Sharon Kendrick - The Baby Bond

There was a fractional pause. ‘Do you want me to break it to you gently?’

She cocked her head to one side and looked at him perceptively. ‘Is that possible?’

‘Not really, no,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘He had another woman, you see.’

His words confirmed her unspoken fears. Yes. Of course he had. Some part of her had known that all along. The part that wasn’t affected by her relative youth and lack of experience. The part that was passed on down through the generations and was known as a woman’s instinct. The part that had registered his complete lack of desire for her whenever he had looked at her. Angel swallowed.

‘He had another woman,’ Rory repeated baldly, because her total lack of reaction to his controversial statement made him imagine that she had not heard him the first time.

‘Yes,’ said Angel, and let out a long, low sigh. ‘That figures.’

‘Do you want me to continue?’ he questioned.

She drew her chin up proudly. ‘I hope to God that I’m not the kind of person who runs away from the truth, Rory. So, yes, please continue. Tell me about this woman. Does she have a name?’

Some indefinable emotion briefly escaped from the shuttered confines of his face, hardening his mouth into a forbidding line. ‘Jo-Anne. Jo-Anne Price.’

Angel wrinkled up her nose as the name struck a familiar chord in her memory. ‘And she’s Australian. Am I right? She worked as a temporary at the advertising agency.’

‘That’s right.’

‘She had just finished uni,’ Angel remembered, racking her brain. ‘And she had come to get work experience in England.’ Angel pushed a stray strand of hair off her forehead, finding that actually she seemed to know an awful lot about a woman she had only met once or twice. So how was that? Maybe Chad had spoken about her lots, and she simply hadn’t noticed. ‘Hadn’t she?’

Rory nodded uncomfortably. ‘Yes, that’s right. She had. Chad met her in a pub near the office, found her a temporary job at the agency, and, bingo, suddenly he was in love.’

Angel drew in a deep breath, stunned by his cruel candour, despite all her protestations that she could take whatever he had to tell her. ‘And I was his bride of less than a year,’ she reminded him bitterly. ‘So was he not still in love with me?’

There was a small, uncomfortable pause. ‘I think that Chad thought he loved you, Angel, and that’s why he married you.’ Rory’s face hardened again with the pain of the truth. ‘Only then Jo-Anne appeared on the scene, and…’

‘And?’ prompted Angel acidly, glaring at him, as though it was his fault.

Rory held his palms out in a gesture of apology, realising that he owed her the truth, however painful. ‘He wasn’t quite sure what had hit him. This wasn’t just a fling, you see. It was that once-in-a-lifetime thing—if you believe it exists. I don’t, personally.’ His face darkened. ‘But Chad certainly did.’

Angel winced.

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said—’

‘Oh, yes, you should!’ she declared fiercely. ‘I told you that I wanted the truth, and that’s exactly what you’re giving me. And, yes, you are absolutely correct in your assessment, Rory. Chad thought he was in love with me—that’s why he married me. And then…’ But she shook her head, unwilling to pursue it further. What on earth was the point of dissecting her relationship with her husband? Especially now. And especially not with his big brother.

But Rory did not prompt her, or press her to continue. Instead he sat back in his seat and raised the glass of brandy to his mouth to take his first sip, then he put the glass carefully back down on the table.

‘Chad couldn’t face telling you what had happened. Or me, for that matter. He and Jo-Anne just took off for Australia. They wanted to get away from anyone who might cast censure on their perfect relationship. A form of geographical escape, I guess.’

‘Well, not quite—since I presume that she had family living in Australia? And most parents wouldn’t really want their daughter involved with a married man, surely?’

‘No, you’re right. They wouldn’t.’ Rory frowned. ‘But that wasn’t going to be a problem. Not in Jo-Anne’s case, anyway. All her family were dead, you see. She was completely on her own, and I think that fact triggered a protective quality in Chad which he hadn’t realised existed.’ He gave a deep sigh, as though his next words were the hardest of all to say. ‘And it meant, of course, that they had something very big in common. They were both orphans—united against the world.’

Angel’s green eyes narrowed as something in his voice alerted a sixth sense in her. A sense of danger. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there, Rory? Something that you aren’t telling me?’

He gave her the kind of smile which told her she shouldn’t worry her little head about anything, but Angel had grown immune to men with dazzling smiles. Immune to most men generally. Broken marriages tended to have that effect on women.

‘Why don’t we take this one step at a time?’ he suggested silkily, but his eyes had taken on a watchful gleam.

‘Because you’re hiding something from me!’

He expelled the breath he had been holding. Damn the woman, and damn her intuition, too! ‘Okay then, Angel,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll give it to you in a nutshell. Chad and Jo-Anne went to Australia together and travelled around and were, by all accounts, extremely happy together.’

‘And how did you find all this out?’ she demanded. ‘You can’t have just pieced it together since Chad’s death. You told me that the accident only took place…’ she frowned to remember ‘…twelve days ago.’

This had been one of the questions he had been dreading answering. ‘He wrote to me just before Christmas,’ he admitted quietly.

‘He did what?’ Angel rose to her feet, her face disbelieving. ‘Then why the hell didn’t you tell me then?’

‘Because he asked me specifically not to—’

‘And blood is thicker than water, I suppose?’

‘That wasn’t why I agreed—’

‘And tell me, Rory,’ she cut across his words sarcastically, ‘if Chad hadn’t died, how long would you have kept news of his whereabouts from me?’

‘It wasn’t my decision to make. It was Chad’s. He wanted to speak to you himself. Face to face. Not by letter.’

‘But he decided to wait until after Christmas?’ she questioned frostily. ‘So why put off the moment of truth? For surely once he had seen me then he would be able to ask for a divorce.’

‘He had to. He wasn’t able to travel until then.’

Angel glanced at him suspiciously. ‘Because?’

This was proving a lot more difficult than Rory had imagined it would, but then he had quite forgotten the impact that his sister-in-law could make with those beacon-bright green eyes of hers. God, a man could lose his soul in eyes like that…And yet it wasn’t fair on her to pussyfoot around like this, was it? To search for polite platitudes where none would ever be appropriate.

‘Because Jo-Anne was expecting Chad’s baby,’ he told her bluntly, ignoring Angel’s shocked intake of breath as he ploughed relentlessly on. ‘And she was naturally precluded from flying in the latter stages of her pregnancy. Chad wanted to come and see you in person, to ask your forgiveness for his behaviour and to request an early divorce. And he wanted me to meet my brand-new nephew,’ he finished heavily.

Fragments of what he was saying began to make sense at last, and the picture that they formed in Angel’s brain had connotations which made her blood run cold.

‘You mean that they all came over?’ she demanded in horror. ‘Jo-Anne and Chad and—’