In Bed With a Stranger (7 page)

‘I knew anyway. I’ve followed your career as much as I could. I read about your George Cross in the papers. I was so proud.’ She gave a swift, sad smile. ‘I have no right, I know that. But you must be, Sophie.’

Caught off guard, her mouth full of some kind of spicy chickpea thing she’d absent-mindedly picked up from one of the bowls in front of her, Sophie could only nod frantically.

‘Anyway, a toast to you both,’ Juliet said, picking up her untouched glass and holding it aloft so the golden liquid gleamed. ‘To your marriage and your future together. May it be joyful and untroubled.’

Kit looked at Sophie as he raised his mineral water. To her shame Sophie’s glass was almost empty.

‘To all of us,’ she said brightly, in an attempt to dispel the tension that crackled in the sultry evening. ‘To a happy, untroubled future.’

Juliet took a tiny sip of champagne. Sophie tried very hard not to drain hers.

‘So, tell me about the wedding,’ Juliet said, putting her glass down again and looking at Sophie. Sophie could see the anguish in her luminous eyes, and understood the meaning of the term ‘noblesse oblige’: the effort required to keep the façade of gracious courtesy in place. ‘Have you set a date?’

She glanced at Kit. He looked distant to the point of boredom but the restless tap of one long finger against the square arm of the couch betrayed his tension. Her heart squeezed with love and longing.

‘We haven’t even decided what kind of wedding it’s going to be or where,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m not the kind of person
who’s been fantasising about ivory silk dresses and gigantic cakes since I was old enough to say “wedding planner” so it really cannot be small enough or private enough for me. A deserted beach would be good …’ She trailed off, but the silence crouching in the shadows around them threatened to swamp them. Desperately she ploughed on. ‘Lots of my friends have had register-office weddings, but they can be a bit … well, soulless. You come out wondering whether you’ve just witnessed two people pledging to love each other until they die, or applying for planning permission for a house extension.’

Juliet’s smile was wistful. ‘What about the chapel at Alnburgh?’ she said carefully. ‘It’s tiny, and so beautiful.’

The tension that had been building in the still air cracked. From opposite Kit gave a muted sound of disgust and got to his feet, dragging a hand through his hair before turning to face Juliet. His silver eyes were luminous with anger.

‘And unfortunately not licensed for public marriages. And since it turns out I’m not technically a Fitzroy …’

‘Oh, Kit …’ Juliet stood up too. The expression on her face was almost defiant, but her voice ached with compassion. ‘I wondered if you knew. If you’d somehow worked it out.’ She looked down, taking a second to regain her composure. ‘That’s why I wanted to see you. You
are
a Fitzroy. Alnburgh is yours.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘W
HAT
the hell are you talking about?’

Through a fog of adrenaline Kit was dimly aware that his hands were bunched into fists at his sides and that his voice pulsed with anger. He didn’t care.

‘
I
saw Ralph’s solicitor,’ he went on, not bothering to stop his lip from curling into a sneer. ‘Ralph’s will made it very clear
I
was nothing to do with him, and he had no intention of letting his family estate fall into the hands of
your
bastard son.’

Juliet took a tiny gasping breath. Her eyes were like headlamps, fixed on his, her face pale.

‘
I
thought he might do something like that. It’s why
I
knew
I
had to get in touch. Ralph wasn’t your father, Kit, but …’ she took another quick breath ‘… but his older brother was. Which means it’s you, not Jasper, who is the rightful heir of Alnburgh.’

Once, on duty, Kit had been set upon by a gang of insurgents and dragged into a back alley where they’d kicked and punched him repeatedly before he managed to get away. That scene, complete with the taste of blood and acid in his mouth, the pain under his ribs, came vividly back to him now. He turned away, mentally searching for something to hold onto.

‘Ralph’s older brother …?’

‘Leo,’ Juliet said quietly. ‘Leo Fitzroy.’

Memories shifted and rearranged themselves. A portrait that used to hang in the hall at Alnburgh before it was moved to some less prominent position. A uniform. ‘He was in the army,’ Kit rasped. ‘He died in the Falklands.’

‘No.’ He heard Juliet sigh. ‘No, he didn’t. He fought there, and as time passed and he never came back to Alnburgh that was what people assumed. Ralph didn’t set them straight. It reflected well on the family, and it explained why there was no funeral.’

Kit rounded on her. ‘What was the truth?’

Wrapping her arms around herself, as if for comfort or protection, Juliet moved away from the table with its virtually untouched dishes. ‘I don’t know where to start.’ She gave a shaky laugh. ‘Even though I’ve been rehearsing telling you all this in my head for weeks.’

‘Start at the beginning.’ From the couch, Sophie spoke. She was sitting very still, her head bent so that Kit couldn’t see her face, but her voice was calm and quiet. ‘Start with when you met Leo.’

Kit’s heart was beating hard. He wanted to go to her, wanted to pull her against him and bury his face in her hair, but he couldn’t move. Juliet went over to light a lamp hanging from the wall, the match illuminating her face for a second, clearly showing the lines of age and sorrow etched there.

