Marriage And Miracles

‘And you promised to help me any way you could.’

‘God knows why,’ Celeste muttered.

Gemma reached out and gently touched her mother on the wrist. ‘Because you love me?’ she said softly.

Celeste was stunned by the rush of maternal love that flooded her heart, tears pricking her eyes. Blinking madly, she nodded acknowledgement of this, squeezing her daughter’s hands before finding her voice. ‘I suppose I’ll just have to take your word for it that Nathan is worth fighting for and not the coldest, most cynical bastard I’ve ever laid eyes on.’

‘Lenore thinks he’s worth it,’ Gemma argued with a quiet intensity. ‘And she was married to him for twelve years.’

Celeste sighed. ‘Whatever his faults, he certainly knows how to inspire loyalty in his wives.’

‘He’s only had two!’ Gemma protested.

‘So far. If he divorces you as he says he’s going to, that leaves the field clear for number three.’

‘Nathan and I won’t be getting a divorce,’ Gemma said with a stubborn set of her mouth. ‘And there won’t be any number three!’

‘Oh? And how do you intend to change his mind?’

‘By whatever means are at my disposal.’

‘Mmm...’ Celeste gave Gemma the once-over, a sardonic gleam coming into her eyes as they carefully assessed her appearance. ‘I was at a loss earlier on to understand what you hoped to achieve coming here tonight. Now I see it’s not your attending the play you had in mind but the party afterwards.’

Gemma felt a guilty heat seep into her cheeks but she refused to succumb to embarrassment over her appearance, or shame over her plan. Nathan was her husband, after all! Besides, she wasn’t nearly as provocatively dressed as she’d seen Celeste on occasions. OK, so her red crèpe dress was very form-fitting, the wide beaded belt emphasising her hour-glass figure. And yes, the deep V neckline showed clearly that she wasn’t wearing a bra. But that was hardly a crime these days, was it?

‘I only want to talk to him,’ she lied outrageously. ‘I can’t achieve anything unless I talk to him, can I?’

‘People who play with fire often get burnt,’ Celeste warned softly. ‘I should know. I’ve been there, done that.’

‘And you ended up with the man you love, I noticed,’ Gemma said. ‘I aim to do the same.’

Celeste blinked in surprise at the hard edge in her daughter’s voice, till it came to her that Gemma was a chip off the old block. Both her parents were pigheaded people who didn’t know when to quit. She almost felt sorry for Nathan.

‘Ah...here’s Byron now.’ Celeste smiled and linked arms with him. ‘We thought you’d got lost, darling. How are things backstage?’

‘Everyone’s a bundle of nerves. Except Nathan, of course. That man had nerves of steel.’

And a heart of steel, Celeste thought, but declined to say so.

‘What did he say about me?’ Gemma asked nervously.

‘Not a word.’

Gemma looked and felt crestfallen. ‘Does...does he know I’m here, and that I’m going to the party afterwards?’

‘I did mention it in passing, but he didn’t seem to care one way or the other. To be honest, I’m a little shocked at Nathan’s stand over this divorce business. I’ve never known him to be so inflexible, or so unfeeling. It’s as though he’s retreated behind some hard shell that nothing can penetrate.’

‘That’s just a faç ade he hides behind,’ Gemma stated, and did her best to believe it. Because if she didn’t, what then?

‘It’s time we went inside, isn’t it?’ Celeste jumped in, deciding a change of subject was called for when she saw a stricken look momentarily flash across her daughter’s eyes. God, if that bastard hurt her again, she was going to kill him with her bare hands, something she was capable of. All those years of martial arts training had to be good for something!

‘The bell hasn’t gone,’ Byron replied. ‘But yes,’ he added quickly on seeing Celeste’s withering glance, ‘I think we might go in.’

A photographer snapped the three of them as they walked into the theatre, Celeste and Byron flashing him a quick smile. Gemma’s face, however, reflected an inner misery that she could not hide. Her faith in her plan was already crumbling, as was her faith in Nathan’s love for her.

Their seats were in the middle of the fifth row from the front, the best seats in the house. As the play’s producer, Byron had access to this whole row if he wanted. He’d offered seats to both Jade and Ava, but they had declined to come in protest over Nathan’s unreasonable behaviour towards Gemma. Both women had declared they would never speak to him again till he came to his senses.

Gemma sat down and began flicking through the programme booklet Byron had bought her on arrival, anything to still the butterflies in her stomach. The sight of her husband’s face staring out at her jolted her for a second.

The black and white photograph brought a hardness to his looks that she had never noticed before. He’d always looked like a golden god to her, with hair the colour of wheat, skin like bronze satin, a classically handsome face, a highly sensual mouth and the most beautiful grey eyes. Now, those eyes stared out at her with all the warmth of a winter’s dawn, a slight arching of his left eyebrow adding a cynical edge to their cold expression, as did the twisted curve of his half-smile.

Oh, how she’d always hated it when he smiled at her like that, as though he knew things about the world that she was not yet privy to. Nathan had always declared the world a rotten place full of rotten people. He was cynical through and through about the human race, and the female sex in particular, probably because of the wicked, even depraved women who had played vital roles during his growing-up years.

First there had been his mother, a spoiled rich bitch who had left home as a teenager to live a life of debauchery, drugs and total self-indulgence. Nathan had been illegitimate, his father unknown to him and possibly to his mother, who had spent her entire life going from lover to lover, orgy to orgy, trip to trip.

