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Logically, perhaps not, but emotionally, even after so many years apart, he wasn’t ready for that, for another man in Claudia’s life.
‘You rang me last night,’ he told Claudia as he felt his blood pressure and his heartbeat start to return to normal.
Claudia avoided meeting his eyes, giving a small, oddly girlish shrug as she responded, ‘Did I? I …’
‘Claudia, don’t play games with me,’ Garth warned her. ‘I’m not asking you a question. I’m making a statement. You rang me and I know why. Tara’s told you that she’s going to marry Ryland.’
‘She has told me, yes,’ Claudia agreed, still refusing to look at him, ‘and yes, I did ring you, but why on earth that should bring you rushing down here behaving like some character out of a bad play, I really don’t know.’
‘You’re lying, Claudia. For God’s sake, I know you rang and I know why. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. If you needed—’
‘I need nothing and no one, but most of all, I do not need you,’ Claudia interrupted him with a fierce passion. ‘I would never let myself need a man I can’t trust, a man who—’
‘Let yourself need,’ Garth broke in. ‘Hell, Claudia, there’s no shame in being afraid … in being vulnerable … human … in turning to someone else for help.’
‘I want you to leave, Garth. I want you to leave right now,’ Claudia told him, then walked away from him and went to stand in front of the window. Dear God, she couldn’t bear this. She simply didn’t have the emotional reserves to cope with it, not right now, not after last night. She could feel her heart starting to beat furiously fast. She tried to swallow and found that she couldn’t. Her palms felt damp and she knew that any minute now she was going to start to visibly betray what she was feeling—the panic, the fear, the despair—and the last person she wanted to see her doing that was Garth, the very last.
Didn’t he know, couldn’t he understand, that superimposed over every memory she had of him was the image she had created out of the darkest depths of her imagination of him with her, of him loving her, of his face contorted with passion and need as he possessed her, and that image was like a sickness buried deep inside her that surfaced through all the smothering layers of rigid self-control she had placed over it to reduce her to a pulsing, aching, dying thing of burning acid jealousy and bitterness?
‘Claudia, look, I know how you must be feeling.’
Instead of leaving, he had walked up behind her, and Claudia tensed as she felt his breath against her hair.
‘No, you do not know how I’m feeling, Garth,’ she snapped. ‘How can you? How can anyone know?’
Claudia could hear hysteria edging up under her voice. Damn Garth. Why had he had to do this, come here like this and undermine her previous self-control?
‘Tara is my daughter, too, and I’m going to miss her as well—’
‘Miss her? It isn’t because I’m going to miss her that …’ Gulping in air, Claudia shook her head, unable to go on any further. ‘I don’t know what brought you here, Garth,’ she continued when she had finally regained control of herself. ‘I’ve got a very busy day ahead of me and right now I’d like to get dressed.’
‘Why did you ring me last night?’
Somehow or other, Claudia found the strength to turn round and face him. ‘That was a mistake,’ she told him quietly. ‘I … I—’
‘Dialled the wrong number?’ Garth suggested harshly.
Claudia shook her head. He knew perfectly well she hadn’t done that; they both did.
‘It was a mistake, Garth,’ she repeated.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ Garth contradicted her. ‘You rang me because for once your emotions, your real emotions got the better of you. You rang me because you were afraid, because you needed me.’
‘No,’ Claudia denied. ‘I don’t need you, Garth. I stopped needing you a long time ago, and—’
‘You needed me as Tara’s father,’ Garth continued as though she hadn’t spoken, as though she hadn’t uttered those passionate words of denial and fury. ‘Clo …’
The unexpected use of his old pet name for her was like a sawtooth file being used on an oversensitive raw nerve ending, and Claudia flinched, visibly unable to suppress the tears that suddenly filled her eyes. Garth reached out and caught hold of her, drawing her close.
She still smelled the same as she had always done, of vanilla and soft clean skin and something that was and always would be essentially her. She still felt the same, too, feminine, womanly, all the woman he had ever really wanted although he knew that she would never believe that.
