AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Shh… Lie still.’
Tristan’s face swam in front of her, grave and perfectly still, as if it had been carved in granite. Lily felt the pain recede a little as he brushed the hair back from her forehead and stroked his fingers down her cheek. He was here, and the sheer strength of his presence soothed her. Whatever had happened, Tristan could make it all right again.
With his hand still warm against her cheek, Lily let herself be pulled back down into blissful oblivion.
So this was his punishment.
Tristan felt the ache of exhaustion bite into his bones and scream along the muscles and nerves of his arm. Lily was asleep again now, her exquisite face as pale as milk from all the blood she had lost, but still he forced himself to go on stroking her hair, her cheek. As a gesture of comfort it was so pitifully small, so very inadequate, but it was all he could do.
All he could bloody well do.
He had promised to protect her, to keep her safe and he’d failed. Spectacularly. He had offered her security, and thought that that was nothing more than a luxurious home. A name.
And in the end that name had counted for nothing. A title and a bloodline and all the Romero riches hadn’t kept their baby safe, because the only thing that could have done that was Tristan himself.
And he wasn’t there.
A baby girl, the doctor had told him. His jaw set like steel and he kept his eyes fixed unblinkingly ahead, refusing to look down at the fragile figure in the bed. Her peacefulness was like a deliberate reproach, because he knew that soon he would have to shatter it when he tried to explain to her just what she had lost. Outside a watery winter dawn was breaking over Barcelona, filtering into the room through the slats of the blind. They seemed to Tristan like bars of a prison.
A prison of guilt, in which he would serve a life sentence.
‘You’re here.’
Her voice was a whisper—barely more than a breath—but it made Tristan jump just as if she’d shouted. He forced himself to look down at her, but suddenly found that his throat had closed around and he couldn’t speak. Yes, I’m here. Where I should have been all along.
He nodded.
‘I thought I’d dreamed it earlier,’ she said softly.
‘No. You didn’t dream it. I’m here.’
‘That’s good, but…’ Her eyelashes fluttered down over her cheeks for a moment and her brows drew together in a frown. When she looked back up at him her eyes were clouded with anxiety. ‘But that means I didn’t dream the rest either, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes. I’m afraid so.’
Her face was ashen and she spoke through bloodless lips. ‘What happened?’
Tristan stood up abruptly, turning his back on her and going over to the window. It was early afternoon, and a pale winter sun had broken through the leaden clouds and was now making the wet city streets gleam like polished silver. Finding the words, speaking them without breaking down, was going to be the hardest thing he had ever done, but he had to be strong for her.
He had done so little else, after all.
‘It was something called a…’ He stopped, ruthlessly slashing back the emotion that threatened to crack his voice. ‘…a placental abruption. That’s what caused the bleeding. By the time I found you, you had lost a lot of blood, and the baby…’
He squeezed his eyes very tightly shut for a second, as if that could dispel the image of what he had found when he’d finally let himself into the apartment late last night. But there was a part of him that knew already that it would always be there in his head, a lifelong reminder of his culpability. Savagely he thrust his clenched fists into his pockets and turned around. Dios, he had to at least look at her when he said this.
‘The baby had died already.’
The only movement she made was to close her eyes. Apart from two small lines between her fine brows her paper-white face was completely composed, so that for a moment he thought she might have slipped back into her morphine-induced slumber. And then he saw that tears were running down her cheeks and into her hair in a steady, glistening river.
He stood, stony and utterly helpless in the face of her silent, dignified suffering. Slowly he approached the bed and sat down beside her again, picking up her hand from the sheet. It felt cold, and his chest contracted painfully as he looked down and saw how very pale and fragile her fingers looked against his.
‘I’m sorry.’ His voice was a low, hoarse rasp.
Almost imperceptibly she nodded, but her eyes stayed closed, shutting him out of her private grief. It was hardly surprising, he thought bitterly. It was his fault. How on earth could he expect her to forgive him when he would never be able to forgive himself?
