Читать книгу To Love, Honour & Betray - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I know.’

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

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

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

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

Now Claudia couldn’t conceal her reaction.

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

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

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

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

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

‘No … well, at first, perhaps. Ry …’

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

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

Tara bit her lip.

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

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

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

Tara shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I sincerely hope not,’ Claudia declared truthfully.

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

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

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

‘I’ll be there,’ Claudia agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

To discover that the man she had loved, trusted, put her faith, her whole self in, had betrayed her, had been almost more than Claudia could bear. To know that he had slept with another woman, touched her, embraced her, physically known and shared with her the intimacy that Claudia had believed was hers alone had almost destroyed her and it had certainly destroyed their marriage. How could it not have done so?

But Chris was right about one thing. She and Garth had made a pact to remember that, whatever their own differences, whatever their own pain, they would not allow the death of their love for one another to touch Tara, their precious and much loved daughter, all the more loved because for Claudia she would always be her only child. The doctors had told her that after … ‘You are so lucky,’ Chris had commented enviously and Claudia was remembering those words as she stopped her car and climbed out.

The ivy still clothed the front of the house but now it had been joined by the wisteria she and Garth had planted the year after they moved in. It had finished flowering now, and its silvery green tendrils rustled softly in the evening air as Claudia inserted her key in the lock.

Upper Charfont was the kind of vintage small English town where up until very recently back doors were frequently left unlocked and neighbours knew all of one another’s business. Claudia had been a little wary at first about moving into that kind of environment, but Garth had gently reassured her, pointing out the advantages of a semi-rural upbringing for Tara and the fact that the town was less than an hour’s drive away from the small Cotswold village to which her parents had recently retired.

Her father was an army man, Brigadier Peter Fulshaw, and it had been through him that she had originally met Garth, who had been one of his young officers. The peripatetic nature of her childhood, moving from one army base to another, had meant that Claudia had a very strong yearning to give her own child the kind of settled existence she herself had never experienced, the chance to develop friendships that would be with her all her life, and Garth had agreed with her. On that, as well as on so many other subjects, they had thought exactly alike, but even then he …

Claudia tried to shake aside her memories as she let herself into the house and locked the door behind her. But tonight for some reason, success in burying thoughts of the past eluded her. Everywhere she looked there were reminders of Garth and the life they had shared. The wall lights in the hallway, which she had just switched on, had been a find they had made in an antique shop in Brighton, pounced on with great glee and borne triumphantly home where Garth had carried them off to his workroom above the garage to clean and polish them.

He had left the army by then, working initially for the PR firm run by an old school friend of his father’s and then later setting up his own rival business.

Like her own, Garth’s parents were still alive, living just outside York in the constituency that Garth’s father had represented as a Member of Parliament before his retirement.

Claudia still saw them regularly and loved them dearly. Just like her own parents, they adored Tara and spoiled her dreadfully. She was, after all, for both of them, their only grandchild since she and Garth were themselves only children.

‘I’m so sorry that there can’t be any more little ones, darling,’ her mother had tried to comfort her after she had broken the news to her that Tara would be her only child. ‘But sometimes … Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure, Mummy,’ Claudia had told her, her voice raw with pain.

‘But at least you have Tara, and she’s such a beautiful, healthy baby. You’d never know that she’d been born prematurely. You can’t imagine how your father and I felt when we got Garth’s telephone call. I wanted to come home straight away, but of course we couldn’t get flights, and with Garth’s parents being away at the same time … I must say I was surprised that the hospital allowed you home with her so soon.’

‘They knew we were planning to move,’ Claudia had reminded her mother quickly before adding, ‘Anyway, that’s all behind us now. I do wish you wouldn’t keep harping on about it. I’m sorry, Mummy,’ she had apologised when she saw her mother’s expression. ‘It’s just that I don’t like being reminded …’ She bit her lip.

‘It’s all right, darling, I do understand,’ her mother had assured her, patting her hand. ‘I know how dreadful it must have been for you, especially when … Well, after losing your first baby and then to nearly lose our darling, precious Tara, as well …’

‘Yes,’ Claudia had agreed. Even nearly eighteen months after the event, she had still hated being reminded of the early miscarriage she had suffered with the baby she had been carrying before Tara’s arrival. Friends had told her then that it was a relatively common occurrence and that the best thing she could do was to get pregnant again just as quickly as she could.

She had still been working at that time, of course, with Garth still in the army, and it had seemed to make sense for her to continue with her probationary work, a very newly qualified and raw probation officer, she reminded herself bleakly now, remembering the interview she had had with her supervisor at the end of her initial training period.

