CHAPTER EIGHT

      LOW-KEY, IT HAD been agreed, was appropriate under the circumstances, and the civil ceremony was just that, a handful of people beyond the immediate family. There were photographs, which would be released along with an official statement to be issued later that week.

      So she was married. Sabrina could not decide if she was meant to feel different. She glanced to the man, her husband, who sat beside her. There was a remote, untouchable quality about him that even had she wanted to make conversation would have made her think twice. Sabrina didn’t want to.

      They were physically inches apart but in every other way worlds apart; the journey passed in total silence, not the companionable variety. He was making no effort to change that.

      The only time he had spoken was when they’d got in the car and she had told him that she wanted to go to the hospital to see Chloe. He’d nodded and issued a curt instruction to the driver. Then, when they’d arrived at the hospital, he’d pulled out a laptop.

      ‘I’ll wait here.’

      So Sabrina had gone into the private London hospital her sister had been transferred to, flanked by two security men, to the room where her sister had spent the last few weeks. Chloe had been scheduled to leave before the wedding, but an infection had meant that the skin grafts on her leg that had sustained injury had not taken and the entire painful process had had to begin all over again.

      The amount of suffering her sister had endured made her own situation seem insignificant. She took a deep breath before she went in, donning a smile along with a sterile gown. The guilt she felt was her problem. It was not something she was about to burden Chloe with; her sister had enough to contend with but Sabrina knew it was her fault. If she hadn’t run away Chloe would not be lying in a hospital bed.

      ‘Hello, you!’

      Chloe was lying in bed, her lower body beneath a cradle arrangement that held the sheet off her skin, her face a little thinner than it had been a few months ago and a lot paler, but her smile was just as bright.

      ‘So, how did it go?’

      Sabrina pulled up a chair and did her best to soften the truth with humour.

      ‘Oh, you know—your usual shotgun wedding atmosphere. Without the pregnancy, of course. Lots of glaring and suspicion and a man...actually, four...guarding the door to stop anyone from legging it.’

      ‘Sounds a laugh a minute.’

      ‘It was pretty much what I’d expected and this time the groom turned up, which most people seemed to think a plus,’ Sabrina added drily.

      ‘Well, I think you had a lucky escape. Imagine living your life with a man who was in love with someone else.’

      The way Chloe was talking it was almost as if she believed that Sebastian loved her. If it made her happy Sabrina saw no reason to correct her.

      ‘So where is the man himself? I forgot to thank him for the fruit basket he brought this morning, so send my love.’

      ‘You saw Sebastian this morning?’

      ‘Didn’t he say?’

      Say? She swallowed a bubble of hysteria in her throat. ‘He must have forgotten.’ She was not about to tell her sister that they barely communicated at all.

      Had it really been two months since that strange twenty four hours when they had shared a hospital room the night after the accident? She had barely been alone with Sebastian since.

      ‘He comes most mornings—has all the nurses drooling. You do know that if you hadn’t married him I would have had him myself, don’t you? If he hadn’t got me off that cliff I couldn’t have held on any longer.’ She shuddered. ‘I know that nowadays it would be sympathy sex, but—’

      ‘Chloe, don’t say that!’ Sabrina said, her voice husky with tears. ‘The doctors say that the scars will be—’

      ‘They will be scars, and, unlike your husband’s, they will not be sexy ones. And while we all know that it’s what you’re like inside that counts, back in the real world, well...’ She gave a sudden deep sigh and wiped her hands across her eyes. She smiled. ‘Ignore me, Brina. I’m just having a self-pity day, but Sebastian is a good man, you know, and we have kind of bonded over our scars.’

      Sabrina stayed for half an hour before reluctantly leaving her sister.

      * * *

      The sight of the streaks left by dried tears on Sabrina’s cheeks when she returned to the car elicited an involuntary stab of protective warmth in Sebastian’s chest.

      ‘How is Chloe?’ he asked.

      ‘Being brave, but I think she’s in pain, though she says not. She thanked you for the fruit.’

      He gave a grunt of assent and nodded.

      ‘I’m grateful, Sebastian.’

      He stiffened. ‘I do not want your gratitude.’

      She could almost feel the dignity and calm that she had fought hard to retain all day slipping like sand through her fingers. Except her fingers were clenched so tightly into fists that nothing could have escaped them.

      ‘You don’t want a wife,’ she blurted, hearing the heavy thud of her pulse like a hammer in her temples as her suppressed anger surged hotly.

      Even as she acknowledged it she realised that she had no legitimate right to feel this way. It was no more rational to feel angry now than it had been to imagine that they had made some sort of connection that night when they had shared a hospital room.

      What had happened since had shown pretty clearly that the only time they were ever going to be connected was when he was heavily medicated. She smothered a hysterical bubble of laughter and coaxed some calm into her manner.

      ‘But