A Passionate Affair

‘The hell we will.’

She ignored the interruption and hoped she hadn’t revealed her composure was only skin-deep. ‘And we can put the past behind us,’ she finished evenly.

‘You really think I will just let you walk away from me for ever?’ He raised dark brows. ‘You know me better than that.’

‘I have never known you.’ She had answered too quickly, her voice raw for a moment, and immediately she knew her mistake. She had to be calm and collected in front of him; it was her best defence. ‘Just as you never really knew me,’ she added quickly. ‘We both thought each other was someone different. That was our mistake.’

‘Our mistake?’ The dark brows rose even higher. ‘Did I hear correctly? You’re actually admitting you’re capable of being wrong occasionally?’

She would have given the world to sock him right on the jaw. Her neck and shoulders were stiff with the effort it was taking to remain poised and dignified, but she conquered the desire to wipe the slight smile off his face, although not without some gritting of teeth. When she could trust herself to speak, she said sweetly, ‘I’ve nothing more to say to you. Goodbye, Taylor,’ turning on her heel as she spoke his name.

It was only a moment or two before she realised he was walking alongside her. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked frostily.

‘Walking you back home.’ He didn’t actually add, Of course, but he might as well have.

‘I don’t want you to.’

‘Okay.’ He stopped, but as she walked on, head high and heart thumping a tattoo, he called, ‘I’ll pick you up at eight, so be ready.’

‘What?’ She whirled round, causing a middle-aged woman with a huge bag of shopping to bump into her. When she had finished apologising she marched over to where Taylor was standing, arms crossed, as he leant against a convenient lamppost. ‘Are you mad?’ she asked in a tight voice.

‘Me?’ The innocence was galling. ‘It was you who nearly knocked that poor woman off her feet.’

‘You know what I mean.’ She glared at him, wondering how she could have forgotten quite how attractive he was. There were very few men with truly black hair, but Taylor was one of them, and the contrast between his eyes and hair had always been riveting. Brushing this traitorous thought aside, she continued, ‘I have no intention of having dinner with you, Taylor. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. We’re getting a divorce, for goodness’ sake.’

He smiled. Marsha caught her breath. His smile had always affected her, like warm sunshine flooding over a stormy sea, possibly because he did it so rarely. Not genuine smiles anyway. ‘Then what are you so afraid of?’ he asked silkily. ‘I’m merely suggesting we have dinner together, not that we finish the evening in bed.’

Her pulse jumped and then raced frantically as her body remembered what it had been like to be in bed with this man. To be loved, utterly and completely. To be consumed by him until all rational thought was gone and all that existed was Taylor. But then it hadn’t been love, had it? At least not as she interpreted the word. Love and marriage meant commitment, faithfulness and loyalty as far as she was concerned, and she was blowed if she was going to apologise for feeling that way. ‘I’m not afraid,’ she said shakily. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous.’

‘Then have dinner with me. For the time being at least we are still man and wife, Fuzz. Can’t we try to be civilised?’ His eyes were searching hers in that old way she remembered from when they had still been together. He had always looked at her like this in moments of stress or importance, as though he was trying to see the inner core of her, the essence of what made her her.

Marsha blinked, breaking the spell the glowing tawny colour that circled fierce black centres had wrought. She clutched at a reason for refusal. ‘What about Penelope?’ she said. ‘Won’t she mind?’

‘Penelope?’ He repeated the name as though he didn’t have the faintest idea who the woman was, and then he said softly, ‘Penelope Pelham is a business colleague, that’s all. I’m quoting for new sound equipment and a load of stuff and she is my contact.’

Oh, yes? Who was kidding who? It had been as plain as the nose on her face that Penelope had decided Taylor was her next bedfellow. Kane International might well be putting in a tender for the new equipment they had all heard was being acquired, but if Taylor’s firm won the work it would be because he had provided proof that his equipment was the best in more ways than one. Marsha blinked again. That last thought was not like her—but that was Taylor all over, she thought irritably. Bringing out the worst in her. ‘I don’t think dinner is a good idea,’ she said firmly.

‘It’s an excellent idea,’ he said, even more firmly.

