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‘I wish Dad would lighten up a bit,’ Sally had often complained during her teenage years, and Claire had sympathised with her because her stepdaughter had a wonderful sense of fun.
It must be nice to share that kind of intimacy with someone, Claire decided wistfully as she removed the pie from the oven and put the vegetables into the serving dishes. And they did say, didn’t they, that laughter was the best aphrodisiac? Her heart gave a tiny little flutter, the heat from the oven making her face flush.
How much longer would Brad be …? It was over fifteen minutes since he had gone upstairs; perhaps she’d better go and give him that call.
As she walked along the landing she saw that the door to the master bedroom was open. Without thinking she stepped up to it and then paused. Brad’s shirt lay on the bed, his shoes beside it on the floor, his trousers over the back of a chair, which meant that Brad, wherever he was, must be minus those articles.
She swallowed a small gulp of panic as the bathroom door opened and Brad walked into the bedroom before she had time to escape.
‘Sorry. I’m running late, I know,’ he apologised, apparently as oblivious to her flushed face as he was to the fact that all he was wearing was a short—a very short—towelling robe, secured so loosely around his waist that Claire was terrified when he lifted his hands to towel-dry his damp hair that it was going to come unfastened.
Unlike her, he was clearly no stranger to the intimacy of sharing his bedroom with a member of the opposite sex. She and John had very early in the days of their marriage established a routine which ensured that they went to bed at separate times, after allowing one another a decent amount of time and privacy in which to prepare for bed.
Claire suspected that it had been simply for the sake of convention and Sally that John had allowed her to share his room and his bed, and she had sensed his relief when, at the onset of his serious illness, she had suggested that she move into the spare room.
She was still standing just inside the door of Brad’s room, transfixed, dizzied almost by the greedy fervour with which she was drinking in the sight of his barely clad body. A hot rush of shame flooded through her as she realised what she was doing. Quickly she turned away, stumbling back out on to the landing.
As a teenager, partially because of her upbringing and partially, she always assumed, because of her own nature, she had been rather naïve and slow to reach sexual awareness, but even when she had her daydreams had been more of the idealised, romantic variety—of meeting someone with whom she would fall in love and marry.
The actual physical details of her lover-to-be had never been something she had dwelt specially upon, and, unlike other girls she had known, she had certainly never drooled over bare male torsos or compared the rival attractions of a pair of well-muscled, strong male arms with an equally well-muscled and strong pair of male buttocks.
Nor had she ever thought about men—or even one specific man—in any sexual sense in the years since, so it was all the more of a shock now to realise that, when she had been standing there watching Brad as he moved lazily and easily around the room, in her mind’s eye he had somehow or other disposed of his towelling robe and the Brad she had been watching had been totally and magnificently—very magnificently, she blushed to recall—male.
‘That was wonderful,’ Brad said when he had finished eating. ‘Irene mentioned that you’d be able to introduce me as a temporary member at your local health club. I’m certainly going to need to go if you keep feeding me like this.’
He didn’t look as though he needed to work out to her, Claire reflected, but then she had no idea what kind of lifestyle he normally lived; perhaps he exercised regularly at home.
‘I must admit I’ve been a bit lax about developing a proper exercise programme,’ he told her, answering her unspoken question. ‘But when the kids were younger we lived a pretty outdoors lifestyle, especially in the summer. We’d be out on the lake most summer evenings and weekends, swimming or sailing …’
‘The lake?’ Claire asked him enviously. She had always had a secret dream of living close to water. As a child it had fascinated her, and a boating holiday—any kind of boating holiday—was her idea of heaven, although the only time she had persuaded John to hire a boat their holiday hadn’t been too successful. John had preferred luxury hotels but she and Sally had had a wonderful time.
‘Mmm … the town is close by the edge of a lake and most folks locally spend a lot of their recreation time either in it or on it. We had a sailing dinghy and—’
‘I’ve always longed to be able to sail,’ Claire told him impulsively, and then flushed slightly. It was unlike her to be so forthcoming with someone.
‘Well, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t learn,’ Brad told her.
