‘Why did you ring me last night?’
Somehow or other, Claudia found the strength to turn round and face him. ‘That was a mistake,’ she told him quietly. ‘I … I—’
‘Dialled the wrong number?’ Garth suggested harshly.
Claudia shook her head. He knew perfectly well she hadn’t done that; they both did.
‘It was a mistake, Garth,’ she repeated.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ Garth contradicted her. ‘You rang me because for once your emotions, your real emotions got the better of you. You rang me because you were afraid, because you needed me.’
‘No,’ Claudia denied. ‘I don’t need you, Garth. I stopped needing you a long time ago, and—’
‘You needed me as Tara’s father,’ Garth continued as though she hadn’t spoken, as though she hadn’t uttered those passionate words of denial and fury. ‘Clo …’
The unexpected use of his old pet name for her was like a sawtooth file being used on an oversensitive raw nerve ending, and Claudia flinched, visibly unable to suppress the tears that suddenly filled her eyes. Garth reached out and caught hold of her, drawing her close.
She still smelled the same as she had always done, of vanilla and soft clean skin and something that was and always would be essentially her. She still felt the same, too, feminine, womanly, all the woman he had ever really wanted although he knew that she would never believe that.
‘Clo, it’s all right, it’s all right,’ he told her huskily. Unexpectedly, uncontrollably, he was transported back to another place, another time, another life, when he had had the right to hold her, to touch her. ‘Claudia …’
Memory … instinct … could be a dangerously powerful and unmerciful force. Her eyes closed, her body taut with anger and rejection, Claudia’s senses registered the tone of his voice, recognised its hunger, and like Garth, she was transported back to a time when all that it had taken to arouse her had been that particular note in his voice, that special touch of his hands caressing her body.
As he felt her body relax, Garth automatically closed the gap between them, bending his head to cover her quiescent mouth with his own.
She felt so good, so right … so Claudia. As his hands sensuously kneaded the warm flesh of her arms, he started to circle her lips with the tip of his tongue, waiting for her lips to part in their private sexual signal, their special shorthand message passed from him to her and back again that very soon the hungry, urgent thrust of his tongue within her mouth would be echoed by the even more hungry, urgent thrust of his body within hers.
Outside in the street, a car door slammed abruptly, bringing Claudia back to reality. Hot-faced, she tried to thrust Garth away.
She was forty-five, damn it, and even if she hadn’t, even if she wasn’t … even if they didn’t … there was no way she considered the kind of openly sexual way Garth was behaving acceptable in a relationship between people of their age. It just wasn’t … it just didn’t …
‘Let me go,’ she demanded freezingly, pushing him back more defiantly. ‘Let go of me, Garth! I can’t bear your touching me … I loathe your touching me,’ she told him vehemently, the flustered colour burning even more hotly in her face.
‘No,’ Garth challenged her furiously. He knew that he was deliberately feeding his own anger and using it to mask very different, far more complex emotions.
It had shaken him badly to discover just how frighteningly easy it had been to allow his emotions to work that time trick on him, that subtle but volatile and dangerous mirage that exchanged reality for fiction.
‘Yes,’ Claudia insisted icily.
Freezing her feelings, numbing herself, had been the only way she had of denying her pain, of escaping from it all those years ago when …
‘I can’t bear it when you touch me, Garth,’ she reiterated quietly. ‘I can’t bear it because every time you do, I see her. I see you touching her and I feel sick … I am sick,’ she told him expressionlessly.
‘I’m sick, too,’ Garth retorted bitterly. ‘Sick of being treated like a leper, sick of being made to feel that I’m some kind of lowlife who doesn’t … I’ve tried to tell you. It wasn’t like that, Claudia. It just wasn’t like that. I thought … I can’t even remember touching her, never mind—’
‘Really … you can’t remember?’ Claudia could hear her voice rising, cracking under the strain of trying to maintain her self-control. ‘You can’t remember making love to her in our home … our bed? You can’t remember that you …’
She was screaming the words at him, Claudia recognised in horror, shouting them, as out of control now as she had been all those years ago when she had first realised, first acknowledged the truth.
‘Claudia …’ Garth protested, swearing under his breath with male impotence in the face of so much female fury.
‘Get out,’ Claudia demanded. ‘Just go, Garth. You may have come here to gloat, to—’
‘To what? Just what the hell do you think I am?’ Garth demanded. ‘Claudia, I didn’t—’
‘To remind me that you warned me that something like this might happen. How that must please you, Garth. How happy it must make you—’
‘Claudia. I didn’t come here to gloat. I came because I thought you might need someone to talk to … because I was concerned.’
‘Concerned.’ Claudia froze. ‘Concerned,’ she repeated, her voice metallic and sharp with disbelief. ‘Concerned for whom, Garth? Certainly not for me, the woman, the wife, you betrayed so easily. Did you talk about me when you were in bed with her? Did you discuss your concern for me with her? Ah, but I was forgetting. If you can’t remember making love to her, then you certainly won’t be able to remember discussing me, will you?’
‘Claudia, for God’s sake … I came here to talk to you about Tara, about her …’ Garth held his breath, waiting for her to retaliate, and when she didn’t, he started to release it very slowly.
‘But we are talking about her, aren’t we?’ she said softly now.
Across the silence that divided them, their eyes met and it was Garth’s that fell first.
‘Claudia,’ he began rawly, but she shook her head, the tempest of the emotions that had driven her so close to the edge of her self-control safely harnessed now, and she wasn’t going to allow Garth to provoke her into another demeaning outburst.
‘I’ve got to get ready to go out, Garth, I’m already running late,’ she told him crisply.
One look at her face told Garth that he would be wasting his time trying to talk to her, to reason with her. Shaking his head, he turned round and headed for the open doorway, cursing himself as he did so. He had handled things badly. Beneath her outwardly calm, gentle demeanour, Claudia had a very strong skein of the same stubborn pride and indomitable spirit that had made her father, the brigadier, the respected warrior that he was.
In Claudia, though, its inflexibility was normally tempered by her woman’s awareness that life came in varying shades of grey, rather than two opposing colours of black and white—apart from where he was concerned.
As he let himself out of the house and headed for his car, he reminded himself that there was that school of belief that said the greater the love, the greater the hatred following any form of betrayal, but his betrayal …
There were always two sides to every story and she hadn’t ever been prepared to listen while he told her his.
After the miscarriage of their first