The Unexpected Baby

The time would never be right for what she had to tell him, and keeping the truth from him would only make him think more badly of her.

But the way he was looking at her, the way his eyes slid over every last one of her five-foot-six slender inches and endless, elegant, lightly tanned legs, paralysed her with physical awareness. So, despising her weakness but unable to do anything about it, she took his former remark and clung to it as to a reprieve. Just a few more hours. Surely she could give herself that?

Striving for lightness as she poured coffee for them both, she told him, ‘Stop fishing for compliments—there’s nothing cheapskate about you! I practically forced you to agree to spend our honeymoon here.’

She was justifiably proud of her home. She’d bought the former Andalucian farmhouse with part of the proceeds from the sale of the film rights of her first runaway bestseller. And she and Jed had already decided to keep it as a holiday home, to come here as often as they could—a welcome respite from the pressure of his position at the head of the family-owned business. Based in London, Amsterdam, New York and Rome, it had a two-hundred-year-old tradition of supplying sumptuous gems and exquisitely wrought precious metals to the seriously wealthy.

Sam had considered the business arcane, refused to have anything to do with it, making his mark in the highly competitive world of photo-journalism.

She pushed his name roughly out of her head, but, almost as if he’d known what she’d done, Jed pushed it straight back in again. ‘I can understand why Sam came here so often between assignments. Life travels at a different pace, the views are endless and the sun is generous. He told me once that it was the only place he could find peace.’

He refilled his coffee cup and tipped the pot towards her, one dark brow lifting. Elena shook her head. She had barely taken a sip. Listening to him talking of his brother was screwing up her nerves and shredding them. Why should he decide to talk about him now? She couldn’t meet his eyes.

Jed replaced the pot, selected an orange from the blue earthenware bowl and began to strip away the peel, his voice strangely clipped as he remarked, ‘Over the last couple of years, particularly, he was always getting sent to the world’s worst trouble spots. Though I think he thrived on the edge of danger, he must have been grateful for the relaxation he knew he could find here. With you. He seemed to know so much about you; you must have been extremely close.’

Elena’s throat closed up. He had rarely mentioned Sam’s name since the day of his funeral, but now the very real grief showed through. The brothers had had very little in common but they had loved each other. And now she could detect something else. Something wildly out of character. A skein of jealousy, envy, even?

‘He was a good friend,’ she responded, hating the breathless catch in her voice. She watched the long, hard fingers strip the peel from the fruit. Suddenly there seemed something ruthless about the movements. She wondered if she knew him as thoroughly as she’d thought she did.

She shivered, and heard him say, ‘In a way, I think he deplored the fact that I did my duty, as he called it—knuckled down and joined the family business and took the responsibility of heading it after Father died—despised me a little, even.’

‘No!’ She couldn’t let him think that. ‘He admired you, and respected you—maybe grudgingly—for doing your duty, and doing it so well. He once told me that your business brain scared the you-know-what out of him, and that he preferred to go off and do his own thing rather than live in your shadow, a pale second-best.’

Jed gave her a long, searching look, as if he was turning her words over in his mind, weighing the truth of them, before at last admitting, ‘I didn’t know that. Maybe I wouldn’t have envied him his freedom to do as he pleased and to hell with everyone else if I had.’ Regret tightened his mouth. ‘I guess there’s a whole raft of things I didn’t know about my kid brother. Except, of course, how fond he was of you. When he came home on those flying visits of his the conversation always came round to you. He gave me one of your books and told me to be impressed. I was; I didn’t need telling,’ he complimented coolly. ‘You handle horror with a sophistication, intelligence and subtlety that makes a refreshing change from the usual crude blood and gore of the genre.’

‘Thank you.’ I think, she added to herself. There was something in his voice she had never heard before. Something dark and condemning. She left her seat swiftly and went to lean against the wall, looking at the endless view which always soothed her spirits but signally failed to do anything of the sort this morning.

Perched on a limestone ridge, high above a tiny white-walled village, her home benefited from the pine-scented salt breezes crossing western Andalucia from the Atlantic, moderating the heat of the burning May sun.

Elena closed her eyes and tried to close her mind to everything but the cooling sensation of the light wind on her face. Just a few moments of respite before she had to face the truth, brace herself to break the news to Jed before the day ended. Could she use her gift for words to make him understand just why she had acted as she had? It didn’t seem possible, she thought defeatedly.

