Appraisingly, he studied it. The heavy bronze frog he and Tara had chosen together as a pre-birthday present for Claudia that same year was still there standing guard to the left of the door. Quickly, he bent down and felt beneath it, his fingers curling over the familiar shape of the key he found there.
He and Claudia had not had the kind of divorce that had necessitated anything so aggressive or traumatic as changing the house’s locks. And some habits, it seemed, lasted longer than others. Quietly, he unlocked the conservatory door and walked in.
It wasn’t that he feared that Claudia would refuse to let him into the house; the relationship they presently shared was civil enough if coolly distant. It was just …
Just what? That he wanted to surprise her—to catch her off guard, to see her face before she had time to hide behind the barrier he knew she would throw up against him?
‘Why?’ he had asked her passionately in the early years after their divorce. ‘Why the hell do you have to treat me with this ridiculous blanket of cold civility, Claudia, after all we’ve—’
‘Why? Because I have to,’ she had flung back at him bitingly. ‘I have to because if I don’t, I might start letting you see how I really feel about you, Garth, and for Tara’s sake, I can’t afford to do that.’
‘Do you really hate me that much?’ he had asked her emotively.
‘Yes,’ she had told him. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Well, you know what they say,’ he had returned. ‘Hate and love are merely different sides of the same coin, and where there’s hate, there must also be love.’
‘Where there was love, there is now hate,’ Claudia had corrected him. ‘Hate for you and hate even more for myself that I was ever fool enough to love you … to trust you.’
Maxine had said that Claudia was working from home, but there was no sound of any kind of activity coming from the room where he knew she worked, and a sharp prickle of atavistic emotion jarred up his spine.
The mere fact that Claudia had actually telephoned him last night was a clear indication of just how distraught she must have been, not that he had needed any telephone call to warn him of the devastating effect Tara’s news would have on her.
The house felt alien and alarmingly silent, a house he remembered being filled with the sounds of Tara’s childhood. Suddenly impelled by a sharp sense of urgency, he started to take the stairs two at a time, calling her name as he did so.
Later, Claudia told herself that her instinctive automatic response to the sound of Garth’s voice—a response that had her racing to her bedroom door and flinging it open, ignoring the fact that she was still only wearing the towel she had wrapped around her naked body after her shower—was simply a reflex action and nothing more. Just in time, she realised what she was doing, and as Garth reached the landing, Claudia took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway.
‘Garth, what are you doing here?’ she demanded unsteadily, an uncomfortable colour flooding her face and then slowly spreading to her body as she recognised how betraying her presence here at home and still not being dressed must be—especially to someone who had once known her as well as Garth did.
The relief Garth had felt when he first saw her evaporated as he saw the way she was reacting to his presence, her obvious discomfort, the way her face and body had coloured, the way she was looking almost furtively back into the bedroom, as though …
‘Why didn’t you go into work this morning?’ he demanded suspiciously.
Claudia stared at him.
‘That’s none of your business,’ she told him crisply, turning on her heel dismissively and walking back into her bedroom.
Garth followed her.
‘Isn’t it?’ he demanded, and then stopped. The bed was made up, no sign of an alien male presence to sully its immaculate neatness. Claudia’s hair-dryer lay on a chair on top of the clean underwear she had obviously put out to wear.
‘Garth, what are you doing … what are you looking for?’ Claudia demanded sharply as she quickly checked the bedside table, thankful to see that there was no sign of the bottle of sleeping tablets—not that it was any business of Garth’s what she did, not any more, but she knew him and knew he would fuss if he thought …
‘I’m not looking for anyone … anything,’ Garth denied quickly, catching himself up as he realised how much he had betrayed himself and the reason for his male aggression and hostility. Had he really expected to find someone else in Claudia’s bed?
Logically, perhaps not, but emotionally, even after so many years apart, he wasn’t ready for that, for another man in Claudia’s life.
‘You rang me last night,’ he told Claudia as he felt his blood pressure and his heartbeat start to return to normal.
Claudia avoided meeting his eyes, giving a small, oddly girlish shrug as she responded, ‘Did I? I …’
‘Claudia, don’t play games with me,’ Garth warned her. ‘I’m not asking you a question. I’m making a statement. You rang me and I know why. Tara’s told you that she’s going to marry Ryland.’
‘She has told me, yes,’ Claudia agreed, still refusing to look at him, ‘and yes, I did ring you, but why on earth that should bring you rushing down here behaving like some character out of a bad play, I really don’t know.’
‘You’re lying, Claudia. For God’s sake, I know you rang and I know why. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. If you needed—’
‘I need nothing and no one, but most of all, I do not need you,’ Claudia interrupted him with a fierce passion. ‘I would never let myself need a man I can’t trust, a man who—’
‘Let yourself need,’ Garth broke in. ‘Hell, Claudia, there’s no shame in being afraid … in being vulnerable … human … in turning to someone else for help.’
‘I want you to leave, Garth. I want you to leave right now,’ Claudia told him, then walked away from him and went to stand in front of the window. Dear God, she couldn’t bear this. She simply didn’t have the emotional reserves to cope with it, not right now, not after last night. She could feel her heart starting to beat furiously fast. She tried to swallow and found that she couldn’t. Her palms felt damp and she knew that any minute now she was going to start to visibly betray what she was feeling—the panic, the fear, the despair—and the last person she wanted to see her doing that was Garth, the very last.
Didn’t he know, couldn’t he understand, that superimposed over every memory she had of him was the image she had created out of the darkest depths of her imagination of him with her, of him loving her, of his face contorted with passion and need as he possessed her, and that image was like a sickness buried deep inside her that surfaced through all the smothering layers of rigid self-control she had placed over it to reduce her to a pulsing, aching, dying thing of burning acid jealousy and bitterness?
‘Claudia, look, I know how you must be feeling.’
Instead of leaving, he had walked up behind her, and Claudia tensed as she felt his breath against her hair.
‘No, you do not know how I’m feeling, Garth,’ she snapped. ‘How can you? How can anyone know?’
Claudia could hear hysteria edging up under her voice. Damn Garth. Why had he had to do this, come here like this and undermine her previous self-control?
‘Tara is my daughter, too, and I’m going to miss her as well—’