LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER THREE

      SHE didn’t get the opportunity to ask him to leave. He’d already done it.

      The sun had only just begun to gild the flanks of the rugged hills with new-day light when she left her solitary bed and dragged herself downstairs after a monumentally miserable and sleepless night.

      Which bedroom Jed had used she had no idea, and didn’t care, she told herself as she secured the belt of the robe she’d thrown on more tightly around her narrow waist. As soon as he surfaced she would ask him to leave, announce that she’d be in touch, through her solicitor, some time in the future. Let him know that he wasn’t the only one who could make decisions and hurl them around like concrete slabs.

      If he wasn’t prepared to listen to her, to believe her, then their relationship wasn’t worth keeping—certainly not the acrimonious, desolately empty relationship he had in mind. Better by far to make a clean break.

      Making for the kitchen for the coffee she suddenly dramatically needed, she saw his note the moment she pushed open the door. A scrap of paper on the polished pine table top. It didn’t say a lot, just a scrawl of distinctive black handwriting. ‘I’ll be in Seville for the next three weeks. I’ll collect you for our return journey.’

      The hell you will! Elena scrunched the paper up and hurled it at the wall. Frustrated by his disappearance, before she could tell him she had no intention of meekly tugging her forelock and submitting to his orders, she felt her blood pressure hit the roof.

      She didn’t even know which hotel he’d be using in Seville. She couldn’t get in touch and remind him that she was perfectly capable of making the decisions that would affect the rest of her life, that no way would she be returning to England, simpering and smiling and pretending to be deliriously happy. No way!

      Hot tears flooded her eyes. Had she been secretly hoping that Jed would have come to his senses this morning, found enough trust in her to believe her story? If so, she’d been a fool. Well, no more.

      She’d just have to sit out the next three weeks with the rage festering away inside her, and—Suddenly the now all too familiar morning sickness struck, and twenty wretched minutes later she was standing under a warm shower, patting her still flat tummy and murmuring wryly, ‘You’re certainly giving Mummy a hard time, Troublebunch!’

      Even as the tender smile curved her lips her eyes filled with tears again. Tears for Sam, who would never know he’d left a child behind, for herself, and for Jed, who had lost something wonderful that could never be retrieved.

      Warm needles of water washed the tears away, and she dried herself, wrapped her long hair in a towel, dressed in cotton shorts and a halter-neck top and told herself they were the last tears she would shed for any of them.

      Life went on.

      She had her child to look forward to, and she would love it to distraction and give him or her the happiest life any child could want Now that she was marginally calmer she could see that, in a way, it was a blessing that Jed had taken off. That action alone told her that he’d never truly loved her. If he had. he’d have trusted her, believed her, asked for more details. It had also saved her from a demeaning slanging match, from allowing all her hurt to pour out and hit him right between the eyes.

      When she next saw Jed she would be able to tell him of her own decisions, calmly and rationally. She was intelligent enough to know that no amount of rage could alter anything. He despised her now; all the love had gone and nothing she could do or say would bring it back. That was a fact. Hard to face, but not impossible.

      She could handle the hurt; she’d managed before and would manage again. Certainly the way Liam had hurt her had been a mere pinprick compared to this. But then she’d had nothing, just a mother who’d wrung her hands and wailed, prophesied heaven alone knew what horrors if she insisted on skipping the country with little more than the clothes she stood up in.

      But from having nothing and no one she’d made a good life for herself. At least this time round she had a successful career to fall back on, and was carrying the child she’d begun to need so desperately.

      So, on the whole, she reasoned, wondering if she could manage a glass of water and a slice of dry toast without upsetting her unborn baby, everything balanced out and she could hack it.

      She wasn’t at all sure about that one week later, when Jed arrived with his mother.

      She hadn’t been able to think about starting a new book, and hadn’t responded to the faxes from her agent which had come chattering through over the last couple of days—apologising for interrupting her honeymoon, but apparently excited over some awards ceremony to be held in London. She hadn’t been interested. One day she’d have to read through them properly, absorb what her agent was trying to tell her and respond. But not now. Not yet.

      She’d driven down to the village and told Pilar to take two more weeks’ leave, and then had sought the solitude she so desperately needed in the hot few acres of Spanish earth that was her garden.

      She was weeding amongst the massed clumps of sweet-smelling carnations that bordered one of the twisting paved paths when she heard the car. Brushing her hands down the sides of her cotton skirt, she stood up and walked towards the house, resenting the intrusion. Resenting it to the point of internal explosion when she saw Jed handing his mother from the car.

      She couldn’t imagine what either of them was doing here, or what she could possibly say to them—especially Catherine Nolan, who was one of the nicest women to draw breath.

      Wearing a pale blue linen suit, the older woman looked less stressed out than the grieving mother she’d come to know during the two weeks she’d stayed in Netherhaye, the family home in rural Hertfordshire. Though she had perked up enormously for the quiet wedding, bossing the caterers and florists around, making sure the small reception back at Netherhaye was as perfect as it could possibly be.

      ‘Elena!’ Catherine beamed as she became aware of her daughter-in-law’s approach. ‘How good of

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