by Penny Jordan
The next moment he had swept her up into his arms, holding her so tightly that she could hardly breathe.
‘Oh, Kate…Kate…’
She heard the emotion in his voice as he buried his face in her hair, and a huge wave of reciprocal emotion engulfed her. In this she could empathise with him entirely. After all, she loved their daughter too, and she only had to put herself in his shoes to be able to feel what he must be feeling now.
‘How on earth am I going to thank you?’
She pulled away from him and said quietly, ‘By making sure you never, ever do anything to hurt Sophy.’
He looked at her and said slowly, ‘I shan’t,’ and then, while she stood motionless in front of him, he bent his head and brushed his mouth lightly against her own.
The shock of it transfixed her. Her lips parted on a shocked gasp, and just for a second the pressure of his mouth hardened and her body melted with familiar need and response, but already he had withdrawn from her, and was saying softly, ‘Thank you, Kate. I’ll never forget this.’
Nor would she, Kate reflected bleakly as he turned his back on her and walked over to the window.
‘It’s another fortnight before Sophy and John get back from Antigua,’ she told him shakily, ‘and then I think I ought to give them a week to settle in.’
‘Yes,’ she heard him agree. ‘I think the best thing would probably be for me to ring you in three weeks’ time and then we can make the necessary arrangements. Will you come to London by car or train?’
She hadn’t thought that far ahead.
‘Train, I expect,’ she said puzzled. ‘Why?’
‘If you let me know the time it gets in, I’ll make sure someone picks you up.’
She opened her mouth to tell him that wouldn’t be necessary, and then closed it again.
Joss was saying something to her, but she hadn’t caught it. She frowned and said, ‘I’m sorry…what were you saying?’
‘I was asking you if you’d care to have lunch with me,’ he told her with dry irony.
The tone of his voice made her flush a little. ‘Oh, that’s very kind of you, but…I don’t think…’ she began to flounder while he watched her with cool grey eyes.
‘What’s wrong, Kate?’ he challenged.
‘Nothing,’ she told him sharply. ‘There’s no need for you to take me out for lunch, Joss. I’ve already agreed to tell Sophy, and besides…besides, I’ve got rather a lot of work to catch up on…’
‘I see.’
She couldn’t understand why he was looking so angry. Surely he must be relieved by her refusal?
‘What about dinner tonight, then?’ he challenged. ‘Or do you have another date?’
The word ‘date’ made her heart twist a little, bringing back as it did memories of the ‘dates’ they had once shared.
‘No, I don’t,’ she retorted swiftly. ‘I’ve already told you, I don’t live that kind of life.’
She missed the sharp, speculative look he gave her, and the sadness that edged up under it.
‘Well?’ he prompted when she remained silent.
She swung round and stared at him. ‘Well what?’
‘Will you have dinner with me tonight?’
She knew she ought to refuse. There was no point in accepting, but something reckless and yearning inside her overruled her common sense.
‘If you like,’ she offered offhandedly.
‘Such enthusiasm,’ was his dry comment. ‘But I suppose it’s no less than I deserve. I’ll pick you up at eight, shall I?’
Wearily Kate nodded, glancing at her wristwatch as she did so. It was just gone twelve; he had been here barely two hours, and in that short space of time she had run such a gamut of emotions that she felt physically and emotionally drained.
He moved and she followed him to the door.
‘Until tonight,’ he said quietly as he stepped outside.
Kate gave him a tight smile, already regretting her weakness.
* * *
She was regretting it even more at six o’clock when she opened her wardrobe and wondered what on earth she was going to wear. She had her pride, after all, and she could hardly appear at dinner dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, but her wardrobe was devoid of anything remotely deserving the appellation ‘glamorous’…and, for some reason she was not prepared to examine too closely, glamorous was exactly what she wanted to be tonight. Then at the back of the wardrobe, she saw a long cardboard box and she frowned, pulling it towards her.
Last Christmas, when she had refused to attend Lucy’s New Year’s Eve party, claiming that she had nothing to wear, Lucy had arrived with this box, claiming that she now had no excuse for not attending.
In the event she had attended the party, but she had not worn the dress Lucy had bought for her.
Uncertainly she put the box down on her bed and opened it. At first glance the dress inside it was simply a plain black sliver of silk jersey with nothing particular to recommend it, but once on, as Kate had good reason to know, it was a different matter. She had been stunned at her friend’s choice, wondering if it had been intended as some sort of joke, but Lucy had insisted that the dress was exactly her.
If so, it was a side of herself with which she herself was unfamiliar, Kate reflected with dry humour, picking it up and holding it in front of her.
If anything, time had dimmed her memory of the dress’s shortcomings rather than exaggerated them.
It had a halter neck, and virtually no back, the fabric designed to cling to her hips and thighs, and was only spared from complete indecency by a gathered flare of diamond-pointed fabric to the front and back of the dress which acted as a kind of overskirt.
Chewing on her bottom lip, she studied it. It was glamorous all right…sexy, sophisticated…all those things that she normally avoided…the kind of dress a woman normally only wore for a man…or for another woman, when she wanted to warn her off. It was a dress more suited to Joss’s red-headed secretary than to her. The thought slid into her mind like a serpent, and before she knew what she was doing she was wriggling out of her clothes and pulling it on over her head to study her reflection in her bedroom mirror.
