LITMIR.BIZ

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walked down the corridor and settled in the waiting room. He wasn’t just upset, he was furious. She was his wife and she was shutting him out, dismissing him as a husband as if he were of no account.

      Did he really deserve a wife who had such a low opinion of him? Did she think he had been faking it with her for the whole of the past month? Faking the passion, the laughter, the enjoyment? Without warning he badly wanted a drink and he wanted to punch something hard. He leapt upright again and paced. Grace was stubborn and rigid in her views. That wedding-ring jibe? How could she be so petty?

      Unfortunately, her prejudice against her father for the way she had believed he had treated her late mother had ensured that Grace had not had a very high opinion of men even to begin with. And how much had Leo’s own behaviour since their first meeting contributed to her continuing distrust? The casual one-night stand? The engagement he had neglected to mention? The blackmail he had used to persuade her to marry him? His conduct had been less than stellar.

      But Leo had always had a can-do approach to problems. Grace wanted him to love her? He could lie and tell her he loved her. Was he willing to do anything to keep her? Leo winced, shocked by the concept. What had she done to his brain? His brain clearly wasn’t working properly. Shock and sorrow had temporarily deranged his wits because for the first time since childhood he felt helpless and almost panicky.

      It felt wrong not being with Grace although maybe she genuinely needed time alone to deal with what had happened. He couldn’t help wishing she had turned to him, leant on him. He spoke to the nurse in charge, asking her to contact him if Grace’s condition changed, and then he breathed in deep and fought his reluctance to leave the hospital. Perhaps if Grace slept a while, she would be more normal in the morning, a little less worked up and fatalistic, although it was hard to see how a confirmation of the miscarriage would do anything to improve her outlook.

      Leo helped himself to a whiskey in his limousine. He would get stinking drunk and stop agonising over a situation he couldn’t fix, he decided despondently. He checked his phone to see if Grace had texted him; she had not. He embarked on a second whiskey while wondering if a wedding ring could really mean that much to a woman and he thought about texting Grace to ask to have that mystery explained. But there was a yawning hole stretching ever wider somewhere inside his chest. He thought about the baby, the baby that wasn’t going to be, and his eyes burned and prickled, deep regret engulfing him.

      He lifted his phone again, needing to talk to Grace, wanting to share his thoughts with a woman for the first time ever. He’d probably wake her up or upset her by saying the wrong thing, he conceded heavily. And the last thing she needed was a series of drunken maudlin texts asking silly questions. But the phone, the only link he had with the woman he so badly wanted to be with, was a terrible temptation. After a moment’s reflection, Leo extracted his SIM card, buzzed down the window and flung his phone out of the car. There, now he couldn’t be tempted to do or say anything stupid.

      * * *

      Grace tossed and turned restively in the bed, tears trickling from below her lowered eyelids. She wanted Leo, she wanted him back so badly, but he had never really belonged to her in the way a real husband would have done and now she needed to learn not to look for him and not to rely on him. She had to accept that this phase of her life was over. There would not be a baby with Leo. He had been so angry when he’d left her and she knew she had provoked him. He had tried to be there for her and she had rejected him, needing him to see that honesty was now the best policy. Their shotgun marriage no longer had a reason to exist and she had recognised that reality long before he did. Wasn’t that better than Leo waking up some day about a year from now and questioning why he was still married to a woman so far removed from his ideal of a wife?

      Yet the prospect of life without Leo, life after Leo was unbearable to Grace. She couldn’t sleep and it was mid-morning before she was taken to be scanned. This time the scanner was a bigger, more complex machine and the doctor was present. Grace lay still, all hope of good news crushed by a wretched sleepless night and an irredeemable tendency to expect only bad things to happen to her. So, when the doctor urged her in heavily accented English to look at the screen, she was reluctant and glanced up, startled to see that the small medical team surrounding her were all smiling.

      And they showed her baby’s heartbeat and switched on the sound so that she could listen to that racing beat that quickened her own. An intense sense of joyous relief filled her with a wash of powerful emotion and tears flooded her eyes. ‘I was so sure I’d lost my baby...’

      The obstetrician sat down by her side to enumerate the various reasons why bleeding could occur in early pregnancy, pointing out that her blood loss had already stopped and that her baby’s heartbeat was strong and regular.

      The minute she got back to her room, Grace snatched up her phone to text Leo, but what on earth was she to say to him? What an idiot she had been! Panicking and distraught at the conviction she had lost their baby, she had flung their marriage on the bonfire of her hopes as well. It would be her own fault if Leo received the news that he was still going to be a father with a new sense of regret because she had blown their relationship apart with all her foolish talk about wanting love. She laboured long over the text she sent him, apologising profusely for the way she had behaved and the things she had said before sharing the fact that she was still pregnant. She was a little surprised that there was no immediate response and rather more disconcerted when a nurse came to tell her that a car had arrived to collect her and she was wheeled out expecting to see Leo and instead saw only his driver and two of his bodyguards. Had she expected Leo to rush hotfoot to the hospital to greet her?

      Perhaps that had been a little unrealistic after what she had slung at him the evening before, she conceded wretchedly. She sent him another text, hoping to elicit a response, but it was not until the evening that Leo phoned her and the conversation they shared was brief and stilted. He asked how she was, made no reference to the baby or their marriage and told her that he was in London on business and that he would be away for about a week.

      ‘When you get back, I suppose we’ll talk,’ Grace said uncomfortably, disappointed that he hadn’t once mentioned the baby.

      ‘Great...won’t that be something to look forward to?’ Leo derided, silencing her altogether.

      Had Leo ignored her text because he had decided that there was a lot of truth in what she had said at the hospital? Had he reached the conclusion that the fact they were going to be parents wasn’t a good enough reason to stay married to a woman who wasn’t his ideal? Was that why he had made no comment? And was the divorce she had suggested what he would be discussing when he reappeared?

      Five days later, Grace sat out on the terrace below the twining vines that were slowly colouring to autumnal shades and dropping their leaves. She had thrown up before she made it down to breakfast and her breasts were painfully sensitive. It was as if every possible side effect of pregnancy was suddenly kicking in all at once. She had gone for her blood tests with Dr Silvano and he had reassured her that the results were normal.

      Her nerves though were all over the place because Leo was due back that very evening and she was stressed out at the thought of seeing him again because he had been so polite and distant when he phoned. In addition, he had mentioned dining with Marina, who was also in London, and Grace had had to battle an innate streak of jealousy and tell herself that she was relaxed about his friendship with his former fiancée. But even so, Grace feared comparisons being made and knew it would always hurt that Leo should believe that Marina would have made him the ideal wife.

      Josefina popped her head out of the French windows that led out to the terrace. ‘Signora Zikos? Visitor. Meester Robert,’ she pronounced, utilising her tiny English vocabulary.

      Her brow pleating in surprise, for she didn’t recognise the name, Grace stood up and stared at the man walking towards her, a chord of recognition striking her so hard that she froze and her eyes widened. The man was in his forties and of medium height with red hair as bright as her own. She had studied his photos on Facebook on several occasions and she knew who he was even though she couldn’t quite credit that he could be in Italy to visit her.

      ‘You’re...’

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