‘Clo, it’s all right, it’s all right,’ he told her huskily. Unexpectedly, uncontrollably, he was transported back to another place, another time, another life, when he had had the right to hold her, to touch her. ‘Claudia …’
Memory … instinct … could be a dangerously powerful and unmerciful force. Her eyes closed, her body taut with anger and rejection, Claudia’s senses registered the tone of his voice, recognised its hunger, and like Garth, she was transported back to a time when all that it had taken to arouse her had been that particular note in his voice, that special touch of his hands caressing her body.
As he felt her body relax, Garth automatically closed the gap between them, bending his head to cover her quiescent mouth with his own.
She felt so good, so right … so Claudia. As his hands sensuously kneaded the warm flesh of her arms, he started to circle her lips with the tip of his tongue, waiting for her lips to part in their private sexual signal, their special shorthand message passed from him to her and back again that very soon the hungry, urgent thrust of his tongue within her mouth would be echoed by the even more hungry, urgent thrust of his body within hers.
Outside in the street, a car door slammed abruptly, bringing Claudia back to reality. Hot-faced, she tried to thrust Garth away.
She was forty-five, damn it, and even if she hadn’t, even if she wasn’t … even if they didn’t … there was no way she considered the kind of openly sexual way Garth was behaving acceptable in a relationship between people of their age. It just wasn’t … it just didn’t …
‘Let me go,’ she demanded freezingly, pushing him back more defiantly. ‘Let go of me, Garth! I can’t bear your touching me … I loathe your touching me,’ she told him vehemently, the flustered colour burning even more hotly in her face.
‘No,’ Garth challenged her furiously. He knew that he was deliberately feeding his own anger and using it to mask very different, far more complex emotions.
It had shaken him badly to discover just how frighteningly easy it had been to allow his emotions to work that time trick on him, that subtle but volatile and dangerous mirage that exchanged reality for fiction.
‘Yes,’ Claudia insisted icily.
Freezing her feelings, numbing herself, had been the only way she had of denying her pain, of escaping from it all those years ago when …
‘I can’t bear it when you touch me, Garth,’ she reiterated quietly. ‘I can’t bear it because every time you do, I see her. I see you touching her and I feel sick … I am sick,’ she told him expressionlessly.
‘I’m sick, too,’ Garth retorted bitterly. ‘Sick of being treated like a leper, sick of being made to feel that I’m some kind of lowlife who doesn’t … I’ve tried to tell you. It wasn’t like that, Claudia. It just wasn’t like that. I thought … I can’t even remember touching her, never mind—’
‘Really … you can’t remember?’ Claudia could hear her voice rising, cracking under the strain of trying to maintain her self-control. ‘You can’t remember making love to her in our home … our bed? You can’t remember that you …’
She was screaming the words at him, Claudia recognised in horror, shouting them, as out of control now as she had been all those years ago when she had first realised, first acknowledged the truth.
‘Claudia …’ Garth protested, swearing under his breath with male impotence in the face of so much female fury.
‘Get out,’ Claudia demanded. ‘Just go, Garth. You may have come here to gloat, to—’
‘To what? Just what the hell do you think I am?’ Garth demanded. ‘Claudia, I didn’t—’
‘To remind me that you warned me that something like this might happen. How that must please you, Garth. How happy it must make you—’
‘Claudia. I didn’t come here to gloat. I came because I thought you might need someone to talk to … because I was concerned.’
‘Concerned.’ Claudia froze. ‘Concerned,’ she repeated, her voice metallic and sharp with disbelief. ‘Concerned for whom, Garth? Certainly not for me, the woman, the wife, you betrayed so easily. Did you talk about me when you were in bed with her? Did you discuss your concern for me with her? Ah, but I was forgetting. If you can’t remember making love to her, then you certainly won’t be able to remember discussing me, will you?’
‘Claudia, for God’s sake … I came here to talk to you about Tara, about her …’ Garth held his breath, waiting for her to retaliate, and when she didn’t, he started to release it very slowly.
‘But we are talking about her, aren’t we?’ she said softly now.
Across the silence that divided them, their eyes met and it was Garth’s that fell first.
