by Penny Jordan
The staff she and Lucy had hired to serve the meal were moving deftly among the guests, gently encouraging them on to the lawns as they circulated offering pre-wedding breakfast drinks.
James took her arm and gently guided her towards the marquee where it had been decided they would line up to receive the guests. Slowly the guests filed past, all of them beaming their pleasure and enjoyment of the day. Old friends, whose faces were as familiar to her as her own…strangers, people who belonged to John’s side of the family, but who nevertheless were reaching out to her with warmth; all of them passed her in a blur, until the shocking moment she had been waiting for, and she heard John’s mother exclaiming warmly, ‘Joss! It’s lovely to see you. We weren’t sure you could make it…’
And then she heard the familiar timbre of a voice she had never, ever forgotten. A voice that had whispered such things to her that she had shivered in unbearable pleasure and arousal, now saying mundanely, ‘We only just made it, but it’s lovely to be here.’
Sophy was speaking to him, flirting lightly with him, and then it was John’s turn…John who was turning to introduce her to him.
‘You won’t believe it, but Kate is my new mother-in-law,’ he said gallantly, and the whole world stood still as they looked at one another, and she saw from his face that this meeting was as much a shock to him as it was to her.
‘Kate,’ he said hoarsely, and the hand touching hers gripped her so tightly that she actually winced with pain.
He had aged, but only slightly. He was no longer a young boy, but a man…tall, dark, powerful, his jaw lean and clean-cut, bearing no trace of too self-indulgent living, his skin bronzed and his grey eyes as clear as those of his daughter.
His hair was just as thick and dark as she remembered, and his body as he had walked towards her had moved lithely and easily.
He was a man in his sexual prime, she recognised numbly, and it didn’t need the sidelong looks the other female guests were giving him to tell her so.
Shock absorbed her and held her, and then abruptly released her so that she started to shake and her eyes stung with tears. Totally unable to hold on to her composure, she tugged her hand from his and looked past him to the woman accompanying him. Her mouth had tightened into an unattractively thin, tight line. She glared pointedly at Kate as she stretched out her hand, and Kate said mindlessly, ‘Mrs Bennett.’
John waited until they had gone past to chuckle and say to her, ‘Not Mrs Bennett as yet, although I suspect she’s hoping to be. She’s Joss’s secretary.’
His secretary. A cold, sour sickness rose up inside her. So he hadn’t changed, she thought bitterly. He was still the same lying cheat who had deceived her. And yet outwardly he looked too uncompromisingly honest and steadfast…
His appearance was as deceitful as his nature. Where were his wife…and his child? Something inside her twisted painfully as she stopped concentrating on the line-up of guests waiting to smile and shake her hand, and remembered instead the shocking agony of that cold, blustery September day when, not having heard from Joss for almost twenty-four hours, she had gone round to his lodgings to find out why he had broken their date. She had discovered from his landlady that he had packed his bags and gone… ‘Gone back to his wife and child,’ she had told her maliciously, leaving only the cursory message that their affair was over and that she was not to try to get in touch with him.
She could remember even now the pebble-hard acidness of the woman’s cold eyes…and how, despite her casual attitude, she had sounded as though she had enjoyed delivering Joss’s message.
She had only met the woman on a couple of previous occasions. Normally she and Joss met just outside the village on the cliff-path. She hadn’t liked his landlady then, and she had liked her even less at that moment.
Joss, married. She had hardly been able to take it in. He was still only a student, in his last year at Oxford and, although she had surmised from the odd comments he had made about them that his family had money, he had said nothing to her to indicate that his family consisted of anything more than parents, and various aunts, uncles and cousins. He had certainly never intimated that he was married…and not just married, but a father as well.
His landlady had watched her unkindly, callously smiling at the tears she had been unable to stop stinging her eyes.
‘What did you expect?’ she had scoffed. ‘He was just using you, that’s all. Did you really think he intended it to be anything more than a brief fling? He’s told me not to give you his address. So don’t bother asking for it,’ she had added brutally and triumphantly, starting to close the door.
Numb with pain and shock, somehow or other Kate had managed to drag herself back to the cliff-path which had been their trysting place. She still could not take it in. Only forty-eight hours ago he had held her, kissed her, whispered to her that he loved and wanted her…and she had thought that implicit in those words was a promise for the future. And now…
She started to tremble violently realising what she had done. She had given herself to him with joy and fervour…given herself to a man who was already committed elsewhere…a man who was married with a child.
Mercifully, then, she hadn’t known that it wasn’t only a broken heart he had left her with.
She had only discovered she was pregnant six weeks after she had returned home. Shocked and bewildered, she had made no attempt to hide the truth from her parents; they, having observed the stunned, silent state in which she had returned to them after her holiday, had already guessed that some emotional trauma was at the root of her distress.
It had not occurred to them that it might be more than a mere holiday romance that was making her so pale and listless until she started being so violently ill.
