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‘Oh. Well, I suppose that helps explain why you’ve managed to create such a lovely stable home for your children.’
‘Have I? They have one parent.’
‘One loving parent.’
‘It isn’t what I wanted for them.’ He hesitated, unsure just how much to reveal. ‘When Fiona left, the girls were torn apart with insecurity. She hadn’t ever even spent much time with them but that seemed only to make things worse. They believed that they were the reason that she left. They knew she hated being a mother.’
Lara winced. ‘She couldn’t have hated it that much. She had two children.’
Christian stared into the bottom of his glass. ‘I don’t think she ever thought it through. People don’t, always. Society expects a woman to be maternal. The last thing she said to me before she left was something like, “You wanted these children, well, it’s your turn to look after them.”’ He gave a short laugh. ‘The irony was that she never had looked after them. She employed nannies all the way through and I accepted that because I could see that she needed her work.’
‘Do you miss her?’
Christian felt the tension across his shoulders. ‘I feel bad for the girls. When your children are hurting, it’s impossible not to ask yourself if you could have done something differently.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know.’ It was the first time he’d ever spoken his thoughts aloud. ‘But there must have been something more I could have done to have stopped her leaving.’
‘You obviously loved her very much.’
Christian stared at her, wondering how she’d managed to come to that conclusion. ‘There was no love between us at all,’ he said flatly. ‘And that was the problem. Love is the one thing you can’t manufacture. Everything else can be bought if the money is there. Houses, nannies, good schools—they’re all available for a price, but love—no.’
‘You didn’t love her?’
Was he supposed to deny the truth?
Christian nursed his empty glass, wondering whether to fill it again. ‘I thought I did,’ he said finally. ‘But I was wrong. I married her for the wrong reasons.’
‘Did she love you?’
Why the hell was he telling her this? With a determined effort he put the glass down on the mantelpiece. He didn’t need a headache and he didn’t need to indulge in maudlin confessions. ‘She loved my money.’
‘I’m sure there was more to it than that,’ Lara said softly. ‘You have a lot of very special qualities, Christian.’
‘I thought you were searching for flaws.’
She gave a weak smile. ‘Yes. Thanks for reminding me. Did your wife stay at home when the children were little?’
‘Fiona was working on her laptop in the delivery room, thirty minutes after Aggie was born.’ While he’d been busy falling in love with his daughter.
‘But if she didn’t want to be a mother…’
‘Why did she have the children?’ He gave a twisted smile. ‘For me. She knew I wanted to create a stable family. If she’d confessed that she didn’t want children, I never would have married her.’
‘They must have been in a state when she left.’
‘For six months Aggie slep
t in my bed because she was afraid that, if she didn’t, I’d leave, too, when she was asleep.’ His voice was gruff. ‘And Chloe—well, she said less but she was hollow-eyed and listless. We stumbled on together and eventually we somehow managed to form ourselves into a family again. It’s starting to work. I can’t risk destabilising that.’
Lara looked at him. ‘You’re assuming that they’d be hurt if you had another relationship. But maybe they wouldn’t be.’
There was a long, difficult silence while Christian struggled against the masculine instincts that threatened to drive common sense out of his brain. ‘Maybe not.’ His tone was rough. ‘But that’s a risk I’m not prepared to take.’
CHAPTER NINE
‘HOW high was the wall, Eddie?’ Lara checked the young man’s observations and recorded them on the chart.
