‘That is untrue,’ Leo grated, losing patience. ‘You’re my wife and I made a serious commitment to you.’
‘But I don’t want your cold sense of commitment...I want love!’ Grace flung back at him helplessly.
‘I warned you that I couldn’t put that on the table,’ Leo breathed harshly.
‘Oh, you could if you wanted to,’ Grace fielded with unmistakeable bitterness. ‘But you don’t want to. And do you know why? It’s not because you had an unhappy childhood, it’s because you’re an emotional coward.’
His nostrils flared, his eyes kindling like flames. ‘Let’s not descend to that level.’
‘But it’s true. You don’t get involved because you’re scared of getting hurt. Nobody wants to get hurt, Leo, but most of us still try to make a relationship that goes further than practicality and convenient sex. You’re too busy protecting yourself to even give it a go.’ Exhausted by telling him what was wrong with their marriage, Grace fell back against the pillows, drained by emotion. ‘Go back to the castle.’
‘To start planning our divorce?’ Leo challenged darkly.
‘It’s inevitable now,’ she whispered numbly, her heart heavy as lead inside her tight chest. ‘There’s nothing left to keep us together.’
‘If you really want me to leave, I’ll leave and come back first thing in the morning,’ he bit out grimly, his darkly handsome features bleak with constraint.
‘There’s no point you coming back for the second scan.’ Grace knew she would cry then because, no matter how hard she was striving to be realistic, a little spark of hope still flourished inside her. She would be shattered when she received the confirmation that, yes, she had miscarried and lost their baby and she didn’t want Leo to witness that emotional breakdown and start feeling sorry for her again. ‘I could handle that better alone. I’ll be able to leave the hospital straight after it.’
‘To do what? Fly back to London?’ Leo demanded bitterly. ‘You’re in no fit state for that. At the very least you need to spend a couple of weeks recuperating. If it makes you happier, I’ll leave and you can have the castle all to yourself. At this moment I feel that getting fully back to work would be a welcome distraction.’
‘I didn’t want it to be like this, Leo,’ Grace muttered wretchedly. ‘I know you’re upset as well.’
‘I’m not upset.’ Leo swung round and left the room, walked down the corridor and settled in the waiting room. He wasn’t just upset, he was furious. She was his wife and she was shutting him out, dismissing him as a husband as if he were of no account.
Did he really deserve a wife who had such a low opinion of him? Did she think he had been faking it with her for the whole of the past month? Faking the passion, the laughter, the enjoyment? Without warning he badly wanted a drink and he wanted to punch something hard. He leapt upright again and paced. Grace was stubborn and rigid in her views. That wedding-ring jibe? How could she be so petty?
Unfortunately, her prejudice against her father for the way she had believed he had treated her late mother had ensured that Grace had not had a very high opinion of men even to begin with. And how much had Leo’s own behaviour since their first meeting contributed to her continuing distrust? The casual one-night stand? The engagement he had neglected to mention? The blackmail he had used to persuade her to marry him? His conduct had been less than stellar.
But Leo had always had a can-do approach to problems. Grace wanted him to love her? He could lie and tell her he loved her. Was he willing to do anything to keep her? Leo winced, shocked by the concept. What had she done to his brain? His brain clearly wasn’t working properly. Shock and sorrow had temporarily deranged his wits because for the first time since childhood he felt helpless and almost panicky.
It felt wrong not being with Grace although maybe she genuinely needed time alone to deal with what had happened. He couldn’t help wishing she had turned to him, leant on him. He spoke to the nurse in charge, asking her to contact him if Grace’s condition changed, and then he breathed in deep and fought his reluctance to leave the hospital. Perhaps if Grace slept a while, she would be more normal in the morning, a little less worked up and fatalistic, although it was hard to see how a confirmation of the miscarriage would do anything to improve her outlook.
Leo helped himself to a whiskey in his limousine. He would get stinking drunk and stop agonising over a situation he couldn’t fix, he decided despondently. He checked his phone to see if Grace had texted him; she had not. He embarked on a second whiskey while wondering if a wedding ring could really mean that much to a woman and he thought about texting Grace to ask to have that mystery explained. But there was a yawning hole stretching ever wider somewhere inside his chest. He thought about the baby, the baby that wasn’t going to be, and his eyes burned and prickled, deep regret engulfing him.
He lifted his phone again, needing to talk to Grace, wanting to share his thoughts with a woman for the first time ever. He’d probably wake her up or upset her by saying the wrong thing, he conceded heavily. And the last thing she needed was a series of drunken maudlin texts asking silly questions. But the phone, the only link he had with the woman he so badly wanted to be with, was a terrible temptation. After a moment’s reflection, Leo extracted his SIM card, buzzed down the window and flung his phone out of the car. There, now he couldn’t be tempted to do or say anything stupid.
* * *
Grace tossed and turned restively in the bed, tears trickling from below her lowered eyelids. She wanted Leo, she wanted him back so badly, but he had never really belonged to her in the way a real husband would have done and now she needed to learn not to look for him and not to rely on him. She had to accept that this phase of her life was over. There would not be a baby with Leo. He had been so angry when he’d left her and she knew she had provoked him. He had tried to be there for her and she had rejected him, needing him to see that honesty was now the best policy. Their shotgun marriage no longer had a reason to exist and she had recognised that reality long before he did. Wasn’t that better than Leo waking up some day about a year from now and questioning why he was still married to a woman so far removed from his ideal of a wife?
Yet the prospect of life without Leo, life after Leo was unbearable to Grace. She couldn’t sleep and it was mid-morning before she was taken to be scanned. This time the scanner was a bigger, more complex machine and the doctor was present. Grace lay still, all hope of good news crushed by a wretched sleepless night and an irredeemable tendency to expect only bad things to happen to her. So, when the doctor urged her in heavily accented English to look at the screen, she was reluctant and glanced up, startled to see that the small medical team surrounding her were all smiling.
And they showed her baby’s heartbeat and switched on the sound so that she could listen to that racing beat that quickened her own. An intense sense of joyous relief filled her with a wash of powerful emotion and tears flooded her eyes. ‘I was so sure I’d lost my baby...’
The obstetrician sat down by her side to enumerate the various reasons why bleeding could occur in early pregnancy, pointing out that her blood loss had already stopped and that her baby’s heartbeat was strong and regular.
The minute she got back to her room, Grace snatched up her phone to text Leo, but what on earth was she to say to him? What an idiot she had been! Panicking and distraught at the conviction she had lost their baby, she had flung their marriage on the bonfire of her hopes as well. It would be her own fault if Leo received the news that he was still going to be a father with a
