Unexpected Pleasures (25 page)

Sasha gave a mirthless smile. ‘Oh, yes, I certainly implied—and he certainly existed. He tried to proposition one of the girls I was on holiday with. The truth is that I was very young and even more foolish. I wanted you to think I was sexy and desirable...I was too naïve to realise you’d simply think I was used and available.’

‘I don’t understand any of this. You claim you were a virgin, so why the hell did you go to bed with me? You must have known—’

‘What? That all you wanted was a one-night stand?’ Sasha shook her head. ‘Gabriel, I was seventeen. I’d been in care since I was a child. I craved love. I thought it was the answer to everything. My prince would ride into my life and sweep me up into his arms and we’d live happily ever after. That was all I wanted—to be loved. To be in love.’

He could hear the derision in her voice at her own foolishness and somehow that hurt him—for her.

‘The other girls were older than me. I’d only been included in the holiday because we all worked together. I got in their way, and on their nerves, so I spent most of my time on my own. I saw you the first day we arrived in St Tropez. You were walking past the café where I was having a cup of coffee. You fitted my mental template of hero perfectly. All it took was a handful of seconds to convince myself that it was love at first sight, and that you were the only man I could ever and would ever love.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘That’s how my neediness expressed itself.

‘I started hanging around the harbour, hoping I’d see you. And I did. Coming off the yacht. I thought you must work on it. It never occurred to me that you owned it.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Your money was never the draw for me, Gabriel, although of course you could never believe that. It scared me half to death when I realised just how wealthy you were, but by then it was too late. I was deeply in love. So much in love and so very hungry for you that even that first time what little pain there was was far outweighed by my pleasure.’

Gabriel closed his eyes. He could remember that first time and how good it had felt, how good
she
had felt, with the close sheath of her muscles gripping him tightly. He had put that down to her experience. He should have known... And perhaps deep inside he had known, but had preferred to pretend that he did not. Shame and an acute sense of loss tightened his throat.

‘And of course I’d convinced myself that you returned my feelings,’ Sasha continued lightly. ‘Even though you did everything possible to make it obvious that you didn’t. But what did I know? All I knew was my own need. No one had ever loved me; I had no experience of what real love was. So predictably, I looked for love where I was never going to find it. I set myself the task of making myself good enough for you to reward me with your love. It’s a common enough pattern. The more you withheld your love, the harder I worked to try to gain it.’

‘I didn’t know—’

‘How could you? We never talked, we simply had sex, and I made up my foolish fantasies. Even when you did mention your mother and your grandfather, it never occurred to me that those relationships had to impact on ours. I simply thought how wonderful it was that we had both had unhappy childhoods and how it must bond us together. I convinced myself that I had been given the opportunity to give you the love you had never had. I agreed with you that your mother was cruel and selfish. I couldn’t reason then that she might have been afraid and alone, that she might have found herself in a marriage that wasn’t working, and that she might have been tricked by her father into returning home, only to discover too late that the price of being rescued from an unwanted marriage was the loss of her son.’

Sasha could see that Gabriel was frowning, and there was a bleak look in his eyes. ‘I’m not saying that’s what happened, Gabriel. I’m simply saying that there could be other explanations than the one you were given.’

Gabriel wasn’t looking convinced.

‘Look, I’m not trying to rewrite your family history or defend your mother. But you were too young when your mother left to know what she felt or why she did it. All you know is what you were told by others.’

Sasha gave a small tired shrug. ‘We can look back to our childhoods, see the pain there and blame our parents, and then we can look back to their childhoods and see that they were damaged too. But where does it end, Gabriel? How far back do we go in loading the blame? How much of our lives do we need to spend looking for answers in the past and blaming others for our present? I had to step away from my childhood and re-
create myself as the person the twins needed me to be. It was the biggest turning point in the whole of my life.’

That wasn’t entirely true. But Sasha wasn’t about to tell Gabriel that even now he still held a grip on her heart that no amount of counselling or anything else could release.

‘So you reinvented yourself and turned your whole life around by deciding that your childhood wasn’t as bad as you remembered? Unfortunately I don’t have your imagination.’

