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As he followed her up the stairs and along the landing Brad acknowledged that there was something about Claire that he found profoundly compelling; there was such a dramatic contrast between the warm, emotional woman who had flown at him with such fury to protect the feelings of her young charges and the cool, hostile person he was seeing now.
Claire had stopped outside one of the bedroom doors and was waiting for him to join her. Irene and Hannah had both come with them and Irene frowned as she saw which door Claire had opened.
‘But that’s your bedroom—yours and John’s,’ she protested. ‘I thought you were going to give Brad Sally’s bedroom.’
‘This is larger and more … more suitable,’ Claire told Irene quietly.
‘But where will you sleep …?’ Irene demanded.
‘I—’
‘Look, the last thing I want is to deprive you of your bedroom …’ Brad began.
But Claire shook her head quickly, her face flushing slightly as she told him, ‘I … I had already decided to … to move to another bedroom. This one … John’s … John’s and mine,’ she amended quickly, ‘is too … The decor is much more suitable for a man. It has an ensuite bathroom and there’s already a desk in the dressing room. John sometimes worked in there himself … I—’
‘You’ve moved out of your own bedroom?’ Irene was persisting, apparently oblivious to Claire’s lack of enthusiasm for pursuing the subject. She looked, Brad decided, rather like a guilty schoolgirl caught out in some forbidden act.
Why? Why shouldn’t she change bedroom if she wished? It was, after all, her home … her house. He remembered the look in her eyes as she had talked about her late husband’s love for his first wife, the woman whose “home” it had actually been.
‘I was thinking of having it redecorated. It’s never been my favourite room, and—’
‘But it’s the master bedroom,’ Irene protested.
‘Yes,’ Claire agreed with a quiet irony in her voice which was obviously lost on Irene but which Brad picked up on. So she was passionate and quick-witted too—a dangerously alluring combination in a woman—or so he had always felt.
The room was a good size, he acknowledged as he stepped into it, with what looked like plenty of solidly built dark wood closet space and a generously proportioned, sensibly constructed bed. As he studied it Brad let out a small sigh of relief. British standard-sized double beds did not easily accommodate a man used to the luxury of an American king-size, as he had already discovered. This bed was the only one he had seen in Britain so far that came anywhere near the spacious comfort of his own at home, even if it was a little on the high side.
As he cast his eye appreciatively and approvingly over the immaculate percale bedlinen, he acknowledged that it would be hard for him to find anything to surpass the comfort that such a bed promised. From behind him he could hear Irene saying almost accusingly to Claire, ‘You’ve changed the bedding …’
He could sense from Claire’s response that Irene’s comment had embarrassed her and guessed that the new bedlinen had been bought specifically for him. She really was the most extraordinarily sensitive woman, he thought as she showed him through to the well-planned bathroom with its large bath and separate shower.
The dressing room was small, but plenty large enough for the desk and chair already installed in it, and as she waited for him to rejoin her on the landing he admitted to himself that in terms of comfort and convenience it wouldn’t be easy to match the facilities of this house.
From the bedroom window he could see out into the garden. Long and wide, it was split into a series of areas by a variety of cleverly intermingled structures and plantings, and a rueful smile curled his mouth as he espied the smallest of the enclosed gardens with its swing and scuffed grass.
There was an area of equally stubborn baldness on his own lawn back home. When he had threatened to have the swing removed and the area reseeded the previous fall, the whole family had been up in arms, protesting against the removal of one of their sacred childhood haunts. The house was far too large for him now, of course. He really ought to sell it …
Outside on the landing Claire could feel her face start to flush defensively as Irene reiterated, ‘Claire, I thought you were going to give him Sally’s old room …’
‘I … I didn’t think it would be very suitable. The decor is so very feminine,’ Claire told her, unwilling to admit that she had not wanted her stepdaughter to return from her honeymoon to find that someone else had taken over her old bedroom.
Sensitively she wanted Sally to be able to feel that the house was still her home, that her room was still her own and that she could return to it whenever she wished. Not that she anticipated that Sally would ever do so—nor did she want her to: her place, her home now was with her new husband.
‘But to move out of your own bedroom …’ Irene protested.
‘It isn’t my room,’ Claire told her. ‘It was John’s room—our room,’ she amended hurriedly as she saw Brad walking towards them. How could she explain to Irene—to anyone—how, after John had died, instead of finding comfort in remaining in the room—the bed—that they had shared during their marriage she had found it … empty and that she much preferred the smaller, prettier, warmer guest room that she had now appropriated as her own?
It hadn’t been totally unfamiliar to her, after all; there had been nights during her marriage when she had woken up and, unable to get back to sleep, afraid of waking John, had crept quietly into the solitude of the guest bedroom.
‘So, Brad, what do you think?’ Irene demanded with the confidence of one who already knew the answer she was going to get.
‘I’m sure I shall be very comfortable here,’ he declared, before turning to Claire and saying, ‘We haven’t had an opportunity to discuss the financial details yet, I know. Would it be OK with you if I called back later … say, this evening … to do so?’
‘This evening? Oh, no, I’m afraid I can’t; I’m going out.’
‘You’re going out?’ Irene frowned. ‘Where … who with?’
