Reclaiming His Wife

It was one of the reasons she had fallen in love with him, she remembered painfully, that depth of understanding and fairness he had always seemed to display towards most things, if not, in the end, towards her. And she had been overawed by his experience and his wealth of knowledge.

Having led what she considered to be a rather mundane existence herself, his hard sophistication garnered from a shrewd determined brain and his twelve years seniority had excited her. How often had she lain on that old battered sofa with her head in his lap while he had talked about so many things and she had listened, rapt? And how willingly and wildly had she, on so many occasions afterwards, succumbed to that other kind of experience, the skilled mastery of his lovemaking?

How could things have gone so badly wrong? she wondered desolately, sliding her finger down the spine of a particularly large tome on world affairs. Because they had always made love. Even when they were breaking up they had still craved each other with a hunger that had bordered on desperation, the heat and bitterness of their rows somehow only seeming to kindle desire.

Perhaps if…

Her thoughts were brought up sharply by a sound outside in the hall. No, not in the hall, she thought. Outside the front door!

The wind was increasing in strength, playing with the metal disc over the keyhole. At least she tried reassuring herself that was all it was, until she realised the front door was being thrust forcibly open.

One of Jared’s tenants!

Remembering he had said he sometimes let the place to friends, for a moment Taylor wondered if, as he hadn’t heard from her, he had gone ahead and let someone else have the house this week. But no, he wouldn’t do that, she thought, certain of it. Not when there was the slimmest chance of her coming here!

The door banged rather loudly, as though someone had kicked it closed, and quickly, snatching up the brass poker from the hearth, Taylor raced out into the hall.

‘Are you going to hit me with that?’ Stopping dead, Jared was grimacing down at the potential weapon Taylor was holding. ‘Or is this some new type of fell-walking aid?’ He was carrying two bags of groceries, balancing one on each arm, and sleet was glistening on his jet-black hair.

‘It’s you.’ Heart still thumping, Taylor’s shoulders sagged with relief.

‘I’m sorry.’ Casually dressed in dark trousers and a black anorak, he was shouldering his way past her. ‘I didn’t mean to alarm you.’

Didn’t mean…? Flabbergasted, Taylor demanded, ‘What are you doing here?’

Ignoring her question, he carried the bags into the square, old-fashioned kitchen, dumped them down on the table and started to unpack them.

‘What are you doing?’ Taylor breathed, following, not frightened or shocked any more, just angry. ‘Why are you here?’

‘I spent an awful lot of my childhood in this house,’ he told her. ‘I also happen to own it.’ His long hands were dealing with tins and cartons and packages. ‘I think that gives me the right to come here whenever I get the chance.’

‘Not while I’m here,’ she returned uncompromisingly. Standing in her thin socks, she could feel the cold striking up from the hard stone floor.

‘Really?’ For a moment he stopped what he was doing, while his gaze moved over her jean and sweater-clad slenderness with disconcerting intensity. ‘I can’t think of a better reason to come.’

‘Jared!’ How could he do this to her? A justifiable hurt anger lined her fine features and with it increasing puzzlement. ‘You said you’d be away…’ She remembered him saying that in the car when he had dropped her outside the dental surgery.

‘I am away,’ he said calmly. ‘And put down that poker. You’re making me feel at a distinct disadvantage.’

Him—at a disadvantage! ‘You lied to me,’ she accused, ignoring him.

‘No I didn’t.’

‘Tricked me then.’ Tensely her fingers tightened on the cold brass rod. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Because, one,’ he said, as though he needed to emphasise his point, ‘I wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to get here or not. And two, if I had said I was coming, you wouldn’t have.’

Resentfully she watched him moving around the kitchen, unable to drag her reluctant gaze from his long lean frame as he reached up to open a wall cupboard. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

‘And put on some shoes or slippers before you catch your death of cold,’ he advised without looking at her, taking no heed of her little burst of sarcasm.

She stayed right where she was, however, even though her feet were freezing, simply because he had instructed otherwise. ‘Don’t change the subject.’

‘All right. I wanted to be with you. Is that direct enough for you?’

