A Perfect Marriage (31 page)

,He
brought crumbed chicken with chips and a couple of salads. The fire was crackling away, a neat pile of freshly chopped wood stacked on the hearth. "You didn't cut that, I hope?" Max said.

"I didn't even carry it," Celine told him. "The boy who does the lawns did it all for me."

Max divided the food and handed her a plate. He sat by the fire on the floor, but she chose a chair. These days if she sat on the floor she had difficulty hoisting herself to her feet again.

"Delicious," she said, her emptied plate on her knee. "Want more?" There was still some left in the containers.

"No, that was plenty. Can you put some more wood on the fire?"

It had died down to a sluggish red glow. "Not yet. It's just right for-" Max rummaged among the discarded wrappers and boxes "-these."

"Marshmallows!
Don't tempt me!"

"That's just what I'm about to do. Hang on, I'll find a skewer."

 
Five minutes later he presented her with a delicately browned marshmallow, working it off the skewer for her and popping it into her mouth, where it melted warmly on her tongue. "Mmm," she murmured, closing her eyes. "Perfect.'

The next moment she felt his mouth on hers, his hands holding her shoulders as her lips parted in surprise.

This was no tentative, formal brushing of mouth against mouth. It was a full-blooded kiss of passion, controlled but fierce and demanding. Sudden heat leapt along her veins, and her hands touched his shirt, warmed by the fire, the fabric crisp under her fingers. She slid them up until her arms were about his neck, her head tipped back under his kiss.

Kneeling before her, he pulled her towards him, kissing her still more deeply, tasting the sweet marshmallow with his tongue. Her dress rucked up as her thighs enclosed his hips. His arms went round her and he edged her gently but purposefully off the chair, easing her down as he knelt back on his heels, so that she sat comfortably on his thighs, her back supported by the chair.

His arms tightened. The baby gave a strong, protesting kick, and they broke apart, laughing.

"Wrong position, I guess," Max said, patting her placatingly. He carefully moved to one side, his arm about her shoulders. Celine straightened her legs, and his longer ones stretched out beside them.

His lips nuzzled her ear. "Do you realise," he breathed against it, "that's the first time you've kissed me back since-well, for a very long time?"

Celine sighed. "I know." Her body was pleasantly tingling. She tilted her head, allowing his mouth to wander to the groove below her ear and linger there. "It's the first time you've kissed me properly for ages," she complained. Lately he seemed to have gone back to not touching her unless he had
to,
his goodbye kisses nothing more than a formality, a bare meeting of mouths.

Max's head went up so that he could look at her face. "Did you want me to?"

"Sometimes," she admitted. "That day on the beach that you were so embarrassed about-"

"But you were trying to wriggle away-"

"No, you idiot!
I was trying to wriggle towards you-turn around and kiss you. It just was going to take a while, arranging this bulge, but you didn't wait."

"I thought I'd blown it, offended you. You'd been putting up with the odd good-night kiss, but you were hardly enthusiastic. I figured that my reaction that day had put you right off."

"It didn't. It turned me right on." But they hadn't been able to go on where they'd left off that day, because of Kate's advent. She said, "I kept wanting to return those kisses, but somehow
. ..
I just couldn't bring myself to."

"Yes?" His free hand began lightly massaging her distended figure. "You never actively refused, and I hoped that you liked them, but there was no reciprocation. I wondered if you were trying to punish me."

"Punish you?"

"I can't say I didn't deserve it." His hand momentarily stilled as he looked up at her, and then he resumed his slow stroking.

"It wasn't that," she said. "Only I wanted more."

His eyes questioned hers.
"More lovemaking?"

"More loving.
Passion.
I don't mean in bed-I mean, we've never allowed ourselves to express all our feelings, never tried to get under the surface of each other, of our relationship. Oh, I know I'm being unreasonable. You didn't promise me anything more than what I had. But even if it's true that you're not in love with Kate anymore-"

He stopped what he was doing and raised both hands to her face, making her look at him. "What makes you say that?" His eyes were shadowed. "Do you think I could have been that cruel to her if it wasn't true?"

