Her Pregnancy Surprise (20 page)

‘So…’ Caroline cleared her throat, then took a deep breath to calm the wild fluttering in her stomach.
Sadie was sixteen
…the same age Caroline had been when she’d lost her heart to Jack. ‘When did all this happen and how did you meet?’

Again, Sadie’s pale complexion was suffused with visible heat. ‘I’ve been seeing him for about a month now. His name is Ben and he goes to the local art college. A friend of mine has an older sister who goes there, and she got us tickets for a dance they were having. That’s when we met.’

‘He’s obviously older than you if he’s at college?’

‘Only by three years, Miss…that’s not much of an age difference, is it?’

‘No.’ Quickly gathering her scattered wits, Caroline combed her fingers through her mane of blonde hair. ‘That’s not much of an age difference at all. So now I know why you’ve seemed particularly distracted lately. Is everything going all right? Have your parents met him?’

‘Yes, they have. I wouldn’t see him behind their backs, Miss! Besides…I’m not one for going out much usually, and lately…well…I’ve been going out quite a lot, so they’d immediately know that something was
going on if I didn’t tell them. My dad likes him very much, as it happens…and my mum’s slowly coming round to the idea that I’ve got a boyfriend…I
think
.’ Sadie shrugged self-consciously. ‘She’s a bit of a worrier, my mum. I think she’s afraid that I might get into trouble.’

‘What kind of trouble?’ Even as the words left her mouth Caroline knew that Sadie meant becoming pregnant. For a moment anxiety made it hard to breathe.
Oh, God, don’t let history repeat itself,
she thought in anguish. Sadie
deserved
her bright future, untarnished by the pain of a romance that had gone wrong or a man who’d rejected her before she had really even grown into a woman…

She took another deep, steadying breath. At least Sadie had parents who loved her…who would in all likelihood stand by her should things go wrong. It was a very
different
scenario from her own cautionary story.

‘You know…I meant getting pregnant, Miss.’ Her pale hands tightening around her dark blue school bag, Sadie grimaced a little. ‘But even though I’m only young, I’m much more sensible than my parents give me credit for. Ben and I are just really getting to know each other still. We haven’t slept together, and when and if we do I’ll go to the doctor and get protection. I won’t jeopardise either of our futures.’

‘That sounds…extremely sensible, Sadie.’

Swallowing hard, Caroline forced a smile to her lips.
If only she and Jack had been nearly so sensible
…But
unassailable passion had made them its willing slave, and they’d been like pieces of driftwood afloat on a stormy ocean of insatiable lust. The word ‘sensible’ hadn’t even been in their vocabulary. Her stomach flipped over at the bittersweet memory.

‘But even when you’re trying to be sensible, sometimes things can get a little out of hand. You know that the Head of Sociology at school—Glynis Hopkins—does relationship counselling for teenagers? Why don’t you go and have a word about things with her? She’s very kind, and anything you tell her will be in the strictest confidence, I promise.’

Sadie’s face lit up with touching beauty. ‘Thanks, Miss…it’s been great to have you to talk to. I knew you’d understand.’

If only I didn’t understand half so well,
Caroline reflected painfully as she reached out to squeeze Sadie’s hand. ‘As your teacher and your friend I only want you to be happy,’ she replied softly.

Later that evening, although on edge, and once more consumed by thoughts of Jack after Sadie’s revelation that she was seeing a boy, Caroline did not have the heart to visit the little cove in search of some calm. Instead she opted to go for a drive—anything to try and distract herself for a while.

Usually the ocean would call to her whenever she was remotely upset, but not
tonight.
She was simply feeling too anxious about the parallels she’d drawn with Sadie
to even summon up the energy to walk on a deserted beach. Instead she drove by it, barely even glancing over at the waves that were splashing onto the shoreline.

The evening was drawing in, and the air had the sting of frost in it when she finally returned home and parked the car on the drive. Retrieving her bag from the passenger seat beside her, she locked up, then proceeded to walk wearily up to her front door.

‘Do you usually stay behind this late at school?’

