by Helen Brooks
‘I’m sorry, Clay.’ It was a whisper. ‘I wasn’t trying to open old wounds.’
She watched him take a long, deep breath and then his voice came more or less evenly when he said, ‘I know that.’
They were silent for a moment, Clay turning from her so his face was in profile as he stared across the slumbering garden, and Robyn sitting in numb misery. Some small, buried part of her was saying, Aren’t you glad he’s suffered a little after what he put you through? Aren’t you pleased he hasn’t had it all his own way? And she answered the silent voice with all her heart as she realised there was no shred of satisfaction or gratification in her thinking. There was envy, jealousy, even hate, against this unknown woman who had so captured his heart as to make him look like he did now, and that was awful. She acknowledged her weakness even as she knew it was still there.
And then he began to talk, and suddenly Robyn realised she was hearing from the essence of the man. It was there in the bitter, clipped tone of his voice and the almost tangible anger. ‘My mother—’ He stopped abruptly. ‘Well, I’ve told you a little of what my mother was like,’ he continued almost immediately. ‘When Mitch and I were eleven she put my father through a particularly humiliating experience by having an affair with one of his close friends. My father worshipped the ground she walked on but this was one affair too many and he threw her out. She didn’t go quietly.’
He turned and smiled mirthlessly for a moment before turning to stare over the garden again. ‘She had never really bothered with Mitch and I but she knew how much my father loved his sons and so she fought him in the courts for us. It was an acrimonious time and because my father still loved her it made it doubly hard for him. The courts decided my father should have custody most of the time with my mother having us in the holidays and so on, but even before the divorce was through my father was giving in to her again. She decided one day she was going to whisk us over to England for an extended stay with her parents, but as we were about to board the plane I looked at my father and knew I wanted to stay with him.’
‘He was upset, your father?’ Robyn asked softly.
‘He was crying,’ Clay said flatly. ‘There was a scene at the airport and the end result was Mitch leaving with my mother and my staying with my father in the States. A week later there was an accident at the farm. Mitch had been driving a tractor in one of the fields—without permission of course—and it turned over on him. He was killed instantly.’
‘Oh, Clay.’ She was thinking about her own upbringing, the well of love that had been present in her home, and her voice was thick. What would she have done if anything had happened to Cass?
‘You would think my mother would have been grief-stricken, wouldn’t you?’ His hands were thrust deep in his pockets now, his profile hard and cold. ‘That’s what my father assumed, anyway, and he couldn’t wait to get over to her. She put on a good act, the grieving mother and wife, and the divorce was dropped and they got back together again, but she was playing him for a fool within weeks. She was an unnatural mother and the mistress of manipulation: cold, conscienceless and utterly selfish. When my father found out about her latest affair, she managed to turn the tables on him and intimate he was responsible for Mitch’s being in England, and therefore his death, by wanting a divorce in the first place. More amazingly she got him to believe it.’
He shook his head slowly as though it still filled him with incredulity. ‘It did something to him, the guilt, and whatever I said over the next few years it never went away. She used to tell him he was a failure as a husband and a father—’ He stopped abruptly, and she saw the broad male chest rise and fall with the force of his emotion.
Robyn was still trying to come to terms with the picture in her mind of a small, confused eleven-year-old boy who had lost his beloved twin brother, and who, instead of being comforted and supported by those nearest to him, had taken on the role of emotional support for his father whilst despising and loathing his mother.
‘I hated her.’ It was as though he had heard her thoughts. ‘If it wasn’t for my father’s youngest sister, Margo, I don’t know how I’d have got through those dark years. She’s a wit, Margo.’ He turned to look at Robyn suddenly. ‘You would like her. She’s sharp, funny, direct to the point of rudeness but with a heart of gold underneath. My mother couldn’t stand the sight of her—or me. She never forgave me for choosing my father over her.’