‘Claudia,’ he began rawly, but she shook her head, the tempest of the emotions that had driven her so close to the edge of her self-control safely harnessed now, and she wasn’t going to allow Garth to provoke her into another demeaning outburst.
‘I’ve got to get ready to go out, Garth, I’m already running late,’ she told him crisply.
One look at her face told Garth that he would be wasting his time trying to talk to her, to reason with her. Shaking his head, he turned round and headed for the open doorway, cursing himself as he did so. He had handled things badly. Beneath her outwardly calm, gentle demeanour, Claudia had a very strong skein of the same stubborn pride and indomitable spirit that had made her father, the brigadier, the respected warrior that he was.
In Claudia, though, its inflexibility was normally tempered by her woman’s awareness that life came in varying shades of grey, rather than two opposing colours of black and white—apart from where he was concerned.
As he let himself out of the house and headed for his car, he reminded himself that there was that school of belief that said the greater the love, the greater the hatred following any form of betrayal, but his betrayal …
There were always two sides to every story and she hadn’t ever been prepared to listen while he told her his.
After the miscarriage of their first child, Claudia had become so depressed and withdrawn, so caught up in her own grief and sense of loss, that she had not realised that he was grieving, too, that he needed … wanted … As he started the engine, Garth shook his head. What was the point in thinking about that now? It was over. They were over; the only thing they had in common any more was their love for Tara.
Tara …
As the big car purred out of the drive, Garth realised that something was obscuring his vision. He switched on the windscreen wipers and then frowned, grimacing to himself, blinking fiercely. Men weren’t supposed to cry, were they? He could remember saying that to Claudia the night she had silently put Tara into his arms for the first time. She had been pathetically small, and he had ached with the overwhelming need to protect her and to keep her safe.
Tara. She was an adult now, not a child, and he could no longer guarantee to make the world, or life, safe and secure for her.
Claudia blinked as she focused vaguely on the flashing light on the telephone, her heart beating unsteadily. She felt … she felt … She was afraid, she acknowledged as she tried to analyse her feelings. How long had she been standing here staring into space? How long was it since Garth had gone?
She felt empty, hollow, disembodied and yet so heavy. So weighed down with the burden of her pain that her feet felt leaden, unable to move.
The telephone had stopped ringing. No doubt her caller would ring back. She was, she discovered, still wrapped only in the towel she had pulled on after her shower. She started to shiver. Beyond the bedroom window, the garden still basked in the warmth of the sun, but Claudia no longer saw it with the zest of a pioneer and adventurer bent on transforming it into her own private vision of paradise. In fact, it wasn’t the garden she saw at all.
She had always hated rows, arguments. They left her feeling sick, disorientated, weakened physically and emotionally, and the unexpectedness of this one with Garth had doubled its traumatic effect on her nervous system.
Like a sleepwalker, she started to get dressed, keeping her eyes focused on her dressing-table and its collection of silver-framed photographs, all of them of Tara—Tara as a baby, as a little girl, a teenager, a graduate. Her car keys lay on the dressing-table in front of one of the photographs, the one of Tara in her christening robe. Numbly, Claudia picked them up. She was dressed now, although she couldn’t have said what she had on … couldn’t have said and didn’t care.
Tara … The agonising ache inside her became a racking physical pain.
As she walked slowly downstairs, she could hear a sharp, anxious voice inside her head scolding her, telling her that there were things she had to do, people she had to see, but she ignored it, blotting it out.
There was something else she had to do, somewhere she had to be that was far more important.
The phone on his desk was ringing. Automatically, Lloyd reached out and picked it up.
‘Lloyd, Lloyd, when are you coming back to the island?’ His heart sank as he recognised Margot’s voice. He could tell from the sound of it that she was crying. Unwillingly, he pictured her.
She would be lying on her bed, her dark eyes burning with intensity, her thin frame curled protectively into a foetus-like ball.
Her body had developed a hard, angular edge to it and she had about her a hungry, voracious look. But as he of all people had good reason to know, her hunger wasn’t for food.