‘I’m trying to say no nicely.’ She eyed him severely.

‘Try saying yes badly.’

He was so close his warm breath fanned the silk of her hair, and for a moment she wanted to breathe in the smell and feel of him in great gulps. Instead the intensity of her emotion acted like a shot of adrenalin. ‘It might surprise you, Taylor Kane, but you can’t always have what you want,’ she said steadily, the blood surging through her veins in a tumult.

‘Not always, no.’ This time he didn’t smile. ‘But tonight is not one of those times. Eight on the dot. I’m quite prepared to break the door down if you play coy.’

She was so surprised when he upped and walked away that for a good thirty seconds she was speechless. Then she called after him, oblivious of the passers-by, ‘You don’t know where I live!’

He turned just long enough to say, ‘I have always known where you are, every minute since you’ve been gone.’ And after that she found she was unable to say another word.

CHAPTER TWO

WHEN Marsha opened the front door of her bedsit a little while later, it was with the disturbing realisation that she couldn’t remember a moment of the walk home. Her head had been so full of Taylor and their conversation, not least his ridiculous presumption that she would eat dinner with him, that the stroll she normally so enjoyed at the end of the working day had been accomplished on automatic.

Her bedsit was on the top floor of a three-storey terraced house, and in the last twelve months since she had been living in it Marsha had made it her own haven, away from the stress and excitement of her working life. She stood on the threshold for a moment, glancing round the sun-filled room in front of her, and as always a sense of pleasure made itself felt.

The room had been a mess when she had first viewed it, the previous occupiers having been a pair of young female students who clearly had never been introduced to soap and water or cleaning materials in the whole of their lives. She had scrubbed and scoured and cleaned for days, but eventually, after plenty of elbow grease and some deep thought on what she wanted, she had begun to decorate.

First she had stripped the old floorboards, which had been in surprisingly good condition, and once they were finished, she’d known how to proceed. She had painted the whole bedsit in a palette of gentle shades of off-white and cream, which harmonised with each other and the different tones of wood in the floorboards, before splashing out on organdie curtains for the two wide floor-to-ceiling windows, along with ecru blinds which she only pulled at night when it was dark and she was getting ready for bed.

The small sitting and sleeping area was separated from the kitchen by a sleek and beautiful glass breakfast bar, which Mrs Tate-Collins—Marsha’s elderly landlady, who lived in the basement along with her three cats—had had installed in each of the three bedsits when she’d had the house converted after her husband had died. The pièce de résistance for Marsha, however, and the thing which had really sold the bedsit to her when she had first viewed it, was Mrs Tate-Collins’s forethought in providing a tiny shower room in a recess off the kitchen. It was only large enough to hold a shower, loo and small corner washbasin, but all the other bedsits she had viewed at the time had necessitated a walk along a landing to a communal bathroom.

Once she had bought a sofabed, TV and two wooden stools for the breakfast bar, which served as her dining table, Marsha had left the bed and breakfast she had lived in since her split with Taylor and moved into her new home, adding touches like the ecru throw and tumbled cushions of soft ash-gold, stone and cream for the sofa as she had lived there.

The slim built-in wardrobe to one side of the front door, which held all her clothes, meant she had to be selective in what she bought, and the kitchen was only large enough to house the smallest of fridges, along with the built-in hob and oven, but Marsha didn’t mind the lack of space. The bedsit was her retreat, somewhere she could shut the rest of the world out whenever she wanted to.

Her miniature garden was in the form of a Juliet balcony opening out from the windows, and although it could only hold one small wicker chair, along with a profusion of scented plants, she spent a good deal of her free time there in the warmer months, reading, dozing and looking out over the rooftops.

She loved her home. Marsha walked across to the windows now, opening them wide and letting the scents from the small balcony drift into the room. And now Taylor was going to come here, and that would spoil everything. She did not want him in her hideaway. She didn’t want him in her life.

The hum of evening traffic from the busy main street beyond the cul-de-sac the house was situated in was louder now the windows were open. Normally Marsha didn’t even hear the sound, so used had she become to the background noise. Tonight, though, it registered on her consciousness, and she found herself wondering what Taylor would make of the bedsit. The downstairs cloakroom in his lovely home deep in Harrow was about the same size as her entire living space.

