The Unexpected Baby(22)

The wrong thing to have said, Elena thought. Jed smiled for his mother, but his eyes, when they glanced her way, were full of contempt. He was thinking about the child she was carrying. Sam’s child.

Suddenly she wanted this day to be over. Wanted Catherine safely back in England. Wanted Jed to love her again, wanted to turn the clock back...

But what she wanted she couldn’t have. She followed the other two into a shady warren of narrow cobbled streets. Her spine felt like wet string and her heart felt like a lump of sludge, low down in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t know how she was going to get through the rest of the day because she was hurting so much.

She had two options, she decided bleakly. One, she could drag along, looking and feeling like a wet weekend, making Catherine suspect something was very wrong, because she wasn’t a teenager in a sulk but a mature woman on her honeymoon. Or, two, she could act the part of the besotted new bride, just as Jed had told her to!

Pride made her decide on the latter. Taking a deep breath, blinking away the threat of tears, she caught up with the other two, slipped between them and took Jed’s arm, leaning against his shoulder, her hip and thigh brushing his as they walked.

She felt a shudder rake through his body, noted the way he tensed, and turned her grin of satisfaction into, ‘There’s a gorgeous restaurant overlooking the sea. We could eat outside, catch the breeze.’

Jed grunted and Catherine cried, ‘Sounds good to me! Lead the way!’

Elena did, keeping up the body pressure, reminding herself that she was punishing him, repeatedly reminding herself of just why she was having to stoop to that—to take her mind off the effect the closeness of him was having on her.

When they’d seated themselves at an open-air table in a discreetly secluded corner—deliberately chosen because if she was going to make an exhibition of herself she didn’t want it to be public—shaded by an awning of clambering vines, cooled by the breezes from the Atlantic, Elena could see that Jed was having a hard time controlling his temper.

The look he gave her as she slid into the seat beside his, allowing the unbuttoned edges of her skirt to fall apart to display every last inch of her long tanned legs, told her he was bitterly regretting having ordered her to pretend to be a loving wife!

Good! She gave him a brilliant smile and did her best to convince herself that she was enjoying this, getting under his skin, making him want her and despising himself for doing it, livid with her for doing it to him.

She put her hand on his arm and trailed her fingers down his skin. She felt his muscles tense and knew he wanted to brush her hand away, but he couldn’t do anything of the sort under Catherine’s fond maternal eye.

‘Perhaps I should order, darling?’ Elena murmured. ‘Very few people here speak any English at all—Cadiz isn’t one of those heaving internationally orientated tourist spots.’

‘Whatever.’ He dipped his head in seeming compliance, but she knew he didn’t like her taking charge. He liked making his own decisions—witness the way he’d issued those directives on the way their future was to be conducted.

Tough! Elena consulted the menu and opted for roast vegetable salad—red peppers, tomatoes and aubergines—and clams cooked with sherry and garlic. ‘Does that sound OK to you guys?’

She beckoned one of the white-coated waiters over and ordered in fluent Spanish. When she’d come out here all those years ago learning the language had been a priority, and now Catherine said admiringly, ‘Is there no end to your talents?’

Smiling enigmatically, Elena plucked the shady hat from her head and ran her fingers through her hair, looking at Jed through her long, tangled lashes, her mouth pouting. ‘I think you should ask my husband that!’

Recklessly flirting with him throughout the meal, Elena caught Catherine’s doting, satisfied smile and guilt pushed itself right into her heart.

She was creating a fool’s paradise for this nice woman. She felt ashamed of herself. The true situation, stripped of pretence and game-playing, crashed down on her then, swamping her with misery, making her feel wretched.

And she felt worse than wretched—she felt terrified—when, after Catherine had excused herself to visit the washroom, Jed took her chin in cruel fingers and told her, ‘I know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.’

His eyes raked her face and her heart quailed at the dark, brooding intensity of his eyes as they rested on her lips. ‘Our marriage may be over in all but name, but be careful I don’t grab what’s so enticingly on offer. There’s only so much a man can take before he forgets his scruples.’