Her heart in her mouth at the sound of that voice, Caroline felt her knees react as though they might fold like paper beneath her—just like a marionette when the puppet-master stopped working the strings. Spinning round in shock, she found Jack just a scant foot behind her, his face unsmiling, his blue eyes seeming to drill into her like lasers.

‘Jack! What are you—? How did you know I was teaching today?’

Feeling a hot shiver go right through her, Caroline helplessly focused on his mouth—on the little diagonal scar just above his top lip that he’d acquired when he was seventeen, after a fight with another boy who’d had a flick-knife. The way Jack had told it, the boy with the knife had come off far worse than he had, and had never bothered him again after that night. Looking at him now, Caroline could
easily
believe it. To her, he had always been like
electricity
…utterly necessary, but at the same time
dangerous
and unpredictable too…No doubt that teenage boy had completely underestimated what Jack was capable of.

‘I knocked next door and asked your neighbour.’ He smiled, but the gesture lacked warmth. Instead it was the lethal, purposeful smile of a man who knew he had the upper hand where she was concerned…would
always
have the upper hand as long as she couldn’t resist him. ‘She was most obliging too.’

Nicolette was an attractive forty-something divorcee who regularly combed the lonely hearts ads in the local paper with steely-eyed determination, in search of ‘husband number three’. Caroline didn’t doubt she had been only too happy to tell Jack practically
anything
he wanted to know. But—as much as she was overwhelmed by his presence—she wasn’t up to raking over old coals tonight, if that was what he had in mind.
Like the boy who had attacked Jack with the knife, she knew she would come off the loser.

Clutching her bag to her chest, Caroline frowned, secretly longing to get out of the biting wind and into the warmth of her centrally heated house. ‘What is it you want? It’s—it’s cold out here.’

‘Then why don’t you invite me in?’

Stepping towards her, Jack shrugged beneath the expensive leather of his dark brown jacket, the material making a soft creaking sound as he raised his arm and pushed back his hair.

Confusion, then resignation crept into her expressive eyes. Jack couldn’t deny his moment of triumph. He’d had a very brief moment of doubt, when he’d thought she might refuse him, but the tension between them
was palpable and he knew immediately how to manipulate it in his favour.
She was as jumpy as a newborn kitten around him,
he realised,
and he had no compunction…none…in taking the utmost advantage of the fact.

‘All right, then…just for a minute.’

The house was warm and inviting, and Caroline’s perfume—a mixture of jasmine and roses, if Jack wasn’t mistaken—lingered enticingly in the air. It was the kind of home that Jack had dreamed of living in growing up. There was a real sense of permanence and beauty about it, which no doubt Caroline’s artistic soul had liberally contributed to over the years.

Following her into the spacious hallway, he watched her hang up her jacket and bag on the coatstand and free her long curling hair from the back of her knitted cardigan, where it had become trapped. The perfectly blonde curls unravelled down her back with a jaunty bounce, and Jack had to slip his hand urgently into his jacket pocket to prevent himself from acting on the almost irrepressible urge to grab a handful of those luscious curls and twine them possessively round his fingers…

Turning to face him, she clearly had no inkling of the impulse that had gripped him so hard. ‘Would you like a cup of tea or something?’

He had a mind to tease her…to ask her what she meant by ‘or something’ and insinuate a very
different
agenda to the one on offer. But when Jack studied that beautiful and, it had to be said,
guileless
face of hers, he was suddenly filled with the memory of how devotedly
and ardently he’d loved her, and how she had taken that pure, passionate love he’d offered and destroyed it in one shocking, irretrievable act…

‘Jack?’

He shouldn’t have come.
But he’d been as unable to resist seeking Caroline out again as a drug addict was unable to turn down a free fix. He was playing a dangerous game that could only end in unqualified disaster, but he asked himself what he had got to lose when he’d already lost everything that truly meant anything in his life a long time ago.

‘Tea will do fine,’ he said, combing his fingers through his dark hair. But he said it without a smile, and he knew that she knew too that the past had suddenly bitterly intruded into his thoughts.

Crestfallen, she lowered her liquid dark gaze and turned determinedly away. ‘I hope you don’t mind drinking it in the kitchen,’ she threw over her shoulder, her voice falsely bright as she hurried ahead of him down the long, echoing hall…

‘Y
OU’VE
obviously got a good reason for being here, Jack, so why don’t you tell me what it is?’

