by Penny Jordan
He had been too open with her for her to be tempted to lie.
‘Yes, there have,’ she agreed honestly. ‘Although in my case… Well, Katie had her grandfather. He was a wonderful man, but very old-fashioned. After what happened with Katie’s father…’ She bit her lip, unable to go on, alarmed by how much she had already told him.
‘Yes?’ Silas prompted gently, watching her.
‘Er—well…’ She paused and thought frantically of something she could offer him to silence his questions, and then abruptly changed her mind. Why not simply tell him the truth? Once he realised how very far removed from his league she was in terms of experience, if he had been tempted to break the promise he had given her yesterday then he would surely change his mind.
‘Although he never said so, I think my father was concerned that…that history might repeat itself.’
When he frowned, obviously not understanding, she gritted her teeth and told him despairingly, ‘He accepted that what happened with Katie was…was an accident, but you see he was very old-fashioned, very…very shocked by what I had done, and I think he felt that…that it might happen again. That I might…’
‘That you might what?’
‘Have another child,’ Hazel told him huskily. ‘That I might make the same mistake I had made with Jimmy, and become pregnant without being married.’
There was a long pause and then Silas said incredulously, ‘But as I understand it you were barely sixteen when Katie was conceived, and her father hardly a year older. You were children, both of you, and it’s a credit to your maturity, to your spirit that you’ve coped so successfully with a situation like that.’
‘I had help. My father was wonderful. He supported us both financially. Gave us a home.’
‘And forced you to live like a nun?’ Silas asked her grimly.
Hazel chewed her lip defensively.
‘He thought he was doing the best thing for all of us. And I can see his point of view…’
And you never, never once, wanted to break out of the strait-jacket he locked you in? You never once wanted to—?’
‘To what?’ Hazel demanded harshly, her sensitivities bruised by the anger she could hear in his voice. ‘To have some sort of wild sexual fling? No. I never wanted to do that. I’d better go and get your breakfast,’ she added shortly, changing the subject. ‘I have to go shopping later this morning, once I’ve got this room sorted out. Will you be using a computer or a word processor?’
‘Yes. But you can leave me to sort all that out. I do know how to use a duster and a vacuum cleaner, you know.’
As she made to walk past him, it seemed as though he was going to reach out and stop her, but when she froze and stared at him he said simply, ‘There’s no need for you to put yourself out on my account, you know.’
‘No need at all,’ she agreed curtly. ‘Which is why I don’t intend to do so.’
She was angry with him and punishing him because of her own folly, because somehow or other he had drawn her out to such an extent that she had confided in him, telling him things she had never ever told anyone else.
She ought to be punishing herself and not him, she recognised as she headed for the kitchen. It wasn’t his fault that she seemed to find him so…so easy to talk to, so…so easy to confide in.
And what on earth he must think of her idiotic admission that she had lived a completely celibate life since Katie’s conception she had no idea. He probably pitied her, thinking she was virtually devoid of any kind of normal sex drive. He was probably thanking his lucky stars that he had found out the truth about her before it was too late. She had no doubt that he would most definitely keep his promise to her now.
So why, as she prepared another fresh jug of coffee, did she feel more like bursting into tears than being relieved?
CHAPTER SIX
‘GOOD heavens, you’ve been busy, haven’t you?’
Hazel gritted her teeth inwardly, and smiled mechanically as Sheila Simpson stared curiously at her loaded shopping trolley.
Of all the people for her to bump into in the supermarket, Sheila was the very last one she would have chosen. Sheila was the local gossip and busybody, an angular woman of forty-odd who ruled her own apparently perfect family and husband with a rod of iron, and who continually and loudly disparaged those who could not match her own exacting standards.
Hazel had always been aware that Sheila was deeply suspicious of her, both because of her single state and apparently because she considered that Hazel looked far too young to have a daughter of Katie’s age.
‘Expecting visitors, are you?’ she questioned now with false friendliness, her glance fixed on the contents of Hazel’s well-filled trolley.
‘Not exactly,’ Hazel told her coolly.
‘Oh, doing a bit of early shopping for Christmas, then, I expect,’ Sheila hazarded. ‘Of course you’ll have Katherine home, won’t you?’
It was one of Sheila’s many affectations that, as she piously informed everyone, she refused to shorten people’s names to some corrupt derivative of the original, and Hazel had never bothered to inform her that Katie had in fact been christened exactly that. Her full name was Katie Georgina, the Georgina being for Jimmy, whose second name had been George.
Without vouchsafing her a yes or a no, Hazel determinedly pushed her trolley past her. It was ridiculous that she should feel guilty for withholding the truth from Sheila, and even more ridiculous that she should feel uncomfortably aware of how avidly curious the other woman would have been had she told her the truth.
She was thirty-six years old, for heaven’s sake, and if she chose to invite a member of the opposite sex to lodge with her for a short space of time that was no one’s business other than her own.
