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Her mobile phone rang for the umpteenth time. An unknown number every time. She’d learned not to answer it after the first few times, when the media’s questions had been fired at her before she’d even finished saying hello. But this number had a Swiss code in front of it.
‘Archana?’
Archie stopped, any response lodged in her throat.
‘It’s me,’ he faltered uncertainly. ‘Joe?’
‘Yes.’ She bit back the additional, I know who you are.
‘I just thought I should...’ He cleared his throat and she could imagine him, rigid and upright.
A neat shirt and tie under a round-necked wool jumper. She couldn’t imagine why he was calling. She couldn’t imagine it was to revel in her public humiliation. Of all her ex-husband’s flaws, taking delight in someone else’s misfortune had never been one of them.
Archie sucked in a breath, waiting for him to continue. Not wanting to reveal her confusion.
‘I saw your photo in the paper. I...wanted to call and congratulate you.’
‘Sorry?’ The word escaped before she could stop it. A squeak of shock.
‘The baby. And that you look...happy,’ he continued awkwardly, clearly mistaking her response. ‘In love.’
The words didn’t come easily to him. They never had. But she knew him well enough to know the sentiment was genuine.
‘No...’ she managed, her tongue struggling to wrap itself around any form of coherent response. ‘You’ve got it wrong.’
‘Archana.’ He silenced her quickly, and she could hear the rueful smile in his voice. ‘Please don’t do me the disservice of trying to spare my feelings, however well intentioned.’
‘I—’
‘You love him. That’s plain to see from the photos. Had you once, ever, looked at me in that way...’ He tailed off, clearing his throat again. ‘Well, perhaps if I had treated you to the same...passion as Kaspar Athari does, maybe you would have looked at me in that way. It’s clear that he loves you in a way that I never did. Or could. The way you deserve to be loved.’
Archie wasn’t sure what he said after that. She heard him speaking, as far from his usual reserved manner as she thought she’d probably ever heard him, but she was too busy hurrying across the suite to retrieve her laptop, to fire it up and find those images she’d refused to look at since that morning in Kaspar’s study.
By the time Joe ended the short conversation, she was sinking down on the dining chair, staring at the truth, which had been there all along—only she’d been too caught up in the puppy-dog expression on her own face to see it.
Only this time that wasn’t what she saw. It was as though all the scales had dropped from her eyes, taking with them all the preconceived notions she’d been carrying around. Suddenly, she could see what Joe could see. What he’d been trying, in his typically restrained way, to say. What the rest of the world could see.
A couple so patently in love with each other that it shone out from the page.
She didn’t look like a pathetic, lost puppy. She looked like a woman—an expectant mother—very much in control of her feelings. And it showed a man who, even as he dealt efficiently and necessarily with the unmistakeable threat to her well-being, never once let his hot, possessive gaze leave her. As though she was the only important thing in the room. In the entire world.
How had she failed to see it before?
It was time to go and claim her husband. The father of her unborn baby. She wanted a life with him, as a proper family. It was the reason why she’d jumped on that plane to the States those brief few months before, whether she’d realised it or not.
Archie stood with more purpose than she’d felt in a long time, striding across the expansive space to snatch up the phone and call Reception.
‘It’s Archana Athari, from the Princess Suite,’ she began unnecessarily. ‘I would like a taxi, please. To take me to me...home.’
It was done. In that instant she felt lighter, and more optimistic.
She could call Kaspar’s driver, of course, but he might call Kaspar, and she didn’t want to alert her husband to her change of plans.
He loved her. She knew that with a bone-deep certainty that she’d never realised existed in her before now. But she also knew that Kaspar was proud, and stubborn. He had pushed her away because he truly, incredibly, believed that her life was better without him in it. He couldn’t be more wrong, which was exactly what she intended to tell him. He wouldn’t want to hear it at first, but she didn’t care. She could convince him, however long it took. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to stack the deck in her favour as much as possible, and that included giving herself the element of surprise. If he knew she was at his house, he might suddenly decide he had more pressing matters and stay at the hospital, but if he got home to find her already there, he could hardly just walk out.
She threw everything into her suitcases with lightning speed. It wasn’t really difficult since she hadn’t unpacked the bags Kaspar had sent over that first day. Possibly that should tell her everything she needed to know. And then she opened the door to the hallway ready for the bellhop.
As Archie checked the room over for anything she might have forgotten, she wasn’t prepared for the first contraction that gripped her with almost no warning. Neither was she prepared for her husband to walk through the door as though she’d summoned him by her very thoughts.
