Reclaiming His Wife

He paused from his work, one booted foot resting on the cut ring of a tree trunk he was using as a platform to split the logs, a hand resting on a denim-clad knee.

‘Are you any good with an axe?’

She looked at him uncertainly, then at the implement lying beside him.

Well, she had never done it before, but there was always a first time, she thought, moving to pick it up.

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, so that she realised then that he was joking. ‘Go and see if you can rustle up something appetising for breakfast. Bacon, scrambled eggs and blueberry pancakes will do to start.’

‘Ha!’ Her laugh rose on a cloud of warm vapour before she glanced back at him over her shoulder. ‘You wish,’ she told him with a grimace, going back along the cleared path and wondering how she was even going to heat any water let alone anything else.

As it turned out, she found the answer almost immediately in the large black kettle, only kept now for ornamental purposes on the hearth. She supposed it had been used domestically in Jared’s grandmother’s day, in the larger fireplace in the kitchen that now housed the modern equivalent of the old range. Even that needed electricity to operate it, she thought rather despairingly, pulling a face as she picked up the ancient kettle.

Gratefully, however, she took it out into the kitchen, half filled it, then struggled with it into the sitting room, first adding more logs to the fire to make a flat surface for the kettle to stand on, before placing it carefully on top. Only then did she decide it was safe to leave, before grabbing the pale fleece she had unpacked and hung in the hall the previous night and venturing back outside.

‘What will we do if the pipes freeze?’ she called out worriedly to Jared, coming down the path to where he was filling the wicker basket with logs. ‘If we can’t get any water?’ While filling the kettle it had suddenly struck her how much worse things could get.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, seeing her concern. ‘There’s next to no chance of that happening. With these Lakeland winters no one risks being without the necessary insulation. They’re far more diligent about such things up here than we are in the south. The place was already well protected when my grandmother was alive but then just before she died I persuaded her to let me get a major reinsulating job done. Grandmother was stubborn—fiercely independent and quite unmovable in most things—but I was determined she’d let me do that much, though I must admit, she did put up quite a fight.’

Taylor smiled, catching the fond note in his voice, regretting that she had never met the kind-looking grey-haired woman who had died the year before she had met Jared and whose photograph stood in a little silver frame on the tall oak chest in the room she was occupying. It was taken with Jared’s grandfather, almost on the spot where Taylor was standing. She had a feeling that it was Jared who had taken it.

‘You loved her a lot, didn’t you?’ she remarked, slipping her hands into the pockets of her fleece to keep them warm. His grandfather too, she thought, remembering how he had said that when his own father had died just before his second birthday, his grandparents had opted to look after him when their daughter-in-law had insisted on pursuing her acting career.

For an answer he simply went on tossing logs into the basket.

‘Were you close to your mother?’ It surprised her to realise that, despite having lived with him for more than eighteen months, there was still a lot about him she had failed to discover.

‘Not as close as I would have liked.’

‘Did she visit very often?’

‘No.’ The log he threw made a dull ‘chick’ as it landed on top of the others, alarming a little brown dunnock that had been foraging around with scant hope of finding a staple meal of insects, worms or seeds beneath the heavy covering of snow. Watching it hop unobtrusively beneath a winter jasmine which was bravely sporting its bright yellow flowers against the boundary wall, Taylor made a mental note to put down some scraps. ‘She didn’t like Cumbria,’ Jared was enlarging then. ‘She liked bright lights and city life.’

‘Does she still live in New York?’

He stopped what he was doing, and stood, stern-mouthed, looking out across the snow-laden hedge to the silent valley.

‘No,’ he said at length. ‘She died. A couple of months ago.’

‘She…’ Taylor stared at his dark, tousled hair as he stooped to finish loading the last few logs into the basket. ‘How?’ she whispered, shocked.

