Читать книгу Tug Of Love - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 6

THANKFULLY Win got into her car and started the engine. It had been a particularly hectic and fraught afternoon, with some Japanese guests arriving unexpectedly a whole day earlier than their reservations allowed for. Luckily they had been able to fit them in, but she had had one or two anxious moments.

Normally she loved her job, loved the challenges it brought, loved the people she met, the sense of self-worth and achievement she got from using the skills she had learned. She was proud of what she had achieved, all the more so perhaps because of the way Charlie had so unwittingly drawn a contrast between her achievements and those of his father.

She remembered how she had laughed when her parents had tried to tell her that one day she might regret having given up the opportunity to go to university. How could she, she had demanded fiercely, when doing so would mean she would be parted from James?

She also remembered how later, when they were alone, James had whispered to her that he wished she were a little older; that he was not really surprised at her parents’ attitude. But then she had reached up and put her arms around him, kissing him in the way he had taught her, and with a small groan he had taken hold of her, kissing her back, pushing her down against the cushions of the settee.

He had made love to her properly for the first time that night, and Win had been shocked and distressed to learn that sex was not necessarily instantly blissful.

James had blamed himself, assuring her that next time things would be different…better. She had been doubtful, still upset by what she had seen as her inability to fully please him, but he had been right. The next time it had been better—better than better, blissfully, satisfyingly better—Quickly she suppressed her truant thoughts.

Tom’s hotel was several miles outside the town. It was midsummer and the grass verges alongside the road were bright with orange poppies. Fitful sunshine dappled the fields, clouds casting racing shadows over the distant hills.

Feeling the tension gripping her muscles, knowing how reluctant she felt to go home and face Charlie’s stubborn accusing face, on an impulse Win turned off the main road and pulled into a quiet lane, where she stopped her car and wound down the window. Her head ached slightly from the pressures of her day, or from the fear caused by the news of James’s return.

She leaned back against the seat head-rest, closing her eyes and letting her thoughts drift, a luxury she seldom had time for these days, an indulgence she felt she ought to have put behind her anyway. Daydreams were for adolescents, not adult women. As a girl she had often been accused of being a daydreamer.

She smiled painfully to herself. As she had told Heather this morning, until she met James, her life had been a very protected one indeed—over-protected in many ways.

She had been coming out of a shop the first time she met him, and had literally walked straight into him, going over on her ankle and yelping with the unexpected pain. All thoughts of that pain had been driven right out of her mind, though, when he had crouched down at her side and taken hold of her ankle, running his fingers thoroughly and clinically over it, asking her anxiously how she felt. But she had been in too much of a state of delirious shock to respond.

He was the most physically compelling man she had ever seen: tall, with thick dark brown hair and tanned skin. The hands that held her ankle were long-fingered, the nails clean and neatly cut. He was wearing a heavy-duty workmanlike watch and his leather blouson jacket had a softness about it that despite its battered appearance made her want to run her fingertips over it in appreciation of its butter-soft sensuality.

When she didn’t speak, he looked gravely at her. His eyes, she discovered, were pure gold like a tiger’s. Her breath caught in her throat, the most powerful emotional and physical sensation she had ever experienced in her life gripping her, and she knew instantly that she was in love.

In a daze she allowed him to pick up the shopping she had dropped and to guide her to his car. He would take her home, he told her, and she, knowing that if he had told her he was taking her to the moon she would have simply gone with him, nodded and allowed him to take her by the arm and guide her through the other shoppers to the car park.

As he drove, she learned that he had just returned home after completing his Master’s at Harvard, and that he intended to start up his own business in computer software, but that in the meantime he had taken a job locally because he wanted to take some time out to be with his parents before he did so.

He asked her her name and she told him, breathlessly, blushing a little as he repeated it thoughtfully.

‘Winter—unusual.’

‘I was born on the day of the winter solstice,’ she told him awkwardly. Her unusual name had always embarrassed her, and she preferred to be called the more conventional Win.

‘Winter by name, but not by nature,’ he had said then. ‘Not with that warm colouring.’ And as he spoke he leaned forward and touched her hair. She had worn it loose in those days, falling thickly below her shoulders and kept off her face with an Alice band. She’d thought the style childish and longed for something shorter and more sophisticated, but her brothers had derided her, telling her she was far too young to pretend to be sophisticated, and out of habit she had deferred to them.

