Read Online The Society Wife by India Grey - Free Book Online

at that either.
    â€˜Better now?’
    â€˜Yes. I’m sorry.’ Suddenly she was glad that she was sitting down. Adrenaline burned through her, making her feel shaky and spacey as the moment when she would have to tell him rushed towards her with the terrifying inevitability of anexpress train. She bit her lip and said hesitantly, ‘In a funny kind of way it’s worked out rather well.’
    â€˜Meaning?’
    His voice was icy. She could feel goose bumps prickling her bare arms. ‘I wanted the chance to talk to you…alone.’
    His face darkened, hardened, and he sighed and turned away. ‘I thought I explained. I thought you understood that the night we shared—’
    â€˜I did. I do.’ She cut him off, speaking with soft determination, but her heart felt as if it might burst. Oh, God…this is it. ‘But I thought you had a right to know. I’m pregnant.’
    For a moment he didn’t move. Then he took a couple of steps forward, away from her, and Lily caught a fleeting glimpse of his hands, balled tightly into fists, before he thrust them into the pockets of his trousers.
    It was cold. She was aware of the chilly iron scrollwork of the bench biting into her flesh through the thin silk of her dress, but she was powerless to move.
    I’m sorry. The words formed on her lips, so that she could almost taste them, sweet and tempting. But she refused to speak them. She was used to saying what other people wanted to hear and the habit was hard to break, but the truth was she wasn’t sorry. She was glad.
    Her own parenting, by a mother who was barely out of her teens, barely able to cope, had been haphazard and inadequate, but it had only fuelled Lily’s need to nurture. Her dolls had always been care fully dressed in pyjamas, lovingly tucked into their shoebox beds and read to, even when she had not. For as long as she could remember, the need to love and to nurture had been there inside her, beating alongside her heart, echoing through the empty spaces in her life and in her body. She hadn’t wanted to listen to it until that moment in Dr Lee’s office when he’d told her the news. The news that should have horrified her, but had actually filled her with a profound, primitive joy.
    She wanted this baby. More than she’d wanted anything, ever before.
    Slowly Tristan turned round. The expression on his face was like a January dawn in Siberia—dark, bleak, and utterly forbidding.
    â€˜Congratulations,’ he said, very softly. ‘To you, and to the father.’
    â€˜What?’ With a gasp of incredulity she leapt to her feet. ‘No! You don’t understand. I—’
    He turned away from her again, looking out over the garden as he cut through her heated protest. ‘I have to warn you to think very carefully about what you’re just about to say, Lily.’
    His voice was quiet, but there was an edge to it that was like sharpened steel against her throat. Lily felt the sweat cool to ice water on the back of her neck, and clenched her teeth against their sudden chattering, dropping back down onto the bench as her knees gave way beneath her.
    â€˜You can’t intimidate me.’
    To her surprise Tristan laughed; a hollow, humourless laugh, tinged with despair. ‘You really don’t understand at all, do you? I’m not trying to intimidate you. I’m trying to save you. I’m trying to give you a chance . To give you the freedom to make your own choices, because—’ He broke off suddenly. Dragging a hand through his hair, he sat down wearily beside her and dropped his face into his hands for a moment. When he lifted it again the dead expression in his eyes turned her insides to ice. ‘Because the second that you say this child is mine, all that will be taken away from you.’
    Lily clasped her hands together in her lap, twisting and kneading at her own numb fingers as panic made the