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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
'You LOOK VERY pleased with life this morning,'
Maddy told her mother-in-law when Jenny called to see if the younger woman needed any shopping.
'Mmm...' Jenny agreed, soft colour tinging her face as she remembered the special sweetness of the very private and passionate way in which Jon had demon-strated to her just how much he did love her.
'You're looking very well yourself,' she smiled back at Maddy.
'I feel great,' she acknowledged. 'I'm worried about Max, though.' She started to frown.
'He isn't sleeping at all well and—'
'Well, I know he's been concerned about Ben's threats to change his will,' Jenny offered.
'No, I don't think it's that,' Maddy denied. 'We'd both hate to leave this house, of course, but at the end of the day if we had to...'
Jenny's frown matched Maddy's now as she caught the anxious undertone in her voice. The obstetrician might have given Maddy the all clear but Max had made it more than plain to his family that nothing and no one was to cause his wife the slightest degree of concern.
'Have you asked Max if anything's wrong?' Jenny queried.
Maddy gave her a rueful look.
'I've tried but Max insists that there isn't, but I know there is, Jenny. He's been having the most dreadful nightmares night after night and they're getting worse, but he simply won't discuss them with me and...' She paused, reluctant to expose to anyone else the way in which Max seemed to be distancing himself from her.
'He has been through a very stressful time recently,'
Jenny reminded her. 'I've never seen him react the way he did when you were in hospital, Maddy. We were all relieved, of course, when they were able to bring your blood pressure under control, but for Max the strain must have been unbearable, especially...'
Jenny stopped.
'Especially what?' Maddy pressed her determinedly.
Jenny sighed. Jenny was beginning to wish that she had kept silent, but Maddy was looking increasingly distressed and Jenny knew she would have to finish what she had started.
'Max was afraid that he might lose you, Maddy,'
Jenny began gently. 'The consultant had explained to him what might potentially happen to you. And—and to the baby if you didn't respond to treatment, and Max....' Jenny bit her lip.
'Max told me that he couldn't endure the thought of losing you and that if it were his decision to make, then to save your life he would have instructed the hospital to terminate your pregnancy—'
As she heard Maddy's shocked gasp, Jenny reminded her quietly, 'Max loves you very much, and we are talking about a situation where he feared that if you hadn't responded to treatment, both yours and the baby's lives would have been lost. However, the consultant told him that you would have had to have been part of that decision had it needed to have been made. Max had wanted to make the decision for you to spare you.'
As Jenny saw her daughter-in-law's face, she sighed guiltily. 'I'm sorry, Maddy, I shouldn't have said anything.'
'No. I'm glad that you did,' Maddy told her truthfully. 'I had no idea. The hospital never said...'
And neither had Max!
Maddy gave a cold shudder and placed her hands protectively over her body. The thought of anyone or anything harming her baby aroused all her fiercely protective maternal instincts.
Half an hour later after Jenny had departed with the supermarket shopping list—although Maddy was fully recovered Max was insistent that she didn't do anything that might overtire her—Maddy made her way to Max's study.
He looked up as she walked in, the immediate pleasure lightening his eyes dimming to wariness.
'Your mother's just been,' Maddy told him quietly.
Walking over to the window and keeping her back to him Maddy continued, 'I told her how worried I've been about you.'
'What on earth for? I've told you I'm fine, Maddy.'
It was strange what knowledge could do. Now, beneath the surface irritation in his voice she could hear quite plainly other and darker emotions.
'No, you're not,' Maddy contradicted him fiercely.
'How could you be when...' She swung round to face him, her eyes brilliant with anger and pain.
'Jenny told me, Max. She told me about what might have happened to our baby.' There was no way that Maddy could bring herself to use the word that had filled her heart with such anguish and rejection.
'What!'
She knew immediately that Max understood what she was trying to say.
'She had no right,' he began furiously. 'There was no need—'
'No need?' Maddy's voice shook with emotion.
'You had chosen my life above our baby's and you say there was no need for me to know.'
'Maddy, please try to understand,' Max begged her desperately, leaving his desk to go to her, watching white-faced as she stepped back from him, ignoring the silent appeal of his outstretched hand.
'I couldn't bear the thought of losing you, even though...' He was the one who had to turn away now, as his own feelings overwhelmed him.
'Even though what, Max?' Maddy demanded, her voice was as sharp with pain as his.
'Even though I knew you would hate me for choos-ing you above the baby,' Max admitted. 'The children we already have need you and I... There's no way I could bear to live without you,' he told her.
'Do you think it's been easy for me?' he demanded when she made no response. 'Do you think I haven't suffered, cursed myself in my heart over and over again...hated myself...? In my worst moments I've even imagined that...' He stopped, unable to tell her about the true awfulness of his nightmares.
Max closed his eyes. Having admitted so much he might as well admit the rest.
'And if you want the truth, Maddy, if I had to live through the whole hellish thing again I'd still make the same choice. I thought I was strong but I'm not.
I'm selfish and weak. You' re my life, Maddy.
'Don't say any more,' Maddy begged him.
Max waited, tensing his body against the pain of seeing her walk away from him, of knowing that he had destroyed her love for him. But to his astonishment, Maddy was actually walking towards him.
When she reached him she lifted her hand to his face, her eyes luminous with emotion as she touched his skin.
It shocked her that he could have borne so much pain without saying anything to her.
She had known, of course, how much he loved her and their children, but the raw naked intensity and depth of the emotion she was now seeing came as a revelation to her.
'I can't bear knowing that I wanted to destroy our child,' he told her emotionally. 'And I don't—can't—
blame you if you hate me for it, Maddy.'
'I don't hate you,' Maddy told him softly adding,
'and Max, it wasn't our child you wanted to destroy, it was me you wanted to save!'
As she watched him, Maddy could see from his expression that she hadn't managed to reassure him.
His voice cracking with pain, Max told her, 'I even actually thought...wanted...' He stopped, groaning.
Then, covering his face with his hands, he said thickly,
'I wished that this child had never been conceived.'
He drew a deep shaky breath. 'And now,' he stopped and then told her harshly, 'it haunts and torments me, Maddy, that somehow he or she will know and that when it is born, it will be born hating me for...for what I contemplated doing.'
'Max!' Maddy's voice rang with shocked compassion. 'No, you mustn't think that.'
'I should have been the one to protect you both and not... But I couldn't bear the thought of losing you, Maddy, and now I can't bear to think that this child when it is born will believe—'
'Max, stop it!' Maddy commanded him firmly.
Wrapping her arms around him and holding him tightly, she whispered to him, 'You're torturing yourself unnecessarily. Look at me,' she demanded.
The unfamiliar note of command in her voice surprise
d Max into obeying her. The tears had gone from her eyes now and they were clear and calm.
'I promise you, Max, this baby, if it knows anything, will know that it was conceived in love, created out of love...our love for one another and for it.'
'I was so afraid that if you knew what I'd felt...what I would have done...you'd stop loving me,' Max confessed, as the loving reassurance of her words soothed his anguish like cooling healing balm applied to a raw festering wound.
Maddy looked at him steadily, her eyes full of the feelings she wanted him to see.
