Wedding Nights: Woman to Wed?

Claire, thank the Lord, was too caught up in her own emotions to be aware of his arousal.

‘Tell me,’ he insisted, and then added with a smile, ‘I shan’t let you go until you do.’

‘There was a man,’ Claire told him reluctantly. ‘Another graduate. Three of us were sharing a rented house. It was my first time away from home … I … I suppose I was very naïve … My great-aunt was very strict; I … I didn’t have very much experience, didn’t know …

‘He … he came to my room. He said the gas in his own meter had run out and he had no money to replenish it. He asked if he could study with me … He offered to make our supper … I … I had just had a bath … Our rooms were very cold and I was wearing my … my nightdress and my dressing gown … I didn’t know … I didn’t think.

‘I … I went over to my bookshelves to get a book I needed. He followed me over. He was standing behind me … He put his arms round me …’ Claire moistened her upper lip, her eyes darkening as she relived what had happened.

‘At first I was too surprised to realise … I thought … I asked him to let me go but he wouldn’t; he just laughed. He started … he started …’ She stopped and swallowed painfully.

‘He started to kiss the side of my neck.’ She gave a small shudder. ‘I didn’t want him to … I tried to move away but he wouldn’t let me go. He started pulling at my dressing gown and …’ Her voice faltered to a standstill.

Brad’s arm tightened slightly around her. ‘It’s OK. Take your time,’ he told her softly.

‘I … Well, I’m sure you can guess the rest. He thought that by agreeing to him coming in I was … I was agreeing to have sex with him. He was furious with me when I refused—told me … called me … I … I thought he was going to force me … rape me …

‘We struggled for a while and eventually I managed to get free. I ran out of the house and into the street. It was raining and I slipped on the wet pavement … John saw me … he was on his way home … He stopped his car and came to help me. When I felt him touch me, at first I thought … I was almost hysterical,’ she admitted huskily, and Brad, remembering the night when he had unwittingly pursued her down a wet street, winced inwardly and cursed himself.

‘Eventually he managed to calm me down and make me explain. He took me home with him … made me stay the night.

‘He was so kind to me, so … so caring … I felt so safe with him,’ she told Brad quietly. ‘So … it was easy being with him and Sally, who, coincidentally was a pupil at the school where I was placed for teaching practice. There was no pressure … no awful feeling that he was about to pounce on me … that I might somehow … that he might think …’

Claire gave a tiny, despairing shake of her head.

‘You must think me very stupid, very naïve … to be so afraid of … of giving the wrong impression, of having someone, some man think … But I’d never felt very comfortable with boys … My great-aunt … And sexually …’

She struggled to find the right words and could only say huskily, ‘I didn’t … Some people don’t … The fact that John didn’t want to consummate our marriage was never a problem for me, and before you make any more accusations,’ she told him, a little more fiercely, ‘I was never tempted to break the vow of … of fidelity which I’d made when we were married. You must find me very … very cowardly and …’

‘No,’ Brad denied. ‘In actual fact I think you’re very brave to have told me what you just have,’ he elucidated gently when she looked uncertainly at him.

What he couldn’t tell her was what he thought of her husband, a man whom she obviously still looked up to but who, as far as he was concerned, had cruelly and selfishly taken advantage of her by using her naïvety and insecurity to trap her into a marriage which had robbed her of any right to discover her own sexuality.

‘How old were you when you and John married?’ he asked her gently.

‘Twenty-two,’ Claire told him.

Twenty-two. His heart ached for her.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she cried out fiercely when she saw his face. ‘I don’t want your pity. I wanted to marry John … I wanted …’

‘To deny your sexuality. Yes, I know,’ Brad said.

‘Some people … some women just aren’t very highly sexually motivated,’ Claire protested defensively. ‘They just don’t feel …’

‘Some women … some men are born with only a very low sex drive,’ Brad agreed, ‘but you aren’t one of them,’ he told her positively.

Claire stared at him, her eyes rounding, her face starting to flush slightly.

