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She felt bloodless, too—as if all the vibrant life of earlier had left her, never to return again. But she sipped the brandy and felt some of the warmth return.
He stared at her as she drank and she was aware of that burning gaze—as if he was committing her to memory. And maybe she was doing the same as she studied him back—filing away the image of that beloved face so that in some distant future she might be able to take it out and look at it without her heart breaking into tiny pieces.
His face was still dark and his voice distorted with some kind of painful emotion as he spoke. ‘So? No questions, Ashley? No accusations? No rightful fury hurled at me for my deception?’
Fury? Didn’t he realise that fury would be a preferable alternative to this terrible tearing pain which was tearing at her heart? ‘What would be the point? It’s true, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it’s true.’ His mouth tightened. ‘Don’t you want to hear my story?’
‘Why, will it change the facts, Jack? That you had a wife? Have a wife,’ she corrected painfully. ‘It’s usually something a man mentions to a woman—especially when he tells her he loves her and wants to marry her.’
‘Shall I tell you about my wife, Ashley? Shall I?’ he demanded. He was fired up now, a muscle working furiously in his cheek as he stood in front of the fire—so that the flare of the orange flames flickered behind him. ‘You know those bad dreams I sometimes have.’
‘The ones which used to make you pace the corridors?’ she questioned shakily. ‘The ones you never wanted to discuss?’ That had been something else he had kept locked away from her, she thought, realising that maybe she’d never known him at all. Just thought she had.
‘I didn’t want to discuss them because the past was something I wanted to forget—just as you prefer to forget yours. When I was with you, all I was concerned about was the present.’
But the past affected the present, Ashley realised as she stared at him. ‘When did the dreams start?’
‘Soon after I was discharged from the army, when I first returned to civilian life. At first, I barely slept a wink. I couldn’t get used to being in a bed. I felt caged by four walls. I thought I would never know peace again. I was shell-shocked. Literally.’
His voice tailed off and Ashley couldn’t help her heart’s automatic leap of sympathy as she saw the tortured expression on his face. But his war record is not the thing in question here, she told herself fiercely. His marriage is.
‘The dreams started to come nightly,’ he continued. ‘With cruel clarity they replayed scenes straight from hell—which took me straight back to the war zone. They spilled over into my days and I couldn’t seem to settle to anything. Apparently, it’s not an uncommon scenario for military personnel who’ve been engaged in active combat. I had a manager running the estates here and no pressing money worries which tied me to any one place. I’d bought some real estate in America before I’d taken up my commission and so I decided to combine a post-service holiday to Santa Barbara with a look at some of my properties there—before I decided what I wanted to do with my future.’
So far so good, Ashley thought as she put her empty brandy glass down, but she didn’t risk herself to speak. How could she when she knew what he was about to tell her?
‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen pictures of Santa Barbara?’ he questioned. ‘It’s an idyllic little place—as if somebody from Central Casting had gone there and slapped down a perfect beach town on the west coast of the United States. The ocean is amazing and the vegetation was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Blossom trees grow side by side with lush and exotic plants. Every blade on every lawn is clipped and every street is clean. It was warm and it was beautiful and I rented a house on a place called Hope Ranch—and the name seemed somehow symbolic after everything I’d been through. I could see ocean and mountains from my windows and there was a pool where I could swim every morning before breakfast.’
He sounded as if he were quoting from a travel brochure, thought Ashley—but still she said nothing.
‘To some extent, it worked. The rest and the beauty helped heal me but I guess deep down I was lonely and my experiences had left me craving company, and comfort. There was a realty agent who was showing me some of my properties and she happened to be blonde, and fun. For a while she was able to make me forget the horrors I’d seen, and, well, we became… close.’ He sighed. ‘It should never have been anything more than an affair—but somehow it didn’t quite work out that way. Because one day Kelly announced she was pregnant.’
Ashley bit back a gasp of horror. Did the story of his past have even greater ramifications than she’d thought? Did Jack also have a child?
‘So we married,’ he continued, ignoring the blanched expression on her face—unwilling to halt the painful telling of his story in case he couldn’t bring himself to start again. ‘Only it turned out that the pregnancy wasn’t real. It was a classic case of entrapment, only I was still too blitzed to have seen through it—and too much of a gentleman to ask to see the test results. But we were married and I was at an age to start thinking about settling down and so I thought… maybe this can work. And then, I have to make it work. Pride made me want my marriage to be a success. I gave it my best shot—I really did—but we were completely unsuited. We wanted different things out of life. Kelly liked spending my money, going to glitzy parties and flying from city to city. The life she craved was just one big adult playground, and that wasn’t me at all. I began to miss my home—the emptiness of the moors and the low English skies. I couldn’t see myself settling in the States and she took one look at a photo of Blackwood and refused to ever set foot in the place.’
‘So what happened?’ breathed Ashley.
‘I broached the subject of a separation and that’s when she started making astronomical alimony demands. Crazy stuff.’ He gave a hollow kind of laugh. ‘She wanted millions of dollars for a marriage which had lasted less than six months. I told her that while I would be fair, I had no intention of being stitched up. We were driving back towards Hope Ranch one day when she lost her temper and suddenly started hitting at me, and when that had no effect—she tried to grab the steering wheel.’
For a moment there was a long, strained silence and Ashley looked at him with a question in her eyes even though deep down she already knew the bleak answer.
‘We crashed,’ he finished baldly.
Ashley winced. ‘Crashed? ‘
‘We hit one of the tall palm trees they call “widow makers”. Kelly nearly didn’t make it—she sustained a brain injury and they operated on her that day. And when she came round from the anaesthetic, she was in a coma. A deep, vegetative state, the doctors called it.’ He swallowed. ‘In which she remains to this day.’
‘Oh, my God. Oh, how awful. Oh, Jack—I’m so sorry! How long… I mean, how long has it been?’ she whispered.
‘Two years.’
Two years? Suddenly, Ashley felt as if her life were a jigsaw puzzle which somebody had just snatched up and shaken all over the floor.
He gave a ragged sigh as he stared at her. ‘I know what you must be thinking, Ashley—that I’m heartless and cruel and deceitful, and, yes, maybe I am. But I sat by her bedside for weeks while they conducted test after test. Weeks became months. I had every top specialist flown in and they all said the same thing. That it was hopeless, that she would never recover—and that I should go away and live my own life. For a while I refused to believe them. I said that there were such things as miracles—but I was wrong. No miracle ever happened and eventually I took their advice and came home. But I wasn’t planning on meeting someone else and falling in love with her—nor on wanting to spend the rest of my life with her.’
But words which would once have thrilled her had lost their power to move. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’
