Make-Over Marriage

‘Go on, then,’ she responded, in a shocked, low voice.

He drew in a great breath of air. ‘Don’t you ever feel that we’re in some kind of rut?’

‘A rut?’ she echoed in disbelief.

‘Sure.’ He saw the bewildered look on her face and his mouth softened as he put a hand out to touch her, but she pushed him away.

‘I thought you wanted to talk,’ she said coldly.

He nodded. She was right. Sex had already distracted them from the subject once. ‘Anna, you grew up in this flat,’ he sighed. ‘We’ve spent all our married life here. We brought up our three babies here and now we’re running out of space. I think we’ve outgrown it.’

His words had a chilling finality about them, as though that area of their life was now over, and Anna felt a shiver of apprehension ice its way down the entire length of her spine. She swallowed down the fear which had risen thickly in her throat like bile.

‘I hear what you’re saying, Todd,’ she told him quietly.

‘Well, that’s good,’ came his cautious reply.

Tears threatened to spring up behind her eyes. ‘And you’re admitting to me for the first time ever what we’ve both always known—that I trapped you into marriage by getting pregnant! If you’d never met me, you would never have found yourself in this supposedly terrible situation—and you could have gone ahead and married your beloved Elisabeta!’

His grey eyes narrowed into splinters of slate. ‘Please don’t say things in the heat of the moment that you might later regret, Anna!’

But she noticed he didn’t deny her words. ‘In that case, I’d better not say anything else at all,’ she told him flatly.

He opened his mouth to reply, but the loud ringing on the front doorbell heralded the arrival of the triplets and he decided to let the subject drop. For the moment.

As Anna prepared to walk past her husband he made a conciliatory attempt to catch her in his arms, but she stood clear of his embrace, still wounded by the implications of what he had said to her.

‘Just think about everything I’ve said, Anna,’ he urged her as the ringing increased in volume and in frequency. ‘That’s all I ask. Just consider it. Will you do that for me?’

Put that way, how could she refuse?

Anna risked a quick glance in the mirror as she followed Todd out of the bedroom. She looked absolutely frightful! Her hair was mussed and her cheeks were a giveaway red, and she became acutely aware that she had put her navy blue knickers on back to front! Still, none of the girls was about to notice that! She grabbed an elastic band, then scraped her hair back in its habitual ponytail.

Todd opened the front door and there was a whirl of green uniforms and flying blonde curls as three young girls entered the flat like dervishes and began speaking excitedly at the same time, as they had been doing ever since they’d first learned to talk.

‘Mummy, Hannah Phipps who writes those horse books is visiting our school after Christmas, and I’m to present her with a bouquet of flowers!’

‘Mummy, they’ve given me the part of the wicked witch in the summer play and I’m supposed to give you a list of what I need for costumes—but I’ve lost it!’

‘Mummy, I sat an extra Latin paper, just for fun, only I got the whole thing right, and Mrs McFadden is seriously pleased with me!’

‘That’s sad!’

‘It is not sad—Mrs McFadden says I’ll probably get a Headmaster’s Accommodation!’

‘Sadder still!’

Anna’s mouth softened into a wide smile of loving pride as she surveyed her triplet daughters—identical to look at, but so very different in character. They had inherited their pale, freckle-dusted skin, their cobalt eyes and golden hair directly from her, but whereas her hair was straight, theirs was a mass of uncontrollable curls. They were tall for their age, and their rangy, athletic build came straight from Todd. ‘Hello, darlings!’ she beamed as she hugged each one fiercely in turn. ‘What clever girls you all are!’

Natalia, Natasha and Valentina were known affectionately as Tally, Tasha and Tina. Tally and Tasha had been born late on February 13th, but their sister hadn’t joined them until two minutes after midnight on St Valentine’s day. So she never did get christened Nerissa, which had been her parents’ original intention, but everyone who knew her decided that ‘Tina’ suited her loving and slightly scatty personality far better than Nerissa would have done!

‘Daddy, why are you home from work so early?’ asked Tasha curiously, her intelligent eyes flicking from her mother to her father with interest.

‘I...sort of...took the afternoon off,’ explained Todd lamely, and Anna had to try very hard not to smile, their angry spat temporarily forgotten. Rarely, if ever, had she seen her husband look quite so much at a loss for words!

‘Oh. I see. And why is your shirt on inside out?’ Tasha added innocently.

‘Er...juice and biscuits for three hardworking and worn out girls, is it?” enquired Todd hurriedly.

‘Oh, yes, please, Daddy!’ trilled the three in unison.

‘And for you, darling?’ Todd looked directly at Anna.