Cupping her hands around her hot mug of tea at the kitchen table, Caroline decided there was nothing for it but to face head-on whatever was on his mind. She’d spent seventeen years racked with an inordinate amount of guilt about what she’d done…guilt and
fear
…so much so that she had been unable to form a lasting relationship with anyone. Every time she’d tried…every time she’d met someone she’d started to feel herself attracted to and who had been attracted to her…it hadn’t been long before that dreadful burden of guilt and terror had submerged any growing feelings of pleasure or hope in the relationship continuing, and eventually—
inevitably
—it had come to an end.

Hadn’t she carried that debilitating burden for long enough?
Her heart
longed
to be able to love again, to give itself wholeheartedly to the right man without fearing that she might fall pregnant and be forced to terminate
again. But, looking into Jack’s stare—Caroline was convinced it was contemptuous—it was obvious he didn’t think that she’d suffered
nearly
enough.

‘You live here alone?’ he asked, ignoring the question.

‘Yes.’

‘I always wondered what this place looked like on the inside,’ he commented, glancing around him, his gaze alighting on the beautiful Irish dresser with its eye-catching display of highly collectible blue and white china. ‘Your father would never let me over the threshold.’

Feeling shame at the memory, Caroline dipped her head.

‘So…you’re not in a relationship?’

Her head shot up.

‘No.’

She could have said more, but she didn’t
. Whatever she said, Jack would no doubt draw his own conclusion as to the reason for her still single status anyway, and she didn’t need to hear his self-righteous judgements against her.

‘So…you and the disapproving doctor aren’t an item?’ His lip curled slightly as he put his emphasis on the word ‘doctor’, and Caroline knew he was only looking for an opportunity to ‘put her in her place’ and keep her there.

Suddenly resentment welled up in her heart, for all the pain he had caused but clearly took no responsibility for, and she could barely speak over the abominable tightness that locked her throat.

‘That’s totally irrelevant. What interest can it possibly be to you who I’m seeing or not seeing? Let’s have this out for once and for all, shall we? You must have looked me up again for a reason and if that reason, is merely to drive home your point that you can’t ever forgive me for what happened between us, then save your breath! I already
got
that point—loud and clear. We were both so young when it happened, and we’ve both moved on a long way since then. You clearly got everything you wanted in life, so why come back here simply to dig up old unhappy memories?’

Leaving her mug on the table, her tea untouched, Caroline pushed to her feet and, hugging her arms across her chest in her dark green sweater, walked unseeingly over to the darkened kitchen window that only reflected back her own unhappy solitary reflection.

She tensed when she heard Jack rise from the table, sensing immediately that he had moved up behind her.

‘How do
you
know that I got everything I wanted, huh?’

His voice was hoarse with accusation and Caroline hardly dared breathe. Instead, his rage wrapped itself around her and held her prisoner in an icy vice, so that it was impossible to move out of its powerful sphere.

‘All I meant was that you look like you’ve made a success of your life, Jack…I didn’t mean that I—’

‘You think because I’ve got money now, and I’m clearly not the poor boy from the wrong side of town any more, that I’m a
success
?’

Turning towards him, everything in her taut with
trepidation, Caroline was utterly dismayed by the desolate and savagely bleak expression she saw written across his remarkably striking features.

‘I—I don’t know who you are any more, Jack. I don’t know enough about you to assume anything.’

The intoxicating scent of leather from his jacket—an expensive, almost
earthy
smell—mingled with the palpable heat from his body and made a devastating ambush on Caroline’s already acutely charged senses. The clock on the kitchen wall ticked with hypnotic precision, lulling her into a kind of frozen suspended animation, and outside somewhere a car door slammed.

When Jack’s hands locked fiercely onto her upper arms she dizzily registered the unmitigating
bite
of them with a soft, surprised groan. Then his mouth descended upon hers in a hot, punishing kiss that seemed to be governed by equal parts rage and desire, and Caroline was shockingly reminded that pain and pleasure could be as intimately and destroyingly intertwined as love and hate.

