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Like Claudia, he had met and known about Tara’s involvement with Ryland but like her he had been caught off guard by Tara’s announcement that she and Ryland planned to marry.
An hour later, still unable to sleep, Garth looked at the luminous dial of his wrist-watch. Two-fifteen a.m. He could try Claudia again and he was sorely tempted to do so, but if she still hadn’t returned home, if she was still perhaps with Luke Palliser, he knew he didn’t want to know.
It was ten years now since they had separated and while Claudia wasn’t and never had been the type of woman to want a merely sexual relationship, nor to publicly flaunt an emotional one, she was very much a woman whom men automatically found attractive and wanted to get closer to—wanted to protect, if that wasn’t too politically incorrect and chauvinistic a thing to profess.
During their marriage, he had seen the admiring looks other men had given her and the envious ones they had sent him too often not to know that if Claudia was still on her own it was because that was her choice.
‘Get involved with someone else … marry again? No, never,’ she had told him quietly when he made the mistake of venting his bitterness on her shortly after their divorce had been finalised. ‘I loved you, Garth,’ she had told him. ‘I loved you and I trusted you, I believed in you … in us, but you betrayed me.’ With quiet, dignified sorrow, she had gone on to ask, ‘If I can’t trust you, what man can I trust?’ Answering her own question, she had added, ‘I can’t and I don’t intend to try.’
‘You mean you don’t want to try, just as you don’t want to try to understand, to accept,’ Garth had returned hotly, still half-unable to believe that she had gone through with it and that they were actually divorced. ‘You’ve got all the emotional commitment you want, Claudia, all the emotional commitment you can give. You’ve got Tara. I wonder what would have happened if during the early days of our marriage we’d discovered that I couldn’t father children. How strong would your adherence to our marriage and your marriage vows have been then?’
He had told himself in the bitterness of his loss that the pain he had seen burning in her eyes as she listened quietly to his angry outburst—a pain he had caused—was justified and that so were his accusations.
‘You’re not divorcing me because I’ve slept with someone else,’ he had told her angrily during one of their pre-separation quarrels. ‘You’re doing it because I’m simply surplus to requirements, because you don’t want me any more, because all you want, the only one you want is Tara.’
‘That’s not true,’ Claudia had denied vehemently.
‘Isn’t it?’ he had challenged her. ‘How come, then, that we haven’t had sex since Christmas, three months before you found out—’
‘I tried,’ Claudia had parried defensively, ‘but you were away so much, working late so often—’
‘And sex is something we can only have late at night in the dark? What happened to Sunday morning, Saturday afternoon, rainy evenings …?’
‘Tara was younger then. Now she’s older, she might—’
‘She might what? Realise that her parents have a natural, normal, loving sexual relationship? Only they don’t … didn’t … did we, Claudia? There’s nothing natural about the kind of sex we have these days, nothing warm or loving, not with you lying there practically willing me to get it over and done with.’
‘You’re wrong. It isn’t …’ Claudia had begun and then stopped.
Of course it hadn’t been the lack of sex in their marriage that had infuriated and hurt him, Garth admitted to himself now. It had been his fear that he was losing Claudia’s love, that she no longer needed or wanted him, that she and Tara formed their own perfect charm circle in which there was no place for him. That he was in his wife’s life, if not his daughter’s, superfluous to requirements.
But he had been wrong to accuse Claudia as he had done then of being sexually cold and unloving. When they had first been lovers, first been married, she had thrilled and touched him with her gentle sensuality, her total and complete giving of herself to him and to their mutual desire.
She had been a virgin when they met but had kept that fact from him, so totally ardent and responsive in his arms the first time they had made love that it was not until he had felt the unexpected resistance and tightness of her inexperienced body that he had realised the truth.
That, if anything, had made him love her even more than he did already, setting the seal on what to him had been her absolute and total perfection, not because no other man had known her so intimately but because she had loved him enough to give herself to him so totally and completely.
He glanced again at his alarm clock. No, he couldn’t ring her now. He would have to wait until the morning.
