Never Leave Me (53 page)

His eyes flew to hers, his face immediately tightening. ‘We have nothing to say to each other,' he rasped as she moved towards the bed.

‘I have something to say to you,
chéri
,' she said huskily, and he was shocked by the suffering etched on her face, the deep circles carved beneath her eyes. ‘It is that I love you. That I want to stay with you. That I want to remain a part of your life.'

He had rehearsed, several times over, what it was that he would say to her. She had betrayed and deceived him on the deepest level that it was possible for a man to be betrayed and deceived. She had allowed him to think that another man's child was his son. She had continued, probably for years, to be lovers with the child's father. He winced with physical pain as he remembered their holidays at Valmy. The times he had seen her with Luke and been absolutely sure of her faithfulness. They had probably been lovers then. Had probably been lovers ever since Luke's wartime return, weeks before Dominic was born.

He had lain awake for hours, his uninjured hand clenched into a fist, wondering how she could have borne seeing Dominic and Melanie playing together. How she could possibly have agreed to Melanie staying with them. It was an act that was beyond comprehension.

He had thought also of Dominic. Of the child he loved and who thought of him as his father. He had expected his feelings to undergo a change and had been staggered to discover that the knowledge made not the slightest bit of difference to the love he felt for him. In every way that mattered, he
was
Dominic's father. He was the one Dominic came to for advice, for hugs, for companionship. There was far more to fatherhood than mere genetics. It had been an astonishing revelation and hard on its heels had come another.

If he told Lisette he knew the truth, there would be nothing at all to prevent her from joining Luke in London and taking Dominic with her. He would be forfeiting the fatherhood he cherished, losing the child who, in every way that mattered, was his son.

She stood at the foot of the bed, a black wool dress clinging softly to the firm upthrust of her breasts, skimming her hips, and he wondered how he could ever have imagined that he was, at last, free of her. Her hair was swept into a knot, emphasising her delicate bone structure, the enormous dark eyes, the gently curving mouth. It was a face that had haunted him all through the months of fighting in France and Germany. A face he had known he would never forget. He felt something like despair. He still loved her. It wasn't physically possible for him
not
to love her. And now, because of her guilt, she was telling him that her affair with Luke was over. That she wanted to remain his wife.

None of the things he had been going to say were said. Instead he said tersely, ‘Sit down, you look ill.'

He saw something very like hope spring to her eyes as she moved to his side and wondered for a moment if he had been wrong about her motives.

‘They told me about your legs,
chéri
,' she said, a catch in her voice. ‘I'm sorry. So very sorry.'

His eyes hardened. He had known that she would feel responsible. Responsible for his heart attack, for the subsequent crash, for the injuries he had received. And because she felt responsible, she was staying with him. Not because she loved him, he didn't believe that for a moment, but because her own peculiar brand of honour demanded it. And if he rejected her, what would happen then? There would be a custody battle for the children. He would lose perhaps not only Dominic, but Lucy as well. And there would be no more hope of recapturing the happiness they had once known together. His eyes smouldered. He was too weak to face such a future. The charade of their marriage, for Dominic's sake, for Lucy's sake, would have to continue.

When he was discharged from hospital he went to Mexico to recuperate, but he did not take Lisette with him. There was no way that they could go back to the relationship they had enjoyed during the two weeks of Melanie's visit. She was in love with Luke. She had always been in love with Luke. He would be damned to hell before he would accept embraces that were motivated by pity.

It was while he was in Mexico that she lost the baby that had been conceived in such rapture. He knew she grieved, but it was a grief she locked deep inside herself, refusing to talk about it, unable to accept any comfort.

In May she received a letter from her father telling her that Luke and Annabel were divorcing and that Luke was giving up his life in London and was buying a farm on the outskirts of Bayeux. He watched her read it, knowing very well the news that it contained.

