by Penny Jordan
‘Your marriage!’ Brad interrupted her. ‘In my country we don’t classify the type of relationship you seemed to have with your husband as very much of a marriage,’ he told her scornfully. ‘In my country,’ he stressed, ‘no woman worthy of the name would tamely accept being pushed so obviously into second place by accepting second-best—’
‘My marriage was not second-best,’ Claire denied furiously. ‘I knew when I married John how much he loved Paula. I knew then that...’
‘That what? All he wanted you for was to care for the shrine to her that he had turned this place into? And you were happy with that... you accepted that...?’
The contemptuous disbelief in his voice stung Claire into defending herself. ‘You don’t know the first thing about marriage.’
‘Don’t I?’ Brad challenged her softly. ‘I know as much as any other man about what it feels like to be a man. Why did you move out of your—sorry, John’s—bedroom?’ he asked her.
‘I...After John died...I didn’t...’
‘You didn’t what? Like sharing your bed with a ghost? Funny that, since all your married life you’d already been sharing it with the ghost of his first wife.’
Brad didn’t need to hear Claire’s shocked gasp or to see the anguish in her eyes to know that he had gone too far, said too much. He had realised it almost as soon as the cruel words had left his mouth but, of course, it was too late to recall them now; too late too to curse himself under his breath and to question what on earth had prompted him, driven him—him of all men, who had surely learned years ago to deal gently with other people’s vulnerable emotions; you couldn’t raise four sisters without doing so—to tear away another human being’s defences so ruthlessly and so angrily.
Why? Why? What was it about this one particular woman that made him react so challengingly, so malely aggressively?
‘I’m sorry,’ he apologised quietly. ‘You’re right... I was out of line. It’s just...’ He gestured towards the photograph and told her, ‘I guess it’s just that I can’t help thinking how I’d feel if you were one of my sisters. It can’t have been easy for you...married to a man who...’
‘Who what?’ Claire challenged him. ‘Who loved his first wife more than he loved me?’ Her mouth twisted slightly as she saw the way he looked away from her. So she had embarrassed him. Well, it served him right. He was the one who had brought up the subject of her marriage, not her, and a little embarrassment was the least he deserved to suffer after what he had said to her...done to her.
‘Well, I’m not one of your sisters,’ she told him fiercely, ‘and my relationship with John—our marriage was...’ She paused, her eyes suddenly filling with tears.
‘You must have loved him very much,’ she heard Brad saying gruffly, whilst he wondered how and where Tim fitted into her life.
In a way what he had said was true, Claire acknowledged inwardly, only it wasn’t so much John she had loved as what he had done for her. But that knowledge, those thoughts were too private to disclose to anyone, and most especially to the man now standing watching her.
‘He’s been dead for over two years now and yet you still keep this place like a shrine for him,’ he commented. ‘Why?’
Were all Americans so forthright, so...so openly curious about other people’s private lives? Claire wondered in exasperation. Wasn’t there anything she could say to get it through to him that his questions were too personal and unwelcome?
‘It was her home,’ she told him evasively, hoping that he would drop the subject and tell her why he had returned.
Instead he pounced on what she had said with all the skill and speed of a mountain cougar, repeating softly, ‘Was... Past tense; she’s in the past, but so are you. This is the present and you should put the past behind you...’
Now what had he said? Brad wondered perceptively as he saw the way her face changed, her body tensing.
‘The past isn’t always that easy to forget,’ Claire told him in a low voice. ‘Even when we want to—’ She stopped speaking abruptly and Brad guessed that she had said more than she had intended.
‘Why did you come back?’ she asked him, changing the subject. ‘Have you changed your mind about wanting to stay here...?’
She didn’t really want to have him lodging with her, Brad guessed, and had no doubt been pressured into it by her over-assertive sister-in-law. Why? Because Irene was anxious to protect her husband’s job or because she was anxious to protect her marriage?
