The Baby Bond

‘You still haven’t told me exactly how it happened,’ she said.

For the first time since his arrival Rory looked uncomfortable. He had rehearsed what he was going to say over and over again in the car—aloud and in his head—and yet now his pat words of explanation seemed curiously inadequate, especially when he was confronted by the sight of Angel’s over-bright eyes.

He decided to try a different approach from the one he had planned. ‘Tell me about the last time you saw Chad,’ he instructed softly.

Angel blinked. ‘But you know all about that! When he just completely disappeared like that, I came to see you.’ Thinking that if anyone would be able to trace Chad, then it would be his dynamic older brother.

‘But at the time you explained very little, Angel—other than the fact that he had gone,’ he reminded her quietly.

Because she had felt raw and humiliated, with her confidence in tatters. Wondering just what sort of person she must be if her husband of less than a year could go off and leave her like that, without a word to anyone.

‘So tell me again, Angel,’ he insisted, in his deep, compelling voice. ‘Only this time tell me everything.’

And, despite any reservations she might have had about discussing something as painful as Chad’s departure, Angel was no exception to anyone else in responding to the force of Rory’s personality. With those blue eyes boring into her like that it was impossible not to answer him. She focused her mind to concentrate on what he had asked her, though, to be perfectly honest, it was a relief to have something else to focus her thoughts on other than the wrenching realisation that Chad was dead.

‘The last time I saw Chad he was leaving for work,’ she began slowly, as she cast her mind back to that morning more than eighteen months earlier. ‘I remember that it was a glorious, golden June day. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, and I was going to meet him for a drink after work that night.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing.’ Angel shrugged. ‘That was it.’

Rory’s face became shuttered. ‘Did he show any signs that something could be wrong?’

She frowned at him in confusion. ‘Wrong?’ she echoed. ‘What could be wrong?’

‘With the relationship,’ he elaborated. ‘Anything which might have indicated to you that he was planning to disappear from your life without a word?’

Angel bit her lip. With the benefit of hindsight it was easy to see that there had been plenty wrong with their relationship—but she had been so young. So green. So determined to prove wrong everyone who had prophesied disaster that she had ignored the danger signs looming large on the horizon. But she couldn’t possibly tell Rory about those, now, could she? She couldn’t really start explaining that within mere months of her marriage to his brother their sex life had not merely died down but had petered out all together.

‘We weren’t communicating that well,’ she hedged, which she supposed was one way of saying it.

‘But you hadn’t argued?’

Angel shook her head. ‘No. That was the oddest thing. We hadn’t. Chad just seemed very distracted during those last few months. That’s all.’ She fixed him with an unblinking green stare that dazzled him with its emerald blaze. ‘But that’s all irrelevant, surely? Isn’t it time that you told me exactly what you’ve found out, Rory?’

There was a fractional pause. ‘Do you want me to break it to you gently?’

She cocked her head to one side and looked at him perceptively. ‘Is that possible?’

‘Not really, no,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘He had another woman, you see.’

His words confirmed her unspoken fears. Yes. Of course he had. Some part of her had known that all along. The part that wasn’t affected by her relative youth and lack of experience. The part that was passed on down through the generations and was known as a woman’s instinct. The part that had registered his complete lack of desire for her whenever he had looked at her. Angel swallowed.

‘He had another woman,’ Rory repeated baldly, because her total lack of reaction to his controversial statement made him imagine that she had not heard him the first time.

‘Yes,’ said Angel, and let out a long, low sigh. ‘That figures.’

‘Do you want me to continue?’ he questioned.

She drew her chin up proudly. ‘I hope to God that I’m not the kind of person who runs away from the truth, Rory. So, yes, please continue. Tell me about this woman. Does she have a name?’

Some indefinable emotion briefly escaped from the shuttered confines of his face, hardening his mouth into a forbidding line. ‘Jo-Anne. Jo-Anne Price.’