He turned to face her, his eyes glittering with a cold and feral anger.

For a moment his declaration seemed to tear the breath out of her lungs, as powerfully as the wind was tearing at the eaves and chimneys of the old house.

‘Why?’ she said at length, struggling for composure under the influence of his formidable masculinity. ‘So you can take advantage of my weakness and failure ever to resist you?’

The carrier bags rustled as he screwed them up, opened a drawer and stuffed them inside. He sent a wry, sidelong glance down over his shoulder. ‘Not while you’re holding that poker.’

She slung it down, making a point, drawing herself up to her full height. ‘I’m not afraid of you.’

‘Good!’ He thrust the drawer closed, swung away from it. ‘Because I’m sure as hell afraid of you!’

Taylor eyed him with some surprise, a pained query darkening her eyes. ‘Am I so much of a harridan?’

‘A harridan?’ Coming back across the kitchen, he laughed rather harshly. ‘God! I wish you were. At least I’d know how to deal with that. It wouldn’t be any hardship to me to tame a shrew.’

She shuddered, thinking how lethal his brand of taming might be. What woman would stand a chance against his dark and dangerous sensuality? She might feign to put up a fight against it for a while but, in the end, all but the most indifferent would succumb.

‘Oh, no.’ His breath seemed to shiver through him as he stood there now, contemplating, regarding her. ‘You’re quite the opposite, Taylor. Reticent. Uncommunicative. Almost frighteningly aloof. Like a deep, mysterious lake. I used to think it was an admirable quality. In fact, my dear, I must confess, it turned me on—like hell! But there’s a limit to how much unmelted butter a man can get through, even if it’s the loveliest mouth he’s being tempted by. Tell me, Taylor, are you really as cold as you seem? Or is there a real warm woman in there somewhere trying desperately hard to get out? Begging to be rescued from her own worst enemy—herself!’

Is that how he saw her? As a cold, unfeeling human being? With a heart of ice, as other men had accused her of having? Was that why he had been so ready to believe she could hurt her unborn child? Care for nothing but herself? Her independence? Her job?

Pain clouded her eyes and swiftly her lashes came down to hide it. ‘And you think one night trapping me here with you,’ she uttered, cultivating even more of the apparent coolness he had ridiculed, ‘will loosen all my inhibitions— bring out the real warm woman—’ her tone was bitterly emphatic ‘—you seem so sure is there?’

‘Believe me, a man would have to be a genius and it would take more than one night and a diamond cutter to chip through that glacial shell of yours, Taylor. If it is a shell. And I’m hardly trapping you,’ he reminded her brusquely before she could say anything. ‘You came voluntarily.’

‘And I’ll be leaving voluntarily. First thing in the morning!’ she retorted, swinging away.

‘Of course.’ She heard a cupboard being opened, heard it bang forcefully closed again. ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Taylor. You’re beautiful. Talented. Self-sufficient. But where relationships are concerned, it’s what you do best, isn’t it?’

‘What?’ she queried pointedly. Her eyes were dark and questioning as she turned around.

‘Running away.’

Because she had done exactly that. You’ll run away. Because it was inherent in her. You’ll always run away.

Her breath catching in her throat, she brought her cupped hands up to her nose and mouth, her eyes closing for a few moments while she steeled herself against retaliating.

‘Are you all right?’

He’d asked her that in the car park, she remembered, last Friday after that tense, disconcerting lunch she had shared with him.

He was standing right next to her now. Her body was absorbing his dangerous warmth like a soothing balm through her skin and his scent impinged on her nostrils like an intoxicating musk.

‘Taylor?’

When his fingers touched her arm, however, panicking she jerked away.

‘Of course I am! Why shouldn’t I be?’ she protested and, for the sake of her cold feet and her equilibrium, moved away from him, towards the hall.

He had discarded his anorak when he joined her in the sitting room and the thick black casual shirt he was wearing with his dark trousers was unbuttoned at the throat.

Standing, sorting through some books, Taylor glanced up, her senses leaping as her interest fell too willingly on the hint of crisp dark body hair peeping out over the top of his shirt, emphasising the corded strength of his throat.