Their eyes met over three silky blonde heads and the unmissable look of determination in her husband’s grey eyes made Anna dread the resumption of their talk.

‘Tea, please,’ she told him calmly, grateful for a bit of breathing space.

There was a lull while Todd clattered around in the kitchen and Anna brushed the triplets’ wayward hair and exclaimed over offerings brought home from their art class.

And, although she tried very hard not to think about it, her words came back to haunt her as she realised that for the first time ever she had had the courage to speak the truth during her row with Todd.

She had never meant to, but facts were facts, and, yes, she had trapped Todd Travers into a marriage he had never intended...

CHAPTER THREE

ANNA met Todd in a nightclub. She was just seventeen and had never been anywhere quite like it before.

Clubbing had never held any fascination for Anna, but it was the birthday of one of her classmates at the exclusive Kensington school she attended, who had insisted on taking five friends to one of London’s liveliest clubs.

It was certainly very lively! But the place was packed and very noisy and the flashing strobe lights which were turning all her friends into fast-moving silvery white marionettes were giving Anna a splitting headache. She hadn’t been in there for twenty minutes before she found herself wishing that she could go home.

Todd was also at the club under sufferance. His driver, who had been with him since he was well on his way to making his first million, was getting married that weekend, and he had invited Todd to his stag night. At twenty-three, Todd wasn’t into either stag nights or heavy drinking, but he’d felt duty-bound to join in with the party, and only hoped his face didn’t show his boredom!

Just before midnight, with the thumping music pounding away inside his head, he slipped away unnoticed to catch a few moments of peace and found a discreetly lit bar on the first floor of the building.

Anna was in search of the loo, and once she found it wished she hadn’t, because she was confronted with a full-length mirror and quickly became aware that her sophisticated outfit made her look like some experienced big-sister version of herself.

She had borrowed the dress, of course, because her own wardrobe was sadly lacking in most areas. Anna might have been a pupil at a prestigious and expensive London day school, but her father had no idea how young girls wanted to live.

He was an out-of-touch civil servant who spent most of the time locked away in his mote-filled and dingy office in Whitehall; a changed person, so different from the laughing man of Anna’s childhood. Anna’s mother had been mown down by a drunken driver when Anna was just fourteen, and since then all the light seemed to have gone out of her father’s life. He rarely seemed to be home at all. He did not seem able to share his immense grief with his daughter, coping instead by burying himself in his work.

A lofty and somewhat distant intellectual, he cared nothing for high fashion, and what little he knew had convinced him that it was nothing more than an elaborate swindle designed to part young and impressionable girls from their money. Consequently, while Anna received an adequate allowance, it certainly didn’t allow her to indulge herself in the outfits which most of her peers owned.

The dress she had borrowed for the evening wasn’t something she would have normally chosen, but it obviously did something for her, because Anna had never been quite so aware of men ogling her before. It was a short satin slip dress with shoe-string straps which left the creamy skin of her shoulders exposed. The silvery grey silky material clung to her undulating curves like a second skin, and the eyes of most men in the room were out on stalks.

Todd sipped at his tonic water and observed the woman in the tiny, shimmering dress from out of the corner of his eye. Great legs, was his first instinctive thought, and then something made him look closer, and he frowned.

Because for all her beauty there was something about her which did not quite add up. She did not look very comfortable in her surroundings, for a start. And any minute now one of those creeps who had been quaffing far more booze than was good for them was going to breathe stale alcohol all over her and try to chat her up. Or worse.

Todd rose to his feet, unaffected by the fact that every woman present was lasciviously undressing him with her eyes.

Except one.

Anna had noticed him, of course. He was so hunky that everyone had noticed him! But only a woman who was supremely vain, or extremely confident, would ever have expected a man like that to look at her twice. And she was neither.

And then she blinked as she saw that he was walking purposefully across the bar in her direction.

She actually peered over her shoulder to see if some glamorous female was standing behind her, giving the tall man with the slanted grey eyes a welcoming smile, but there was no one. Only her. She bit her lip.

Todd saw her obvious and innocent confusion and felt the oddest glow of satisfaction as he drew closer to her.

‘Hello,’ he said, in his distinctively deep voice. ‘You look lost.’

‘I wish I was,’ Anna told him frankly. ‘This place is worse than being in a fireworks factory.’

‘Oh? Why?’ He was amused and showed it; these days he rarely seemed to meet women who said anything original. Most of them just agreed with everything he said!

‘Well, all those lights flashing like mad and the music banging loud enough to perforate your eardrums!’ Anna looked around her with obvious disapproval. ‘And I can’t believe that they charge those ridiculous prices for drinks!’