After that…she had told them haltingly and miserably what she had done, how she had betrayed the mores they had taught her, how defiled and unhappy she felt, not at making love with Joss—that she could not regret—but at having made love with him believing him to be free when he wasn’t…at having participated, however innocently, in the breaking of marriage vows she considered to be sacred.
Her parents had been marvellous…wonderfully supportive and caring.
She had never gone back to the village. There had been no point…her mother’s aunt, disgruntled with the appalling summer weather, had sold the cottage and moved back to London, announcing that country living was not for her, and Joss had been someone she had resolutely shut away in a dark corner of her mind, refusing to allow herself to think about.
Except when Sophy was born…except when her parents died…except this morning, dressing for the wedding and grieving for all that might have been.
Seeing him had shaken her out of those idiotic daydreams, reminding her of what reality was. Reality was a man who had cold-bloodedly seduced her knowing that he was committed elsewhere, and who, it seemed, still continued to break those same marriage vows he had broken with her.
No wonder he had been so shocked to see her. He was probably wondering how quickly he could make his excuses and leave.
As the thought formed, she looked across the flower-decked marquee and saw him standing with a group of people, but slightly to one side of them, as though apart from them. He was looking directly at her, the grey eyes focusing on her with such intensity that for a moment she actually took a step towards him.
‘Kate, the girls are getting twitchy about serving the buffet,’ Lucy came up to warn her.
Thankfully Kate turned aside and glanced at her watch.
‘Yes. We’d better get everyone sitting down.’
Sophy and John had opted for an informal arrangement of round tables in the marquee, apart from the top table for close members of the family, and as James tactfully organised the ushers into making sure that everyone found their tables and sat down Kate turned her back on Joss and escaped.
The meal was a blur of tension and misery. Conversation hummed around her, Sophy and John as euphoric as the bubbles i
n the champagne. Someone—one of John’s married sisters, she thought vaguely—complimented her warmly on the food. She smiled, feeling as though her whole face had become frozen.
Joss was sitting right in her line of vision; the redhead clawed possessively at his arm whenever his attention wavered from her, and Kate thought viciously that he deserved the other woman’s petulant possessiveness.
All through the toasts and speeches she was conscious of growing tension, of an anxiety that balled in her stomach and made it impossible to concentrate on anything bar the dark-haired man sitting just within her vision.
Afterwards, while Sophy and John circulated among their guests, she tried to escape, but she had barely reached the opening of the marquee when Joss stopped her.
Her heart lodged painfully in her throat, her pulses hammering frantic messages of fear.
‘Your daughter looks very beautiful,’ he told her gravely. ‘John is a very lucky man.’
Stock compliments and phrases, with no nuance in them to make her muscles tense and her eyes flicker with distraught dread…nothing in his eyes to warn her that he had guessed that Sophy was his child…just a fine hardening of his mouth that made him suddenly look older and very bitter as he added devastatingly, ‘And so is James.’
James… She looked round wildly, her heart hammering with frantic, desperate ferocity. James was standing several yards away, talking to John’s mother.
‘Joss, there you are. It’s time we left.’ The redhead drew level with them and glowered warningly at Kate. ‘You know you promised we wouldn’t be staying long.’
Kate winced at her lack of manners, wondering faintly if the woman realised that she was doing her a favour and that the last thing she wanted was for Joss to linger.
She gave them both a polite, controlled smile and said brightly, ‘It was good of you to come. Please do excuse me,’ and quickly sidestepped them both, heading for the house and security.
It was a good half-hour before she was able to accept that they had actually gone and that she was safe, but the shock of Joss’s unexpected appearance had taken its toll, and it was impossible for her to relax and enjoy what was left of the day.
By the time the last of the guests were leaving she had a pounding headache, and the last thing she wanted to do was to join John’s family for the celebratory meal they had organised at the Fleece.
Sophy and John had gone. They were flying to Antigua for a three-week honeymoon, and Sophy’s face had been blissfully rapt as she and John left for the airport.
‘Takes you back, doesn’t it?’ John’s mother had sighed…and had then bitten her lip in embarrassment and apologised.
‘Heavens, I’m sorry…that was tactless.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Kate had assured her, and then, because of the pity she could see in her eyes, she had added firmly, ‘And besides, the relationship I had with Sophy’s father was as important to me as though we were married. It was only later when I discovered that he already had a wife and a child.’
Mary Broderick bit her bottom lip guiltily. She hadn’t meant to raise unhappy memories for Sophy’s mother, and, despite her initial shock at discovering that her son’s mother-in-law was a woman of thirty-seven who looked barely thirty, and who had conceived her daughter outside marriage when she was only sixteen during a relationship with an already married man, once she had met Kate she had quickly realised that, however deplorable the circumstances of Sophy’s conception, her mother was not to blame for them.
‘Do you never see him…hear from him?’ she asked awkwardly, wanting to fill the painful silence.
Kate shook her head quickly and lied, ‘And nor do I want to.’
Her head was pounding with sickening intensity. All she wanted to do was to go and lie down on her bed, but instead she had the evening to go through.
