Would that fear ever leave her now? she asked herself one morning, after a particularly disastrous loving the night before.
Daniel had been as wretched about his affair as she had been. But the knowledge that he could actually fall when the pressure became too great took away that necessary trust she needed to feel safe with him again.
Which left her with the most horrendous feelings of insecurity. An insecurity that played on her nerves to the extent that she was almost constantly plagued by an upset stomach that had never really improved in months.
The kind of months that started her thinking along lines that congealed the blood in her veins…
CHAPTER TEN
TWO o’clock Wednesday afternoon, and Daniel was gathering together the stack of papers he had been working on for his next meeting when the telephone on his desk began to ring.
‘A lady on the line for you, Mr Masterson. She says she’s Mrs Masterson?’
An icy shiver shot down his spine. Rachel never called him here. An accident? he wondered with alarm. One of the children? ‘Put her through,’ he commanded tautly.
By the time his secretary connected him, his mind had conjured up so many lurid things that could have happened to one of his offspring that he was momentarily confused when it wasn’t Rachel’s voice he heard speaking, quick with urgency, but someone else entirely.
He shook his head to clear it. ‘Will you begin again, Mother?’ he requested of that other Mrs Masterson. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t take a single word of that in.’
Within minutes he was in his car and heading at speed for home. His mother had the door open for him even as he climbed out of the car, and he strode quickly inside.
‘She’s in there,’ Jenny told her son, her lined face crinkling with concern. ‘She’s so upset, Daniel,’ she whispered tearfully.
His face clenched as he turned to open the door, to find Rachel huddled into the corner of the sofa. Her face was buried in a cushion, deep broken sobs racking her slender frame. He approached her carefully, his hands trembling a little as he shrugged out of his jacket and loosened his tie before attempting to touch her.
‘Rachel?’ he prompted huskily, squatting down in front of her and reaching out to clasp one heaving shoulder gently.
‘Go a-way,’ she sobbed into the cushion.
He frowned, puzzled and just a little frightened. He had never seen her like this before—so broken up that she couldn’t even tell him what was wrong. And he remained where he was, gently rubbing her shoulder while he tried to think what could have caused her to break down like this? The name Zac Callum hit his mind, and his chest tightened on a hot band of anger. If that bastard had done this to her! If the swine had dared to hurt her when she was only just recovering from the hurt he himself had inflicted on her…
‘Rachel…’ He moved closer, running shaky fingers through her hair—and was shocked by the clammy heat emanating from her. How long had she been like this? he wondered. ‘For goodness’ sake,’ he pleaded, ‘talk to me! Tell me what’s wrong!’
The tousled head shook. He swallowed tensely, not knowing what to do. Then, with a grim resolve, he got up to collect her firmly in his arms, then sat down with her cradled on his lap, cushion and all.
At least she didn’t fight him, he noted, but just curled up against him with the cushion pressed against her face and kept on crying. He listened, his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth at the sheer bloody wretchedness of the sound.
‘It’s all y-your fault,’ she sobbed out suddenly.
His fault. He sighed, casting his mind back over the past few days, trying to discover what he had done this time to cause so much distress. He’d thought he’d been particularly diplomatic over the last week or so. He hadn’t said one word about her damned art class! He had not forced his body on to her more than he could possibly help. In fact, he’d stayed out of her way as much as he could…
‘Y You were s-supposed to take c-care of it.’ She damned him with that pathetically wretched voice which cut him to the quick.
He brushed his cheek over her hair. ‘Take care of what?’ he asked.
The sobs went deeper, threatening to choke her if she didn’t calm down, and sighing, he took control of the situation, sitting her up and determinedly snatching the cushion away from her hot face. Her hands simply took its place.
‘Calm down!’ he commanded sternly, quietly appalled at the state she was in.
