Yes, it would make life easier if they kept them apart, but it wasn’t what she had hoped for, what she had planned when she and Marcus had married. She had never assumed that merging their two families would be easy, but neither had she anticipated that her relationship with Vanessa would become so destructive. Her relationship? What relationship?
The last thing that Vanessa wanted was any kind of relationship with either Eleanor or her sons, but most especially with Eleanor. Sometimes she felt as though she and Vanessa were two rivals locked in a silent and deadly battle for Marcus. And yet the last thing she wanted was for Vanessa to feel that her marriage to Marcus in any way threatened his daughter’s position in his life.
In fact she had been the one who had suggested to Marcus that he see more of his daughter. It had disturbed her a little, when she and Marcus had first become lovers, to discover how little he saw of his child.
‘She’s happy with her mother,’ Marcus had told her.
‘But she needs you in her life as well,’ Eleanor had insisted gently.
‘You have a husband and children,’ she suddenly came out of her brief reverie to hear Pierre Colbert saying to her. ‘Does this not affect your work?’
Eleanor refused to react, to allow him to provoke her into becoming defensive.
‘I’m a woman, monsieur,’ she told him quietly. ‘And as such I am well used to balancing many demands upon my time.’
She saw from his expression that she had both surprised and amused him, and mentally congratulated herself for not falling into the trap of complaining that he would not have asked her such a question had she been a man. He was a Frenchman, undeniably chauvinistic and no doubt unashamedly proud to be. She would succeed far better with him by emphasising the virtues of her sex rather than by challenging him to accept her as the equal of any man.
She watched him thoughtfully as he smiled at her, and then said shrewdly, ‘My partner and I like to think that we offer a very skilled and competitive service, and I believe that you must think so too, monsieur, otherwise you would not be here. You are not, I think, a man who needlessly wastes his time.’
She watched the respect dawn in the clever brown eyes before he looked away from her.
‘You are one of several agencies recommended to me,’ he told her dismissively. ‘It is always wise to consider several options, even though some of them must always be more favourable than others.’
He was standing up, terminating the meeting. Eleanor rose too, still outwardly calm and relaxed, although inwardly she was wryly aware that he would probably prefer not to give them the business. Had she been a man… or French…
As she escorted him to the door, she tried not to dwell on how much they needed the extra income his work would have given them. She had known when he first contacted them that it was extremely unlikely they would get the business. It made her feel a little bit better knowing that she had subtly challenged his initial attitude towards her, drawing respect from him in place of his original hostility.
After she had seen him off the premises, she went back to her office and picked up his file. She needed to put Louise in the picture vis-à-vis her meeting with him.
She got up and walked into the foyer. ‘Is Louise in her office?’ she asked Claire.
‘Yes, she’s just come in,’ the receptionist told her.
Smiling her thanks at her, Eleanor walked across to her partner’s office.
Claire watched her enviously. Eleanor was everything she herself longed to be. Attractive, successful, married to a man who exuded an almost magical charisma of sex and power; a man who, although he might be well into his forties, still had such an aura of compelling masculinity about him that he made her go weak at the knees. Not that he ever gave her so much as a second look. And even if he had…
Eleanor was so… so nice that she couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt her.
Yes, they were an ideal couple, with an ideal relationship; an ideal lifestyle.
Marriage, career, motherhood—Eleanor had them all.
Although she had knocked on Louise’s door before going in, her partner obviously hadn’t heard her, Eleanor realised as she saw Louise’s dark head bent in absorbed concentration over some papers on her desk.
When Eleanor said her name she looked up, startled, quickly shuffling the papers out of sight, an embarrassed, almost furtive look crossing her face.
‘Nell, I didn’t hear you come in…’
‘So I see.’ Eleanor grinned at her. ‘Planning your summer holidays?’
She had noticed, as Louise shuffled the papers out of sight, the photograph on one of them of a pretty and obviously French château-style farmhouse.
To her surprise a faintly haunted, almost guilty expression flickered through Louise’s eyes before she turned her head and confirmed quickly, ‘Yes…’
‘I just wanted to bring you up to date on my interview with Pierre Colbert. Are you free for lunch?’
Once again Louise looked slightly uncomfortable.
‘Er—no, I’m sorry, I’m not. I’m having lunch with Paul…’
Eleanor smiled at her. ‘Lucky you,’ she told her ruefully. ‘I wish my husband could make time to have lunch with me. We’re lucky if we manage to share a sandwich together these days.’
She broke off as she realised that Louise wasn’t really listening to her.
‘Louise, is something wrong?’ she asked her quietly.
‘No,’ Louise assured her quickly.
Too quickly? Eleanor wondered, her intuition suddenly working overtime.
She knew that Louise and Paul had a very turbulent relationship, a relationship which had started while her then new business partner was still nursing wounds from her previous affair, and she was also uneasily aware of how much Paul tended to dominate her partner. He was that kind of man, needing to assert himself or perhaps to assure himself of the superiority of his masculinity by forcing the women in his life to assume an inferior position.
She had become increasingly aware of how often the words ‘Paul says’ or ‘Paul thinks’ had begun to preface Louise’s comments since the two of them had married, but she had firmly dismissed her own dislike of the man by reminding herself that he was Louise’s choice and not hers, and that it was after all just as well that different types of men appealed to different types of women. And besides, if she was honest with herself, didn’t her dislike of Paul stem partly from the fact that his manner towards Louise was a little too reminiscent of her own first husband’s domineering manner towards her?
Still, if there were problems with the relationship, she would hate to think that Louise did not feel she could confide in her.
She tried again. ‘Louise—–’
‘Look, I must go. I promised to call and see a client before I meet Paul. I really must go, Nell.’
Louise was an adult woman and there was no way she could force her into giving her her confidence if she did not want to, Eleanor reminded herself wryly as she went back to her own office.
The trouble with her was that she had a strong maternal instinct, or so Jade said.
‘What you need is to surround yourself with a large brood of children,’ Jade had informed her once.
A large brood