By some quirk of fate that summer they were all away from home. Gareth, the eldest, was in New Zealand getting to know his fiancée’s family, the twins, Simon and Philip, were backpacking in the States, and Jonathan, who was in his last year at university, had gone on an archaeological dig with some fellow students, and so for once Win was without her protective guard dogs.

Initially her parents were quite happy for her to see James. He was older, mature…sensible, aware of her innocence and youth—or so her mother later told her they had believed.

Win might have been innocent, but she was also in love, and she had made no attempt to hide her feelings from James. The first time he’d kissed her she had clung fervently to him, winding her arms around him, opening her mouth experimentally beneath his and then feeling her heart thunder in excitement as his grip on her tightened and she felt the hot eager thrust of his tongue inside her mouth.

Afterwards she watched him with luminous dazed eyes that betrayed the effect he had had on her. Beneath her thin cotton T-shirt her breasts ached and pulsed, the nipples hard, pushing out the fine cloth. James touched one lightly with his fingertip, gently rimming it, dark colour surging up under his skin as he told her thickly, ‘Next time I shall kiss you there, and then you’ll really know what getting excited’s all about.’

She had been so desperately in love with him, so completely without any defence against her own feelings, or against the sudden powerful surge of her own sexuality. And there was no escaping from the truth. It was the discovery of that sexuality as much as what she had believed was her love for James that had carried her so passionately into such an intense relationship with him.

She had wanted him so much that quite simply everything else had ceased to be of any importance, and because she had no past experience to guide her she had naïvely assumed that because she wanted him she must love him.

No one had ever allowed her to discover that the sexual urge could be just as powerful in women as it was in men. Just thinking about James made her body ache in ways she had never before even known existed. Of course she loved him, she cried passionately when her mother tried to suggest that it might just be a crush; that being in love was not the same as loving someone; that she was too young to think of committing her life to someone she had only known a matter of a handful of months.

She was over eighteen, and her parents could not stop them from marrying, she had pointed out defiantly.

What about university? her parents had countered. What about her future?

James was her future, she had told them.

Even James himself suggested tentatively that it might be better if they were to wait, but she immediately burst into tears, accusing him of not wanting her. He had taken hold of her to comfort her, and within seconds she was clinging eagerly to him.

It had been after the first time they had made love and she had confessed to him that, despite her promise to do so, she had still not asked her doctor for a prescription for the contraceptive pill that James had insisted on not just making her an appointment at the family planning clinic, but on going there with her. A baby at this stage in their relationship, or indeed for several years after they were married, was simply not feasible, he had told her.

‘You’re so very young,’ he had groaned when he saw her face. ‘Sometimes I think your parents are right and that we should wait, but I want you so much…’

They had been married two months later, much against the wishes of her parents, a quiet church ceremony because she hadn’t wanted to wait any longer to be James’s wife.

They had bought a small sturdy stone-built cottage on the outskirts of the town, and for a while, for a very short while, Win had been blissfully happy. James was a tender, considerate lover, gradually allowing her to discover her sexuality, and it was only years later, long after their divorce, that she actually realised how much he himself must have been holding himself back.

He had been unselfish and loving to her then, cherishing her, loving her, laughing when she burned his meals and he had to iron his own shirts. When flushed with mortification and shame, she had asked him if he regretted marrying her, he had taken her in his arms and told her that it wasn’t her housewifely skills he had married her for.

‘Besides,’ he had whispered against her mouth, ‘after Christmas you’ll be starting college, and you won’t have time for ironing and cooking then.’

That had been a bone of contention between them. Win had been quite content to be his wife, wanting nothing more, but he had insisted that, while she might have given up her chance to go to university, that did not mean she could not take a degree course here at home.

‘What do I need a degree for now?’ she had asked him. ‘I don’t want a career. Just you and our children.’

James had looked at her seriously.

‘You’re so young, Win,’ he had told her. ‘You think that now, but one day…’

They had argued about it, but he had been insistent, and then had come her flu and Charlie’s conception.

Had it been because she had known how he would feel that she had deliberately kept back the news for as long as she could?

When she had finally broken the news to him, at first he had been shocked and angry. Through her tears she had watched him pacing their sit-ting-room as he told her, ‘It’s too soon, Win. We still hardly know one another.’

And she had discovered over the months that followed how little she knew him.

He had changed his job, getting one that paid far more money in the city, so that consequently she hardly ever saw him.