But, dutiful to that stern tone, Rachel tried to get hold of herself, dragging in some deep breaths that wavered heartrendingly. Daniel found his handkerchief, dragged down her hands, and gently wiped her tear-swollen face. She was so hot that he could actually feel the heat vibrating from her and, on another sigh, he stripped off the warm woollen jumper she was wearing, feeling her shiver as the cooler air hit her through her thin blouse.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘let’s hear what this is all about. You said it was something I’ve done, if I heard you correctly?’
She looked at him, her eyes swimming with hot watery tears. Her soft mouth wobbled, and Daniel almost smiled because she was staring at him through big wounded eyes much as his daughter would if she had not managed to get him to do what she wanted him to do. Only this wasn’t Kate, he reminded himself grimly. This was Rachel. Rachel, who was no petulant child. She was brave and strong, despite that air of fragility she wore around her.
‘Don’t cry again,’ he murmured roughly, when the tears began to run down her cheeks. ‘Rachel, for goodness’ sake—you have to tell me what’s causing all this or how can I help?’
‘You can’t help! No one can help! I’m pregnant, Daniel! Pregnant!’ she choked, then made a lurch for his throat where she began weeping all over again. She punched his chest with a clenched fist. ‘It’s all your fault! You said you would take care of it!’
He had been the one to ‘take care of it’ when she got pregnant with the twins! After that she had taken care of it—right up until she had developed a reaction to the Pill and had to stop taking it, so Daniel had taken charge again—and Michael came along!
‘You’re useless!’ she spat at him, punching out at him again. ‘You may be able to run a million damned companies!’ she choked. ‘But you’re useless at everything else! I’m only twenty-five, for God’s sake!’ Her voice began to wobble again. ‘At this r-rate you’ll be nail-nailing down my coffin by the time I’m thirty!’
Now that deserved the smile it got from Daniel, but he pressed her face into his throat so that she wouldn’t see it. ‘Ssh,’ he commanded. ‘I’m still trying to take this in.’
But Rachel was angry now, and jerked into a sitting position on his lap to begin throwing at him all those self-pitying thoughts which had helped her to weep for such a long time. ‘A proper little baby factory I’ve turned out to be!’ she ground out scathingly. ‘No wonder you keep me hidden away here under wraps, Daniel! Your big-time business colleagues would be shocked to discover what an efficient little production line you’ve set
up in your own home! I bet—’ she warmed to the idea
‘—if you put a team of your time and motions experts on me, they would have you up for contract abuse!’
‘Shut up, Rachel!’ This time he could not contain the need to laugh. ‘I can’t think while you’re throwing all those crazy accusations at me!’
‘Well, just think about this one!’ she snapped, in a voice still thick with tears. ‘I’m pregnant! And I don’t want to be!’
Think on that as long as you want! she thought bitterly.
‘How pregnant?’ he asked after a long pause. He sounded tight-throated suddenly, as though the question had taken a lot of asking, and his face was suddenly white, that nerve in his clenched jaw jumping.
‘Three months,’ she told him, feeling a fool. Fancy not realising what was wrong with her—after all the practice she’d had, too!
‘Three months,’ he repeated, and the tension drained right out of him. ‘Good God!’ It hit h
im then, almost as hard as it had hit Rachel when the doctor had given her the news that morning. ‘That means…’
‘Yes.’ She didn’t need it spelled out for her; she could manage simple arithmetic. It must have happened the first time she had let him near her after she found out about Lydia, and everything went a little crazy.
‘God.’ He seemed stuck on blasphemies. ‘I remember now, I never gave a thought to…’
Silence fell again, while they both pondered their own trains of thought. She still sat curled up against him, and Daniel was stroking absently at her hair. And suddenly it reminded her of another time when she’d sat with him like this, receiving those same soothing caresses while he came to terms with her news.
There had been no anger in him then. And there was none now.
‘Well,’ he said suddenly, ‘that’s it then.’ He turned her face so that he could brush a kiss across her mouth. ‘We’ll have to buy a bigger house now. No bedrooms left in this one!’
