Marriage For Real. Emma Richmond

she added vaguely. ‘I couldn’t get you out of my mind. Couldn’t forget the way you touched me.’

      ‘And you think I can? I’ve been resisting you since you landed at my feet. I should be resisting you now…’

      ‘Then why aren’t you?’

      ‘Because, like you said, perhaps it is allowed to be a fool once in a while.’

      ‘And making love to me would be foolish?’

      Tracing one finger round her gentle face, moving aside the wisps of hair that had escaped from her topknot, he said quietly, ‘I don’t want to hurt you…’

      Putting her hand over his mouth, she said, ‘You don’t know that you’ll hurt me.’

      ‘No,’ he agreed.

      ‘Are you afraid that I’ll be like that woman in Fatal Attraction?’

      He gave a quirked smile. ‘No.’

      ‘I won’t hassle you…’

      ‘You already hassle me.’

      ‘You don’t behave as though I do.’

      ‘No,’ he agreed, but didn’t explain why.

      ‘I’m not very sophisticated.’

      ‘No,’ he agreed gently.

      ‘Or experienced.’

      Staring down into her big brown eyes, he gave a helpless sigh. He said something that she didn’t catch, and then he kissed her again. So gently, so thoroughly, so mind-bendingly sweet that she felt tears prick her eyes.

      Not wanting to talk any more, with her heart beating overfast and her hands shaking, she pushed his shirt off his shoulders and he began to undress her, slowly, methodically, eyes holding hers.

      Feeling light-headed and wanton, barely able to breathe, she gave in to bliss.

      He was so gentle, his hands so sure and experienced, and there was comfort in the fact that he was shaking too. And so began a time of magic. For her, at any rate; she had never been entirely sure about Jed. He wasn’t one given to laughter, or extravagance. He was more wry smiles and quiet amusement. She didn’t know what he thought of her behaviour; he never said. Neither did he ever say he loved her. Not then. But they were happy, and, although he never said the words she wanted increasingly to hear, he was never a reluctant lover. Quite the opposite, in fact.

      Rarely looking to the future, always living for the day, she teased him, laughed at him, and made love to him with an energy he said he found astonishing.

      She would leave him alone during the day whilst he worked. She would visit the friends she had made in the village, go touring by bus or bicycle. Sometimes he would go with her, show her places he had been, and in the evenings, in the warm velvet darkness of the night, they would be together, their lovemaking sometimes urgent, sometimes languorous. How long it would have gone on for if she hadn’t become pregnant, she had no way of knowing. Perhaps they would have married anyway, or perhaps they would have parted and it would have been just a wonderful memory of a magical summer.

      Looking back, she knew the probable date she conceived. August twenty-fourth. They had both taken part in the yearly organised walk in King Ludwig’s footsteps, and at dusk, when the bonfires had been lit, when the world had turned red with the reflected glow off the mountain peaks, he had led her back to the inn for the party that had followed.

      Eventually, they’d gone up to his room, to his big bed. Maybe they’d drunk too much wine, maybe the warmth of his mouth against hers, the heat of his slender body, had overridden the precautions they’d been taking. She had known him four months, and she’d loved him. Hadn’t been able to imagine a time when she would not be with him.

      She’d hesitated a long time before telling him about the baby, and she truly hadn’t wanted to pressurise him, make him feel that he’d had to marry her, and yet, thinking about it now, perhaps she had forced him into marriage. Perhaps subconsciously she had known that his honour, his sense of responsibility, would have made him insist.

      And perhaps it would have been all right if her pregnancy hadn’t been so awful, if she hadn’t felt so ill. Sick all the time, irrational, spotty. Hormones, the doctor had said sympathetically, but even knowing what it had been hadn’t stopped her being horrendous, had it? Shouting at Jed, blaming him, bursting into tears all the time…She still was crying all the time. And then contrite, begging his forgiveness. And he’d been so kind, gentle—long-suffering? She’d expected him to know what she’d been feeling without being told. Expected him to dance attendance, and yet, never by look, or deed, had he ever intimated that he regretted marrying her. Maybe if her parents had been alive, things would have been different. But there had been only Gran and it hadn’t seemed fair to drag her out to Bavaria just because her granddaughter had been having a baby. People had babies all the time. Childish, she told herself. You were childish. Spoilt. A spoilt little girl. And underlying it all, there had been guilt. Guilt that somehow it had been all her fault. Guilt for what she’d been doing to him, changing his life when he probably hadn’t wanted it changed. And she’d felt resentful, she admitted, that everything had been spoilt. Her happy-go-lucky, carefree existence, all gone.

      She’d had a lot of growing up to do, hadn’t she?

      And then had come the fateful trip to Scotland. She had insisted on going with him. He’d begged her to stay in Bavaria with their friends whilst he did his research for the next book; insisted that he wouldn’t be gone long, but no, she’d had to go with him. Poor man. Couldn’t even get away for a few weeks of peace and quiet. She’d insisted on doing the driving that day so that he could make notes…Another row—no, not a row. She’d shouted, and he’d gone all quiet. She hadn’t been going fast because the road had been winding and hilly. There had been a steep ravine on one side, mountainous outcrops on the other. Then the child had run out onto the road on a bend; a child from a family that had parked to admire the view, and had allowed their three-year-old daughter to get out and stretch her legs. There had been nowhere for Sarah to drive but off the road…

      If the safety barrier hadn’t already been weak from a previous accident; if the road hadn’t been wet…It had all happened so fast with no time to think, plan. They’d crashed through the barrier, sailed out into nothing, and hit a tree. The passenger side had borne the brunt of it, and Jed had sustained severe muscle and nerve damage to his left leg, a gashed forehead, concussion—and she’d lost the baby, which had meant that the reason for their marriage no longer existed. And that was what frightened her so. Only she hadn’t been able to tell the doctor that, had she? When he’d gone on about there being other babies, explained about hormone imbalances, about shock and grief…

      The soft tap at the door made her start, and she swung round almost guiltily as the door opened, her eyes swimming with tears.

      ‘Oh, Sarah!’ Jed exclaimed raggedly. ‘You can’t go on like this.’