‘You obviously love them,’ Brad told her.
‘Because they are easy to love,’ Claire responded. ‘And they have so much love to give…’
She should have had children of her own, Brad decided; she was that kind of woman—intensely loving and maternal in the very best sense of the word, and if he could recognise that then surely her late husband must have done too, so why…?
Their conversation was getting too intimate, too close to subjects that she didn’t want to discuss, Claire recognised, quickly getting up from the table, saying that it was getting late, that they still hadn’t discussed the terms of his stay with her.
Ruefully Brad took the hint and started to do so, outlining his requirements. They were less demanding than Claire had anticipated and the amount that he proposed paying her was so generous that it took her breath away. When she tried to tell him that it was too much he overruled her, pointing out things that she had overlooked, such as wear and tear, and reluctantly Claire found herself giving in.
In its box the kitten stirred and complained that it was hungry; Claire laughed as she went to pick her up. Oh, yes, she had the mothering instinct—in full strength, Brad acknowledged as he studied the tender way she held the small animal.
The phone rang just as he was on the point of going upstairs. Claire went to answer it and he could hear the wondering joy in her voice as she exclaimed, ‘Oh, darling… it’s wonderful to hear your voice! I didn’t know you were going to ring…’
Quietly he left her alone to enjoy her conversation with her lover, all his pleasure in the evening draining out of him. As he went upstairs he wondered savagely what the matter with him was. The last thing he wanted or needed was to get emotionally involved with any woman, but especially with one who was not free to return his feelings.
‘You’ve reached a very dangerous—a very vulnerable—age,’ his sister Mary-Beth had teased him at Thanksgiving. He had laughed then, but now he wasn’t so sure that she might not have had a point.
Downstairs Claire clung happily to the telephone receiver as she told her stepdaughter, ‘I never imagined that you would ring. It must be costing you the earth…’
She could almost feel the warmth of Sally’s laughter as it filled her ear.
‘You’re worth it,’ Sally assured her, adding teasingly, ‘Besides, I know I can always get you to sub me from my next allowance.’
John had left certain monies in trust for Sally, from which she received a small quarterly income and of which Claire was one of the trustees, and Sally’s impulsive habit of spending this money before she actually received it was a standing joke between them.
‘Don’t be so sure,’ Claire warned her, laughing. ‘The FT index has fallen several points.’
‘Look, I must go,’ Sally told her. ‘Chris is waiting for me.’ She blew a string of kisses into the phone before hanging up, leaving Claire to replace her own receiver with a warm smile curling her mouth. Darling Sally. How empty and joyless her life would have been without her—her life and her marriage. A small finger of pain poked mercilessly at the secret sore place within her heart that she kept so carefully guarded.
Hurriedly she ignored it, going to attend to the increasingly noisy demands for food from Felicity, blocking out the emotional pain with physical activity. It was, after all, a tried and true formula and one she had perfected over the years.
CHAPTER SIX
BRAD was not in a very good mood. He had just spent the morning going over the books and checking through the order book and it was obvious to him that things were in an even worse financial mess than he had predicted.
The sensible thing to do would be simply to cancel the franchise, close it down as a loss-maker and cut their losses. But if he did that…
How would Claire react to the fact that he was putting Tim out of a job—and why should he care?
He leaned back in his borrowed chair in his borrowed office—Tim’s office, in fact—and closed his eyes, considering his options.
If they made some improvements, tightened things up, developed a more aggressive selling stance and pulled in some more orders, there was a small—a very small—chance that they might be able to turn things around. But achieving that, meeting all those objectives—and they would have to meet them—would require some brutally demanding hard work and the kind of dedication that was synonymous with the term ‘workaholic’. The kind of man that Tim just was not—at the moment!
It would mean recruiting a new agent, someone who could motivate the self-employed fitters who installed the units to adapt the same positive, speedy approach to their work that the firm looked for in its American fitters. Mentally he reviewed the personnel on their home-base payroll. There was someone who could take on such a challenge—on a short-term basis—but how would Tim react to having someone brought in over his head?
The company needed a very different kind of management approach from the one it presently had if it was to survive and succeed.
Tim… Claire’s brother-in-law… and her lover?
Brad closed his eyes again and expelled a weary sigh.
He had heard Claire coming upstairs last night shortly after eleven; he had still been working and had, in fact, gone on working until after midnight.
When she slept in her solitary bed in her solitary room did she dream of her lover? Did she lie awake thinking of him, aching for him, as he…?
He tensed and sat up as he heard the office door open.
‘Ah, Tim. No, it’s all right; come in. I wanted to have a chat with you anyway.’
‘But at least nothing’s been said about any redundancy yet,’ Claire tried to console Tim.
‘No, but it can only be a matter of time,’ he predicted gloomily.
Claire watched him sympathetically. He had arrived half an hour earlier looking for Brad, who had apparently left him just before lunch without giving any indication of where he was going.
‘I thought he might have come back here,’ Tim had told her when she had shaken her head in answer to his initial query.
Much as Claire sympathised—and she did—there was not a lot that she could say and even less that she could do other than listen to him as he paced her kitchen and unburdened himself to her.
She sensed that Tim had been half hoping that Brad might have confided his plans for Tim’s future to her and in a sense she was relieved that he had not; it spared her from either having to betray his confidence or withhold valuable information from Tim.
‘Everything’s changed so much,’ Tim told her miserably. ‘You’ve got to be so much more competitive, so much more aggressive, and I’m too old to learn those sorts of tricks. And God knows where I’m going to find another job at my age…’
He grimaced as the kitten started to wail. ‘She’ll scratch your furniture to ribbons,’ he warned Claire.
‘No, she won’t,’ Claire contradicted him serenely. ‘I’m going to get her a scratching-post.’
‘Mmm…’ Tim eyed the kitten doubtfully. He knew how Irene would have reacted if he had turned up with it at home, but then Irene had never been as soft-hearted as Claire. In many ways Irene was very like her brother.
‘Look, I’d better go,’ he told Claire. ‘Brad’s probably back by now and wondering where on earth I am.’
‘I’ll see you out to your car,’ Claire offered.
He looked tired and stressed, a bit like a slightly rumpled, unhappy teddy bear, Claire decided affectionately as they made their way outside.
‘Thanks for listening to me,’