‘Why did you come back?’ she asked him, changing the subject. ‘Have you changed your mind about wanting to stay here…?’
She didn’t really want to have him lodging with her, Brad guessed, and had no doubt been pressured into it by her over-assertive sister-in-law. Why? Because Irene was anxious to protect her husband’s job or because she was anxious to protect her marriage?
Under normal circumstances the situation would have been enough to have him backing off, making some excuse to let her off the hook, but he recognised that he didn’t want to lose contact with her—not yet… not until…
Not until what? Not until he had pinned down what it was about her that provoked such a range of volatile and unfamiliar emotions and reactions within him. If you really need time to work that one out, you really are in a bad way, he derided himself inwardly. She intrigued him, angered him… incited him… excited him, and if the time ever came when she shared her bed with him he’d make pretty damn sure that there were no ghostly third parties there sharing it with them.
‘No, I haven’t changed my mind,’ he told her, pausing deliberately before adding softly, ‘Far from it.’
It was interesting the way she had coloured up as betrayingly and vividly as a sexually inexperienced girl.
‘I… I’d like to check over the bedroom if I may,’ he continued. ‘Er… which door was it…?’
Claire couldn’t help it; she could feel the hot colour flooding up under her skin. She was quite positive that he knew exactly which door it was—he was that kind of man—but to challenge him would be to unleash on herself all manner of emotional hazards that she doubted that she had the strength of mind to negotiate, not least the appalling, clear mental image that she had just had of Brad laughingly, lovingly, gently drawing the shadowy figure of a compliant, eager woman towards the protective shadows of an invitingly open bedroom door, the bed just visible within—the bed on which he would very shortly be making expert and intensely erotic love to the woman clinging so eagerly to him.
But that woman wasn’t her… That woman could never be her.
As Brad saw the way she glanced towards the stairs and the shadow that crossed her face, he felt irritably angry with himself for tormenting her. It was so out of character for him—the kind of masculine behaviour he had often verbally checked in his brothers.
‘It’s all right,’ he told Claire quietly. ‘I think I can find the way after all. It’s just that I suspect I may have dropped my wallet there earlier; that’s why I came back…’
‘Your wallet…? Oh. I…’
He had come back for his wallet… Then why pretend…? She didn’t understand. Claire frowned as she watched him taking the stairs two at a time and heading straight for the master-bedroom door.
There were a lot of things about Brad that she didn’t understand, she recognised uneasily as she waited for him to come back down. But what disturbed her most was the fact that she was actually acknowledging that lack of understanding, giving it a gravitas that it certainly did not merit.
CHAPTER FOUR
CLAIRE grimaced to herself as she emerged from the bright warmth of the school to discover that it was raining—hard.
It had been dry and fine when she had left home earlier in the evening, and with time in hand she had decided to walk to the school instead of taking her car.
She hesitated for a moment, wondering whether or not to go back inside and ring for a taxi, and then, realising that she was already wet, pulled up the collar of her jacket and started to walk quickly down the road.
Whilst she had hesitated about whether to walk home or not she had been conscious in a hazy sort of way of the car which had pulled up at the roadside, but had assumed simply that the driver was collecting someone.
Even when she heard the engine fire and saw the brilliant sweep of the headlights illuminating the roadway ahead of her, she still didn’t realise what was happening. That recognition didn’t come until her brain, subconsciously waiting for the car to pick up speed and go past her, warily relayed to her senses the fact that it had not done so and what potentially that could mean.
Instinctively Claire reacted to that awareness, quickening her speed, her head tucked protectively down, her body movements designed not to draw any unwanted attention to herself as she fought not to give in to the urge to stop and turn around. She could hear the car crawling along the road behind her in much the same menacing and terrifying way that panic was now beginning to crawl its way along her tense spine.
One heard about such things… read about them—men who preyed on vulnerable, unprotected women. Her mouth had started to go dry, her heart was pounding. The area of the town she was walking through was void of any private homes—just empty shops and public buildings with no other pedestrians in sight. Whilst the rest of the traffic sped past, either oblivious to or uncaring about the slow crawl of the car behind her, it continued its slow, deliberately menacing pursuit.
Not daring to risk turning round, Claire tried to walk even faster. Beneath her clothes she could feel the hot, nervous perspiration drenching her skin; her heart was beating so suffocatingly loudly that she could no longer hear the sound of the car engine.
Her body stiffened abruptly in terrified shock as she realised why. The car had stopped. She heard the sound of a car door being slammed, followed by determined male footsteps.
‘Claire… Claire…’
Claire! Her pursuer knew her name.
Trembling from head to foot, Claire turned round, her eyes widening in disbelief as she recognised Brad coming towards her.
Brad… Brad had been following her. A combination of nausea and fury gripped her by the throat, rendering it impossible for her to speak or move as Brad came up to her.
‘You’re soaked,’ she heard him saying to her. ‘Come and get in the car…’ He stretched out a hand, as though to guide her towards the waiting vehicle, but Claire shrank back from it, fury burning with fevered intensity in her eyes.
‘What is it…? What’s wrong?’ she heard him demand, impatience edging up under his voice as she pushed his hand into his own now damp hair, grimacing in disgust as the heavy droplets of rain ran down the inside of his collar.
‘“What’s wrong?”’ Claire stared at him in disbelief; her voice was cracked and harsh. ‘I thought you were following me,’ she told him.
She could see from his frown that he didn’t understand.
‘I was,’ he agreed. ‘I saw you coming out of the school. I was driving past on my way to the hotel…’
As he watched the way she backed off from him Brad was filled with guilty remorse. It had never occurred to him that she would mistake him for a stranger—the kind of pervert who preyed on solitary women.
‘Hey, look… it’s all right,’ he tried to comfort her. ‘I’m sorry; I—’
‘You’re sorry…?’ Claire’s voice was shaking as much as her body as she flung the words back at him.
‘Claire!’
‘No, don’t touch me,’ she demanded as she stepped back still further to avoid the hand that he was reaching out to her, only to be thrown heavily against him as a runner coming the other way whom she hadn’t seen collided with her, knocking her so off balance that she knew that she would probably have fallen if Brad hadn’t been there to prevent it.
The runner, obviously irritated by her and the fact that she had impeded his progress, muttered an ungracious curse before continuing on his way, leaving it to Brad to ask anxiously and quietly, ‘Are you OK? That was some speed he was running at—quite some speed…’
‘I’m fine,’ Claire fibbed.
The