‘How can you say that?’ she protested. ‘You don’t know—’

‘Oh, I know,’ Brad interrupted. ‘I know very well because of this …’

And then, before she could really grasp what was happening, he had tightened his hold around her, one hand behind her head, and fastened his mouth gently over hers in the lightest and most delicate of kisses until the tantalising brush of his mouth against her own made her reach up instinctively to pull him down closer so that her lips could touch his fully, her body melting in liquid pleasure into his as he started to kiss her properly.

How could she ever have believed that she didn’t want this? Claire marvelled dizzily as her body threw off the shackles of self-restraint and fear and gloried unashamedly in its need to press even closer to Brad’s.

It was like taking off dark sunglasses and suddenly being dazzled by the brilliance of the sun, Claire decided in dazed euphoria as her senses revelled in their untrammelled freedom to indulge themselves.

The sound of Brad’s breathing, heavy and uneven, the smell of his skin, the heat of his body … Greedily Claire’s senses absorbed each new, sensual discovery, each new, sensual pleasure, whilst her mouth clung hungrily to his, willingly obeying his tongue’s urgent demand for her to part her closed lips to allow it to dart inside with quick, urgent strokes.

She could feel the harshness of Brad’s chest against her breasts as he started to breathe more deeply. The stiffness of the cloth separating their bodies chaffed their unfamiliar tenderness.

She could feel the difference, the arousal in her breasts, her nipples, her whole body, Claire realised.

And she could feel too the arousal in Brad’s. But where once the knowledge of a man’s arousal had filled her with revulsion and fear now her body shivered with heady, feminine triumph at her ability to cause such a reaction.

The discovery of her own sensuality and of Brad’s reaction to it was like drinking a heady aphrodisiac. She almost felt drunk on the effects of what she was experiencing, Claire recognised in a daze of pleasure as, without even knowing what she was doing, she rubbed her body provocatively against Brad’s, opening her eyes to gaze drowsily into his, her pupils so dilated that Brad caught his breath in an instantaneous and intense surge of sexual urgency.

She didn’t know what she was doing, he suspected as he fought to control his own searingly intense desire. Not to herself and certainly not to him. Oh, she knew that he was aroused but she didn’t know, had no way of knowing, just how out of character it was for him to be so vulnerable to sexual desire or just how fiercely intense that desire was.

She was still looking up at him, her mouth open over his, her teeth tugging sensually at his bottom lip, and he wondered what she would say if he told her how damned close he was to making the most primitive and urgent sensual use of the table only inches behind them.

And somehow he knew that the way he was feeling right now, the way she was unconsciously telling him what she was feeling … satisfying each other once wasn’t going to be enough … No way was it going to be enough.

As he tried to stifle the groan of longing that her teasingly erotic movements against his body were causing, he caught sight of the kitchen clock and cursed under his breath as he saw the time.

The office was twenty minutes’ drive away and he had an appointment in exactly half an hour with a potential customer.

‘Claire …’ He whispered her name into her mouth, watching in aching regret as he saw her eyes start to cloud. ‘Claire … I’ve got to go,’ he murmured softly.

He’d got to go … But he couldn’t go … She needed him, wanted him.

‘No …’ Claire started to protest huskily, and then abruptly she realised what she was doing, what she was saying, the enormity of her own behaviour. Scarlet-faced with mortification, she pulled away from him, unable even to look at him, never mind actually meet his eyes as she heard him explaining that he had an appointment but that he would get back just as soon as he could.

‘There was no need for you to … to do what you just did,’ she told him in a suffocated voice. ‘I know you feel sorry for me and that …’

Brad cursed silently, realising what she was thinking and what she was probably feeling. She thought that he had made love to her out of pity.

‘Claire—’

‘I suppose it must be quite a change for a man like you. I suppose I’ve got a certain curiosity value, if nothing else. After all, there can’t be many women of thirty-four in this day and age who don’t … who’ve never …’

‘Claire, don’t,’ he begged her. ‘You’re wrong. It wasn’t—’

‘They used to be good music-hall fodder, didn’t they—middle-aged virgins, repressed, dried up, fossilised …?’