With the twins—only they hadn’t known then that she was having twins of course; that little shock had come much later, when she was more than five months pregnant—but with the twins, he had used a similar statement to announce his acceptance of his fate. ‘We’ll just have to get married,’ he had said then. Same difference, Rachel thought with a mental shrug. Daniel had this capacity for accepting the inevitable.
She didn’t go back to her art class. It was a decision reached entirely on her own. Drawing she had come to love again, but common sense told her that she would be doing herself no favours walking back into that class while Zac was still there. And although it was never mentioned by either of them, Daniel began taking her out on a Wednesday night—as if he wanted to compensate for what she had lost. But she did not stop drawing, and her sketch-pads could be found all over the house with their hurriedly drawn comical sketches scrawled in black on white paper.
They went house-hunting. And it took ages to find something which suited everyone. ‘A case of too many cooks spoiling the broth!’ she said drily to Daniel, after a weekend spent trailing around the local countryside viewing properties which did not suit one or the other’s specific requirements.
‘Why do you want something so big?’ she complained once, when they’d arrived back home after viewing a huge mausoleum of a place that was just too grand for comfort. ‘We may need something bigger, but not that big! It isn’t as though we have to have all those extra rooms to entertain your business colleagues, is it?’ He still kept a definite line between his home and his workplace and it still hurt her—hence the comment.
‘We would have a damned hard job trying to entertain anyone here,’ was his deriding reply. ‘And I think, Rachel, that after all the hard work I’ve put in, making it possible for us to have virtually anything we want, you might allow me the pleasure of seeing something special for it!’
Then they found the ideal thing: an old manor-house built in warm red brick with long sash windows which let the natural light flood into the high-ceilinged rooms. It had its own acreage of land hemmed in by a six-foothigh brick wall lined with tall trees to keep the grounds very private. It suited Daniel’s idea of prestige, and Rachel’s idea of a home. The twins liked it because it had its own swimming-pool under glass at the rear, and stables. And, to clinch things, it had a small lodge-house by the electronically controlled gates which was ideal for Daniel’s mother, who fell in love with the tiny cottage the moment she saw it.
It also had a ready-made live-in couple, who had been taking care of the house for over twenty years and were worried sick about what they were going to do once the manor-house was sold. Rachel’s soft heart took them in and Daniel was happy to keep them because it meant fulfilling a couple more of his own requirements. They were getting a housekeeper to take some of the load off Rachel, and a gardener who was to double up as chauffeur and ferry the children to school and back every day instead of him and Rachel and the local taxi service doing it between them.
Rachel threw herself into the delights of completely redecorating and refurbishing their new home, and found to her surprise that she possessed quite a flair for it. She was carrying this new baby better than she had Michael, and, as winter fell away to spring, the new house began to take shape enough for them to consider moving in.
Daniel was up to his neck in yet another take-over— a small Manchester-based engineering company he had once worked for himself but which was now in deep financial difficulties—so he was spending more time up north than he was at home, while Rachel busied herself trying to complete the house-move before her pregnancy became too advanced for her to do it comfortably.
Lydia had faded into the background over the past months. She no longer haunted their lovemaking, though Rachel still needed the darkness to hide in if she was to respond to Daniel at all. But at least she seemed to be coming to terms with a betrayal that had almost wrecked their marriage.
Daniel’s seven-year itch, she cynically referred to it in the privacy of her own mind. If the same thing did not occur for another seven years, then maybe she could cope with that. For she knew for certain that she could never leave him now. Her life was too much bound to him by their mutual love of their children and this latest addition soon to come. But love for herself? She dismissed that ideal as a dream which belonged to Rachel the romantic child and not this older, far more awakened Rachel, who had learned to temper her emotions to suit their new relationship.
She was in their bedroom one afternoon when Daniel arrived home unexpectedly early from one of his quick trips to Manchester. He found her sitting on the floor surrounded by heaps of old clothes she was sorting out for jumble.
