‘I’m not suggesting anything. I’m simply saying that he’s a very… sexy man. Perhaps there is something in that old myth about catching the bride’s bouquet, after all,’ she murmured thoughtfully.
‘Hannah!’ Claire warned her direfully.
‘All right, all right, I know—you’ve taken a vow of celibacy and I shan’t say another word; it just seems such a pity that it’s all such a waste…’
After Hannah had gone, taking the rest of the biscuits with her, Claire walked slowly upstairs and then paused outside the door to the master bedroom, pushing it open slowly, with reluctance almost, pausing on the threshold before eventually walking inside.
This was the room she had shared with John throughout their marriage—as a bride and a young wife—but when she stood still in its centre there were no echoes of those years to ruffle its almost sterile blankness.
There was no sense, no awareness, no feeling in this room of people having lived intimately within the protection of its walls, of having laughed and cried, fought and made up, of having shared intimacies… of having loved. She had seen the way that Brad had frowned as he had studied the room and had worried anxiously that he too might have picked up on the room’s lack of those intimate vibrations.
It was strange how one became accustomed to things, adapted to them, accepted them and eventually came to think of them as the norm. It took something—someone different to make one see things from a different perspective—to make one realise.
As she smoothed down the already smooth cover on the bed Claire realised that her hand was trembling. Her marriage… her life… her… her privacy… they belonged to her and to no one else. There was no need for her to worry that someone else—that anyone else—would ever discover them, she reassured herself firmly.
The only way he… they could ever do so would be if she chose to tell them, and since she was certainly not going to do that…
Brad was halfway through his meeting with Tim when he realised that his wallet was missing. Mentally reviewing the events of the day, rerunning them through his mind’s eye, he pinned down its possible loss to the moment when he had leaned forward and then bent down to inspect the workings on the shower on his tour of Claire’s house. Glancing at his watch, he decided that it would probably be quicker and simpler to drive straight over than to waste time telephoning to announce his arrival.
Breaking gently into Tim’s long-winded description of the vagaries of the British weather and its effect on the sales of air-conditioning systems, he explained that there was an urgent task he needed to perform.
As Brad parked his car in the drive he saw that Claire’s back door was slightly open in the homely way he remembered from his own childhood, and without thinking he pushed it wider and walked in.
He found Claire in the drawing room, gently dusting the face of one of the silver-framed photographs. When she saw him she put it down quickly, guiltily almost, and for some reason the defensiveness of her action angered him, making him demand brusquely as he gestured towards the photograph, ‘Wasn’t there ever a time when you were jealous of her, when you resented her and wished that you came first, instead of always having to stand in her shadow?’
Claire’s flush, initially caused by a mixture of shock at the unexpected arrival and embarrassment at the way he had caught her behaving in her own home almost as though she felt that she had no real right to be there, darkened to one of outraged anger.
‘In your country it might be perfectly acceptable to make personal criticisms and to ask intimate questions, to pry into people’s personal thoughts and lives, but in this country it isn’t,’ she reprimanded him sharply. ‘My marriage—’
‘Your marriage!’ Brad interrupted her. ‘In my country we don’t classify the type of relationship you seemed to have with your husband as very much of a marriage,’ he told her scornfully. ‘In my country,’ he stressed, ‘no woman worthy of the name would tamely accept being pushed so obviously into second place by accepting second-best—’
‘My marriage was not second-best,’ Claire denied furiously. ‘I knew when I married John how much he loved Paula. I knew then that…’
‘That what? All he wanted you for was to care for the shrine to her that he had turned this place into? And you were happy with that… you accepted that…?’
The contemptuous disbelief in his voice stung Claire into defending herself. ‘You don’t know the first thing about marriage.’
‘Don’t I?’ Brad challenged her softly. ‘I know as much as any other man about what it feels like to be a man. Why did you move out of your—sorry, John’s—bedroom?’ he asked her.
‘I… After John died… I didn’t…’
‘You didn’t what? Like sharing your bed with a ghost? Funny that, since all your married life you’d already been sharing it with the ghost of his first wife.’
Brad didn’t need to hear Claire’s shocked gasp or to see the anguish in her eyes to know that he had gone too far, said too much. He had realised it almost as soon as the cruel words had left his mouth but, of course, it was too late to recall them now; too late too to curse himself under his breath and to question what on earth had prompted him, driven him—him of all men, who had surely learned years ago to deal gently with other people’s vulnerable emotions; you couldn’t raise four sisters without doing so—to tear away another human being’s defences so ruthlessly and so angrily.
Why? Why? What was it about this one particular woman that made him react so challengingly, so malely aggressively?
‘I’m sorry,’ he apologised quietly. ‘You’re right… I was out of line. It’s just…’ He gestured towards the photograph and told her, ‘I guess it’s just that I can’t help thinking how I’d feel if you were one of my sisters. It can’t have been easy for you… married to a man who…’
‘Who what?’ Claire challenged him. ‘Who loved his first wife more than he loved me?’ Her mouth twisted slightly as she saw the way he looked away from her. So she had embarrassed him. Well, it served him right. He was the one who had brought up the subject of her marriage, not her, and a little embarrassment was the least he deserved to suffer after what he had said to her… done to her.
‘Well, I’m not one of your sisters,’ she told him fiercely, ‘and my relationship with John—our marriage was…’ She paused, her eyes suddenly filling with tears.
‘You must have loved him very much,’ she heard Brad saying gruffly, whilst he wondered how and where Tim fitted into her life.
In a way what he had said was true, Claire acknowledged inwardly, only it wasn’t so much John she had loved as what he had done for her. But that knowledge, those thoughts were too private to disclose to anyone, and most especially to the man now standing watching her.
‘He’s been dead for over two years now and yet you still keep this place like a shrine for him,’ he commented. ‘Why?’
Were all Americans so forthright, so… so openly curious about other people’s private lives? Claire wondered in exasperation. Wasn’t there anything she could say to get it through to him that his questions were too personal and unwelcome?
‘It was her home,’ she told him evasively, hoping that he would drop the subject and tell her why he had returned.
Instead he pounced on what she had said with all the skill and speed of a mountain cougar, repeating softly, ‘Was… Past tense; she’s in the past, but so are you. This is the present and you should put the past behind you…’
Now what had he said? Brad wondered perceptively as he saw the way her face changed, her body tensing.
‘The