Gemma had heard about Nathan’s mother from several sources—though not Nathan himself. He never talked about the past. Apparently, she had put him in his first boarding-school at the age of eight, dragging him out whenever her latest lover left her or vice versa, then putting him back in school once a new man came on the scene. After she died of a drug overdose when Nathan was sixteen, he had become a street kid up at King’s Cross. When Byron had come across him several months later Nathan had actually been living with some woman old enough to be his mother, and there was nothing platonic about the relationship. Byron had befriended the boy and, later, adopted him.

Gemma shuddered to think what might have happened to Nathan if Byron hadn’t come along.

Not that Nathan’s life as Byron’s adopted son had ever been without its problems, especially when it came to the opposite sex. His relationship with the female members of his adoptive family seemed dicey from what she’d gathered, and his shotgun marriage to Lenore had not been a raving success, even if his plays were. By the time Gemma had met Nathan early this year when he was out at Lightning Ridge on an opal-buying trip, he’d become a rather world-weary thirty-five, divorced from Lenore and about to resign from Whitmore Opals to write full-time.

From the first moment they met, Gemma had been totally smitten by his mature handsomeness, his city glamour and smooth sophistication, while Nathan had seemed equally bowled over by her youthful beauty, countrified innocence and obvious inexperience with men. Gemma had initially been very wary of having anything to do with a divorced man so many years older than herself, but within a few short weeks of her coming to Sydney Nathan had seduced and married her.

Gemma had gone off on her honeymoon with many warnings about Nathan ringing in her ears. Not too many people had been confident that their marriage would work out, their view being that Nathan had only married her for the sex.

They’d been right and they’d been wrong. Sex had played a big part in their relationship so far. This did not bother Gemma as much as Nathan’s jealous possessiveness, plus his tendency to treat her as a naïve child. His extreme cynicism was another bone of contention between them, along with his obvious inability to communicate with women on any other level than the physical.

But none of that meant he didn’t really love her, Gemma kept believing staunchly. He just didn’t know how to express that love any other way, or how to trust in it. Gemma believed that time would bring about the real intimacy and bonding she was looking for with Nathan. Time and love. She had no intention of giving up on her marriage at the first hurdle.

OK, so it was a pretty stiff hurdle. Not many wives would forgive their husbands falsely accusing them of unfaithfulness and then virtually raping them. But Gemma had, after all, been the first to point the finger in the matter of unfaithfulness. As for the rape...she understood why and how that had happened, and with the understanding had come forgiveness.

Nathan had gone crazy when he’d found her in Damian Campbell’s bedroom. Fury had turned to a violent passion which had spun out of control before he could stop himself. Maybe if she had struggled instead of lying there in stunned horror, Nathan might have stopped. As it was, his remorse afterwards had been a palpable thing, and while Gemma had been shocked and appalled at first, in the end she’d been able to put the unfortunate incident into perspective.

Which was just as well, since it was possible Nathan had started a baby in her that afternoon. He’d obviously forgotten that he’d asked her to throw away her pills the previous weekend. But throw them away she had.

Most women might have revolted at a rape making them pregnant. But once Gemma had found it in her heart to forgive Nathan, she’d been consumed by an amazing feeling of rightness. It had also given her a way of getting her husband back. Hadn’t he married Lenore—a woman he hadn’t loved—on the strength of a pregnancy? Surely he’d come back to a wife he already loved if she was having his baby.

Which was why she was going to the post-première party tonight, hoping for an opportunity to seduce her husband, thereby increasing her chance of pregnancy, and at the same time freeing Nathan from having to accept that any baby she might have already conceived had been started on that awful afternoon. Gemma might have forgiven Nathan for the rape but it was clear to her that he hadn’t forgiven himself. She was sure this was one of the reasons he was insisting on a divorce, because of his own self-disgust and guilt.

‘It’s not a very good photo of Lenore, is it?’ Celeste suddenly commented, looking over Gemma’s shoulder at the page across from the one she’d been staring blankly at.

Gemma refocused on the booklet in her lap and examined the photograph of the woman who was not only Nathan’s ex-wife but also the leading lady in his new play.

Celeste was quite right. It was not a particularly flattering photo, though once again the black and white print did not do justice to Lenore’s vivid beauty. In colour and in the flesh, Lenore was strikingly lovely, her bright red hair and flashing green eyes projecting a ‘look-at-me’ quality which no doubt served her well as a stage actress. Gemma imagined that from the moment Lenore walked on stage, all eyes would turn to her as though magnetised.

Though going on thirty-five, Lenore looked much younger, her figure still as spectacular as her face, its model-slim tallness and elegance adding to her already captivating package. Gemma had always felt gauche by comparison. No matter how many people complimented her pretty face and eyes, no matter how many men ogled her voluptuous curves, Gemma only had to look at Nathan’s wife to feel inadequate and inferior.

Lenore’s stunning sex appeal was the main reason Gemma had been so quick to believe what she had believed last Sunday, which was that Nathan had spent the weekend with his ex-wife while she’d been out at Lightning Ridge trying to find some clues to her till-then missing mother’s identity. When Gemma had come back unexpectedly early and found Lenore in their flat with Nathan, she’d been right and ready to misunderstand tragically the seemingly shocking conversation she had overheard.