Her family, to whom she turned for sympathy and company, seemed to share James’s view that her pregnancy was something that should simply not have happened so early on in their marriage.

‘Of course I shan’t be able to go to college now,’ she had said to James, and had winced as she saw the look in his eyes. It was almost as though he had thought she had deliberately got pregnant so that she wouldn’t have to go to college.

The first rifts in their relationship had begun.

And then had come the evening James had told her they had to attend a company function. She had been seven months pregnant at the time and feeling acutely uncomfortable; perhaps because she was so small, with her pregnancy, she had become very large, the slowing down of her body irritating and hampering her.

They had ceased making love. Win had been so angry with James when he had not welcomed the news of her pregnancy that when he attempted to touch her she had pushed him away, and now he no longer tried to touch her. She ached for him to do so, but pride wouldn’t allow her to find the words to tell him, and a small festering worm of misery suggested to her that perhaps he no longer wanted to make love to her now that she was pregnant and so enormous.

And then, at his new firm’s annual dinner dance, she had seen the way Tara Simons was looking at him, the way she stood far too close to him, angling her body, her slim, supple, unpregnant body against his; the way she deliberately excluded Win from the conversation, the way she subtly put Win down by mentioning her qualifications, talking enthusiastically to James about their work, a subject which excluded Win completely. She knew little or nothing about computer software.

Win’s woman’s instinct had told her immediately that Tara wanted James, and just as immediately she had suspected that despite his disclaimers James did find her attractive. How could he not do so? Tara was tall, a redhead, with long catlike-green eyes and a sensuality that even Win could see.

The rifts between them widened and hardened. James took to sleeping in the spare room—so as not to disturb her, he told her when she managed to force herself to question him about it.

Her mother had called round unexpectedly one day when Win was on her own. It was a Saturday morning, and James had announced that he had to go into the office. Win had rung him there when she realised he hadn’t said what time he would be back, and had dropped the receiver as though it burned when Tara answered the call.

‘Win! My dear, are you all right?’ her mother had asked her anxiously as Win opened the door to her.

Win had suddenly seen herself, from her mother’s expression, as her mother had been seeing her—her hair unwashed and untidy, the smock she was wearing grubby and unironed, her face unmade-up and puffy from her pregnancy.

Her mother’s frown had deepened when she saw the untidy state of the sitting-room, and the washing up piled in the kitchen.

She knew how untidy and unappealing everything looked, including her, Win admitted to herself, but she was so tired all the time, and besides, what was the point? James was never there, and when he was…When he was, it seemed to her that he didn’t want to be with her. She saw the way he looked at her sometimes, frowning as he studied her, no doubt wondering why on earth he had married her, she thought miserably.

No doubt he would have preferred to be married to someone like Tara—someone who was far too clever to become accidentally pregnant, someone who, like him, had been to university, who had a career. Well, she could have gone to university as well if she hadn’t met him.

She had seen two of her old schoolfriends in town the other day, and they had been astonished to see that she was pregnant—astonished and pitying.

With her mother’s help, she got the house tidy and washed her hair. Her back ached so much that she was tempted to have it cut short, but James had once told her that he loved its thick length, as he wound it around her throat and kissed her through it.

Tears blurred her eyes. What had happened to them, to their love?

It had been gone four o’clock in the afternoon when James came home. Win had seen the relief, the pleasure almost in his eyes when he took in the tidy house and her cleanly washed hair. He had come towards her, putting his arms around her, nuzzling her ear, and that had been when she had smelled the strong perfume on him. She had become acutely conscious of different smells during her pregnancy, and there was no mistaking this one. It was Tara’s.

She had pushed him away from her immediately, her face red with anguish as she yelled at him, ‘Don’t touch me! Just don’t touch me!’

It had been less than a month after that that she had gone into early labour and Charlie had been born, while James was away—with Tara.

He hadn’t even seen Charlie until he was over a day old. Win remembered how he had frowned at the baby, almost reluctant to look at him, never mind pick him up, and how he had turned away when she had started to feed him.

She had ached for him to show her some affection, to reassure her that he still loved her and that he loved their child, but none had been forthcoming.

She had wanted to have Charlie’s cot in their room next to their bed, but James had insisted on banishing him to his nursery. When Charlie developed gastro-enteritis she had screamed furiously at James that it was his fault, that if she had been allowed to have Charlie next to her, as she had wanted, he wouldn’t have become ill.

