‘Iknowwhy you broke up. It was in the gossip columns. She dumped you because she didn’t think you were a long-term match. I think the implication was that you weren’t enough fun for her.’
‘I admit there might be some who find me a bore.’ He half smiled but his eyes were serious when he spoke again. ‘I have never talked to anyone about this,’ he began, pushing his plate to one side and leaning towards her, his expression as grave as she had ever seen. ‘Not even to William, although he wasn’t as curious as I might have expected. Probably didn’t want to jinx the situation by asking too many questions. Not sure he ever saw Caitlin as a match made in heaven for me.’
‘Who knows?’ Jess murmured vaguely.
‘You, I expect.’
She blushed and inclined her head to one side but could hardly deny that wry observation.
‘Caitlin and I got engaged because she told me that she was pregnant.’
His words dropped between them like a rock thrown into still water, spreading ripples outwards until the ripples absorbed everything. For a minute Jess’s brain seemed to stop completely. She had never been so shocked in her life before because it was the last thing she’d expected him to say.
She knew she was staring with her mouth open, but she couldn’t help herself.
‘You’re surprised.’
‘That’s putting it mildly!’
‘I say shetoldme that she was pregnant. It was an elaborate lie designed to get exactly what she wanted. A marriage proposal. She showed me the evidence, the positive pregnancy test. What I didn’t realise was how she got hold of it. She managed to convince someone she knew whowaspregnant to hand over one because she wanted to play a joke on a friend.’
‘I don’t understand... Why on earth would she do that, Curtis? It’s not as though she could carry on faking a pregnancy for nine months.’
‘No, but she could fake one until we were married, only to tragically have a miscarriage. I found out because the girl she duped, someone who was far removed from her social circle, a satellite she befriended on a shoot somewhere abroad, joined the dots and came to me.’
‘This is crazy.’
‘I confronted Caitlin and she confessed.’ He sighed, raked his fingers through his hair and looked at her. ‘Caitlin has...many issues. As soon as I found out the whole shocking truth, I naturally called off the engagement but...’
‘But...?
‘Caitlin, as I discovered, was obsessed with me. It was something I only recognised in stages and by the time I wanted to bow out...well, it seemed to be too late. She came to me with the pregnancy story.’
‘And you would have actuallymarriedher because she was pregnant?’
‘I believe in the sanctity of family life,’ he said gruffly. ‘Believe it or not.’
Don’t we all want the things we are denied? Especially when those things denied are rooted in our childhood?
‘So... I still don’t quite understand, Curtis.’
‘Caitlin has...an unfortunate background. She was pretty upset when I told her I wanted out. Felt humiliated. She mistakenly imagined that I might spread the story of the fake pregnancy. Of course, she could not have been further from the truth, but the fact is that I felt sorry for her, despite what had happened.’
‘Because...she had an unfortunate background?’
‘Correct.’ He looked at her for one long moment, his eyes shuttered. ‘I told her that she could tell the world whatever she wanted on the condition that she had therapy, which I was more than happy to pay for, for however long it took.’
So many gaps in the telling, Curtis thought, but even so he was curiously glad to be talking to Jess. It occurred to him that, whatever she thought, there would be a level of empathy at the very heart of her that would stop her from prying because there were things he had no intention of sharing.
The past, for Curtis, was a place where sadness was buried, where memories were too painful to bring out for inspection. It was a place he preferred to keep locked away because to go there would always feel too steep a mountain to climb. He might occasionally confront the darkness inside him, but he would never share it with anyone else.
He had told her that Caitlin had an unfortunate past. He would never tell her that that unfortunate past was what had kept him tethered to her even when he’d recognised that he should get out. She had been in and out of foster care most of her life and had emerged, at the age of eighteen, tough and determined to leave a miserable past behind her.
He had not been in foster care for the length of time that she had, but he had been there and could remember what fear and loneliness and abandonment had tasted like. The two years he had spent there after his mother died had made him understand what it meant to look at a future where love would be in very short supply because when he’d been put there, at the age of six, he’d been just a little too old to be desirable for adoption. Too old to adopt but not too young to care.
Those dark places he kept to himself and always would, but they had shaped him. Trust and an ability to give his heart away were commodities in short supply. He had the capacity for neither. He had formed a protective shell around himself that allowed no one in, no one but his godfather, the man who had rescued him.
Caitlin had dealt with her ordeal in another way. Her insecurities, so well hidden under that beautiful exterior, manifested themselves in a desperate need to be loved. Had she sensed something in him, some shared background, and that was why she had become so obsessive about him in such a short space of time? Obsessive enough to want him, whatever the cost? He had no idea because she certainly knew nothing about his past.
