“I’m alright.”
“Would you like a cup of tea?”
He smiled. His chest still felt a little tight but he had to smile. Laura and her cure-all tea.
“Please.”
“Stay here, I’ll be back in a sec.”
Chapter Forty-Two
The church bells were loud,signalling the end of the wedding ceremony. There would be a formal reception for invited guests later, but for the first part of the afternoon, there was a cream tea service outside in the spring sunshine.
Everyone was invited. Everyone. All guests, the Duke of What’s His Name and every single person from the island, all two thousand of them. Of course it was the wedding of the Seigneur, so the fields surrounding the church were teaming with people. Laura ducked round the back and made it into one of the tea pavilions before the crowd arrived.
The cream tea was inspired by the Blue Sage café menu. She eyed the lavender scones, raspberry and mint cheesecakes, and cheese and herb sandwiches. Would Adam be able to eat? Her google search had said nothing about food. So she grabbed a couple of takeaway tea cups and went back.
He was looking better; even from a distance she could tell his colour was better. Not great, but no longer a shade whiter than the bridal gown. When he saw her, he came to meet her and took one of the teas with a grateful, “Perfect, my throat is dry as sand.”
Behind the church, the little garden overlooked an ancient graveyard that dated back to the Middle Ages. Trees hid most of it from view, ivy trailed over weathered statues and grass grew in the cracks of the crumbled headstones. There was no one here except the two of them.
They swept the leaves from the surface of an old grave, then Adam took off his Stefano Ricci suit jacket and spread it for them to sit on.
“You must be wondering…” He stared at his empty paper cup.
She handed him the rest of hers. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“The vows,” he said, looking into the milky tea, “took me back.”
She didn’t interrupt as he started telling her what turned out to be a long and very private story.
When he finished, the tea was cold. He drank a little then set the cup down on the ground.
“Did you doubt the child was yours? I mean didn’t you use protection?” It was the first of many, many questions swirling in her head.
He sighed. “I don’t know. I’ll never know. I was always very careful with condoms. They’re not supposed to be a hundred-percent fail-safe, but they’re pretty effective and I…” He scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “It was probably my secret wishful thinking. And that’s the worst part of it. That in my heart, I wanted it to be a lie.”
“So why did you rush into marriage, why not wait until the baby was born?”
“Because I felt ashamed of thinking it.” He stood up as if stung and walked away, deeper into the churchyard.
A little later he circled round and came back to sit down next to her.
“My own mother had fallen pregnant; my father’s family didn’t believe her. She found herself alone, so much that she tried to lose the baby. When my father found out, he dropped everything and married her. That was my example. When you get a woman pregnant, you stand by her. You do the right thing.”
He blew out a long breath through his lips. “Except… Except, they were happy together.”
She asked the next question as kindly as she could. “Why did you stay after the miscarriage, or later when it became clear you were so very unhappy?”
He met her gaze for the first time since he started telling the story, and his eyes looked haunted. “And abandon the woman who had become paralysed miscarrying my baby?”
She had no answer; the situation sounded like an utter nightmare.
“For five years?”
“If only I’d known it would be five years. I thought it would be forever. A life sentence. ’Til death us do part.”
She suppressed a shiver. She’d heard of similar things, a slow PTSD that developed so gradually the person never realizes until they broke down.