He could hear in her voice the tears she wouldn’t let fall and he ached to reach out and take hold of her, but she was already stepping back from him, her eyes wild and angry, warning him not to come any closer.

‘This is all my own fault,’ Claire told him bitterly. ‘I should never have given in to Irene and agreed to let you stay here. I never wanted—’ She stopped but Brad knew what she had been going to say.

‘You never wanted me here in the first place,’ he guessed wryly.

‘Why can’t you all leave me alone to live my life the way I want to?’ she demanded fiercely. ‘You … Irene … even Sally with that ridiculous trick to force us to catch her bouquet. As though anyone gives any credence to that ridiculous superstition these days …’

‘What superstition?’ Brad asked her curiously.

‘The one that says the girl who catches the bride’s bouquet will be the next to marry,’ Claire told him angrily. ‘Sally arranged it so that both of her bridesmaids and I were tricked into catching it. She even put something about it on her postcard.’

The postcard … Suddenly Brad understood. So that was what the reference to Claire having a part-share in a man had meant.

Claire glowered at him furiously as she saw the way he had started to grin.

‘Look, I’ve got to go,’ he reiterated, ‘but I am coming back, and when I do don’t even bother to think about running away, Claire,’ he warned her firmly.

‘This,’ he told her softly, reaching out and touching her lips lightly with his fingertips before she could stop him, ‘is just the beginning …’

Claire stared at him, transfixed by the sheer intensity of the jolt of sensation that had run through her at his touch.

She wanted to tell him that he was wrong, that she didn’t want whatever it was that he thought they had started to continue, but somehow the words just wouldn’t come and she had to watch in tongue-tied silence as he headed for the door.

The plaintive mewing of the kitten broke the heavy silence of the kitchen. Claire went automatically to pick her up, stroking the soft baby fur and marvelling at the little creature’s capacity to trust and survive as she started to purr noisily.

She was still semi-dazed by disbelief at everything that had happened—not just the intimate physical sensuality she had shared with Brad and her unexpected response to him but, even more unbelievably, the fact that she had actually told him about her past, revealed to him the secret shame and shock she had felt and the way it had affected her whole life and her feelings about herself and her sexuality.

Not even to John had she confided her fear that she somehow had been responsible, had invited in some way that young man’s assault on her, but somehow it had almost been as though Brad had known what she was thinking, what she was feeling … had known just how to encourage her to reveal that hidden fear to him.

And as for what had happened afterwards … Could it have been the result of the release of all the emotions she had repressed by locking away her fears about what had happened and her dread that she had somehow been responsible for it?

It was a well-known fact that emotional trauma could have an extremely odd effect on human behaviour.

But what about the fact that the night before last she had been dreaming about Brad in the most erotic way?

The kitten gave a sharp howl of protest, making Claire realise that the eye-dropper was empty of milk.

Apologising to her, Claire refilled it, smiling at the way the little creature clung to the dropper with her front paws as she sucked on the teat.

Sally had already told her that she intended to wait until she was at least thirty before she and Chris started their family. She was twenty-five now, which meant that she was going to have a long wait before she became a grandmother, Claire acknowledged.

A grandmother … A rueful, slightly sad smile touched her mouth as she admitted to herself how much she would secretly have liked to have children, a family of which Sally would always have remained her eldest and most specially loved daughter.

It was not too late, of course. Women of her age and even older were having babies every day, many of them without the support of a husband or partner, but, having been brought up solely by her great-aunt, Claire had very ambivalent feelings about having a child on her own. Of course, if she were ever to find herself in a situation where for some reason she’d conceived accidentally, then there would be no question but that she would have her child and love him or her.

She bent her head protectively over the kitten as she realised the direction her thoughts were taking and just why the thought of an accidental pregnancy should have crossed her mind.

It wasn’t going to happen, of course. She must make sure that it did not happen, she told herself sternly.

Outside it had started to rain, the wind gusting fiercely against the window.

The weather forecast had warned that they were in for a stormy evening with heavy rain and gale-force winds. As she returned Felicity to the new basket that Brad had bought for her and glanced out of the window at the lowering sky, Claire was thankful that she didn’t have to go out.