Claire shook her head. ‘Not at my age,’ she told him quietly.
‘Your age?’ Brad scoffed. ‘You can’t be a day over twenty-seven, if that.’
‘Well, I’m thirty-four in actual fact,’ Claire informed him quietly, but inwardly she acknowledged that it was flattering that he had mistakenly thought her so much younger.
‘Just because we’re not under twenty-one any more, it doesn’t mean that we can’t still have dreams,’ Brad told her softly. ‘In fact sometimes the older we get, the more we need them.’
He paused, and Claire knew instinctively that he was thinking about a dream of his own. What was it? she wondered curiously.
‘I’ve got this boat out on the lake; four years I’ve been working on her, stripping down the engines, making her seaworthy. I had this plan that once all the kids were off my hands I’d have some space in my life to do the things I want to do. I had this idea that I’d get the boat ready and that I’d then take off, sail wherever the tide and mood took me …’
‘Why haven’t you?’ Claire asked him quietly.
‘I got outsmarted by two wily old men—my uncles,’ he told her drily. ‘I was just on the point of telling them that I wanted out of the company when they beat me to it by announcing that they were both planning to retire—You don’t want to hear all this,’ he told Claire abruptly.
Yes, I do. I want to hear all about you … know all about you. Claire felt herself going rigid with shock as the words formed silently in her head but thankfully remained un-uttered.
‘What about you? What are your plans for your future?’ Brad asked her, obviously wanting to change the subject.
‘I … I … don’t really have any,’ Claire admitted reluctantly. ‘I’ve got my work at the school, although …’
‘Although what?’ Brad pressed her as she paused and frowned.
‘There’s a strong chance that it may have to close. Lack of funding,’ Claire explained.
‘Then what will you do?’ Brad asked.
Claire shook her head. ‘I’m not sure, although it is always possible to find some kind of voluntary work even if …’
‘Even if it’s not exactly what you might want to choose,’ Brad supplied for her. ‘What would you prefer to do?’
‘I like working with children,’ Claire confessed. ‘There’s something about their hope and optimism, even those …’
‘You obviously love them,’ Brad told her.
‘Because they are easy to love,’ Claire responded. ‘And they have so much love to give …’
She should have had children of her own, Brad decided; she was that kind of woman—intensely loving and maternal in the very best sense of the word, and if he could recognise that then surely her late husband must have done too, so why …?
Their conversation was getting too intimate, too close to subjects that she didn’t want to discuss, Claire recognised, quickly getting up from the table, saying that it was getting late, that they still hadn’t discussed the terms of his stay with her.
Ruefully Brad took the hint and started to do so, outlining his requirements. They were less demanding than Claire had anticipated and the amount that he proposed paying her was so generous that it took her breath away. When she tried to tell him that it was too much he overruled her, pointing out things that she had overlooked, such as wear and tear, and reluctantly Claire found herself giving in.
In its box the kitten stirred and complained that it was hungry; Claire laughed as she went to pick her up. Oh, yes, she had the mothering instinct—in full strength, Brad acknowledged as he studied the tender way she held the small animal.
The phone rang just as he was on the point of going upstairs. Claire went to answer it and he could hear the wondering joy in her voice as she exclaimed, ‘Oh, darling … it’s wonderful to hear your voice! I didn’t know you were going to ring …’
Quietly he left her alone to enjoy her conversation with her lover, all his pleasure in the evening draining out of him. As he went upstairs he wondered savagely what the matter with him was. The last thing he wanted or needed was to get emotionally involved with any woman, but especially with one who was not free to return his feelings.
‘You’ve reached a very dangerous—a very vulnerable—age,’ his sister Mary-Beth had teased him at Thanksgiving. He had laughed then, but now he wasn’t so sure that she might not have had a point.
Downstairs Claire clung happily to the telephone receiver as she told her stepdaughter, ‘I never imagined that you would ring. It must be costing you the earth …’
She could almost feel the warmth of Sally’s laughter as it filled her ear.
‘You’re worth it,’ Sally assured her, adding teasingly, ‘Besides, I know I can always get you to sub me from my next allowance.’
