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Claire could see how nervous Brad’s comments were making Tim. Was he simply trying to get at her, she wondered, or was he using her as a means of warning Tim of what lay ahead?
Either way there was something she intended to point out to him.
‘I did train as a teacher,’ she told him coolly. ‘That’s how I met John and—’
‘John wanted Claire to be at home for Sally once they were married,’ Irene intervened. ‘She works part-time now on a voluntary basis at a special school for disadvantaged children …’
‘I see … Such work must be very emotionally draining. I should have thought you would prefer the … tranquillity of your gardening.’
‘Plants can be as quarrelsome and awkward in their way as children,’ Claire told him with unusual sharpness as she watched the way he looked from Tim’s face to her own. ‘And besides, it isn’t the children I find hard to deal with so much as the way that other people treat them …’
‘No matter how well intentioned they are or how well drawn up, no amount of anti-discrimination laws can genuinely legislate against people’s prejudices—what they feel gut-deep inside themselves,’ Brad told her quietly, his earlier sharpness subsiding.
‘No,’ Claire agreed. ‘They can’t.’
‘I realise that it may not necessarily be of any comfort to you, but there is a school of thought that suggests that we can and do choose what we will and will not be when we are reincarnated on this earth, and that such children bring with them special gifts of courage and understanding.’
Claire gave him a surprised look. In view of what had happened between them she had not expected him to want to offer her any kind of emotional comfort.
As though he had read her mind, he told her calmly and unexpectedly openly, ‘I went through a very bad time when my folks were killed. I was very angry, very resentful, very bitter. We were never what you would call a religious family but out local pastor did his best to help. He told me that some people found it helped to view such tragedies as indications that they were stronger than others, that somehow they must be and that they would find strength to overcome whatever had happened to them. Or perhaps he simply judged that I would react better that way.’
Instead of lapsing into silence and so escaping from the extremely odd and disturbing sensations, both emotional and physical, that Brad was somehow arousing inside her—sensations which were not unlike the unpleasantness of pins and needles experienced when feeling finally started to return to a formerly numb limb, she recognised warily—she heroically subdued her instinct to retreat into herself and said firmly to Brad, ‘I understand that one of the reasons you want to lodge in a family home is because you have a large family back at home in America …’
‘Yes,’ Brad agreed. ‘I’m the eldest of six. They’ve all left home and established lives and families of their own now—all but the youngest … He got married a short while back. But it doesn’t stop there. Ours is a small town by American standards, and at times it feels like I can’t so much as walk down Main Street without bumping into an aunt or a cousin or some other relative.
‘My father and his two brothers set up an air-conditioning plant in the town in the early fifties. Until recently both my uncles still worked in the business. One of them retired on doctor’s orders last fall and the other …’
He paused, his eyes suddenly becoming shadowed, and Claire wondered what it was he was thinking to have caused that look of mingled anger and pain.
It was gone eleven o’clock when she eventually left, and when Brad stood up politely as she said her goodbyes and came towards her she suddenly discovered that instead of holding out her hand for him to shake she was virtually on the point of lifting her face to his … For what …? For him to kiss … And not decorously and socially on the cheek either, but as he had done this afternoon—on her lips, on her mouth, slowly caressing and exploring, making her feel … making her want.
Hot-faced, she took a quick step back from him and almost barged into Irene, who was watching her frowningly.
‘Well, don’t forget that we’re bringing Brad round to see the house in the morning, will you?’ Irene reminded her bossily as Claire turned to her. ‘Will eleven suit you?’
‘Eleven … yes. Eleven’s fine,’ Claire agreed jerkily.
She couldn’t understand why on earth Brad hadn’t already said that he had changed his mind. This evening they had made polite conversation with one another but it must be as obvious to him as it was to her that it would be impossible for them to live under the same roof.
She found him far too … disturbing … far too … male, and underneath her hard struggle for an air of calm she could feel her nerve-ends bristling with anxiety-induced aggression.
Just sitting there this evening on the opposite side of the dinner table to him had mentally and emotionally exhausted her, although quite why he should be having such an extraordinary effect on her she didn’t really know.