It was common knowledge that Johnson Matthie were looking for a new chairman and the advertising grapevine had quickly passed the word along the line that not only was Luke Brandon leaving Johnson Matthie, but that he was not moving to another agency. He was abandoning his business career entirely and moving, minus his wife and child, to a farm he had bought in the Normandy countryside. There were rumours that the girl he had been in love with had died; that in his grief, he was fast becoming a recluse.

He looked across at her as she slipped the letter into her desk, her face betraying no hint of what she was feeling. He had no doubt that, for Luke, Lisette was as good as dead. He knew that there had been no correspondence between them. That she had kept her word to him and that the affair was over.

‘What does your father have to say?' he asked, propelling his wheelchair smoothly forward towards her.

She raised her shoulder in a slight, dismissive shrug, her eyes carefully avoiding his. ‘Maman is not going to visit Valmy at all this year. They will spend two weeks together in Nice in June and then Maman will return to Paris and Papa to Valmy.'

It was a hot day and she was wearing a pale mauve silk shirt and a brilliant turquoise skirt, her legs bare, her feet in delicate sandals, her hair swept up in an elegant figure of eight.

‘Any other news?' he asked with forced indifference.

There was a brief, almost imperceptible pause and then she said, with a too bright smile, ‘No,
chéri.
Madame Bride's arthritis is worse, Madame Chamot is visiting her daughter in Toulouse, and life in Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts is continuing as usual.'

His lips tightened. Some devil inside him wanted to hear Luke's name on her lips. Wanted to hear the inflection in her voice, see the expression in her eyes when she uttered it. Jealousy rocked through him. He had come to terms with his disability. He had come to terms with the fact that Dominic was not his son. But he could not come to terms with the fact that her love was given elsewhere.

‘I'm flying to Washington in the morning,' he said, spinning the wheelchair expertly round and away from her. ‘I want to close the United Motels deal personally.'

Her too bright smile faded, and the immeasurable sadness that filled her eyes whenever she thought herself unobserved returned.

‘Would you like me to come with you,
chéri
?' she asked tentatively, already knowing what his answer would be.

‘No.' The wheelchair did not stop in its smooth passage to the door. ‘It's going to be all work. I would have no time to keep you company.'

‘Will your secretary be going with you?' she asked, trying to keep her voice light.

The wheelchair halted, he turned round, regarding her steadily with brandy-dark eyes. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘She always travels with me.'

And then his wheelchair shot out into the hallway and she was once more alone.

Although he had made no sexual overtures to her since his accident, she knew that it was not because he was incapable of love-making. He was. He was also physically just as attractive as he had ever been. He had returned from Mexico determined that the wheelchair would make as little difference to his life as possible, and he had succeeded admirably.

He exercised fiercely every day, his arm and back muscles rippling with vigour. He still drove himself, his wheelchair in the boot of his adapted Cadillac limousine. He continued to fly to Washington, to New York, to Houston, to Acapulco. He attended dinners and banquets and film premieres, and by sheer force of will and personality was still regarded as one of the most sexually attractive men in whatever gathering he found himself.

People who had heard of his accident and had not met him since, expected to feel pity and repulsion, and perhaps even curiosity, when they met him again. None of them did so. He was an object for no one's pity; he was a big, handsome, powerful man, as much in demand socially as he had ever been.

Lisette had met his blonde, Swedish secretary only on a few occasions, but they had been enough to convince her that the girl was in love with him. She rose from her desk, her heart hurting, wondering if they slept together. If, when he made his frequent trips to New York, he still met the model he had admitted to having an affair with. Her nails pressed deep into her palms as she walked towards the French windows that led out on to the patio.

She had been as loving towards him, as physically demonstrative as it was possible to be when meeting with no encouragement. As the weeks had turned into months and his attitude towards her had not altered, she had been filled with growing despair. There were scores of men who would have been only too happy to offer her comfort, but she had frozen any overture the instant it had been made. She didn't want another affair. She didn't simply want sex. She wanted sex with Greg.

