The Secret Sinclair (17 page)

Ridiculous!

But, whether he had intended it that way or not, his point was driven home over the next few days, during which he came at appointed and prearranged times so that he could take Oliver out. He had asked her advice and laughed when she had told him that any restaurant with starched white linen tablecloths and fussy waiters should be avoided at all costs, but there was a patina of politeness he now exuded which Sarah found horribly unnerving.

Of course she wondered whether she was imagining it. His marriage proposal was still whirring around in her head. Had that made her hyper-sensitive to nuances in his demeanour?

She had tried twice to raise the topic, to explain her point of view in a way that didn’t end up making her feel as if she was somehow
letting the side down
, but in both instances his response had been to repeat that she had to think it through very carefully.

‘Wait and see how this arrangement works,’ he had urged her, ‘before you decide to rush headlong into a decision that you might come to bitterly regret.’

In a few well-chosen words he had managed to sum her up as reckless, irresponsible, and incapable of making the right choices.

Again Sarah had tried to get a toe hold into an argument,
but he had expertly fielded her off and she had been left stewing in her own annoyance.

And at the bottom of her mind crawled the uncomfortable scenario of Raoul finding someone else. Now that he had taken on board the concept of marrying someone, would it prove persuasive enough for him to actually consider a proper relationship? He had had a congenital aversion to tying himself up with someone else. His background had predicated against it. But then Oliver had come along and a chip in the fortress of his self-containment had been made. Then he had taken the step of asking her to marry him.

Of course
for all the wrong reasons as far as she was concerned! But he
had
jumped an enormous hurdle, even if he
did
see it only as a logical step forward, all things considered.

What if, having jumped that hurdle, he now allowed himself to finally open up to the reality of actually taking someone else on board? What if he
fell in love
?

When Sarah thought about that, she found herself quailing in panic.
She
could give him long, moralising speeches about the importance of not getting married simply for the sake of a child.
She
could scoff at the idea of entering into a union as intimate as marriage without the right foundations in place, because she was scared that she would not be able to survive the closeness without wanting much, much more. But how thrilled would she be if he took himself off to some other woman and decided to tie the knot?

It could easily happen, couldn’t it? Having a child would have altered everything for him, even if he barely recognised the fact. She wondered whether he had been changed enough to consider the advantages of having a permanent woman in his life—someone who could be a substitute mother. Sarah felt sick at the prospect of having a
step-mother
in the mix, but on the subject of things
making sense
it certainly would make sense, down the road, for him to get married.

He would surely find it difficult to continue playing the field, always making sure that Oliver and whatever current woman of the day didn’t overlap. Would he want to live the rest of his life like that? And what about when Oliver got older and became more alert to what was happening around him? Would Raoul want to risk having his private life judged by his own child? No, of course he wouldn’t. If there was one thing she had learnt, it was that Raoul was capable of huge sacrifices when it came to Oliver. He would never countenance his own son seeing him as an irresponsible womaniser.

Sarah found herself frequently drifting off into such thoughts as they settled into their new house and began turning it into a home.

There was absolutely nothing to be done, décor-wise, because everything was of an exquisite standard, but the show home effect was quickly replaced with something altogether more cosy as family pictures were brought out of packing boxes and laid on the mantelpiece in the sitting room. The fridge became a repository for Oliver’s artwork as she attached his drawings with colourful little magnets, and the woven throws her mother had given her when she had first moved to London turned the sofa in the conservatory into a lovely, inviting spot where she and Oliver could watch television. They went on short forays into the nearby village, locating all the essentials.

On the surface, everything was as it should be. It was only her endlessly churning mind that kept her awake at night and made her lose focus when she was in the middle of doing something.

Raoul continued to behave with grindingly perfect, gentlemanly
behaviour, and Sarah found herself wondering on more than one occasion what he was getting up to on the evenings when he wasn’t around.

She hadn’t realised how accustomed she had become to seeing him pretty much every day, or at least being given some explanation of where he was and what he was doing on those days when he hadn’t been able to make it. On the single occasion when she had tried fishing for a little information he had raised his eyebrows, tutted, and told her that really it wasn’t any of her business, was it?

Two days before they were due to go to Devon to visit her parents Raoul returned Oliver to the house after their evening at a movie and, instead of leaving, informed her that the time had come to have a chat.

‘I’ll wait for you in the kitchen.’ He had given her two weeks, and two weeks was plenty long enough. He wasn’t used to hanging around waiting for someone else to make their mind up—especially when the matter in question should really have required next to no deliberation—but Raoul had taken a couple of steps back.

Although she was attracted to him, she had refused to become his mistress, and he didn’t think that she had done so because she had been holding out for a bigger prize. The plain and simple truth was that she was no longer his number one adoring fan. He had hurt her deeply five years ago, and that combined with the hardship of being a single mother without much money to throw around had toughened her.

Raoul knew that there was no way he could push her into marrying him. He was forced to acknowledge that in this one area, he had no control. But biding his time had driven him round the bend—especially when he kept remembering how easy and straightforward things had been between them before.

She returned to the kitchen forty-five minutes later. She had changed into a pair of loose, faded jeans that sat well below her waist and a tee shirt that rode up, exposing her flat belly, when she stretched into one of the cupboards to get two mugs for coffee.

‘So …’ she said brightly, once they were both at the kitchen table with mugs of coffee in front of them. This kitchen, unlike the tiny one in the rented house, was big enough to contain a six-seater table. He sat at one end, and Sarah deliberately took the seat at the opposite end. ‘You wanted to talk to me? I know I’ve said this a thousand times, but the house is perfect. I can’t tell you what a difference it makes, and there’s so much to do around here. I’ve already found a morning playgroup we can go to! It’s just so leafy and quiet.’