Since the ending of her first disastrous marriage, she had refused to let anything defeat her, get in the way of her fight for successful independence. But this—this was something else...

‘You haven’t eaten a thing.’ He’d come to stand behind her, not touching but very close. The heat of his body scorched her, yet she shivered. ‘Not hungry? Suddenly lost your appetite?’

His cool tones terrified her. He hadn’t already guessed, had he? No, of course he hadn’t. How could he? Despising herself for the way she seemed to be heading—spoiling the morning and the few hours’ respite she’d promised herself—she turned and forced a smile to the mouth she had always considered far too wide.

‘No, just lazy, I guess.’ She walked back to the table. She would have to force something into a stomach that felt as if it would reject anything she tried to feed it. ‘I thought we might go down to the coast today.’ She plucked a few grapes from the dewy bunch nestling in the fruit bowl. ‘Cadiz, perhaps, or Vejer de la Frontera if you fancy somewhere quieter. We haven’t set foot outside the property all week.’

Edgy, acutely aware of the way he was watching her, she popped a grape into her mouth and felt her throat close up as he answered, ‘So far, we haven’t felt the need to, remember?’

She bit on the grape and forced it down, because she could hardly spit the wretched thing out. His words had been idly spoken, yet the underlining accusation came through loud and clear. They hadn’t needed to leave the property; they’d had all they needed in each other. Simple expeditions through the gardens and into the pine woods, eating on the patio or in the rose-covered arbour, their lives attuned to the wonderful solitude, the rhythm of their lovemaking, the deep rapture of simply being. Together.

‘Of course I do.’ Her voice was thick, everything inside her panicking. The incredible feeling of closeness, of being made for each other, was slipping away. She knew it would happen once she’d broken her news, but the frightening distance between them had no right to be happening now. It hadn’t been there before he’d begun to talk of Sam. ‘Pilar, who helps me around the house, was instructed to keep well clear after stocking the fridge on the morning we arrived’ She spoke as lightly as she could, desperate to recreate all that wonderful closeness for just a little longer. ‘We’re starting to run low on provisions, so I thought we could combine shopping with sightseeing, that’s all.’

‘Is it?’ He prowled back to the chair opposite hers and sat, his hands clenched in the side pockets of his trousers. Steel-grey eyes searched her face. His voice was low, sombre, as he imparted, ‘Sam and I had our differences, but he was my brother and I loved him. His death rocked me. Until coming here, to where he was happy, where he found peace and comfort, I haven’t been able to open up about what I feel. Yet it seems to me that you don’t want to talk about him Get edgy when I mention his name. Why is that?’ he wanted to know.

What to say? She couldn’t deny it. She picked up her cup of now cold coffee and swallowed half of it down a throat that was aching with tension, and Jed asked tightly, ‘Were you lovers? Is that the reason?’

Dread tore at her heart, knotted her stomach, perspiration dewing her forehead. For the first time since meeting him she deeply regretted his uncanny ability to see right into her soul. She twisted her hands in her lap and tried to smile.

‘Why do you ask? Don’t tell me you’re trying to pick a fight!’ Did her prevarication come out sounding as jokey as she’d intended? Or had she merely sounded as if she were being strangled?

‘I ask because my talking about him appears to disturb you. It’s something I never considered before, but from what I can gather Sam spent a fair amount of time here. He was a handsome son-of-a-gun. Add the spice of a dangerous occupation—no mere shopkeeper , our Sam—and an extremely beautiful woman with a talent he greatly admired, and what do you get?’ He lifted one brow. ‘I repeat the question.’

Elena felt everything inside her start to shake. Although Jed was doing his best to look relaxed and in control, his hands were still making fists in his side pockets, and that tough, shadowed jaw was tight. There was more to this than she could fully understand.

The fact that she’d been married before hadn’t mattered to him. He hadn’t wanted her to talk about it, had assimilated her, ‘It was a dreadful mistake; he turned out to be completely rotten,’ then refused to let her go on with the complete explanation she’d intended to make.

He’d dismissed her marriage to Liam Forrester as a total irrelevance, and had never once asked if there had been any other man in her life in the intervening years. He had acted as though their future was the only thing that was important to him.

