by Penny Jordan
‘Then stop being so damned preoccupied by a few centimetres of flesh! You’ve still got your life and all your faculties; there are millions upon millions of people far worse off than you. You’re a very attractive woman, as I’m sure you know, but you’re also a coward.’
Amber flinched, but Joel ignored the defensive gesture, his voice grim as he continued relentlessly, ‘If you weren’t you’d put down that chip you’re carrying—are you sure the weight of it isn’t what’s making you limp, Amber? It’s fatally easy to get into the habit of feeling sorry for oneself—I know I’ve been there, and the hardest thing I’ve ever done is to face up to the fact that life doesn’t pull any punches, and how you take them is all down to you—you can either be a loser or a winner.’ His hand rested warmly against her leg, covering the damaged muscle, and for a moment it seemed to Amber almost as though the warmth of his flesh were affecting some miraculous healing process restoring strength to the fragile limb.
‘Remember,’ Joel instructed her softly, ‘the world treats you the way you tell it you want to be treated.’
Amber opened her mouth to protest, to tell him that she’d never wanted Rob to reject her, then she closed it again as she remembered her own hesitancy with Rob; her shame of her maimed limb.
CHAPTER FIVE
AS the days slipped by into weeks and a new pattern of living was established, much to her own amazement Amber realised that she was no longer as completely obsessed by the determination to make Rob bitterly regret abandoning her as she had been when she first accepted Joel’s proposal. In fact whole days at a time went by without her even thinking about them, and by some subtle magic she began to notice that when she did indulge in the daydream which she had clung to so strongly during the early days of Rob’s desertion; it was Joel’s face she saw admiring her new made-whole-again body, and not Rob’s. That was because Joel had become so familiar to her, she rationalised to herself, but mere familiarity did not account for the sudden increase in her pulse rate when she heard his car in the drive, or the sense of completion his presence brought whenever he walked into a room.
Now, when he was away on business as he was at the moment, the house seemed empty; the double bed they shared cold and lonely even though he had stuck rigidly to his word and made no move to touch her. He was always up and dressed long before she woke in the morning and always came to bed after her, and yet still Amber missed the warm bulk of his body next to hers, the fresh, spicy smell of his cologne, and the male presence.
Every afternoon she and Paul went for a walk, wet or fine, and she knew that Paul’s limp was much less noticeable. A specialist had come up from London the previous week to examine the small boy, and had pronounced himself well pleased with his progress. Amber had deliberately worn jeans and kept still on the settee for the duration of his visit, determined not to draw attention to her own injury. Paul was progressing so well she didn’t want that progress impeded by the knowledge that sometimes people did not get properly better.
A close relationship had developed between them. He called her by her first name, which Amber encouraged. There was no point in inciting him to call her ‘Mother’ when she knew she was not to be a permanent feature in his life. He had put on weight and seemed less solemn than the boy she had first met. She had been delighted to discover that he had an impish sense of humour, although the resemblance to his father when he did smile was devastating.
He sometimes mentioned his mother and the divorce, and Amber encouraged him without asking too many questions, a little dismayed by his stoic acceptance of the fact that his mother had deserted him.
‘I didn’t like her much anyway,’ he shocked her by saying one afternoon as they walked through the woods by the lake. ‘And she didn’t like me.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you’re wrong,’ Amber demurred. ‘It’s just that different people have different ways of showing their love.’
‘Is that why you and Daddy aren’t always kissing?’ Paul stunned her by asking. ‘On television when people have just got married they’re always hugging and kissing.’
‘Television is different,’ Amber told him firmly, glad that Joel wasn’t there to overhear and glance at her with those sardonic grey eyes. He had warned her more than once that on occasions she seemed less than loverlike, but she found it hard to naturally adopt the intimacy he suggested—and in some ways resented the fact that he found it so easy. But then he was far more experienced in such things than she; he, after all, had been married; and Teri had not been the first woman in his life, she was sure. Although by no means a flirt, he emanated a subtle sexual magnetism that suggested to her that women had always found him attractive and always would. But then, of course, he was a very attractive man.