Under normal circumstances the situation would have been enough to have him backing off, making some excuse to let her off the hook, but he recognised that he didn’t want to lose contact with her—not yet...not until...
Not until what? Not until he had pinned down what it was about her that provoked such a range of volatile and unfamiliar emotions and reactions within him. If you really need time to work that one out, you really are in a bad way, he derided himself inwardly. She intrigued him, angered him...incited him...excited him, and if the time ever came when she shared her bed with him he’d make pretty damn sure that there were no ghostly third parties there sharing it with them.
‘No, I haven’t changed my mind,’ he told her, pausing deliberately before adding softly, ‘Far from it.’
It was interesting the way she had coloured up as betrayingly and vividly as a sexually inexperienced girl.
‘I... I’d like to check over the bedroom if I may,’ he continued. ‘Er...which door was it...?’
Claire couldn’t help it; she could feel the hot colour flooding up under her skin. She was quite positive that he knew exactly which door it was—he was that kind of man—but to challenge him would be to unleash on herself all manner of emotional hazards that she doubted that she had the strength of mind to negotiate, not least the appalling, clear mental image that she had just had of Brad laughingly, lovingly, gently drawing the shadowy figure of a compliant, eager woman towards the protective shadows of an invitingly open bedroom door, the bed just visible within—the bed on which he would very shortly be making expert and intensely erotic love to the woman clinging so eagerly to him.
But that woman wasn’t her... That woman could never be her.
As Brad saw the way she glanced towards the stairs and the shadow that crossed her face, he felt irritably angry with himself for tormenting her. It was so out of character for him—the kind of masculine behaviour he had often verbally checked in his brothers.
‘It’s all right,’ he told Claire quietly. ‘I think I can find the way after all. It’s just that I suspect I may have dropped my wallet there earlier; that’s why I came back...’
‘Your wallet...? Oh. I...’
He had come back for his wallet... Then why pretend...? She didn’t understand. Claire frowned as she watched him taking the stairs two at a time and heading straight for the master-bedroom door.
There were a lot of things about Brad that she didn’t understand, she recognised uneasily as she waited for him to come back down. But what disturbed her most was the fact that she was actually acknowledging that lack of understanding, giving it a gravitas that it certainly did not merit.
CHAPTER FOUR
CLAIRE grimaced to herself as she emerged from the bright warmth of the school to discover that it was raining—hard.
It had been dry and fine when she had left home earlier in the evening, and with time in hand she had decided to walk to the school instead of taking her car.
She hesitated for a moment, wondering whether or not to go back inside and ring for a taxi, and then, realising that she was already wet, pulled up the collar of her jacket and started to walk quickly down the road.
Whilst she had hesitated about whether to walk home or not she had been conscious in a hazy sort of way of the car which had pulled up at the roadside, but had assumed simply that the driver was collecting someone.
Even when she heard the engine fire and saw the brilliant sweep of the headlights illuminating the roadway ahead of her, she still
didn’t realise what was happening. That recognition didn’t come until her brain, subconsciously waiting for the car to pick up speed and go past her, warily relayed to her senses the fact that it had not done so and what potentially that could mean.
Instinctively Claire reacted to that awareness, quickening her speed, her head tucked protectively down, her body movements designed not to draw any unwanted attention to herself as she fought not to give in to the urge to stop and turn around. She could hear the car crawling along the road behind her in much the same menacing and terrifying way that panic was now beginning to crawl its way along her tense spine.
One heard about such things...read about them—men who preyed on vulnerable, unprotected women. Her mouth had started to go dry, her heart was pounding. The area of the town she was walking through was void of any private homes—just empty shops and public buildings with no other pedestrians in sight. Whilst the rest of the traffic sped past, either oblivious to or uncaring about the slow crawl of the car behind her, it continued its slow, deliberately menacing pursuit.
