With cold dread, she cast her eye over the menu and chose something which would take ages to prepare and then attempted to speak as if she actually cared about it. ‘Why don’t we have the chateaubriand, to share?’
‘If that’s what you want.’
If only he knew that the only thing she wanted could never be hers. Lucy spoke quickly to the waiter and, once the order had been given, clasped her hands together as if praying for a courage she wasn’t sure she possessed.
‘Drakon. There’s something…’ Her voice trembled. ‘Something I haven’t told you.’
His body tensed—as if her tone was warning him that what she was about to say wasn’t just some undiscovered quirk of character. ‘Oh?’
She sucked in a deep breath but the air which made its way to her lungs was scorching her airways. ‘I can’t give Xander the brothers and sisters you want for him,’ she husked, ‘because I’m…’
Go on. Say it. Say those two painful words which you’ve never quite been able to get your head around.
‘I’m…infertile.’
There was total silence as he sat back in his seat and Lucy searched his face for some kind of reaction. But there was none. His enigmatic features were as unreadable as they’d ever been, and somehow that felt much worse than open pain, or anger.
‘Have you known about this for long?’
The conversational tone of his voice gave Lucy the hope she needed and she nodded. ‘I found out while I was nursing. It’s one of the reasons which made me leave midwifery. I found it…’ She swallowed as she tried to convey some of the pain she’d felt—not just the physical pain of endometriosis, but the emotional pain of knowing her womb was always going to be empty. ‘I found it increasingly hard to be around pregnant women and babies. Every day when I went into work, I was reminded of what I could never have.’ She searched his expression but still she could pick up nothing from his hard-featured stillness. ‘It’s one of the reasons I never really had any boyfriends before you, because most of the time I only felt like a shell of a woman.’
And now the cold words which began to fall like stones from his lips gave her a clue as to what he was feeling.
‘But you didn’t think it was pertinent to tell me all this before we were married?’
‘I meant to. But we didn’t really know each other back then, did we? It’s not the kind of thing you just casually drop into the conversation with a virtual stranger.’ She licked her lips. ‘And it didn’t seem relevant, because you said you didn’t ever want children of your own.’
‘But things change, Lucy,’ he ground out. ‘We’re both intelligent enough to realise that. People change their minds all the time. I would like to have been given the choice instead of having it taken away from me, without my knowledge.’
Lucy shook her head, but it didn’t change the fact that her throat felt as if someone were pressing their fingers against it, making it almost impossible to breathe. But she needed to breathe. To try to explain how it had been. How it had felt. ‘A couple of times I intended to tell you—but the right time never seemed to come up,’ she said. ‘The preparations for the wedding were so intense and all-consuming that I never found the opportunity to start a conversation about it.’
‘You could have made the time,’ he said repressively.
Her head was hurting and so was her heart. She could sense that he didn’t understand and she wanted to make him understand. ‘Did you ever see that film about Queen Elizabeth I—the one which won all the awards?’ she questioned suddenly.
‘What?’ he demanded, his dark look of accusation momentarily morphing into one of perplexity.
‘The English Queen was almost completely bald, and she hid her baldness beneath a lot of elaborate wigs,’ she rushed on. ‘But they said that anybody who had seen her in her true state could never look at her in quite the same way again. That she remained permanently ugly and scarred in the mind’s eye of the beholder. And that’s how I felt, Drakon. I didn’t want you to look at me as less than a woman. As some barren creature only to be pitied. I wanted you to continue to desire me and want me.’
He gave a short and bitter laugh. ‘So you lied to me?’
‘I did not lie!’ she protested. ‘The subject never came up.’
‘Oh, but you did. It was a lie by omission—and deep down you know that, Lucy.’
She stared at him, unable to deny his bitter allegation.
‘It was a lie by omission,’ he repeated with quiet force, his face a blur of rage. ‘In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman who doesn’t lie. It seems to be stamped into their very DNA. I learnt it first from my own mother, almost as soon as I’d left the cradle, and I’ve been having it reinforced on a regular basis ever since.’
Lucy heard a note of triumph which edged the cynicism in his voice as their meal was brought to the table, and she watched in excruciatingly tense silence as the meat was carved into neat slices and heaped onto their plates.
‘I guess in a way this has made you happy?’ she ventured, once the waiter had gone.
‘Happy?’ he echoed. ‘Are you out of your mind?’
‘Not at all. This must be a self-fulfilling prophecy for you,’ she said slowly. ‘You don’t like women and you don’t trust them—you never have. And I’ve just given you yet another reason to hate us as a sex.’ She sucked in a deep breath. ‘The only thing I can say to you, Drakon, is that I’m sorry. And if I could have the time back, I would do it differently.’ She could hear her voice starting to wobble. ‘Except that then you might never have wanted me and I would never have become your wife and learned to love you as I do.’
‘Love?’ he queried disdainfully. ‘You think I want your tainted love, Lucy? That I want to spend the rest of my life with a liar?’
Lucy recognised that their marriage was hanging precariously in the balance. That a delicate line as fine as a spider’s web was all that lay between happiness and loneliness. One clumsy move and it would all be lost. Yet surely what they had discovered together was worth fighting for. Fighting with every single breath in her body. ‘But we’re all capable of lies by omission. Of fashioning reality to look like something quite different,’ she pointed out quietly. ‘Even you, Drakon.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about your close friendship with Amy. So close that even your godfather told me he thought the two of you would get married and so did everyone else. And before you remind me that Amy’s gay—surely that’s all part of it. She hasn’t come out, for whatever reason—so it probably suits her very well to have people speculate on the true nature of her relationship with her business partner.’ She took a sip of her cocktail and felt the champagne and peach juice foam against the dry interior of her mouth.
‘That’s different,’ he snapped.
‘Is it?’ she questioned quietly. ‘Oh, Drakon.’ Her voice was filled with a deep sadness which she couldn’t seem to hold back. ‘Can’t you ever forgive me? Can’t we just put all this behind us and start over—now that everything’s out in the open?’
But she got her answer instantly as he rose to his feet, towering over her and the table, his muscular shadow seeming to swallow her whole.
‘I’ll tell you exactly what’s going to happen now,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m going to pay the bill and leave. And then I’m going outside to catch a cab. You can take the car.’
‘I don’t want your damned car!’
‘Really? Then how are you proposing to get back to Milton tonight?’
‘To Milton?’