swung impatiently away from her, his fierce loyalty to his late father strained by her candour. ‘I must be honest with you. At that point in my recovery I didn’t want to see you either. I did initially intend to visit you when I was stronger but by the time I was fit to see you so much time had passed that it seemed like a pointless exercise,’ he divulged, tight-mouthed with restraint.
Inwardly Chrissie reeled as though he had struck her because that admission, that very dismissive terminology, was a body blow beyond her comprehension. ‘I don’t understand how you can say that it would have been pointless. How much time passed after the accident before you were fit to travel?’ she demanded, folding her arms defensively as if she could hold in the emotions still churning inside her. His self-command, his granite-hard hold on control maddened her.
‘It took well over a year for me even to get back on my feet again.’ His lean dark features were taut and pale with the strain of being forced to recall that traumatic period of his life. ‘My spine was damaged. It took further surgery and weeks of recovery before my doctors were able to estimate whether or not I could hope to walk again.’
In point of fact at a time when his whole world seemed to have fallen apart and he was confined to a hospital bed unable to move and requiring help for every little thing, Jaul had felt quite ridiculously unsurprised by the announcement that his new bride had run out on him as well. In truth he had been seriously depressed back then and traumatised by survivor’s guilt because military friends and bodyguards he had known since childhood had died instantaneously in the same accident.
In addition to his deeply troubled state of mind and his belief that his father had bought Chrissie’s loyalty off, he had been painfully aware that he and Chrissie had parted on very bad terms in Oxford. She’d been angry with him for leaving her behind. In so many ways back then Chrissie had been an idealistic dreamer and, while he had loved those traits so very different from his own, he had also seen them as a potential weakness should life ever become tough. What could be tougher for a youthful bride than a husband suddenly sentenced to a wheelchair? Ultimately, his conviction that their marriage was invalid as his father had asserted had played the biggest role in his lack of action. After all, if Chrissie wasn’t even his wife what possible claim could he have on her?
‘But surely by that stage you must’ve had access to a phone and to visitors and you could have contacted me yourself?’ Chrissie pressed accusingly.
Jaul’s broad shoulders went rigid, his jawline squaring at an aggressive slant. ‘I was in a wheelchair...what would I have said to you? I will be frank—I did not want to approach you as a disabled man. You had accepted a five-million-pound settlement from my father and I assumed that money was all you had ever really wanted from me.’
Chrissie was outraged that Jaul had believed that she had taken his father’s money and run. Without a doubt he had found that easier than confronting her with his disability and the risk that he might not regain the use of his legs. Jaul, the original action man and macho to the core, was very physical in his tastes. Deprived of his freedom of movement, forced to accept such bodily weakness and restriction, how must he have felt? But Chrissie suppressed that more empathetic thought and tried to concentrate purely on facts. Jaul, she realised with a sinking heart, had put his wretched pride first when he’d chosen not to approach her in a wheelchair and that truth hurt her more than anything else.
‘But I didn’t actually accept the money,’ she whispered almost absently, so deep was her sense of rejection that he had found it impossible to reach out to her even when he was injured.
‘You did.’
‘No, I didn’t. Your father left a bank draft for a ludicrous five million pounds on the table but I never cashed it.’
‘But you said you had plenty of money when I first saw you again and naturally I assumed—’
‘Only I wasn’t referring to your father’s bank draft,’ Chrissie cut in ruefully. ‘Cesare bought the Greek island which my sister and I had inherited from our mother. My share of the purchase price was very generous. I bought my apartment with some of it and put the rest into trust until my twenty-fifth birthday next year. That’s what I meant about having plenty of money. I didn’t touch a penny of your father’s cash. I left that bank draft lying on the table.’
Jaul was transfixed by that claim. His keen gaze lowered, ebony brows drawing together in a frown. Five million pounds had impressed even him as an enormous sum to offer as a bribe to a young woman from an impoverished background. People lied, cheated and killed for far less money than Chrissie had been given. That was the main reason why he had never questioned his father’s story but now he was determined to check out her story for himself. Could it be true that she had not claimed that money?
‘When did my father’s visit take place?’ Jaul asked abruptly.
‘About two months after you left and he was in a rage when I met him. You once told me he spoke English but he didn’t use any within my hearing. His companion had to translate everything he said.’
‘He had someone with him...aside of his bodyguards?’ Jaul shot the question at her in frowning surprise. ‘Describe him.’
‘Small, sixtyish, goatee beard and spectacles.’
Jaul fell very still as soon as he realised that there was a living witness to his father’s meeting with his wife. ‘My father’s adviser, Yusuf,’ he identified without hesitation, reflecting that Yusuf would be receiving a visit from him in the near future. Chrissie’s allegations demanded and deserved closer scrutiny. If she hadn’t taken the money, what had happened to it and why hadn’t he been told? Keeping him unaware of the fact that his wife hadn’t used the bank draft had ensured that he would misjudge her. It wasn’t a thought that Jaul wanted to have but he knew that his father must’ve been informed that that bank draft had not been cashed.
Slowly, Chrissie settled down onto the sofa again, letting the fierce tension leach out of her spine. Her brain felt dazed as though she had gone ten punishing rounds with a boxer. Shock at what she had learned from Jaul was still passing through her in waves. Her bitterness and antagonism had been wrenched from her while she’d listened to the true story of what had separated them two years earlier. Jaul had not ditched her. Jaul had not voluntarily or cruelly chosen to desert her. In fact he had planned to return to her and, had fate not intervened with that accident and the lies his father had told to both of them, Jaul would almost certainly have returned to her.
For a split second she allowed herself to think of how that might have been and she swallowed painfully, struggling to imagine how she would’ve felt if Jaul had come back to her and if he had been with her when she’d discovered that she was pregnant. She realised that she was picturing an entirely different and infinitely happier world and fierce regret filled her, backed by a terrible anguished sense of loss because she was beginning to suspect that Jaul had been as miserable as she was when they were first separated. How could his father have believed he had the right to inflict such suffering on them both?
Hot, burning tears lashed the backs of Chrissie’s eyes in an unsettling surge. She blinked rapidly, intense mortification threatening to engulf her because she only ever cried in the strictest privacy, a discipline learned the hard way after her life had fallen apart following Jaul’s vanishing act two years earlier. She snatched in a deep, audible breath and Jaul swung away from the window, suppressing his uneasy thoughts at the prospect of confronting Yusuf, his late father’s staunchest supporter.
Yusuf would not necessarily be discreet in the aftermath of such a discussion. It was a stark moment of choice for Jaul because he had to choose between his marriage