He could well imagine how she had reacted to Tara’s news and how she must be feeling. And how much it would have hurt her pride to have to get in touch with him.
‘Easy peasy,’ Tara had said, and he had heard the pride in her voice as she laughed off Ry’s aunt’s inquisition into her family background.
Easy peasy. If only that were the truth.
Estelle opened her eyes, the luminous numbers on her clock radio showing that it was quarter to three. Frowning, she wondered sleepily what had woken her and then she heard it—the soft creak of a door opening within her apartment.
She knew who it was, of course. Only one person besides herself had a key to her home and she was sitting up in bed waiting for him when he turned the handle of the door and walked in, soft-footed as a mountain cat, feral eyes gleaming in the half-light as he brought into the room with him the raw, pulsing intensity of his sexually driven persona and with it the scent of sex that clung to his skin—another woman’s sex, Estelle acknowledged as she felt the familiar excitement leap and crackle between them like an unseen charge of electricity.
It had always been like this with him, right from that first time when she had still been a child and he had been the older stepbrother. She had adored him from the start. She was his, he had told her. She would always be his.
‘Open your legs,’ she heard him demanding softly as he approached her bed.
Smiling luxuriously, she did so. The girl or girls whom he had had earlier had plainly not satisfied him, but she was not surprised, and although he might at times like to torment her by denying it and denying her, she was as essential to him as he was to her.
As she lay there on the bed, she could feel the anticipation and urgency pulsing through her; just watching him watching her was all it took. He had started to undress, but his gaze never moved from her open legs, not even when he dropped his trousers and she couldn’t stop herself from giving a small, sharp moan at the sight of his erect penis.
The myth that you could tell the size of a man’s sexual equipment from the size of his feet and hands was in Blade’s case just that—a myth. Short and stocky, he had almost femininely small hands and feet, but his sex …
A sharp thrill of sexual energy trembled through her as she studied it. Thick, much thicker than that of any other man she had known, hard, too, and so voracious in its appetite for the deep plunging thrusting she loved. Indeed, loved so much that sometimes even when she couldn’t satisfy it or him, she knew that no other man could ever make her feel the way Blade did.
‘Mmm, that feels good,’ Blade told her, his voice a soft, lulling coo of warmth. He stroked her with expert fingers, kneeling between her parted legs. ‘So wet, so warm … so hungry, so … empty …’
Estelle wriggled in mute ecstasy as he inserted his fingers into her—just enough to make her aware of their presence, to make her feel tight and hot and achingly eager for the thick, hot shaft of flesh he was starting to rub with his free hand.
Estelle thrust her hips up, trying to draw his fingers deeper inside her, but he kept on teasing her by withdrawing them each time she surged upwards, leaving her empty and aching, her frustration turning her earlier smile to an angry glower as she tried and failed to trap his fingers inside her.
Laughing at her, he stroked the hard length of his penis, holding her off as she tried to reach for him and then forcing her hands away as she made to satisfy her frustrated need by herself. He pinned down one of her arms with his knee and held the other in a painful grip, laughing tauntingly down at her, his thick red lips drawn back against his teeth so that he did look almost dangerously vulpine as he reached out and thrust into her with his fingers again, telling her softly, ‘That’s right, babe, go ahead and fuck yourself on my fingers,’ laughing when he heard the small explosive sound she made and demanding, ‘What is it you want? More …? How much more …? This much?’
She ought to have been prepared for it. After all, he had done it to her before, yet the sharp, thrilling bite of pain he was causing her made her cry out and brought as he had known it would the first frantic convulsions of her orgasm. But he didn’t let her have it, removing his hand from her body and taunting her excitedly as she reached for his erection.
‘Oh, no, not yet, you can’t have it yet. First you’ve got to stroke him a little … suck him, show him how much you want him,’ he mocked as her hand and then her mouth closed hungrily over his body and she started to rock herself rhythmically to and fro, her eyes closed as she did so, still sucking deeply on him.