"If ... you wanted to set her free, because your sense of responsibility had sent you back to me, and you were determined to stick by your decision." She met his eyes unflinchingly, prepared for more pain, but knowing she had to have the truth.

"I had to set her free, yes." Max dropped his hands to her shoulders, his eyes still holding hers. "It would be monstrously selfish and unfair to let her go on thinking that I loved her. She didn't get the message when I tried to do it kindly, so the only thing left was to be brutal. It made me feel like dirt, and I won't blame Kate if she hates me for the rest of her life. I'll carry the guilt of that for the rest of mine. But I wasn't lying to her, Celine. I was fighting for my life. I was ready to sacrifice Kate or anyone else for our marriage."

"What did you feel for her, Max?" Celine asked him quietly. "It was something pretty potent."

"Attraction, at the start," he said slowly, his hands leaving her.
"Physical attraction, obviously.
A middle-aged impulse, no doubt.
And I liked her, too-her intelligence, her drive, her eagerness about her job. She still had a youthful freshness of outlook,
an idealism
about the practice of law that I'd more or less forgotten as I grew older."

"But that wasn't all."

"No, it wasn't all."

"A kind of loving, then?"

Perhaps he wanted to deny it, but in the end he bowed his head in brief acknowledgement. "I guess it was," he said. "Only it didn't last. She said once I was asking too much of her, and she was right. I suppose for a little while I projected onto her, wanted to find in her, all the things that I felt I'd missed."

"In our marriage?"

He picked up her left hand, looking down at her fingers, her wedding ring. "None of it was your fault."

"Some of it was," Celine acknowledged. "You were trying to give me signals that you weren't happy, and I ignored them, didn't I?"

"It seemed like that at the time but, as you pointed out, I had the kind of marriage I'd been willing to settle for. If suddenly it wasn't enough I had only myself to blame. And I wasn't miserable, you know. I just wanted-"

"Stars."

  
 
He looked slightly confused, and she explained, "Honoria says on our honeymoon there should have been stars in our eyes. And she didn't see any."

"I think I know what she means."

"That was what Kate gave you that I hadn't,
wasn't
it?" Celine asked wistfully.

"I guess. The trouble is
,
it was about all we had. We had a lot in common at work-I thought that the strong physical attraction and the fact that we could talk for hours, share ideas, stimulate each other's minds, enjoy each other's company, added up to love. I have to admit, the way Kate looked up to me as a mentor, in some ways even a role model, fed my ego. On her part there was an element of hero-worship, I'm afraid. I guess the thing I feel worst about is that I took unwitting advantage of that. Looking back, it wasn't fair."

"But it didn't occur to you at the time?"

Max made a wry face. "At the time I was too caught up in a muddle-headed romantic daze to think it through. Oh, hell, Celine! I shouldn't be telling you all this."

"I was very jealous." Perhaps he was right, but since he'd started talking of it, she discovered a dire need to hear more.

"Jealous?" His eyes searched her face. "I wondered, a couple of times. But you seemed so cool. Angry, of course, but I put that down to hurt pride. When you started advising me about Kate in that detached, clinical way, I thought,
This
woman doesn't give a damn. If you cared at all for me, in more than a mild fashion, I didn't see how you could be so. ..
objective
. The odd thing was, when it should have pleased me, it made me mad as hell."

"I wasn't always able to be objective. And at that particular time, if you recall, you'd just made love to me and then told me it was all a mistake that shouldn't have happened."

Max momentarily closed his eyes. "It was then," he said, opening them again, "that I became totally confused. We'd made wonderful love together, after the biggest fight of our lives-not barring when we were children-and I wanted nothing more than to take you back to bed and do it all over again. But by then I was committed to Kate. Making love
to
 
two
women concurrently must be an all-time low for despicable behaviour." He gave a crack of laughter.

Staring, Celine said, "What's funny?"