Yet couple her name with Sam’s and something suspiciously resembling jealousy and anger stared out of the eyes that had, thus far, only looked at her with love, warmth and hungry desire.

Because Sam had been his brother? Was there a twist of bitterness on that sensual mouth now? The sardonic stress he’d laid on the word ‘shopkeeper’ told her that Sam must have tossed that taunt at him at some time, told her that it still rankled.

And had Sam been handsome? Looking back, she supposed so. Not as tall as his brother, nothing like as powerfully built. Smooth, nut-brown hair and light blue eyes, with elegant features. He would have been a wow as an old-style matinee idol. Handsome he might have been, but he couldn’t hold a candle to his older brother... Sam had had none of Jed’s dangerous masculinity, none of that forbidding sexual excitement.

‘Elena. I need to know.’ There was a raw edge to his voice she had never heard before, and a few short hours ago she could have reassured him. But now, knowing what she knew, the task seemed impossible. Nevertheless, she had to try.

‘I first met your brother at a party I threw to celebrate my second movie deal.’ She concentrated on the facts because that was the only way she could handle this. ‘I’ve made a lot of friends in this area—ex-pats as well as Spaniards. Sam came along with Cynthia and Ed Parry. He was staying with them for a few days—apparently he’d known Ed since university.’

She saw the way his brows pulled together, the way his mouth went tight, and knew he was turning over every word she said, impatient because she wasn’t telling him what he wanted to know. But she had to do this her way, or not at all.

‘That had to be about a couple of years ago,’ she went on, needing him to see the whole thing from her perspective, needing to get it right. ‘And, as you know, he often visited this corner of Spain when he needed to unwind. Usually he stayed with the Parrys—’

‘But not always?’

‘No,’ she agreed, doing her best to stay calm, to ignore the churning, burning sensation in her tummy. ‘We got to know each other well, enjoyed each other’s company. He’d wander up here in the evenings and we’d talk, and sometimes, if it got very late, I’d offer him the use of one of the spare roms. You asked if we were lovers...’ She lifted slender shoulders in a light shrug. ‘He once admitted he had a low sex drive—something to do with using all his emotional and physical energy in his work. He knew the dangers of getting news out of the world’s worst trouble spots. He talked a lot about you, your mother, your home. He was proud of his family. He told me he’d never marry, that such a commitment wouldn’t be wise, or fair, because of the way he earned his living. But he said you would. Some woman to give you children because you wouldn’t want the business to die out with you. Said that women flung themselves at you, couldn’t keep away. But that you were picky. And discreet.’

Too late, she realised exactly what she was doing. And loathed herself for it. She had side-stepped his question and was trying to turn the situation round and become his accuser, letting the implication that he was a calculating user of women hang contentiously on the air between them, pushing them further apart.

And the bleak, most scornful look on his face told her he knew exactly what she was trying to do. And why.

Suddenly, the nausea that had been threatening all morning became an unwelcome, undeniable fact. She shot to her feet, one hand against her mouth, and lurched through the house to the bathroom.

Knowing he had followed her didn’t help a scrap, and when it was over she leant weakly against the tiled wall, the futile wish that she could turn the clock back three months uppermost in her mind.

‘Sweetheart—come here.’ He pulled her into his arms and she rested her throbbing head against the hard, soft-cotton-covered wall of his chest, wishing she could hold onto this moment for ever and knowing that she couldn’t.

The look of compassion, of caring, on his face didn’t help. It made things worse because she didn’t deserve it. And when he said softly, ‘What brought that on? Something you ate? I’ll drive you to the nearest surgery if the sickness carries on,’ she knew she had to tell him now.

Waking before him early this morning, she’d been rooting round at the back of the bathroom cabinet, looking for a fresh tube of toothpaste, when she’d found the pregnancy testing kit she’d bought.

Over the last few days she’d felt strangely nauseous on waking, had suffered one or two inexplicable dizzy spells. Common sense had told her that there were no repercussions from what she and Sam had done, but she’d run the test all the same, just to put her mind at rest.

And now she was going to have to face the consequences.

She pulled out of Jed’s arms, her face white as she told him, ‘I’m pregnant, Jed.’