She had known the moment she said it that she was being unfair, but it was too late to call back the words, and besides, what difference would it have made? James no longer loved her; she was sure of that.

Confirmation that she was right came six months later, when James did not come home at all one night.

Halfway through the morning the phone rang. Win recognised Tara’s smooth-as-cream voice immediately.

‘If you’ve been worrying about James, there’s no need,’ she told Win smoothly. ‘He spent last night with me…’ She paused delicately and then added, ‘you do understand what I’m saying, don’t you, Win?’

Win had replaced the receiver without answering. Sickness filled her body, her head pounded with pain, while her heart ached with the most acute anguish she had ever experienced. She had put Charlie in his pram and walked him for miles, the tears running down her face, and then when James came home she had told him she wanted a divorce.

He had tried to argue with her, but she refused to listen to him, or to mention his affair with Tara. She had too much pride for that—too much pride and too much pain.

She had realised when she’d listened to Tara’s revelations just how much she actually did love him. Too much, she acknowledged as she kept her back to him and repeated her demand for a divorce.

Oddly, her family counselled her against her decision, pointing out that she had Charlie to consider now, but she had been adamant, demanding that James move out of the house immediately and then refusing to see him.

The sound of a plane overhead brought her sharply out of her thoughts. She moved uncomfortably in her seat, frowning a little. It had been a long time since she had allowed herself to recall so much of the past, to think about it so deeply. Normally the moment any old memories of her brief marriage surfaced she pushed them aside, suppressing them, and now with adult hindsight she was uncomfortably aware of how very immature she had been, how very selfish and spoiled in some ways.

Her frown deepened as she dwelt on this new image of her younger self, surveying it with the maturity and knowledge she had gained in the years that had passed.

Her family had been right; she had been too young for marriage and for motherhood. Now, for instance, there was no way she would not immediately question the kind of hours James had claimed he had to work; no way she would behave with such childish petulance and such short-sightedness, no way she would allow her pride and self-respect to become so diminished that she neglected herself or her home, no way she would not leap at the opportunity to broaden her horizons.

No way, either, that she would become so totally engrossed in her child that she didn’t merely neglect its father, but virtually abandoned him as well.

Win moved uncomfortably in her seat. It was odd how plainly she could see now how her own actions must have contributed to the rifts that had developed between them.

James hadn’t been ready for the commitment of children. He hadn’t wanted Charlie. In fact, she suspected with hindsight that all he had wanted was simply a sexual relationship with her, and that because of this he had convinced himself that he loved her.

Whatever the original reasons for their marriage, it was over now, and had in fact never really existed. The kind of relationship she and James had shared was certainly not what she now considered to be the kind of relationship she wanted with a man.

She had been so subservient, so clinging, so pathetic in many ways. She would never be like that now. Motherhood had changed her, forcing her to put someone else’s needs before her own.

As the youngest of the family, she had been indulged. Her brothers had sometimes treated her more like a pet dog than a fellow human being, she reflected wryly, and that was as much her fault as theirs.

They didn’t do so now.

Win smiled to recall how surprised they had been by the way she had changed, by her new authority, her new awareness of herself and others, her calm claiming of her right to their respect as well as their love. No, she would never make the mistakes again that she had made with James the next time.

The next time…Win’s heart thumped heavily. She still hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell Charlie that Tom had proposed to her. She hadn’t even made her own mind up whether or not she intended to accept him.

She liked him; she admired his drive and what he had achieved, even if sometimes his aggression and occasional lack of sensitivity made her wince. What she had no doubts about at all was the fact that he loved her.

Did she love him?

She stared at the skyline. Three months ago, while Charlie was away on a school trip—finding time to be alone together with a sharp-eyed thirteen-year-old about was, she had discovered, virtually impossible—she and Tom had made love.

For her it had been the first time since James. Perhaps it was because she was older, wiser, less inclined to see things through rose-coloured glasses that the experience had somehow not really lived up to her expectations.

Tom had been considerate and caring enough. He had taken time and care, and he was certainly far from inexperienced. She had not expected, as she had with James, that there would be immediate fireworks, but she had certainly expected to feel rather more than she had—a lot more, given her knowledge of how easily James had aroused her.

Neither of them had said anything about it, of course, but she had sensed that Tom was disappointed, and if she was honest with herself it was almost a relief that Charlie’s antipathy towards him and constant presence meant that they had not had any opportunity to repeat the exercise.