‘You sound as though you shouldn’t be here,’ he observed drily. ‘Which rather begs the question of why you are.’

Anna shrugged. ‘I came with some friends,’ she told him, deliberately omitting the prefix ‘school’.

‘And they are...?’ He looked around.

‘Dancing. Downstairs.’

‘And don’t you want to dance?’ he questioned, thinking that it would be heaven to have her swaying in his arms to the music.

Anna considered the question briefly. She wouldn’t have minded dancing with him. Not one bit. But did she dare risk taking him back downstairs to the dance floor? He was the best-looking man she had seen all night. Wouldn’t the others just leap all over him, like slavering dogs confronted with a bone? ‘Not really,’ she shrugged. ‘It’s too crowded.’

‘A drink, then? Or a coffee, perhaps?’

‘Oh, I’d love a coffee,’ she said fervently. ‘Do they sell it here?’

He shuddered. ‘I believe they do a foul brown liquid masquerading as coffee but I know a little expresso bar just around the corner which serves the best coffee in the whole of London. If you’re interested, that is?’

Anna hesitated. She had listened and learnt her lessons in personal safety well, and yet some bone-deep instinct told her that she could trust this man.

‘Bring along a chaperon, if it makes you happier,’ he prompted gently as he correctly interpreted her hesitation.

No fear! Anna shook her head and her bright blonde hair shimmered in the subdued bar lighting. ‘That won’t be necessary—I happen to have a black belt in karate, in case I need protecting.’

‘Do you really?’ he quizzed her in admiration.

‘No!’ she laughed. ‘But I had you worried there for a moment, didn’t I?’

He laughed back. ‘Todd Travers,’ he murmured, and held his hand out.

‘Anna Marshall,’ she told him as they shook hands.

They spent an innocent and absorbing hour over coffee, though afterwards Anna could barely remember what they had talked about. She was glad that she had paid so much attention to all her subjects in class, and also glad that her father had always insisted she read the newspapers thoroughly, because she was more than able to hold her own with the remarkably well-informed Todd Travers.

They stepped out together into the neon-lit street and he hailed a black cab, then accompanied her back to Knightsbridge. Anna was awfully glad that it was dark, because she started blushing wildly when the driver pulled over outside her building, desperate for Todd to ask to see her again.

Todd had tussled with his conscience during the journey. She was not like the women he usually dated. There was something pure and clean about her which, ironically, made him feel awfully protective of her, an emotion he had only ever experienced with his little sister, and his friend from school, Elisabeta. And he had never fancied Elisabeta...

As the cab stopped, his conscience got the better of him, and he forced himself to ask, ‘Just how old are you, Anna?’

It was the moment of truth and Anna refused to heed it.

‘Twenty,’ she told him blithely, saw his relieved smile, and the die was cast.

During the next few weeks, Anna managed to meet with Todd every single day, while keeping him well away from her father. This proved to be easy since Todd had no desire to share her company with anyone else, and she felt exactly the same about him.

She was evasive when she chose to be, telling him simply that she was on her Easter vacation; when he assumed that she was at university, she let him carry on believing it, justifying it by telling herself that she would be at college before long. She, who was normally as honest as the day was long, soon discovered that deception was terribly, terribly easy when you wanted something badly enough.

And Anna wanted Todd...

She didn’t care that she was duping him. She had fallen in love with him, but knew that he would drop her like a hot potato if she told him how old she really was. And love was love. Anna had already lost her mother; it had made her grow up fast. More than most people she recognised the ephemeral nature of happiness—embraced the idea that you had to grab at it when you got the chance, because you never knew when it might be snatched away from you. She would, she decided, do almost anything to keep Todd Travers in her life...

Todd was in far deeper than he wanted to be too; he had never been in love before either, and it had knocked him for six. For the first time in his life, he was conscious of being in the throes of something much more powerful and much more exciting than reason.

In a way, his life had been as fractured as Anna’s. He had inherited a run-down plastics factory in Islington on his eighteenth birthday, and this had played a big part in his decision not to take up a scholarship to Oxford. His father had gambled away what little money the family had left, before running off to Australia and dying penniless just a year later from an excess of alcohol.

It had been left to Todd to support his mother and little sister, and the anger he had felt at his father’s betrayal he had channelled into turning the factory into a dynamic and successful business manufacturing luxurious ice-creams made out of the best natural ingredients. It had been a perfectly timed strategy. People were just beginning to rebel against impersonal mass production and were prepared to pay more for quality. Todd hadn’t realised at the time that he was setting a trend, but then he had always been ahead of his time.

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