‘She had a crippling illness that came on gradually over the past fifteen months or so,’ he surprised her by saying. ‘I spent a lot of time going backwards and forwards to the States. If I hadn’t, I would have come looking for you a long time ago,’ he interjected grimly, without looking at her, which explained why she hadn’t seen or heard from him for so long, Taylor realised, her heart going out to him over what must have been an extremely difficult time. ‘I tried to spend as much time with her as I could during her last months and I suppose we became closer than we had ever been throughout our lives. After all, she did her best for me—gave me everything,’ he said, with something of the strain he must have suffered showing briefly in that hard, handsome face. ‘But I would have traded it all for some of her time.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Taylor whispered, catching that note of deep regret—the loss—for what might have been—in that last, softly uttered statement.

She had only met the woman once. It was shortly after their wedding when they had come back from Hawaii. A fading actress who had never really achieved star status, Calista Steele had been in London with an equally fading male counterpart and had called to see them at Jared’s penthouse flat.

Tall and elegant, with a swathe of grey streaking her thick black hair, the woman had nevertheless possessed the same awesome detachment as her son. And while there had seemed to be a deep respect for each other, between mother and son, Taylor had noticed no real display of obvious affection in their relationship.

‘Why didn’t you let me know?’ she repeated emphatically.

‘When?’ His voice, as he swung the basket up into his arms, was harshly cynical. ‘Yesterday? Last week? Or at the time?’

‘Well…’ Taylor gave a quick bewildered shake of her head. She couldn’t believe something like that could have happened to him and she hadn’t even known about it. ‘At the time of course.’

‘I didn’t feel I needed to involve you when you’d made it quite plain you no longer wanted any part in my life— even if I had known where you were.’ He was all muscle and fitness striding ahead of her down the path, those brawny shoulders effectively blocking her out.

‘You thought I wouldn’t care because I couldn’t live up to what you wanted me to be?’

‘And what was that?’ he threw back over his shoulder.

‘A dutiful wife and mother.’ She hadn’t intended to get back on this subject but his low opinion of her hurt more than she could have imagined possible. ‘Ready to turn a blind eye to any other woman you wanted in your life. Effectively second best!’

He stopped, turning so abruptly that she almost collided with the wicker basket. The cold anger in his eyes chilled her more than the bitterly cold day.

‘Is that what you thought you were?’

‘Wasn’t I?’

‘What you thought I wanted? An obedient little mouse and bed partner? Someone I could manipulate and bend easily to my will? What respect do you think I would have had for you—for myself—if I’d thought that was all you— and I—were worthy of? Credit me with some ethics, Taylor, because we did have something, only you were too damn blinkered to see it!’

Feeling unjustly chastened, she retorted heatedly, ‘Too besotted, you mean, not to see what was going on!’

‘What was going on, dearest, was all inside your head. Oh, I admit Alicia tried to ring me a few times, but that didn’t mean I was still seeing her. As I told you before, it was your petty jealousies and suspicions that killed our marriage—nothing else!’

‘That isn’t true!’

‘Isn’t it?’

Those inky eyes seemed to be penetrating right through to her soul and his features were as bleak suddenly as the ice-packed fells across the valley.

Of course, he was probably still mourning his mother, Taylor thought, chastising herself for not having immediately realised that. Regrettably she wished she had kept her mouth shut.

‘Believe it if you want to,’ she said wearily, tired of continually fighting with him. She was relieved when he turned and carried on down the path.

With her eyes on his broad back she considered what he had said about her doubts and suspicions all being in her head. Were they? she wondered wretchedly. Certainly he had done nothing to allay her fears and insecurities. So what was he saying? That it had all been her fault? Their rows? Her refusal even to entertain having his children?

When he had been flaying her with his hurtful insinuations about terminating their unborn child—accusing her of wanting nothing but her precious job, had he, she wondered suddenly, somehow been comparing her with his mother?

‘Come inside,’ he commanded gently, as though sensitive to her change of mood and, with unerring courtesy, stood aside to let her pass.

The kettle was singing on the fire as they came back inside the house. The sound was comforting, helping to lift Taylor’s downcast spirits.

‘I’m afraid I can’t conjure up anything more than plain bread and rock-hard butter,’ she murmured, hearing him come into the kitchen just as she was lifting the lid off the butter dish. At least they had plenty of the basic foods, she thought with some sense of relief, since Jared had doubled up on some of the provisions she had brought last night.