He waited until he was almost ready to come before removing himself from her mouth and thrusting deeply and urgently into the eagerly open wetness of her body, automatically reaching out for a pillow to hold over her mouth to silence her screams of pleasure as she climaxed, even though the days were now long gone when he had to prevent their parents from hearing the noise she made.
Estelle had never had a flatmate because she liked her privacy, and one of the earliest lessons she had learned was to distrust her own sex.
Gloatingly, just before dawn, Blade surveyed Estelle’s naked body. The whole room smelled of sex and he breathed in the scent of it, of himself, with luxurious, satiated enjoyment. Then, after gathering up his clothes, he dressed and headed for the door.
He and Estelle never slept together. They didn’t have that kind of relationship, and besides, the two girls he had left curled up on his bed would still be there waiting for him, or rather, waiting for the money he had promised to pay them.
‘What’s wrong?’ Lovingly, Ryland reached out an arm and drew Tara closer against his body.
‘How did you know I was awake?’ she asked him, sidestepping the question.
‘I knew,’ Ryland told her and then prodded gently, ‘You’re worrying about your Mom, aren’t you?’
Tara turned her head and pressed her face into his chest.
‘She didn’t say anything to me about our going to Boston, but I could see in her face … her eyes … I know.’ She gulped back a small choking sob. ‘I feel so guilty about leaving her, Ry, but I know, I just know that I couldn’t bear not to be with you.’
‘There’s no way you are going to be without me even if I have to kidnap you and drag you bodily onto the plane with me,’ Ryland assured her, adding more seriously, ‘If there was any way I could change things, stay over here, I would, but I can’t. I’m the only male of my generation. My uncle was twelve years older than my father—if he and my aunt had had a son, perhaps things might have been different. As it is, it’s always been kinda understood that when my aunt retires, I’ll be taking over from her and running the business.’
‘Doesn’t your cousin—’ Tara began, referring to his aunt’s and late uncle’s only child, a daughter, but Ryland shook his head before she could finish explaining.
‘Margot isn’t interested in the business. She never has been. She isn’t that kind of woman.’
‘What do you mean?’ Tara asked him, wrinkling her forehead. All she knew about his cousin was that she was nearly seven years Ryland’s senior and unmarried.
‘Margot works in the business, yes,’ Ryland agreed. ‘She works in the archive department where we house all the originals of everything we’ve published. But she has no wish to take over and run the company.’
‘But she could marry and have children,’ Tara pointed out.
‘No,’ Ryland returned, shaking his head, ‘no, she won’t.’
‘How can you be so sure?’ Tara half teased him. ‘I know she’s not so young any more but …’
‘Margot will never marry because it’s impossible for her to marry the man she wants,’ Ryland told her bluntly, explaining when he saw her puzzled expression, ‘Margot loves Lloyd—her mother’s brother’s son. They’re first cousins. It’s against the law in the state of Massachusetts and a number of others for them to marry and my aunt would never have condoned their getting married even in another state. Margot fell in love with him when she was fifteen and since then … It isn’t something that’s discussed in the family.’
‘Does he … Lloyd … love her?’ Tara interrupted him, her eyes full of tender compassion.
‘I … Lloyd has been married and has two stepchildren. He doesn’t have Margot’s intense … well, she’s a very driven sort of person. Lloyd lives in California. My aunt decided to set up a branch of the business out there, printing pretty much the same sort of stuff for the campus at UCLA as we do for Yale and Harvard. She put Lloyd in charge of that end of things.’
‘She sent him away from Margot, you mean,’ Tara said in a low voice.
‘It’s impossible—illegal—for them to be together,’ Ryland reminded her quietly. ‘She did it for the best. Except when Lloyd met someone else out there and decided to get married, well, Margot had a bit of a breakdown. They meet every summer at the island. There’s an island my great-grandfather bought, just off the coast—’
‘An island, your family owns an island …?’ Tara began, but Ryland shook his head dismissively.
