early, but when he’d come to bed he would wake her, snuggling up, either for a cuddle or to make love to her, slowly, tenderly, languorously—or wildly, as if he couldn’t get enough of her.
When had it changed? she asked herself, but she knew.
The miscarriage—the most recent one, three months ago.
That was when it had changed—when he’d withdrawn from her so completely. When she’d lost the baby she’d thought they’d been so thrilled about.
Except maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe he hadn’t been thrilled at all. Maybe this last miscarriage had been a lucky escape, a narrow squeak in the midst of all the happy, fluffy stuff—choosing the colour of the paint for the nursery, discussing names, telling both sets of parents. Thank God they hadn’t told Sophie, but they’d been waiting till after the three-month watershed, till it was safe.
Except it hadn’t been.
She scrubbed away the sudden, unexpected tears and swallowed hard.
No. She wouldn’t cry again. Not after all this time. She’d cried all over Kate today, embarrassingly, but she wasn’t doing it again. It didn’t help. She’d cried an ocean after the first miscarriage, and it hadn’t done any good.
And neither had anything else they’d tried, because she still hadn’t conceived again until they’d gone down the IVF route.
Of course, the opportunity wouldn’t have gone amiss and, looking back on it, she realised that ever since the first miscarriage things had been different. She’d put it down to too much work and the pressure of the farm, but really he’d been avoiding her for years, she thought with shock, and she’d been more than happy to let him, because it meant she didn’t have to confront her fears and feelings.
Well, not any more.
She stared out of the window again, and decided it was time to act. If she was going to save her marriage, she was going to have to fight for it—she just wished she knew what it was she was fighting …
‘We can’t go away!’
‘Why not?’
Mike stared at her, puzzled by her sudden insistence, but maybe more puzzled by his own curious reluctance.
The truth was, with Joe already fixed to cover him for the coming weekend there was no reason at all why they couldn’t go away. Sophie was coming on Sunday afternoon, but otherwise they were free—the animals were taken care of, and Brodie would be perfectly content down at Joe and Sarah’s house with their two dogs. They spent a lot of time together anyway.
So there was no reason, no reasonable excuse he could give, and he wasn’t sure why he wanted to get out of it, but he did.
‘I’ve got a lot of paperwork.’
‘You always have a lot of paperwork.’
‘Yes, and it won’t just go away because we have!’
‘No, it won’t,’ she agreed. ‘It’ll still be there when we come back. Mike, nobody’s going to die if you don’t do the paperwork this weekend. We can do it together.’
‘No. Fran, I can’t go.’
‘Or won’t.’
He met her eyes, wondered what the hell was happening to them, and, abandoning his coffee, he walked out of the farm office and headed for the machinery store. ‘I haven’t got time to talk about this now,’ he said shortly. ‘I’ve got to get on. Brodie!’
And he walked away, haunted by the look of hurt in her eyes and kicking himself, but he couldn’t imagine what the hell they’d do for the whole weekend.
He laughed bitterly. His own wife, the woman he loved, and he couldn’t work out what they’d do alone together for a night? ‘Hell, man, you’re losing it,’ he muttered, and Brodie nudged his hand, her face anxious.
‘It’s all right,’ he said reassuringly, giving her a pat, but it wasn’t. It was far from all right, and he didn’t quite know how they’d ended up there.
He threw the chainsaw into the back of the pickup, loaded in the other tools he’d need for his day’s work, opened the cab door for Brodie and followed her in, starting up the engine and getting out of the farmyard before Fran came up with any other excuses for—what? Finding time with him?
Was that really such a bad thing?
Yet just the other night, when he’d sat with her and tried to get through to her, she’d stonewalled him and got a book out. Well, let her run after him. Maybe she’d find she wanted him after all …
‘So how did it go with Fran?’
Kate gave a ‘so-so’ shrug. ‘Not sure, really. I think I gave her something to think about. She’s coming in to see me at the end of the afternoon, before my clinic. I’m going to give her the details of that fertility-boosting diet I was telling you about, so that if they decide to go down the IVF route they’re starting from the best possible position.’
‘Do you think they will? IVF’s not cheap and they’ve invested a lot in the farm recently. I don’t know if they can afford it.’
‘I don’t know if they even want it,’ Kate admitted quietly.
Nick sighed. ‘It seems such a damn shame that they got pregnant and then she lost it.’
‘But at least we know she can get pregnant, which is a good starting point.’
Nick nodded and pushed a hand through his hair, the fingers parting it, leaving it rumpled. It was greying now, pepper and salt, but still thick, and her fingers itched to feel it, to thread through it as his had, to see if it still felt as soft and heavy as before …
She was going crazy. She had no business thinking things like that. She had to get on.
‘Just seems so tough, when the rest of the world seems to have babies at the drop of a hat.’
‘Well, you would know,’ she said, a touch bitterly, reminding herself of all the reasons why Nick was so very bad for her. ‘And at least if and when they have a child, it’ll know it was wanted.’
‘My children are wanted!’ he retorted.
‘All of them?’
He coloured and turned away, staring out of the window and stabbing his hand through his hair again. ‘We still don’t know—’
‘Yes, we do,’ she said with quiet emphasis. ‘James was sub-fertile. He’d had a test.’
Nick turned slowly and stared at her, his eyes carefully expressionless. ‘So—he really is mine?’
She felt her heart kick. ‘Yes, Nick. He really is. There’s no doubt at all. Jem is your son.’
The colour seemed to drain from his face, and for a moment he just stood there, rooted to the spot. Then he swallowed, dragged in a breath, straightened his shoulders. ‘Right. Um—got to get on.’
‘That’s it—run away.’
He stopped, paused, then started walking again, then paused once more with his hand on the doorhandle. ‘I’m not running, Kate,’ he said, defeat in his voice. ‘There’s no point. There’s nowhere to go.’
And, opening the door, he strode out into the waiting room and left her there.
‘Brodie, get out of the way! Come on. Stupid dog—what the hell are you doing?’
Brodie was tugging Mike’s trousers, trying to get him to play, but he wasn’t interested. He’d been clearing up fallen and dead timber all day, and he’d just found an old willow which had snapped halfway up the trunk but stayed attached, the top swinging down to make a ragged arch, but it was still hanging by a thick rope of twisted wood and bark, propped on a lower branch that had dug into the ground and broken its