John had left certain monies in trust for Sally, from which she received a small quarterly income and of which Claire was one of the trustees, and Sally’s impulsive habit of spending this money before she actually received it was a standing joke between them.
‘Don’t be so sure,’ Claire warned her, laughing. ‘The FT index has fallen several points.’
‘Look, I must go,’ Sally told her. ‘Chris is waiting for me.’ She blew a string of kisses into the phone before hanging up, leaving Claire to replace her own receiver with a warm smile curling her mouth. Darling Sally. How empty and joyless her life would have been without her—her life and her marriage. A small finger of pain poked mercilessly at the secret sore place within her heart that she kept so carefully guarded.
Hurriedly she ignored it, going to attend to the increasingly noisy demands for food from Felicity, blocking out the emotional pain with physical activity. It was, after all, a tried and true formula and one she had perfected over the years.
CHAPTER SIX
BRAD was not in a very good mood. He had just spent the morning going over the books and checking through the order book and it was obvious to him that things were in an even worse financial mess than he had predicted.
The sensible thing to do would be simply to cancel the franchise, close it down as a loss-maker and cut their losses. But if he did that …
How would Claire react to the fact that he was putting Tim out of a job—and why should he care?
He leaned back in his borrowed chair in his borrowed office—Tim’s office, in fact—and closed his eyes, considering his options.
If they made some improvements, tightened things up, developed a more aggressive selling stance and pulled in some more orders, there was a small—a very small—chance that they might be able to turn things around. But achieving that, meeting all those objectives—and they would have to meet them—would require some brutally demanding hard work and the kind of dedication that was synonymous with the term ‘workaholic’. The kind of man that Tim just was not—at the moment!
It would mean recruiting a new agent, someone who could motivate the self-employed fitters who installed the units to adapt the same positive, speedy approach to their work that the firm looked for in its American fitters. Mentally he reviewed the personnel on their home-base payroll. There was someone who could take on such a challenge—on a short-term basis—but how would Tim react to having someone brought in over his head?
The company needed a very different kind of management approach from the one it presently had if it was to survive and succeed.
Tim … Claire’s brother-in-law … and her lover?
Brad closed his eyes again and expelled a weary sigh.
He had heard Claire coming upstairs last night shortly after eleven; he had still been working and had, in fact, gone on working until after midnight.
When she slept in her solitary bed in her solitary room did she dream of her lover? Did she lie awake thinking of him, aching for him, as he …?
He tensed and sat up as he heard the office door open.
‘Ah, Tim. No, it’s all right; come in. I wanted to have a chat with you anyway.’
‘But at least nothing’s been said about any redundancy yet,’ Claire tried to console Tim.
‘No, but it can only be a matter of time,’ he predicted gloomily.
Claire watched him sympathetically. He had arrived half an hour earlier looking for Brad, who had apparently left him just before lunch without giving any indication of where he was going.
‘I thought he might have come back here,’ Tim had told her when she had shaken her head in answer to his initial query.
Much as Claire sympathised—and she did—there was not a lot that she could say and even less that she could do other than listen to him as he paced her kitchen and unburdened himself to her.
She sensed that Tim had been half hoping that Brad might have confided his plans for Tim’s future to her and in a sense she was relieved that he had not; it spared her from either having to betray his confidence or withhold valuable information from Tim.
‘Everything’s changed so much,’ Tim told her miserably. ‘You’ve got to be so much more competitive, so much more aggressive, and I’m too old to learn those sorts of tricks. And God knows where I’m going to find another job at my age …’
He grimaced as the kitten started to wail. ‘She’ll scratch your furniture to ribbons,’ he warned Claire.
‘No, she won’t,’ Claire contradicted him serenely. ‘I’m going to get her a scratching-post.’
‘Mmm …’ Tim eyed the kitten doubtfully. He knew how Irene would have reacted if he had turned up with it at home, but then Irene had never been as soft-hearted as Claire. In many ways Irene was very like her brother.
‘Look, I’d better go,’ he told Claire. ‘Brad’s probably back by now and wondering where on earth I am.’