He shrugged as though dislodging a weight from his shoulders, and his voice was even and steady when he continued. ‘My father died when I was twenty-two, although I think the death blow was dealt by my mother when Mitch died. Three months later I met the girl I married: the daughter of one of my mother’s bridge friends. Damn it, I was such a fool.’
‘I don’t understand?’ Robyn was shocked by the savagery in the last words.
‘My mother manipulated the whole thing although I didn’t see it until much later,’ he ground out slowly. ‘She recognised a kindred spirit in Laura you see: someone as cold and calculating as herself. Laura could have been her blood daughter. And they liked each other—that should have told me something. Before Laura, my mother had tried to make my girlfriends’ lives hell.’
‘But didn’t you ever suspect Laura was different to how she appeared?’ Robyn asked quietly This was Clay Lincoln: he of the razor-sharp mind and ruthless discernment that was a byword in business circles. But then, she reminded herself silently, he had certainly got her all wrong that night out at the lake. He had thought she was like his mother. The thought hit her in the stomach with the force of a sledgehammer. And later, when they had first met again at Guy’s birthday party.
‘I tried to finish the engagement once before we got married.’ It was expressionless. ‘But it wasn’t because I thought Laura was anything other than what she portrayed: sweet, innocent, gentle, kind.’
Everything his mother hadn’t been and everything he was craving for, Robyn acknowledged.
‘She was devastated, threatened to kill herself and so on, and so…I went through with it, the marriage. I hadn’t realised then that the possibility of Laura committing suicide was as likely as a black-widow spider stinging itself to death. They reserve all their venom for their mate.’
‘Emotional blackmail, the oldest trick in the world,’ Robyn agreed softly.
‘However marriage revealed Laura was different to my mother in one respect,’ Clay continued cynically. ‘Whereas one was an alley cat, the other was totally frigid. And the ironic thing, the really funny thing, which must have given my mother a great deal of amusement, was that it was Laura’s profession that she wanted to keep herself pure until her wedding night that really hooked me.’
Because of how he had watched his mother behaving all his life. Yes, she could understand that, Robyn thought painfully, her heart aching for him.
‘The marriage didn’t work?’ she asked carefully.
‘Didn’t work?’ He smiled bitterly. ‘Oh, I tried to make it work for a time, too long a time. Margo realised I was near to a breakdown one day and got me to tell her the whole story; until then I’d kept it to myself. How do you tell anyone your wife expected to be paid for her favours with diamonds and mink coats, and that even then she’d make you feel you were raping her every time you tried to make love? Sex was a weapon of power to Laura but even when she could bring herself to use it it disgusted her. I disgusted her.’
‘She was sick, Clay.’ Her heart was thudding with the impact of what he had revealed and the knowledge, the terrifying knowledge, that she would never be able to see him as ruthless womaniser and cold man of the world again. And she needed to do that, desperately. It was her only protection against her heart.
‘Yes, she was sick,’ he agreed quietly. ‘But not in a vulnerable, susceptible way. She was a twin soul with my mother in that they were immune to self-doubt, impervious to anyone else’s feelings but their own. Unassailable and without conscience. I tell you, Robyn—’ he turned to look her full in the
face and she felt her breath constrict at the look in the silver eyes ‘—it’s a terrifying thing to live with someone like that, and I’ve managed it twice. I’ve seen what love and marriage and commitment can do to a good man like my father, and the only reason I didn’t end up crushed and broken like him was because I recognised very early on that I had never known the real Laura. The one I’d married had been a figment of my imagination—or perhaps I should say, hers.’
‘She…she died, didn’t she?’
He nodded, his profile showing no emotion. ‘We were in the middle of divorce proceedings and she’d moved out and gone to live—not with her own parents as one might have expected—but with my mother. They’d called in at my office after a lunch-time at the bridge club and informed me they were really going to take me to the cleaners. Boy, did they enjoy telling me what was in store.’ His eyes narrowed at the memory. ‘It was probably the last pleasure they had. The car went off the road at a nasty bend, I understand; my mother always drove too fast.’
