‘And the next day you got your period which therefore cancels out that night.’
Sara sighed at that one, heavily, defeatedly. She had lied to him that next day. Lied because he had just told her that he was going away and she’d wanted to punish him for leaving her again so soon. She had concocted the lie which would deprive him of her body—and had learned to regret the lie every single day of her life since.
All of which she had confessed to him before without it making an ounce of difference to what he believed, so she was not going to try repeating it again now.
‘No ready reply to that one, I note,’ he drawled when she offered nothing in return.
Sara shook her head. ‘Believe what you want to believe,’ she tossed at him wearily. ‘It really makes little difference to me any more …’ She meant it, too; her expression told him so as she lifted blue eyes dulled of any hint of life to his. ‘I once loved you more than life itself. Now my love for Lia takes precedence over anything I ever felt for you.’
All emotion was honed out of his face at that. ‘Tidy yourself,’ he instructed, turning with cold dismissal back to the door. ‘Then come downstairs. I will go and arrange for something to eat.’
CHAPTER THREE
THE house had returned to its usual smooth running. Mrs Hobbit, the housekeeper, bustled about. Mr Hobbit, Sara noticed when she glanced out of her bedroom window before going down, was busily working on the new play area he and Sara had been planning at the bottom of the garden. It wrenched at her heart to see him rhythmically spreading bark chippings over the specially prepared patch where, next week, a garden swing and slide were due to be fixed—yet, oddly, it comforted her. Mr Hobbit had not given up hope of Lia’s return and neither would she.
When she eventually made herself go downstairs to the dining room she found Nicolas standing at the window watching the old man at his work. It was June and the sun set late in the evenings. You could work outside until ten o’clock if you were so inclined. This evening the garden was bathed in a rich coral glow that cast a warmth over everything, including Nicolas.
Something stirred inside her—something long, long suppressed. The ache of a woman for the man she loved.
And for a moment she couldn’t move or speak, couldn’t let him know she was there because she was suddenly seeing another man from another time who used to stand by the window like that. A man whom she would have gone to join, slipping her arm through the crook of his and leaning against him while she described all the plans she had made for their garden. Their daughter.
How would Nicolas have responded if things had not been as they were between them and she had been able to go freely and tell him what Mr Hobbit was doing? Would he have been amused? Interested? Would he have wanted to join in the planning of their child’s first play garden?
Her eyes glazed over, sudden tears blurring his silhouette as rain would against a sheet of glass.
The first time she had met Nicolas it had been raining, Sara recalled. Not the fine summer rain you tended to get at this time of year, but a sudden heavy cloudburst that had sent people running in an effort to get out of it as soon as they could.
She’d been a very ordinary assistant in a big garden centre on the outskirts of central London then. Twenty-one years old and so painfully shy that her cheeks flushed if a stranger so much as smiled at her, she had been more happy to spend her time amongst the shrubs and plants than to deal with customers. But the garden centre had run a plant service whereby they’d provided and cared for the plants the big office blocks in the city liked to decorate their foyers with. One aspect of her job had been to attend to a certain section of these ‘rentals’, as they called them. But it had taken every ounce of courage she possessed to walk into some of the palatial foyers on her list.
The shyness had been left over from the quiet, lonely childhood spent with her widowed, ageing father who had taken early retirement from teaching when his wife had died leaving him solely responsible for their only child. They’d moved away from the quiet London suburb to the wild, lonely fells of Yorkshire, where he’d decided to teach his daughter himself rather than send her the five miles to the nearest school.
She was thirteen years old when he died, quite suddenly, of a heart attack while walking on his beloved fells. The first thing Sara knew of it was when his dog, Sammie, came back without him, whimpering at the cottage door.
After that she was sent to a boarding-school to finish her education, paid for out of her father’s estate. But by then the shyness was already an inherent part of her and she found it difficult if not painful to interact with any of the other girls. She coped, though—barely, but she coped—learned to deal with other people on a quiet, timid level. But she did not manage to make any real friends, and spent most of her free time wandering around the school’s private grounds, which was probably how she developed such an interest in plants—that and the fact that the school’s resident gardener was a quiet little man who reminded her of her father, which meant she could at least relax with him.
It was with his quiet encouragement that she discovered she had a flair for gardening. Green-fingered, he called it—an ability to make anything grow—and she would have gone on to horticultural college after leaving the school, but then another disaster struck when she contracted glandular fever just before her final exams, which stopped her taking them. The virus lingered with her for over a year. By the time it had gone, so had her funds. And rather than take her exams a year late then try for college she had to get herself a job instead.
Which was why she was in that particular street in London the day she bumped into Nicolas—literally bumped into him, she on her way back from attending to her customer list, he as he climbed out of a black cab.
It was lunchtime. A heavy downpour of rain had just opened up. People were running, as was Sara herself—hurrying with her head down as a black cab drew up at the kerb just in front of her. The door flew open and a man got out, almost knocking her off her feet when they collided.
‘Apologies,’ he clipped. That was all; she didn’t think he even glanced at her then, just strode off across the flow of rushing pedestrians and into the nearest building.
That should have been the end of it. And sometimes when she looked back she found herself wishing that it had been the end of it. Her life would have been so different if Nicolas had not come barging into it as he had. But then at other times she could only count her blessings, because without knowing him she would not have learned that she could love another person as deeply as she had learned to love him—she had been too shy to experiment with feelings at all, until she’d met him. She would not have learned about her own simmering passions or how they could overpower any shyness when coaxed to do so by a man whose own passions ran hot and dynamic through his blood.
And she would not have known the greatest loves of all. The love of a child for its mother. And the love a mother could feel for her child.
So no, no matter what had happened to them since, she was not sorry now that her first encounter with Nicolas had not been the last encounter. But coming into contact with a man of Nicolas Santino’s dynamic personality had been a bit like being a dove devoured by an eagle.
He’d dropped his wallet. Right at her feet and in the pouring rain. He had stalked off without knowing he had dropped it, having absently tried to shove the wallet back into his jacket pocket.
Standing there with the rain pouring down on her head and still feeling a bit winded by the way he had bumped into her, she had taken a moment to realise what it was that had fallen onto her feet. She’d bent, picked it up, glanced a bit dazedly around her for a sign of what to do next. He had already disappeared into the building by then, and logic had told her that she really had no choice but to follow him.
The rest, she supposed, was history—her following him into the building, luckily seeing him standing by the reception desk with a bevy of dark-suited men around him all shaking hands, her approaching shyly.
‘Excuse