‘I don’t care what he thinks.’ She spoke out loud, flexing her shoulders as though to dislodge a weight there. ‘And there is absolutely no way I am going out to dinner with him.’

So saying, she roused herself and walked into the kitchen, fixing herself a mug of milky chocolate which she took out on to the balcony. She sat down with a sigh, curling up on the big soft cushion in the wicker chair as she gazed out into space, a frown between her eyes.

Thirty minutes later and she had had a shower, and her hair was bundled under a soft handtowel as she stood surveying her meagre wardrobe.

She was only going to dinner with him to prevent a scene, she assured herself silently. A scene which would undoubtedly occur if Taylor did not get his own way. But this was strictly a one-off, something she would make perfectly clear to him, as well as letting him know she was counting the days until the divorce when all ties would be cut for good.

She pulled a pair of slinky, slightly flared pants in a misty silver colour from the wardrobe, teaming them with a bolero-style silk jacket in pale green. They were the newest items of clothing she possessed, bought for a cocktail party she had attended a month or so before. After placing the clothes on the back of the sofa she walked over to the full-length mirror on the back of the wardrobe door, staring at herself long and hard for a moment or two.

How could Taylor imagine, even for one single second, that there was any hope for them after what he had done? But then she had walked away from Taylor, rather than it being the other way round, something he would have found insupportable. To her knowledge, no woman had ever ended a relationship with him before—it had always been Taylor who had ditched them. Which was probably why his ego had been big enough to think he could have his cake and eat it.

This last reflection brought Marsha’s lips into a thin line as she pictured the ‘cake’ in question. Tanya West—a voluptuous redhead with the body of Marilyn Monroe and the face of an angel. And according to Susan, Taylor’s sister, Tanya hadn’t been the first little dalliance he’d indulged in since his marriage.

She whipped the towel off her head, beginning to blow dry her hair into a soft silky bob and all the time denying the hurt and anger which had flared up at the thought of the other woman.

She was still denying it when the buzzer next to the door sounded forty minutes later. Pressing the little switch, she stared at Taylor’s face—small and very far away—as she said, ‘I’ll be down in just a second.’ She didn’t open the front door of the building, deciding he could think what he liked.

One last swift glance in the mirror told her she was looking cool and controlled, despite the way her heart was pounding, and she offered up a quick prayer that the illusion would hold during the time she was with Taylor. He had to understand she wasn’t the same gullible fool who had been so besotted with him she hadn’t seen what was in front of her nose. She had thought he’d accepted that when she had left him and refused to see him eighteen months ago, especially in view of the fact there had been no objection from his solicitor—to her knowledge—when she had filed for divorce.

Locking the door of the bedsit behind her, she made for the stairs, careful how she descended in the high strappy sandals she was wearing, and it was as she approached the ground floor that she heard the unmistakable sound of Taylor’s voice talking to someone inside the house. Someone had let him into the hall. She froze for a moment on the stairs, her ears straining to hear whom he was speaking to.

Mrs Tate-Collins. As Marsha identified the other voice she raised her eyes heavenwards. Her landlady was a sweetie-pie, but the elderly lady really belonged in a powder and crinoline age, where men were gallant and noble and all women were prone to attacks of the vapours. Mrs Tate-Collins had told her once of her privileged upbringing and her private education at home and then an establishment for well brought up young gentlewomen. When Marsha had said she had been raised in a children’s home after her single-parent mother had abandoned her when she was two years old the other woman had stared at her as though she was a creature from another planet. Not that she hadn’t been sympathetic, Marsha qualified, but it had been plain the other woman was out of her depth with such an alien concept. How Mrs Tate-Collins was going to cope with finding out Miss Gosling was really Mrs Kane, Marsha didn’t know.

‘Ah, here she is, Mr Kane,’ Mrs Tate-Collins trilled as Marsha came into view. ‘And looking very lovely.’

Marsha gave what she hoped was a neutral smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said directly to the other woman, before glancing at Taylor, whereupon the smile iced over. ‘I told you I’d be straight down,’ she said evenly. ‘There was no need to come in.’

