A Rekindled Passion

‘Joss, there you are. It’s time we left.’ The redhead drew level with them and glowered warningly at Kate. ‘You know you promised we wouldn’t be staying long.’

Kate winced at her lack of manners, wondering faintly if the woman realised that she was doing her a favour and that the last thing she wanted was for Joss to linger.

She gave them both a polite, controlled smile and said brightly, ‘It was good of you to come. Please do excuse me,’ and quickly sidestepped them both, heading for the house and security.

It was a good half-hour before she was able to accept that they had actually gone and that she was safe, but the shock of Joss’s unexpected appearance had taken its toll, and it was impossible for her to relax and enjoy what was left of the day.

By the time the last of the guests were leaving she had a pounding headache, and the last thing she wanted to do was to join John’s family for the celebratory meal they had organised at the Fleece.

Sophy and John had gone. They were flying to Antigua for a three-week honeymoon, and Sophy’s face had been blissfully rapt as she and John left for the airport.

‘Takes you back, doesn’t it?’ John’s mother had sighed…and had then bitten her lip in embarrassment and apologised.

‘Heavens, I’m sorry…that was tactless.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Kate had assured her, and then, because of the pity she could see in her eyes, she had added firmly, ‘And besides, the relationship I had with Sophy’s father was as important to me as though we were married. It was only later when I discovered that he already had a wife and a child.’

Mary Broderick bit her bottom lip guiltily. She hadn’t meant to raise unhappy memories for Sophy’s mother, and, despite her initial shock at discovering that her son’s mother-in-law was a woman of thirty-seven who looked barely thirty, and who had conceived her daughter outside marriage when she was only sixteen during a relationship with an already married man, once she had met Kate she had quickly realised that, however deplorable the circumstances of Sophy’s conception, her mother was not to blame for them.

‘Do you never see him…hear from him?’ she asked awkwardly, wanting to fill the painful silence.

Kate shook her head quickly and lied, ‘And nor do I want to.’

Her head was pounding with sickening intensity. All she wanted to do was to go and lie down on her bed, but instead she had the evening to go through.

When it was all over, she would sleep for a week, she promised herself tiredly as she forced a smile to her lips and tried to appear as though she was enjoying herself.

CHAPTER THREE

OF COURSE, she didn’t. On Monday morning it was back to her normal routine of preparing the very special sandwiches that she and Lucy delivered to offices in York, along with their special executive lunches.

They were frantically busy, with two of their staff off on holiday and Kate having to drive into York in their van to make the deliveries and pick up fresh supplies.

After that she had an appointment with a woman who wanted them to cater for her husband’s fortieth birthday party, and then there was an evening reception in York, but thankfully Lucy was doing that.

The week whirled by and it was Friday before she knew it. Thankfully she had managed to give herself Friday afternoon off. The house was desperately untidy and needed cleaning from top to bottom, she acknowledged ruefully, and then there was the garden…The marquee people had been as careful as they could, but…

Acknowledging wryly that her afternoon off was likely to prove more arduous than working, she rushed back from York, dropped off the fresh supplies at Lucy’s home and then hurried home.

All afternoon she worked at top speed, refusing to acknowledge that part of her determination to keep busy was rooted in her desperate need to hold at bay the shock of seeing Joss again so unexpectedly and unwantedly.

By six o’clock she was exhausted, but she refused to allow herself to rest. There was still the garden to do, and it was silly not to take advantage of the long summer evening.

She hadn’t bothered to stop for lunch and she wasn’t hungry now. In fact, she hadn’t been hungry all week, and had lost a dramatic amount of weight. Lucy had noticed it and teased her about it, saying that it was the bride who traditionally wasted away, not her mother, and Kate had grimly let her believe that it was the build-up to Sophy’s wedding that had caused her to drop so many pounds, rather than admitting the truth.

At nine o’clock, her back aching and her muscles trembling with exhaustion, she acknowledged that it was time to give up.