A summer of working in the garden had given her a light tan, just enough to remove some of the dress’s starkness. It was still every bit as devastating as she remembered. It still clung with over-enthusiastic closeness to her skin. It still showed her a bewildering, unfamiliar image of herself, and it still made her feel acutely conscious of all that was missing from her life…which was probably why she had refused to wear it in the first place.
This was a dress for a sensual, sexual woman, not one who lived like a nun.
It was also the only dress she possessed, she reminded herself grimly. It was either that or the formal silk she had worn for Sophy’s wedding, and Joss had seen that already.
Vanity, she chided herself derisively.
She took another look at herself and grimaced. It was either this or nothing, and, on balance, the dress was the better choice.
It was her own fault. She should have refused to have dinner with him when she had the opportunity. He was, after all, only being polite…only doing what he probably thought was necessary.
The trouble was, she thought, exasperated with her own inability to come to terms with her own emotional response to him, that she was reacting to him as though she was still sixteen years old, and she wasn’t. They were two adults, thrown together by an uncomfortable twist of fate. The situation wasn’t an easy one for either of them; Joss was obviously doing his best to treat her with cordiality and good manners, and it was down to her to respond to him in exactly the same mature, adult way.
Only her heart would keep somersaulting whenever she thought about him, and her body would keep on reacting to its memories of him in a way that made her pray that Joss wouldn’t realise exactly what effect he was having on her.
Things were difficult enough as it was. The last complication they needed was for her
to start mooning around like an adolescent in the throes of a major crush.
The trouble was that, while her brain seemed to have little difficulty in accepting the fact that she was thirty-seven years old, her body and her hormones appeared to feel differently.
Ironic that after all these years, when she had so successfully contained the mild sexual impulses which had attacked her from time to time by reminding herself of what happened when she gave in to them, she should suffer this idiotic surge of arousal the moment she saw Joss again.
She didn’t need to search far for the reason. Joss had been her first and only lover; he was the father of her child, the reason she had virtually lived the life of a nun since he left her; it was not altogether unexpected that she should react so strongly to him.
Not unexpected, perhaps, but decidedly inconvenient…and potentially very embarrassing. Joss was no fool, had not lived a celibate life; he had been married, divorced… Then there was his secretary, but it had been plain to Kate that the woman wanted far more than a business relationship with him. How long would it be before he realised that the tension she exhibited when she was with him, the anxiety that filled her, the way she trembled and reacted to him were not borne of shock, but of something vastly different?
She dreaded to imagine what his reaction would be. Embarrassment…pity…resentment… She went pale as it struck her that he might even suspect her of using her relationship with Sophy to get closer to him, to urge an intimacy on him that he did not want. And then she calmed down a little, reminding herself that the best way to avoid such an event was simply not to spend any time with him.
An excellent and logical decision, but she had already agreed to have dinner with him tonight, and to potentially spend more time with him in London when she broke the news to Sophy.
Come on, she derided herself as she got ready. You’re a fully functioning adult with a mind of your own. You don’t need to go into a state of collapse whenever you’re with him. You’ve got will-power. Use it…
Once she’d told Sophy the truth, the ball would then be in their daughter’s court. If Sophy wished to further her relationship with her father, then she wasn’t going to need Kate to help her to do so. She would be able to bow out of the situation. They would, after all, only be like too-long-divorced parents, each taking their part in their offspring’s life, and allowing one another to live their separate lives in a civilised manner.
Civilised… She pulled a face at herself in the mirror. All very nice, but there was nothing civilised about the way she felt about Joss.
So how did she feel about him?
The question stayed her. She looked blindly into the mirror, not seeing her own reflection.
That was the big question. How did she feel? After the first fierce trauma of shock had come a fierce surge of heady relief that she no longer had to hate him…that she no longer had to remind herself of what he’d done, and how, because of it, she must now even allow him into her thoughts.
She’d felt free, she recognised wryly. Free to…to what? Love him… What was the matter with her? They were different people from the boy and girl who had fallen in love. He had changed, and she had undoubtedly changed too. They didn’t know one another. She couldn’t love him. What she was doing was transferring her adolescent adoration of the boy on to the man, and that was crazy.
So crazy, in fact, that it was time she pulled herself together and put a stop to it.
CHAPTER FIVE
IT WAS with this admirable intention that she opened the door to Joss’s knock slightly before eight o’clock.
As she heard his car, she had snatched up the lightweight black silk shawl which was all she had by way of an evening wrap to cover her bare shoulders and back, so that she was ready to accompany him out to his car as she opened the door.
As the gravel crunched beneath the unfamiliarity of her high-heeled shoes she winced a little at their sharpness on her thin soles. She so rarely wore high heels these days that she had forgotten how uncomfortable they could sometimes be, but the dress demanded them and so, gritting her teeth, she picked her way over the gravel carefully until she heard Joss say in amusement, ‘I can never understand why women torture their feet with those things.’
