by Penny Jordan
Although outwardly well adjusted and cheerful children, Sophy knew that neither of them could have gone through the experience of losing their parents without some scars. They were both passionately attached to Jon and she had thought him equally devoted to them. It had shocked her immensely to hear him talk of sending them away…it didn’t equate with what she knew of his character somehow.
‘I, er…think I’ll have an early night,’ she heard him saying. ‘My flight’s at nine and I’ll have to be at the airport for eight.’
‘Do you want me to drive you?’ Jon did not possess a car; he could neither drive nor, it seemed, had any desire to do so, although he had hired a small car for Louise’s use.
‘No. I’ve ordered a taxi. Don’t bother to get up to see me off.’
Picking up their coffee cups, Sophy grimaced slightly to herself. She always saw him off on his journeys because she lived in perpetual dread that if she did not he would lose or forget something of vital importance. She made a mental note to tell the cab driver to check the taxi before Jon got out of it and then, bidding him goodnight, carried their cups to the kitchen.
She was tired herself. It had, after all, been an eventful day. On her way to the room she always had when she stayed over at the house and which was next to the children’s room, she had to walk past Jon’s room. As she did so, she hesitated, still amazed to think that Louise had actually gone into that room fully intent on making love to its occupant. That earlier and extraordinarily disturbing mental vision she had had of their bodies sensuously entwined she had somehow managed to forget.
CHAPTER TWO
SHE WAS AWAKE at half-past-seven, showering quickly in the bathroom off her bedroom. The room which she occupied was what the estate agent had euphemistically described as ‘a guest suite’. Certainly her bedroom was large enough to house much more than the heavy Victorian furniture it did and it did have its own bathroom but after all that it fell rather short of the luxury conjured up by the description bestowed on it.
She dressed quickly in her jeans and a clean T-shirt. Her body, once gawky and ungainly, had filled out when she reached her twenties and now she had a figure she knew many women might have envied; full breasted, narrow waisted, with long, long legs, outwardly perhaps, as her friend had once teased, ‘sexy’, but inwardly… She was like a cake that was all tempting icing on the outside with nothing but stodge on the inside, she thought wryly, pulling a brush through her hair and grimacing at the crackle of static from it.
There wasn’t time to pin it up and she left it curling wildly on to her shoulders, her face completely devoid of make-up and surprisingly young-looking in the hazy sunshine of the summer morning.
As she went past Jon’s door she heard the hum of his razor and knew that he was up. Downstairs she checked that the cases she had packed for him the previous night were there in the hall. In the kitchen she ground beans and started making coffee. Jon was not an early morning person, preferring to rise late and work, if necessary, all through the night and despite the fact that she knew he would do no more than gulp down a cup of stingingly hot black coffee, she found and poured orange juice and started to make some toast.
He didn’t look surprised to find her in the kitchen, and she knew from his engrossed expression that he was totally absorbed in whatever problem was taking him to Brussels.
Jon was the computer industry’s equivalent of the oil world’s ‘trouble shooter’. She had once heard one of his colleagues saying admiringly that there was nothing Jon did not know about a computer. Although she knew that Jon himself would have been mildly amused by her lack of logic, she herself would have described his skill as something approaching a deep empathy with the machines he worked on.
As far as she was concerned the computer world was a total mystery but she was a good organiser, an excellent secretary and Jon found her flair for languages very useful. He himself seemed to rely entirely on the odd word, nearly always excruciatingly mispronounced from what Sophy could discover. But then, who needed words to communicate with a computer? Logic was what was needed there…and Jon had plenty of that, she thought wryly as she poured and passed his coffee. Only a man of supreme logic would propose to a woman on the strength of needing her to look after his wards and run his home. And also to keep other women out of his bed, Sophy reminded herself.
She didn’t ask him if he wanted toast, simply pushing the buttered golden triangles in front of him. He picked one up, absently bit into it and then, frowning, put it down.