She truly didn’t know what to say. This explained so much but it was so awful, so hard to take in, that she was speechless. She reached forward, touching his arm. ‘Some people have happy marriages, Clay. Your mother—’ should she say this about his mother, she thought suddenly before her heart said, Go on, say it, it’s the truth ‘—your mother was unnatural, like you said. Every generation has one or two people like that but most people want happy relationships with the person they love.’
‘And Laura?’ The question was very dry and cynical.
‘You were unlucky.’ She saw the dark eyebrows rise derisively and added quickly, ‘You said she was virtually chosen by your mother and presented in a nice gift-wrapped package your mother knew would appeal. Your mother orchestrated it all really.’
Although how a woman could behave like that to her own son was beyond belief. But then, through the ages, from Roman times and before, there were instances of mothers murdering offspring for position, manoeuvring sons and daughters and sacrificing them for gain or spite, toppling children from thrones and betraying one child in favour of another. Love could be the most powerful force for good in the universe but when it was corrupted…
‘So you believe in happy families and two point four children?’
His voice had been scathing and now her small chin lifted in defiance of the mockery. ‘When it works, when it’s good then it can be very, very good,’ she said quietly, ‘like with my own parents.’
‘And when it doesn’t work?’ he asked expressionlessly. ‘Who is there for the countless casualties, the children, then? Who mends the broken lives, Robyn? Society demands we put a nice clean mask on and get on with the task of living, you know that as well as I do. There are millions of people out there living in a hell of their own making, and the divorce statistics don’t even begin to tell the real number.’
‘You are like the old man who looked at the sky and saw the rain clouds.’ She didn’t have the words to fight what he was saying, besides which the cynicism, the pain, was too much to combat. ‘Next to them was a gloriously radiant rainbow, and when someone pointed that out to him do you know what he said?’
‘Surprise me.’
‘That is merely an arch of colours formed by reflection which will shortly disperse, leaving only the rain clouds.’
He eyed her silently for some moments, and Robyn was conscious of a sudden squawk and carrying-on in the privet hedge at the far side of the garden where a group of sparrows were squabbling as to who sat where, before all fell silent and the insects continued their background drone.
‘Old man.’ His tone was thoughtful. ‘Charming!’
‘I meant—’
‘I know what you meant.’ His eyes were pure silver in the mellow light, and sombre, his lips slightly pursed as though in reflection. And then his mouth unexpectedly softened. ‘Are you real, Robyn Brett?’ he murmured, pulling her towards him so that the smell and feel of him was all about her, teasing at her senses and making her head swim.
‘Real enough.’ She tried to make it light but instead her voice came out breathless.
‘Maybe, maybe not.’ He was holding her loosely within the circle of his arms, his hands round her waist and his face looking down into her upturned one. ‘For the first time in a long, long while I’m looking forward to being with someone, and I’m not so sure I like that at times.’ The comment was almost bewildered and at another time, with someone else, might have been funny. But not now, not with Clay.
Robyn was aware her heart had soared at the reluctant confession which again was a warning in itself, and an odd panicky yet thrilling, excitement had her looking at him wide-eyed, her pupils dilated. His eyes looked back at her, crystal-bright under their thick black lashes and his hard, handsome face dark.
He didn’t want to start caring about her. Her heart was pounding much too fast and she wanted to take a long, deep breath to draw air into her lungs but she didn’t dare. Those piercing eyes saw far too much at the best of times.
And she understood the playboy façade now. The two women who should have loved him most in his life—his mother and his wife—had been the very ones to betray him. The first wrecking his childhood and youth, taking his twin brother from him and slowly torturing his father, and the second rejecting and deceiving him, entrapping him in a loveless marriage which had threatened to destroy his mental health. How could he ever open up his eyes to the beauty of the rainbow after all that?
