An Interrupted Marriage (Silhouette Special Edition) (15 page)

She heard Magnus come quietly out behind her, and then his arms slid about her waist, drawing her against him. She sighed. “I wish we didn’t have to go back.”

“You’ve enjoyed it?”

“Yes, of course, but—”

“But?” His breath feathered her ear.

“It’s been almost a dream world, up here. Now we have to face up to reality.”

“And you’re not very good at that, are you?”

Jade stiffened in his arms. She felt as though he’d drenched her in icy water, the cruelty of it taking her breath. She pulled away and turned to face him, shock and hurt showing on her face.

Magnus frowned, and cursed quietly. “I didn’t mean that!” he said forcefully. “Not the way you think. Jade, I’m
sorry.
“

Her lips felt stiff. “What...did you mean?”

He looked at her tight-lipped, and then shook his head. “This isn’t the time,” he said. And then, almost under his breath, he added, “Maybe there isn’t one.”

“For what?” She didn’t understand what he was talking about, or why he was looking at her so strangely. And yet it wasn’t a new look—she’d caught glimpses of it before—a baffled, wary scrutiny, as though he was unsure of something about her.

He said, “There are still things you don’t remember, aren’t there?”

“You know there are. Little things, mostly. It’s annoying, but not important.”

“You haven’t forgotten any of the important things?”

“I don’t think so.” She smiled. “But then, how can I know something’s important if I’ve forgotten it?”

Magnus didn’t seem to think that was funny. “Do you remember the...accident?”

Her smile faded. “No. But that’s normal, they said. Quite common.” Her car, they’d told her, had gone over a cliff, smashing onto rocks in the water below.

“If that young couple hadn’t come by,” he said, “if they hadn’t gone to the rescue so fast, you’d never have got out of the car alive.” His face looked drawn suddenly, the skin over his cheekbones taut and pale. “I’ve wondered if it
was
an accident. What were you doing on that cliff, anyway? Miles from home?”

She turned from him, her hands clutching the wooden railing about the deck. “I don’t know. I can’t remember—”

“You knew you were pregnant.” He sounded almost accusing.

The pregnancy must have been unplanned, inconvenient. It had been tacitly understood between them when they married that it would be some time before they could think about a family.

She turned to face him again. “You were very angry about that, weren’t you?” she asked him.

His head jerked up as if he’d received a shock. “Who told you that?”

“I could feel it. I thought, when you first visited me in the hospital, that you wanted to kill me, or kill the baby. That’s why I screamed when you came near.” In that terrifying world where she couldn’t distinguish between reality and the distorted images that filled her mind, she’d had strange fantasies.

Without moving from his stance a few feet away, Magnus seemed to withdraw from her, become more remote, his eyes sinking back in his skull. “You’d
lost
the baby.”

“I know. In the accident. But sometimes I thought she—”

“She?” Magnus queried sharply.

“I’ve always thought of it as she. A little girl, black-haired, with dark grey eyes. She had a little dimple in her chin, and long, curling eyelashes—”

Magnus was staring at her. She tried to explain. “For a long time she was very real to me. More real than what was going on around me. I think I resisted getting better because as long as I was sick I had my daughter, my baby, safely with me. Deep down I must have known that once I was cured, I’d have to let her go—admit that she was dead.” Her voice sank to a whisper of pain.

“You cried for days,” Magnus said hoarsely, “when you were under that latest treatment. I thought it was making you worse.”

Jade admitted, “I hadn’t allowed myself to mourn her before. Instead, I’d imagined her alive, and growing into a little girl, as she ought to have. I don’t remember how the crash happened, but it wasn’t deliberate, Magnus. I would never have taken my baby’s life.”

“And now you want to replace her?”

“I suppose that’s part of it. I do miss her.”

She hoped he wasn’t going to say she couldn’t miss someone who had never been a real, living person. Even though she knew that, the child who had been her shadowy companion was a sweet and tangible memory.

He didn’t. Instead, his eyes dark and brooding, he said with a peculiar violence, “
I hope you’re pregnant now, Jade.
I hope I’ve planted my child
—our
child—in you this week.”