Besides she could just imagine how Sheila would embellish and extend the truth, how she would serve it up to others, dressing it up with a sauce of sexual innuendo while virulently protesting that of course she knew there was nothing in it and that the relationship was totally innocent.
Hazel had heard Sheila in action before. She specialised in stirring up trouble.
But what did it matter if people did gossip about her? she asked herself later as she drove home. Her father was dead and could no longer be hurt by that sort of thing. Katie was far too modern and youthful in her outlook to do anything more than laugh her head off at the suggestion that her mother was involved in a sexual liaison with someone, and, as for her own feelings, she was of course concerned what her friends, her real friends, thought of her, but they knew her far too well to judge her on Sheila’s gossip, and besides she had been urged more than once by all of them to stop hiding herself away, to go out and enjoy herself, to, as one of them had very bluntly put it, ‘Go out and find yourself a man, and use what nature has so generously endowed you with before it’s too late.’
And after all, who knew? Perhaps they were right and she was wrong. Perhaps she had lived with her father for so long that she had unconsciously adopted his views as her own.
Several of her unmarried and divorced friends cheerfully and frankly admitted to brief affairs, and even in some cases to the odd one-night stand, and evidently felt no shame or embarrassment in doing so, and after all why should they? They were, much as she was, accountable only to themselves. Her lifestyle was an unusual one for a healthy woman of her age. Perhaps if she’d been older when Katie was conceived, perhaps if her experience of sex with Jimmy had been different, she might not have found it quite so easy to fall in with her father’s wishes, to suppress her own desires almost before they were born, to relentlessly control every impulse towards expressing her sexuality which she had experienced, so much so that it was now almost second nature, rather like being taught to sit up straight or hold your tummy in—it had become something she did without even having to think about doing it any longer.
Or at least she had. Perhaps in the years since her father’s death she had not kept such a careful guard on herself, because she had fooli
shly begun to believe that at her age she was past suffering the pangs of need and loneliness which had beset her in her twenties, or perhaps she had simply grown careless. She had no idea which of these weaknesses had been responsible for her reaction to Silas.
* * *
WHEN SHE GOT home, the Jaguar was no longer parked outside. She stared at the space where it had been, her heart thumping. Had Silas perhaps changed his mind and left, without telling her? What if he had gone? Wouldn’t that be for the best?
All the time she was walking up the path and unlocking the back door, she was telling herself that it would be a relief if he had gone—that it was the most sensible thing he could do, that she wouldn’t be in the least bit upset…and yet when she opened the kitchen door and saw the note he had left on the table, she reached for it with trembling hands, scanning it quickly while her mouth went dry and her stomach heaved.
‘Gone to Chester to see if I can borrow some research material from their library,’ the note read.
She pulled out a chair and sat down in it. She felt weak and oddly light-headed, and she told herself that what she was experiencing could not be relief. Of course it couldn’t be, and yet all the time she was unpacking and putting away her shopping, she was listening for the sound of his car, for his footsteps, for his voice.
When she had finished and he still hadn’t returned, she paced restlessly around the kitchen, unable to settle to anything.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ she muttered out loud to herself impatiently. ‘You’re a woman of thirty-six and you’re behaving like a girl of sixteen. Anyone would think you’d fallen in love with the man.’
She froze where she stood, suddenly shivering.
What a ridiculous notion. Of course she hadn’t fallen in love with him. She was far too old for that sort of thing. Far, far too sensible. Women of her age did not fall in love. After all, she barely knew Silas.
And yet already she had told him far more about herself than she had told some of her closest friends.
That knowledge was like touching the nerve in an aching tooth: highly painful and highly addictive, something to which her thoughts kept returning again and again no matter how much she tried to distract him.
‘You know what you’re doing, don’t you?’ she derided herself. ‘You’re virtually willing yourself to be in love with him. Stupid woman.’
She went into the study determined to banish such thoughts with some physical work, but when she had opened the door and walked inside the room she stood and blinked in amazement.
Every surface was clean and polished, the window sparkled, and the carpet was immaculate. All those items she had put to one side to be disposed of were neatly stacked in one corner of the room, a fire had been laid in the grate and the old brass coal bucket had been polished within an inch of its life.
All that the room now lacked was its curtains, and on the desk stood a modern computer screen and keyboard, neither of them somehow or other looking at all out of place with the heavy old-fashioned furniture.
Silas certainly hadn’t exaggerated when he’d said he was perfectly capable of wielding a vacuum cleaner and a duster, and yet for some reason, instead of feeling relieved that she no longer had to face the task of cleaning out the room, she felt faintly aggrieved. Resentful almost, as though in cleaning the room himself he had somehow in a subtle and non-verbal way been telling her that he had no need of her help, that he was entirely self-reliant, that there was no place for her in his life.
But she didn’t want a place in his life. She didn’t want to become involved in any way at all with a man who, while he might give her some brief passing sexual pleasure, could never satisfy her deeper and more important emotional needs, could never give her the companionship, the emotional stability, the love she had always denied to herself that she wanted, but which in actual fact…
Stop this right there, she warned herself shakily. Such thoughts could only lead in one direction. Such thoughts could only lead her into pain and the kind of heart-searching which would achieve nothing.