‘You know I don’t eat breakfast.’
‘Then you should,’ she reproved him. ‘It’s no wonder you’re so thin.’ But he wasn’t, she remembered…recollecting that brief, unexpected glimpse of hard muscles.
She heard the sound of a car approaching over the gravel. So did Jon. He stood up, swallowing the last of his coffee.
‘I’ll ring you on Wednesday to let you know what time I get back. If anything urgent crops up in the meantime—’
‘I know where to get in touch with you,’ she assured him. She would have to drive into Cambridge later and leave a message on the office answering service asking callers to ring her here at the house. Her mind raced ahead, busily engaged in sorting out the host of minor problems her being here instead of in Cambridge would cause.
She walked with Jon to the taxi…sighing in faint exasperation as he forgot to pick up his briefcase, handing it to him through the open door and then turning to speak to the driver.
‘Ticket…’ she intoned automatically, turning back to Jon. ‘Passport, money…’
He patted the pocket of his ancient tweed jacket, a faintly harassed look crossing his face.
Registering and interpreting it correctly Sophy instructed. ‘Stay there, I’ll go and get them.’
She found them in a folder beside his bed, and sighed wryly. She remembered quite distinctly handing them to him yesterday and telling him to put them in his jacket pocket.
She ran downstairs and handed the documents to him, catching the driver’s eye as she did so. He was looking faintly impatient.
‘I’ll see you late Wednesday or early Thursday.’ She closed the taxi door and waited until it had turned out of the drive.
Back in the kitchen she munched absently at Jon’s toast and drank her coffee. She and Jon were to be married. It was incredible, ridiculous…only strangely it didn’t seem that way. Already she felt an oddly comfortable pleasure in the thought, as though some burden of pressure had been released. She wanted to marry him, she realised with a start of surprise…or at least…she wanted what marriage to him would give her. She frowned. Didn’t that mean that in her way she was just as selfishly grasping as Louise? But, unlike Louise, she did care about Jon. As a person she liked him very much indeed. As a man he was so totally unthreatening to her that she found his company relaxing. Marriage to Jon would be like slipping into a pair of comfortable slippers… But on Saturday? She comforted herself with the thought that it was hardly likely that Jon would be able to organise a special licence so quickly. In fact she doubted he would even remember about it once he got on the plane. No doubt the task of sorting out all the arrangements would fall to her once he came back but she would still prefer not to tell her parents until after the ceremony.
Coward, she mocked herself, hearing sounds from upstairs that meant David and Alex were up and about.
She told them about Jon’s proposal after breakfast. All three of them were outside, sitting on the lawn. Their open delight and excitement made tears sting her eyes. David flung his arms round her embracing her exuberantly, Alex hanging on to her arm.
‘I’m glad he’s marrying you and not that nasty old Louise,’ she told Sophy. ‘We didn’t like her, did we, David?’
‘No, and neither did Uncle Jon…otherwise he would have let her sleep in his bed.’ A thought seemed to strike him. ‘
Does that mean you’ll be sleeping in his bed, Sophy?’
A strange paralysis seemed to have gripped her. She wasn’t sure how much the children knew about adult behaviour. They must have learned something from school but their parents had been dead for three years and she could hardly see Jon satisfactorily explaining the so-called facts of life to them. On the other hand, it was pointless telling them a lie.
‘No, I won’t, David,’ she said at last.
She watched him frown and saw that for some reason her answer had not pleased him.
‘That’s because both of you are so big, I expect,’ intervened Alex, ever practical. ‘You wouldn’t both get in one bed.’
‘They would in Uncle Jon’s,’ David told her gruffly. ‘It’s huge.’
It was…king size and Jon normally slept diagonally across it. She knew because she occasionally had to wake him up in the morning when he had an early business appointment and he had been up late the previous night working. She had never needed to do much more than lightly touch his duvet mummy-wrapped body though.
‘If you’re going to get married, why won’t you be sleeping in his bed?’ he persisted doggedly.