She stepped out into the early summer heat. In a few weeks' time she would be thirty. If Dieter had lived, he would have been forty-four. A tide of grief swept over her, ripping wide the dusty years and sending them scattering. Dieter had loved and understood her. There had been no lies between them. No deceit. In that moment, on the patio of her San Francisco home, her pain at his loss was as raw as it had been on the morning of his death.

‘What am I to do?' she whispered. ‘Oh, Dieter, my love, what am I to
do
?'

‘Why couldn't Mel visit us at Easter?' Dominic asked, when she came into his room that night to check that he had finished his homework.

He turned down the volume on his record player, subduing the raucous tones of a young white singer who sounded black. ‘She wanted to come.'

‘Who is the singer?' she asked, wondering what she could say to him to soften his disappointment.

He shrugged impatiently. ‘A guy called Presley.' He took out a crumpled blue air letter from his school bag. ‘She says she had to go to her grandmother's for three weeks because her mother went on a trip to Italy with friends. She says her grandmother finds her a nuisance and she didn't like it there. She wants to know if she can come here for the summer holidays instead.'

Lisette hugged his shoulders. ‘It's a very long way,
mon petit.
And Melanie's mother will probably have made other plans.'

‘But we could
ask
,' Dominic persisted. ‘
Please
, Maman.'

Lisette wondered what Greg's reaction would be to the prospect of having Melanie once more beneath his roof. He had liked her enormously, and his generous nature wasn't one that was likely to bear resentment towards a child, no matter what his feelings for her father.

She spoke to him the evening he returned from Washington. ‘… and so Dominic would like Melanie to come over for the summer holidays. They get on so well together,
chéri
, and if Annabel is agreeable …'

He stared at her as if she had taken leave of her senses. ‘Have Brandon's
daughter!
' Dominic's sis …' He broke off sharply. ‘Have her
here
? After all that has happened? Sweet Christ, you must be mad!'

She had been writing a letter to her father. Her eyes flew to his, the blood draining from her face as she saw the depth of his fury. His eyes were like live coals, his knuckles white on the arms of his wheelchair.

‘I'm sorry,' she stammered, thinking of his heart, terrified that he was going to have another attack. ‘Truly I am. I won't mention it ever again …'

The expression in his eyes made her gasp. There was such bitter, burning contempt in them that she could hardly breathe. ‘Greg, please …' She rose dizzily to her feet but he shot the wheelchair round, not even pausing to look behind him as she swayed against her desk, her face ravaged.

The whole hideous scene had been for nothing. A week later she received a terse, typewritten letter from Annabel in which she said that she had discovered that Dominic and Melanie were corresponding. She had forbidden Melanie to continue the correspondence and wished Lisette to instruct Dominic likewise. Luke was in Normandy. There was to be a divorce on the grounds of his desertion. He had, however, told her the truth. That he had never loved her; that it was Lisette he loved, and had always loved. He had told her of their affair. That he had no intention of ever living with herself and Melanie again. Lisette would understand that there could be no further communication between them, or between their children. Their friendship, so grossly betrayed, was at an end.

Dominic had been uncomprehending. ‘But
why
can't I write to Mel any more?' he asked bewilderedly, ‘Why won't Aunt Annabel let her write to me?'

‘Because she and Uncle Luke no longer live together,' Lisette had said, hating herself for being the cause of his hurt, hating Luke for his unnecessary callousness to Annabel.

‘But I still don't understand …'

‘Aunt Annabel has been very hurt, Dominic. She doesn't want to be reminded of the past, and we are part of her past. And so she has asked that we don't communicate with her, or with Melanie.'

‘That's silly, and I shall still write!' Dominic said savagely, pulling away from her, not allowing her to comfort him.

She never knew how long he persisted in writing, but no letters came back in reply. Her father told her that Annabel and Melanie never visited Normandy and that Luke rarely spoke of them. He had bought a fifteen-hundred acre farm some sixteen kilometres from Valmy, and was a regular visitor.