CHAPTER SEVEN

BRAD grimaced in disgust as he realised that one of the tyres on his hire car had developed a slow puncture and was now flat. Cursing under his breath, he glanced from the car window to the bleak, empty landscape and the heavy rain. It was barely six o’clock in the evening but the sky was so overcast that it was already almost dark.

There was no one else around, the desolate area that the local council had designated as a new industrial complex as yet little more than a vast sea of mud, broken here and there by sets of footings.

It had been a chance remark during his interview with their potential new customer—an official from the head office of a locally based insurance broker which was thinking of installing air-conditioning in all its offices—that had led to his trip out here to look at the new industrial site.

He hadn’t realised, until the other man had mentioned it, that the existing warehouse was built on a piece of potentially very valuable land. The town had expanded rapidly in the years after the warehouse had first been constructed—adjacent to the original owner’s home—and although Brad had been aware that virtually all the property surrounding the warehouse was residential he hadn’t appreciated the significance of this fact until the other man had brought it to his attention.

He had a client, he had told Brad, a well-known local builder, who he suspected would be very interested in acquiring the land for development if it ever came onto the market. After he had gone, a few brief enquiries by Brad had elicited the information that as prime residential building land the warehouse site was very good indeed, and, moreover, that if they were to move to a new purpose-built unit the savings they could make would more than offset the cost of such a move.

On impulse Brad had decided to drive out and look at the new industrial complex that the local council were building, but what he hadn’t bargained for was the fact that his hire car was going to get a puncture.

It was still raining very heavily but there was no help for it—he was going to have to get out and change that tyre, Brad acknowledged, removing his suit jacket and opening the car door.

Ten minutes later, his hair plastered wetly to his scalp, his back soaked to the skin through the inadequate protection of his shirt, Brad had managed to remove the spare wheel from the trunk—the boot of the car, he amended grimly—and to locate the jack.

The unmade road along which he had driven to inspect the site was rapidly changing to a thick mush of sticky mud beneath the lashing downpour. Removing the rubber-backed lining from the boot floor to use as a kneeling pad, Brad started to jack up the car.

Half an hour later, so wet that he might just as well have been standing naked under a shower, and perspiring heavily from his efforts to release the wheel-nuts, Brad gave in. What he wouldn’t give now for a can of lubricant, he thought, but the nuts, fitted by machine, were simply not going to budge.

He reached into his car for his phone and punched in the number of the car-hire firm.

It was over an hour and a half before he finally saw the headlights of the breakdown vehicle coming towards him through the heavy downpour of the continuing rain.

He had been reluctant to run the car engine for too long in case he ran out of petrol and his wet shirt, still clinging clammily and coldly to his skin, coupled with the sharp drop in temperature which had accompanied the driving rain made him shiver and sneeze as he stepped out of the car to greet the mechanic.

‘Better watch it, mate,’ the mechanic told him cheerfully as he sprayed the stubborn wheel-nuts and waited for the lubricant to take effect. ‘Sounds like you’ve got yourself a nasty chill there.’

It was another half an hour before the wheel was finally changed, the wheel-nuts proving recalcitrantly stubborn but eventually coming free.

Thanking the mechanic, Brad climbed back in the car and restarted the engine.

Claire glanced uncertainly at the kitchen clock. Where was Brad? She had assumed, obviously erroneously, that he was going to be back in time for dinner but it was after nine now and she had long since disposed of the meal she had prepared for him.

When Brad hadn’t returned when she had expected she had been tempted to phone the office, but she had reminded herself fiercely that he was simply her lodger and that was the only relationship between them—the only relationship she wanted there to be between them.

It hadn’t been easy to ignore the mocking laughter of the inner voice that had taunted her, Liar, but somehow she had made herself do so. If she’d wanted or needed any confirmation that what had happened between them this afternoon was something that Brad very definitely did not want to take any further, she had surely had it in the very fact that he had delayed his return for so long.

