She sensed his stillness and wanted to snatch the words back. But they were out in the open now, and she didn’t know what to do with his continuing lack of response. She tried to recapture some of her anger but it was disappearing fast, leaving in its wake regret and dismay.
‘So the sex is all that matters to you, I take it?’
‘Yes, of—of course it is …’ she stammered, bewildered by that remark. ‘Just like it is to you. And responsibility too, of course … We’re doing this for Oliver, because it’s always better for a child to have both parents at home. We’re being sensible … practical …’
‘What story are you going to spin your mother when it comes to the heirloom bracelet?’
‘Wha …?’
‘I one hundred percent agree with you. Heirlooms to be handed over are for brides who actually want to be married.’
‘You’re not being fair, Raoul.’
‘I’m being perfectly fair. I had actually thought we had more going for us than just physical attraction, but I was wrong.’ He began walking towards the door.
Sarah watched him, frantically trying to process what he had said.
His voice was flat and composed and as cold as ice. ‘I’ve got your message loud and clear, Sarah. It’s always good to have the rules laid bare …’
SARAH lay frozen for a few minutes. Now that she wanted to recall everything he had said, so that she could sift through his words and get them to make sense, she found that her thoughts were in a jumble. Her heart was beating so furiously that she could scarcely catch her breath, and she had broken out in a film of perspiration. Her nakedness was a cruel reminder of how she had attempted to drown her misery in making love.
She could get herself worked up at the thought of Raoul using her, but only now was she appreciating that she had been equally guilty of using him—even if she had tried to tell herself that that couldn’t possibly be the case, because wasn’t sex all he had wanted from her from the very start?
Where had he gone?
His self-control was such a part and parcel of his personality that to see him stripped of it had shaken her to her core.
Or had she been mistaken? Was he just angry with her?
With a little cry of horror and shaky panic, Sarah flung the covers off her and scrambled around the room to fling on a pair of jogging bottoms and an old long-sleeved jumper—a left-over reminder of her teenage years, when she had been in the school hockey team.
The house was dark and quiet as she tiptoed into the hall. Her parents had never been ones to burn the midnight oil, and they would be fast asleep in their bedroom at the far end of the corridor. Oliver’s door was ajar, and she peeped in, through habit, to see him spread flat on the bed, having kicked off his quilt, a perfect X-shape, lightly snoring.
Just in case, though, she made sure not to turn on the lights, and so had to grope her way down the stairs until her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she could move more quickly, checking first the kitchen, then the sitting room.
It wasn’t a big house, so there was a limited number of rooms she could check, and her anxiety increased with each empty room. After twenty minutes, she acknowledged that Raoul just wasn’t in the house.
The temperature had dropped, and she hugged herself as she quietly let herself outside.
At least his car was still there. She hurried down to the road and glanced in both directions. Then, as she headed back towards the house, a faint noise caught her ears and she stealthily made her way to the back of the house.
The garden wasn’t huge, but it backed onto fields so there was an illusion of size. To one side was her mother’s vegetable plot, and towards the back, through a wooden archway that had been planted with creeping wisteria, was a gazebo. Her father’s potting shed was right at the very bottom of the garden. Trees and shrubbery formed a thick perimeter.
Walking tentatively through the archway, she spotted Raoul immediately. He was in the gazebo, sitting with his head in his hands. She paused, and then walked quietly towards him, feeling him stiffen as she got nearer although he didn’t look up at her.
‘I’m really sorry,’ she said helplessly.
Just when she thought that he wasn’t going to reply at all, he looked up and shrugged his broad shoulders.
‘What for? You were being honest.’
‘I was just trying to be mature about the whole thing …’
Raoul flung his head back and stared up, away from her, and in the fierce, proud, stubborn set of his features she could see the little boy who’d grown up in a foster home, learning young how to hide himself away and build a fortress around his emotions.
She rested her hand on his forearm and felt him flinch, but he didn’t pull it away and for some reason that seemed like a good sign.
‘I gave you what you wanted,’ Raoul said, his eyes still averted. ‘At least I gave you what I thought you wanted. Don’t you like the house?’
‘I love it. You know I do. I’ve told you so a million times.’
‘I’ve never done that before, you know. I’ve never let myself be personal when it comes to choosing things for another person, but I made it personal this time.’
‘I know. You wanted Oliver to have the very best.’
‘I very much doubt whether Oliver cares that there’s a bottle-green Aga in the kitchen or not.’
Her heart skipped a beat. ‘What are you trying to say?’
‘Trying? I thought it had been obvious all along.’ He glanced across at her and her breath caught painfully in her throat. ‘I wanted you to marry me. Maybe at the beginning I didn’t think it was necessary. Maybe at the beginning I was still clinging to the notion that I was a free, independent guy who happened to have found himself with a child. It took me a while to realise that the freedom I’d spent my life acquiring wasn’t the kind of freedom I wanted after all.’
‘I don’t want to tie you down,’ Sarah said quietly. ‘I did. Once. When we were out there. I thought you were just the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life. I built all sorts of castles in the air, and then when you dumped me my whole world fell to pieces.’
‘I did what I thought was right at the time.’
‘And I understand that now.’
‘Do you? Really? I look at the way you are with your family, Sarah, and I see how badly you must have been affected by our break-up. You’ve grown up with security and a sense of your own place in the world. I grew up without either. I never allowed myself to get too close to anyone, and even when we met again, even after I found out that I was a father, I kept holding on to that. It was different with Oliver. Oliver is my own flesh and blood. But I still kept holding on to the belief that I wasn’t to let anyone else in.’
‘I know. Why do you think it’s been so hard for me, Raoul? You’ve no idea what it’s been like, standing on the side, wondering if the time will ever come when I can just get inside that wall you’ve spent a lifetime building around yourself.’ She sighed and dragged her eyes away from him. The moon was almost full and it was a cloudless night. ‘Look, you’re not the only one who was afraid of getting hurt.’
Raoul opened his mouth to protest that he wasn’t scared of anything, and then closed it.