Angel wrinkled up her nose as the name struck a familiar chord in her memory. ‘And she’s Australian. Am I right? She worked as a temporary at the advertising agency.’

‘That’s right.’

‘She had just finished uni,’ Angel remembered, racking her brain. ‘And she had come to get work experience in England.’ Angel pushed a stray strand of hair off her forehead, finding that actually she seemed to know an awful lot about a woman she had only met once or twice. So how was that? Maybe Chad had spoken about her lots, and she simply hadn’t noticed. ‘Hadn’t she?’

Rory nodded uncomfortably. ‘Yes, that’s right. She had. Chad met her in a pub near the office, found her a temporary job at the agency, and, bingo, suddenly he was in love.’

Angel drew in a deep breath, stunned by his cruel candour, despite all her protestations that she could take whatever he had to tell her. ‘And I was his bride of less than a year,’ she reminded him bitterly. ‘So was he not still in love with me?’

There was a small, uncomfortable pause. ‘I think that Chad thought he loved you, Angel, and that’s why he married you.’ Rory’s face hardened again with the pain of the truth. ‘Only then Jo-Anne appeared on the scene, and…’

‘And?’ prompted Angel acidly, glaring at him, as though it was his fault.

Rory held his palms out in a gesture of apology, realising that he owed her the truth, however painful. ‘He wasn’t quite sure what had hit him. This wasn’t just a fling, you see. It was that once-in-a-lifetime thing—if you believe it exists. I don’t, personally.’ His face darkened. ‘But Chad certainly did.’

Angel winced.

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said—’

‘Oh, yes, you should!’ she declared fiercely. ‘I told you that I wanted the truth, and that’s exactly what you’re giving me. And, yes, you are absolutely correct in your assessment, Rory. Chad thought he was in love with me—that’s why he married me. And then…’ But she shook her head, unwilling to pursue it further. What on earth was the point of dissecting her relationship with her husband? Especially now. And especially not with his big brother.

But Rory did not prompt her, or press her to continue. Instead he sat back in his seat and raised the glass of brandy to his mouth to take his first sip, then he put the glass carefully back down on the table.

‘Chad couldn’t face telling you what had happened. Or me, for that matter. He and Jo-Anne just took off for Australia. They wanted to get away from anyone who might cast censure on their perfect relationship. A form of geographical escape, I guess.’

‘Well, not quite—since I presume that she had family living in Australia? And most parents wouldn’t really want their daughter involved with a married man, surely?’

‘No, you’re right. They wouldn’t.’ Rory frowned. ‘But that wasn’t going to be a problem. Not in Jo-Anne’s case, anyway. All her family were dead, you see. She was completely on her own, and I think that fact triggered a protective quality in Chad which he hadn’t realised existed.’ He gave a deep sigh, as though his next words were the hardest of all to say. ‘And it meant, of course, that they had something very big in common. They were both orphans—united against the world.’

Angel’s green eyes narrowed as something in his voice alerted a sixth sense in her. A sense of danger. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there, Rory? Something that you aren’t telling me?’

He gave her the kind of smile which told her she shouldn’t worry her little head about anything, but Angel had grown immune to men with dazzling smiles. Immune to most men generally. Broken marriages tended to have that effect on women.

‘Why don’t we take this one step at a time?’ he suggested silkily, but his eyes had taken on a watchful gleam.

‘Because you’re hiding something from me!’

He expelled the breath he had been holding. Damn the woman, and damn her intuition, too! ‘Okay then, Angel,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll give it to you in a nutshell. Chad and Jo-Anne went to Australia together and travelled around and were, by all accounts, extremely happy together.’

‘And how did you find all this out?’ she demanded. ‘You can’t have just pieced it together since Chad’s death. You told me that the accident only took place…’ she frowned to remember ‘…twelve days ago.’

This had been one of the questions he had been dreading answering. ‘He wrote to me just before Christmas,’ he admitted quietly.

‘He did what?’ Angel rose to her feet, her face disbelieving. ‘Then why the hell didn’t you tell me then?’