Be honest with yourself, she told herself firmly as she drove home; you never wanted to have him lodging with you. Irene caught you at a weak moment and now that you’ve actually met him …
Now that she had actually met him … what? Guiltily she realised that the traffic lights had changed colour and that the driver behind her was hooting impatiently for her to move off.
It wasn’t dignified for a woman of her widowed status to experience emotions and physical sensations which more properly belonged to the early years of a woman’s sexual burgeoning, although in her case her sexual burgeoning had been delayed so that she had assumed that it would never happen. Had been delayed—did that mean—?
Hastily she censored her thoughts.
Suddenly, she was defensively resentful of the way Brad’s unwanted intrusion into her quiet, well-ordered life had brought to the surface issues, emotions and feelings that she had long, long ago thought safely buried.
It was a relief to get home, to walk into the familiar warmth and smell of her own kitchen.
John had originally bought the house on his marriage to Sally’s mother, and, as he had explained to Claire, since it had always been Sally’s home he felt it would be unfair to her to sell it and move somewhere else, especially since it was such a large and comfortable house situated in the most sought-after area of the town.
Claire had agreed with him—genuinely so. She herself had liked the house from the first moment she had walked into it, from that very first night when John had taken her there. It had felt right somehow—welcoming, warm, protective, reaching out to hold her in its sturdy Edwardian embrace.
She had known, of course, that there were other reasons why John didn’t want to move. He had loved his first wife very, very much indeed. The house was a part of her, her home. Even now there were still photographs of her in the drawing room, and an oil painting of her hung at the bend in the stairs, revealing how very like her Sally was.
Some of the rooms were still furnished with the pieces of antique furniture she had inherited from her family.
Down the years Claire had lovingly cared for and polished them and when Sally had announced her engagement she had immediately offered them to her.
‘No, thanks,’ Sally had told her, wrinkling her nose. ‘Just thinking of how much it would cost to insure them makes me feel ill.’
‘But they are yours,’ Claire had insisted. ‘Your father left them to you. They were your mother’s …’
‘The best and most important gift my father ever gave me, the most valued asset he left, is you,’ Sally had told her emotionally, hugging her fiercely, making them both cry.
‘Until you came into my life, into this house, I can only remember how dull and dark my life was—how shadowed. When you came you brought the sunshine with you. When I hear people talking about wicked stepmothers I want to stand up and shout that it doesn’t have to be that way, that there are “steps” who are genuinely loved and valued.
‘Don’t you dare even think of going out of my life, Claire,’ she had told her stepmother fiercely. ‘When I eventually have my children I want you there for them just like you were there for me. You will be their grandmother … you … and I will need you to be there for me and for them so much.
‘I still wish that you and Dad had had children of your own, you know. I know that Dad always felt that it wasn’t fair to me but he was wrong. You were the one he wasn’t fair to, and I would have loved a brother or a sister or, even better, both …’
‘Sometimes these things just aren’t meant to be,’ Claire had told her huskily.
She loved her stepdaughter as though she were her own child—had loved her from the moment John had introduced them. Sally had then been a solemn, too serious and mature child, who had stood out from her peers with her too big school uniform and the neat plaits which John had copied from photographs he’d had of Sally’s mother at the same age.
It had been left to Claire to explain gently to him that Sally felt self-conscious and different because of them, that such a hairstyle was out of date and could tempt other children to pick on her and bully her.
Those first years of her marriage had been happy, productive years. Years when she had eagerly reached out to embrace the opportunity to put the past behind her—something she felt she had done very successfully and thoroughly.
So why had it now started to force its way past all the careful barriers she had erected to protect herself from it? And, more importantly, why was it Brad who was somehow responsible for the unwanted turbulence and disturbance of her normally calm and easily controlled emotions?
CHAPTER THREE
‘SO COME on, then, tell me. What was he like …?’
‘You’ll be able to judge for yourself soon enough,’ Claire told her neighbour placidly. ‘Irene’s bringing him round at eleven to look over the house.’
Hannah had called round ostensibly to show Claire a photograph of the hotel where she would be staying on holiday in Turkey, but Claire was more amused than deceived by her old friend’s ploy to satisfy her curiosity.
‘I’ll go if you want me to,’ Hannah offered, but without making any real attempt to dislodge herself from her comfortable seat at Claire’s kitchen table.
