Mistress To Her Husband

Her task completed, she headed for the door.

‘Where are you going?’ Laura demanded anxiously.

‘I’m leaving,’ Kate answered patiently. ‘I’ve written my resignation letter. As of now, I no longer work here!’

‘But, Kate, you can’t leave just like that—without telling anyone!’ Laura protested.

‘Watch me!’ Kate answered succinctly, walking calmly towards the door.

But inwardly she was feeling far from calm. Frantically she clamped down on her treacherous thoughts.

Kathy was working here! Sean paced the floor of his office, having terminated the call from the wife of his financial adviser. She had called to invite him to a dinner party she was planning, but Sean did not do dinner parties. His mouth twisted bitterly. Until he had met Kathy he hadn’t even known the correct cutlery to use. She had been the one who had gently taught him. Gently rubbed off his rough edges. And he…

He strode angrily over to the office window and stared out of it. He had deliberately not kept track of Kathy after their divorce. There hadn’t been any point. The marriage had been over and he had made her a generous financial settlement, even if she had returned it to his solicitor intact. Who had she married? When had she married him?

He went back to the desk and picked up the personnel files he had not yet read.

CHAPTER TWO

AS SHE climbed out of her car Kate acknowledged that really there was no way she should have been driving. She was shaking from head to foot, and she had no real idea of how she had driven home. The entire journey had been a pain-fuelled blur of fighting back unwanted memories whilst surge after surge of panic and anger had washed through her.

‘Kate!’

Kate tried to looked relaxed and smile as Carol, her friend and neighbour, came hurrying towards her.

‘What are you doing back so early?’ Carol asked, adding teasingly, ‘Did the interview go so well that the new boss gave you the rest of the day off?’

Kate opened her mouth to make a suitably lighthearted response, but to her chagrin she could feel her lips starting to tremble as emotions overwhelmed her.

‘I’ve handed in my notice,’ she told Carol shakily. ‘I…I had to…My…the new boss is my ex-husband!’ Tears filled her eyes. She was shaking so violently she could have been in shock, Kate recognised distantly.

‘Come on, let’s get you inside,’ she heard Carol announcing in a motherly voice. ‘And then you can tell me all about it.’

Ten minutes later, after she had made them both a cup of coffee and chatted calmly about their sons, Carol turned to Kate and said gently, ‘I’m not going to pry, Kate, but if you want to get it off your chest I’m a good listener, and I promise it won’t go any further.’ When Kate made no response, but simply continued to sit huddled in her chair, her hands gripping her coffee mug, Carol added quietly, ‘Not even to Tom, if that’s what you want.’

Kate turned her head to look at her, her gaze blank and withdrawn, then forced herself to focus on her friend.

Taking a deep breath, she began to speak, slowly and painfully. ‘I met Sean when I was eighteen. He was building an extension for my aunt and uncle’s neighbours. We’d had a very hot summer, and he worked bare-chested in a pair of old tight-fitting jeans—’

‘Mmm, sexy. I can picture the scene.’ Carol smiled encouragingly, relieved to see just the merest twitch of humour lifting Kate’s mouth.

‘I used to walk the long way round just so that I could see him,’ Kate admitted. ‘I hadn’t thought he’d notice me, but then one night at a local club he was there and he asked me to dance. Fantasising over him when I walked past the building site was one thing. Being confronted with him there in front of me in the flesh was another! I felt intimidated by him.’ Kate gave small shrug and looked at Carol.

‘I was a naïve eighteen-year-old virgin, and all that fierce, potent hot male sexuality was a bit overwhelming. Unfortunately he thought I was rejecting him, and…’ She shook her head. ‘I didn’t know it then, but like me he’d had a very unhappy and lonely childhood, which had left him with a bit of a chip on his shoulder and a determination to succeed. I can see now that I was a bit of a challenge to him, because I was a girl from a different background. A trophy girlfriend, I suppose the press would call it nowadays, and for a while I was good enough for him as just that. Good enough to marry, in fact. But once he’d become very successful I think he began to realise that I wasn’t much of a trophy after all, and that with his money he could afford a much, much better one than me.’