‘The summer is our time,’ she was protesting tearfully now. ‘My time with you. It’s the only time we have together. Oh, Lloyd, I can’t bear it here without you.’
The words made a sound like a long, tormented wail, assaulting his eardrums with their pain.
‘I had to come back, Margot, but I should be through here by the weekend.’
‘The weekend … That means we’ll have missed a full week together. Ring me tonight, won’t you? I’ll be … thinking of you.’
As he replaced the receiver, Lloyd stared unseeingly across his desk. He normally closed his office during the summer vacation—after all, with the campus practically deserted, there was no need for him to keep it open. Their business in California, like that in Boston, came from the universities’ professors and students whose work they published, but his assistant had sounded so excited over the telephone about the manuscript he had received in Lloyd’s absence that Lloyd had agreed to fly home to meet with the author and read the manuscript.
Margot had protested, of course, pleading with him not to go.
‘We have so little time together,’ she had reminded him, and of course it was the truth, but these past few summers he had somehow or other found that when he was with her, the intensity of her love, her need, made him feel uncomfortably claustrophobic. It wasn’t that he loved her any the less, he hastily reassured himself. How could he? She had given up so much for him, for their love, even to the extent of …
Pushing away his chair, he got up and walked across to the window.
He lived on the coast, and his apartment had wonderful views of the ocean. Whenever he had time, he enjoyed walking along the beach. When they were younger, the girls had enjoyed going with him, but they were almost grown up now, students at UCLA and with far better things to do with their time than visiting their ex-stepfather—he hadn’t had any children with Carole-Ann. When the girls were younger, he had often thought that he would enjoy being a birth father. He liked children, but during the few years he had been married, he had felt that it would almost be tantamount to being unfaithful to Margot to have a sexual relationship with Carole-Ann, even though she was his wife. After all, their marriage had been more or less a business arrangement anyway. He had thought that the presence of a wife and two children in his background added the necessary gravitas to his professional status, and she, after a bad divorce and two failed live-in relationships, had told him quite bluntly what she wanted. It wasn’t for sex so much as security, financial security and stability, for her and her daughters. And so they had married.
Margot had hated his marrying Carole-Ann; she had refused point-blank to attend the wedding or to meet with Carole-Ann and the girls.
Carole-Ann had known all about Margot. Impossible for him not to have told her.
‘I love her,’ he had told her quietly, ‘but we can’t marry and—’
‘Not in some states maybe, but you could go away together, abroad …’
‘No. To live apart from family and friends, in a kind of exile, that isn’t what either of us wants. Margot is inclined to be a little highly strung.’ He had paused, wondering how much he should tell Carole-Ann and then decided that it wasn’t necessary to explain to her that the pressure of their love for one another had already brought Margot close to the edge of a nervous breakdown.
‘I can’t give Lloyd up … I can’t. Please don’t make me,’ she had cried hysterically when her mother had intervened in their teenage love affair to remind them that they were by law prohibited from sharing their lives. ‘If you try to make us part, I shall kill myself,’ she had threatened, and both Lloyd and her mother had known that there was a very real possibility that she would do exactly that.
Then, he had loved her just as much as she loved him. But there had always been room for other things in his life; he had played sports in those days, enjoyed sailing and socialising. But Margot had become so upset about the time they spent apart, the activities that kept them apart, that he had unwillingly dropped them to please her.
Uncharacteristically, it had originally been her idea that he should marry. Family pressure had been brought to bear on them both to make him agree to move to California, but following his departure, Margot had immediately stopped eating and made herself so ill that her mother had been forced to give in and agree that Lloyd should return to Boston and to the island every summer.
‘You want me to marry, but why?’ Lloyd had questioned Margot in astonishment when she had first raised the subject with him.
‘Because, don’t you see,’ she had demanded passionately, ‘that way, no one will be able to object.’
‘What about my wife?’
‘You’re not to call her that,’ Margot had immediately flashed furiously at him. ‘She is not to be your wife … only I can ever really be that. She is simply to be married to you. It will be a marriage of convenience, that’s all.’
