To Love, Honour & Betray

MILLS & BOON

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1

Lying across her mother’s bed, long legs dangling over the side, one hand propping up her chin, the other pushing aside the thick, dark heaviness of her long, curly hair, and waiting while her mother put the final touches to her make-up, Tara started to read from the local newspaper she had stopped off to buy as she drove through town.

‘“Town Honours Prominent Local Businesswoman,”’ she read aloud, telling her mother unnecessarily, ‘that’s you,’ before continuing, ‘“Last Saturday evening, a celebratory dinner was held in the town’s twelfth-century Knights Hospitallers’ Hall to mark a decade of fund-raising by the Upper Charfont Beneficiary Trust and to honour one of its founder members and, more recently, its chairperson, Mrs Claudia Wallace.”

‘Sounds good, Ma,’ Tara told Claudia in the soft, husky voice whose intonations and idiosyncrasies were so exactly those of her mother that when Tara was at home, callers often confused the two of them. She turned back to the article.

‘“Over the past decade, Mrs Wallace has worked tirelessly and successfully to promote the interests and activities of the Trust and it is thanks to her that it has seen donations rise so spectacularly. Not only has Mrs Wallace worked selflessly to raise funds for charity, she has, in addition, privately given her time and her skills as a trained probation officer and the senior partner in a successful local private counselling and advisory practice to train and, where necessary, give her own services to help with the charity’s work.

‘“In recognition of her committed involvement with the community, the Town Council has proposed that the new day care and recreation centre for physically disadvantaged residents be named after her….’”

Tara looked away from the newspaper and studied her mother’s reflection in the mirror.

‘You don’t look forty-five,’ she told her judiciously. ‘In fact … have you ever thought of remarrying, Ma?’ she asked her mother curiously. ‘I mean, it’s over ten years now since you and Dad divorced and …’

Very carefully, Claudia put down her mascara and turned to face her daughter. At twenty-three, Tara might now, in the eyes of the world, be very much an adult young woman but to her she was still her daughter, her little girl, the most precious gift that life had given her, and as such, Claudia had every mother’s need to protect and guard her.

‘After all, it’s not as though there aren’t at least a dozen men that I know of who’d love to marry you, given half the chance.’

Claudia gave her a wry look and suggested, ‘I think that’s rather an exaggeration, don’t you?’

‘Well, there’s Charles Weatherall and Paul Avery and then there’s John Fellows and, of course, there’s Luke,’ she slipped in.

‘Luke is a client, that’s all,’ Claudia told her calmly, but she still turned her head away just in case that small flutter of sensation she could feel inside should somehow or other reveal itself outwardly. Not that there was any reason why the mention of Luke’s name should cause that disturbing slight palpitation of her heartbeat, she reminded herself severely. For a start, he was at least seven years her junior.

‘Mmm … So you haven’t considered remarrying, then,’ Tara repeated. Claudia studied her daughter thoughtfully.

Despite all her attempts to sound and look light-hearted, Claudia could sense Tara’s tension.

‘I haven’t, no,’ she conceded, and then waited.

‘Mmm … Have you seen anything of Dad recently?’ Claudia’s stomach muscles knotted. Now it was her turn to hide the quick, fierce stab of tension that struck through her at Tara’s carefully casual mention of Garth, and instinctively Claudia looked away from her, letting the smooth, silky bell of her blonde bob swing forward to conceal her face as she responded, ‘No. No, I haven’t. Is there any reason why I should have done?’

‘No, none at all. It’s just that … well, Dad’s been seeing quite a lot of Rachel Bedlington, that’s the new account executive who joined the company just after Christmas. She’s in her early thirties. Dad head-hunted her from Faversham Bayliss. She specialises in women-focused ads. You know the type. New woman drives the car while wimpish boyfriend looks on.’

‘Yes, I know the type,’ Claudia agreed calmly, and it wasn’t just the advertisements she was referring to. She could see Garth’s new account executive already—elegant, intelligent, witty, young … She would be besotted with him, of course. What young woman in her position wouldn’t be? And, in all fairness, Claudia had to admit that her ex-husband might be fifty, but he was still physically an outstandingly good-looking and a very masculine man—even more so now perhaps in his maturity than he had been when he had been young.

‘I don’t think it’s anything serious,’ Tara hastened to add, but Claudia could see from her expression, hear in her voice that, on the contrary, she thought it was extremely serious. Taking a deep breath, she turned her head to look smilingly at her daughter—their daughter—hers and Garth’s.