"It isn't, really. The fact is, after that night I couldn't... satisfy Kate. I guess I hated myself so much my mind put a halt to things. I wasn't able to perform."

"Oh, Max!
How embarrassing."
She tried to look sympathetic, and she was
,
she was, she reminded herself, sinking her teeth into her lower lip.

He must have seen the suppressed laughter in her eyes. "All right," he said. "Crow if you want to. It wasn't funny at the time, I can assure you."

"You mean after that you never
... ?"

He looked at her and glanced away. "A couple of times I managed ... but somehow it was never the same. And it didn't help that every time I saw you, my mind insisted on replaying that last time we'd been together, remembering how fantastic it was. I had to keep telling myself it couldn't have been that good."

"Yes, it was," Celine told him.

"For you, too?"
His eyes lit briefly. "I didn't dare to believe that." He sighed. "You seemed to get more beautiful and more desirable every day, and it jolted me when I found that other men had noticed. You weren't the only one who was jealous. I despised myself for that, too. As you said, I'd given up the right to feel like that about you. I should have let you alone, left you free to make a life without me, and yet I found myself clutching at any excuse to see you."

"So Kate wasn't imagining things?"

He shook his head. "She had a right to complain. Every time I saw you, I'd remember how it had been, the things we both liked, the way we could share a joke without exchanging a word-I always had to explain, to Kate, and then she often didn't see it, or didn't think it funny. I kept recalling the stupidest little happenings and wanting to say, `Do you remember
... ?'
We'd shared so much for so long."

"I thought that was part of the problem," Celine objected. "Weren't you bored because you thought we
knew

  
 
all
there was to know about each other, that there was nothing new for us?"

"Maybe," he conceded. "No, it wasn't that, exactly. I've always known that there were depths to you that I'd never explored-that maybe you didn't want me to." Giving her no chance to comment on that, he continued. "I'd remember what you were like at ten years old-at fifteen-at Kate's age. And then I found myself comparing, finding her less mature, less perceptive than you were even at twenty-five."

"We'd known each other a long time by then," Celine reminded him. A faint, fluttery hope fought with a confusion of other emotions. So he'd found Kate less than perfect, after all. But all that meant was that she'd been less good at reading him than Celine, who'd known him all her life.

"I know," Max agreed. "I knew I was doing her a gross injustice, and felt like a louse. The fault was in me. Why couldn't I accept her for what she was? Good God, I'd ditched my marriage, treated you appallingly and virtually estranged myself from my entire family because I was so sure I'd found in her exactly what I wanted, what I'd been subconsciously searching for. And when it began turning sour, there was no one to blame but myself."

Celine bit her tongue. There was no arguing with that. But she restrained her natural impulse to rub salt in his wounds. Max was doing a fair job of beating himself; he didn't need her help.

"I was going crazy," he said, "falling in love with my own wife-my estranged wife!"

Falling in love? Celine's head jerked up at that, her eyes painfully fixed on his face.

His voice had lowered, and he didn't meet her eyes. "I kept thinking of you-wondering what you were doing, who you were with. In the end I had to tell Kate I'd made a horrible mistake. That it was all over. And after what I hoped was the minimum decent interval I came to find out if there was any hope you'd have me back, and discovered you were pregnant, as I thought, to another man-and even though
 
I thoroughly deserved it, that was the worst-worst-time of my entire life."

He raised his eyes then and, catching her arrested expression, he frowned. "What is it? What's the matter?"

"You..." Her voice cracked, and she started again. "You broke off with Kate before you knew I was pregnant?"

"You didn't know that? I'm sure I said-"

Vehemently, Celine shook her head. "I assumed you'd done it because of the baby. Heavens, that's why I tried to keep it a secret from you that you were the
father
! I didn't want you back out of duty or conscience. I couldn't bear it!"

Max grabbed both her hands in his. "The baby-once I knew it was mine-was a bonus. What I couldn't bear was the thought that I'd thrown away everything we had, and everything we might have had in the future, for a mirage, a false emotion that hadn't lasted."