by Penny Jordan
‘I pictured you comfortably ensconced in your home, surrounded by your family and friends…’
‘You’re talking about me as though I’m closer to fifty-odd than thirty-four,’ Philippa protested indignantly, her expression changing and becoming very sad as she added quietly, ‘You’re drawing a picture of a woman like my mother, Blake… not me…’
‘Yes. I know,’ he agreed. ‘But don’t you see… if I hadn’t done that I couldn’t have come back? It was safer to imagine you like that, Pip, than to risk visualising the truth… safer for me and safer for you as well. After all, what right did I have to come back and disrupt your whole life? I guessed from what Michael told me how much I must have hurt you but it was too late then to do anything about it. You were married, you had the boys, and Michael had stressed to me how loyal you were to Andrew…’
‘I never loved Andrew,’ she told him quietly. ‘I married him because he was my escape route and he married me because I was my father’s daughter; both of us were too cowardly, too afraid to reach out for what we really wanted from life; too insecure in one way or another to believe that we could stand alone and be valued for what we were. I’ve learned that since Andrew’s death, and I’ve learned as well that it’s much easier to forgive another’s weakness than it is your own.
‘It doesn’t feel very good looking back and seeing myself as others do…’ She heard the small sound of denial Blake made and a faint smile touched her mouth. ‘I’ve begun to learn to accept Andrew’s weaknesses, so hopefully it shouldn’t be too long before I can accept and forgive my own, and in truth, compared with some marriages, ours wasn’t so bad. Andrew was never abusive or unkind. His work, worldly success—they were what mattered most to him; sexually…’ She gave a small, revealing shrug. ‘When he first died I felt so angry with him because of what he had done, the way he had locked me out of his life and left me so unprepared for living on my own, for coping with the mess he had left behind; but then I started to see that I had helped him to lock me out, even encouraged him in some ways.
‘I didn’t want our marriage to be any different because I didn’t want that kind of intimacy with Andrew. Quite what that makes me…’
‘It makes you human, and honest,’ Blake told her huskily, ‘and it makes me glad.’
When he saw the questioning look she was giving him he told her, ‘It makes it easier for me to deal with my jealousy of him and of the years he had with you knowing that you didn’t really love him, knowing that when you and I marry we’ll be making a completely fresh start; that he won’t be a ghost in our lives or our bed.
‘With a bit of luck we should be able to arrange things so that we can get married before Christmas. I don’t know how you feel about it, but a holiday away somewhere with the kids over the Christmas break rather than a honeymoon might…’
‘I can’t marry you, Blake.’
‘What?’
The look in his eyes made her reach out towards him, gripping his hands tightly in her own. Had she ever really thought this man unemotional, cold, hard? How blind… how juvenile… how self-obsessed she had been!
‘I don’t mean not ever… I just mean not yet.’
‘Not yet? But you said you loved me. If you’re not sure about how you feel…’
‘I am sure. It isn’t anything to do with how I feel about you.’ She touched his face lightly. ‘There’s nothing I want more than to marry you, Blake, to commit my life to you and to know that you’ve committed yours to me, but if I marry you now, with the company’s bankruptcy and my own financial problems still hanging over me, unresolved…’
‘You’re afraid of what people might say… that they’d think you married me for my money?’ he asked her roughly.
‘No, of course not. It isn’t anything to do with what other people might think, it’s us, Blake. You and me… I want us to be equals in our relationship, not me some pathetic Cinderella needing to be rescued from the mess she’s made of her life by you, her prince. I want to participate actively in our future together, not sit back passively and let you take all my problems off my shoulders. I… please try to understand.’ Her voice shook slightly, betraying the depth and intensity of her emotions. ‘I need to prove to myself that I have learned something from this whole mess, that I have grown… that I have coped. I want to be for you the woman that you deserve,’ she told him softly, ‘for you and for myself.’
Blake groaned. ‘You already are that woman… More woman than I ever thought I would be lucky enough to find.’
‘To marry you now would be a betrayal not just of my love for you but of myself as well. I don’t want to come to you burdened by the detritus from my and Andrew’s marriage, either emotionally or financially,’ Philippa told him firmly, but she couldn’t quite keep the small tremor out of her voice. It told him not just how important what she was saying was, but how important he was as well.
‘I need to be able to respect myself, and I still have to earn that respect,’ she told him.
‘The way we feel about one another is bound to show,’ Blake pointed out. ‘Others will see it and you know what they’re going to say, don’t you?’
‘That you’re sleeping with the hired help?’ Philippa hazarded. She gave a small shrug. ‘Other people’s words and opinions can’t hurt me any more, Blake, but if you’re concerned that that kind of gossip might affect your career…’
He shook his head. ‘No. But your family won’t like it. Your parents, your brother Robert…’
‘Tough. Their likes and dislikes are their own problem, not mine,’ Philippa told him squarely. ‘When you and I marry, become partners, I want us to become equal partners; I want to show my sons and Anya, by our example, all the good ways in which a man and a woman can relate to one another. I want Anya to grow up with the self-respect and the self-confidence that I never had. I want her not just to believe it but to accept without question that a woman has the right sometimes to be selfish about her own needs, to put herself first, and that those who genuinely love her will accept her as she is; that in a good relationship both partners make sacrifices for one another sometimes and, equally, both partners put themselves first sometimes. I want my sons to grow up with a respect and admiration for my sex… I want our children, if we should have any…’
She stopped when she saw his face…
‘What is it—don’t you want children?’ she asked him hesitantly.
