Accidentally Expecting!

‘Just something you happened to be reading?’ His voice was calm but as cold as ice. ‘I don’t think so. There are at least a dozen downloads in that folder. You’ve been searching the Internet for anything you could find on this one subject, and you didn’t just chance on it by accident, did you?’ When she hesitated, he added, ‘Don’t lie to me, Ferne.’

If only he would return to being the Dante she knew, and not this frightening stranger. She tried to find some warmth in his eyes, but there was only a cavern of emptiness that filled her with dread.

‘I won’t lie to you, Dante. I knew you had a problem.’

‘Who told you? Hope, I suppose?’

‘Yes, she was worried about you. You had that funny turn on the ladder the day of the fire, and then a bad headache.’

‘And you both put two and two together and came up with five. I was sick with smoke that day, but you had to make a big thing of it.’

‘All right, you think we were fussing about nothing, but people who care about you do fuss. That’s how you know they care. You told me once that Hope has been the nearest thing to a mother that you’ve known since your own mother died. Well, mothers fuss. They may have to hide it, but it’s what happens.’

‘So, she told you-when? How long ago?’

‘I-’

‘How long ago?’ he repeated relentlessly. ‘Before we came away together?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve known all this time?’ he said softly. ‘There was I, like a fool, thinking I could guard my privacy, never dreaming you were spying on me.’

‘I wasn’t spying.’

‘This is spying.’ His voice was like the crack of a whip, making her flinch back.

‘Is it wrong to care for you, to want to see you safe?’

‘My safety is my own affair.’

‘Not always,’ she said, beginning to get angry. ‘What you do affects other people. You can’t spend your life cut off from everyone.’ She drew a sharp breath. ‘But that’s what you’ve tried to do, isn’t it?’

‘That’s my business.’ His face was deadly pale, not white but grey. ‘Is that why you came with me? As a kind of guardian, watching over me like a nurse with a child-or worse?’

‘I never thought of you like that.’

‘I think you did-someone so stupid that he has to be kept in the dark while he’s investigated behind his back.’

‘What did you expect me to do when you kept the truth from me?’ she cried.

‘You’ve been hiding secrets from me,’ he shouted.

‘I had to, but I didn’t want to. I always hoped that you’d come to trust me.’

‘But that’s the irony; that’s the ugly joke. I did trust you. I’ve never felt so close to anyone.’

‘Then you were fooling yourself,’ she said hotly. ‘How could we be close when you were concealing something so important? That’s not real closeness. That’s just a pretence of it on your terms.’

‘Exactly: “how could we be close when you were concealing something so important?” That says it all, doesn’t it? When I think of you watching me, judging me, adjusting your actions to keep me fooled…’

He drew a sharp breath, and she saw sudden, bitter understanding overtake him. ‘That’s the real reason you refused to take that job, isn’t it? And there was I thinking that maybe you wanted to be with me as much as I-Well, it just shows you how a man can delude himself if he’s stupid enough. I must remember to pay you back the money you sacrificed for me.’

‘Don’t you dare say that!’ she cried. ‘Don’t you dare offer me money.’

‘Do you feel insulted? Well, now you know how I feel.’ His voice rose on a note of anguished bitterness. ‘But can you also understand that at this moment I can’t bear the sight of you?’

CHAPTER TEN

AS IF to prove it, he turned away and began to pace the room, talking without looking at her.

‘What a laugh I must have given you!’

‘You don’t really think that?’ she said. ‘You can’t. I have never laughed at you.’

‘Pitied, then. That’s worse. Can’t you understand?’

Wearily, she understood only too well. Dante was staggering under the weight of humiliation as he realised how close he’d come to opening his heart to her. For years he’d held off, never risking deep emotion and trust, until he’d met her. Now he felt betrayed.

She’d known that he guarded his privacy, but it was worse than that. He shut himself away from the world’s eyes in a little cave where he dwelt alone, and even she wasn’t allowed to venture. She thought of his loneliness in that bare cave, and shivered.

‘I’ve always wanted to talk to you about it,’ she said. ‘I hated deceiving you. But I’d have hated it more if you’d died, and you might die if you don’t have it properly checked.’

‘What is there to check? I know the chances.’

‘I wonder if you know as much as you think you do!’ she said in a temper. ‘You’re a conceited man, Dante, proud, arrogant and stubborn, in a really stupid way. You think you know it all, but medical science moves on. If you’d let the doctors help you, something could be done. You could be fit and strong for years ahead.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said harshly. ‘Don’t tell me what happens with this, because I know more about it than you ever will. I’ve watched what it’s done to my family, the lives it’s ruined; not just the people who suffer from it, but those who have to watch them die. Or, worse, when they don’t die, swallowing up the lives of the people who have to care for them. Do you think I want that? Anything is better. Even dying.’

‘Do you think your death would be better for me?’ she whispered.

‘It could be, if it set you free, if I’d made the mistake of tying you to me so that you longed for my death as much as I did.’ A withered look came into his face. ‘Except that I wouldn’t long for it, because I wouldn’t understand what was happening to me, wouldn’t know. Everyone else would know, but I’d know nothing. I’d just carry on, thinking I was a normal man. And I would rather be dead.’

Then he stared at her in silence, as though his own words had shocked him as much as they had her. When the silence became unbearable, Ferne said bitterly, ‘What about what I want? Doesn’t that count?’

‘How can you judge when you don’t know the reality?’

‘I know what my reality would be like if you died. I know it because I love you.’

He stared at her with eyes full of shock, but she searched them in vain for any sign of pleasure or welcome. This man was dead to love.

‘I didn’t mean to, but it happened. Did you ever think of what you were doing to me?’ she pleaded.

‘You weren’t supposed to fall in love,’ he grated. ‘No complications. We were going to keep it light.’

‘And you think love is like that? You think it’s so easy to say “don’t” and for nothing to happen? It might be easy for you. You arrange things the way you want them, you tell yourself that you’ll get just so close to me and no further, and that’s how things work out, because you have no real heart. But I have a heart, and I can’t control it like you can.

‘Yes, I love you. Dante, do you understand that? I love you. I am deeply, totally in love with you. I didn’t want that to happen. I told myself the same silly fantasies that you did-how it could be controlled if I was sensible. And it crept up on me when I wasn’t looking, and, when I did look, it was too late.

‘Now I want all the things I swore I’d never let myself want: to live with you and make love with you, marry you and bear your children. I want to crack jokes with you, and hold you when you’re sleeping at night.

‘You never thought of that, did you? And you don’t think it matters. I wish I was as heartless as you.’

‘I’m not-’