In order to dispel some of her unwanted nervous energy Claire had been trying out a new biscuit recipe. The results of her work would be eaten by the children at the school, but there was a deeper purpose to her self-imposed task than merely the execution of her culinary skills.
The school, which was privately and voluntarily funded, with some council aid, took, in the main, children from backgrounds where for one reason or another there were certain social deprivations.
In many cases these sprang solely from the fact that the child’s mother had to work and could not be there full-time, and one of the things Claire enjoyed doing was showing the children and teaching them when she could, the kind of simple domestic tasks which they would have learned as a matter of course in a different age.
The biscuit recipe she had been trying out this morning was of the very simplest variety and one she was sure that her children would thoroughly enjoy trying for themselves.
‘Mmm … these are good,’ Hannah opined as she sampled the first of the batch to be removed from the oven.
‘I thought you were supposed to be on a diet,’ Claire reminded her.
‘Tomorrow,’ Hannah muttered through a second mouthful of warm biscuit, turning her head in the direction of the kitchen door as they both heard a car pull up onto the drive.
‘Oh, Hannah … were you just about to leave?’ Irene demanded bossily as Claire opened the door to let her and Brad into the kitchen.
Hannah and Irene were old adversaries, probably because Irene knew that she couldn’t boss the other woman about in the same way as she could Claire, Claire admitted wryly, mentally acknowledging that that was, perhaps, one of the reasons why she had not encouraged Hannah to leave. She didn’t care to think of herself as being manipulative, but there were times …
‘You must be Brad,’ Hannah announced, ignoring Irene’s suggestion to get up and go and shaking Brad’s hand. ‘I’m one of Claire’s neighbours … Your neighbour too, I understand. You’ll love living here with Claire; she’ll spoil you to death,’ she declared. ‘She’s a wonderful cook.’
‘Mmm … smells like it,’ Brad agreed pleasantly.
He was more casually dressed this morning, although not in the jeans and T-shirt in which she had first seen him. This time he was wearing a pair of plain, casual, neutral linen trousers with a white linen shirt and a soft knit neutral unbuttoned waistcoat. On another man such clothes might have looked too stylish and uncomfortable but Brad wore them so easily that they seemed; to be an intrinsic part of him.
There was something about a man who took an interest in his appearance but at the same time managed to look as if he didn’t care if sticky little fingers touched his clothes that was infinitely appealing, Claire recognised. Too appealing, she warned herself hastily as she became aware that Brad had turned his head and was watching her watching him.
‘I … er … Where would you like to start …? The bedroom?’ she suggested quickly, and then for no reason that she could think of immediately blushed so hard and so colourfully that she felt completely humiliated by her ridiculous reaction.
What on earth had got into her? She was behaving like a … like a … She didn’t know what she was behaving like, only that she didn’t care for it, she acknowledged as Irene frowned at her and told her firmly, ‘Brad will want to see the whole of the house, of course.
‘My brother bought this house in the early days of his first marriage,’ she told Brad informatively as Claire dutifully walked towards the kitchen door. ‘It was very run-down then and he and Paula completely renovated it. Paula had very, very good taste and of course John was well off enough to indulge her.
‘It was her idea to use some of the spare bedroom space to give each of the four main bedrooms its own bathroom, wasn’t it, Claire?’ Without waiting for Claire to reply she continued talking to Brad.
They were in the hallway now, all of them, Claire noticed in mild exasperation as she opened the double doors into the drawing room so that Brad could see for himself the colour scheme that Irene was describing.
Claire could remember the first time she had walked into this room—how overawed she had felt by its pristine beauty and, at the same time, how protected and at peace. The whole room breathed serenity and beauty.
Without being conscious of what she was doing Claire frowned as she realised that the large, silver-framed photograph of John and Paula’s wedding had been pushed to the rear of the display on the pretty Regency sofa table and her own much simpler wedding photograph pushed to the fore.
Sally, had done that, of course; she had had a bit of a thing about her father’s insistence on giving prominence to his first wife’s photographs, but Claire hadn’t minded.
‘Your late husband’s first wife?’
Claire paused as Brad stepped past her and picked up the photograph she had just moved.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Sally, my stepdaughter, is very like her mother … just as pretty, although John would never have it. In his eyes no one could ever measure up to Paula …’
She missed the frowning look that Brad gave her as he heard the conviction and warmth in her voice.