Especially when she eventually found out the rest, and understood the devastating extent of her loss: that by the time he had found her she had lost too much blood, and they hadn’t been able to stop it coming and had had to operate to remove her womb…
That she had not only lost this baby, but any chance she might have had of having any more.
Because he hadn’t been there.
After a few more minutes he got up and very quietly left the room. She didn’t open her eyes, so she never saw the tears that were running down his face.
Steadily the room filled up with flowers, exotic fleshy blooms sent by Scarlet and Tom and Maggie and the cosmetics company and all the crew from the perfume advertisement shoot, which made the air turn heavy with their intoxicating hot-house scent. Nurses came and went, some silent and compassionate, some brisk and matter-of-fact. Lily was indifferent to them all.
She felt hollowed out and as insubstantial as air. All the feelings that had nagged at her before that fateful night at Stowell—of emptiness and futility—came back now; swollen to huge and grotesque proportions, ballooning inside her until there was no space for anything else.
Which was good, she thought distantly, watching a nurse change the bag of fluid that had been dripping into her arm, because at least it stopped her from thinking about Tristan. Longing for him.
She wondered where he was; if he had gone back to wherever he had been once he had broken the news about the baby. The image of his set, emotionless face as he told her what had happened kept coming back to her, and the carefully controlled way he’d said, ‘I’m sorry.’
It must have been hard for him, she recognised that. So hard for him to keep his relief from showing, but typical of him to try so dutifully.
The nurse smiled kindly, folding back the heavy hospital blankets to check the dressing covering Lily’s scar. ‘Your husband rang, señora,’ she said in her cheerful, sing-song Catalan. ‘To ask how you are and to see if he might come back to see you this afternoon?’
Lily turned her head away, biting her lip as several explanations for Tristan’s desire to see her flashed into her brain; none of them good.
‘I… I’m not sure…I…’
She looked down. The nurse had peeled back the gauze dressing to show the livid scar that cut across her pitifully flat stomach. Lily felt her insides turn cold with horror, everything in her recoiling from the square of torn and deflated flesh and what it meant.
The nurse seemed pleased.
‘Healing nicely,’ she said with a complacent smile, dabbing iodine onto Lily’s skin as if she were glazing pastry. ‘You will be able to go home in no time.’
Lily moistened her cracked lips with her tongue. ‘But will it happen again? Next time?’
The nurse seemed to freeze for a moment, and then several different expressions crossed her face in quick succession: shock, pity, fear—and finally, as the doctor appeared in the doorway, relief.
‘The doctor will explain everything.’ She patted Lily’s hand, hastily gathered up her tray of equipment and bustled towards the door.
When she went back later, she found Lily curled up into a foetal position, her face turned to the wall. Thinking she was asleep, the nurse was just about to tiptoe out again when Lily said, ‘I’d like you to telephone Señor Romero and tell him not to come. Today, or any day.’ ‘Ah, bambino…’ The nurse crossed to the bed in a rustle of starch and compassion and touched Lily’s shoulder. ‘Do not say that… A husband and wife must stick together in such terrible times. That is what marriage is for; for love and support…’
Slowly Lily turned over, and the expression on her face shocked the cheerful nurse into silence. Later she described it to her colleague on the ward as like an animal who knew it was dying and wanted to be left alone to do it.
‘Not my marriage,’ she said dully. ‘My marriage is over now. There is nothing between us any more. Please tell him.’
There was a primal, ferocious glitter in her eyes as she spoke. Nodding mutely, the nurse bolted from the room.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Stowell, England. August.
‘DEARLY beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of God to witness the marriage of Scarlet to Tom…’
Lily stared fixedly down at her ringless hands, clasped so tightly together on her knee that the knuckles gleamed, opal-white against the flowered silk of her dress.
‘God and the world’s media,’ muttered Scarlet’s brother Jamie beside her as the drone of helicopters circling the cloudless blue sky outside threatened to drown out the thin voice of the vicar. Lily managed a smile. The small church at Stowell was packed to the gills, and, while she would much rather have slipped anonymously into a back pew, Scarlet had other ideas.