The love for Gabriel that she had tried so hard to tell herself was dead filled Sasha’s heart. She ached to go to him and hold him, make whole and heal all the damaged places of his past. In her mind’s eye she could see him as a child—alone, afraid, and unloved;
hurting.
Tears stung her eyes. She wanted to reach into the past and snatch Gabriel the child from it, so that she could give him love. But she knew that no amount of love from her could take away his bitterness. And she knew too that she couldn’t risk that bitterness flowing from him into the lives of her sons.

‘Nothing more to say?’ Gabriel asked grimly. ‘This kind of talk is all very well, Sasha, but you can’t
really expect me to believe it can alter reality. Forget the past. What we need to talk about now is the present, and our sons.’

Sasha looked away from him.

‘What’s wrong?’ Gabriel demanded. ‘Or can I guess? You’d have preferred it if I’d never learned the truth, wouldn’t you? That I’d continued to believe that Carlo fathered them?’

‘Yes,’ Sasha admitted quietly.

‘Thanks for that vote of confidence.’

‘I’m thinking of the boys.’

‘And what you’re thinking is that I’m not good enough to be their father?’ Gabriel said.

Sasha dipped her head. This was so difficult, and so painful. She could remember how she had felt when she had first realised she was pregnant, her sense of excited awe that
she
was having
Gabriel’s
baby. She had felt as though she’d had the greatest gift on earth bestowed on her. The pregnancy had been accidental; she had been far too much the junior partner in their relationship to think of doing something like deliberately sabotaging Gabriel’s contraception. The fact that she had conceived despite Gabriel’s precautions had just made her feel that her pregnancy was extra special and meant to be. She had been delirious with joy, expecting with every early-morning bout of sickness to hear Gabriel announcing that he knew she was pregnant. She had even imagined the scene, right down to his words of love and reverence as he held her and told her how thrilled he was, how much he loved her. He would insist on marrying her immediately, of course, and they would live happily ever after with their adorable baby.

Only it hadn’t worked like that. Now she knew that she must have had some inner instinct warning her of what was to come. Why else would she have lied when Gabriel had commented on her sickness, saying it was food poisoning? She might have believed she wanted him to guess she was pregnant, but something deep within her had made her keep it a secret.

She had been in her second month when she had begun to feel impatient with Gabriel’s lack of insight, and she had started to drop heavy hints about babies. That was when Gabriel had told her bitingly that far too many people produced children they didn’t want. And he had underlined his views with explicit descriptions of his own childhood.

Remembering that time now, she took a deep breath.

‘I don’t think that you are whole enough to be the father I want for them. I don’t want them to suffer the repercussions of your childhood, Gabriel,’ she told him quietly.

It hurt her physically to see the shock in his eyes and the way he battled to conceal it from her.

‘You think I’d
hurt
them, physically abuse them?’ he burst out.

Sasha shook her head. ‘No,’ she told him honestly. ‘I lived with you for long enough to know that you wouldn’t hurt them that way. But there are other ways of harming those we love.’

‘So you
do
accept that I love them?’

Sasha smiled ruefully. From the moment they had set eyes on one another Gabriel and the twins had formed a united male bond that had given her more cause for guilty anxiety than she wanted to admit. If he’d known right from the start they were his children Gabriel couldn’t have been more of a father during these few weeks they had all spent together. He possessed an instinctive perception of what would work for them and what wouldn’t, and he treated them as individuals instead of lumping them together as ‘the twins’. But most telling of all was the way in which he had immediately and instinctively been able to tell them apart. Something that until now only she had been able to do. Carlo had certainly never managed to work out which of them was which.

‘Yes, I do accept that. But even love can be damaging, Gabriel. It’s natural for us to want to give our own children the best of everything, emotionally and materially. But that isn’t always a good thing.’

‘You mean you think I’d overload them with too much love and money because I’d want to give them what I never had?’