Raoul watched her and listened in silence, waiting until she had rambled on for a while longer before coming to a halting stop.

‘Two weeks ago I asked you a question.’

Having spent the entire two weeks thinking of nothing else
but
that question he had posed, Sarah now looked at him blankly—and received an impatient click of his tongue in response.

‘I’m not going to hang around for ever waiting for you to give me an answer, Sarah. I’ve waited so that you have had time to settle into the house. You’ve settled. So tell me—what’s the answer going to be?’

‘I … I don’t know …’

‘Not good enough.’ Raoul contained his mounting anger with difficulty.

‘Can I have a few more days to think about it?’ Sarah licked her lips nervously. ‘Marriage is such a big step,’ she muttered, by way of extra explanation.

‘Likewise having a child.’

‘Yes … but …’

‘Are we going to go down the same monotonous route of self-sacrifice?’

‘No!’ Sarah cried, stung by his bored tone of voice.

‘Then what’s your answer to be?’ He looked at her fraught face and thought that he might have been sentencing her to life in prison—and yet five years ago she would have exploded with joy at such a proposal. ‘If you say no then I
walk away
, Sarah.’

‘Walk away? What do you mean walk away? Are you saying that you’re going to abandon Oliver if I don’t agree to marry you?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake! When are you going to stop seeing me as a monster? I will never abandon my own flesh and blood!’

‘I’m sorry. I know you wouldn’t,’ Sarah said, ashamed, because sudden panic had driven her to say the first stupid thing in her head. ‘So what
are
you saying?’

‘I’ll find someone else,’ Raoul told her bluntly, ‘and we will get in touch with lawyers, who will draw up papers regarding settlement and visiting rights. You will see me only when essential, and only ever when it is to do with Oliver. Naturally I will have no control over who you see, don’t see, or eventually become seriously involved with, and the same would apply to me. Am I spelling things out loud and clear for you?’

The colour had drained from Sarah’s face. Presented with such a succinct action-and-consequence train of events, she felt her wildly scattered thoughts finally crystallise into one shocking truth. She would lose him for ever. He really would meet another woman and the question of love wouldn’t even have to arise. He would regulate his love-life because he would have to, and she would be left on the outside … watching.

She wouldn’t conveniently stop loving him just because he’d removed himself from her.

He might not love her, but he would be a brilliant father—and she would be spared the misery of
just not having him around
. Who had ever said that you could have it all?

She was sadly aware that she would settle for crumbs. She wanted to ask him what would happen when he got bored with her. Would he begin to conduct a discreet outside life? It was a question to which she didn’t want an answer.

She had thought that any marriage without love would be doomed to failure. She had never imagined herself walking down the aisle knowing that the guy by her side was only there because he had found himself in the unenviable position of having no choice. Duty and responsibility were two wonderful things, but she hadn’t ever seen them as sufficient. Raoul, on the other hand, had moved faster towards the inevitable—and she had to catch up now, because the stark alternative was even more unpalatable and she hated herself for her weakness.

‘I’ll marry you,’ she agreed, daring to steal a look at his face.

Raoul smiled, and realised that he had been panicked at the thought that she might turn him down. He
never
panicked! Even when he had been confronted with a child he hadn’t known existed, when he had realised that his life was about to be changed irrevocably for ever, he hadn’t panicked. He had assessed the situation and dealt with it. But watching her, eyes half closed, he had been aware of a weird, suffocating feeling—as if he had stepped off the edge of a precipice in the hope that there would be a trampoline waiting underneath to break his fall.

He stood up, thinking it wise to cover the basics and
then leave—before she could revert to her previous stance, reconsider his offer and tell him that it was off, after all. She could be bewilderingly inconsistent.

‘I’m thinking soon,’ he said, feeling on a strange high. ‘As soon as it can be arranged, to be perfectly honest. I’ll start working on that straight away. Something small …’ He paused to look at her pinkened cheeks. Her hair was tumbling over her shoulders and he wanted nothing more than to tangle his fingers into it and pull her towards him.

‘Although you are the one who factored marriage into your dreams of the future,’ he murmured drily, ‘so it’s up to you what sort of affair you want. You can have a thousand people and St Paul’s Cathedral if you like …’

Sarah opened her mouth to tell him that anything would do, because it wouldn’t really be a
true
marriage, would it? Yes, they had known each other once. Yes, they had been lovers, and she had been crazy enough to think that he had loved her as much as she had loved him, even if he had never said so. But he hadn’t intended marrying her then, or even setting eyes on her again once he had left the country. He hadn’t wanted her then and he didn’t want her now, but marriage, for him, was the only way he could be a permanent and daily feature in his son’s life. Because she had rejected the first offer on the table, which had been to be his mistress.

Approaching the whole concept of their union in the way he might a business arrangement, maybe he had thought that living together would be the lesser of two evils. They would have learned to compromise without the necessity of having to take that final, psychologically big step and commit to a bond sealed in the eyes of the law. Or maybe he had just thought that if what they had fizzled out it would just be a whole lot easier to part company if they had merely been living together. And by then
he would have had a much stronger foothold in the door—might even have been able to fight for custody if he’d chosen to.

Racked with a hornets’ nest of anxieties, she still knew that it would be stupid to open up a debate on the worth of a marriage that had yet to happen. What would that get her? Certainly not the words she wanted to hear.

‘Something small,’ she said faintly.

‘And traditional,’ Raoul agreed. ‘I expect you would like that, and so would your parents. I remember you saying something about a bracelet that your grandmother had given your mother, which she had kept to be passed on to you when you got married? You laughed and said that it wasn’t exactly the most expensive trousseau in the world, but that it meant a lot to both of you.’