‘Is that so,’ he said, not sounding at all perturbed. ‘Then you go and make the tea—’ he was thrusting a teapot into her hands ‘—and I’ll see to whatever has to be done here.’

Taylor was only too glad to. Standing in a cold kitchen, making holes in fresh bread with unspreadable butter wasn’t her idea of fun, she thought, adding cups, saucers and a jug of milk to a tray with the teapot, before carrying them through into the welcoming warmth of the sitting room.

She had just made the tea and was sitting on the rug in front of the fire when he strode in carrying another tray.

‘Crumpets!’ she breathed delightedly, her face aglow as he set them down on the low table she had dragged nearer the fire. They looked plump and soft. Hungrily she watched him spear one with a toasting fork.

‘Always look further than only at what at first appears to be apparent,’ he advised, and she knew he wasn’t just talking about the crumpets. ‘We used to do this on winter nights just for the sheer hell of it.’

We. ‘You and your grandparents,’ Taylor supplied, surprised that he had never confided even that small piece of information to her before.

His mouth compressed in wry contemplation as he stood there, turning the fork expertly before the flame. The crumpet was beginning to brown and it smelled yeasty and delicious as it cooked. ‘They were good days. Especially when my grandfather was alive.’

‘They must have been.’ Taylor sat back from pouring tea into the two cups she had set down on the hearth, drawing her legs up under her. It was easy to visualise how things must have been, the domestic, happy family scene. It was something she had not known. Not in the same secure, taken-for-granted way…

‘Ouch!’ he said, shaking his hand, bringing her attention to the fact that, in turning the crumpet, Jared had just burnt his finger.

‘Hot?’ she taunted laughingly.

‘Not so you’d notice.’

She looked up into his strong abstracted features, flushed from the heat of the fire. He hadn’t shaved, either because of an uncharged razor or because he had had more important things to do. But in his country clothes, with that dark stubble shading his jaw, he looked at ease, relaxed and totally at home.

Often, in his high-powered world, sporting his clean-cut executive image she had tried to imagine him as a child and hadn’t been able to. Now, away from the pressures of the fast lane in which he functioned, here amidst the rugged country where he seemed to belong, she could see him as a gangling youth, obstinate, determined, a free spirit. She could visualize him sitting here with his grandparents on winter nights, and, during the summer, fishing for minnows in the tumbling becks, running barefoot, wild as the moorland and the fells.

Her eyes still trained on his formidably handsome features, almost involuntarily Taylor murmured, ‘This place brings out the best in you, too.’

His cruel mouth slackened broodingly as he gazed down on her, those black eyes holding hers with such dark power that she couldn’t look away. Sitting there on the rug she felt like a slender flower beneath the shadow of a great tree whose daunting presence was capable of blocking out the sunlight from her life, or giving her the strength to grow and thrive from its protection.

With their eyes linked, Taylor felt the stark desire that seemed to flow from the very root of him, filling her with a mutual need that rose like a dark and dangerous sap through her veins. Her breath came shallowly as her pulse rate quickened, and her throat ached so that she had to swallow to ease its dryness.

Light flared in his face at the same instant as Taylor smelled the smoke, became aware that the crumpet he was toasting had caught fire.

‘Look what you’re doing!’ she gasped with a shaky little laugh, catching the oath he uttered before he swiftly pushed the charcoaled offering, still flaming, onto a plate.

‘You’ll never make Chef of the Year like this!’ she laughed, more easily now, relieved that the emotion-charged moment was past.

‘Perhaps Chef of the Year doesn’t have the world’s sexiest siren to distract him,’ he chastised, defending himself as he speared another crumpet with the fork.

Putting a lump of butter on the blackened pikelet, careful not to burn her hands, Taylor watched the gold butter melt instantly across its surface, filling the holes. The way he could melt her resistance—fill her—she thought shamefully, and didn’t say anything because it was safer that way.

Breakfast was delicious, she decided, watching Jared chomp his way through at least a plateful of his own efforts, while Taylor surprised herself by eating at least three of the crumpets. She had brought some honey with her from Edinburgh and while Jared had refused it, she had indulged herself, spreading it thickly over each warm buttered mound.