‘I suppose the beginning is when I met Ralph,’ she said slowly, moving over to one of the lemon trees, cupping a fruit in the palm of her hand. The light from the lamp threw a circle of gold around them all and cast their shadows on the terrace wall. Kit remembered when Juliet used to come in to say goodnight to him in his turret bedroom at Alnburgh.

‘I’d just finished boarding school and was terribly naive and sheltered,’ she was saying in the same soft voice he remembered. ‘My parents wanted me to go to Switzerland to some kind of finishing school, mostly because they didn’t know what else to do with me while they waited for me to
find a suitable husband. Then one weekend a friend invited me to go with her to a house party at Alnburgh.’ She pulled a face. ‘The seat of the Earls of Hawksworth. My mother was delighted.’

On silent feet the manservant, Philippe, returned, impassively loading the plates back onto the tray, topping up glasses, lighting the candles in the lanterns on the table. As he moved away Juliet came to sit down again.

‘I fell in love with the place,’ she went on, picking up her glass. ‘It was the middle of summer and I’d never been anywhere more romantic. And at the centre of it all was Ralph, this laughing, handsome man who seemed to constantly have a bottle of vintage champagne in one hand and a half-naked blonde in the other.’ She broke off to take a sip of her drink. ‘The party went on for about three days. My parents were furious when I finally went home.’ She gave a hollow laugh. ‘Until I told them I was engaged.’

Although it was Juliet who was speaking, although she was his mother and he hadn’t seen her for almost thirty years, it was Sophie at whom Kit found himself unable to stop looking. Propped on one elbow on the cushioned couch, she was watching Juliet, and her beautiful face was wistful.

‘I thought I was in love with him,’ Juliet said sadly, ‘but really it was the castle, the glamour, the champagne, the freedom. It was just a shame I only realised that when it was too late. When Leo came to the wedding.’

She faltered, and, in one of the gestures of warmth and compassion that came so naturally to her, Sophie reached out and put a hand on Juliet’s arm. In that moment the most prominent of the complex emotions churning inside Kit was gratitude. Sophie had taken responsibility for Juliet’s feelings, meaning he could absorb the facts of his own painful history without the burden of responding.

It made it … easier.

‘It was awful,’ Juliet said bleakly. ‘He was Ralph’s best man
and he only arrived on the morning of the wedding, so the first time I set eyes on him was as I walked down the aisle. It was like I recognised him, in some profound part of myself, and I knew, absolutely, that I was marrying the wrong brother.’

Across the table Sophie’s eyes met Kit’s, and he knew she too was remembering how she had come to Alnburgh as Jasper’s pretend girlfriend. For the briefest second a smile passed across her face, but somehow it just made her look sad.

‘So … what did you do?’ she murmured, looking away again.

Juliet gave an elegant shrug. ‘Nothing. I did what any polite, well-brought-up girl would do and I made my vows and said all the right things at the reception and went away on my honeymoon and tried to be a good, proper wife. But it was a disaster. Ralph had never had any intention of giving up the parties and the half-naked blondes, and I found that Alnburgh wasn’t so romantic in winter. I thought I’d die of either loneliness or cold.’

In the sultry twilight Sophie pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them. ‘I know the feeling. I was only there for two weeks, but I could think of nothing but how cold I was.’ Her eyes found Kit’s again, and another jolt of electricity fizzed through him as she added softly, ‘Well,
almost
nothing.’

‘Go on.’ Kit’s voice was like gravel as he forced himself to drag his thoughts away from that time, when Sophie’s presence at Alnburgh had been like a knife in his side, tormenting and obsessing him.

‘Then Leo came home.’

Juliet sighed and let her head fall back. ‘If I say it was impossible to stop what happened between us, that sounds like an excuse. But that was how it felt.’

Tell me about it
, Kit thought wearily. If he’d been a nicer
person he probably would have said it out loud, to let Juliet know that he was every bit as fallible and incapable of resisting temptation as she and Leo had been, but he didn’t. Opposite, Sophie leaned her cheek on her knees and looked at Juliet. Desire beat a relentless tattoo through his veins as he remembered how he had finally given up fighting the want, and in one of the castle’s ancient, dusty four-poster beds had given in to it …

‘We had three weeks before he had to go away again. We swore that would be it—that it was a one-off, a miraculous slice of perfection that would go no further. We made a decision not to write or keep in touch and so …’ her voice cracked slightly ‘… when I discovered I was pregnant there was no way of contacting him.’

For the first time since she’d started speaking Juliet looked at Kit properly, her expression a mixture of apology and helplessness. ‘I didn’t even know where he was,’ she said, almost imploringly. ‘By that time he’d been selected for the SAS and everything he did was top secret. I was terrified. I was also horribly sick, which meant Ralph soon guessed I was pregnant. He was … happy. It didn’t cross his mind for a second that it couldn’t have been his baby.’

‘And you didn’t think you should tell him?’ Kit said tonelessly.