Wincing as her strained muscles protested, she went inside and straight upstairs to her bedroom.

After her parents’ death, although she had cleared out their room, she had felt unable to move into it, and so she was still using the bedroom she had grown up in. She and Sophy had shared a bathroom, her parents having their own, and she acknowledged tiredly how empty the house felt now that she was living in it on her own.

Showered and dried, she grimaced slightly at her unmade-up face and wildly curling hair. All she wanted to do was to go to bed, but there were the books waiting downstairs for her attention…if she could just spend a couple of hours on them now…

Tiredly she went down to the comfortably shabby sitting-room at the back of the house. It overlooked the garden and had been her parents’ favourite room.

Both she and Sophy had grown up in this room with its faded chintz furniture, and its worn rugs and polished parquet floor.

She got the books out and sat down at the desk that had belonged to her mother.

She was so tired that it was virtually impossible to concentrate on what she was doing. The french windows were open, admitting the cool evening air and the musky scent of the bourbon roses.

Her back ached appallingly. If she could just lean back in the chair and close her eyes for a couple of minutes…

When the expensive Jaguar saloon car purred up over the gravel, she was too deeply asleep to hear it.

It stopped alongside her own car, the driver’s door opening and then closing again with a quiet click.

The man who emerged from the car straightened up and looked warily at the silent house.

It had been a long drive from London, and an even longer week, with this meeting on his mind throughout the length of it. He had been hard pressed to leave the office early, but eventually he had managed it. The ailing company he had taken over from his father twenty-odd years ago was now high-powered and very successful, but there were times when that success tasted like ashes in his mouth.

He walked to the back door and knocked briefly on it. There was no bell, and when no one answered his summons he turned to glance back at the car parked next to his own and his frown deepened.

Her car was here, but that didn’t necessarily mean that she was in. Then the faint movement of the open french windows on the other side of the back door caught his eye and he walked curiously towards them.

The light was just beginning to fade, the room illuminated by a lamp on the desk several feet away.

There were papers scattered on it; the breeze had lifted some of them on to the floor; a familiar blonde head lay on the desk, pillowed on two slender, tanned arms.

The breath locked in his throat as he stared at her ringless left hand. He took a step towards her and then another, stopping abruptly when he saw the silver photograph frame on the desk.

He focused hungrily on the photograph inside it. Her daughter. His daughter. Then with a bitter frown he overcame his qualms and reached out to shake her awake.

The sensation of a hand on her shoulder was at once both familiar and alien, bringing her instantly out of her exhausted doze and into alert tenseness.

As she opened her eyes she struggled to sit up, wincing as her stiff neck muscles protested.

Someone was leaning towards her, blocking out the light from the lamp so that his features were indistinct, and then he said her name and a wild shudder convulsed her.

‘Kate, wake up,’ he demanded peremptorily, and to her own astonishment she heard herself saying grumpily and mundanely, as though the sight of him here in her sitting-room was nothing unexpected at all.

‘I am awake. What do you want? What are you doing here, Joss?’

Her mind, fogged by exhaustion and shock, relaxed its normally vigilant hold on her defences. She lifted her head, rubbing her stiff neck muscles and glaring at him fiercely.

‘How did you get in?’

She saw the open french windows and grimaced wryly. It was her fault. She had left the french windows open.

A little to her surprise, she saw his mouth thin angrily as he too looked at the open doors.

‘Anyone could have walked in here,’ he told her tersely.

Her eyes widened a little as she caught the note of reproval in his voice.

‘Anyone could,’ she agreed drily. ‘But you did. Why? What are you doing here, Joss?’

Her brief surge of shock-born defiance left her as he responded derisively, ‘I think you already know the answer to that question. I’ve come to talk to you about your daughter…our daughter…’

He stressed the possessive pronoun, watching her with eyes that seemed to see right inside her soul. Hard, bitter eyes, that seemed to blame and accuse; but who was he to accuse her? Why should he feel bitter?