He looked tired out, and the way he glanced irritably at the mess told her that the never-ending sorting and packing was beginning to get him down. ‘Why can’t you employ someone to do all this for you?’ he snapped out impatiently, shrugging out of his jacket and tie as he stepped carefully over the mess on his way to the bathroom.
‘I’m not having strangers going through our personal belongings!’ she protested. ‘And how would they know what to throw out and what to keep?’ she added sensibly. ‘I have to do it myself!’
He didn’t bother to reply, but the bathroom door shut with an expressive slam. A moment later and she was on her feet and rummaging for her sketch-pad. By the time Daniel returned to the bedroom, freshly showered and with just a towel slung around his hips, Rachel was sprawled across the bed with her pencil, busily drawing.
‘What are you doing?’ He came to lie beside her, receiving a scolding frown when he jolted her pencil.
‘You cheeky witch!’ he exclaimed when he saw what she’d drawn. Laughing, though, despite the fact that he could clearly recognise himself in the naked devil with horns and a forked tail taking a shower. But instead of water washing down over him, flames licked upwards while he stood there, wearing an expression of evil bliss. ‘You cheeky witch,’ he repeated ruefully—and filched the sketch-pad from her.
Rachel made a lurching dive to retrieve it, but he rolled on to his back, hooking his arm around her swollen waist to hold her still while he closed the pad, then began flicking slowly through the busy pages.
Rachel went very still, her heart thumping anxiously in her breast, watching his face intently as he studied each new sketch in turn. He wasn’t laughing, but then he wasn’t meant to. This was not one of Rachel’s cartoon pads. And the only funny drawing in it was the one she had just done of him. No, this was her more serious work, until now kept right away from curious eyes.
The head and shoulders of Sam looked solemnly out on them from beneath faintly frowning brows, his hair ruthlessly flattened to his head as he insisted on its being. His chin was stubborn. He looked like Daniel—so much like Daniel that Rachel’s heart contracted as she stared at him.
Kate looked pleased with herself, her golden hair a shimmering halo around her pretty face. She looked like the cat who had just stolen the cream—which she had, in a way, beca
use that was how she had looked when she had just talked Daniel into letting her have a small pony when they moved into the new house. Kate had a mind of her own—stubborn, extrovert. She looked like Rachel, but she was not Rachel. She was too much her father’s daughter for that.
Michael. There were more of him because he was the one Rachel spent more time with. There was one of him sleeping, with his padded bottom stuck up the air and poor old tattered teddy cushioned by his plump cheek. And one of him laughing, his small teeth standing out in his beaming round face. Then a serious one of him, face dark with concentration as he took that first wobbly step on his own.
‘They’re good,’ Daniel said quietly.
Rachel took in a deep breath, her heart thudding now because she knew what was coming next. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and made a casual grab for the pad before he could turn to the next page. ‘It gave me pleasure to do them.’ She tugged, but Daniel was not letting go. Her nerve-ends began to tingle. He turned the next pagethen went very still.
He had expected to see himself, she realised later. It seemed the logical conclusion to make when the pad was filled with drawings of the family. But it wasn’t him.
It was her own face which gazed back at them. Rachel, with her hair a golden bob of fine-spun silk around a face that showed few lines of living. A young Rachel. A Rachel who had changed little over the years. Her mouth was small and soft, her nose delicately straight. But her eyes—those wide-spaced expressive eyes—looked out on them with a sadness in their gentle depths which tugged at the soul. To her it was like looking at a stranger. She had hated it when she’d finished it, could not see how accurately she had caught the sad, wistful creature everyone else saw when they looked at her these days. And she had shown her distaste of the drawing by scoring a cross through it from corner to corner.
‘Why did you do that?’ Daniel asked sombrely, following one of the negative lines with a gentle finger which paused at the corner of her mouth.
The Ultimate Betrayal Page 14