Carol could hear the pain in Kate’s voice. ‘You obviously loved him,’ she said softly.

‘Loved him?’ Kate looked at her starkly, her emotions darkening her eyes. ‘Yes, I loved him—totally and completely, blindly and foolishly I realise now. Because I believed then that he felt the same way about me!’

‘Oh, Kate!’ Carol sympathised, her own eyes prickling with emotion as she covered Kate’s cold folded hands with her own.

Kate swallowed and then continued. ‘My aunt and uncle were furious when it came out that I was seeing him—especially my aunt. There was a dreadful row, and it came out that she had never liked my mother, had been appalled when she had married her brother. She told me that if I didn’t agree to stop seeing Sean they would wash their hands of me and disown me. But I couldn’t give Sean up. I loved him too much. He had become my whole world! And when I told him what my aunt had said he told me that he wasn’t going to let me go back to them, to be hurt and bullied, that from now on he would look after me.’

Kate exhaled in a deep sigh.

‘We were married six weeks later. Sean had finished the extension by then, and was ready to move on to his next job.’

Carol could see the events of the day were beginning to catch up with Kate and, surveying her friend’s exhausted hollow-cheeked face, she stood up and told her firmly, ‘Look, you’re all in. Why don’t you have a rest? I’ll collect Oliver from nursery, if you like, and give him his tea.’

Kate was tempted to refuse. But while a part of her was longing desperately to have the warm, solid feel of Oliver’s sturdy body in her arms, so that she could hold him and take comfort from his presence, another part of her said that this was not fair to her son and that she must not get into the habit of leaning on him emotionally. And anyway, she had things to do, she reminded herself grimly. Like finding a new job for a start!

‘You’re very kind,’ she told Carol wanly.

‘Nonsense. I know you’d do the same for me.’

She would, of course, but it was hardly likely that she would ever be asked to do so, Kate acknowledged wearily after Carol had gone. Carol had a loving husband, and George had two sets of adoring grandparents only too willing to spend as much time as they could with their grandson.

And Oliver only had her. No grandparents. Just her. Just her? What about Sean? He was Oliver’s father, after all, Kate reminded herself angrily.

Sean!

Her whole body felt heavy with misery and despair. She had struggled so hard, and it seemed so unfair that she should have her precious financial security snatched from her because her ex-husband had taken over the company.

For the first time since Sean had announced that their marriage was over Kate felt angry with herself for not accepting the generous pay-off he had offered her. Two million pounds and she had turned it down! She had turned it down not knowing that she was already pregnant with Oliver. And then, when she had realised…Well, she had sworn that she would never ask for anything from the man who had cold-bloodedly told her that he had changed his mind about wanting to be a father and that he had no desire to tie himself to a wife he no longer loved.

The pain was just as sharp as she remembered it being, and she stiffened against it. It should not exist any more. It should have been destroyed, just like Sean had destroyed their marriage.

All those things he had said to her and she had believed in; like how he, too, longed for children. All those promises he had made her—that those children, their children, would have the parental love neither of them had ever known. They had all been lies.

Against her will Kate could feel herself being drawn back into the past and its painful memories.

There had been no warning of what was to come, or of how vulnerable her happiness was. In fact only the previous month Sean had taken her away on an idyllic and very romantic break to an exclusive country house hotel—to make up, he had told her lovingly, for the fact that the negotiations he had been involved in to secure a very valuable contract had gone on so long that they had not been able to have a summer holiday.

They had arrived late in the afternoon and had enjoyed a leisurely and very romantic walk through the grounds. And then they had gone back to their room and Sean had undressed her and made love to her.

They had been late for dinner, she remembered—very late. And during it Sean had handed her a large brown envelope, telling her to open it. When she had done so she had found inside the sale details of a pretty Georgian rectory she and Sean had driven past early in the year.

‘You said it was the kind of place you had always wanted to live in,’ he had reminded her simply. ‘It’s coming up for sale.’

She’d spent the rest of the evening in a daze, already excitedly planning how she would decorate the house, and insisting that Sean listen to her as she went through the house room by room.

