‘“My darling Danny,”’ he read flatly, interrupting her without an apparent qualm. ‘“I can’t bear it any more. You know how hard we tried to have a baby and what a wrench it was for me to have to have my sister being a surrogate for us. I know that she’s always wanted you for herself and I’m just so afraid that she’s going to steal our precious baby and there’s nothing I can do about it. I just can’t bear it any more, Your loving Zara.”’
Sara felt the blood drain from her face then flood back in a scalding blush when he read the note for all to hear. Didn’t he realise how humiliating it was for her to have her unrequited love spoken about like that? Didn’t he realise that, even if she hadn’t loved him, she would still have loved the children she was carrying because they were an intrinsic part of her?
And the letter was a complete lie because even though she desperately wished that she was carrying Dan’s babies for the two of them, there was no way that she would have broken her promise to him to give him the family he wanted. He was going to be a wonderful father and Audrey would spoil her grandchildren at every opportunity and provide the feminine touch that Zara would probably be too busy for.
She really didn’t need all this extra emotional stress, to say nothing of the embarrassment of having her private feelings paraded for all, not when all the pregnancy books advised calm and serenity for the sake of the baby. After all, she was still recovering from her injuries and had, admittedly voluntarily, just gone through the exertions of moving out of his flat and back into her own.
And going from mind-blowing topics to the merely petty, there was the fact that she wasn’t certain her smart-enough-for-work trousers would ever recover from her decision to come all the way down four flights of stairs on her bottom.
‘Look at her face!’ Zara demanded shrilly, pointing straight at Sara. ‘At least she has the honesty to look guilty.’
With everyone’s eyes directed at her, Sara had felt the heat of embarrassment flooding into her face. She was unused to being the centre of attention at any time, least of all when she was in the same room as her twin.
She hated what Zara was doing to her but she had known for far too many years that there was no point protesting her innocence. Zara’s position as everybody’s favourite was unassailable. The thing that hurt worst was the fact that Dan was privy to all Zara’s spiteful lies. At least in the past it had been kept within the family.
‘You ask her, Danny,’ her sister demanded, with every evidence of being on the verge of tears. ‘You ask her if she hasn’t been thinking about keeping the kid for herself.’
Of course she’d been thinking about it, Sara admitted silently as she reached for the rim of the wheel to turn herself around. She was carrying the babies of the man she loved so it was obvious that she would long for the chance to bring them up with him, and there was no way she was staying in this room to allow her sister to make something shameful about a normal human response.
‘Sara, stay,’ Dan said in a low voice, his lean fingers resting on her wrist to dissuade her from opening the door. ‘Please?’
There was something in those amazing green eyes that told her she could trust him, that he wasn’t asking her to stay to have more humiliation heaped on her head. And even though she had no idea where this dreadful conversation was going, she knew that she could trust him, implicitly.
She missed the warmth of his touch when he took his hand away, but then he reached into his pocket again and pulled out a plastic bag.
Walking over to the side of Zara’s bed, he tipped out a piece of plastic onto her lap.
‘Do you know what that is?’ he asked in a quiet conversational tone.
Sara almost gave herself away with a gasp of surprise. The last time she’d seen a piece of plastic like that had been in the garage when they’d been asking about the damage to Zara’s car.
‘Of course I don’t know what it is,’ she said with a dismissive shrug. ‘It’s just a bit of scrap plastic.’
‘Actually, it’s a bit more than that,’ he said with a noticeably sharper edge to his voice as he retrieved it and put it back in the bag, without touching it with his fingers. ‘It’s part of the light from your BMW—the one you broke when you ran your sister down and left her lying in a side street, not caring whether she was alive or dead.’
‘That’s a lie!’ Audrey gasped, clearly shocked out of her unaccustomed bystander’s role. ‘That’s a wicked, wicked lie. Danny, why are you doing this to Zara? She’s your wife and she’s ill. You should be supporting her, not spouting this ridiculous nonsense that Sara’s been feeding you.’
‘Audrey—’ Dan said forcefully, trying to break into her tirade.
‘I know why you’re doing it,’ she continued, condemnation in every stiff inch of her. ‘The two of you have got your heads together and made the whole thing up to cover up the fact that you’ve got a thing going between you. You’re an adulterer and she’s no better than a …’
‘Mrs Walker,’ Dan barked, apparently reverting to formality as nothing else seemed to be getting through. ‘If you dare say one derogatory word against Sara, I shall assume you’re hysterical and slap you.’
‘What?’ Her eyes and mouth were wide with shock but she must have seen something in his face that made her believe he would do what he’d threatened because she subsided ungracefully into the chair on the other side of Zara’s bed.
‘As I was saying,’ Dan continued, apparently calm again, but from her position Sara could tell from the way his veins were distended that his anger must have sent his blood pressure up. She would have to suggest that he have it checked, but for now she was still amazed that he would have sided with her against the rest of her family. No one had ever done that before. ‘Unfortunately, it’s the truth. I took that piece of plastic from the BMW and gave it to the police because I saw that there were fibres caught in it. Their forensic labs have confirmed that they were strands of top-quality vicuna and that they were an absolute match for the fibres in Sara’s coat—the one you gave to her and that she was wearing when you knocked her down.’
There were several seconds of horrified silence at the end of his recitation and Sara almost felt sorry for her parents when she saw the way they were staring at their beloved daughter … almost as if they didn’t recognise her any more … as if she’d suddenly grown a second head, or something.
‘All right!’ Zara snapped. ‘So it all went a lot further than I expected, but I still didn’t get what I wanted, and that was to get rid of the kid.’
It was all too much for her mother to cope with and she burst into noisy tears, unwilling even to be consoled by her husband.
‘Why did you have to go poking around? Why couldn’t you just leave it alone? After all, bones heal and she’s still carrying your precious baby … Oh, I’m sorry, it’s babies, isn’t it? There’s two of the ghastly ankle-biters in there, gradually bloating her body until she’s going to look like a hippo.’
‘Why, Zara?’ Frank demanded, obviously completely confused. ‘What went wrong? You seemed so happy until you couldn’t have children, but then Sara offered—’
‘Sara didn’t offer,’ she interrupted rudely. ‘Mum virtually blackmailed her into it because I said I couldn’t get pregnant.’
‘Well, there was very little likelihood that you’d be able to while you were taking the Pill,’ Dan supplied dryly.
Zara blinked, as though surprised that he knew that she’d been lying to him, but he was already moving on. ‘What I don’t understand is why you went through the whole pantomime in the first place.’
‘Typical man!’ she scoffed, tossing her head in a wellpractised move that sent her hair tumbling over one shoulder. ‘It’s obvious. It was all a game, just a bit of fun seeing