in a fury of Greek.
Sitting there like that, Claire closed her eyes tightly and waited for the furious stream to stop before grimly forcing herself to continue. ‘He said that research into male infertility is relatively new. That they are only just discovering that a man’s sperm count can change virtually by the m-month.’
‘I’m not listening to this.’ Reeling almost drunkenly, he made for his own room.
‘H-he said if you only did the test once,’ she stammered after him, ‘then you could have just chosen an unlucky day!’
‘An unlucky day?’ he repeated, coming to a taut standstill. Then he twisted his dark head to look at her. What she saw written on his face made her insides shrivel. ‘I had five years of unlucky days, Claire,’ he reminded her bitterly. ‘Try talking your way around that.’
She nodded, and swallowed, her blue eyes determined even while they swam with tears. ‘Ap-apparently he used to be Sofia’s family doctor,’ she explained. ‘He…’
‘No.’ Andreas immediately denied that. ‘Our family doctor is in Athens—’
‘And this doctor was Sofia’s family practitioner before she married you!’ Claire inserted. ‘He—he w-wants to talk to you—confidentially,’ she told him. ‘H-he says he has some information y-you may like to hear ab-about Sofia…’
Something happened, Claire wasn’t sure exactly what, but something most certainly cracked that death mask he was wearing clamped over his face—before he turned and walked into his own room without a word.
She wilted like a dying swan, her long neck folding over her knees. Her heart was pounding heavily, her lungs almost completely locked inside the tension surrounding them. And her brain seemed to have closed itself down altogether, because she could not think of a single thing beyond that expression on his wretched face as he’d walked away.
Something landed on the bed beside her. Her head shot up, blue eyes despairingly vulnerable as they searched out his. But Andreas had shut off completely. ‘Ring him,’ he commanded.
‘Ring who?’ She frowned in confusion.
‘This—doctor.’ A long, taut finger pointed stabbingly at something beside her on the bed; glancing dazedly down, Claire saw it was a mobile telephone.
‘But it’s the middle of the night,’ she protested.
‘Then wake him up,’ he insisted.
When she still didn’t make a move to do his bidding, he bent to snatch the telephone back again. ‘What’s the bloody number?’ he grated.
‘I d-don’t know,’ she confessed. ‘All I did was ask Nikos to take me to see a doctor and he drove me there…’
‘His name, then,’ he flicked tightly at her. ‘You do at least know the name of this doctor you allowed to make an intimate examination of you?’
‘An appointment card,’ she suddenly remembered. ‘Over there on the dressing table.’
Grimly he went to find it with hard fingers scattering things anywhere they fell. In that kind of tight, staccato way, he read the Greek symbols printed on the card, and stabbed them into his mobile.
Claire couldn’t sit there and take any more. She climbed off the bed and escaped into her bathroom, where she sat on the toilet seat and shivered while she listened to his deep voice firing questions at the poor doctor in Greek.
Then the silence came back. She continued to sit there, not sure what to do, until her flesh grew so cold she had to get up and pull on her bathrobe. Shoving her hands into the cavernous pockets, she allowed herself a couple of deep breaths for courage, then let herself into the bedroom again.
Andreas was sitting on the end of her bed, slumped over with his face buried in his hands. In all her life she had never seen anything so wretched as this proud Greek man reduced to this.
Without a second thought, she went over there, climbed onto the bed behind him then simply wrapped her arms around him as tightly as she could.
‘She lied to me,’ he murmured hoarsely.
‘I know,’ Claire softly replied.
‘She knew even before she married me that she was not able to conceive, yet she put me through all of that—torment. Month after month.’ He laboured the point, dragging his hands away from his face so he could use them to help him. ‘She made me feel useless and helpless and…’
It all came pouring out then. While Claire knelt behind him and held onto him tightly, Andreas drew a vivid picture of what it had been like to live with a woman whose obsessive need to bear a child had turned both their lives into a living nightmare. Not once had Sofia suggested the fault could be hers. Loving him and living in fear of losing him, she had created a web of deceit that involved cruel tricks and lies which kept him balanced on a knife-edge of failure and despair. By the time he had been driven into taking a fertility test himself, the sheer stress of it all must have lowered his count.
‘She took a terrible risk, allowing you to take that test,’ Claire pointed out soberly.
‘Not really,’ Andreas contended. ‘Either way, the torment would have continued. With a strong count she would have merely increased her efforts to conceive. A low count gave her a similar excuse to—be lucky one day—as she loved to say to me.’ A shudder ripped through him; Claire tightened her hold on him. ‘In the end I couldn’t bring myself to touch her, I felt such a pitiful failure,’ he admitted. ‘I think my withdrawal from her bed was what finally tipped her over the edge.’
And left him with yet another sense of failure he had to learn to live with, Claire realised sadly.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she murmured.
His shoulders flexed. ‘What have you got to be sorry for?’ he demanded. ‘It should be me apologising to you for the way I behaved before!’
‘I understood.’
‘You’re pregnant…’ he husked suddenly.
‘Mmm,’ she softly confirmed. ‘Are you pleased?’
He rubbed his hands over his face. ‘Shell-shocked, I think,’ he admitted, but some of the tension began to ease out of him.
‘I have something for you,’ she said, and, taking the pen-shaped tester out of her pocket, she gravely handed it to him over his shoulder. ‘Our baby,’ she confided. ‘What do you think—boy or girl?’
She tried to keep it light, but she could feel the emotion come roaring up inside him as he sat there staring down at that silly little indicator that had been such a source of pain to him before now.
When he moved, he did it with a throaty growl as he twisted around and tumbled her onto the bed. ‘From the moment you opened your lovely blue eyes on a dusty road back in London, I knew you were going to mean something special to me,’ he told her deeply. ‘But I never dared to so much as dream of anything this special.’
‘Here,’ Claire invited. ‘Feel for yourself just how special…’ And, taking hold of his hand, she fed it between their bodies so she could press his palm against her womb. There was nothing to show for the miracle taking place inside her, of course—it was much too soon—but the gesture itself was enough to have her drowning in the intense darkness of his wonderful eyes.
‘I am going to love you until the day I die,’ he vowed. ‘And I am never going to let you go.’
‘I’ve been trying very hard not to get away, please note,’ she pointed out gently.
‘Stubborn,’ he accused her softly.
‘In love,’ she amended.
For that, he kissed her. Kissed her long and deep and with a heart-stirring tenderness that told her more than anything else could do just how much he loved