“So do I,” she whispered, but the harshness of his face, his voice, stirred again that familiar apprehension that for days had been almost—though never quite—smothered by his determined concentration on the more enjoyable aspects of their relationship. Not just the sexual dimension, but other shared activities like reading and crosswords and walking. And talking, although this was the first time they’d talked about anything so personal, so important.

Magnus’s mouth twisted in a strange kind of smile. “Perhaps it’s what we both need to wipe out the past.”

* * *

Mrs. Riordan greeted Magnus with cool affection, and Jade with her usual distant courtesy. Jade thought that the older woman had never got over the humiliation of those early months after her stroke, when she had been forced to accept the most intimate services from her daughter-in-law. The loss of her dignity, for such an imperious person, must have been mortifying, and Jade’s renewed presence in the household was, she supposed, a continual and unwelcome reminder.

Ginette was unable to hide the bright curiosity behind her cheerful smile. “You both look more relaxed,” she said over dinner. “Your second honeymoon has done you good.”

Mrs. Riordan looked at her with faint distaste and asked her to pass the pepper.

Magnus slanted a lightning-fast glance at Jade, but she pretended to be only interested in her meal.

When they’d come home, he’d unpacked in their room and without comment replaced his clothes in the previously empty wardrobe.

Tonight he didn’t retire to his office after dinner, but stayed in the lounge watching television and catching up on some of the newspapers they hadn’t had the opportunity to read that week. And when Jade rose and said good-night, it wasn’t very long before he joined her in the bedroom.

She’d showered and put on a satin nightgown, its sea colour enhancing her eyes, and applied perfume to her skin. She hadn’t heard Magnus come in, and when she emerged from the bathroom he was standing in the middle of the room.

“Déjà vu,” he said softly, his eyes wandering from her hair, damp at the ends and a little untidy, over the low-necked, figure-skimming gown to her bare feet.

He walked over to her, and warm, hard fingers lifted her chin. His kiss lingered lightly on her lips. When he raised his head, his eyes were still closed. “You even smell the same,” he murmured, before he opened them and looked at her again. His glance was suddenly searching. “Did you used to—”

“Used to what?”

Magnus shook his head, stepping back from her. “Never mind. It—isn’t important.” His eyes passed over her again, and this time she thought there was a bitterness in them, mingled with unmistakable desire. “I’ll be with you shortly,” he said, and walked past her, closing the door of the bathroom behind him.

Jade quickly brushed her hair and got into bed, picking up a book that she’d brought with her from downstairs. It was silly to be nervous, she told herself. For the past week she’d been sharing a bed—as well as several more unconventional venues—with Magnus. Just because this was the first time since her homecoming they’d been together in this bed—the one they’d slept in and loved each other in for scarcely a year—there was no reason for her to be feeling like a new bride again.

Even then, her bridal jitters had been faintly ridiculous. It wasn’t as though they’d never slept together before. Jade had been sharing a flat then with Lida Farrell, but Magnus lived alone. After she’d spent the night at his place several times Lida had guessed, of course, that there was a man involved, but to her chagrin Jade had refused to satisfy her curiosity as to who he was.

Then had come the shock of Mrs. Riordan’s stroke and her emergency admission to hospital. Magnus had rushed to the hospital, then home to Waititapu and his younger brothers and sister. When he returned to the office he said to Jade, “I’m going to have to move to Waititapu for a while.”

“Your business—”

“I’ll commute. I can’t leave the youngsters to cope entirely on their own. I can at least be there at nights and weekends. I don’t know yet how bad my mother’s condition is, whether she’ll be able to return home. If she does, she’ll probably need nursing care for some time, if not forever—and my father’s will is still awaiting probate. The lawyers are dragging their feet. I suppose the farm accounts need sorting out. Dad was never good at the paperwork, and he was too proud and stubborn to let me help. Until that’s finalised I can’t make any arrangements about the farms, or anything else.” He passed a harried hand over his hair, closing his eyes for a moment.

Instinctively, Jade had moved closer to him, slipping her arms about him. “I’m sorry, Magnus. You know I’ll do anything I can—”

“Thank you. I must go back to the hospital this afternoon, and hope the doctors can tell me something more specific. Once I’ve cleared some of this backlog, can you hold the fort a bit longer?”

