* * *
Sara’s initial relief that she wasn’t going to be called upon to endure the torment of a honeymoon alone with Jonas was abruptly terminated when they reached the house and he coolly announced that he would take her case up to his room. ‘Forgive me, I should have said our room,’ he amended wryly.
Sara couldn’t move. She stood at the bottom of the stairs too shocked to edit her thoughts as she blurted out, ‘Do you mean we’ll be sharing a bedroom?’
One dark eyebrow lifted satirically. ‘It is the custom, and bearing in mind the fact that we’re supposed to be wildly in love, Vanessa would be rather surprised, to say the least, if we deviated from it. Of course I suppose we could always improvise—suggest to her that we enjoy the romantic folly of creeping secretly from bedroom to bedroom in the small hours of the night,’ he added with fine sarcasm.
‘All right, you’ve made your point. But I don’t want to share a room with you.’
‘No… I can see that,’ he agreed suavely, and then mocked dulcetly, ‘as I remember it, you said you didn’t want to make love with me either…’
‘You know the reason for that.’ She was so frantic that he might guess the truth that her voice was unusually sharp with tension. ‘I told you, I pretended you were Rick.’
‘Good heavens, not quarrelling already, are you?’
Neither of them had heard Vanessa come in, and she laughed at their expressions. ‘It’s all right; I’m not staying. Sam has suggested that I use your room tonight, Sara, so that you can have a token honeymoon at least. I’ve just come back to collect a few things. Are you taking her somewhere special tonight, Jonas?’
He recovered far faster than she could, smiling at his sister with a lazy mockery that made shivers of unwanted pleasure curl down Sara’s spine.
‘Yes,’ he agreed softly. ‘In fact I was just taking her there when you interrupted.’
Vanessa’s eyes widened and then she laughed. ‘I’m not sure which of us it is you’re trying to shock, me or Sara,’ she complained, her eyes drawn from Sara’s flushed face to the flight of stairs leading up to the bedrooms. ‘Take her into the drawing-room and give her a glass of champagne instead,’ she suggested with a grin. ‘I promise I’ll be gone in ten minutes.’
In fact it was fifteen minutes before Sara heard Vanessa’s small car drive away, and for every one of them she had sat in a grimly tense silence, refusing the drink Jonas offered and hating him more than she had ever thought it possible to hate a man she also loved.
She waited until the car had disappeared before attempting to speak her anger, which was so intense that she could barely get the words out.
‘How dare you humiliate me like that?’ she demanded bitterly. ‘How could you humiliate me in front of Vanessa by intimating…’
‘That I couldn’t wait to take you to bed?’
He was watching her face like a cat at a mousehole, she saw, and she was fearfully conscious that the room was filled with an anger that didn’t emanate only from her.
‘Since when has that been humiliation?’ he demanded bitingly. ‘Most brides would consider it perfectly normal, not to say flattering, that their new husbands were so eager to make love to them, but since we’re talking of humiliation, I could point out to you that I find it less than pleasant to be constantly reminded that in your eyes my child was fathered by a ghost. You’re very quick to tell me you won’t share my bed, Sara, but as I remember it you didn’t need much persuasion the last time.’
What he said was all too sickeningly true, and Sara blenched at what he must think of her. In his eyes she must figure no better than a cheat and a fraud, a woman who claimed to love another man, but who was willing to accept his embraces instead.
‘I’m tired, Jonas,’ she protested huskily and not untruthfully, unwilling to pursue her own thoughts to their conclusion and suddenly exhausted by the antipathy between them that kept her nerves in such a constant state of tension.
‘You look it,’ he replied. ‘I’ll take you upstairs and show you the room, then I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you for a while.’ The look he gave her was mockingly derisory. ‘The greenhouses will need watering.’ He glanced at his watch as he opened the door for her to precede him, and even that simple economic movement, that brief glimpse of tanned sinewy skin, was enough to make her pulses hammer.
His bedroom was larger than the one she had occupied during her overnight stay, its décor in keeping with the elegance of the room, the furniture antique and the colour scheme quite obviously chosen to blend in with the lovely faded Aubusson carpet on the floor. The bed was huge and very high, complete with solid mahogany top and tail boards. In a smaller room it would have looked ridiculous, but in here it looked exactly right.
The sheets were linen and monogrammed. Sara touched them reverently. ‘They belonged to my great-grandmother,’ Jonas told her. ‘They were part of her trousseau, apparently. I got Mrs Lyons to make up the bed with them this morning. They seemed rather more bridal than the easy-care ones Vanessa seems to favour.’
For some reason his words hurt—perhaps because they brought home to her all that she would never have. In that one brief action she had seen an agonising glimpse of the lover Jonas would be if he really was in love. She had had another the day he had tried to tell her what he was beginning to feel for her, but she had recklessly destroyed those feelings like a small child destroying a longed-for toy in a fit of rebellious pique, and now it was too late. She shivered, and instantly he frowned.
‘You’re cold. Go downstairs and I’ll light the fire in the sitting-room before I go out. Mrs Lyons has left us something to eat…’
Like a wooden doll, Sara let him guide her back downstairs. She had entered this marriage willingly; she could hardly complain now because Jonas didn’t love her.
CHAPTER TEN
AFTER the first week of their marriage, Sara told herself that she had lived through the worst and she could scarcely get any more unhappy. She had learned painfully what it was like to sleep in the same bed as a man who seemed completely unaware of her presence—and equally undesirous of it, while she… For the first couple of nights she told herself her restlessness came from the fact that she was not used to sharing a bed with someone else, but by the end of the week she knew she was wrong. The reason she was sleeping so badly, the reason she kept on waking through the night, was that part of her still hoped that one time she would wake and find herself in Jonas’s arms.
Why on earth even one part of her should be under such an illusion Sara had no idea. Since their marriage, Jonas had made it more than plain that he did not want her.
Now they had been married for two weeks, and today Vanessa and Sam were to be married.