‘Oh, I was just on my way across the hall after seeing Miss Gordon when your young man rang,’ Mrs Tate-Collins chimed in before Taylor could speak, turning to him as she added, ‘That’s the lady who lives on this floor, you know, the poor thing. She had a fall the other day and it has shaken her up a little, so I took her a drop of soup and a roll to save her having to think about supper. She is getting on a bit, bless her.’

Marsha saw Taylor gaze into the lined face of the small wizened woman in front of him, who looked ninety if a day, but his voice was perfectly serious when he said, ‘That was kind of you, Mrs Tate-Collins.’

‘Shall we go?’ It was clear Taylor hadn’t got round to mentioning their marital status, which suited her just fine, and she was anxious to get him out of the door before her landlady started another cosy chat. ‘Goodbye, Mrs Tate-Collins,’ she added briskly.

‘Oh, goodbye, dear.’

It was a little surprised, but in view of the fact Marsha had gripped Taylor’s arm with one hand and opened the front door with the other, virtually pushing him on to the top step, she really couldn’t blame her landlady.

‘She’ll think you can’t wait to have your wicked way with me.’ Once they had descended the eight steps and were on the pavement Taylor raised an amused eyebrow at her.

Up to this moment she had successfully fought acknowledging how drop-dead gorgeous he looked, but as her heart missed a couple of beats she said stiffly, ‘Mrs Tate-Collins would never think anything so vulgar.’

‘Really? I thought she had a little twinkle in her eye.’

Any female, whatever her age, would have a twinkle in her eye when she looked at Taylor. That was the effect he had on the whole of womankind. ‘I think not,’ she said crisply. ‘And before we move from here I want to make it perfectly plain that I have agreed to this meeting under sufferance, and only because I want the divorce to go through with the minimum of disruption.’

Taylor surveyed her silently, his customary stern expression now in place. ‘Feel better now you’ve got that off your chest?’ he asked mildly after a very long moment.

Marsha shrugged. ‘I just wanted you to know, that’s all,’ she said, wondering why she suddenly felt like a recalcitrant schoolgirl.

‘Believe me, Fuzz, I was never in any doubt,’ he said drily. ‘You are nothing if not straightforward.’

Which was more than could be said for him. She hadn’t spoken, but the words must have been plain to read on her face because he next said, even more drily, ‘Especially when you say nothing at all.’

‘So, in view of that, why are we doing this?’ she asked a touch bewilderedly. He hadn’t contacted her in almost eighteen months, so why now, with the divorce just weeks away?

‘Because it’s time.’

He had always been good at those—the cryptic one-liners. Right from when she had first met him she had known he was an enigma, but she had thought she’d found the key when he’d asked her to marry him just weeks after they had first been introduced at a dinner party by a mutual friend. Love. She had mistakenly imagined he loved her as she loved him—had loved him, she corrected immediately. Had.

The warm evening was redolent with the faint smells of cooking from various open windows, along with the strains of a popular chart hit and bursts of laughter from the house next door. Marsha watched Taylor wrinkle his aquiline nose. ‘Shall we go?’ he asked quietly, his eyes tight on her face.

She would have liked to have said no and turned on her heel, but it really wasn’t an option. She nodded, allowing him to take her arm as they walked a few steps to where his Aston Martin was parked. He had changed the model in the last eighteen months, she noted silently, although the other car had only been six months old when she had left him. This one was sleek and dark and dangerous—very much like Taylor.

He opened the passenger door for her, and she slid into the expensive interior with a gracefulness she was pleased about, considering the way her stomach was jumping and her legs were trembling. That was the trouble with Taylor, she thought irritably. However much she tried to prepare herself, he always got under her skin.

Once he had joined her in the car, she steeled herself to glance at him as though his closeness bothered her not at all. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Surprise.’ He didn’t look at her, starting the engine and then manoeuvring the powerful car out of the close confines of the parking space. Her eyes fell on the thick gold ring on the third finger of his left hand, and again her heart lurched. Did he wear his wedding band all the time, or had he donned it specially for this evening? she asked herself, before answering in the next breath, what did it matter anyway? The ring was just an item of jewellery if the commitment it was meant to signify wasn’t there. Her own hands had been ringless from the moment she had walked out of their house and out of Taylor’s life.