They had made love again that night, and in the morning. And afterwards she had lain in Sean’s arms, her eyes closed, whilst she luxuriated in breathing in the sexually replete scent of him and wondered what on earth she had done to merit such happiness.

Less than a month later she had been wondering what on earth she had done to merit such intense pain.

One minute—or so she had thought—Sean had been negotiating for the purchase of the rectory; the next he had been telling her that he no longer loved her and that he intended to divorce her.

Kate closed her eyes and lay back in her chair. She felt both physically and emotionally exhausted. What she should be doing right now, she told herself grimly, was worrying about how she was going to get another job, instead of wallowing in self-pity about the past.

She would have to enrol with an employment agency, and then probably take on as much work as she could get until she found a permanent position. She had some savings—her rainy day money—but that would not last for very long.

Why, why, why had Sean had to come back into her life like this? Hadn’t he hurt her enough?

Tiredly Kate stopped trying to fight her exhaustion and allowed herself to drift off to sleep.

The dream was one she had had before. She tried to pull herself awake and out of it, as she had taught herself to do, but it was too late. It was rushing down on her, swamping her, and she was already lost in it.

She was with Sean, in the sitting room of their house. It was mid-afternoon and he had come home early from work. She ran to greet him, but he pushed her away, his expression not that of the husband she knew but that of the angry, aggressive man he had been when she had first met him.

‘Sean, what’s wrong?’ she asked him, reaching out a hand to him and flinching as he ignored her loving gesture. He turned away from her and walked over to the window, blocking out its light. Uncomprehendingly she watched him, and the first tendrils of fear began to curl around her heart.

‘I want a divorce.’

‘A divorce! No…What…? Sean, what are you saying?’ she demanded, panic, shock and disbelief gripping hold of her throat and giving her voice a hoarse, choked sound that seemed to echo round the room.

‘I’m saying that our marriage is over and I want a divorce.’

‘No! No! You don’t mean that. You can’t mean that!’ Was that piteous little voice really her own? ‘You love me.’

‘I thought I did,’ Sean agreed coldly. ‘But I’ve realised that I don’t. You and I want different things out of life, Kathy. You want children. I’m sick of having to listen to you boring on about it. I don’t want children!’

‘That’s not true. How can you say that, Sean?’ She stared at him in disbelief, unable to understand what he was saying. ‘You’ve always said how much you want children,’ she reminded him shakily. ‘We said we wanted a big family because our own childhoods—’

If he heard the pain in her voice and was affected by it he certainly didn’t show it.

‘For God’s sake,’ he ground out. ‘Grow up, will you, Kathy? When I said that I’d have said anything to get into your knickers.’

The contemptuous biting words flayed her sensitive emotions.

‘Look, I don’t intend to argue about this. Our marriage is over and that’s that. I’ve already spoken to my solicitor. You’ll be okay financially…’

‘Is there someone else?’

Silently they looked at one another whilst Kathy prayed that he would say no, but instead he taunted her. ‘What do you think?’

Her whole body was shaking, and even though she didn’t want to she started to cry, sobbing out Sean’s name in frantic pleading disbelief…

Why the hell was he doing this? Sean’s hands clenched on the wheel as he drove. What was the point in risking resurrecting the past? She was easily replaceable. But Sean knew that he was being unfair. She was, according to John and from what he had been able to recognise himself, an extremely intelligent and diligent employee—the kind of employee, in fact, that he wanted. No way was he going to allow her to walk out of her job without working her statutory notice period.

She was his ex-wife, damn it, Sean reminded himself grimly. But this was nothing to do with her being his ex-wife, and nothing to do either with the fact that he had discovered from her records, contrary to his assumptions, she was not married.

He was in the village now, and his mouth hardened slightly. Oh, yes, this was exactly the kind of environment she liked. Small, cosy, homely—everything that her life with her appalling aunt and uncle had not been.

He swung the car into a parking space he had spotted, stopped the engine and got out.

He hadn’t told anyone as yet about the fact that she had handed in her notice. Officially she was still in the company’s employ…in his employ.

He skirted the duck pond, his eyes bleak as he headed for Kate’s front door.