Of course she could, and she had.

The patterns of Magnus’s life shifted. Each evening he left the office at five and made the long drive to Waititapu. There were no more leisurely dinners followed by a nightcap at his flat and the inevitable slow, sweet lovemaking afterwards. One day he looked up from his desk as Jade came in carrying a pile of folders, and said, “I can’t stand this. Will you come home with me at lunch-time, Jade—to the flat?”

They left the office together at twelve, drove to his place and tumbled straight into bed. Afterwards they had to scramble into their clothes and hurry back, and she was sure that the receptionist was smirking behind her desk as they entered the building again, knew that the flush of passion hadn’t yet had time to fade from her cheeks, the soft lustre of fulfilled desire from her eyes.

She’d been distracted for the rest of the day, unable to concentrate, fumbling with her work.

At five, Magnus had thrown some papers into his briefcase and stood up, grabbed his jacket from its hook behind the door, and then turned to look at her.

She looked back at him, and something in his face changed. He came over to her desk, and put down the briefcase, dropping his jacket on top of it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m a selfish, unthinking swine. I shouldn’t have asked you to do that, at lunch-time.”

“You know I wanted you, too.”

“Oh, sure, you...enjoyed it, in a way. But it felt wrong, didn’t it? A bit sordid, in fact.”

Jade looked down at her electronic typewriter. He was right. She did feel as though something wonderful and shining had become slightly soiled. “It can’t be helped,” she muttered. “I know you don’t have time for me, with your family and...everything. There isn’t much we can do about that.”

“There is something,” Magnus said. “You could marry me, and come to live at Waititapu with me. We’ll be together at night, as well as during the day. When my father’s will is probated and we know what the prognosis is with my mother—and I’ve sorted out what to do about the farms, the children and everything—we’ll be able to move back to Auckland. But right now I don’t know when that will be, and...I need you, Jade! You’re too good for a hole-and-corner office affair. I want you to be my wife.”

Of course she’d said yes, and they’d been quickly and quietly married with only his business partners, his brothers and Danella, and Jade’s erstwhile flatmate and another friend as witnesses.

She’d bought herself a special frock for the occasion, and indulged in a trousseau of lovely undies and nightwear. That was before Magnus had discovered that his father’s business affairs were not only in a muddle, but that somehow he had managed to run the family farms into debt. Before the hospital discharged his mother, still needing a good deal of physical care. Before Magnus had returned grim-faced from a visit to the lawyers and said to Jade, “I can’t see getting Waititapu back on its feet in under four or five years. The only alternative is to sell up.”

It would have been another major blow for Mrs. Riordan, and an upheaval for Andrew and the older children, coming right after their father’s death and the shock of their mother’s stroke. It was Jade who had suggested that if Magnus hired another secretary, she could look after Mrs. Riordan, take care of the house and supervise the twins and twelve-year-old Andrew, while Magnus continued to commute to Auckland.

“I can’t ask you—” he’d protested. But she saw the faint light of hope in his eyes.

“You haven’t asked me,” she’d told him. “I volunteered. It’s the sensible solution.”

“It’s only for a while,” he’d said, giving in. “And Jade—I’m really grateful.”

* * *

Magnus came out of the bathroom, interrupting her memories. She looked over at him, his hair damp and tousled, his chest bare above a towel wrapped about his waist. He didn’t smile at her, his eyes lingering on her with a disturbingly remote expression in them.

For some reason Jade recalled Mrs. Riordan’s words.
He married you because he needed someone to give him practical help...

For a moment she contemplated asking him if it was true. But of course it wasn’t! He hadn’t known until after the wedding that there wasn’t any money to provide nursing for Mrs. Riordan, or hire household help. Had he?

Needing physical contact to disperse her thoughts, she held out her hand to him and murmured his name. He hesitated for a second, then crossed to the bed. “What do you want, Jade?” he asked, his fingers enclosing hers.

She tried to smile, feeling the blood rise in her cheeks. “You know what I want,” she said.

He was looking at her now with a dark, brooding intensity. His gaze slipped from her face to the thin nightgown that barely covered her shoulders, and dipped low between her breasts. “I think I can guess.”