She stopped walking and stared blindly ahead of her. Surely she didn’t find him attractive? Not knowing how he despised her?
Impossible, she assured herself, and yet there had been that odd feeling the first night of their marriage, when she had lain tense at his side and he had turned his back on her.
‘Hello there!’
She swung round suddenly at the sound of the cheerful male voice, and found herself almost face to face with a pleasant-looking young man somewhere in his mid-twenties, his eyes so frankly appreciative as he skimmed the fragile contours of her face, and the dark gold tangle of her hair, that she couldn’t help returning his smile.
Before she could speak, Paul materialised from out of the undergrowth, eyeing the intruder with a suspicion that almost made Amber want to laugh.
‘I’m Tom Forbes,’ the young man introduced himself. ‘Currently investigating this part of the world with a view to bringing forty children up here later in the year. I’m a schoolteacher,’ he added with a grin. ‘I work in Liverpool, and this year we’ve managed to raise enough to bring some of the kids away for a break—camping, you know the sort of thing. Now I’m looking for an understanding farmer who’ll be willing to let us use his field at a peppercorn rent. My landlady at the village pub suggested a Mr Digby who farms High Tor.’
‘High Tor is the across the other side of the lake,’ Paul told him warily. ‘This side belongs to us.’
‘Does it now? Am I to take it that I’m trespassing?’
Tom knelt down, his face on a level with Paul’s, his expression serious enough to make the boy’s wariness relax a little.
‘I expect it will be all right,’ Paul told him large-mindedly.
Amber glanced up, grimacing as she felt the first large splashes of raindrops. The month had been a wet and windy one, and she was anxious to make sure that Paul did not catch a cold.
‘I think we’d better go,’ she told the little boy.
‘Do you live far from here?’ Tom asked them, and when Amber explained that the house was only half a mile away, but hidden by the trees, he suggested walking back with them as it was on his way.
He chatted as they walked, making a point of including Paul in his conversation. Amber could tell he was used to children, and suspected that he had a rare gift for imparting knowledge, as she watched him draw Paul aside as they reached the main road to point out the cloud formation racing across the sky towards the Lakeland peaks.
‘It’s those hills that make it rain so much up here,’ he explained to Paul, ‘because they’re so high.’
‘High enough to make holes in the clouds, and then it rains,’ Paul agreed seriously. Over his head Amber and Tom exchanged a smile. Tom bent down, ruffling Paul’s hair, the same admiring glint Amber had noticed before back in his eyes as they rested on her face. Strangely enough she felt no awkwardness or selfconsciousness with him, and made no attempt to hide her limp. She felt completely at ease with him, laughing as he teased both her and Paul as they walked homeward.
‘You don’t look like brother and sister,’ he hinted as they reached the gates.
‘We aren’t,’ Paul informed him scornfully before she could speak. ‘Amber is married to my daddy.’
‘Lucky Dad
dy,’ Tom remarked softly, delighting in the faint colour tinging Amber’s face.
‘Would you like to come in and have a cup of tea with us?’ Amber invited, conscious of the dropping temperature and the black menacing clouds piling up overhead. Tom was casually dressed in jeans, walking shoes and a thick jumper, which wouldn’t provide him with any protection at all if the clouds released their promised burden.
His frank, ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ made her laugh, and she was still laughing as the three of them walked into the kitchen just as Mrs Downs was removing a tray of scones from the oven, the warm baking smell intoxicatingly mouthwatering as they came in from the fresh air.
‘This is Tom,’ Paul told the housekeeper importantly. ‘He’s looking for somewhere to bring his children.’
‘All forty of them,’ Tom agreed, eyes twinkling.
‘Tom is a schoolteacher looking for a site to bring some children to on a camping holiday,’ Amber explained. ‘It looks as though the heavens are about to open, so, as he was kind enough to escort us home, I thought the least I could do was invite him back to share your scones.’
