‘Not that again,’ she said wearily. ‘Not even you are that stupid. Sure…sure I had a string of lovers.’
The expression she saw cross his face suggested this wasn’t the response he had been expecting. ‘I had proof.’
‘That I would really like to see.’
‘You’ve got nerve, I’ll give you that,’ he gritted back. ‘But you were not as careful as you thought.’
‘Come on, Angolos, I’m not listening unless you tell me the real reason you rejected Nicky.’
His beautiful mouth twisted as their eyes touched. ‘I was prepared…I actually thought we might be able to get beyond your infidelity,’ he recalled. ‘I blamed myself for leaving you alone.’
‘You were going to forgive me!’ This got even more implausible. ‘If you seriously thought there was another man you would have torn him limb from limb,’ she contended.
He gave an odd, twisted smile. ‘You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?’
‘So what’s the real reason?’
Above the sound of the waves crashing softly on the sand she heard his white teeth grating. ‘Be honest,’ she recom mended.
‘Me, honest?’
‘A baby didn’t fit in with your life then, did it?’ she claimed, ignoring his raw interjection. ‘I don’t know what’s changed, but now you’ve suddenly decided—’
He pressed his hand to his mouth and shook his dark head. ‘Theos!’ he thundered, eyeing her with frustrated incredulity. His chest rose and fell in tune to his rapid, uneven respirations. ‘I knew I couldn’t have children.’
CHAPTER NINE
THE only sound to disturb the silence that followed Angolos’s driven declaration was the cracking noise as he clenched his long fingers and the audible hiss of his laboured breathing.
‘Not have children…?’ Georgie shot a sideways look at his taut profile. ‘You’re not making any sense.’
‘I was told that I couldn’t have children.’
She just stared at him, hearing, but not able to digest what he had said.
‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’
She pressed her fingers to her temples and shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Evidently I was wrong.’
‘But it’s silly—you couldn’t…’ Angolos was so rampantly male he couldn’t be…She shook her head positively and without thinking her eyes dropped down his body. ‘You’re—’
‘I am functional,’ he cut in. ‘You’re confusing sterility with impotence.’
Flushing to the roots of her hair at his sardonic intervention, she jerked her eyes back to his face.
‘I just didn’t think I was capable of fathering a child.’
‘But we’d only been together a few weeks. You couldn’t know that unless—’ Unless he had already tried to have a baby. With someone else. With Sonia. The colour suddenly leached dramatically from her lightly tanned skin. ‘Oh,’ she said swallowing. ‘I see.’
So now she had the answer to the question that had puzzled many people at the time. Namely, why should a couple so supremely well suited as Sonia and Angolos get divorced? This new revelation provided the answer, and Georgie could see how it could have happened. They had desperately wanted a family, and Sonia hadn’t got pregnant.
It wouldn’t be the first time the strain of that sort of situation had split up a marriage.
She could see it all: Sonia had thrown herself into a mad social whirl, and Angolos had buried himself in his work. They wouldn’t have talked, of course…as she knew to her cost Angolos didn’t talk.
You had only to witness Sonia and Angolos together to see that they still had feelings for one another. And Georgie had witnessed them together. She hadn’t had much choice when the woman had been their house guest barely weeks after they had married.
‘So when I said I was pregnant…some men might have thought it was a miracle, but you thought that I…’
Some men hadn’t had a letter written by their wife’s lover in their possession. Even after all these years the humiliation of that discovery was still with him. ‘I suppose some men might, but that is all in the past, now I know…’
‘And now you know you can have children.’
Right result, wrong mother.
Was that what he had thought when he realised…? Had he wondered why this couldn’t have happened while he was with Sonia?
Georgie pressed the heel of one hand to the centre of her chest where misery had lodged like a solid object behind her breastbone. Would the pain ever go away…?
‘Yes, now I know I have a child. I have Nicky, and I want to be his father.’
A furrow appeared in her smooth brow. ‘No.’ She wouldn’t deprive Nicky of his father, but how could she survive with Angolos as part of her life? If she had ever kidded herself she weren’t as madly in love with him as ever, she recognised now that this convenient self-delusion was no longer an option.
He slid her a burning look of impatience. ‘What do you mean, no?’
‘I mean…I don’t know what I mean.’ She shook her head. ‘No, this can’t be right. We talked about having a family…we planned…’ She stopped and realised that they hadn’t talked; she had talked. Her stomach lurched sickly as the implications of his confession hit her. ‘You knew about this when we got married?’
‘I did.’
‘And you didn’t tell me—you let me think…’
Angolos watched the colour drain from her face; the sprinkling of freckles across her nose stood out against the marble pallor. ‘You can’t love them,’ she had always said when he had told her he loved those freckles.
‘You let me talk about babies when all along…’ A shudder ran through her body as she turned her tearful, accusing eyes to his face. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? You let me carry on thinking…’
‘It was an omission, and I was wrong.’ A man with an ounce of integrity would have given her the opportunity to make an informed decision.
In his own defence he had fully planned to tell her before the wedding. He had lost count of the number of times that he had started to tell her only to pull back at the last moment.
He had rationalised it, of course, told himself that she was marrying him…After all, her inability to give him a child wouldn’t have altered his feelings.
Feelings