‘Idealism and concern for others are all very praiseworthy, my dear,’ the older woman had told her, ‘but in this job you have to learn to achieve a certain amount of detachment. It’s essential if one is to do one’s job properly.’

In those days, twenty-odd years ago, the problems and pitfalls in the field of social work she had chosen weren’t as widely recognised as they were now, Claudia acknowledged as she opened the door into the drawing room and walked in. The traumas and trials, accusations of negligence and lack of expertise, of pointless meddling in other people’s lives had still lain ahead, but she had known that the older woman was right and that she was too sensitive, too much in danger of becoming overinvolved with the problems of her clients to be truly effective on their behalf.

She had been sensitive, too, to the unspoken criticism of her colleagues, suspicious of her prosperous and, to them, protected upper-middle-class background and upbringing. What could she possibly know of the difficulties and dangers that beset the people they were dealing with and their poverty-trapped, inner-city lives? In the end, her conscience had coerced her into accepting that no matter how much she cared, no matter how passionately she wanted to help, no matter how praiseworthy her commitment to the job and excellent her qualifications for it, she was simply not the best person, the right person, to help those she was supposed to be helping.

The drawing room was Claudia’s second favourite room in the house. Elegantly proportioned, it faced south and always seemed to be flooded with light. It still had the same soft yellow colour scheme Claudia had chosen for it when she and Garth had first moved in. The Knoll sofas that faced one another across the fireplace had been a gift from her and Garth’s parents and, if anything, Claudia loved them even more now over twenty years later than she had done then, their heavy damask dull gold covers softened and gentled with age. Mellow and lived-in, the whole room had the kind of ambience about it, the kind of feel, that made newcomers comment on how welcoming it was.

Above the fireplace was a portrait of her father in his full regimentals. It had been presented to him on his retirement and her mother had insisted that she had spent enough of her life looking at him in his uniform and that Claudia and Garth should have it.

On the stairs, Claudia had a further collection of family portraits, some simple pencil sketches, others more detailed, along with the totally un-recognisable ‘picture’ that Tara had drawn of her parents in her first term at school.

On the opposite wall from the fireplace above the pretty antique side table that Garth’s mother had inherited from her own family and passed on to Claudia hung a portrait of another man in regimentals.

Instinctively, she walked over to it, switched on the picture light above it and studied it sombrely.

Garth had been twenty-seven when it had been painted and it had been a wedding gift from the regiment to them—a surprise wedding gift as the artist had painted the portrait from photographs. It was still a good likeness, though, with Garth’s face turned slightly to the left so that the clear thrust of his jaw could be seen along with the aquiline profile of his nose.

Put Garth in a Roman centurion’s outfit and he would immediately fulfil every Hollywood mogul’s ideal of what a sexy man in uniform should look like, a friend had once commented to Claudia, and it was true. Garth’s predecessors had originally come from Pembrokeshire in Wales and there was a joke in the family that it wasn’t merely driftwood washed up from the shipwrecks of the fleeing remnants of the Spanish Armada that his ancestors had salvaged from the Pembroke beaches.

Clearly, Garth’s skin tone and thick dark hair suggested that he could have Latin blood somewhere in his veins, and those who knew the family history had been very quick to point out that Tara’s lustrous dark curls could also be a part of that inheritance.

Fact or fiction, what was true was that Garth was a stunningly handsome man, an outrageously sexy man, so Claudia had been told enviously at their wedding, but oddly enough, it wasn’t Garth’s strongly sensual physical appeal that had initially attracted her.

Perhaps because of his career and his knowledge of the more base and raw instincts of the male sex, her father in particular had always been very protective of her, over-protective perhaps in some ways. Certainly it had taken a good deal of persuasion and coaxing on both her own part and that of her mother to gain his approval when she had wanted to go to university.

Garth, as one of her father’s junior officers, had been deputised to escort her to a regimental ball. He had called to collect her in the shiny, bright red Morgan sports car that had been his parents’ twenty-first birthday present to him and Claudia remembered that she had found both the car and the man rather too over the top, too stereotypical and obvious in many ways for her own taste.

It had been a warm June night and still light as they set out for the ball. They had had the country lane that led from her parents’ house to the main road to themselves, and typically, or so she had decided, Garth had insisted on driving his car rather fast if admittedly very dexterously. Then, just as they had straightened out of a sharp bend, Claudia had seen a hedgehog crossing the road. Her immediate instinct was to call out in protest as she anticipated the animal’s fateful demise, but to her astonishment as he, too, spotted the small creature, Garth had immediately taken evasive action, braking and turning the front of the car away from the road and plunging it instead nose first through a muddy ditch and up a bank into a thorny hedge.

