Ruthless Husband, Convenient Wife Read online

  He kissed her briefly on the cheek and walked down the stairs without a backward glance. She knew he was bitterly hurt by her sending for the prospectuses without telling him. She wanted to call after him—but there was nothing she could think of to say.

  She shut the door and looked around the flat.

  There was suddenly such a hole in her life. The stuffy little space seemed to crowd around her with an air of dust, loneliness and melancholy. She went to the window and saw Ryan get into his car, a tall, dark figure. He drove away.

  The sky was darkening, and neon was already flickering all down the street of shabby little shops.

  ‘If you only knew it,’ she whispered to Ryan’s disappearing tail-lights, ‘I don’t deserve you, darling. And God knows you’d be better off without me.’

  The next day was a day for reflection. She did not call Ryan, and when he called her she let the answering machine take it, and deliberately avoided listening to the message he left.

  She felt a deep unease. The lowering sky and the claustrophobic atmosphere of her flatlet did not help. There were currents of anxiety stirring at the very foundations of her soul today.

  She dusted and cleaned, ashamed that she had let the little nest she had once been so proud of get so neglected. When she’d done her chores she sat down and pored over the prospectuses that had come from universities all over the country—Manchester, Liverpool, East Anglia, as far afield as Wales and Scotland.

  Reading the inviting descriptions of the courses and the campuses, Penny felt like a prisoner who was getting a glimpse through a barred window at a life she had once used to have.

  There were photographs in the leaflets, too. Happy students attending lectures, wearing casual clothes, strolling through leafy campuses. Or wearing academic dress, holding their degree certificates.

  Graduating into lives they had chosen for themselves.

  She allowed herself to slip into a daydream where everything worked out just the way she wanted it—where she got her degree, opened her own florist’s business, and kept Ryan Wolfe.

  When her dreams finally turned into dust and slipped away, she went to do what she had been putting off all morning.

  She checked her diary, and accepted the truth—that today she was not one month late, but two months late.

  She took some money out of her purse and went out to the pharmacy to get a pregnancy-test kit.

  When she called Ryan she was close to hysteria, though the dam wall hadn’t yet broken.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked in a blank voice. He was in a meeting with a group from one of the high-street banks, and had rushed out of the conference room to take her call.

  ‘The test kits are supposed to be very accurate,’ she replied, her voice quivering with the strain. ‘And I’m two months late with my period.’

  ‘I thought you said you had everything under control?’

  ‘I thought I did,’ she replied. ‘But things go wrong sometimes. You know that. I’ve made an appointment to do a laboratory test this afternoon. But I know I’m pregnant. I’ve been feeling sick every morning for a week now. And God, I’ve got such a headache!’

  ‘Oh, Penny!’ After the initial shock, Ryan’s voice was changing. ‘This is the most wonderful news!’

  ‘What’s wonderful about it?’ she asked, her own voice cracking.

  ‘We’re going to have a baby!’

  ‘Not we,’ she snapped, ‘me. I’m the one having the baby, Ryan.’

  ‘Penny,’ he said in an excited voice, ‘I have to go and cancel this meeting. I’ll be with you in an hour. Please go to the apartment; I’ll meet you there.’

  She felt like a volcano waiting to erupt. It was the worst possible news for her. It rendered all her options null and void. All her plans, all her speculations, doubts, longings, all were cancelled out with this one stroke.

  Why hadn’t she run from Ryan right at the start?

  She went across to Knightsbridge and let herself into Ryan’s apartment. She hadn’t been here since before they’d flown to Milan. The service staff had kept it spotless, but her flower arrangements were wilted and drooping.

  She threw them out, feeling as she did so that she was throwing out the faded blooms of her own hopes.

  Her head was aching terribly, a blinding pain behind her eyes. She grabbed a handful of headache pills from the bathroom cupboard, then stopped as she was about to swallow them. Would these affect her baby? She needed to ask someone.

