Woman To Wed?

The navy wool with the fine, barely discernible chalk stripe running through it was such a reassuring contrast to the well-washed, snug-fitting jeans that were now beginning to haunt her that she almost laughed out aloud. How could her protagonist from the park possibly be...?

Claire literally felt the blood draining from her face as the two men finally stepped down onto the patio and came into full view.

She could feel the sharp, questioning look that Irene was giving her as she inadvertently drew in her breath in a short hiss of horror, but she refused to look back at her. She dared not do so.

Her face felt as though it was burning hot with chagrined embarrassment and dismay and she knew too that he had recognised her just as instantly as she had him, even though he gave no indication to the others—thankfully—as he extended his hand towards her and said formally, ‘Mrs...?’

‘Oh, good heavens, there’s no need for such formality. Claire—Brad,’ Irene announced, quickly introducing them.

‘Tim, get everyone a drink, will you, whilst I go and check on dinner...?’

‘I... I’ll come with you and give you a hand,’ Claire offered, desperate to escape.

But Irene wouldn’t let her, shaking her head firmly and telling her pointedly, ‘No, you stay and talk to Brad. We’ll drive you over to see the house tomorrow,’ she told their other guest. ‘But in the meantime, if there are any questions you want to ask Claire...’

Claire could feel her heart starting to thump unevenly and heavily as he gave her a long, steady look. Her face, her whole body felt so suffused with colour that she was surprised that Irene hadn’t commented on it.

‘I understand you’re a widow...’ was his only comment as Tim, obedient to his wife’s commands, bustled about getting them drinks.

‘Yes...yes. John, my husband, died some time ago...’

‘And you’ve lived on your own since then?’

Claire gave him a sharp look, made faintly uncomfortable by some undercurrent to his words. What was he trying to imply? Did he assume that just because... just because he had caught her momentarily off guard this afternoon with his...his unforgivably arrogant male behaviour in taking hold of her and kissing her... and just because, for the briefest possible smidgen of time, she might actually have involuntarily and inexplicably responded to him...that she was some kind of...that she...that her widowhood had been filled with a series of relationships...men...?

Indignation as well as a certain amount of self-conscious guilt coloured her face a soft, pretty pink, but when she opened her mouth to refute his subtle condemnation to her own shock she heard herself saying almost coyly, ‘Well, no, as a matter of fact...until recently there was someone...’

It was left to Tim, returning with their drinks, to rescue her from the potential consequences of her own folly by picking up the tail-end of their conversation and telling Brad jovially, ‘Claire’s only been on her own a matter of days. Sally, her late husband’s daughter, was living with her until she got married—’

‘Your stepdaughter,’ Brad elucidated, turning to take his drink from Tim with a brief smile that was far, far warmer than the one he had given her but nothing like as warm as the one he had bestowed on Paul and Janey in the park this afternoon, Claire registered, wondering at the same time why on earth she should feel so ridiculously forlorn and shut out somehow because she was excluded from that warmth.

Well, at least one thing was pretty sure, Claire decided fatalistically; now that he had recognised her and knew who she was, Brad Stevenson was hardly likely to want to stay with her.

For some reason, instead of the security and relief she would have expected to feel at such knowledge she felt a small and astonishingly painful stab of regret.

Regret...for what? Or would it be more appropriate to ask herself for whom?

‘Yes...yes. Sally, my stepdaughter,’ she agreed, flushing a little more pinkly under the look he was giving her.

‘Claire is the sort of person that others just naturally gravitate towards,’ Irene added, coming into the room to announce that dinner was ready. ‘She always seems to have a house full of people. If John hadn’t been so much older than her I’m sure she would have filled their home with children—’

‘Your husband was a good deal older than you?’ Brad interjected, looking even more assessingly at Claire.