‘I see you’ve eaten.’ His gaze was resting on the mug and the plate, which contained the remains of her sandwich. ‘Or put up some show of eating.’

Taylor snapped closed the poetry book she had been looking at. A book of love poems. A book he had bought for her to celebrate their being married for two weeks.

There was dark emotion behind the challenge in the green eyes that clashed with his. ‘Did you come here to start criticising my diet?’

‘No.’ His mouth tugged down on one side. ‘But it’s a darned good idea. Somebody needs to.’

‘Why? Worried about me?’ A little hint of sarcasm slipped out, unheeded, unchecked.

‘Of course.’

‘Well, don’t be. I can take care of myself.’

‘Can you?’ His gaze was tugging over the creamy polo-necked sweater she had been wearing when he had first turned up at Charity’s over a week ago, moving down over her small breasts and waistline and the barest suggestion of curved hips beneath her fitted jeans. ‘You could have fooled me.’

Why? she wanted to throw at him. Because I haven’t been able to eat properly since I saw you again? Because I can’t get you out of my mind and because when you’re around you dominate everything I think, say and do?

Instead, taking another book out of the bookcase, turning it over in her hands, she said, ‘When did you get here anyway?’

He slipped his hands into his pockets. ‘This afternoon. I switched on the heating and went into town to stock up on some things while the house was warming up,’ he told her.

Broodingly she watched him cross the room, pick up the plate and the used mug she had left on the side of the hearth.

‘This place always did bring out the best in you, didn’t it, Taylor?’ He gestured with the mug he was dangling from one finger, his mouth moving wryly. ‘Back in London this would have been in the dishwasher before it was even cold.’

She looked up from the book she was making a performance of studying. ‘Meaning?’

‘Your penchant for order is commendable but sometimes it can be bloody infuriating. It would do you good to be slovenly occasionally. Mess up your hair. Rough it for a while.’

She gritted her teeth against what she considered was yet another of his totally unjust analyses of her.

‘Don’t you have business to attend to?’ Pushing back a strand of the expertly cut hair to which he had metaphorically referred, she watched him move over to the door. ‘Something important you’ve left that can’t possibly proceed without you being around?’ It was one of the reasons for their arguments, she remembered; his always having to work late—something that hadn’t helped lessen her suspicions about him having an affair—and his going away so much, especially when he’d had the gall to accuse her of only being interested in her career!

‘No.’ He sounded remarkably decisive. ‘I meant it when I said that I think we should get back together. When two people have what we had, I think it’s no less than stupidity to throw it all away.’

‘What you had you mean,’ she said softly, hurting. Hadn’t he had a mistress—and the luxury of a convenient wife?

He moved back into the room, setting the mug and plate down on the low table that filled the space on the rug between the long comfortable sofa and a deeply cushioned chair.

‘Are you saying you didn’t get anything out of it too? Because, my pretty wife, it wouldn’t be too much punishment to me to have to remind you.’

‘No!’ She took a step back, seeing the steely resolve burning in his eyes, relaxing a little when he stopped, clearly thinking twice about carrying out his threat.

‘I thought you’d accepted my decision,’ she expressed, uncomfortably conscious of the tremor in her voice. ‘I thought that was the reason why I’m here…’ a toss of her chin indicated the books she was holding ‘… doing all this.’ Puzzled green eyes searched those that were as dark and impenetrable as midnight. ‘It was the last thing you said— about me not divorcing you…’

His black brows came together while he inclined his head in the way he always did when something puzzled him, a gesture that was so poignantly familiar to her that she found herself battling with a host of treacherous emotions.

‘I said that there were things of yours here that you might want to have with you. Things I thought you might be missing or might even have forgotten you had. It wasn’t my intention for you to start clearing them out. You accused me of assuming too much, Taylor. Well I’m not the only one who’s been guilty of that. And what I said was, that if you tried to divorce me, I’d fight it all the way, and I will—until you come to your senses and realise that it was only your petty jealousies and suspicions that broke us up in the first place.’

How could he say that?