Half an hour later the four of them were still sitting round the large wooden kitchen table, chatting away.
‘Time I wasn’t here,’ Mrs Downs pronounced, getting up.
‘If you’re walking in the direction of the village I’ll go with you,’ Tom offered.
They left together, Tom eventually accepting a lift in Mrs Downs’ car, having promised to return the following day to inspect Paul’s train set which was up in his bedroom.
The phone rang while Amber was helping Paul to get ready for bed. Instructing him to finish his supper, she went to answer it, and a sudden thrill coursed through her as she recognised Joel’s voice on the other end of the line.
He was calling from Brussels where he had gone on business, and he sounded so curt that Amber wasn’t tempted to prolong the conversation, until he commented, ‘You sound cheerful, what have you been doing? Drinking the sherry?’
‘Nothing,’ she told him lightly. ‘When are you coming home?’ She could have bitten her tongue out the moment the words were uttered. What a fool she was! Her face burned, and she was glad of the miles separating them, preventing him from seeing her humiliation.
His malice-spiked, ‘I don’t realise you cared,’ reinforced her own opinion that it had been a silly thing to say, and as a defensive measure she fell back on a face-saving lie that her interest had been purely domestic; unless she knew when he was coming home she wouldn’t be able to make the necessary domestic arrangements.
It was a weak excuse, she knew, and she waited tensely in the silence that followed, not really able to rationalise why it was so important that Joel didn’t think her interest had been personal.
‘Don’t worry,’ he drawled at last, ‘I won’t embarrass you by turning up at the wrong moment, if that’s what’s worrying you.’
He had rung off before she had the opportunity to answer, but it wasn’t until later, when Paul was asleep, that she had the opportunity to consider properly why she had felt it so necessary to deny that her interest in his return was in any way personal. Why had she felt such an upsurge of panic? Could it be because she knew that her interest in Joel’s whereabouts was personal? That she actually wanted him to return, for them to be a complete family unit, for him to stop sleeping with his back to her and… She pressed her hands to her ears, getting up and pacing the drawing-room hurriedly. Of course not. Why should she?
Why? Because she was falling in love with him!
No! She breathed the words aloud, filled with fresh panic, longing with every part of her mind and body to repudiate the admission. But once admitted the truth would not simply go away.
Several more days passed. Tom became a regular visitor. Paul liked him and he was endlessly patient with the small boy. He was also a keen naturalist and had promised to show Paul a badger’s sett he had discovered.
Although they included her in their walks and conversations Amber was experiencing the curious sensation of standing outside herself observing and watching. She learned that Joel had been right; she had been hugging her resentment and bitterness to her, refusing to relinquish the burden of her hatred of Rob. Now, suddenly, Rob no longer mattered; even her leg and its scars were not as important as they had been. Now when she longed to be whole again it was because she wanted Joel to see her as she really could be, and yet all the time her mind acknowledged that Joel was not a man to be impressed simply by a pretty face, but neither would he accept imperfection in any way; whether physical or mental, Amber warned herself. Teri had disillusioned him about her sex; she had never seen a photograph of Teri, but she assumed the other woman to have been extremely beautiful; and Joel must have loved her once—very much, to judge by his present-day cynicism.
How could she had been stupid enough to fall in love with him?
It was a question she could not answer.
Joel rang again, one afternoon when Amber was out with Paul and Tom. When they got back Mrs Downs told her that he had been further delayed. He was been away nearly two weeks, but according to Mrs Downs there was nothing unusual in the length of his absence. The highly technical computer technology his firm supplied sometimes developed teething troubles that could be time-consuming in being sorted out.
Tom’s time in the Lake District was coming to an end. On his last day he suggested that Amber allow him to take her out to dinner, as a ‘thank you’ for her hospitality to him. He was in high spirits, having secured the permission of one of the farmers to camp in one of his low meadow fields during the summer, and Amber was sorry to have to disappoint him.
