Naomi had offered to help her to her bedroom and Raoul had looked in on her later, after the last of the mourners was gone. She had been fast asleep.
A sound made him turn his head. Framed in the doorway where he had just imagined his grandfather was Lara, her hair long and loose, glowing against the black fabric of the simple shift dress she still wore. She didn’t move as their eyes connected.
‘Are you feeling better?’ he asked, refusing to acknowledge the tightening in his chest as anything other than a natural protectiveness. She nodded and walked into the study, her bare feet silent on the wood. Her eyes looked enormous in her pale face and the milky pallor of her smooth skin emphasised the delicate purity of her cleanly drawn features.
‘I’m fine,’ she lied, struggling to throw off the lethargy that seemed to weigh down her limbs. ‘I slept.’
She had fallen into a deep sleep only to wake and find Naomi standing beside her bed, causing her to let out a startled squeal of alarm.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you, but Raoul was worried and he asked me to look in.’
If Raoul was so worried why couldn’t he look in himself? Even acknowledging the thought made her feel guilty; Raoul had buried his grandfather today and she was acting like an attention-seeking brat.
‘Thank you, I’m fine.’
To her dismay the other woman sat down. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she began hesitantly, ‘but I’ve noticed... Well, I’ve got the impression,’ she corrected, ‘that you feel you’re living in Lucy’s shadow.’
Lara was simply too astonished to respond.
‘You have nothing to live up to. Lucy was a bitch,’ she said simply.
Lara thought she had misheard. ‘Pardon? I thought—’
‘She was a bitch.’
‘I thought she was your friend?’
‘She didn’t have friends, just people she used. She made Raoul’s life a misery, and she knew all along that he loved someone else, but they cannot be together. I am so happy to see that Raoul has someone to make him happy now. I’ll let you rest.’
Lara watched her go, not knowing what to make of the one-sided conversation. It wasn’t just what she had said, it was the way she had said it...the secret little smile... She shivered, very much unsettled by the woman’s manner.
Naomi hadn’t actually meant that she was the person Raoul couldn’t be with...had she? Lara thought about all the occasions she had seen them together or at least in the same room. There would have been signs, she’d have picked up the signals, wouldn’t she...?
On the other hand, she had managed not to know she was in love with him for months. Maybe signals weren’t her thing. Did any of this even matter? She’d be out of his life soon...except that there would always be the baby... Would he even want to be part of the baby’s life?
Just what she needed—another unanswered question to add to all the others!
With a deep sigh she sat up and propped a pillow behind her head, running over Naomi’s words in her head again and again. The more she thought about it, the more it felt off somehow. As was the idea that Raoul’s marriage had not been happy, that his perfect wife had not been quite so, well, perfect.
It seemed much more likely that Naomi had a thing for Raoul and was making up stories about a poor woman who couldn’t defend herself. The only way she’d know for sure was to ask him.
‘Now there’s a revolutionary thought, Lara,’ she whispered mockingly to herself, and made her way downstairs to find Raoul.
* * *
‘Sorry I skipped out like that.’
He shrugged, dismissing her apology as he dragged a hand across the dark stubble that already dusted his jaw and lean cheeks. He closed the laptop that had been sitting open on the desk. It was all for show—he hadn’t been able to focus on work or even read his emails or any of the messages of condolence.
‘I coped.’
‘It’s been a hard day for you.’ Her heart ached for him; he looked so tired, so sad.
After a pause he acknowledged this with a tiny tip of his dark head, while privately acknowledging the fact that she had made it easier. Her quiet presence beside him, support expressed with a touch and a look.
‘I should have been there.’
‘Naomi was only too happy to stand in.’
He felt ungrateful but he’d found it impossible not to compare Naomi’s practised social skills with Lara’s more instinctive ones... Oh, there was no doubt that the woman could work a room and she never said the wrong thing, but then her smile was never genuine either and her laugh never uninhibited or too loud.
Not that there had been much to laugh about today, he thought sombrely, but Lara had not just given the impression of listening to the long-winded reminiscences of the elderly friends of his grandfather’s, she had listened. It didn’t matter who had been talking; he was pretty sure that mostly she didn’t have a clue who they were—or how important. At one point he had seen her spontaneously grab his godfather and hug the man!
Just after Lara had slipped away the elderly but still-influential Greek shipping magnate had taken Raoul to one side and shaken his hand, telling him that he was lucky indeed in his wife: ‘A keeper, my boy, but if I was thirty years younger you’d need to watch your back!’ he’d chortled.
For a man who would have preferred to walk in front of a bus than get married again, this arrangement with Lara was actually suiting him. Plus, the sex was incredible.
He wished they could extend the arrangement, but he had come to see the real Lara, to know her, and she deserved more...
Lara deserved better than him.
Closing the open French doors on a breeze that had sprung up, he missed Lara’s flinch at the mention of the other woman’s name.
‘Has she gone?’
‘Who?’
‘Naomi.’
He nodded, making a mental note to have a tactful word—she had been dropping around a little too much lately.
‘You should have stayed in bed.’
‘Were you happy?’
There was a hushed, husky vehemence in the abrupt question that made him look at her sharply, sensing suppressed emotions that showed their physical presence in the restless twisting of her long fingers. Something was going on in that beautiful head and he didn’t have a clue what it was. He allowed frustration to mask the protectiveness that made him want to take her in his arms.
‘Was I happy when?’
‘People say that you had a perfect marriage.’
‘Do they?’