  She threw the pills away in disgust. Already, her every decision was being shaped by her pregnancy—she could not think of it as a baby yet. Already, she was being stopped from doing what she needed to do.

  When Ryan arrived, he was alight with joy.

  He swept her into his arms and held her tight. ‘Oh, Penny,’ he said, his mouth close to her ear, ‘this is so wonderful. I know you must be feeling mixed-up about it, but that will pass. My darling, my precious one, I’m so happy.’

  They sat on the leather sofa, and she looked at him with blurred eyes. ‘Ryan, it’s not wonderful,’ she said. ‘It’s a disaster.’

  ‘I want you to marry me,’ he said, holding her hands.

  ‘I don’t want to get married,’ she said, starting to cry again. ‘I’m only twenty-two!’

  ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘The only reason I haven’t asked you to marry me up to now is because I knew it would frighten you off. But I always wanted you to be my wife, from the first moment I met you. And I want that more than ever now.’

  ‘Ryan, I wanted to go to university. I wanted to finish my degree. I wanted to start my own business. None of that is going to happen now!’

  ‘Not in the short term,’ he agreed. ‘But other things are going to happen. Wonderful things. You’re going to be so happy. Look. I got something for you.’

  He gave her the blue velvet box. She opened it. Inside was an exquisite ruby necklace. The stones glowed with red fire.

  ‘They’re Burmese rubies,’ he said. ‘I saw this piece a few weeks ago and I knew I wanted it for you. It will set off your beautiful eyes and hair perfectly.’

  ‘This must have cost a fortune,’ she said numbly.

  ‘Let me put it on,’ he said.

  Her head was pounding as he put the necklace round her throat. The headache was getting worse and worse. The red glints thrown off by the rubies seemed to pierce her eyes, making her wince.

  The necklace somehow made everything much worse. It must have cost a huge amount, and it merely rammed home how much in Ryan’s power she now was.

  Now she didn’t merely have to be the perfect girlfriend.

  Now she had to present him with the perfect baby, be the perfect mother, and spend the rest of her life being the perfect wife.

  Something rose up in her breast, and the tears she’d been holding back for so long filled Penny’s eyes. She burst into hysterical sobs.

  Ryan held her close, trying to soothe her. But her crying seemed to have no ending.

  In the afternoon, she went for a laboratory test, refusing to allow Ryan to come with her. The nurse at the clinic told her that the results confirmed that she was between eight and ten weeks pregnant.

  She was feeling desperate now. She went back to her own flatlet, rather than to Knightsbridge, and tried to call her mother. But she and Aubrey were away for the weekend. There was nobody she could talk to.

  The nurse she had spoken to at the clinic had told her she could take painkillers in moderation, so she had taken the prescribed dose to try to combat the awful pain in her head. But it did not even budge. The headache throbbed behind her eyes, so blinding that she could not even think.

  Ryan arrived, filled with concern. He sat next to her on the sofa and held a cool, damp cloth to her burning forehead.

  ‘My poor baby,’ he said. ‘Let me take you to a doctor, please. You should have a check-up right away.’

  ‘I don’t want to see a doctor,’ she said tightly.

  ‘You can’t
stay here,’ he said. ‘Not any more. It’s time for you to move in with me. So I can look after you. I think we should go down to Devon, too. We need to speak to your parents, tell them the good news. Tell them we’re getting married.’

  ‘We’re not getting married!’

  ‘Penny, do you love me?’ he asked her.

  She was silent for a long time before answering that question. The throbbing in her head seemed to have been ratcheted up in intensity by what he was saying.

  ‘I always thought of myself as an artist,’ she said at last, in a low voice. ‘Not a great artist. Not even a good one. But I know I am someone who needs to create things in the world.’

  ‘You create beautiful things,’ he said.

  ‘I have so much to learn, Ryan. I know how to arrange flowers a little. I can paint a little, draw a little. But I’ve just dabbled. I’ve never carved wood. I’ve never worked with stone. I’ve never made ceramics. I’ve never done mosaic—or sculpted in clay—or painted in oils. And now I never will.’