‘It’s nothing,’ he told her, ‘just an exposed piece of rocky headland, really, but …’ He paused. ‘It’s there Margot and Lloyd see each other. Not that it’s ever mentioned.’
Tara shivered and wrapped her arms tightly around her body, trying to imagine how it must feel to love a man you could never really be with, to want a man you could never truly have.
In their early days together when he had been telling her about his family background, Ryland had played down the role he knew he was ultimately going to have in the family business.
He had told Tara he had come to England to study British publishing and he had then gone on to explain to her the nature of his family’s business, telling her that his great-grandfather had started a small company to publish textbooks and papers written by his friends at Yale and Harvard.
The business had grown and become extremely profitable, still maintaining its close links with the university.
After his uncle’s untimely death in a sailing accident—his hobby had been racing ocean-going yachts—his wife, Ryland’s aunt, had stepped into his shoes and run the business as its chief executive. Ryland’s father continued with his own work, bringing in new manuscripts for them to publish and sell. Under his aunt’s aegis, the company had gone from strength to strength. She had an extremely sharp financial brain and Boston’s money men had a great deal of respect for her—as did Ryland himself.
Any one of Boston’s first families would have been highly delighted to see their daughter marrying Martha Adams’s nephew, Ryland suspected, but marriage hadn’t been something he had been remotely interested in—until he had seen Tara. Within days, within hours of meeting her, he had known that she was the one—the only one.
Perhaps he was more like his cousin Margot than he had previously imagined, he acknowledged ruefully.
There was something in Tara’s make-up, a streak of idealism, the result perhaps of having always and only ever known the loving, tender protection of those around her and of having known, as well, just how much she was cherished and valued, that somehow set her apart and made her special, made him love her.
‘I do understand you have to return,’ Tara assured him, adding, ‘I just wish that Boston wasn’t so far away.’
‘It isn’t,’ Ryland murmured, tilting her face up towards his own so that he could look down into her eyes as he whispered softly a second time, ‘It isn’t.’
As he bent to kiss her, Tara shook her head. ‘Not to us, perhaps, but it is to Ma. I could see it in her eyes. She looked almost … almost frightened … as though … I’ve never seen her look like that before. Not even when she and Dad … I hated it when they divorced. I don’t want anything like that to ever happen to us, Ry.’
‘It won’t,’ he reassured her gently. ‘It won’t. Your mother probably just needs a little time to get used to the idea of our living in Boston,’ he added comfortingly. ‘After all, she’s got her own life. She’s still a very active and attractive woman … a very, very attractive woman,’ he noted appreciatively, causing Tara to give him an indignant pinch. ‘Perhaps we could give ourselves a week or so to settle in and then get her to come over for a visit,’ Ryland suggested as he removed Tara’s fingers from his arm and then bent his head to slowly suck them one by one.
‘Mmm …’ Tara moaned responsively.
‘Mmm …’ Ryland agreed as he eased her down against the bed and transferred the moist heat of his mouth from her fingers to her nipple.
Tara closed her eyes and gave herself up voluptuously to the pleasure of his lovemaking.
Ryland had teased her shortly after they had revealed their love for one another and celebrated that revelation with a romantic and very sensual weekend away at a discreet country hotel in a bedroom complete with a four-poster, a huge open fire and, even better, a bed-sized open space in front of it that there was a delicious wantonness, a wildness almost, about the way she lost herself in their lovemaking that was intriguingly at odds with the mild-mannered and restrained day-to-day image she presented to the outside world.
‘That’s because I’m in love with you,’ Tara had told him seriously and meant it, because it was true.
Her emotions had always been close to the surface, easily stirred and fired, and it had taken the gentle influence of her mother to help her learn how to harness the impetuous, impulsive side of her nature and to look beyond its immediacy to the eventual consequences. Tara felt privileged that in her the passionate intensity she felt, an inheritance from her father’s side of the family, was tempered and strengthened by the quiet wisdom that was her mother’s. Passion and sensitivity—they could, for someone without the loving parenting she had received, have been uncomfortable bedfellows, but Tara loved and valued both sides of her personality because they were her emotional inheritance from her parents.