Her heart was thumping so crazily inside her chest that all the blood seemed to drain from her body, leaving her like a limp rag doll in his arms. That was until she came to her senses, felt the tenor of the kiss change into something even more dangerous, something even more potentially explosive, and became terrifyingly aware that every honed-to-perfection muscle and granite-like inch of his devastating body was pressed as intimately close to hers as a body could be, making them virtually inseparable.

Grappling with the urgent need to set herself free, as well as to stay right where she was and accept the earth-shattering consequences that contact with him wrought throughout her body, Caroline shoved against the implacable hardness of his chest and abruptly disengaged from his tormenting embrace.

‘No!’

The terror in her voice was unrecognisable to her.

Having no choice but to let her go, Jack smiled tauntingly against the back of his hand. He had started to wipe away her taste, as though it was somehow beneath him to bear it. Her eyes stinging with outraged, furious tears, and her mouth quivering defencelessly as she fought the frighteningly potent seductive allure of him, Caroline was shocked at how powerfully and treacherously the old magnetic attraction had asserted itself between them.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she demanded, moving nervously across the room to the door. ‘Get out of my house and don’t come back! Do you hear me? I want you to go! I want you to go right now and never come back!’

‘Still think you’re too good for me…don’t you, baby?’

The smirk on his lips and the derision in his eyes made Caroline feel quite wretched. But beneath the drowning sensation of despair that washed over her she couldn’t believe that he could even
utter
such a calumny with the smallest
grain
of conviction. She had never,
ever
felt that Jack wasn’t good enough for her, and she
had certainly never treated him like that either. He was quite unfairly getting her mixed up with her father—his fury towards Charles Tremayne blinding him to the truth of her own feelings towards him.

‘I’ve
never
thought I was too good for you! You’re twisting things around so that you can heap more blame on me…so that you can make me the brunt of all your old bad feeling towards my dad!’ Catching the corner of the door, Caroline pushed it deliberately wide. ‘I only invited you in because of plain good manners, but I should have listened to my better instincts and left you standing there! I’ve had a long day, and now I just want to be on my own and have some peace. Please go, Jack. Just go.’

It was hard to get his feet to move.
In those melting, feverish seconds when once again Jack had tasted the irresistible soft satin of the most lustfully sweet pair of lips he had ever kissed all his passion, all his urgent, relentless,
destroying
need for the woman in his arms, had been furiously and frighteningly rekindled. So much so that Jack really didn’t know what to do next. To incite some urgently needed self-preservation he ruthlessly reminded himself of what she had so callously destroyed, and as that old hatred towards her helpfully resurfaced, and made another painful score across his heart, he was finally able to move.

‘I’m going, Caroline, don’t worry.’

Unable to resist stopping in front of her before going out through the door, Jack deliberately took his time examining the wild rose colour that had flared so arrestingly
in her cheeks. ‘Living alone must be quite a challenge for you. I’d say that you’ve definitely been without a man too long, sweetheart. I’d certainly put my last dollar on it that that superior doctor friend of yours can’t effect the same shamelessly undone expression you’re wearing right now with
his
kisses. Am I right?’

When she didn’t reply, but glanced away from him instead with a resentful, hurt look in her eyes, Jack laughed softly.

‘Don’t fret…I’m certain we’ll be seeing each other around again quite soon…of that I’ve no doubt.’

‘Why? I should have thought that you’d want to go out of your way to avoid me.’

‘What? And deprive you of the beautiful memory of me and our happy times together for ever?’

‘You don’t have to be so cruel’

‘Yes, sweetheart…I do.’ Smiling arrogantly, Jack scathingly angled his jaw. ‘It helps remind me of your own cruelty towards me.’

As he turned to go, Caroline couldn’t resist asking one final question. ‘You still didn’t tell me why you came back here. I think you could at least have the decency to tell me that much.’

His mocking expression unchanging, Jack shrugged. ‘I bought my parents’ old house—the one that got repossessed…remember?’