When it was all over, she would sleep for a week, she promised herself tiredly as she forced a smile to her lips and tried to appear as though she was enjoying herself.
CHAPTER THREE
OF COURSE, she didn’t. On Monday morning it was back to her normal routine of preparing the very special sandwiches that she and Lucy delivered to offices in York, along with their special executive lunches.
They were frantically busy, with two of their staff off on holiday and Kate having to drive into York in their van to make the deliveries and pick up fresh supplies.
After that she had an appointment with a woman who wanted them to cater for her husband’s fortieth birthday party, and then there was an evening reception in York, but thankfully Lucy was doing that.
The week whirled by and it was Friday before she knew it. Thankfully she had managed to give herself Friday afternoon off. The house was desperately untidy and needed cleaning from top to bottom, she acknowledged ruefully, and then there was the garden… The marquee people had been as careful as they could, but…
Acknowledging wryly that her afternoon off was likely to prove more arduous than working, she rushed back from York, dropped off the fresh supplies at Lucy’s home and then hurried home.
All afternoon she worked at top speed, refusing to acknowledge that part of her determination to keep busy was rooted in her desperate need to hold at bay the shock of seeing Joss again so unexpectedly and unwantedly.
By six o’clock she was exhausted, but she refused to allow herself to rest. There was still the garden to do, and it was silly not to take advantage of the long summer evening.
She hadn’t bothered to stop for lunch and she wasn’t hungry now. In fact, she hadn’t been hungry all week, and had lost a dramatic amount of weight. Lucy had noticed it and teased her about it, saying that it was the bride who traditionally wasted away, not her mother, and Kate had grimly let her believe that it was the build-up to Sophy’s wedding that had caused her to drop so many pounds, rather than admitting the truth.
At nine o’clock, her back aching and her muscles trembling with exhaustion, she acknowledged that it was time to give up.
Wincing as her strained muscles protested, she went inside and straight upstairs to her bedroom.
After her parents’ death, although she had cleared out their room, she had felt unable to move into it, and so she was still using the bedroom she had grown up in. She and Sophy had shared a bathroom, her parents having their own, and she acknowledged tiredly how empty the house felt now that she was living in it on her own.
Showered and dried, she grimaced slightly at her unmade-up face and wildly curling hair. All she wanted to do was to go to bed, but there were the books waiting downstairs for her attention…if she could just spend a couple of hours on them now…
Tiredly she went down to the comfortably shabby sitting-room at the back of the house. It overlooked the garden and had been her parents’ favourite room.
Both she and Sophy had grown up in this room with its faded chintz furniture, and its worn rugs and polished parquet floor.
She got the books out and sat down at the desk that had belonged to her mother.
She was so tired that it was virtually impossible to concentrate on what she was doing. The french windows were open, admitting the cool evening air and the musky scent of the bourbon roses.
Her back ached appallingly. If she could just lean back in the chair and close her eyes for a couple of minutes…
* * *
When the expensive Jaguar saloon car purred up over the gravel, she was too deeply asleep to hear it.
It stopped alongside her own car, the driver’s door opening and then closing again with a quiet click.
The man who emerged from the car straightened up and looked warily at the silent house.
It had been a long drive from London, and an even longer week, with this meeting on his mind throughout the length of it. He had been hard pressed to leave the office early, but eventually he had managed it. The ailing company he had taken over from his father twenty-odd years ago was now high-powered and very successful, but there were times when that succes
s tasted like ashes in his mouth.
He walked to the back door and knocked briefly on it. There was no bell, and when no one answered his summons he turned to glance back at the car parked next to his own and his frown deepened.
Her car was here, but that didn’t necessarily mean that she was in. Then the faint movement of the open french windows on the other side of the back door caught his eye and he walked curiously towards them.
The light was just beginning to fade, the room illuminated by a lamp on the desk several feet away.
There were papers scattered on it; the breeze had lifted some of them on to the floor; a familiar blonde head lay on the desk, pillowed on two slender, tanned arms.
The breath locked in his throat as he stared at her ringless left hand. He took a step towards her and then another, stopping abruptly when he saw the silver photograph frame on the desk.
He focused hungrily on the photograph inside it. Her daughter. His daughter. Then with a bitter frown he overcame his qualms and reached out to shake her awake.
* * *
The sensation of a hand on her shoulder was at once both familiar and alien, bringing her instantly out of her exhausted doze and into alert tenseness.
As she opened her eyes she struggled to sit up, wincing as her stiff neck muscles protested.
Someone was leaning towards her, blocking out the light from the lamp so that his features were indistinct, and then he said her name and a wild shudder convulsed her.
‘Kate, wake up,’ he demanded peremptorily, and to her own astonishment she heard herself saying grumpily and mundanely, as though the sight of him here in her sitting-room was nothing unexpected at all.
‘I am awake. What do you want? What are you doing here, Joss?’
Her mind, fogged by exhaustion and shock, relaxed its normally vigilant hold on her defences. She lifted her head, rubbing her stiff neck muscles and glaring at him fiercely.