She liked knowing that in her individuality she was still a part of them, just as the children she and Ryland produced would be a part of them. Like her, she hoped that they, too, would one day listen with the same rapt attention as she had while their grandparents told them stories of their own youth and that they, as she had done, would absorb from those stories a sense of family and continuity, a sense of security and safety, of warmth and belonging.
It still sometimes brought quick emotional tears to her eyes to visit her grandparents and to see the love and pride in their eyes, to see and touch the familiar things that she had known from babyhood: the Sèvres dinner service that a member of her mother’s mother’s family had brought back from France; the medals her maternal grandfather had received on the death of his uncle, a veteran of the Somme; the linen sheets both of her grandmothers had been presented with on their respective marriages and that both of them had ruefully admitted they never used, much preferring the easier laundering of modern bedclothes.
Despite her totally modern outlook on life, Tara was a girl who was very much in touch with, very much in tune with, her family’s past. Ryland, who had already recognised that about her, hoped it might incline his aunt to look favourably on Tara and approve of their marriage.
He might neither need nor particularly want that approval and the inheritance that would ultimately go with it, but as he had already told Tara, he felt it was his duty to accept the role in the family business for which he had been groomed. There were certain things about his family and that role that he had not as yet told Tara, but they did not affect his love for her, and who knew, if his cousin Margot changed her mind about remaining single …
He smiled in the darkness as Tara fell asleep in his arms. How could his family not love her? How could they possibly find fault with a person as instantly lovable and totally adorable, so perfect in every way, as his Tara?
‘Ryland’s coming home and he’s bringing a girl with him.’
‘A girl? Who?’
Lloyd propped himself up on one elbow as he looked down into the face of his lover—and cousin.
Margot shrugged dismissively. ‘I don’t know, some English girl.’
‘Is it serious?’
‘No relationships are allowed to be serious in this family until mother’s sanctioned it. You know that.’
The expression on her face echoed the bitterness and resentment in her voice as she sat up in bed and reached for the packet of cigarettes on the bedside table, lighting one and drawing fiercely on it.
In the clear light of the island morning, the sharp angularity of the bones both of her body and her face was almost cruelly revealed. What had, on the girl, been extreme slimness had become, on the woman she was now, an almost bony thinness, the outward expression of her inner frustration and bitterness, as though these deep-rooted feelings that had distorted her life had eaten away at her flesh as thoroughly and destructively as any bodily illness.
‘My God, if only things were different,’ she burst out intensely, her dark eyes flashing as she turned to look at the man lying beside her.
Three years separated them in age—three thousand miles in distance, apart from the brief days and hours they occasionally managed to snatch together, those and the six weeks they shared annually here on the island that belonged to Margot’s mother and his aunt.
Every summer for over twenty years, both of them had come here to be together, away from prying eyes. As first cousins, certain states considered their blood relationship too close for them to marry and legalise their love for each other as Margot so passionately wished they might. Margot wasn’t sure which was the stronger feeling she had for these weeks in the summer—hatred or longing. Longing when they were apart from one another and hatred when she was here because being here meant being aware of the fact that she could never ever have her heart’s desire; that she could never be with Lloyd as she ached and wanted to be with him. As they both wanted her to be with him, she amended hastily. After all, he suffered just as much as she did, yearned just as much as she did … ached, needed, wanted, loved just as much as she did.
They had both known, of course, even before they had fallen in love that such a love was forbidden.
‘But what will happen if I get pregnant?’ Margot had asked Lloyd tremulously the first time they had made love, lying uncomfortably together in the sandy earth amongst the trees, hidden out of sight of the house.
‘You won’t,’ Lloyd had assured her, showing her the condom he had bought.
That had been the beginning of it, the beginning of what to her was a continuous rack of pain from which there was no relief, no cessation, no, not even sometimes in his arms, because always at the back of her mind was the knowledge that their togetherness was only temporary, that ultimately they would have to part and go back to their separate lives.