head around it. And at the centre of everything stood this man who was turning her upside down and inside out.
She sat down again when a wave of dizziness went through her. Immediately Pascal was at her side, bending down, a hand on her knee. She tried to flinch away, but he wouldn’t release her.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked harshly.
‘Nothing,’ she answered quickly, restraining the urge to place a hand on her belly. Then hysteria rose again. ‘Unless you count the fact that I’m now jobless and about to be homeless, too.’
‘What are you talking about, Alana? You’re not making sense.’
‘Sense! If I had sense I wouldn’t have opened my mouth earlier.’ She was already hoping he’d forget what she’d just said. But of course he didn’t; his logical brain was sifting through everything.
‘What do you mean, homeless?’
She wished he’d move back. He was crowding her, exactly as he’d done that first time they’d met and had been in the car on the way to the restaurant. She cursed her runaway mouth inwardly.
‘What I mean is that, without a job, I’m going to be homeless. I have this month’s mortgage paid, and after that … nothing.’
He stood up again and she looked up.
He was remote, more remote than she’d ever seen him. ‘How is that possible? You must have been left a fortune.’
Alana felt his coolness touch her deep inside. She stood up, too, moving back towards her galley-kitchen as if seeking refuge. This was the first time she’d ever contemplated telling anyone the whole truth. She grimaced inwardly, apart from her recent exposé.
She shook her head. ‘That’s just it. It’s a myth. Ryan gambled everything away with people like Eoin, on stupidly lavish expensive weekends to places like Las Vegas. They’d hire private jets, stay in the best hotels—drink, drugs, girls, gambling. They did it all. When Ryan died, he had debts to the tune of millions, and no one knew. He kept up the pretence all along. If we hadn’t had the house to sell in Dalkey, I’d have had to declare myself bankrupt. Thanks to my own savings, which didn’t amount to much, I was able to buy this house and set up a loan agreement with Ryan’s debtors to pay the rest of the money back. Without my job, the repayments will fall behind immediately. This house is the least of my worries; the minute the repayments stop, they’ll come after me.’
Alana didn’t glean any comfort from Pascal’s shocked look. She knew well that on some level he’d still had her cast in the role of an ex-WAG—the derogatory term for the wives and girlfriends of sports stars. She couldn’t blame him; she’d seen the way he’d look at her sometimes, as if waiting for her to trip herself up, reveal herself to be the silly bimbo that most of those girls were.
‘I’ll talk to Rory.’
Alana shook her head vehemently. ‘No, that’ll make things even worse. The last thing I need now is to be pushed to the forefront of everything again.’
‘But maybe he can keep you behind the scenes for a while.’
‘It wouldn’t work.’ She could just imagine the snide comments, the looks.
‘What about your family? Don’t they know about this?’
A spasm of pain clenched Alana’s insides. She hated admitting this, knowing it would be hard to understand. ‘No; they don’t know. I was as guilty as Ryan for keeping up the pretence.’ She avoided Pascal’s eye. ‘They just … they don’t have the kind of resources I needed. They had their own things going on, and my parents are old, frail. They didn’t need to hear about my problems.’
Pascal’s tone was frigid. ‘It sounds to me like it was a problem worth sharing.’
She looked at him, feeling defensive. ‘It was my decision, OK? My family aren’t that wealthy, my parents certainly aren’t any more. They live comfortably, but they’ve earned that. I couldn’t burden them with the mistake I made.’
‘Is that how you saw your marriage?’
The way Pascal asked the question so softly made Alana feel even more vulnerable. She had to push him back; she knew well it was only a matter of time now before he ran as fast as he could from her car wreck of a life.
‘For a long time, yes I did, which is why I’m determined not to make the same mistake twice.’
He started advancing towards her, and Alana backed away further.
‘Is that what you see happening here—a mistake in the making?’
Alana shook her head, confused. Did he mean them? ‘I don’t … What are you talking about? This isn’t anything like that.’ It’s worlds apart.
He was still advancing into her kitchen, making the space become tiny. Alana was starting to feel desperate. She felt so raw and vulnerable right now that if he so much as touched her … She stopped abruptly as her hand that had been sliding along the counter hit something. Instinctively, she covered it. She knew immediately what it was; she’d left it there in her shock and confusion just minutes before. Pascal’s eyes darted to where her hand had made the betraying, concealing movement. Alana gulped as he looked back to her. She felt guilty. She looked guilty.
‘What’s that, Alana?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, almost hopefully.
‘So why are you trying to hide it?’
‘I’m not.’
‘Show me what it is.’
‘It’s nothing, just rubbish.’ Desperation tinged her voice, and in a rising surge of panic and rejection at the thought of confronting this, too, when so much had just happened, she whipped it off the counter top and whirled around to put it in the bin. But before she could a strong arm wrapped itself around her midriff and pulled her back into a hard body. With effortless strength, Pascal reached round and pulled the object from her hand. She closed her eyes. Their breathing sounded harsh in the small space, and she could imagine him trying to make sense of what he was looking at.
Alana could feel the tension come into Pascal’s body. His arm grew even more rigid around her. She knew it wouldn’t take long for him to make sense of it. These days pregnancy tests were idiot proof and the results immediate—the word ‘pregnant’ wouldn’t have taken a six-year-old long to figure out.
And then abruptly, so abruptly that she stumbled a little, Pascal released her. She turned round to look up but he wasn’t looking at her, he was looking at the pregnancy test. After a long, tense moment he finally looked at her and she fought not to wince under his almost-black look.
‘It’s pretty self-explanatory.’
He nodded. ‘Yes, crystal-clear.’
He turned and walked back into the sitting room, holding the test in his hand. Alana followed warily. He turned then, and she stopped in her tracks at the harsh lines on his face.
‘And were you planning on keeping this little secret to yourself, too, shouldering this as another burden? Another mistake?’