He was just about to knock when an elderly woman who had been watching him from her own front gate called out to him.

‘You’ll have to go round the back, young man.’

Young man! Sean grimaced. He didn’t think he had ever been young—he had never been allowed to be young! And as for being a man…Something dark and dangerous hardened his whole face as he obeyed the elderly woman’s instructions.

It took him several minutes to find the path which ran behind the back gardens of the cottages. The gate to Kate’s wouldn’t open at first, and then he realised that it was bolted on the inside and he had to reach over to unbolt it. Hardly a good anti-thief device, he reflected, giving it a frowning and derisory look as he unfastened it and walked up the path.

He frowned even more when he realised that the back door was slightly open. If Kate had had his upbringing she would have been a damn sight more safety conscious!

His hand was on the door when he heard her cry out his name.

He reacted immediately, thrusting open the door and striding into the kitchen, then coming to an abrupt halt when he saw her lying in the chair asleep. He felt as though all the air had been knocked out of his lungs, his chest tightening whilst he tried to draw in a ragged breath of air.

He had always loved watching her as she slept, absorbing the sight of her with a greedy secret pleasure—her long dark lashes, lying silkily against her delicate skin, her lips slightly parted, her face turned to one side so that the whole of one pretty ear was visible. The very fact that she was asleep made her so vulnerable, showed how much she trusted him, showed how much she was in need of his protection…

Without thinking Sean stepped forward, his hand lifting to push the heavy swathe of hair off her face, and then abruptly he realised that this was the present, not the past, and he stopped.

But it was too late. Somehow, as though she had sensed he was there, Kate cried out his name in great distress. For a second he hesitated, and then, taking a deep breath, he put his hand on her shoulder and gave her a small squeeze.

Immediately Kate woke up, and as she opened her eyes he demanded brusquely, ‘Sean, what?’

Kate stared up at him. Her dream was still fogging her brain, and it took her several valuable seconds to wake up fully, incomprehension clouding her eyes.

‘You were crying out my name,’ Sean prompted softly.

Kate felt a prickle of awareness run over her. And then the reality of what she had been dreaming hit her. Her face started to burn. All at once there was a dangerous tension in the small room.

‘I was dreaming, that’s all,’ she defended herself sharply.

‘Do you often dream about me?’

The danger was increasing by the heartbeat.

She could feel her skin tightening in reaction to his taunt. ‘It was more of a nightmare,’ she retaliated quickly.

‘You haven’t remarried.’ He said it flatly, like an accusation, in an abrupt change of tack.

Clumsily Kate got to her feet. Even standing up she was still a long way short of his height. She cursed the fact that she was not wearing her heels, and felt the old bitterness mobilising inside her

‘Remarry? Do you really think I would want to risk marrying again after what you did to me?’ she demanded hotly. ‘No, I haven’t remarried, and I never will.’

And there was also a very good reason why she wouldn’t, but she had no intention of telling him so. It was her son. Her precious Ollie was not going to be given a stepfather who might not love him. Kate had firsthand knowledge of what that felt like, and she was not going to subject her son to the same misery she had known whilst she was growing up.

‘Why did you change your name?’

So he still had that same skill at slipping in those dangerous questions like a knife between the ribs. She wanted to shiver, but she folded her arms instead, not wanting him to see her body’s betrayal of her anxiety.

‘Why shouldn’t I? I certainly didn’t want your name, and I didn’t want my aunt and uncle’s either, so I changed my name by deed poll to my mother’s maiden name. What are you doing here anyway?’ she demanded angrily. ‘You have no right—’

‘I’ve come round here because of this,’ Sean said curtly, stopping her protests as he removed her letter of resignation from his jacket pocket, and with it another fat white envelope.

‘This is your contract of employment,’ he announced. ‘It binds you to working a statutory notice period of four weeks. You can’t just walk out on your job, Kate.’

Kate’s mouth had gone dry, and she knew that her eyes were betraying her shock and her chagrin.

‘You…you can’t hold me to that,’ she began valiantly. ‘You—’

‘Oh, yes, I can.’ Sean stopped her swiftly. ‘And I fully intend to do so.’