‘It’s all right, darling,’ she told her equably. ‘Your father is, after all, perfectly free to have a relationship with someone else. We are divorced and have been for ten years.’

‘I know.’

As she watched the expressions chase one another across Tara’s face, Claudia acknowledged that physically no one would ever guess that they were mother and daughter.

For a start, Tara was a good eight inches taller than she was herself, but then that seemed to be the usual way of things these days. She didn’t think she had a single friend whose daughter didn’t tower inches above them.

Tara also had completely different colouring from her mother’s. Where Claudia had a pale, delicate, English-rose complexion and the soft blonde hair to go with it, Tara’s skin tone was much, much warmer, her eyes darker and her hair a rich dark brown tumbling past her shoulders in heavy, lustrous curls. Her deep green eyes were Garth’s, and like her, his hair, too, was very dark, but unlike Tara’s, Garth’s was straight.

‘Dad said that you were going to be nominated for the Businesswoman of the Year award,’ Tara announced abruptly.

Now Claudia couldn’t conceal her reaction.

How on earth had Garth known that? She had only been told of the nomination a matter of days ago herself.

‘He’s very proud of you, Ma,’ Tara asserted. ‘We both are. Everyone thinks you’re wonderful,’ she added, ‘and you are.’

‘The last time you flattered me like this, I seem to remember it had something to do with the fact that you’d completely burned out one of my best pans,’ Claudia reminded her dryly.

‘Boiling eggs, which I forgot,’ Tara agreed laughing, and then suddenly the laughter died. ‘Ryland is going back to Boston at the end of the month,’ she told Claudia quietly. ‘He’s asked me to go with him.’

‘For a holiday?’ Claudia asked lightly even while she knew, guessed, sensed what was coming, felt it in every doom-laden wave of panic that struck her body.

‘No … well, at first, perhaps. Ry …’

Ryland Johnson was Tara’s American boyfriend, seven years her senior. Tara had brought him home to meet Claudia at Christmas, and she had liked him immediately and immensely. It was obvious to Claudia even then that the two of them were head over heels in love.

‘He only planned to stay over here for a year and … He wants me to meet his family and his friends. He wants …’

Tara bit her lip.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she told her mother, adding pleadingly, ‘Please don’t be unhappy. America isn’t so very far away, not these days, and you … I love him so much, Ma,’ she confessed helplessly, flinging herself bodily into Claudia’s arms as the tears filled her eyes. ‘I know how you must be feeling and I wish, too, that I could have fallen in love with someone from home … that we could have lived here close to you and … I’m going to miss you so much.’

Claudia closed her eyes, not to suppress her own tears but to suppress the sick feeling of dread that was surging over her.

‘Does … have you told your father yet?’ she managed to ask through dry lips.

Tara shook her head.

‘No. I wanted to tell you first. Dad just thinks I’m going for a holiday. Well, officially, that’s all it is, but … I’m not, and it will be much easier for me to get a visa that way. I don’t know which I’m dreading the most,’ she added with a shaky smile, ‘the vetting I’m going to get from the US government or the one Ryland says I’ll get from his aunt. If anything, I suspect his aunt’s will be worse. Apparently, she’s fantastically wealthy and very WASP about whom Ryland marries. Ryland says she’s a terrifying combination of old New England blood and equally old New England money.’

Tara giggled as she released Claudia and stepped back. ‘I’m dreading having to meet her,’ she announced indifferently. ‘According to Ry, she’s going to want to know everything there is to know about my background. Not that I’ve any worries in that department. After all, your family and Dad’s go back for ever, don’t they?

‘Ma … what is it? Please don’t look like that,’ Tara begged shakily as she saw her mother’s expression.

Claudia had gone white, the bone structure of her pretty heart-shaped face suddenly standing out so sharply that Tara had an unnerving and distressing image of how her mother might look in twenty years’ time. Her normal warm and loving soft blue eyes looked so bleak and filled with despair that Tara had to fight to control her own emotions.

‘Ma, I know how you must feel,’ she repeated huskily, ‘but there’ll be visits, holidays … and who knows, perhaps Ryland will change his mind once he gets me over there and decide that he doesn’t want to marry me after all,’ she finished lightly. But Claudia knew that she didn’t mean it … didn’t want to mean it.

‘Have you applied for your visa yet?’ she managed to ask as she fought to control her reactions to the blow Tara had just unwittingly dealt her.