  ‘Silly girl,’ he said, smiling at the tears that spilled down her cheeks. ‘You’ll do all of those things. For the rest of your pregnancy you can do whatever you want. And when our baby is born, I’ll get you all the help you need so you can paint or sculpt all day long.’

  ‘You can’t just start hacking a block of marble. You have to learn. You have to go to art school. That’s what I’ll never do!’

  She was crying bitterly now, and Ryan’s smile turned to an expression of concern. ‘I’m going to find a doctor,’ he said. ‘You’d better come to the apartment right away. You can’t stay in this dump any more.’

  She looked at him with bleary eyes. ‘Haven’t you got a meeting this afternoon?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m going to cancel it right away.’

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. With an effort, Penny sat up. Her headache was worsening all the time; it had spread down her neck and into her spine now. But she made an effort to look relaxed. ‘Go to your meeting. I’ll pack a bag and get a taxi to Knightsbridge.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

  ‘Quite sure.’

  She even swallowed her tears and forced a smile to her lips. It wasn’t easy, but she persuaded Ryan to go to his meeting. He left her packing a bag with essential things.

  But she wasn’t planning to go to Knightsbridge.

  She had finally seen what she needed to do. And that was get as far away from Ryan as she possibly could. It had been that final conversation that had done it—that image of herself, a prisoner in the Knightsbridge apartment, pampered and cosseted, her baby safely in the arms of a nanny, all escape cut off forever.

  A midsummer rose cut off and stuck in a vase to be admired and never to feel the touch of the sun or the wind again.

  Looking back later, Penny realised that her encephalitis must have been well under way even then. What she’d thought of as the worst migraine of her life must have been the early stages of the infection that would put her in a coma a few days later.

  And much of the hysteria she felt was probably due to the same cause, though she didn’t know it at the time. She was literally running for her life.

  She packed her bag, locked the flat and took a taxi to Paddington Station. She bought a ticket to Exeter. A one-way ticket. She was not planning to come back to London anytime soon.

  She found her seat on the train and settled into it, huddling into her denim jacket. It was early autumn, the train was cold, and the denim wasn’t doing much of a job of keeping her warm. She had left all her fine new clothes in Knightsbridge; her clothes, the jewellery Ryan had given her, her books, her personal-care things—in fact, she had left her entire life there. The shabby little kitbag next to her held nothing but the few possessions she had brought with her to London, months ago.

  As the train pulled out of Paddington, she was thinking about the new life inside her. She had a vision of a future for her and her baby. It was vague, but it was forming in her pain-racked brain.

  She would register for the course that seemed to suit her best. She would go back to university. Try to find work to help her pay her way. Her mother and Aubrey would help, too; they had always offered any assistance she needed.

  She would have her baby and keep going. Developing the way she wanted to develop—not according to some plan dreamed up by Ryan on her behalf.

  Looking after her baby, working, making her own way.

  If Ryan still wanted her, then he would have to come and find her, and take her on her own terms. She would never again be a bird in a cage, no matter if the bars were made of gold and encrusted with rubies.

  But oh, her poor head hurt so much. She felt nauseous from the pain. She must be coming down with the worst flu ever. She wrapped her hands protectively across her womb, not wanting her baby to be at any risk. She knew she was building a fever. When she got to Exeter, she would go to a doctor. Her mother and stepfather wouldn’t be home for a few days, so she would stay with friends until they got back. She had called Amanda John, and she would pick her up at the station.

  The world flashed past the carriage window. It was a three-hour journey to the west, and she fell into a fitful doze, the pounding in her head meshing with the rush of the train’s steel wheels.

  The warbling of her cellphone woke her. Feeling worse than ever, she groped for the phone in her bag. A glance at the screen told her it was Ryan calling. The little red cellphone was the one link with him she had forgotten to sever.

  She answered the call reluctantly.

  ‘Hello, Ryan.’

  His voice crackled with urgency. ‘Penny, where are you?’