‘That’s better,’ Jared commented when she put her plate down on the hearth, having finished every last crumb. ‘That’s the most I’ve seen you eat since we’ve been together.’

Lounging beside him on the rug, Taylor tensed.

‘We aren’t back together,’ she reminded him swiftly. She had made no such agreement, nor was she ready to.

‘Of course not.’ He flashed her a smile that didn’t quite warm his eyes. ‘I was speaking figuratively.’

She shrugged. ‘Well, don’t presume, Jared. I haven’t said I’m coming back to you.’

‘Taylor,’ he exhaled, the way he addressed her alone assuring her he wasn’t exactly very pleased. ‘The last thing I would ever do with you is presume.’

Feeling strangely chastised, Taylor looked down at her greasy fingers. A small trail of honey clung to the third finger of her left hand, she noticed, with her little finger splayed.

‘No,’ she uttered, her breath coming rapidly when Jared grabbed her hand and she saw the purpose in his face, realised his intention.

‘Stop me,’ he whispered, and it was a deeply sensual challenge.

CHAPTER FIVE

LIKE a rabbit mesmerised by a fox, Taylor watched him watching her even as he dipped his head and his mouth closed over her honeyed finger.

There was desire in his eyes, more potent and deadly than that which she had seen burning in them earlier.

‘Jared…’ She closed her eyes against the raw need she saw in him, against the ache of a new kind of hunger in herself that only this man could assuage. The suckling warmth of his mouth brought with it images of the pleasurable nights she had shared in his bed, the provocative action of his tongue encircling her finger calling forth more erotic imagery, of pleasing him, of his pleasuring her in the most intimate and earth-shattering ways so that remembering produced a deep sensual throb in her lower body.

She opened her eyes. He was still watching her, his proud dark face flushed now from more than the heat of the fire.

‘You used to taste like this all over. Remember, Taylor? You gave me honey every time I took you to bed. Like a queen bee paralysing me with her sweetness until I could do nothing but surrender to your hold over me—and still I could never get enough of you.’

His voice trembled with the depth of his desire. If he had been trying to turn her on, he had succeeded, but only at the expense of his own self-possession. Without even looking at him she could tell he was aroused, and she found herself craving the demands of his rock-hard body. He would be big and ready to take her. Helplessly, she realised, she wanted him to do just that. Push her back against the rug and come down heavily on top of her, give her no choice but to submit to him so that she could drown in the ecstasy of his driving passion, sate this unbelievable need of him and not feel afterwards that she had relinquished her pride or determination to be free.

With every gram of her will, she dragged herself back from the brink of stupidity to say shakily, ‘But you didn’t love me.’

For a moment his fingers tightened around her slim hand.

‘Didn’t I?’ His lips had moved to play erotically over the perfumed flesh of her wrist, and yet the eyes that continued to hold hers were intensely probing, assessing, and as unfathomable as the darkest night.

‘Let me go.’

Surprisingly, he complied at once.

‘I’d better get some more logs in,’ he said heavily, getting to his feet, as though he were totally unaffected by what had just happened between them.

But he had been. And severely, Taylor thought, watching him scoop up the wicker basket and carry it back across the room.

Even so, it felt like another put-down. Like he had been testing her, she decided bitterly, her spirits lowering like the sudden drop in the room temperature as he went through the kitchen and opened the back door, letting in the biting air from outside.

They spent the rest of the day treading carefully around each other, treating each other with polite caution as though each was reluctant to delve too deeply into what the other might be thinking or feeling.

The first thing they did after Taylor had found enough scraps to feed the birds was to search the house for candles, finding the half-burned remains of one, still in its holder, in the cupboard under the kitchen sink.

‘That isn’t going to last an evening!’ Taylor groaned despairingly, then found a whole boxful while she was looking in the electricity meter cupboard under the stairs.

‘So you won’t have to worry about being left in the dark with me after all,’ Jared commented dryly when she rushed eagerly back to the kitchen to acquaint him with her find.