Neither the hedgehog nor Claudia and Garth themselves suffered any physical damage but the same could not be said for the car. Along with the mud spattering its immaculate paintwork, Claudia had also been able to see the long and quite deep scratches the sharp thorns of the hedge had inflicted. But it wasn’t the state of his precious car and its paintwork that had Garth virtually leaping out of the car the moment he had it back on the road. No, it was the still dazed and obviously petrified little animal that he ran to rescue from its plight. He carefully picked it up and, opening a nearby farm gate, carried it to a much safer environment.

It had been then that she had fallen in love with him, Claudia remembered. Not because of his astounding good looks, nor even because of the way he apologised to her for the fact that they would now be rather late arriving at the ball, but because of the completely natural and instinctive way he had put the hedgehog’s safety above the value of his clearly very personally precious car, and it had been an honest and automatic reaction, Claudia had known, not something showy and false done simply to impress her. And she had loved him for it … for the personality, the warmth, the genuine caring and concern she had felt it revealed. The same love and caring he had always shown to Tara.

There was a telephone on the small coffee-table next to the fire. She walked over to it and, before she could change her mind, quickly dialled the number of Garth’s London penthouse. After their divorce, he had bought a small property on the other side of the town but during the week he stayed in London in order to be close to his work.

The phone rang five times and then the receiver at the other end was lifted and an attractively husky female voice that Claudia didn’t recognise said hello.

Without responding, Claudia replaced the receiver. Her hand was trembling and for some ridiculous reason she could feel the aching sensation at the back of her throat that presaged tears.

Why on earth should she cry just because a woman answered Garth’s phone? They had been divorced for years and she, after all, had been the one to agitate for the divorce. She knew that there had been other women in Garth’s life since they went their separate ways and she knew, too, that …

Straightening her spine, she readjusted several stems of the lilies she had already perfectly arranged earlier in the day. She was at a very vulnerable age, she reminded herself, that certain age where, while physically her looks might say that she was still a very attractive and sexually valuable woman, her hormones were beginning to tell her a different story. How many times lately had she heard other women of around the same age or slightly older bemoaning the fact that it wasn’t just in their almost-adult offsprings’ lives that they now felt redundant but in their partners’ beds, as well? ‘I still want sex,’ one had complained frankly to her only the other day. ‘But somehow these days I feel that it doesn’t want me very much any more.’

Claudia sympathised. She didn’t have a man, a lover, in her life. She had had offers, of course, approaches … men who had hovered on the edge of her life during the years of her marriage to Garth, moving a little closer, making their intentions, their desires, a little bit plainer, some of them married, some of them not. No, she certainly needn’t have gone short of sex and perhaps even love if she had wanted it … them. But she had been too busy with other and more important concerns. Tara for one … and then there had been her business, her charity work, her friends.

‘Don’t you miss it?’ someone had asked her curiously in the early years after the divorce. ‘The sex. The having someone to snuggle up to in bed, the comfort of having someone there to hold you. You must get—’

‘Frustrated,’ Claudia had supplied calmly for her before shaking her head and denying, ‘No, not really … I don’t have the time.’

And it had been true, and besides … besides … Her sex drive had always been inextricably linked to her emotions, driven by them almost; love for her was even more important, more driving, than lust.

And after Garth—well, after Garth it wasn’t just that she couldn’t ever imagine wanting another man, loving another man the way she had loved and wanted him, she had actively not wanted to become so emotionally involved with anyone else again.

The devastation upon discovering that Garth had been unfaithful to her had quite simply been so complete, so overwhelming, that she had never wanted to allow anyone else close enough to risk it again. Her love for Garth might have died, been destroyed, annihilated, by her discovery of his infidelity and the fact that, for so many years, she had been living a lie, a myth—believing in their marriage, in him—but her fear of the pain it had caused her had certainly not died.

She did have men friends, yes, and she went out on dates with them; but she had certainly never come anywhere near close to wanting to share anything more than friendship with them. Or at least she hadn’t until she met Luke Palliser.

Was that further confirmation of the fact that she had reached the treacherous choppy waters of middle age, the fact that she was physically attracted to a younger man?

As she left the drawing room and turned to go upstairs, Claudia paused by Tara’s picture of her parents. Neither of them was, of course, remotely recognisable if you discounted the colour of their hair—hers yellow, Garth’s black and straight.

Tara!

Claudia bit her lip as she felt the familiar surge of love thinking about Tara always brought flooding through her, but this time it wasn’t just love she felt. This time there was fear and dread, as well. And guilt, too. Oh, yes, there was guilt.