She was content with her life as it was. Well, she was reasonably content…as content as a woman of her age had any right to expect to be. When she looked around, how many of her friends, of the women she knew, were truly and happily fulfilled by their marriages in the way they had anticipated when they entered into them? Not many of them, and, while sometimes she envied them their husbands, more often than not she found herself listening to their complaints, their frustrations, and thinking that perhaps after all she was more fortunate than they.
The kind of relationship she had once dreamed so yearningly of was pure fiction, did not exist…could not exist. No single other human being could ever match one’s own emotional needs exactly and immediately, and only a fool thought that it was possible for them to do so.
But she did have friends who were happy, who were content, who cheerfully admitted that, while their marriages had matured into far different relationships from those they had initially envisaged, these relationships were good ones; their husbands were men whom they actually liked as well as loved, despite their differences and their disappointments.
She turned blindly towards the window. Was she really content to spend the rest of her life alone? Katie had her own life to live and she had no wish to chain her daughter to her even if that were possible.
So what alternatives were left to her? A steady, secure relationship with one of the men she already knew; there were two or three among her acquaintances who had made it clear that they would like more from her than mere friendship, and who were free and willing to commit themselves to her.
She moved restlessly around the room. The trouble was that, much as she liked each of these men, she did not desire them…did not want the kind of intimacy with them that came with marriage.
So what else was there? An affair… A series of affairs… No, that had never appealed to her. Although she listened with curiosity and sometimes disbelief to her more sophisticated friends’ descriptions of their own relationships, the more she heard, the more she herself felt repressed by her lack of knowledge, her own awareness that while she might in terms of years be a woman of maturity, in terms of experience she was as ignorant as the teenager she had been at sixteen.
No amount of listening to other people’s experiences could make up for the lack of one’s own. Any man who wanted to take her to bed would quite naturally assume that she had the knowledge and the skill to take full responsibility for her own pleasure and a good measure of his. Men, especially older men, her friends told her, were often selfish lovers, expecting, as one of her more frank friends had cheerfully told her, ‘That you’re going to do all the really hard work and they’re going to enjoy the results of it. Give me a younger man every time! They might not have the experience but they more than make up for that with their enthusiasm.’
Hazel did not know why but she did not feel inclined to become involved with a younger man. Perhaps she simply did not have the self-confidence.
No. What she wanted…
What she wanted was Silas.
The thought slid serpent-like into her mind, making her shiver and cross her arms repressively around her body, as though somehow by doing so she could subdue the ache inside her, the knowledge that she only had to think of Silas, to close her eyes and remember what it had felt like when he kissed her, and immediately she wanted him, ached for him.
This was not love. It was lust, she told herself defiantly, and probably the very best thing for her to do would be for her to go to bed with the man and get the whole thing out of her system.
Go to bed with him. She started to shiver, trembling inside with the force of what she was feeling, acknowledging the dangerous insidiousness of her own thoughts, at the same time as she tried to reassure herself that of course she would not want to do any such thing.
Casual sex was not for her. She was adamantly sure of that. And besides… Silas probably didn’t want her any more. If
her behaviour yesterday had not put him off her completely, then surely her idiotic confidences this morning, which had laid bare for him the paucity of her sexual history, must have done so?
Yes, she was safe enough from any subtle sexual pressure from Silas.
But was she safe from herself, she wondered, or was her self-control finally cracking up?
If so… She took a deep breath; if so then she would just have to keep as much distance between Silas and herself as possible, starting right now.
She might not need to do any work on the study, but there was still her father’s bedroom to turn out; the bed to be made up, the bathroom to be stocked with towels.
Silas could move in there tonight, where he would have the privacy of being virtually at the opposite end of the house from her, where he would have his own bathroom. Where she need not go into the house’s main bathroom and discover that the scent of his cologne still hung elusively on the air… Where she need not be tormented by erotic images of his body, nude and supple, and so very, very male.
Stop it, she urged herself as she headed for the stairs. For goodness’ sake stop it.
At half-past six, just when she had decided that Silas had taken her repudiation of him so much to heart that he was not going to return until after supper, she heard the sound of his car coming down the drive.
She hadn’t changed from the jeans and top she had been wearing earlier, and although she was wearing make-up it was no more than she would normally have worn. There was after all no reason why she should make any special effort to make herself look attractive for Silas. No reason at all, and yet before going downstairs she stared at herself critically in her bedroom mirror and decided depressingly that she was perfectly safe from Silas because no man with any sense of taste could possibly find anything remotely attractive in a five-foot-two female dressed in old jeans and a bulky sweatshirt, who wore her hair in a cloud of untidy curls. What she failed to see what was immediately obvious to others, and that was the clear naturalness of her skin, the youthful contours of her face and body, the soft silkiness of her abhorred curls, and the sexual appeal of her slender body clad in its oversized top and snug-fitting jeans.