She took hold of her racing thoughts, forcing her voice into the lightness she had tried for earlier as she said quietly, ‘It’s only you who can decide who you want to be with and how you see your life mapping out, Clay. I’m not going to twist your arm one way or the other.’
‘I’d worked that out for myself,’ he said with the touch of dryness which was habitual with him. ‘Perhaps that’s why I’ve told you more about my past than I’m comfortable with. They say confession is good for the soul but I find the concept of wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve a particularly repugnant one.’
‘I’d worked that out for myself.’ She parried his earlier words with a smile, and was rewarded by a low chuckle. He pulled her into him, kissing her very thoroughly before raising his head again and looking down into her flushed face.
‘How much longer are you going to keep up this ridiculous charade?’ he drawled easily.
‘Charade?’ The change from the bitter, angry and hurt individual to the one who was faintly bewildered by the need to be with her had been pretty hard to take, but now this third person—the normal Clay, the Clay who was totally sure of himself and everyone else—hit her on the raw. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she prevaricated to give herself time to think.
‘You said you wanted time to get to know me,’ he reminded her offhandedly, one hand stroking down her hot face and tracing the outline of her mouth, swollen and tingling from his kisses, before his fingers continued to caress her throat. And then his hand moved in a light, tantalising way over her swollen breasts, which ached from the pressure of being held next to his hard male chest, and she had to bite back a low moan of desire as his fingers lingered on one hard peak. ‘So, what else do you want to know?’ he queried softly.
Now this was pure going-for-the-jugular style, Clay Lincoln. Master strategist and never one to miss an opportunity, Robyn thought with a spurt of healthy anger. She didn’t think for a minute he had purposefully revealed all he had about his background with a premeditated idea of using her sympathy to get her into his bed; in fact she suspected he had annoyed himself with just what he had said, but that taken as read he still had one ultimate goal in mind—an affair. With everything his own way and on his terms. He was amazing!
The lingering effects of his lovemaking and the tender ache in her heart brought about by his revelations about his past took a nose dive. He was still playing games and working to a formula, she acknowledged bitterly.
‘Why do I feel the temperature has suddenly dropped t
en degrees?’ he drawled silkily.
‘Why do I feel I’m being manipulated?’ Robyn countered with a sweetness that didn’t hide the acid underneath.
‘It was worth a try.’ He was totally unrepentant, and Robyn went along with the overt mockery to diffuse the overwhelmingly fierce intimacy that always was a breath away when they were alone together.
Over the last weeks she had grown closer to him, and he to her, and they both knew it. She also knew Clay liked that even less than he liked the thought of looking forward to being with her. This was not what he had expected a couple of months ago when he had first decided to renew his old acquaintance with Guy’s little sister-in-law, she acknowledged painfully. He’d had her labelled as one of the very cosmopolitan, worldly career women he usually went for. But she hadn’t played ball. She still didn’t intend to play ball. So…
How long before he cut his losses and moved on?
Mrs Jones called them into the house for their meal in the next moment but, even as they walked back through the lazy evening hand in hand, Robyn was forcing herself to recognise this could only end one way. She mustn’t hope for anything else.
As usual the meal was wonderful, and Robyn grimaced ruefully after she finished the last of Mrs Jones’s rich chocolate-fudge cake topped by whipped cream and flakes of dark chocolate. ‘I’m putting on weight, this has got to stop,’ she said regretfully. ‘But it’s so tempting when it’s placed in front of you like this.’
‘Quite.’
She looked up and his eyes were smiling, laughing into hers, and she knew he wasn’t talking about the dessert. She wrinkled her small nose at him, smiling herself as she said, ‘I must phone Cass after we’ve finished coffee, if that’s all right? Guy has had to pop across to France with his job and I promised him I would check Cass is all right each night until he’s back. He’ll only be gone three days but you’d think he was disappearing on an expedition up the Nile the way he worried about her. She’s got weeks to go yet but she’s been having the odd niggling pain for the last few days, which the midwife assures her is perfectly normal.’