Not daring to risk turning round, Claire tried to walk even faster. Beneath her clothes she could feel the hot, nervous perspiration drenching her skin; her heart was beating so suffocatingly loudly that she could no longer hear the sound of the car engine.
Her body stiffened abruptly in terrified shock as she realised why. The car had stopped. She heard the sound of a car door being slammed, followed by determined male footsteps.
‘Claire... Claire...’
Claire! Her pursuer knew her name.
Trembling from head to foot, Claire turned round, her eyes widening in disbelief as she recognised Brad coming towards her.
Brad... Brad had been following her. A combination of nausea and fury gripped her by the throat, rendering it impossible for her to speak or move as Brad came up to her.
‘You’re soaked,’ she heard him saying to her. ‘Come and get in the car...’ He stretched out a hand, as though to guide her towards the waiting vehicle, but Claire shrank back from it, fury burning with fevered intensity in her eyes.
‘What is it...? What’s wrong?’ she heard him demand, impatience edging up under his voice as she pushed his hand into his own now damp hair, grimacing in disgust as the heavy droplets of rain ran down the inside of his collar.
‘“What’s wrong?’” Claire stared at him in disbelief; her voice was cracked and harsh. ‘I thought you were following me,’ she told him.
She could see from his frown that he didn’t understand.
‘I was,’ he agreed. ‘I saw you coming out of the school. I was driving past on my way to the hotel...’
As he watched the way she backed off from him Brad was filled with guilty remorse. It had never occurred to him that she would mistake him for a stranger—the kind of pervert who preyed on solitary women.
‘Hey, look... it’s all right,’ he tried to comfort her. ‘I’m sorry; I—’
‘You’re sorry...?’ Claire’s voice was shaking as much as her body as she flung the words back at him.
‘Claire!’
‘No, don’t touch me,’ she demanded as she stepped back still further to avoid the hand that he was reaching out to her, only to be thrown heavily against him as a runner coming the other way whom she hadn’t seen collided with her, knocking her so off balance that she knew that she would probably have fallen if Brad hadn’t been there to prevent it.
The runner, obviously irritated by her and the fact that she had impeded his progress, muttered an ungracious curse before continuing on his way, leaving it to Brad to ask anxiously and quietly, ‘Are you OK? That was some speed he was running at—quite some speed...’
‘I’m fine,’ Claire fibbed.
The physical shock of almost being knocked to the ground and the emotional trauma of fearing that she was being followed, stalked, by an unknown man were both taking their toll of her. Her head felt muzzy, her thought processes were slow and confused, her hip-bone ached where the runner had cannoned into her, her stomach was still churning nauseously and the trembling which had begun when Brad had first called out to her had now become an open shivering.
Add to all that the fact that she was also extremely wet and cold and ‘fine’ was just about as far from describing her condition as it was possible to get.
. Brad obviously thought so too, because instead of accepting her polite disclaimer as his British counterpart would have done he immediately rejected it, exclaiming curtly, ‘Like hell you are! You’re soaking wet through and shivering fit to bust. Come on...let’s get you into the car and home. What you need right now is a shower—a proper shower, good and hot and stinging, not these apologies for showers you have over here—followed by an equally hot, stinging drink... Are you OK?’ he added. ‘Can you walk as far as the car or would you like me to carry you?’
Would she like him to what?
Claire forgot for a moment that he still had both his arms around her, and her chin came shooting up proudly as she tipped her head back to look at him. Only it wasn’t his eyes which her own were on a level with. It was his mouth.
Dizzily Claire stared at it, her tongue-tip hesitantly touching her own, suddenly dry lips; a swarm of confusing and unfamiliar emotions invaded her dazed senses.
The rain had soaked her hair, causing it to curl in soft ringlet tendrils around her face, making her, although she didn’t know it, look closer to twenty-four than thirty-four. In the streetlight her skin had a luminous, transparent quality that made Brad want to reach out and touch it. British women had such delicate, pale skin, and Claire, with her fine-boned frame, had an added delicacy, a fragility almost, that aroused in him emotions...
