored slopped over the rim of its translucent porcelain cup and into the saucer. “Good heavens, Diana,” she said faintly, pressing a pale hand to her heart, “whatever makes you ask such a question?”

Horrified at having brought on one of the dreaded “spells,” Diana rushed to explain. “Well, today Merrilee Hampton was mad at me because I won the spelling bee, so at recess she threw my snack on the ground, so I told her she was stupid, so then she told me I’m adopted. And I told her it’s not true, and she said it is, because her mother said so, and her mother doesn’t tell lies.”

“Dear God, someone should staple that woman’s mouth shut!”