They had reached the car, and as Kate leaned unobtrusively against it, glad of its support while she waited for him to unlock the door, she saw that instead of moving away from her and around to the driver’s side he was studying the slim tanned length of her bare legs and polished toe-nails with a lazy male blatancy that made the breath catch in her throat.
How long was it since a man had looked at her like that? How long was it since she had wanted one to? Lucy and Sophy both were constantly chiding her, amused by her total lack of interest in men, complaining that she never even noticed when a man was interested in her and that she was completely oblivious to any sensual messages sent her way.
But she was far from oblivious now. Her stomach churned in tense protest and, for some reason she couldn’t define, Joss’s long, appreciative survey made her curl her bare toes a little in mute protest.
The silence between them seemed to grow heavy and intense until the sound of a car backfiring in the lane outside the house jolted her into an awareness of what she was doing and made her say curtly, ‘I’m sorry if you don’t approve, but these sandals happen to be the only thing I own that are suitable for evening wear.’
A shadow darkened his eyes as Joss stepped back from her.
‘A subtle reminder of the fact that, without the financial help of Sophy’s father, there hasn’t been enough money to spare for such luxuries, Kate. You don’t have to rub salt in the wound. I assure you I’m all too keenly aware of how very difficult things must have been for you both.’
Kate bit her lip and looked down at the drive, honesty compelling her to admit, ‘Financially it wasn’t really difficult… Mum and Dad supported us both quite comfortably, and then when they died…well, Dad was well insured…’
Her voice trailed off into silence. Joss could hardly be interested in hearing the details of her finances. As she looked upwards it came as a shock to discover that he hadn’t moved.
‘I’d forgotten that about you,’ he said softly, puzzling her with the odd bleakness in his eyes. ‘How very honest you were. Perhaps if I’d chosen to remember that instead of clinging on to my pride…’ He stepped back from her abruptly. ‘We’d better get a move on. I’ve booked a table at a place recommended to me by the landlady of the Fleece.’
He told her the name, and Kate reflected that it was just as well she had opted to wear the black dress. It was a newly opened and very sophisticated restaurant several miles away in a small country house which the owners were planning to develop as a very private and luxurious hotel. So far they had only got as far as opening the restaurant and, although Kate had never visited it, she had heard good reports of it.
From a business point of view, it could be an informative evening; she and Lucy did not aspire to rival the skills of the Roux brothers’ trained chef who ran the restaurant, but it was always interesting to see a menu produced by a first-class expert, and there were always small hints to be picked up.
She and Lucy kept their menus simple and plain, serving the kind of food that a first class and gifted amateur cook might produce if she only had the energy and the time. They knew of more than one of their customers who had passed off their dinner-party food as her own.
She moved to one side as Joss opened the car door for her. The sleeve of his suit brushed her bare wrist, and a quiver of sensation ran through her.
She saw him frown as he registered her reaction.
‘Cold?’ he asked abruptly, as he waited formally for her to seat herself comfortably.
Kate shook her head, turning, averting her face so that he wouldn’t see the tell-tale surge of colour washing over it. He was a good driver, skilled and patient, and in other circumstances it would have been a pleasure to sit beside him in the luxury
of the powerful car, relaxing in its luxurious warmth as one of her favourite pieces of Handel flowed melodiously through the powerful speakers.
‘I can switch this off if it doesn’t appeal,’ he offered considerately. Kate shook her head.
‘No. I like it.’
She heard a soft note of warmth in his voice as he commented, ‘We never really got as far as discussing our mutual taste in music, did we?’
The softness of his voice did something dangerous to her self-control.
‘It wasn’t really necessary, was it?’ she responded sharply. ‘As far as I can recall, we were too busy exploring one another’s bodies to show much concern or appreciation for one another’s minds.’
The acidity of her forthright statement fell a little sharply on her own ears. She knew she was simply being defensive, but she felt uncomfortably aware of a degree of truculent resentment in her voice which sounded more gauche than dismissive.
‘Not quite true,’ Joss corrected her. ‘We did do a lot of talking…or at least I did. I’m afraid I was rather boringly selfish in those days…in more ways than one,’ he added under his breath, causing Kate to drop her defensive manner and say impulsively to him,
‘No, you weren’t. I was grateful to you for telling me so much. At first I was so shy and embarrassed, I wouldn’t have known what to say. You overawed me a little.’
‘Did I?’ He sounded almost amused. ‘I didn’t notice it. All I could think about was that I was with the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen and that I was fathoms deep in love. I never meant to hurt you, Kate…’
‘No,’ she agreed, and then, because she could not allow herself to fall any deeper into the dangerous trap in which she was already floundering, she said curtly, ‘It’s all in the past now, anyway. We’re different people…adult. That’s all behind us.’
‘Is it?’ Joss questioned her sharply. ‘Can it ever be truly behind us when together we produced a child?’
Kate was thankful to see the turning for the restaurant looming up ahead of them, preventing her from having to reply, and she was even more thankful she had remained silent when Joss brought the car to a halt in the car park and said heavily, ‘I suppose you’re right. It doesn’t do to dwell too much on the past.’