The close contact with his body was warming her own, comforting it—an unfamiliar sensation to Claire and one that she instinctively responded to, luxuriated in on a level that was somehow beyond the jurisdiction of her normal strict self-control. Without realising what she was doing she nestled closer, exhaling her breath on a soft feminine sigh.
The hammer-blows of two different consecutive shocks had left her emotionally concussed, her senses and her emotions wandering blindly through an unfamiliar landscape where Brad was the only familiar landmark. Instinctively she clung to it...to him, her eyes huge and dazed in her pale face as she continued to focus on his mouth.
His mouth... It was strange to think that she had already been kissed by it. By him. Strange and dangerous and yet at the same time somehow headily exciting, alluring... with all the dark magic of something dangerous and forbidden.
She wanted to reach out and touch it, to trace its male shape, to...
The blare of a car horn on the opposite side of the road made her jump abruptly, bringing her back to reality, to normality.
Her face on fire with self-conscious anger and embarrassment, she tried to step back from Brad, shocked and confused by what she had been thinking—feeling.
‘Come on; let’s get you in the car,’ he told her firmly, his voice as matter-of-fact as if it was not a very unfamiliar or shocking thing for him to have a woman staring up at his mouth...as though...as though... But then, perhaps it wasn’t... She knew very little about him, after all, Claire reminded herself as she gave in and allowed him to walk her gently towards his car.
‘I’m sorry I gave you such a bad shock,’ she heard him apologising after he had helped her into her seat.
Claire couldn’t bring herself to look at him and instead busied herself trying to fasten her seat belt. Her fingers felt numb and stiff, her actions slow and clumsy.
‘It’s just that I was on my way back from the office and I saw you coming out of the school and—Here, let me help you with that,’ he offered, and without waiting for her agreement he gently pushed her hands away, leaning across her as he reached for the recalcitrant seat belt.
His hair was still damp and she could smell the cold, fresh scent of the rain on his hair and his skin. The nape of his neck, exposed as he leaned across her, was warmly tanned
, unlike her own much paler skin. The rain had made his hair start to curl slightly.
A soft smile touched her mouth. She lifted her hand and then froze, her body stiffening in horror as she realised what she had been about to do. What on earth had come over her? The very idea... The mere thought of reaching out voluntarily to touch a man’s skin...his hair... to stroke her fingers slowly through those almost boyish curls, to straighten them...was so alien to her, to everything that she was, that she could hardly believe she had actually been about to do it.
It took Brad’s anxious, ‘What’s wrong? Is it your hip? I saw how hard he knocked you when he ran into you. It’s bound to be bruised...’ to bring her to her senses.
Claire felt the relief flooding through her as she realised that he thought her tension came from physical pain and hadn’t understood...
‘It’s fine... I’m fine,’ she told him brusquely.
‘No, you’re not,’ Brad corrected her gently.
He was still leaning over her, looking directly into her eyes, and her heart gave a fierce bound as she tried unsuccessfully to look into his.
‘You’re probably as sore as hell... You’ve had a pretty nasty shock...a very nasty shock, I should say,’ he amended, ‘if the way you reacted earlier is anything to go by. Tell me, do you—?’
‘I...I just don’t like being touched,’ Claire blurted out, terrified of what he might be going to ask her, to force her to reveal... ‘Some people just don’t...’
She was willing the betraying colour not to seep up under her skin as she made herself meet his steady scrutiny and willing herself as well not to remember the way she had practically snuggled deeper into his arms such a very short time ago, praying at the same time that he wouldn’t say anything about that either.
To her relief he didn’t, saying only, ‘No, some people don’t,’ before giving her seat belt a small testing tug to make sure that it was fastened and then turning away from her to secure his own and start the car.
‘I’ll walk you to the door,’ Brad announced after he had completed the short journey to her house.