‘Not want them… your children… our children…? Oh, my God, Philippa…’
As he reached for her and then withdrew she leaned forward and told him huskily, ‘As a teenager I wasted so many hours fantasising about what it would be like if you and I were lovers. I don’t want to waste any more hours fantasising, Blake. I want to know now…’
After he had finished kissing her, he warned her ruefully, ‘I’m only a man, you know… Those teenage fantasies… I’m not sure I’m going to be able to live up to them…’
The uncertainty, the vulnerability, the love in his voice made her heart and her body ache with answering emotion. How well she knew what it was like to feel that vulnerability.
She cupped his face in her hands and looked up into his eyes.
‘I am,’ she told him softly, and suddenly, gloriously, unequivocally and irrevocably, she knew she was.
* * *
‘Mmm—what time is it?’ Sleepily Blake lifted his arm from around Philippa’s waist to look at his watch. ‘I suppose I’d better make a move and get back to my own bed before the children wake up and find me here with you.’
‘Mmm,’ Philippa acknowledged, but instead of moving away from him she curled herself more securely round him, her mouth lifting in a smile he couldn’t see as he gave a soft groan and his hand cupped and stroked her breast.
It felt so right being here with him like this, so natural. Last night, after they had made love, she had told him about Joel, banishing the look she had seen in his eyes with a tiny shake of her head.
‘I th
ought I might fall in love with him, but in reality both of us were looking for someone to displace our individual pain.’ Her face had clouded a little. ‘I hope he and his wife resolve their problems.’
She had enjoyed making love with Joel, discovering her sexuality, feeling desired and wanted, but from the first moment that Blake touched her she had known she need have no fear that Joel’s ghost would ever come between them in any sexual sense.
It wasn’t a matter of degree of experience or expertise, it was much simpler than that—and much, much more complex as well.
It was the difference between knowing that Joel was not her man and that Blake was. A ‘coming home’ that both heightened her sexuality and her responsiveness to him and deepened it, so that the emotional rapport between them was as intense as the sexual one.
‘Don’t go yet,’ she whispered to Blake as she removed his hand from her breast and slowly started to lick and then suck his fingers.
It was surprising how sexually inventive and instinctively knowing you could be once you had the confidence of being certain you were wanted, desired… loved… your feelings and needs reciprocated.
‘You do understand why I can’t marry you yet, don’t you?’ she asked Blake gravely just before he pulled on his clothes to go to his own room.
‘I understand, yes,’ he agreed. ‘But that still doesn’t stop me from wishing you’d change your mind.’
‘No,’ Philippa told him firmly.
‘No,’ he agreed ruefully, ‘but you can’t blame me for trying, especially not now.’
From her bed Philippa smiled at him.
‘I love you,’ she told him.
In the bedroom next to her, Anya coughed sleepily. ‘We aren’t going to be able to keep this a secret for long, you know,’ Blake warned her.
‘I don’t want to,’ Philippa told him, and it was only when she saw the way he looked at her that she realised how afraid he had actually been, despite her reassurance, that a part of her was holding back from committing herself to him.
As she held out her arms to him and he came into them he told her thickly, ‘I love you too much to bear the thought of losing you now, but…’
‘You won’t lose me,’ she promised him.
When he held her face in his hands and pushed her hair back off her face, cradling her jaw as he bent to kiss her, she was filled with a sense of strength and purpose, an awareness of being in control of her own destiny; of knowing that Blake loved and accepted her as she was, unconditionally and without any reservation.
As she loved him.
The future they would all share was there waiting for them, but to reach out greedily for it, to act in panic rather than in the sure knowledge that their love would endure, would be a step backwards in time for her, back to the old insecurity and lack of self-esteem she was only just beginning to recognise and push aside.
Their love would be all the better, all the stronger, all the more mature if she listened to what her intelligence was telling her as well as her heart—and so would she.
Knowing that Blake understood and accepted how she felt made her feel, not insecure that because he wasn’t trying to push her into an immediate marriage he didn’t love her enough, as the old Philippa would have felt, but aware instead of just how deep his love actually was.
EPILOGUE
Three years later
‘RIGHT—have we got everyone …?’
Philippa smiled as she heard the chorus of response to Blake’s question.
‘I’ll take Rachel, shall I?’ Anya offered, softly removing one of the sleeping babies from the rear of the car before calling over her shoulder, ‘Come on, Rory—you take Simon.’
Over their heads she and Blake exchanged glances. Life wasn’t always as harmonious as this, especially when the twins were awake.