‘Oh, go on, miss—I mean madam,’ Mrs Downs protested. ‘It will do you good, and I’ll stay here with Paul, if you like.’
Reluctantly Amber allowed herself to be persuaded, even Paul insisting that she must go out and have dinner with Tom.
Tom hired a car especially for the occasion and arrived promptly at seven-thirty, wearing a suit for the first time during their brief acquaintance, his fair hair tamed and plastered damply to his skull. He didn’t have a tithe of Joel’s sensual attraction, but Amber felt a hundred times more at ease in his company. Because she wasn’t emotionally involved with him.
Tom had booked a table for them at a local coaching inn which had retained much of its eighteenth-century air along with its dark oak beams and open log fire.
The food was simple but deliciously cooked. Tom insisted on ordering a full bottle of wine just for the two of them, and somehow Amber found herself starting to float away on a relaxed cloud as Tom refilled her glass and she relaxed under the combined mellowing influence of the wine and the warmth of the logs burning in the open grate.
It was just after eleven when they left. The drive back to the house was accomplished in a comfortable silence that made Amber feel like a lazy kitten.
Tom brought the car to a halt outside the front door, his eyes sad as she opened the door.
‘I can’t help wishing we’d met before you became Paul’s stepmother, adorable Amber,’ he said softly. ‘You’re so beautiful, with those huge gold eyes. Still, if wishes were horses… What would you wish for if you had one wish, Amber?’ he asked her.
She paused. What would she wish for? Joel’s love! The knowledge, shocked her. What had happened to her? For six long lonely months she had yearned feverishly night and day for one thing, and one thing only—to be made whole again, and yet here she was, when confronted with one wish, wanting only Joel.
As though sensing that her thoughts were elsewhere, Tom touched her arm awkwardly.
‘I’ll always remember you, Amber.’ He bent his head and she knew that he was going to kiss her, but she didn’t avoid the kiss, keeping numbly still as his lips burned feverishly against hers for a second.
The sudden harsh glare of headlights imprisoned them in their beam, trapping them like terrified rabbits.
Amber wrenched herself free, half turni
ng in her seat in time to see Joel’s tall figure unfolding itself from a taxi.
‘What’s going on?’ Tom demanded worriedly.
‘Er… nothing… It’s Joel, my husband,’ Amber explained quickly. ‘Please go, Tom.’
He hesitated, frowning. ‘You’re frightened of him?’
‘No, no, of course not,’ Amber lied. ‘I just don’t want there to be any awkwardness. Please just go.’
She slipped out of the car without giving him the opportunity to argue further. His car left the house behind Joel’s taxi, and Amber’s slight frame was swallowed up by the darkness.
‘Joel, it isn’t what you think,’ she began stumbling over the words in her anxiety to assure him that the scene he had interrupted had been wholly innocent, but he merely laughed harshly and grasped her arm, propelling her into the house.
‘Don’t bother lying to me, Amber,’ he warned her. ‘I’ve been there before—and with an expert. And what about Paul?’ he demanded savagely. ‘If you can’t respect the vows you made to me, at least I thought I could expect you to realise that Paul isn’t a child who can simply be left when the whim takes you—he had enough of that with his mother.’
‘I didn’t “leave” him,’ Amber retorted, her own anger fanned by his refusal to listen to her explanations. ‘Mrs Downs is with him.’
‘Is she now?’ Joel stopped suddenly just inside the house, lowering his voice. ‘Well, well, quite the little magic worker, aren’t you? Mrs Downs thoroughly disapproved of Teri.’
‘Perhaps she knows that with me there’s nothing to disapprove of,’ Amber retorted tartly. ‘If you would just listen to me, I’d…’
‘What?’ he demanded. ‘Think of some convincing lies? Oh, no, my dear.’
‘Mrs Sinclair, is that you?’ Mrs Downs looked at Joel in astonishment. ‘Mr Sinclair! I thought you weren’t coming back until next week. None of us did.’
‘So I see,’ Joel commented drily.