  She drew a deep breath. ‘I need to get away for a while, Ryan. Please try to understand.’

  ‘Understand? Understand what?’ he demanded.

  ‘I need space. My own space.’

  ‘Penny,’ he said, obviously making an effort to stay calm, ‘where are you?’

  ‘I’m leaving London for a time. I need to work things out for myself.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ he asked urgently.

  ‘I’m asking you to give me time.’

  ‘How much time?’ He sounded as though he could not believe what she had done to him.

  ‘As long as I need.’

  ‘You need to see a doctor,’ he said, his voice tight. ‘I’ve made an appointment for you to see a top gyn-ob in Harley Street tomorrow!’

  ‘I’ll go to a doctor,’ she promised. ‘But I don’t need someone in Harley Street. I’ll find someone on the NHS.’

  ‘Penny, please come back. Wherever you are, come back to me, I beg you.’

  ‘No, Ryan,’ she said dully. ‘I can’t come back. It’s taken all my strength to get away.’

  ‘For God’s sake, why did you need to get away from me?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said all these months?’ she asked. ‘Do you still not understand?’

  ‘Of course I’ve heard,’ he snapped. ‘And of course I understand. But we need to talk, Penny. We need to work things out. Running away won’t solve anything!’

  ‘It’s the only thing I’ve got left,’ she replied. ‘We talk. But you don’t listen. If you do listen, then you don’t understand. And if you do understand, then you just don’t care.’

  ‘Penny—’

  ‘Well, I can’t do it any more, Ryan. I can’t be a slave in satin. I’m voting with my feet.’

  ‘Penny, please listen to me. I will do whatever you want me to. Just come back to me. I love you. That, at least, you can’t deny.’

  Her eyes filled with tears which spilled over and ran hotly down her cheeks. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I know you love me. Nobody has ever loved me the way you do. You just don’t know how to let me be free.’

  ‘You have always been free, Penny,’ he replied. ‘But you never knew it.’

  ‘If you truly loved me, you would have let me go.’

  ‘Love is not letting go. Love is a compromise. It’s neither be
ing a slave in satin, nor running off to be three hundred miles away from me. It’s something in between. A common course. Something we work out together.’

  ‘I don’t believe you want to work anything out.’ She was still crying. ‘You just want everything your way.’

  ‘Penny, I’m going to find you and bring you home.’

  ‘Listen to me,’ she said, sobbing. ‘If you try to come after me, I’ll go to a clinic and have this pregnancy terminated.’

  The words were out of her mouth before she’d even realised she had said them. They were the worst thing she could think of, to keep him at bay. She was shocked to hear herself say something so terrible.

  ‘Penny!’ he gasped.

  ‘I mean it,’ she said brokenly. ‘Just leave me alone!’

  She snapped the cellphone closed, switched it off so he could not call her back, and threw it into her kitbag. Then she had to run to the toilet, and was violently sick.

  She cried and vomited all the rest of the journey, until the train pulled into Exeter St David’s, bringing her into a red mist of pain. She blundered out onto the station, frightened by the way she felt, by the huge pain in her head.

  Something was badly wrong with her, she knew that now. She needed Ryan now, with a terrifying urgency.

  Amanda, her friend, was waiting for her on the platform. She greeted Penny with an exclamation of dismay.

  ‘Sweetie, are you sick?’

  ‘I think I’m coming down with flu, or food poisoning, or something,’ Penny said. Her legs were so weak that she could hardly stand up. ‘I think I’d better see a doctor.’

  ‘We’ll go to one straight away,’ Amanda said, taking Penny’s bag. ‘You look awful, love.’

  ‘Wait.’

  Penny dug in her bag and unearthed the cellphone. She switched it on and called Ryan’s number in London. She didn’t even get a ringing tone. The voice-mail service cut straight in, requesting that she leave a message.

  She stood there on St David’s Station, with the little phone to her ear, wondering what message she could possibly leave him. An apology for what she had done? A plea that he come and rescue her from her foolishness?