They would be one in two months’ time, walking and creating even more havoc. A rueful smile curled her mouth.
She had been in the second year of her Open University course when she had discovered she was pregnant. At first she hadn’t been sure how Blake would react. After a year of marriage had resulted in her failure to conceive they had agreed that enough was enough; they had three children, after all. Blake was heavily involved in helping to raise finance for the new children’s ward they were hoping to open, Anya and the boys were already teenagers, and they shared a happy and fulfilling life together.
She had started doing part-time voluntary work at the hospital in the children’s ward and concentrating on her studies.
On her birthday they had celebrated with a small family party; and, as she had told Blake lovingly in bed later that night, she felt she had a lot to celebrate.
Four days later, when she woke up in the morning, she had felt oddly queasy.
Idiotically, she had put it down to delayed stress after the effects of the difficult months before she and Blake had married, when she had struggled to sort out the financial mess Andrew had left behind him.
When the factory had ultimately been sold at a knockdown price nowhere near its real value, she hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry. After the house had been sold the bank had decided to write off what remained of its losses. Andrew’s personal debts she had managed to pay off herself … after a fashion. Without the salary Blake had insisted on paying her before they married she wouldn’t have stood a chance of doing so.
She had earned the money, he’d insisted, adding that if she didn’t take it he would begin to believe that she did not want to marry him after all.
‘Stress?’ Susie had laughed when she’d told her how ill she’d felt. ‘Sounds more like you’re pregnant to me …’
Blake had come home to find her sitting in the kitchen staring into space.
‘What’s wrong?’ he’d asked her.
‘I’m not sure,’ she had told him. ‘Blake … do you still want children …?’
He had sighed, taking hold of her and telling her softly, ‘I thought we’d agreed that what we’ve got is more than enough. I may not have fathered the boys or Anya but to me they are my children, Pip.’
‘So you don’t want any more children?’ she had asked him intensely, plucking at his jacket with her fingertips.
‘I have what I want,’ he had told her gently. ‘All that I want … Pip, what is it?’ he’d asked when he’d seen that she was crying.
‘Oh, Blake, Susie thinks I could be pregnant, but you don’t want me to be,’ she had wailed against his chest.
Later they had agreed that her reaction had probably been caused by her burgeoning hormones. There was certainly no other reason for her to have acted so ridiculously, she had acknowledged.
Blake had been thrilled by her news, doubly so when they learned she could be carrying twins.
‘It will mean you putting your career plans on hold,’ he had warned her, watching her.
‘Mmm,’ she had agreed, laughing. ‘Looks as if I never was destined to get that degree.’
* * *
‘I’ll push them,’ Anya told Rory firmly.
‘Are you sure we’re not going to spoil your image, turning up en masse like this?’ Philippa teased Blake. The hospital car park was already almost full.
It had been a unanimous decision by the senior staff that this opening of the combined children’s surgical and pys-chiatric ward they had all campaigned so hard for should be attended, not by a mass of local dignitaries, but by those who had done the most to make the ward’s opening possible: the staff and their families and those who had done the most to raise the money for it.
The ward was in many ways Blake’s baby, the idea born originally out of the success of the Fast Response Accident Unit where they had combined surgical and counselling procedures in an innovative, ground-breaking venture.
Semi-reluctantly the authorities had given in to Blake’s badgering for a similar unit for children, with the proviso that they must raise half the money themselves.
On Monday the ward would open official
ly to its first patients, but today it was empty of beds, and was being used to celebrate the fact that against all the odds they had managed to bring it into existence.
It was worth all those cold, wet Saturdays spent in town with her collecting tin, all those car boot sales, all those fund-raising lunches and other events to see what their efforts had achieved.
The walls of the ward had been painted with bright murals, their design a gift from a talented local artist. The work itself had been done by groups of local children of varying ages, all of whom would be here this afternoon proudly showing their families their handiwork.
The walls of Blake’s consulting-room were painted a warm, soft yellow. Philippa’s smile faded temporarily as she reflected on the pain that would fill this room as his young patients relived their various traumas.
There was a gymnasium filled with equipment donated by local firms, and—Richard Humphries’ pride and joy—a swimming-pool to help children suffering from paralysis and other forms of limb weakness, the entire cost of which had been donated by one single person.
Philippa glanced over her shoulder. Anya was talking to one of her friends, at the same time fiddling importantly with the twins’ clothes and safety harnesses while the friend watched slightly enviously. Encouragingly, the twins’ birth had seemed to give Anya the confidence she had previously lacked, bringing her out of the shell she sometimes retreated into.
Philippa looked round for Blake to check that the boys were with him. It was perhaps natural that now that they were growing up that they should attach themselves more to Blake than they did to her.
She had wondered at one time if Blake ever felt constricted or that his skills were not being put to their best use here in a small country hospital, but when she had tentatively suggested it to him he had shaken his head.
‘Moving to a larger hospital would ultimately mean teaching instead of practising, and that isn’t what I want. My career is important to me, but you and the children and the life we have built together here are far more important …’