FORGOTTEN LOVER, Carole Mortimer [chrysanthemum read aloud TXT] 📗

Velvet swallowed hard, holding her breath. ‘And—and now?’

‘Now?’

‘How do you feel now?’

‘I’m a bit dazed at the moment,’ he told her ruefully. ‘It seems incredible to think that the week that changed my entire life you can’t even remember.’

‘I can’t remember it,’ she admitted softly. ‘But my body does,’ she blushed fiery red under his searching gaze. ‘Every time you touch me I—I want you.’ She looked up at him with apprehensive eyes.

‘Oh, Velvet!’ He crushed her to him. ‘I wish to God you could love me.’ He shook against her.

‘I—I do,’ she choked, tense with the enormity of her confession.

Jerard looked down at her disbelievingly. ‘You do?’ he probed slowly.

‘Yes,’ she breathed. ‘I know it sounds strange, but I think if two people are supposed to love each other, then they will, no matter what barriers stand in their way. Now I can’t remember knowing you the first time around, but I—I love you now …’ She trailed off.

‘You really do?’ Hope lightened his voice.

‘Yes,’ she nodded eagerly. ‘And you, how do you feel about me, now—now that you know—’

‘I’ve never stopped loving you, Velvet, not even for a moment. I’ve been angry with you, impatient with you, but never out of love with you. Tell me again,’ he pleaded.

‘I love you. I love you!’ she cried.

‘She loves me!’ he shouted exultantly, swinging her round in his arms, then slowly lowering her to the ground. ‘I don’t know if I dare kiss you,’ he said shakily.

‘You’d better!’ Her arms went up about his neck to pull him down to her, her lips instigating the kiss, but Jerard soon took command.

This kiss was like nothing they had ever shared before, a giving and receiving of mutual love, the touching of their lips enough for both of them.

Jerard buried his face in her throat. ‘I love you so much I’m burning up with it,’ he admitted softly.

She caressed his cheek, the harshness gone now to be replaced by glowing love, a look of tenderness on his face that she had never seen before. ‘Stay with me tonight,’ she begged.

He shook his head regretfully. ‘The next time I share a bed with you we’ll be man and wife. I don’t want you to go off and forget all about me again.’

Velvet flinched, although she knew he intended no rebuke. ‘Do you hate me for marrying Anthony?’ she asked guiltily.

‘I told you to be happy, that your life had to go on,’ he dismissed abruptly. ‘I have to admit that your marriage a couple of weeks later came as something of a shock to me, but I understood.’

‘Did you?’ She made him look at her, seeing the raw pain in his eyes. ‘Did you really?’

‘No!’ he cried in an agonised voice. ‘I didn’t understand at all. When I saw the announcement in the newspapers I contemplated suicide—’

‘Oh no!’ she gasped. ‘Not you, Jerard,’ she shook her head dazedly. ‘You’re too strong to do something like that.’

‘Believe me, it was only the thought of leaving Vicki with a very sick mother that stopped me,’ he revealed harshly. ‘I couldn’t do that to her—or Tina. Then about six months later I saw the report of your plane crash,’ he sighed.

‘Anthony had only just got his licence.’ Velvet had been allowed to read the newspaper reports too, mainly in the hope that it might jog a memory. It hadn’t. ‘It was the first time he’d taken up a passenger.’

‘He was a bloody fool, taking you in your condition,’ Jerard rasped.

‘They said it was the trauma of Anthony’s death that caused the shock and Tony’s premature birth,’ she recalled dully, ‘not the crash itself.’

‘He still had no business—What the hell, the man’s dead now,’ he shrugged off his anger towards Anthony.

‘I wanted to come and see you, but Tina was even worse by then, her illness was becoming critical, and our situation would still have been the same, I was still tied to her. I did call the hospital, though, and they said that both you and the baby were well.’

‘Tony was in an incubator for a while, but only because he was so small, not because he was ill.’

‘It was obvious by this time that Tina wasn’t going to make it, but I couldn’t let you know that, it would have been as if I were wishing her to die,’ he revealed abruptly. ‘Even if my divorce from Tina had gone through as it should have done I would still have felt tied to her when I found out how ill she was.’

‘You were divorcing her?’

‘Of course, you wouldn’t remember that either. When I met you my divorce was going through the final stages. I had to leave Florida in a hurry because of my father’s sudden death, and it was while we were standing at his graveside that Tina chose to tell me of her serious heart condition. I thought the whole damn world was falling in about my head,’ he groaned.

‘You poor darling,’ she choked, wanting to be closer to him. ‘You must have hated me when I married Anthony.’

‘I didn’t hate you—I’ve never hated you. I hated the circumstances that made it impossible for me to marry you. And I’d already stolen a week of your life, I couldn’t ask you to accept anything less than marriage from me, not when it looked as if Tina would just be very weak, possibly bedridden, for many years to come. But it doesn’t matter now,’ he smiled. ‘We love each other, and we’re going to be married, that’s all that does, or can, matter to us now. The past is over.’

There was so much love in his face that she felt like crying. ‘Kiss me,’ she pleaded.

‘Gladly,’ he breathed against her mouth, parting her lips in a long and hungry kiss. ‘This won’t do,’ he said briskly. ‘All my good intentions will fly out of the window if I stay here much longer.’

‘I wish they would.’ She clung to him.