Claire had started to walk down the stairs, and as they reached the bottom Hannah appeared in the hall just in time to catch Irene’s question and to comment, with a sly smile in Claire’s direction, ‘Well, it can’t be with a man—not unless you’re cheating already …’
Cheating? Brad frowned. Did that mean that there was someone in her life? It must be a man whom she didn’t want Irene to know anything about, to judge from Claire’s uncomfortable and slightly hunted expression.
‘It’s parents’ evening at school,’ she explained.
‘But they can’t expect you to be there,’ Irene said. ‘You only work on a voluntary basis.’
‘No, they don’t expect it,’ Claire agreed, her voice and her manner suddenly a good deal firmer. She could be firm and indeed almost aggressive in her defence of those whom she deemed vulnerable and in need of her protection, Brad guessed—be it a child or an adult. ‘However, I want to be there. I’m sorry I can’t see you tonight,’ she apologised to Brad. ‘Perhaps tomorrow evening.’
The effects of his long flight were beginning to catch up on him and he still had to go out to the warehouse to see Tim, although he didn’t intend to start any in-depth investigations into the difficulties of the British distribution and sales side of the business as yet.
He was already aware of how on edge Tim was in his presence and he could guess why; the spectre of redundancy haunted them all these days. Just as it no doubt would have haunted him were he married with a not quite fully adult and independent family.
‘You should get married,’ Laura, one of his sisters, had scolded him the previous Thanksgiving. She and the rest of them had certainly done their best to find him a suitable wife. He found himself wondering for a moment what they would make of Claire and then quickly caught himself up, warily aware of how unusual it was for him to have such a thought.
It was her differentness that intrigued him so much, he reassured himself—the complexity and contrast of what he had so far witnessed of her personality.
‘Wow. Now that’s what I call a real man,’ Hannah commented, greedily munching another purloined biscuit when she and Claire had the kitchen to themselves once again. ‘He’s not at all what I expected. I thought he’d be all crewcut and loud checked suit.
‘He’s got the teeth, though,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘Americans always have good, strong teeth … all the better to eat you with, my dear,’ she added mischievously, grinning widely when Claire gave her a suspicious look. ‘And he does look as though he’d be rather good at that sort of thing …’
‘If you’re suggesting what I think you’re suggesting—’ Claire began primly, but then gave up, shaking her head as Hannah interrupted her.
‘I’m not suggesting anything. I’m simply saying that he’s a very … sexy man. Perhaps there is something in that old myth about catching the bride’s bouquet, after all,’ she murmured thoughtfully.
‘Hannah!’ Claire warned her direfully.
‘All right, all right, I know—you’ve taken a vow of celibacy and I shan’t say another word; it just seems such a pity that it’s all such a waste …’
After Hannah had gone, taking the rest of the biscuits with her, Claire walked slowly upstairs and then paused outside the door to the master bedroom, pushing it open slowly, with reluctance almost, pausing on the threshold before eventually walking inside.
This was the room she had shared with John throughout their marriage—as a bride and a young wife—but when she stood still in its centre there were no echoes of those years to ruffle its almost sterile blankness.
There was no sense, no awareness, no feeling in this room of people having lived intimately within the protection of its walls, of having laughed and cried, fought and made up, of having shared intimacies … of having loved. She had seen the way that Brad had frowned as he had studied the room and had worried anxiously that he too might have picked up on the room’s lack of those intimate vibrations.
It was strange how one became accustomed to things, adapted to them, accepted them and eventually came to think of them as the norm. It took something—someone different to make one see things from a different perspective—to make one realise.
As she smoothed down the already smooth cover on the bed Claire realised that her hand was trembling. Her marriage … her life … her … her privacy … they belonged to her and to no one else. There was no need for her to worry that someone else—that anyone else—would ever discover them, she reassured herself firmly.
The only way he … they could ever do so would be if she chose to tell them, and since she was certainly not going to do that …
Brad was halfway through his meeting with Tim when he realised that his wallet was missing. Mentally reviewing the events of the day, rerunning them through his mind’s eye, he pinned down its possible loss to the moment when he had leaned forward and then bent down to inspect the workings on the shower on his tour of Claire’s house. Glancing at his watch, he decided that it would probably be quicker and simpler to drive straight over than to waste time telephoning to announce his arrival.
Breaking gently into Tim’s long-winded description of the vagaries of the British weather and its effect on the sales of air-conditioning systems, he explained that there was an urgent task he needed to perform.
As Brad parked his car in the drive he saw that Claire’s back door was slightly open in the homely way he remembered from his own childhood, and without thinking he pushed it wider and walked in.
He found Claire in the drawing room, gently dusting the face of one of the silver-framed photographs. When she saw him she put it down quickly, guiltily almost, and for some reason the defensiveness of her action angered him, making him demand brusquely as he gestured towards the photograph, ‘Wasn’t there ever a time when you were jealous of her, when you resented her and wished that you came first, instead of always having to stand in her shadow?’
Claire’s flush, initially caused by a mixture of shock at the unexpected arrival and embarrassment at the way he had caught her behaving in her own home almost as though she felt that she had no real right to be there, darkened to one of outraged anger.
‘In your country it might be perfectly acceptable to make personal criticisms and to ask intimate questions, to pry into people’s personal thoughts and lives, but in this country it isn’t,’ she reprimanded him sharply. ‘My marriage—’
‘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.