Caroline experienced a heartfelt jolt. ‘I remember.’
He’d been enraged about that. She remembered the savage look on his face when he ‘d told her about it the
same night it happened…unhappily recollected that there had been tears in his dazzling blue eyes as he’d told her and how it had shocked her to witness them.
It was then that he’d asserted his intention of leaving this ‘Godforsaken place’ to make his name and fortune. When he came back, his mother would never be afraid to hold her head up in this ‘ignorant, small-minded town’ again.

‘What are you going to do with it? You’re not going to move back there, are you?’ Her voice almost dropped to a crushed whisper at the very idea, and she thought wildly that she’d have to move away, or even go abroad herself…
anything
but live in the same small town as Jack Fitzgerald again!

As if sensing her panic, Jack studied her with a deliberate taunt in his fierce blue gaze. ‘You’re just going to have to wait and see, Caroline…just like everybody else in this town.’

It was when he got back to his hotel suite, his body as restless as someone high on amphetamines from their charged encounter, unable to do anything but pace the floor for several minutes until he’d calmed himself down, that Jack reluctantly recalled the fear and panic he had witnessed on Caroline’s beautiful face.

He didn’t want to feel the slightest grain of compassion for her obvious distress. He didn’t want to remember that she’d trembled like a leaf in his arms when he’d kissed her so savagely—probably scaring
her half out of her wits as well as making him almost crazy with desire. But she’d looked so
good
…more than he’d been able to bear…and smelled so divine. She was a fully matured woman now, not a young, innocent schoolgirl, and she was even
lovelier
than ever.

Briefly touching his fingers beneath the bridge of his nose, Jack sucked in a deep ragged breath at the taunting waft of her perfume that clung to his skin.
Dear God! Why did this have to happen to him after all these years, when he’d spent a lifetime trying to forget her?
Why now, when he’d established himself as a man of means, when he could go anywhere, do anything, be with practically any woman he wanted? Why was it that the
only
woman he craved beyond any good reason was Caroline Tremayne?
It was like having an addiction to dynamite. And he didn’t doubt that pursuing her in any way would cause his whole life to blow up in his face.

Dropping down onto the bed and shrugging off his leather jacket, Jack impatiently undid the first three buttons on his black shirt, as if their being closed was choking him, and sat for long minutes just staring off into space, his hand against his chest, beyond furious that he should have to consider the effect of the stress he was suffering on his heart.

Why was it that she hadn’t married?
Impatiently considering the possible reasons, Jack could have crawled out of his own skin at not knowing the answer. Why was it that she wasn’t even living with someone, didn’t have a man in her life on a regular basis? Of
course she might well have been married and it just hadn’t worked out. Whatever. The mere idea that she was single now was enough to conjure up all kinds of impossible dangerous fantasies in his head.

It would have been so much easier for both of them if they’d been involved with someone else,
he realised. Jack had a strict code of conduct about fidelity. Even when Anna had been playing around he hadn’t retaliated by taking a lover outside of their marriage himself, and he wouldn’t have persuaded Caroline to cheat on her husband if she had had one…
no matter how badly he yearned to have her in his bed again
…His father had destroyed his mother with his heartless philandering. His cheating and drinking and lying had driven her to resort to ‘medication’ to numb her pain. Even as a young boy, Jack had realised that.

‘For God’s sake! The past is dead and buried…just leave it alone, why can’t you?’

Pushing to his feet, he walked across the room and, moving the velvet drape at the window aside, stared out at the quiet empty street below—the silence only broken by the sound of the ocean in the distance. Why
had
he been so compelled to return to this place? There was no salvation for him here…no one except the seller of the house he had bought for too high a price because he wanted it so badly to be glad that he’d returned to the town he was born in.

No
…his coming home was
nothing
like he’d once envisaged it would be. The sooner he finished overseeing
the renovations on the house the sooner he could leave, return to the life and work that had brought him an undoubted measure of success in the world…an undoubted measure of the
respect
he’d so badly craved as a young man. He should think about that and stop driving himself mad with thoughts of what he
couldn’t
have and definitely
shouldn’t
want if he knew what was good for him.
And he was damn sure that when he did leave Caroline Tremayne would mourn his going about as much as she’d grieve over some unknown stranger leaving town…