Didn’t it bother her to know that her husband had loved her predecessor so much and, if not, why not? She was either an extraordinarily unusual woman or …
As he glanced around the beautiful, serenely immaculate room his eyes were caught by something that looked glaringly out of place—a very amateurishly stitched sampler which was framed and had pride of place on one of the walls.
Intrigued, he moved closer to study it.
‘Paula’s hobby was tapestry work,’ Claire told him quietly. ‘She stitched the cushions in here whilst she was pregnant with Sally. There were complications with her pregnancy which meant she had to rest.’
A small shadow touched her face. ‘Unfortunately it wasn’t enough and after Sally’s birth … John lost her when Sally was less than three days old. It was the most terrible tragedy …’
So tragic, Brad thought, that her husband had never got over it, even though, eventually, he had found and married her, and even though, from all that Irene and Tim had told him, and from what he could see with his own eyes, she was very obviously the kind of woman whom it would be easy for any man to love … Too easy …
Brad’s frown deepened. He didn’t like the direction his thoughts were taking—and kept taking, in fact, ever since that incident in the park when, for God alone knew what mad, impulsive reason, he had seized hold of her and kissed her. Kissed her and felt her mouth soften into the kind of quivering, softly feminine response that he couldn’t remember experiencing since he had left the heady days of his early teens behind …
‘We were all thoroughly relieved when he married Claire,’ Irene told him. ‘There was a time when we were beginning to worry that John was trying to turn Sally into a carbon copy of Paula.’
‘He was just trying to do his best for her,’ Claire protested. ‘He loved Paula so much … thought she was so perfect—’
She broke off as she saw the way that Brad was looking at her—the mingled pity and curiosity she thought were in his eyes. Pride and rejection of his unwanted compassion sparkled in her own eyes as she lifted her head and looked back at him.
Her upbringing had had its share of pain, like Sally’s. Orphaned whilst she was still a toddler, she had been brought up by a maiden aunt of her father’s—a retired schoolteacher who had had very strong views on the way that children and most especially girls should behave.
Under her tutelage Claire had developed into an intelligent but socially shy and uncertain girl with very little in common with her peers.
Her great-aunt had died unexpectedly from a fatal heart attack whilst Claire was coming to the end of her teacher training. She had first met John a few weeks later, just after …
Brad, who was still watching her, wondered what it was that had suddenly made her look so haunted.
Despite the obvious tension it was causing between them, he couldn’t bring himself to regret totally what had happened at their first meeting, but the passionately vibrant woman she had been then seemed curiously at odds with the woman she appeared to be now—a woman who seemed quite content passively to accept her role as a very poor second best to her husband’s first wife.
She was such an obviously sensual and loving woman that he couldn’t imagine how she could ever have been happy with a man who, from what he had heard about him, could not possibly have met and satisfied her emotional needs—or her physical ones either.
He frowned, angry with himself for the probing intimacy of his thoughts.
But he had seen for himself how warm and womanly she was, both with the children and with Tim, her gentle smile taking the edge off Irene’s almost acerbic comments to her husband.
It was, perhaps, no wonder that Tim should choose to spend so much of his free time helping Claire with her gardening.
His frown deepened as he wondered if the relationship between them was as innocent as it had first seemed.
There had been nothing so far in Irene’s manner towards either her husband or her sister-in-law to suggest that she suspected anything, but she was being remarkably insistent that Claire’s home was the perfect place for him to lodge. Why? Because she felt that a third party living there would put a stop to any untoward intimacy between her husband and Claire?
If Claire was having a relationship with Tim, that would explain her shocked reaction to her brief response to his kiss—and the anger he had sensed in her both at dinner and again now.
He frowned again, unwilling to delve too deeply into why he should feel almost a personal sense of disappointment and loss at the thought of her being involved with another man.
What was really bugging him? The thought that his own judgement was at fault, that his first impression of her as a warm, open and very loving woman was wrong, or was it something more than mere pique at the possibility of having misjudged her?
What was Brad thinking about? Claire wondered as she saw the way he frowned. Did he, perhaps, not care for the house, or was it her he didn’t like?
‘If you’d like to follow me …’ she told him, determined to sound businesslike and in control.