‘Tell me honestly that you haven’t already mentally picked out top-of-the-range bicycles for them,’ Sasha asked him dryly. She could tell from the way Gabriel avoided her gaze that she was right. ‘It isn’t that I don’t believe you love them, Gabriel, or that I doubt for one minute that you’d want the very best of everything for them. It’s... I’ve had to learn that sometimes the best thing you can do for them is to say no.’

‘So you don’t want me to be part of their lives because you think I’ll spoil them?’

‘You are
already
a part of their lives. You’re their guardian and their father.’

‘Sasha.’ He reached across the table and took hold of her hand before she could stop him.

‘I understand what you’re saying, and, yes, I accept that being a father is going to involve me in a pretty steep learning curve. But what about the other side of the equation?’

‘What other side?’ Sasha asked woodenly. But she already knew. This was it. She was living her worst nightmare—and her most longed-for dream.

‘You and I share a history that holds a lot of pain and anger. I know that. But it also holds our sons. I know that I’ve let the best thing in my life slip away from me because I was too blind to see what I had. We’ve already proved that sexually we’re not so much compatible as combustible.’ Gabriel paused, and the smouldering look in his eyes made Sasha’s toes curl and her heart thump with remembered pleasure. ‘The best gift any parent can give their child is surely the security of a loving home life. I’d like to give that to our sons.’

It might have taken him a long time to accept that he loved Sasha, but now that he had he didn’t intend to waste any more of it. There was nothing he wanted to hold back from her now; not his love, not his admission that he had deliberately made himself think the worst of her, not his heartfelt apology for his mistakes—nothing! He wanted a clean conscience, a clean fresh start, a new beginning for them all, and a life in which he could show Sasha just how much she and their sons meant to him every single day.

‘You mean you want the four of us to live together as a family?’ There was a note of caution in her voice he could fully understand.

‘I want us to live together as a family—yes, Sasha. And I want you and I to live as husband and wife. I want to marry you, Sasha. I want our sons to grow up with us as their parents.’

Just for a few precious seconds Sasha allowed herself to dream and believe, to think the impossible. But only for a few seconds. Because she already knew what her answer had to be.

‘No,’ she told Gabriel quietly.

‘No? Why not? What—?’

‘It wouldn’t work, Gabriel. I accept that sexually we...it works between us,’ she agreed hurriedly, not wanting to linger on thoughts that could only add to the rebellion inside her, threatening to overturn her hard-won decision. ‘But you and I... We both may love the boys, but let’s not pretend that we love one another. Because we both know that we don’t.’

They were the hardest words she had ever had to say. All the more so because they were a lie. No matter what she’d told herself during the intervening years, she knew herself too well now to be able to pretend that the way he made her feel was purely sexual. But she also knew that for her sons’ sake she could not afford to love him—especially not via a public relationship and a commitment that could rebound on them.

In a dream world, a perfect world, this was where she would fling herself into his arms with cries of joy that they would live happily ever after. But reality wasn’t like that. Reality could be harsh and unforgiving.

‘On the contrary, I know nothing of the sort,’ she heard Gabriel saying softly. Her heart skipped a beat. Had he guessed that she still loved him? And if so... ‘You may not love me any more, Sasha, but I do love you.’

If only she could let herself believe that. The thrill of hearing those words after so many years was threatening to sweep away all her doubts. But she mustn’t let it.

‘You say that now, Gabriel, but how can I believe it? How can you? Only days ago you believed that I was a bad mother, a woman who went from one man’s bed to another’s, a woman who was looking for a rich man to support her. Remember?’

Gabriel couldn’t deny it. ‘I said all those things, yes,’ he said. ‘And, yes, initially I was convinced that they were true. But it didn’t take me very long to realise just how wrong I was, even if I was too stubborn to face up to it. I had to make myself believe them, Sasha, because my pride wouldn’t let me admit how I really felt when you walked out on me that day. I’d sworn that I would never risk falling in love and I couldn’t admit that I had. Besides, if you’d really wanted a wealthy man to seduce, you could have seduced me.’ He smiled at her, to show that he was making a joke against himself. ‘Perhaps a part of me was hoping that you would.’