‘Married people don’t always share the same bed, David,’ she told him, giving him what she hoped was a reassuring smile. ‘You know what your uncle’s like. He often works very late and I like to go to bed early. He would wake me up and then I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep.’
He looked far from convinced, muttering, ‘Ladies always sleep with their husbands,’ and betraying a innate chauvinism that made Sophy smile. Already at ten he was very, very sure in his masculinity and of its supremacy which was surely something he didn’t get from Jon. He was also, as she had often observed, very protective of his sister…and too, of her. She bent forward and ruffled his dark hair.
‘Perhaps Uncle Jon doesn’t want her to sleep with him, David,’ Alex offered, smiling at him. ‘He didn’t want Louise to.’
The little girl was more right than she knew, Sophy thought grimly, glad of the distraction of the telephone ringing.
As she had half suspected it was her mother, eager to tell her all about the previous evening’s dinner party.
‘Chris came too,’ she told Sophy, oblivious to her daughter’s lack of enthusiasm, ‘and he brought his wife. Such a lovely girl…tiny with masses of blonde curls and so obviously in love with him. She’s expecting their first baby. He asked after you, and didn’t seem at all surprised to hear you weren’t married.’ There was a hint of reproof in her mother’s voice. ‘He even laughed about it.’
Sophy realised as she replaced the receiver that she was actually grinding her teeth. So he had laughed, had he? Well, he would soon stop laughing when he heard that she was married! She stood motionless by the telephone staring blindly out of the study window for a few seconds picturing the ordeal the dinner party would have been for her had she been there…that future dinner parties would have been if it hadn’t been for Jon’s extraordinary proposal. Without being aware of it had he had saved her from the most galling humiliation and pain. Now she needn’t even see Chris, never mind endure his mocking taunts on her unmarried state.
* * *
OVER THE NEXT couple of days, cautiously at first and then with growing confidence, like someone blessedly discovering the cessation of toothache and then cautiously exploring the previously tormented area and finding it blissfully whole again, Sophy allowed herself to acknowledge the totally unexpected happiness unfurling inside her.
The children were a constant, sometimes funny, sometimes exasperating joy and one she had never thought to know. For some women the physical act of giving birth was acutely necessary to motherhood but she, it seemed, was not one of them. She could not take the place of the children’s dead mother and did not seek to but it gave her a special delight to know that she would have the joy of mothering them. It was this, probably more than anything else, that convinced her that her decision to marry Jon was the right one. She still didn’t know how he could even have thought of relinquishing his responsibility for them but then his mind was so wrapped up in his work, that everything else was obviously secondary to it.
On Tuesday evening it rained and they spent the evening going through some old photograph albums David had found in a bureau drawer.
Once she and Jon were married she would ask him if she was to be allowed a free hand with the house, Sophy mused, glancing round the shabby sitting room, and mentally transforming it with new furnishings. At the present moment in time it wasn’t even particularly comfortable. Both the sofa and the chairs had loose springs which dug into vulnerable flesh if sat upon.
‘Look, Sophy, there’s Daddy and Uncle Jon when they were little.’
Sophy glanced down at the open page of the album, her eyes widening fractionally as she studied the photograph Alex was pointing out.
Two lanky adolescent boys stood side by side, one topping the other by a couple of inches. Both of them had identical shocks of near black hair—both of them had the same regular features, hinting at formidably good looks in adulthood.
‘Uncle Jon looks really like Daddy there, doesn’t he?’ Alex commented, wrinkling her nose. ‘He doesn’t look anything like Daddy did now though, does he, David?’
Thus applied to, her brother studied the photograph briefly and then said gruffly. ‘Yes he does…underneath.’
It was an odd remark for the little boy to make and one, Sophy sensed, made in defence of his uncle against his sister’s comment.
‘Uncle Jon would look much better without his glasses,’ Alex continued cheerfully. ‘He should wear contact lenses like our teacher at school.’