The car purred along the busy London streets, passing numerous pubs and wine bars where folk were sitting outside drinking or eating in the dying sunshine. In the interim between leaving university and meeting Taylor Marsha had often enjoyed summer evenings with friends in this way, but since the breakdown of her marriage she hadn’t wanted to go back to the old crowd. She still saw one or two of them occasionally, but it wasn’t the same—not for her. They were still all relatively fancy-free and into having a good time, but she felt she had passed that stage and couldn’t go back—certainly not while she was still legally a married woman anyway. Stupid, maybe, she admitted a trifle bitterly, considering the way Taylor had behaved, but she couldn’t help it.

She glanced down at her hands, which were tight fists in her lap, and forced her fingers to relax, uncurling them one by one as she breathed deeply and willed her pulse into a steady beat. ‘I don’t like surprises,’ she said clearly, as though Taylor had just spoken that moment rather than all of ten minutes ago. Ten minutes of ragged vibrating silence.

She kept her gaze on the windscreen as the tawny eyes flashed over her tight profile before returning to the road ahead. ‘Shame,’ he drawled smoothly.

‘So, where are we going?’ And then, as the car made another turning, she knew. He was taking her home! No, not home—home was now her tiny sanctuary in West Kensington. ‘Stop the car please, Taylor,’ she said as evenly as she could.

‘Why?’

His tone was so innocent she knew she was right. ‘Because you told me you were taking me out to dinner,’ she said stonily.

‘I am.’ He gestured with one hand at the immaculate dinner suit he was wearing.

‘Taylor!’ She paused, warning herself to take care not to lose her temper and give him the satisfaction of winning. ‘I recognise where we are,’ she said more calmly. ‘This is a stone’s throw from Harrow.’

He nodded, totally unrepentant. ‘That’s right, and Hannah has been like a dog with two tails knowing you were dropping by tonight.’

Dropping by? Was the man mad? And then the thought of the buxom, middle-aged housekeeper who had mothered her from the first moment she had been introduced to her melted Marsha enough for a lump to come into her throat. She bit down on the emotion, saying, ‘I have no intention of going to your home.’

‘Our home, Fuzz.’ His voice was suddenly dangerous. ‘And although you might be able to cast people off as though they have never existed, Hannah can’t. Mad as you were with me, it wouldn’t have hurt you to have dropped her a line or arranged to meet her somewhere. Even a phone call would have been something. You damn near broke her heart.’

She couldn’t stand this. Didn’t he know that any reminder of him, however small, had crucified her in the early days, and if she had seen Hannah all her resolve to be strong and make a new life would have been swept away? She had missed the woman who had become the only mother she had ever known nearly as much as Taylor. And then, because she was working on sheer emotion, and without the necessary protective shields in place, she spoke out the thing which had hurt her as much as his betrayal with Tanya. ‘If you were so concerned about Hannah’s feelings, why didn’t you contact me after I’d left?’ she bit out harshly. ‘You’re a fine one to talk about casting people off.’

‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this,’ he growled, raking back his hair with an angry gesture which spoke volumes. ‘I came home after three days in Germany which had been pure hell to find you already packed and waiting to leave. You came at me all guns firing and accusing me of goodness knows what, and when I tried to make you see reason you walked out of the door. I followed you to your car to prevent you leaving and you slammed the door on my hand, breaking several bones in the process.’

‘That was an accident,’ she defended quickly. ‘I said so at the time, if you remember. I didn’t know you’d got your hand in the way of the door.’

‘It didn’t prevent you from driving off though, did it?’ he reminded her heatedly.

Marsha took a moment to compose herself. He was turning this all round, as though she was the one who had had an affair! ‘Hannah was there to take care of you—’

‘Damn Hannah,’ he said furiously, as though he hadn’t just accused her of being unfeeling. ‘I drove after you, if you remember, and do you recall what you said when we stopped at those traffic lights? If I didn’t stop following you, you’d drive into a wall. Tell me you didn’t mean that.’