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‘Adam…’
If he had caught the note of despair and rejection in her voice he had chosen to ignore it.
‘I saw you leaving the meeting and I came to see if you were all right. You shouldn’t be here on your own like this.’
He spoke the words under his breath, frowning as he glanced round the dim shadowiness of the hallway. ‘I know how you must be feeling, how much you must be hurt, but going to that meeting tonight… Fern, can’t you see that Nick doesn’t…?’
Suddenly Fern had enough. She didn’t want Adam’s pity, his compassion… his belief, like everyone else’s, that she was stupid enough actually to regret Nick’s going… to want him back…
‘That Nick doesn’t what?’ she demanded fiercely. ‘That he doesn’t want me, that he doesn’t love me, that he prefers Venice’s bed and her undoubted skill in it to mine and my equally undoubted lack of it?’
She turned on him, her eyes blazing. ‘Of course I can see those things, Adam. All of them and a lot more as well. Like the fact that Nick is weak, vain and manipulative… like the fact that he married me without loving me, lying to me even then. That he and Venice between them have made me not just an object of public curiosity and pity but of public amusement as well. The woman who would rather be a housekeeper than a wife… a woman. Oh, yes, I’ve heard the gossip, but it doesn’t matter any more, Adam, none of it. Just as Nick doesn’t matter any more either.’
‘Are you trying to tell me that you don’t love him any more?’
His disbelief was obvious. Obvious and humiliating.
‘Do you honestly think that I could? That any woman could? Do you really think me so lacking in intelligence, Adam… so devoid of self-respect? I never loved Nick.’
Suddenly it was a relief to say the words, to discard the burden of loathing and guilt that knowing that fact and yet being unable to express or admit it had caused her. There was relief also in being able to free herself of the label of a woman too emotionally vulnerable and intimidated to face up to the reality of what her marriage actually was.
Adam was staring at her as though he had never seen her before, she recognised, pain twisting savagely in her heart as she acknowledged that this would be the final meeting between them and that they would part not as lovers, not even as friends, but as two people forever destined to be unknown to one another.
‘You don’t mean that…’
His voice was hoarse… harsh… filled with rejection and anger, and Fern tensed in shock as he reached out and took hold of her, the fierceness of his grip threatening to bruise the soft flesh of her upper arm.
‘You don’t mean that, Fern,’ he repeated tersely.
Fern refused to be quelled. Why, after all, should it matter to Adam what she felt or didn’t feel for Nick? She would be gone out of both their lives very soon now. There was no need for her to hold on to the protection of the deceit she had lived with so long.
Her head lifted… as she looked at him, tensing her body away from his, the angle of her head proud and defiant, she told him fiercely, ‘I do mean it. I never loved him. Not before our marriage, not during it… not ever.’
As she spoke, the defiance left her voice and flatness took its place. She found after all that she could not continue to look at Adam.
‘I married him because he wanted me to. Because he said he needed me… loved me… and I stayed married to him for those same reasons. Those and the fact that I believed it was my duty to do so. My duty and my responsibility towards my parents and the way they had brought me up. I forgot, or perhaps I never knew, that my first duty should have been to myself. Perhaps if I had remembered or known that, both Nick and I would have saved ourselves a lot of misery.
‘And for the record…’ She took a deep breath and before she could lose her courage told him quietly, ‘I had already told Nick our marriage was over before he left me for Venice. Not that I expect you to believe me. Why should you?’ she asked tiredly. ‘After all, we both know that in your heart of hearts you must prefer to believe that I did love Nick.’
Silently she started to pull away from him, exhausted now, not just by the emotional intensity of what had just happened, but by all the strain and pressure of the preceding weeks as well.
&n
bsp; ‘Yes, you’re right. I would prefer to believe that,’ Adam agreed heavily.
She had known it all along, of course, but somehow hearing Adam actually say the words hurt more devastatingly than she had believed possible. She had thought herself inured to pain, anaesthetised to it, somehow safely beyond it, but now she was discovering that she was wrong, and the agonised low-voiced moan she couldn’t control broke through the exhausted silence of the tired air of the hallway, replacing it with a tension so intense and stifling that to Fern it felt almost as though she could hardly breathe in the density of the emotion-congested atmosphere surrounding her.
She took a step back into the open sitting-room doorway, grasping weakly for the door for support as she stumbled.
‘Fern…’
She froze as Adam grabbed hold of her. He was holding her far too tightly, far too close to his own body. She could feel the panicky thud of her own heartbeat as she closed her eyes and tried to stifle behind their darkness the sharp image of his face.
The scent of him surrounded her, male, musky, shockingly familiar; she hardly dared breathe because of the effect it was having on her.
From somewhere she found the will-power to grit her teeth and demand feverishly, ‘Let me go!’
To her astonishment, instead of complying with her demand, she heard Adam saying thickly, ‘No… I’ve let you go twice already, Fern, let you go and watched as you walked out of my arms and into Nick’s. There isn’t going to be a third time.’
