outside life? It was a question to which she didn’t want an answer.
She had thought that any marriage without love would be doomed to failure. She had never imagined herself walking down the aisle knowing that the guy by her side was only there because he had found himself in the unenviable position of having no choice. Duty and responsibility were two wonderful things, but she hadn’t ever seen them as sufficient. Raoul, on the other hand, had moved faster towards the inevitable—and she had to catch up now, because the stark alternative was even more unpalatable and she hated herself for her weakness.
‘I’ll marry you,’ she agreed, daring to steal a look at his face.
Raoul smiled, and realised that he had been panicked at the thought that she might turn him down. He never panicked! Even when he had been confronted with a child he hadn’t known existed, when he had realised that his life was about to be changed irrevocably for ever, he hadn’t panicked. He had assessed the situation and dealt with it. But watching her, eyes half closed, he had been aware of a weird, suffocating feeling—as if he had stepped off the edge of a precipice in the hope that there would be a trampoline waiting underneath to break his fall.
He stood up, thinking it wise to cover the basics and then leave—before she could revert to her previous stance, reconsider his offer and tell him that it was off, after all. She could be bewilderingly inconsistent.
‘I’m thinking soon,’ he said, feeling on a strange high. ‘As soon as it can be arranged, to be perfectly honest. I’ll start working on that straight away. Something small …’ He paused to look at her pinkened cheeks. Her hair was tumbling over her shoulders and he wanted nothing more than to tangle his fingers into it and pull her towards him.
‘Although you are the one who factored marriage into your dreams of the future,’ he murmured drily, ‘so it’s up to you what sort of affair you want. You can have a thousand people and St Paul’s Cathedral if you like …’
Sarah opened her mouth to tell him that anything would do, because it wouldn’t really be a true marriage, would it? Yes, they had known each other once. Yes, they had been lovers, and she had been crazy enough to think that he had loved her as much as she had loved him, even if he had never said so. But he hadn’t intended marrying her then, or even setting eyes on her again once he had left the country. He hadn’t wanted her then and he didn’t want her now, but marriage, for him, was the only way he could be a permanent and daily feature in his son’s life. Because she had rejected the first offer on the table, which had been to be his mistress.
Approaching the whole concept of their union in the way he might a business arrangement, maybe he had thought that living together would be the lesser of two evils. They would have learned to compromise without the necessity of having to take that final, psychologically big step and commit to a bond sealed in the eyes of the law. Or maybe he had just thought that if what they had fizzled out it would just be a whole lot easier to part company if they had merely been living together. And by then he would have had a much stronger foothold in the door—might even have been able to fight for custody if he’d chosen to.
Racked with a hornets’ nest of anxieties, she still knew that it would be stupid to open up a debate on the worth of a marriage that had yet to happen. What would that get her? Certainly not the words she wanted to hear.
‘Something small,’ she said faintly.
‘And traditional,’ Raoul agreed. ‘I expect you would like that, and so would your parents. I remember you saying something about a bracelet that your grandmother had given your mother, which she had kept to be passed on to you when you got married? You laughed and said that it wasn’t exactly the most expensive trousseau in the world, but that it meant a lot to both of you.’
‘Isn’t there anything that you’ve forgotten?’ Sarah asked in a tetchy voice. All her dreams and hopes were being agonisingly brought back home to her on a painful tide of self-pity. She thought that she might actually have been hinting to him at the time when she had said that. ‘Anyway, I think she lost that bracelet.’
‘She lost it?’
‘Gardening. She took it off, to … er … dig, and it must have got all mixed up with soil and leaves …’ Sarah shrugged in a suitably vague and rueful manner. ‘So, no bracelet to pass on,’ she finished mournfully.
‘That’s a shame.’
‘Isn’t it?’ She suddenly frowned. ‘So … we get married and live here …’
‘In this house, yes.’
‘And what will you do with your apartment?’
Raoul shrugged. His apartment no longer seemed to have any appeal. The cool, modern soullessness of the décor, the striking artwork that had been given the nod by him but bought as an investment, the expensive and largely unused gadgets in the kitchen, the imposing plasma screen television in the den—all of it now seemed to belong to a person with whom he could no longer identify.
‘I’ll keep it, I expect. I don’t need to sell it or rent it, after all.’
‘Keep it for what?’
‘What does it matter?’
‘It doesn’t. I was just curious.’
They were going to be married. It wouldn’t be a marriage made in heaven, and Sarah knew that her own suspicious nature would torpedo any hope of it being successful. As soon as Raoul had told her that he would keep the apartment she had foreseen an unpalatable explanation. An empty apartment would be very handy should he ever decide to stray.
She tried her utmost to kill any further development on that train of thought. ‘I suppose you have some sort of sentimental attachment to it?’ she prompted.
Raoul shook his head. ‘Absolutely none. Yes, it was the place I bought when I’d made my first few million, but believe it or not it’s been irritating me lately. I think I’ve become accustomed to a little more chaos.’ He grinned, very relaxed now that he could see a definite way forward and liked what he saw.
Suddenly the reality of Raoul actually living with them made her giddy with apprehension. Would there be parameters to their marriage? It wouldn’t be a normal one, so of course there must be, but was this something she should talk about now? Were there things she should be getting straight before she entered into this binding contract?
‘Er … we should really talk about … you know …’
He paused and looked down at her. She had one small hand resting on his arm.
‘What your expectations are …’ Sarah said stoutly.
Raoul’s brows knitted into a frown. ‘You want a list?’
‘Obviously not in writing. That would be silly. But this isn’t a simple situation …’
‘It’s as simple or as difficult as we choose to make it, Sarah.’
‘I don’t think it’s as easy as that, Raoul. I’m just trying to be sensible and practical. I mean, for starters, I expect you’d like to draw up some kind of pre-nup document?’ That had only just occurred to her on the spur of the moment—as had the notion that laying down guidelines might confer upon her some sort of protection, at least psychologically. The mind was capable of anything, and maybe—just maybe—she could train hers to operate on a less emotional level. At least to outward appearances. Besides, he would be mightily relieved. Although, looking at his veiled expression now, it was hard to tell.
‘Is that what you want?’ Raoul asked tonelessly—which had the instant effect of making Sarah feel truly horrible for having raised the subject in the first place.
In turn that made her angry, because why should he be the only one capable of viewing this marriage with impartial detachment? What was so wrong if she tried as well? He didn’t know what her driving motivation for doing so was because he wasn’t in love with her, but why should that matter? He didn’t