Don’t run away, he had told her, but perhaps, like her, he too had been caught up in the intensity of the moment, suspending normal, rational judgement and reality.

Hannah had been round earlier to leave her a book that she had promised to lend her on traditional Edwardian rose gardens; she would make herself a hot drink and go and sit down in the sitting room and look at it, Claire promised herself. She had just settled down when she saw the headlights of Brad’s car. Uncertainly she bit her lip, not sure whether to stay where she was or go and greet him.

As his landlady, she ought perhaps at least to check to see if he wanted anything to eat. She was not really sure what the mode of behaviour should be between landlady and lodger—where one drew the line between a presence that was welcoming and one that was intrusive.

It was time to feed Felicity, she reminded herself, and if she didn’t appear Brad might think … might assume …

What? she asked herself grimly. That she was afraid … embarrassed … self-conscious? Well, he would be right on all those counts. She did feel all those things and more—much more, she acknowledged, her body suddenly growing hot as she had an unnervingly vivid memory of the way his mouth had felt on hers—his body, his …

Swallowing hard, she reminded herself that, no matter what she felt, she did have a responsibility as his landlady to make at least an attempt to behave in a businesslike manner towards him.

Irene would certainly have something to say to her if she learned that Claire had left him supperless. As she got up and walked towards the door Claire heard Brad walk into the hall and sneeze—once and then again.

Frowning now, she opened the door, her eyes widening in shock as she saw his coatless, damply dishevelled state.

‘Brad, what on earth …?’

‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘There was a problem with the car and I had to wait for them to get a breakdown truck out to me. I should have let you know, but I had no idea how long they were going to be.’

A problem. Her heart thumped anxiously against her chest wall. ‘Not an accident?’ she protested. ‘You—’

‘No, not an accident,’ he assured her. ‘I had a flat tyre, that’s all, but unfortunately—’ he paused for another volley of sneezes, visibly shivering as Claire looked on in appalled consternation—’I tried to change it myself and got soaked,’ he told her ruefully, his teeth suddenly chattering.

‘You’re soaked,’ Claire told him. ‘And frozen. You’d better go upstairs and have a hot shower. I’ll make you a drink and something to eat.’

Had she got any cold or flu remedy in the house? Claire wondered, listening anxiously as she heard Brad pause halfway up the stairs for another fit of obviously feverish sneezing.

He was going to be lucky if all he got away with was a bad chill, she recognised as she hurried into the kitchen to fill the kettle and look through the drawers to try to unearth the old hot-water bottle she always kept handy for cold sufferers. In these centrally heated days it probably wasn’t necessary but somehow it made one feel better, Claire acknowledged. Sally certainly insisted on having it whenever she went down with a cold.

A brief check on the high shelf where she kept her medicines revealed the patent aspirin-based remedy which Sally always swore worked for her. Expelling a small sigh of relief, Claire picked it up. She had no doubt whom Irene would blame if Brad did become ill.

He was used to a much better regulated climate than theirs, she reminded herself as she added some brandy to the mug of coffee that she had made him. He would, perhaps, be better off going straight to bed and keeping warm there rather than coming down for something to eat. She could easily take him a tray of food upstairs.

His bedroom door was ajar when she went up with the coffee but, recalling what had happened the last time she had walked into his room, she paused, knocking and calling out uncertainly.

‘Brad …?’

His husky ‘Come in’ confirmed her earlier suspicions about the state of his health.

‘I’ve brought you some coffee,’ she told him, and added, ‘And I’ve put some brandy in it, so …’

‘Wonderful,’ Brad praised her. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing the towelling robe she had seen him in before. As he reached out to take the coffee from her Claire saw to her concern that his face already looked hectically and feverishly flushed.

‘I think you might be running a temperature,’ she warned him gently.

‘I think you’re probably right,’ Brad agreed. He was beginning to feel decidedly unwell. As a boy he had been very susceptible to frighteningly severe chest infections brought on by any kind of exposure to a cold or flu virus, but fortunately over the years he seemed to have developed a better immunity to them. Until now, he acknowledged, already recognising the signs of a return of his childhood symptoms.