‘He can’t,’ David told her loftily. ‘They don’t suit his eyes, and besides, he doesn’t need to wear his glasses all the time anyway.’
This was news to Sophy. She had never seen him without them, apart from one occasion she recalled, remembering watching him remove them here in this very room. Then she had been struck by the very male attractiveness of his profile, she remembered and then shrugged mentally. What did it matter what Jon looked like? It was the kind of man he was that was important. She already knew all about the pitfalls encountered in getting involved with handsome men. Chris was good looking.
On the Wednesday morning after she had dropped the children off at school she got back just in time to hear the phone ringing noisily.
Thinking it might be Jon, she rushed inside and picked up the receiver, speaking slightly breathlessly into it, barely registering her sudden spearing disappointment at discovering it wasn’t him as she listened to the crisp American tones of the man on the other end of the line.
She explained to him that Jon was due back that day, and slowly read back to him the message he had given her, frowning slightly as she did so.
She knew, of course, that Jon often did work for various governments, but that call had been from the Space Center in Nassau, where apparently they were urgently in need of Jon’s expertise.
Would that mean he had to fly straight out to Nassau, before they could get married? She shrugged slightly. It didn’t really matter when the ceremony took place, surely?
The next time the phone rang it was Jon, ringing her from the airport in Brussels, to tell her the time of his flight.
‘I managed to get through a little earlier than planned,’ he told her, adding, ‘any messages?’
Quickly Sophy told him about the call from Nassau, giving him the number and asking hesitantly, ‘Will that mean that you’ll have to fly straight out there?’
There was a pause so long that she thought at one point their connection had been cut and then Jon said slowly, ‘I’m not sure.’ Having rechecked with him the number of his flight, Sophy said goodbye and replaced the receiver.
She would have to ring Heathrow now and check what time it was
due to arrive…her mind ran on, mentally ticking off all that would have to be done. The children would have to be collected from school, fed… Yet all the time at the back of her mind was that same ridiculous sense of apprehension.
Suppose Jon had changed his mind about wanting to marry her? How long would he need to be in Nassau? What if he…?
Stop it! she urged herself firmly, reminding herself that less than a week ago there had been no thought in her mind of marriage to anyone, let alone her boss and now here she was in a mild flurry of panic in case they did not marry.
Since the time needed to get to Heathrow and back to meet Jon’s flight interfered with the children’s school leaving time, and because she knew of no one she could ask to meet them in her place, Sophy rang the school and asked to speak with the headmistress, quickly explaining the situation and getting permission to collect David and Alex on her way to Heathrow just after lunch.
Neither of them stopped chattering during the drive. Oddly enough, this would be the first time either of them had been to the airport and since Sophy always believed in having a little time in hand once they had parked the car she was able to take them to the viewing gallery to watch the flights taking off and landing.
‘Will we see Uncle Jon’s plane from up here?’ David demanded at one point.
Sophy glanced at her watch. Jon’s flight was due in in five minutes.
‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘We’ll watch it land and then we’ll go down to the arrivals lounge to wait for him.
The flight was on time and the plane landed perfectly, so there was no reason for her to feel that odd choking sensation of fear clutch at her throat, Sophy chided herself, especially when she had already watched half a dozen or so planes come and go without the slightest trace of apprehension.
‘Look! Look, Sophy…they’re putting the stairs up,’ Alex told her excitedly, tugging on her hand. ‘Can we wait and see Uncle Jon get off?’
Sophy knew from past experience that Jon was likely to be the last to leave the plane but in the face of the little girl’s excitement she could hardly refuse. It would be a bit of a rush down to the arrivals lounge…and she always liked to be on hand just in case Jon ran into any problems. There had been that time he had left his passport on the plane and another when he had lost the keys for his briefcase, and the strange buzzing sound emanating from it had drawn frowns and stern looks from the security authorities. In the end it had simply been the alarm he had forgotten to switch off but…