He had caught her off guard, and as she struggled to reassemble her defences she licked her over-dry lips, tension seeping into her muscles and paralysing them.

‘What do you mean?’ she challenged, knowing as she spoke that she had hesitated for far too long.

He gave her a derisive look.

‘You know exactly what I mean, Kate.’

She moved restlessly in her chair. It was hard and uncomfortable, making her feel even more physically vulnerable. She longed for the soft comfort of one of the easy chairs by the fire where she could at least relax her compressed muscles, but he was standing right in front of her, making it impossible for her to move without brushing past him.

‘That was some shock, seeing you so unexpectedly like that last week—and then to discover, almost by accident, that—’ He broke off abruptly. ‘My cousin, John’s mother, invited me to have dinner with them last Sunday. We had a most illuminating conversation.’

The grey eyes bored into her, making her heart pound with fear. She wanted to drag her gaze away, to break the hypnotic concentration of his eyes and the anger she could sense he was only just able to control.

‘Sophy is my child.’ He said it flatly, refusing to allow her the opportunity to deny it.

She moistened her dry lips again, wanting to tell him that he was wrong, but her throat muscles refused to respond to her need and she could only stare wildly and betrayingly at him, while the colour came and went under her skin.

Her exhausted brain couldn’t cope with the hostility emanating from him. Last weekend she had dreaded this very confrontation…dreaded the denouement which would have ruined Sophy’s wedding day, and when it had not come she had reassured herself that acknowledging Sophy as his child was the very last thing Joss was likely to do.

Safe and reassured, she had started to let go of her fear, and in doing so had rendered herself vulnerable.

Her whole body ached with shock and fear.

‘I can’t see the point in dragging up the past now,’ she challenged him bitterly.

He stared at her for a moment as though he had never seen her before, his eyes merciless, his mouth a hard line of contempt. She focused on it despairingly and then, whether because of her fear or her exhaustion, she did not know which, she suffered the shockingly hallucinatory sensation of suddenly slipping back in time, so that when she looked at his mouth she remembered how it had felt moving against her own…how she had felt…almost sick with excitement and desire, wanting him so much…loving him so much…

‘The point is that I have already missed out on the first twenty years of my daughter’s life,’ Joss told her gratingly, destroying the fragile spell of the past and jolting her into the present, ‘and I do not intend to miss out on the next twenty. You had no right to do what you did, Kate,’ he told her savagely. ‘All right, so you discovered that you no longer wanted me…that there was no place for me in your life, but…What’s wrong?’ he asked her roughly, seeing the way the colour drained from her face, leaving it pinched and white with shock, her eyes enormous in its delicacy, their soft depths betraying her disbelief and pain.

It was a look that no one could have manufactured, painful and haunting enough to make him stop in his tracks to focus on her and study her.

‘What’s wrong, Kate?’ he repeated less savagely.

She had started to tremble violently, her reaction so intense that he reacted instinctively to it, reaching out to clasp her wrists firmly in warm fingers as though in comfort, while he registered the frantic race of her pulse.

She made an inarticulate sound of pain in her throat and tried to stand up…to escape. What was he trying to do to her? Why was he trying to pretend, to lie, to hurt her more than she had already been hurt?

Her cramped muscles refused to respond to her need to get away from him, and as she tried to pull herself free and push past him her legs simply refused to support her. She fell heavily against him, with an impotent cry of frustrated panic.

The too familiar scent of him was all around her, and as she struggled to escape from it she felt his arms locking round her. The silk shirt he was wearing felt nothing like the T-shirts and rough woollen shirts he had worn before, but the body beneath it was the same, hard and warm, its scent and shape dangerously evocative of the past. The harder Kate tried to escape from the miasma of emotions pouring through her, the more impossible escape became. Confused, exhausted, unable to understand why he was accusing her

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