Page 40 of One Forbidden Night In Paradise (Hot Winter Escapes)

‘You asked me where those divers got lost.’ The anger was gone. In fact, his voice was wiped of all emotion. ‘It was off the coast of Mexico.’

Staring across the room at Jemima, Chase felt his chest tighten.

‘Why didn’t you just tell me that?’ Her grey eyes found his, clear, puzzled, the anger that had lit them up moments earlier fading.

Because of this. Because in answering one question he had unleashed a wave of others. Only they were harder to answer. And each one would be more painful than the last.

‘I didn’t think you needed to know. I thought it would make things complicated. I knew you didn’t want that. Neither of us did.’

He heard her breath quicken. ‘Why would you being in Mexico complicate things?’

His head shuddered like a building in an earthquake. ‘Because I was with my parents-in-law.’

Her face seemed to shrink. She sank back down on the bed and he could see that her legs were shaking. ‘You’re married?’

He shook his head. ‘Not any more.’ He could hear the finality in his words; she heard it too. He could tell from the way her body seemed to lose shape.

‘What was her name?’ she said quietly.

‘Frida. I didn’t tell you about her because—’His head was spinning, there were so many reasons, and yet weirdly he couldn’t think of one.

‘You don’t have to explain. We don’t have to talk. We can just sit here.’ Jemima’s voice cut across the panicky swirl of his thoughts and instantly he felt calmer. She was right. He didn’t have to tell her anything, but for some reason he wanted to.

‘She was their only child. They miss her especially around the anniversary of her—’ The word stuck in his throat.

‘When did it...? When did she...?’

‘Eight years ago.’ His chest tightened. He had never talked to anyone about the accident. Had never wanted to, but then this was the first time he had spoken Frida’s name aloud to anyone outside his family and it seemed to loosen something inside him so that before he understood that he was doing it, he began talking about a past he had buried along with his wife.

‘We met at college. When I dropped out, she still married me. For our honeymoon, we hired a yacht. Not like theMiranda. It was smaller but we both loved sailing. That’s when we saw the rays.’

He hesitated, then cleared his throat.

‘She got her law degree, joined a firm while I messed around on more boats. Then my dad got ill and I went to help out at his insurance firm, and I liked it. But I wanted to do things my way so I set up Monmouth Rock.’

Something strange was happening to his voice. It sounded different, almost as though it were being artificially generated.

‘We started trying for a baby and she got pregnant really quickly. But then we lost the baby early before the first scan. And we were upset but we tried again, and she got pregnant again. And she miscarried. It kept happening. The doctors were doing all these tests and we talked about surrogacy but Frida wanted to keep trying.’

It had been the hardest thing that had never happened.

‘By then the business was global and I was flying all over the world and it was hard for both of us. She was struggling. Not sleeping. She blamed herself even though it wasn’t her fault. And then one day she told me she couldn’t do it any more. She couldn’t keep trying.’

It had been the worst moment of his life watching her despair. Or so he had thought then.

‘So we stopped trying for about a year. She went on the pill. She changed her diet, started doing yoga and painting and we agreed that we would use a surrogate. We were looking into it when she got this bug and she was sick for days. It must have messed up the pill because about a month later she found out she was pregnant. And this time it stuck, and she was so happy. I was too.’

His chest tightened. There was no easy way to say what happened next. In fact, he’d always thought he didn’t have the words, but glancing over to where Jemima sat clutching the sheet around her body, her gaze still, steady, unwavering, he said quietly, ‘She was five months pregnant when she lost that baby.’ There was a tiny silence. ‘It was a girl.’

He felt as shocked now as he was then. Shocked too that he was telling Jemima.

‘I’m so sorry, Chase.’

Her voice was so soft he wished he could just wrap himself in it. But he didn’t deserve to be comforted. He didn’t deserve her sympathy.

‘I had some time off but then I had to go back to work.’ He frowned. ‘I wanted to go back to work because I thought that if things got back to normal it would help. But it didn’t. She was hardly eating. She’d stopped seeing her friends. I took her to the doctors and she was given anti-depressants but they made her drowsy. In the end I decided to take some more time off work. We had a house in upstate New York. I thought we could spend some time there, together. I was going to drive her, but I had to hand over things at work and it all took longer than I thought it would.’

He felt as if he were underwater. Every breath was being torn from his lungs. ‘I was still at work when the police came to find me. Her car had spun off the road and hit a bunch of trees. She was killed instantly.’

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