But then, as she had remarked quite recently to Heather, there were far more important things in a relationship than sex—or at least there were in the kind of relationship she wanted—and Tom, fortunately, had not pushed her.

Perhaps things would get better with practice and custom. But then when did they get the opportunity? Win was well past the age when she welcomed the idea of making love impetuously in a car on the way home from a date.

She winced a little, suddenly remembering doing exactly that with James. They had been out to dinner, and on the way back she had touched his thigh, tensing as his muscles clenched, staring at him wide-eyed, her heart pounding when he abruptly stopped the car and turned towards her.

Perhaps she was just past the age of being capable of that kind of sexual intensity, she reflected as she restarted her car. And if she did agree to marry Tom, would that have the effect of driving Charlie closer to his father? If only Tom could learn to be a little less hard on Charlie, a little more understanding, and if only Charlie wouldn’t always be so belligerent, and if only he would not constantly bring James’s name into the conversation whenever Tom was there.

She winced as she remembered Tom’s angry comment that he was thankful James was living in Australia. ‘If he’s as wonderful as Charlie seems to think, I’m surprised you’re still not married to him,’ he had told her sourly.

‘He is Charlie’s father,’ Win had felt obliged to point out in defence of her son.

And when she had tried to suggest to Charlie that it might not be a good idea to mention James quite so often when Tom was there, Charlie had demanded, ‘Why shouldn’t I? He is my dad.’

The problem was that Charlie was starting to grow up and that he seemed to be getting as over-protective of her as her brothers had once been.

Well, she had learned her lesson, and no matter how much she loved her son he must accept that she had a right to her own private life and to her own friends, even if he himself could not always like them. That was a lesson he must learn for his own sake, and for the sake of the woman who would eventually share his life, as well as for hers.

However, it was one thing to get him to accept her right to have Tom as a friend. To get him to accept him as her husband and his own stepfather was quite a different matter.

As she drove through the town, she heard the church clock striking, and grimaced. She hadn’t realised how late it was. Charlie had been spending the afternoon with a friend. They had been planning to watch a football match on television together. The friend’s father was apparently bringing them home.

When she had queried this, he had been quite cross with her, reminding her of how old he now was.

The cottage James had bought when they were first married was still her home. Together with half a dozen others, it looked out on to open fields at the back and had a good-sized garden. Last year she and Charlie had painted the outside, a task neither of them had really enjoyed but which Win had felt had done them both good.

Tom had been horrified. He would have got one of his own handymen to do that for her, he had told her, but she had shaken her head. One thing she had learned was how important it was to her to be independent—a change from the days when she had helplessly leaned on others and docilely allowed them to make her decisions for her.

There was a car parked outside the cottage, an expensive Daimler saloon with new numberplates. Guiltily she parked behind it.

Charlie had his own key for the cottage. Obviously his friend’s father had brought him home and Charlie must have invited him inside. She would have to apologise for being late. She only hoped the father would not judge her as a bad mother for allowing her son to return to an empty house.

It had been difficult for her to assuage the guilt she had felt at first, going to work, but Heather had chided her for it.

‘Charlie can always come to us for a couple of hours if necessary,’ she had told her. ‘You know that. You need this job, Win—not just for the money. You need it for yourself. You’ve devoted yourself exclusively to Charlie when he’s needed you most. Just remember, another handful of years and he’ll be gone.’

Even though she had acknowledged the truth of Heather’s comments and even though she felt that both Charlie and herself had benefited from the independence her job gave them both, Win still had these sharp attacks of guilt.

She could hear the television as she walked into the hall. The sitting-room door was open, and through it she could hear Charlie yelling excitedly.

‘That’s it! Did you see it, Dad? Did you see the way he kicked that goal?

Dad!

Win froze, her nerve-endings screaming a rejection of all that that one simple word conveyed.

‘He certainly has some real power there.’

She hadn’t heard him speak in over ten years, but she would have recognised his voice in a hundred…in a thousand. Deep, reflective, the words measured and firm, no trace of any Australian accent, the same voice which had once slurred like honey with desire when he had told her how much he wanted her, how much he loved her. The same voice which had been raw with need when he’d leaned over her in the dark, entering her body.

The same voice which had been hard and cold when he’d condemned her for conceiving their child.

Forcing down the feeling of icy shock threatening her, Win took a deep breath and then, straightening her shoulders, she pushed open the sitting-room door and walked in.