‘But why?’ Kate demanded wildly, stiffening as she heard in her own voice how close she was to the edge of her self-control. ‘I should have thought you’d want me gone as much as I want to go, given the speed with which you ended our marriage! You can’t want me working for you. Your ex-wife, the woman you rejected? The woman you—’

‘Rules are rules—you are legally obliged to work your notice and I want you back at your desk so that you can hand over your responsibilities to your replacement.’

‘You can’t make me!’ Kate protested. Her voice might sound strong and determined, but inside she was panicking, she recognised. She did, after all, have a legal obligation to work her notice period, and if she didn’t it could cause other employers to think twice about taking her on. With Oliver to bring up she just could not afford to be out of work.

‘Yes, I can,’ Sean corrected her. ‘You may have walked out on our marriage, but no way are you walking out of your job!’

Kate’s shock deepened with every word he threw at her.

‘I left because you were having an affair—you know that. You were the one who ended our marriage, Sean.’

‘I’m not interested in discussing the past, only the present.’

His response left her floundering and vulnerable. It had been a mistake to refer to their marriage, and even more of a mistake to mention his affair. The last thing she wanted was to have him taunt her with still suffering because of it.

‘I like value for my money, Kate. Surely you can remember that?’

His comment gave her a much needed opportunity to hit back at him, and she took it.

‘I don’t allow myself to remember anything about you.’ The angry, contemptuous words were out before she could stop herself from saying them. She could feel the tightening of the tension between them, and with it came dangerous memories of a very different kind of tension they had once shared.

‘Anything?’ Sean challenged her rawly, as though he had somehow read her thoughts. ‘Not even this?’

The feel of his hands on her arms, dragging her against his body, the heat of his flesh, the feel of his body itself against her own, was so shockingly and immediately familiar and welcome that she couldn’t move.

Somehow, of its own volition, her body angled itself into Sean’s. Somehow her hands were sliding beneath his jacket and up over his back. Somehow her head was tilting back and her eyes were opening wide, so that she could look into the familiar hot, passionate blue of his.

Shockingly, it was as though a part of her had been waiting for this, for him, and not just waiting but wanting, longing, needing.

The steady tick of the kitchen clock was drowned out by the sound of their mingled breathing: Sean’s harsh and heavy; her own much lighter, shallow and unsteady.

The touch of his hand on the nape of her neck as his thumb slowly caressed her skin sent a signal to her body which it immediately answered.

Now she had to close her eyes, in case Sean could read in them what she could feel—the small, telling lift of her breasts as they surged in longing for his touch, the tight ache of her nipples as they hungered for his mouth, the swift clench of her belly and, lower than that, the softening swelling moistness of her sex.

She felt the hard warmth of his mouth and her own clung to it, her lips obediently parting to the fierce thrust of his tongue—a feeling she remembered so well.

Her fingers clenched into his shoulders beneath his suit jacket as the familiar possessive pressure of his kiss silenced the moan of pleasure bubbling in her throat.

When his hands dropped to her hips, and his fingers curled round the slenderness of her bones, Kate went weak with longing. Soon he would be touching her breasts, tugging fiercely at her clothes in his hunger to touch her intimately. And she wanted him to. She wanted him to so much.

Fine shudders of eager longing were already surging rhythmically through her. If she slid her hand down from his back she could touch the hard readiness of him, stroke her fingers along it, tormenting him, tormenting them both until he picked her up and—

‘Mummy…?’

The sound of Oliver’s voice from the other side of the back door jolted her back to reality.

Immediately Kate pulled back from Sean, and equally immediately he released her, so that when the door opened and Oliver came in, followed by Carol, they were standing three feet apart, ignoring one another.

‘Ollie wanted to come home, so—’ Carol came to a halt as she saw Sean, and looked uncertainly at Kate.

‘Thanks, Carol.’ Kate bent down to receive the full weight of Oliver’s compact sturdy little-boy body as he ran towards her, only too glad of an excuse to conceal her face. Picking up Oliver, she avoided looking at both her neighbour and Sean.