‘I’ll see you out to your car,’ Claire offered.
He looked tired and stressed, a bit like a slightly rumpled, unhappy teddy bear, Claire decided affectionately as they made their way outside.
‘Thanks for listening to me,’ he told her gruffly. ‘I suppose if I’m honest I’ve known for a while that things can’t go on the way they are, but one always hopes.’
Poor Tim.
‘Try not to worry,’ Claire advised him, reaching out to hug him affectionately.
As he drove down the road towards Claire’s house Brad saw the two of them locked in a deep embrace, oblivious to his approach.
They broke apart, Tim turning to get into his car without looking behind him, and Claire remained on the footpath watching his car disappear, only aware of Brad’s arrival when he slammed his car door. She turned to face him with a startled expression.
‘Oh, Brad … You’ve just missed Tim,’ she began. ‘He—’
‘Yes, I saw him,’ Brad said tersely.
Claire tensed, searching Brad’s averted profile anxiously as she recognised his curt withdrawal.
Was Tim right? Was Brad on the point of dismissing him? She knew that there was no way she could bring herself to ask him; all she could manage was a hesitant, ‘Did you want to speak to Tim …?’
‘Not right now,’ he told her grimly, walking away from her and heading towards the house, leaving her to follow him—an act which in itself was so out of character for him that it caught her off guard. One of the first things she had noticed about him and reluctantly liked had been his quietly considerate good manners, his way of treating a woman with the kind of old-fashioned courtesy which seemed to have gone out of fashion.
‘In fact, right now, I think it would be just as well if I didn’t speak to him,’ he threw at her over his shoulder as he reached the back door.
‘You’re … you’re angry with him …’ Claire guessed hesitantly.
‘Angry with him! That’s one way of putting it,’ Brad agreed bitingly as he waited for her to precede him into the kitchen.
‘I know … he is very anxious about his job …’ Claire revealed, stumbling slightly over the words, wondering if she was doing the wrong thing in saying them. ‘Tim may not be a particularly … ambitious or aggressive man,’ Claire told him, feeling that she ought to do something to defend her brother-in-law and draw attention to his good points, ‘but he is very conscientious, very—’
‘You obviously hold him in high esteem,’ Brad interrupted her.
The sarcasm in his voice made Claire feel uncomfortable.
‘You obviously think I’m trying to interfere in something that is none of my business,’ she felt bound to say, ‘but—’
‘But you’d like to know anyway what my plans are for the future of the British side of our distribution network and, of course, Tim’s future with it. Is that it?’ Brad asked her, and grimly continued before she could make any denial.
‘Very well, I’ll tell you. Some changes will very definitely have to be made. As you yourself have just said, Tim is not the most confident of men and his lack of assertiveness comes across to potential customers as a lack of confidence, not just in himself but in our product as well. Couple that with his apparent inability to recruit the kind of highly motivated and even more highly skilled technicians and fitters we pride ourselves on using back home and it’s no wonder we’re having the problems over here that we are having.’
‘So, you do mean to cancel your contract with him and find a new distributor?’ Claire challenged him.
To her surprise, instead of immediately conceding that she was right, Brad frowned slightly and then said slowly, ‘No, not necessarily.’
When Claire looked questioningly at him, he explained, ‘It occurs to me that Tim might benefit from an intensive course on self-assertion techniques plus some input from a more positive role model to show him—’
‘How the job should be done,’ Claire supplied wryly.
‘No,’ Brad corrected her quietly. ‘To show him what can be achieved with a more positive approach … a different outlook if you like. We have someone working for us on the distribution side back home who would be perfect for the job, although it won’t be easy persuading him to come over here. But that’s my problem and you aren’t interested in my problems, are you? Only Tim’s. But then, after all, you are lovers.’
‘Lovers?’ Claire repeated in astonishment.
But before she could continue Brad was demanding angrily, ‘When did it start? After your husband’s death …? Before it?’
An affair! Brad thought she was having an affair with Tim.