Taylor gritted her teeth, decided not to challenge that statement. Instead she said in a much steadier voice, ‘So I just jump back into your bed and everything will be all right?’

A nerve tugged in his jaw for a few silent seconds, the only life in a face that might have been chiselled out of rock.

‘If that’s all I thought it would take, we wouldn’t be standing here now,’ he answered her softly, his arrogance, with what his words conjured up, sending a menacing excitement licking through her veins.

He knew her intimately; from every small fantasy to every last sensitive part of her body, and he had recognised that dangerous attraction that still existed between them. OK. Perhaps he hadn’t come here to capitalise on it, she accepted, but he knew, as well as she did, that if he tried to seduce her back into his bed, she wouldn’t stand a chance against his lethal skill and charisma. And if she stayed here, who knew what sort of fool she could wind up making of herself over him—and at what cost to her self-respect?

Pain warred with anger over his audacity and the knowledge that he had, indeed, tricked her. Without a thought for what she wanted. Without a care about how it might affect her in the end!

‘I’m sorry for misconstruing all your motives,’ she uttered tightly. ‘But there’s one thing I’m not leaving either of us under any misconceptions about.’ Nimbly she stooped to scoop up the plate and mug he had put down on the table. ‘I’m still leaving here first thing tomorrow morning.’

CHAPTER FOUR

IT was the silence that woke her. The thick, heavy silence and the light that burned with a peculiar brightness through the chintzy curtains.

Snug in the small double bed in the smaller of the two main bedrooms she had opted to sleep in the previous night, Taylor was reluctant for a moment to give up its warmth.

Suddenly though, as realisation dawned, she was pushing back the duvet and racing over to the window, gasping as she pulled back the curtains.

Everything was white—the garden, the trees and the hillsides, dazzling—like the mountains beyond them—under a crisp heavy fall of virgin snow.

She shivered, wondering why the air felt so icy, and went over to feel the radiator on the opposite wall. It was stone cold.

Fetching her light robe from the bathroom, quickly she slipped it on, pushing her hair into place with agitated fingers.

Jared must have gone to bed without setting the heating to come on, or the thermostat in the hall was too low, she thought, racing downstairs to set the control higher. Either that, or it had come on and gone off again hours ago which meant that Jared wasn’t even up yet. Which was unlike him, she remembered from their marriage, when he had been up at six most days of the week.

As she reached the hall, sounds coming from the sitting room brought her up sharply.

Jared?

She could smell smoke now—wood smoke—and could hear what she instantly distinguished as the crackling of an open fire.

He didn’t see her at first. He had his back to the door and was bending over the fireplace, tossing logs from a wicker basket onto the brightly burning flames, and the sight of him performing that simple, domestic chore tugged unexpectedly at something deep down inside Taylor.

Greedy for the smallest chance to feast her eyes on him, undetected, her hungry gaze tugged unashamedly over his pleasing torso.

He was wearing a dark-blue cable-knit sweater and jeans, which showed off the superbly fit lines of his body. His hair was waving, dark and thick, over the polo neck of his sweater, while the thick wool encased shoulders that could set themselves squarely against anything that promised trouble. His hips were hard and lean, his buttocks tightly muscled, and even through the denim his long legs looked packed with the whipcord strength of a hunter. On his feet he wore a pair of casual black shoes, but it was his hands to which Taylor’s eyes were ultimately drawn; those long sinewy hands that could apply themselves to any manual task, however mundane, seeing it through with the same skilled competence with which they could also caress and arouse a woman…

‘So you’re up.’

He turned round so suddenly that he couldn’t have failed to notice her interest in him and, from the rather sensual amusement tugging at his mouth it was clear he hadn’t.

‘You should have woken me,’ she protested, blushing and tousled in her dressing gown and slippers. She had slept for hours, she realised, having claimed a headache and gone to bed straight after their light dinner last night.

‘Why? Are you going somewhere?’ He was grinning so shamelessly that she wanted to hit him.

With an exasperated glance at him, she hurried over to the window. Unlike her bedroom, the sitting room faced the lane and she could just make out her car, virtually buried beneath a thick mound of snow.

