His appearance was as deceitful as his nature. Where were his wife…and his child? Something inside her twisted painfully as she stopped concentrating on the line-up of guests waiting to smile and shake her hand, and remembered instead the shocking agony of that cold, blustery September day when, not having heard from Joss for almost twenty-four hours, she had gone round to his lodgings to find out why he had broken their date. She had discovered from his landlady that he had packed his bags and gone…‘Gone back to his wife and child,’ she had told her maliciously, leaving only the cursory message that their affair was over and that she was not to try to get in touch with him.
She could remember even now the pebble-hard acidness of the woman’s cold eyes…and how, despite her casual attitude, she had sounded as though she had enjoyed delivering Joss’s message.
She had only met the woman on a couple of previous occasions. Normally she and Joss met just outside the village on the cliff-path. She hadn’t liked his landlady then, and she had liked her even less at that moment.
Joss, married. She had hardly been able to take it in. He was still only a student, in his last year at Oxford and, although she had surmised from the odd comments he had made about them that his family had money, he had said nothing to her to indicate that his family consisted of anything more than parents, and various aunts, uncles and cousins. He had certainly never intimated that he was married…and not just married, but a father as well.
His landlady had watched her unkindly, callously smiling at the tears she had been unable to stop stinging her eyes.
‘What did you expect?’ she had scoffed. ‘He was just using you, that’s all. Did you really think he intended it to be anything more than a brief fling? He’s told me not to give you his address. So don’t bother asking for it,’ she had added brutally and triumphantly, starting to close the door.
Numb with pain and shock, somehow or other Kate had managed to drag herself back to the cliff-path which had been their trysting place. She still could not take it in. Only forty-eight hours ago he had held her, kissed her, whispered to her that he loved and wanted her…and she had thought that implicit in those words was a promise for the future. And now…
She started to tremble violently realising what she had done. She had given herself to him with joy and fervour…given herself to a man who was already committed elsewhere…a man who was married with a child.
Mercifully, then, she hadn’t known that it wasn’t only a broken heart he had left her with.
She had only discovered she was pregnant six weeks after she had returned home. Shocked and bewildered, she had made no attempt to hide the truth from her parents; they, having observed the stunned, silent state in which she had returned to them after her holiday, had already guessed that some emotional trauma was at the root of her distress.
It had not occurred to them that it might be more than a mere holiday romance that was making her so pale and listless until she started being so violently ill.
After that…she had told them haltingly and miserably what she had done, how she had betrayed the mores they had taught her, how defiled and unhappy she felt, not at making love with Joss—that she could not regret—but at having made love with him believing him to be free when he wasn’t…at having participated, however innocently, in the breaking of marriage vows she considered to be sacred.
Her parents had been marvellous…wonderfully supportive and caring.
She had never gone back to the village. There had been no point…her mother’s aunt, disgruntled with the appalling summer weather, had sold the cottage and moved back to London, announcing that country living was not for her, and Joss had been someone she had resolutely shut away in a dark corner of her mind, refusing to allow herself to think about.
Except when Sophy was born…except when her parents died…except this morning, dressing for the wedding and grieving for all that might have been.
Seeing him had shaken her out of those idiotic daydreams, reminding her of what reality was. Reality was a man who had cold-bloodedly seduced her knowing that he was committed elsewhere, and who, it seemed, still continued to break those same marriage vows he had broken with her.
No wonder he had been so shocked to see her. He was probably wondering how quickly he could make his excuses and leave.
As the thought formed, she looked across the flower-decked marquee and saw him standing with a group of people, but slightly to one side of them, as though apart from them. He was looking directly at her, the grey eyes focusing on her with such intensity that for a moment she actually took a step towards him.
‘Kate, the girls are getting twitchy about serving the buffet,’ Lucy came up to warn her.
Thankfully Kate turned aside and glanced at her watch.
‘Yes. We’d better get everyone sitting down.’
Sophy and John had opted for an informal arrangement of round tables in the marquee, apart from the top table for close members of the family, and as James tactfully organised the ushers into making sure that everyone found their tables and sat down Kate turned her back on Joss and escaped.
The meal was a blur of tension and misery. Conversation hummed around her, Sophy and John as euphoric as the bubbles in the champagne. Someone—one of John’s married sisters, she thought vaguely—complimented her warmly on the food. She smiled, feeling as though her whole face had become frozen.
Joss was sitting right in her line of vision; the redhead clawed possessively at his arm whenever his attention wavered from her, and Kate thought viciously that he deserved the other woman’s petulant possessiveness.
All through the toasts and speeches she was conscious of growing tension, of an anxiety that balled in her stomach and made it impossible to concentrate on anything bar the dark-haired man sitting just within her vision.
Afterwards, while Sophy and John circulated among their guests, she tried to escape, but she had barely reached the opening of the marquee when Joss stopped her.
Her heart lodged painfully in her throat, her pulses hammering frantic messages of fear.
‘Your daughter looks very beautiful,’ he told her gravely. ‘John is a very lucky man.’
Stock compliments and phrases, with no nuance in them to make her muscles tense and her eyes flicker with distraught dread…nothing in his eyes to warn her that he had guessed that Sophy was his child…just a fine hardening of his mouth that made him suddenly look older and very bitter as he added devastatingly, ‘And so is James.’
James…She looked round wildly, her heart hammering with frantic, desperate ferocity. James was standing several yards away, talking to John’s mother.
‘Joss, there you are. It’s time we left.’ The redhead drew level with them and glowered warningly at Kate. ‘You know you promised we wouldn’t be staying long.’
Kate winced at her lack of manners, wondering faintly if the woman realised that she was doing her a favour and that the last thing she wanted was for Joss to linger.
She gave them both a polite, controlled smile and said brightly, ‘It was good of you to come. Please do excuse me,’ and quickly sidestepped them both, heading for the house and security.
It was a good half-hour before she was able to accept that they had actually gone and that she was safe, but the shock of Joss’s unexpected appearance had taken its toll, and it was impossible for her to relax and enjoy what was left of the day.
By the time the last of the guests were leaving she had a pounding headache, and the last thing she wanted to do was to join John’s family for the celebratory meal they had organised at the Fleece.
Sophy and John had gone. They were flying to Antigua for a three-week honeymoon, and Sophy’s face had been blissfully rapt as