‘I’ve applied but I haven’t got it as yet,’ Tara told her cheerfully. ‘Not that there should be too much of a problem getting a visitor’s visa. It’s when Ry and I get married and I need to apply for citizenship that we might have some difficulties. Ryland keeps teasing me that if I can pass his aunt’s inspection of my antecedents, then I won’t have any problems with the US government and everyone knows how strict they are and how thoroughly they go into a person’s background.

‘Ma … what is it … what’s wrong?’ Tara demanded anxiously as her mother gave a small strangled gasp and then covered her mouth with her hand.

‘Nothing,’ Claudia lied. ‘I just don’t … I think I may have eaten something that disagreed with me. I just feel a little bit nauseous.’

‘If you feel sick, do you think you should be going out this evening, then?’ Tara cautioned with maternal solicitude that, at any other time, would have brought Claudia to touched laughter. In that respect, in her nature, her upbringing, her reactions and responses to others, Tara was totally and completely her child, even if her swift intelligence and her equally swift assimilation of information were her father’s inheritance to her.

‘I … I … I have to go out,’ Claudia told her truthfully. ‘I’m giving a talk to the Townswomen’s Guild and I can’t let them down.’

‘You could, but you won’t,’ Tara corrected her lovingly. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve given you a shock. I …’ She dipped her head in the same protectively defensive gesture Claudia herself had adopted earlier. ‘I … Ryland asked me to go back to Boston with him several weeks ago, but I couldn’t get down to see you before now and I didn’t want … I wanted to tell you myself … to be here. I love him so much, Ma. He’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a man. You do like him, don’t you?’

‘Yes. I do like him,’ Claudia agreed truthfully.

‘I know how you must be feeling,’ Tara had told her when she announced her plans. But could she? How could anyone?

Perhaps she ought to have been prepared … to have known … guessed … She had, after all, seen at Christmas how much Tara and Ryland were in love, but she had somehow assumed—because she had wanted, needed, to assume, no doubt—that Ryland had decided to make his future in Britain. Still, even if she had known, what could she have done? How could she have prevented the catastrophe now staring her in the face?

How could she prevent it? There was no way. She could only hope and pray, beg God, fate, call it what you would that ruled one’s life, to help her.

‘I came down specially to tell you,’ she heard Tara saying softly. ‘I wish I could stay longer, Ma, but I can’t. I’ve got a client meeting in the morning and then I’ve got to break the news to Dad that it isn’t just a few weeks’ holiday that I want.’ Tara reached out and hugged her mother tightly.

‘Please tell me that you’ll be happy for me,’ she begged in a hoarse little pain-filled whisper.

‘I’ll be happy for you,’ Claudia repeated dutifully, and as she said it she gave up a silent prayer that it would be true and that she would be able to be happy for her daughter instead of …

‘I’d better let you get to that meeting,’ Tara told her mother gruffly as she hugged her a second time even more fiercely than the first. ‘I promise we’ll both come and see you before we go, and once we’re over there I’ll want you to come and stay. I want to show you off to Ryland’s family so that they can see how lucky I am to have such a special, wonderful mother. You are special and wonderful and I do love you very, very much … and I think I’m just so lucky to have you for my mother, to have you and Dad as my parents.’

The subject of Claudia’s talk to the members of the Townswomen’s Guild had originally been spurred by her awareness that many of her closest friends had recently had to readapt to a married life where their children had flown the nest and, so far as nature was concerned, they themselves were in many ways now redundant.

‘It’s a matter of what you actually do with your time,’ one friend had commented woefully to Claudia, adding self-critically, ‘I never thought I’d ever be the kind of mother who couldn’t wait for her own children to produce their children so that she could be a grandmother but …’

‘We aren’t old in the same way that our mothers and their mothers before them were old at our age,’ another friend had told her. ‘After all, in terms of life expectancy, fifty is nothing these days, but it’s what you do with those years … how you fill them … the fact that you feel a need to fill them when, for virtually the whole of your adult life, what you’ve been struggling to do is to make time, not fill it.’

But after the bombshell Tara had dropped on her, Claudia knew that she couldn’t follow through with her original plans without being in danger of betraying her own emotions. So instead, and to their bemusement, she rather suspected, she gave the women an abbreviated talk on the problems that could face new, first-time fathers.

After the meeting, several people wanted to talk to her, to congratulate her in the main on the article that had appeared in the local paper and that Tara had read out to her earlier. Just listening to them brought back such a sharp mental image of Tara lying on her bed that she could hardly bear to have them speak.