‘Still thinking of leaving, Taylor?’ The deep tones were overlaid with mockery, and she whipped round, eyes daring him to carry his joking any further. It didn’t help having noticed that he had had the foresight to put his own car straight in the garage when he had driven in last night.

‘I suppose you think this is all very funny!’ She moved away from the window, rubbing her arms, shoulders hunched against the cold.

‘Are you going to blame me for this too?’

No, of course she wasn’t. It was his complacency she couldn’t take, which made her reply in a way that sounded childish even to her own ears, ‘You knew I was bent on leaving here this morning.’

‘Then start walking.’ Suddenly he wasn’t amused any more. The alarmingly swift movement that brought him to face her had her recoiling from him. His teeth were clenched between grim lips and his whole face was harsh with anger. Lifting her chin, Taylor caught the strong scent of wood smoke clinging to his sweater, with the underlying freshness of the great outdoors. ‘I’ve got enough problems here without you whingeing and whining like some petulant little schoolgirl.’ He swung back to resume tending to the fire. ‘I can’t help the damned weather, all right! Contrary to what you think I didn’t order it to help me with some Machiavellian scheme to trap someone who’s made it very plain she clearly doesn’t want to be married to me—because if you’re going to be like this for the next two or three days, believe me, it’s not going to be any picnic for me either!’

Two or three days? Mentally Taylor shook that unsettling possibility aside, aware of Jared’s anger in every movement of his body, the way he was suddenly tossing logs onto the fire with more vehemence than before, sending sparks and ash flying up into the huge chimney. She supposed she deserved his anger, in a way.

‘Problems?’ she repeated tentatively to his broad back, wanting to smooth things over between them. ‘What problems? What’s happened?’

He stood up again, one hand on the back pocket of his jeans. A deep sigh lifted the thick cable stitch of his sweater. ‘The snow’s brought the power cables down. There’s no electricity. No heating. That means no hot food or water—except in any way we can improvise ourselves.’

A barely audible, shocked little oath escaped her.

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘So you see, I didn’t instigate the weather or this situation. Nor do I like it, though I will reiterate what I said last night. I wanted some time with you.’

‘Why?’

‘To sort out our differences.’

‘You think they can be sorted out?’

‘I don’t know, but I sure as hell want to try. I’m not proud of having the label of Failed Marriage stamped on my head either. Isn’t that why you kept your marital status a secret from Charity and Craig?’

Taylor’s back stiffened. How well he knew her! Or was it simply from the realms of his knowledge marked Human Psychology, gleaned from life and the wealth of books he kept in his own extensive library?

‘I saw coming here as an opportunity, that’s all. An opportunity for us to talk—relax—without the pressures of our jobs, life or anything else getting in the way.’

She let out a short brittle laugh because he had given her no say in the matter. Apart from which they had tried before; tried and failed, and it had only resulted in pain, pain that, even until he had stormed into her life again, hadn’t even really begun to ease.

‘And supposing I don’t go along with your optimism— don’t share your idealistic view of what you think our marriage should be? Don’t want to be here?’

A hint of a smile touched his mouth as he looked from her flushed and finely contoured face towards the window and the heavy snowfall that imprisoned them.

‘I hate to say this, darling, but I hardly think you have a choice.’

He was chopping logs when she came back downstairs, having already cleared the path at the back of the house leading from the kitchen to the log store.

He was wearing black rubber boots now, pulled high and tightly over his jeans. His black hair was falling forward as he worked. Wielding the axe against the backdrop of the snow-swept valley and the awesome vastness of the sparkling mountains, he looked like the wild man of the moor, Taylor fancied, feeling the tug of something reckless inside of her as she stepped out into the biting air.

Throwing down the axe, he glanced up and saw her.

‘That’s much more practical,’ he commented laconically with a swift appraisal of her thick dark sweater, warm trousers and sensible shoes before bending again to his task.

He was using a large steel wedge to split the logs he had already chopped, driving it into the wood with a mallet, the strike of metal on metal ringing out across the frozen hillside.

He was working hard—looked hot, Taylor thought, volunteering, ‘Do you want any help?’