away? What do you mean walk away? Are you saying that you’re going to abandon Oliver if I don’t agree to marry you?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake! When are you going to stop seeing me as a monster? I will never abandon my own flesh and blood!’
‘I’m sorry. I know you wouldn’t,’ Sarah said, ashamed, because sudden panic had driven her to say the first stupid thing in her head. ‘So what are you saying?’
‘I’ll find someone else,’ Raoul told her bluntly, ‘and we will get in touch with lawyers, who will draw up papers regarding settlement and visiting rights. You will see me only when essential, and only ever when it is to do with Oliver. Naturally I will have no control over who you see, don’t see, or eventually become seriously involved with, and the same would apply to me. Am I spelling things out loud and clear for you?’
The colour had drained from Sarah’s face. Presented with such a succinct action-and-consequence train of events, she felt her wildly scattered thoughts finally crystallise into one shocking truth. She would lose him for ever. He really would meet another woman and the question of love wouldn’t even have to arise. He would regulate his love-life because he would have to, and she would be left on the outside … watching.
She wouldn’t conveniently stop loving him just because he’d removed himself from her.
He might not love her, but he would be a brilliant father—and she would be spared the misery of just not having him around. Who had ever said that you could have it all?
She was sadly aware that she would settle for crumbs. She wanted to ask him what would happen when he got bored with her. Would he begin to conduct a discreet outside life? It was a question to which she didn’t want an answer.
She had thought that any marriage without love would be doomed to failure. She had never imagined herself walking down the aisle knowing that the guy by her side was only there because he had found himself in the unenviable position of having no choice. Duty and responsibility were two wonderful things, but she hadn’t ever seen them as sufficient. Raoul, on the other hand, had moved faster towards the inevitable—and she had to catch up now, because the stark alternative was even more unpalatable and she hated herself for her weakness.
‘I’ll marry you,’ she agreed, daring to steal a look at his face.
Raoul smiled, and realised that he had been panicked at the thought that she might turn him down. He never panicked! Even when he had been confronted with a child he hadn’t known existed, when he had realised that his life was about to be changed irrevocably for ever, he hadn’t panicked. He had assessed the situation and dealt with it. But watching her, eyes half closed, he had been aware of a weird, suffocating feeling—as if he had stepped off the edge of a precipice in the hope that there would be a trampoline waiting underneath to break his fall.
He stood up, thinking it wise to cover the basics and then leave—before she could revert to her previous stance, reconsider his offer and tell him that it was off, after all. She could be bewilderingly inconsistent.
‘I’m thinking soon,’ he said, feeling on a strange high. ‘As soon as it can be arranged, to be perfectly honest. I’ll start working on that straight away. Something small …’ He paused to look at her pinkened cheeks. Her hair was tumbling over her shoulders and he wanted nothing more than to tangle his fingers into it and pull her towards him.
‘Although you are the one who factored marriage into your dreams of the future,’ he murmured drily, ‘so it’s up to you what sort of affair you want. You can have a thousand people and St Paul’s Cathedral if you like …’
Sarah opened her mouth to tell him that anything would do, because it wouldn’t really be a true marriage, would it? Yes, they had known each other once. Yes, they had been lovers, and she had been crazy enough to think that he had loved her as much as she had loved him, even if he had never said so. But he hadn’t intended marrying her then, or even setting eyes on her again once he had left the country. He hadn’t wanted her then and he didn’t want her now, but marriage, for him, was the only way he could be a permanent and daily feature in his son’s life. Because she had rejected the first offer on the table, which had been to be his mistress.
Approaching the whole concept of their union in the way he might a business arrangement, maybe he had thought that living together would be the lesser of two evils. They would have learned to compromise without the necessity of having to take that final, psychologically big step and commit to a bond sealed in the eyes of the law. Or maybe he had just thought that if what they had fizzled out it would just be a whole lot easier to part company if they had merely been living together. And by then he would have had a much stronger foothold in the door—might even have been able to fight for custody if he’d chosen to.
Racked with a hornets’ nest of anxieties, she still knew that it would be stupid to open up a debate on the worth of a marriage that had yet to happen. What would that get her? Certainly not the words she wanted to hear.
‘Something small,’ she said faintly.
‘And traditional,’ Raoul agreed. ‘I expect you would like that, and so would your parents. I remember you saying something about a bracelet that your grandmother had given your mother, which she had kept to be passed on to you when you got married? You laughed and said that it wasn’t exactly the most expensive trousseau in the world, but that it meant a lot to both of you.’
‘Isn’t there anything that you’ve forgotten?’ Sarah asked in a tetchy voice. All her dreams and hopes were being agonisingly brought back home to her on a painful tide of self-pity. She thought that she might actually have been hinting to him at the time when she had said that. ‘Anyway, I think she lost that bracelet.’
‘She lost it?’
‘Gardening. She took it off, to … er … dig, and it must have got all mixed up with soil and leaves …’ Sarah shrugged in a suitably vague and rueful manner. ‘So, no bracelet to pass on,’ she finished mournfully.
‘That’s a shame.’
‘Isn’t it?’ She suddenly frowned. ‘So … we get married and live here …’
‘In this house, yes.’
‘And what will you do with your apartment?’
Raoul shrugged. His apartment no longer seemed to have any appeal. The cool, modern soullessness of the décor, the striking artwork that had been given the nod by him but bought as an investment, the expensive and largely unused gadgets in the kitchen, the imposing plasma screen television in the den—all of it now seemed to belong to a person with whom he could no longer identify.
‘I’ll keep it, I expect. I don’t need to sell it or rent it, after all.’
‘Keep it for what?’
‘What does it matter?’
‘It doesn’t. I was just curious.’
They were going to be married. It wouldn’t be a marriage made in heaven, and Sarah knew that her own suspicious nature would torpedo any hope of it being successful. As soon as Raoul had told her that he would keep the apartment she had foreseen an unpalatable explanation. An empty apartment would be very handy should he ever decide to stray.
She tried her utmost to kill any further development on that train