‘Of
course
I did. I thought about nothing else. But I was ill, and Leo wasn’t there. I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing.’

Philippe had come back, bearing more dishes, which he set down on the table, seemingly oblivious to the currents of tension flowing across it. As he retreated again Sophie felt an urge to escape from the emotional cyclone that seemed to be building in the thick, hot air and follow him back to the kitchen. Where she belonged.

Kit waited until he was gone to speak again. His eyes were
like lasers as he looked across at his mother, his voice dangerously quiet.

‘And
how long
did you do nothing for?’

‘You were about a year old when Leo came back.’ Juliet didn’t meet his gaze, busying herself taking the lid off a terracotta tagine and spooning out its fragrant contents. ‘It had always been the plan that Leo would take over the running of the castle when he left the army, but everything had changed. Ralph thought you were his. Leo felt he’d already taken his brother’s wife, and he couldn’t bring himself to take his child and his home as well.’

Her hand shook, so that cous cous spilled over the tabletop. Raising her head, she looked at Kit. ‘He gave up Alnburgh without a second thought, but we couldn’t give up each other.’

‘So you left to be with him.’ In the candlelight his face was masklike, only the cuts showing that he was flesh and blood. ‘Did you just
forget
to take me with you?’

Sophie’s head throbbed. She discovered that she wanted very much to shut her eyes and put her hands over her ears, to make it all go away, like a child.

‘Oh, Kit, it wasn’t that simple!’ For the first time Juliet’s voice lost its careful moderation and became raw with weary emotion. ‘I didn’t leave straight away, as you know. We
tried
to stop seeing each other, but deep down we both knew it was hopeless, and in the end we stopped feeling guilty. He was abroad a lot—places I read about in the newspapers, places that were synonymous with violence and terror—and the whole thing had an air of tempting fate about it. He’d survived another tour, another siege, another shoot-out and he came back to me to celebrate being alive.’

Kit flinched.

‘But after the Falklands it was different. Leo changed. He couldn’t do it any more. He’d been posted in Gibraltar for a time, and that was when he’d bought this place, to come to
when he had time, to relax. He wanted to come and live here full time, and he wanted us to join him—
both
of us.’

For a moment Kit said nothing. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked.

‘So what happened?’

Sophie heard Juliet take a breath, as if she was steadying herself. Or preparing herself for something.

‘He wasn’t well when he came back from the Falklands. He wasn’t sleeping, and he’d noticed things—things he assumed would get better when he got back here and had a chance to rest. When they didn’t he came back to London to get checked out.’

Kit stood up abruptly, raising his hands to his temples. Stumbling to her feet, Sophie saw that they were clenched into fists.

‘Go
on
.’

He spoke through gritted teeth, and when Sophie touched him he didn’t seem to notice her.

‘He got passed around a few specialists—different addresses on Harley Street who each subjected him to a battery of tests before referring him on to the next doctor.’ Juliet’s voice was eerily calm again now. ‘I wasn’t with him when he went to the last one. A neurologist. The one who told him he was suffering from a progressive illness affecting the central nervous system, and that he had a year to live.’

Kit turned away, walking over to the edge of the terrace as Juliet continued. The ache in Sophie’s head had been joined by a burning feeling in her chest.

‘It’s a marvellous way of focusing your mind, hearing something like that. Suddenly everything seemed simple.’

‘Leaving your child seemed
simple
?’ Kit asked hollowly. It was dark now, and the magnificent view was swallowed up by layers of shadow. Beyond the circle of light on the terrace there was nothing to see, but he stared out into the blackness anyway, until his eyes stung.

‘A year.’ From behind him Juliet sounded very tired. ‘I thought that was all. And I couldn’t take you halfway across the world to be with a man you barely knew, a man who was terminally ill and was going to need me twenty-four hours a day. You needed school, routine …’

I needed parents
, Kit thought bleakly. He’d needed
her
. But with a crushing sensation in his chest he could see that Leo had needed her too. His father. He had needed her more.

‘So why didn’t you come back?’ he said harshly.

She sighed, a long, sad sigh. ‘Because the doctors were wrong. They told us what would happen, how his body would shut down, bit by bit, like lights being switched off, until he couldn’t move, couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breathe. They were right about that, but what they badly underestimated was how long it would take.’

Slowly Kit turned round.

‘How long?’

‘Sixteen years. He lived for sixteen years. So you see, by then it was far too late to come back.’

Looking back later, Sophie could remember very little of the evening after that. She wasn’t really aware of what they ate, only that it was delicious enough for her to find that her plate was empty, and she was hungry enough to accept a second helping. Her glass seemed to empty itself very quickly, and be filled again by invisible hands. The warm air caressed her and Juliet’s low, musical voice lulled her, distracting her from the dark shapes that moved in the back of her mind.

She talked of safe things. Of the labour of love that had been the restoration of Villa Luana, the way Leo had gradually won the trust and respect of the local people. Kit said little, and with the candlelight flickering over his face he looked like a carved saint in church: silent and suffering.