Mariella could hear the exasperation in her agent’s voice, and ruefully acknowledged inwardly that she could perfectly understand Kate’s feelings.
However, Kate did not know that she had two very good reasons for her reluctance to return to Zuran.
Xavier… and… Instinctively she glanced down her own body. At three months, her pregnancy was not really showing as yet. She and the baby were both perfectly healthy, her doctor had assured her, it was just that being so slight she was not as yet showing very much baby bulge.
‘Just wait another couple of months and you’ll probably be complaining to me that you feel huge,’ she had teased Mariella.
Even now sometimes when she woke up in the morning she had to reassure herself that she was not fantasising, and that she actually was pregnant.
Pregnant… With a baby she already desperately wanted and loved. Her baby! Her baby and Xavier’s baby, she reminded herself warily.
But Xavier would never need to know! No one looking at her could possibly know!
And if she was not careful she could potentially be in danger of arousing more suspicions by not returning to Zuran for the extravaganza that was to be the opening of the new enclosure and the first public airing of her frieze than by doing so.
Tanya for one would certainly have something to say to her if she didn’t go!
And of course it would be a perfect opportunity for her to see Fleur, whom she still missed achingly. Her niece would also always have a very, very special place in her heart!
But against all this, and weighing very heavily on the other side of the scales, was Xavier. Xavier whom disturbingly she had spent far too much time thinking about since her return home! Mystifyingly and totally contrary to her expectations, not even the official knowledge that she had conceived her much-wanted child had brought an end to the little ache of longing and loneliness that now seemed to haunt both her days and her nights. There was surely no logical reason why she should actually physically ache for Xavier now. And there was certainly no reason why increasingly she should feel such a deep and despairing emotional longing for him. Those kinds of feelings belonged to someone who was in love! And she knew far better than to allow herself to do anything as foolish as fall in love!
She had actually begun to question, in her most emotional and anguished moments, whether what she was feeling could in some way be generated by the baby—a longing on his or her part for the father that he or she was never going to know. She had promised herself that her child would never suffer the anguish of being rejected by his or her father, because she had made sure there would be no father there to reject it. She would make sure right from the start that her baby would know that she would provide all the love it could possibly need! She would bring him or her up to feel so loved, so secure, so wanted, that Xavier’s absence would have no impact on their lives whatsoever. Unlike her, her child would never suffer the pain of hearing his or her mother talk with such longing and need about the man who had abandoned them both, as she had had to do. Her child would never feel as she had done that somehow he or she was the cause of that father’s absence; that, given the real choice, her mother would have preferred not to have had her and kept the love of the man who had quite simply not wanted the responsibility of a child!
‘You must go,’ Kate was insisting.
‘You must come,’ Tanya was pleading.
‘Okay, okay, I give in,’ she told Kate, grinning as her agent paused in mid-argument to look at her in silence, before breaking into a flurry of relieved plans.
‘You’ll be staying with us, of course,’ Tanya was chattering excitedly as she bustled Mariella outside to the waiting limousine. ‘I didn’t bring Fleur because she’s been cutting another new tooth. It’s through now, but we had a bit of a bad night with her. I can’t wait for the opening. It’s going to be the highlight of our social calendar. Khalid has bought me the most fabulous dress. What are you going to wear? If you haven’t got anything yet, we could go shopping—’
‘No, it’s okay, I’ve already got an outfit,’ Mariella stopped her quickly, mentally grateful for the fact that Kate had insisted on taking her on a whirlwind shopping trip, following her decision to attend the opening, so that she could vet the outfit Mariella would be wearing, to make sure it made enough of the right kind of statement! Her small bulge might not show yet when she was dressed, but someone as close to her as her half-sister had always been would be bound to spot the differences in her body in the intimacy of a changing room with her wearing nothing more than her underwear!
Of course she was going to tell Tanya about her baby—ultimately—once she was safely back in England, and all the questions her sister was bound to ask about just who had fathered her coming baby could be answered over the telephone rather than in person! The last thing Mariella wanted to do was to risk betraying herself by a give-away expression.
She knew exactly what she was going to tell Tanya. She had already decided to claim that her child was the result of artificial insemination, the father an unknown sperm donor.
They were speeding along the highway towards the familiar outskirts of the city.
‘How far is it to your new villa, Tanya?’ Mariella asked her.
She had been receiving a constant stream of emails from her sister full of excitement about the new villa she and Khalid were having built, and which they had recently been due to move into.
‘Oh, it’s several miles up the coast from Xavier’s. I’m really looking forward to moving into it now, but I must admit I’m a bit worried about how Fleur is going to adapt. She adores Hera, and to her Xavier’s villa is her home and so—’
‘What do you mean you’re looking forward to moving in?’ Mariella checked her anxiously. ‘I thought you already had!’
‘Well, yes, we were supposed to, but then all the furniture hasn’t arrived yet, and so we’re still living with Xavier. His great-aunt is visiting at the moment as well. You made a real hit with her, Ella—not like me. She’s always singing your praises and in fact… I…’
Mariella could feel her heart, not just sinking, but literally plunging to the bottom of her ribcage with an almighty thump before it began to bang against her ribs in frantic panic. She wasn’t prepared for this, she admitted. She wasn’t armed for it, or protected against it.
The villa was ahead of them. It was too late for her to announce that she had changed her mind, or to demand that she be taken to the centre of the city where she could book into a hotel! The car was sweeping in through the gates.
Hazily Mariella noticed that the red geraniums she remembered tumbling from the urns in the outer courtyard had been changed to a rich vibrant pink to match the colour of the flowers of the ornamental vine softening the walls of the courtyard.
‘Leave your luggage for Ali,’ Tanya instructed her.
Where was the trepidation she should be feeling? Mariella wondered as, completely contrary to any kind of logic, the moment she stepped into the villa she immediately experienced a sense of well being, a sense of welcome familiarity, as though… as though she had come home?
‘We’d better go straight in to see Tante Cecille!’ Tanya pulled a face. ‘I’ll never hear the end of it if we don’t. She’s even told them in the kitchen to bake some madeleines for you!’
Mariella had to bite down hard on her bottom lip to subdue the threatening weakness of her own emotional