What on earth was wrong with the man? Why did he have to make every question he asked her sound not merely like an accusation but virtually like a denunciation? Listening to him just then, she had heard quite dearly the disapproval and the cynicism in his voice, and she could see herself quite clearly through his eyes: the young, calculating woman deliberately enticing a much more financially well off and vulnerably older man into falling for her.

The truth was that her relationship with John had been nothing like that...nothing at all.

‘He was older, yes,’ she confirmed quietly now. Suddenly she felt very tired and drained. She was the one who should be questioning him, not the other way round, she told herself indignantly. How could she possibly allow him to move into her home after what he had done?

But, no matter how hard she tried to stir up a sense of injustice as they made their way to the dining room, honesty compelled her to admit that the last thing she had experienced in his arms was her normal lack of interest in sensual intimacy between a man and a woman and that she had, disconcertingly, actually responded to him.

Brad might have broken all the rules by kissing her but, startled though she had been by his behaviour, it had been her own unfamiliar and totally unexpected response to him which had really thrown her.

After years of passively accepting that she was simply not a very sexual person it had not been a pleasant experience to discover that she was in danger of responding to a totally unknown man with the kind of sensual hunger that she had always associated with books and films and with having far more to do with fiction than reality.

She still wasn’t quite sure which aspect of her own behaviour she found the least palatable—the fact that she had been so unexpectedly sensually aware of and aroused by him or the fact that her behaviour had made her question if she knew herself as well as she had always thought.

Both led to the kind of in-depth thinking about herself and her past which she found easier to avoid than to face, which was probably why, right now, she found herself not just embarrassed to have met Brad again but almost antagonistic towards him as well.

Once they were sitting down and eating, to Claire’s mild irritation and embarrassment, Irene started to list enthusiastically Claire’s domestic abilities for Brad’s benefit.

‘Claire is a wonderful cook,’ she told him when he had commented on her own cooking. ‘Of course, my brother, John, was an extremely fussy eater and he never really approved of the fact that Claire insisted on growing her own vegetables...’

‘Oh?’ Brad gave Claire a curious look. ‘Most health-conscious people these days take the view that homegrown produce is the best.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t that he disapproved of that,’ Irene explained. ‘No, John simply thought that that kind of gardening wasn’t really suitable for a woman. He—’

‘My husband would have preferred me to hire someone to look after our vegetable plot.’ Claire felt compelled to interrupt Irene and explain. ‘He didn’t think that sort of gardening was... He felt I should confine myself to—’

‘John was a very old-fashioned man,’ Tim cut in, giving Claire an affectionate, supportive smile. ‘He believed that a woman’s role in the garden should be confined to the picking and arranging of flowers.’

‘John simply didn’t want Claire overtaxing herself.’ Irene bristled, quick to defend her brother.

‘And besides, our mother always had someone in to do the heavy work. Of course, you know, Tim, that John always blamed you for Claire’s interest in her vegetable garden. You were the one, after all, who encouraged her, going round there virtually every weekend to help her.’

Whilst Claire and Tim exchanged slightly guilty and conspiratorial looks Irene sighed and shook her head, grumbling about the amount of time that Tim gave to his precious garden.

Then Tim commented enthusiastically to Claire, ‘I’m going to have another try with the asparagus, dig out a new bed, and I was thinking... That south wall of yours—there’s no reason why we shouldn’t try a grapevine on it. There are some new strains now that are far more hardy.’

‘You prefer the domestic environment, then, do you, Claire?’ Brad overrode Tim, his voice somehow unexpectedly hard-edged as he looked almost challengingly at her. ‘You’ve never had any desire to have a career?’ he asked pointedly, or so it seemed to Claire.

‘Being a stepmother to Sally and John’s wife was my career,’ Claire told him stiffly.

‘A career which is now over,’ Brad said silkily. ‘Haven’t you been tempted, as so many modern women are, to take up the challenge of making a place for yourself in the commercial arena? After all, these days there is no such thing as a job for life. All of us have to be flexible, adaptable and to accept that sometimes, for our own good, we have to change career paths.’

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.

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