Taylor didn’t respond, sensing that there was more than one meaning behind that outwardly innocuous remark but, apart from that, the day continued on an otherwise even course.

Wrapped up in warm layers, scarves and gloves, together they scraped the snow from the drive that sloped upwards alongside the house, making a clear path to the lane. Then Taylor beat the soft snow from the bonnet and roof of her car, opened the electrically operated door to the adjoining garage that was a later addition to the house, and climbed into her car with the intention of putting it away.

Unfortunately the little hatchback refused to comply immediately; coughing and spluttering each time she turned the ignition key.

‘Problems?’

Jared was beside her open door, big and capable, ready to lend a hand.

‘It’s just cold,’ she said, silently urging it to start, which, fortunately, it did after a bit of gentle coaxing with the ignition.

‘The drive’s treacherous. I’d leave it right where it is,’ he advised grimly.

‘No, I’d prefer to put it away.’ She didn’t like the thought of her car—her key to self-sufficiency—being left out in such extreme conditions.

‘Then perhaps you’d better let me do it,’ he suggested, looking every bit like taking over. ‘I intended to put it away last night but I’m afraid seeing you swept all my good intentions out of the window.’

‘I can manage,’ Taylor assured him firmly, deciding to ignore his comment as she pulled the door closed, shutting him out.

If he could do it, why couldn’t she? she thought, conscientiously steering the car towards the open garage.

Having never negotiated the drive before, however, she hadn’t reckoned on the unexpected swing to the left at the top of the incline, or the sheet of ice just outside the garage door.

Pressing her foot down on the accelerator, needing a few more revs to accommodate the slope, she had almost levelled up when the back wheels started to spin alarmingly.

Feeling the car starting to slide, she braked instinctively, but too hard, she realised too late, and with a sinking heart felt the back wheels pull away from her as the car skidded with an ominous scraping into the steel frame of the garage door.

‘Oh…!’ She swallowed the small invective, uncertain as to what hurt most as Jared rushed up to survey the damage, her loss of face or what she might have done to her car.

‘I’m afraid you’ve put a hell of a crease in the front wing,’ he called over his shoulder before moving back to open her door. ‘Good try,’ he breathed in a way that left her unsure as to whether he was praising her efforts or being sarcastic. ‘But you’d better let me take it from here.’

This time Taylor didn’t argue. If she had she could only have wound up making an even bigger fool of herself, she decided, and she was feeling bad enough as it was.

With banked resentment that she knew was totally unjustified, she watched him put the car into reverse gear, pull back and set it easily on a straight course into the garage, bringing it to a halt beside the dark gleaming lines of his own saloon.

Shoulders hunched, she was waiting on the drive as he used the remote control switch to close the garage doors— a feature that certainly hadn’t been there in his grandmother’s time, she was certain—and as he strode back down to her she gripped her upper arms as though to fend off more than the freezing air.

‘There you are. All safe and sound where nothing can touch it,’ he said dryly and now she knew he was mocking her. ‘Does it hurt so much to let me help you?’ he enquired, walking beside her back down the drive. She wasn’t looking at him but she could feel his eyes resting on her with a regard that was as ruthless and penetrating as the icy wind. ‘Is it just me you want to prove your independence to? Or are you the same with every other man?’

‘So I pranged my car.’ The sparkling hillsides were almost painful to her eyes and she dragged her dazzled gaze away, tossing over her shoulder, ‘Do you have to make such an issue of it?’

There was a side gate in the low hedge that separated the drive from the garden. He reached around her, opening it with a sharp click of the latch.

‘One day, Taylor, you might realise—to use an old cliché…’ he held the gate open as she preceded him through ‘…that no man—or woman—is an island. We all need each other.’

She didn’t answer, mainly because passing so close to him she was all too aware of his long, lean body—of his dark and dangerous persona—dangerous to her at any rate, she decided, sticking out her chin, fighting against the truth of his words.

Perhaps he was right, she thought, hearing the gate close behind them. But needing someone too much left you exposed and vulnerable, didn’t it? Hadn’t she learnt that lesson long ago, with the bitter betrayal of that first and fundamental trust?