It was a relief to escape and finally be on her own; it was even a relief to know that she was going to be alone once she got home. At least, it was a relief to know that Tara wouldn’t be there, that she could finally relax her guard a little and allow herself to show some real emotion.

The intensity of her own sense of foreboding and doom, her own fear and despair had shaken her. Why had she not guessed … realised … prepared herself for something like this? Why had she allowed herself to become so complacent, to think …

‘Claudia.’ She stopped, forcing herself to smile as one of her closest friends approached her. ‘I saw Tara driving through town earlier. You are lucky to have a daughter and to have such a close relationship with her,’ she commented enviously, before adding, ‘Not that you don’t deserve it. You and Tara are both lucky,’ she amended firmly. ‘My boys …’ She paused. ‘Do you know, if you weren’t so … so you … there are times when I could almost hate you. You’ve got everything right.’

‘Not everything,’ Claudia felt bound to point out to her quietly, reminding her when she gave her a surprised look, ‘Garth and I are no longer married, Chris.’

‘You’re divorced. Yes, I know, but even your divorce has been a model of what a divorce should be. Neither of you has ever been heard to utter a word of criticism against the other. Despite the trauma you were going through at the time, I can remember how determined both you and Garth were that Tara shouldn’t suffer. It was all done so … so quietly and discreetly, with Garth moving out of Ivy House and buying himself that new place on the other side of town.

‘But it isn’t just the way the two of you handled your divorce. It’s everything even before then. While the rest of us were all complaining about having to manage our careers and bring up our children, you and Garth moved here from London. You gave up your job as a probation officer to be at home with Tara when she was a baby. Then when you and Garth divorced, you set up your own business and worked from home until you were well enough established to branch out and take on office premises.

‘I know how hard you work—what long hours—and you’ve always managed to find time for your friends and your charity work. So far as I know, neither you nor Garth has ever missed even one of Tara’s school events. You’re a wonderful cook—’

‘I’m an adequate cook,’ Claudia interrupted her dryly.

Chris overrode her, insisting, ‘You’re a wonderful cook, and you still look stunning and sexy, as my darling husband frequently reminds me.’ She continued firmly, ‘I doubt that there’s a single one of your friends whose husband, whose partner, hasn’t compared her to you at some stage or another and found her wanting.’

‘I sincerely hope not,’ Claudia declared truthfully.

‘Well, it’s true,’ Chris persisted. ‘But more than that, what I envy you most of all for, Claudia, is that you are just such a nice person. You’re generous, warm, witty … and honest … so totally honest in everything you do. Claudia, what is it?’ she demanded uncertainly as she saw the sudden quick tears fill her friend’s eyes. ‘I didn’t mean to embarrass you … I was just—’

‘It’s all right,’ Claudia assured her hastily. ‘I’m just … I’m just a little bit tired. I … Too many late nights,’ she fibbed, ‘which is why I’ve promised myself an early one tonight.’

‘Yes, I’d better go, as well,’ Chris agreed, taking her hint. ‘I’ll see you on Thursday … it’s our week for lunch,’ she reminded Claudia.

‘I’ll be there,’ Claudia agreed.

It was still light as Claudia turned off the road and in through the arched gateway in the brick wall that surrounded her home.

She and Garth had first seen Ivy House on a cold snowy day when the branches of the tree had been bare and the ivy clothing the house itself and the brick wall around it frosted white against the mellow backdrop of the Cotswold stone.

The house had originally been built in the eighteenth century as a dower home attached to the estate of the then Sir Vernon Cupshaw. The main house had fallen into disrepair after the Great War, when all three sons of the family had been killed, and the estate had eventually been broken up. Claudia and Garth had bought the house and learned of its history from the last surviving spinster aunt of the original family. Claudia could still remember how the old lady had looked from her to the small bundle that was Tara, whom she had been holding, as she told them, ‘This house needs love and I can see that you have it. It also needs children … just as our family needed children.’ Claudia hadn’t been able to tell her what she already knew, which was that Tara would be an only child.

They had had to do a great deal of work to turn the house into the comfortable home it now was and, after the breakdown of their marriage, one of the hardest things Claudia had had to prepare herself for was the prospect of losing Ivy House, but Garth had insisted that she was to keep it.

‘It’s Tara’s home,’ he had reminded her quietly when she had pointed out to him with fierce, bitter passion that she didn’t want his charity … that she didn’t, in fact, want anything of him. But even then … even then that had not been entirely true and they had both known it. But Garth, whether out of guilt or compassion, had refrained from telling her so.