Lloyd had laughed at her indulgently at the time. He had felt very indulgent towards her in those days. Since his move to UCLA and his taking on full responsibility for their business there, he felt that he had become immeasurably more mature, a man of the world, whereas Margot was still very much a cherished and protected girl.
But then he had met Carole-Ann, and Margot’s suggestion had suddenly seemed to make good sense. There was a part of Lloyd that enjoyed playing the archetypal Bostonian gentleman’s role … of rescuing a woman in distress. And at first Margot had seemed pleased. It was only later, after he had proposed and Carole-Ann had accepted, that she had started asking questions, telephoning him at all hours of the day and night—a habit that she had continued even after he and Carole-Ann were married.
‘Look, I don’t give a shit if she disturbs your sleep,’ Carole-Ann had yelled at him once in the middle of a row, ‘but I won’t have the crazy bitch disturbing me, and waking up the kids.’
‘She loves me—’ Lloyd had started to protest.
But Carole-Ann had cut him short, telling him in angry disgust, ‘She’s mad, obsessed, possessed by what she feels for you, but as for love … I don’t think she’s capable of knowing what that means. If she really loved you, she’d want you to have a proper life of your own….’
That had been one of the worst summers, the worst years, of his life.
Six weeks after his return home from the island, he had received a hysterical telephone call from Margot.
‘But you can’t be pregnant,’ he had protested in shock, his hand tightening sweatily around the receiver, his heart pounding sickly and heavily.
‘I’m five weeks late,’ Margot had screamed. ‘Five weeks! Oh, God, Lloyd, what are we going to do?’
In the end, it had turned out to be a false alarm, but it had been after that that Margot had announced to him her decision to be sterilised.
‘Margot, no,’ he had protested instinctively, telling himself that the tight sensation he could feel in his throat was the anguish of his love for her rather than that of any psychological sense of a noose tightening around his neck. ‘You could meet someone else, marry, have children with him …’
‘No,’ she had howled, the sound a primal protest. ‘I shall never marry, never. The only man I want to marry is you, the only child I want is yours. You’re just saying that because you don’t love me any more,’ she had accused him. ‘You don’t care. You—’
‘Of course I love you,’ Lloyd had protested.
At the end of the year, Carole-Ann informed him that she was filing for divorce. She had met someone else, she told him, shrugging aside his shock.
He had kept in touch with the girls although he had said nothing to Margot about doing so. She had, after his divorce, begun cross-questioning him about the places he went and the people, the women, he met. His was a lonely life; he had friends, of course, but his relationship with Margot had to be kept a secret from them. She at least had her family, their family, around her.
He glanced at his watch. Two o’clock. His meeting with Dr Jamie Friedland was at two-fifteen. Danny, his assistant, had made all the arrangements. Since the professor was apparently still looking for an apartment, having spent his first term at UCLA in someone else’s spare room, it made sense for their meeting to take place at Lloyd’s apartment. Normally, he preferred to see potential authors away from his own home, but Danny had been so thoroughly excited about the professor’s manuscript that Lloyd hadn’t had the heart to remind him of that.
Certainly his work made very interesting reading—what Lloyd could understand of it, which wasn’t very much. But according to Danny, who could, it was a definitive work on its subject, breaking new ground and raising questions about established procedures other academics were going to find hard to answer.
Out of the corner of his eye, Lloyd saw a car turning into his driveway, a small European convertible sports model, driven by a redhead, her long hair mussed by the wind.
Frowning, Lloyd watched as she parked the car and got out. Tall and fashionably voluptuous, she moved with a confidence, an inherent liking of herself, that momentarily took his breath away. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen a woman so completely at peace with herself. She was, he decided, the complete antithesis of Margot. His frown deepened as he saw her look up at his window before heading for the entrance to his apartment. Ten seconds later as his intercom buzzed, he heard her announcing her arrival.
Dr Jamie Friedland to see Lloyd Kennet.
As he activated the automatic lock and let her in, Lloyd had the oddest sensation of being on the brink of something so fateful and portentous that for a moment, he almost felt half-afraid to meet her.