‘OK, I can understand that your … marriage may not have … satisfied you, but hell … surely a woman like you could have found a man who was free to have a relationship and not one …’
Claire stared at him in shocked disbelief. ‘You have no right to make those kinds of assumptions about me,’ she told him stiffly. ‘You know nothing about me … or about my marriage.’
Even though she would rather have died than admit it to him, his comment about her marriage had hit a painful nerve, but not for the reason that he imagined.
‘I would never have an affair,’ she told him with passionate sincerity. ‘Never … I couldn’t.’
The vehemence in her voice fuelled Brad’s fury. How could she deny it when he had seen the evidence with his own eyes, heard it with his own ears? And if she had to have an affair with someone, surely she could have found someone more … more worthy than her poor, downtrodden brother-in-law?
‘“Couldn’t”?’ he challenged her contemptuously. ‘Oh, come on. You’re an adult, mature woman; you’ve been married … Your body knows how it feels to experience sexual desire, sexual fulfilment … sexual need; you must—’
‘No,’ Claire protested frantically. ‘No, that’s impossible; I could never … I have never …’
Something in her voice, in her face made Brad pause and look searchingly at her. She looked haunted, her eyes shadowed, her voice shamed … bruised.
‘What is it?’ he asked her. ‘What is it you’re trying to say?’
‘Nothing,’ Claire denied rigidly, starting to turn away from him.
But he reached out and caught hold of her arm, preventing her, telling her, ‘No, you can’t leave it like that. You could never … have never … what?’ he pressed.
He could feel the slight tremor that she tried to suppress run down her arm as she refused to look at him.
It was no use, Claire acknowledged fatalistically. Brad wasn’t going to give up until she had told him the truth. She closed her eyes, fighting back the engulfing wave of panic that threatened her. How on earth had this happened? How on earth had she got herself in such a situation, betrayed herself to such an extent?
As a child she had learned that the easiest way to deal with her aunt’s displeasure whenever she provoked it was simply to take a deep breath and submit to it, rather like taking a nasty dose of medicine all in one big swallow, so that she could get the whole thing over and done with.
‘I could never take a lover, have never had a lover,’ she emphasised with quiet dignity, fiercely ignoring her voice’s struggle not to wobble and the fact that she knew that her face, her whole body in fact, was burning with humiliated colour as she made herself admit the shameful truth to him—not that he had any right to demand it or any right to make her reveal it …
‘John … our marriage … John married me because he wanted a stepmother for Sally. I knew … he told me … that he could never love anyone the way he had loved Paula, but that for Sally’s sake he felt that he ought to provide her with a substitute mother.’
‘And you were happy with that … you accepted that?’ Brad persisted. There was something here that he didn’t understand. Had she, perhaps, been so desperately in love with her husband that she had hoped that he would change his mind … that he would fall in love with her? His heart ached with pity for her, and anger as well.
‘Yes,’ Claire confirmed.
‘But why?’ Brad probed. ‘Why? Why marry a man who you knew did not love you? A man who could never be a proper husband to you … never give you children … never share with you the pleasure of sexual fulfilment and commitment, the emotional …’ He paused as he saw the way she shuddered at his mention of her lack of sexual fulfilment.
‘What is it?’ he asked her curiously. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I didn’t mind the fact that John only wanted me as a stepmother for Sally because I didn’t want to have a sexual relationship with him … or with anyone,’ she told him doggedly.
For a long moment they looked at one another.
‘You didn’t want a sexual relationship … with anyone,’ Brad repeated.
Something here was eluding him. There had been no sexual revulsion or rejection in her reaction to him when … Shock, yes … anger too. Shock, anger and arousal. He listed them carefully in his mind a second and then a third time just to be sure that he was not making a mistake and letting his own emotions and responses obscure hers.
He looked away from her and started to release her arm, too stunned by what she had said to know what to say or do, and then he looked briefly back at her and saw that her eyes were brimming with huge tears which she was struggling desperately to control.
‘Oh, hell, come here,’ he muttered roughly under his breath, reacting instinctively to her distress, reaching for her and wrapping her in his arms in a fiercely protective hug, rocking her against his body as he held her tight with one arm and smoothed the silky fineness of her hair with the other and tried to comfort her.