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Her pasted smile wobbled at that last lie, and disappeared totally when he answered suavely, 'Yes, isn't it? Nice for both of us.' His smile was warm enough but the azure eyes, set between thickly fringing black lashes, were quite cold. He turned to Grace, his poise, his, outward charm, masking a taut purposefulness that only Cleo could detect, and she shuddered uncontrollably as he apologised, 'Lunch would have been delightful, Grace.
But I promised myself I'd take Cleo for a break- she's been working much too hard lately. So I've planned a second mini-honeymoon.' A smooth movement gathered Cleo into the crook of his arm and she stood rigidly still, knowing this was a deadly game. She was sickeningly afraid of the outcome.
'I would have come for you sooner,' he was telling her silkily, 'but I got bogged down in endless meetings.' He made it sound like an apology, but the pressure of his hard fingers as they bit into the soft flesh just below her ribs told a different story. 'So, if you'll forgive the rush, Grace, I suggest Cleo throws her things together. We've quite a drive ahead of us.'
'But of course!' Grace's eyes, as they flickered between the two of them, were alight with approval. She had really taken to her new nephew-in-law, Cleo thought dully. Grace thought he was the best thing to happen to the Slade family in a long time.
Although she knew she was being manipulated, that a second honeymoon, a break for his hard-working, adored wife, was the last thing Jude had in mind, she tried to smile, to look happy. Her fight with her husband was a private thing, dark, demanding and devious. She would do anything to prevent it becoming public knowledge.
She had little choice but to obey Jude's smoothly worded yet heavily loaded instructions, she thought as a few minutes later she was bundling the things she'd brought with her into her suitcase. To have put up any objection, no matter how slight, would have been useless in the face of his sugar-coated determination. Besides, it would have alerted her uncle and aunt to the dark nuances of their private life. And that she did not want.
Sitting beside him in the Jaguar XJS he used when he drove himself, Cleo was lost for words. She picked a few openers over in her mind and abandoned them with a bleak compression of her lips. Whatever she said would only result in a row. He had fetched her from Slade House because she was his property, a fact he had been known to point out to her before!
Before too long she was going to have to tell him about the baby, and she didn't want to impart such wonderful information on the heels of yet another row. And she would have to choose her moment carefully because she hoped—oh, how she hoped!—that together they could talk things over and try to make the future come right.
He didn't have to love her, she confessed to herself with a deep-
seated disgust at her own humility, but if he could only revert to feeling about her the way he had, with respect and liking, then it would be something she could work on.
She closed her eyes, the bright sunlight of late spring mocking her depression. But she willed herself to relax, to find some of the strength she would need when Jude at last thought fit to break his scathing silence. And eventually she sank into an uncomfortable dozing state, the tension that stretched edgily between them unabated as mind images, rather than dreams, tormented her jumpy brain. They were all of Jude—of the way he had been and the way he was—and she snapped back into full consciousness" and became immediately aware that they were passing through deep countryside, unfamiliar to her.
'Been enjoying the sleep of the just?' His words were edged with sarcasm, telling her that he had known precisely when she had opened her eyes. 'Have 1 ever told you that you look innocent, like a child, when you sleep?'
She ignored that opening gambit. It was an invitation to yet another attack and she wasn't going to oblige him. Instead, finding a level tone, she asked,
'Are you making a detour for some reason? We should be back in town by now, surely?'
'When you chose to run away you left me with no option but to bring you back,' he replied obliquely, his profile ungiving.
'I did not run away!' she snapped, unable to prevent the hot words coming.
Their future was precariously balanced, not to mention their child's, and this infighting wouldn't achieve anything useful, she was well aware of that. But she didn't see why she should always be put in the wrong. 'You knew where I was, and why,' she qualified stonily.
'I knew you'd run out on me. You could have worked with Luke just as easily from home,' he stated unequivocally. And, morosely, she supposed he was right. She had been running away from a situation that was intolerable.
And as if he'd read her thoughts, he told her levelly, 'Things can't go on as they are,' and she wondered, with a wrench of pain, if he'd decided to go for a divorce, after all. He could be extracting no pleasure from the bitter thing their marriage had become. Even his revenge, his need to humiliate her, had to lose its savour eventually.
'So what are you going to do about it?' She heard herself sounding surly, though that hadn't been her intention, and averted her head to stare out of the window, appalled by the ready sting of tears in her eyes, determined he shouldn't see them, because that would be the final humiliation.
'Start talking it out,' he informed her coldly. 'It's more than time.' He changed gear smoothly and gentled the softly growling vehicle through tight bends which had clusters of stone cottages on either side, and the tiny flicker of hope his words had brought to life was doused by the acid of past experience.
'Do you mean you'll actually let me get a word in among those accusations you're so good at?'
She bit the words out snappily then, for some reason, began to tremble as he told her, 'That's why I decided to borrow Fiona's cottage for a day or two.
We can have complete privacy—and I've a feeling we're going to need it.
I've a few things to say to you, and no doubt you'll have more than a few to say back,' he added drily, halting at a leafy intersection and peering at an ancient finger post.
'It's quite a time since I visited,' he imparted with the coolness of a stranger, and she stared at him, hardly able to believe that he had actually gone to such lengths in order to talk things out. And he was saying, 'Fiona's in Paris at the moment. Part business, part pleasure, so we shall have the place entirely to ourselves.'
A few hours ago that thought would have appalled her. She had gone to Slade House to escape the torment of living with him. But now, he had said he wanted to talk things out, would allow her to have her say, and that was progress. A tingle of real hope rippled through her, and she was looking through rose-tinted glasses when they drew up in front of a squat stone cottage bordering the narrow lane, and Jude introduced, 'Fiona's hideaway.
Small but secluded.'
'It's perfect!' It was tiny, like a child's drawing, a straight, peony-bordered path leading from the wicket to the centrally set front door. The rest of the garden was given over to vegetables in tidy rows.
Cleo couldn't imagine Jude's elegant sister barrowing manure, forking and hoeing, and Jude, following her thoughts in the almost uncanny way he had, said, 'An old boy from the village has the use of the garden in return for keeping an eye on the place. It works well. He gets all the fresh fruit and vegetables he needs, and she feels the place is safer from the attention of vandals if it looks as if someone with a spade is about to come out of the garden shed.'
