She panicked, jerking her head back from his and raising her hands to ward him off.
Just for a second before he released her, Marcus had looked right into her eyes. His own were almost black, obsidian, with an anger he wasn’t bothering to conceal, his mouth—the same mouth which had just burned hers—twisting into a dismissive grimace.
‘You’re a woman now, not a girl, Polly,’ she heard him telling her angrily. ‘Richard is dead and—’
‘I don’t care.’ She interrupted him wildly, her heart beating in frantic, nervous little thuds as though she was in fear of her life and fleeing from some terrible threatening danger. ‘To me he is still my husband and he always will be.’
‘Such noble sentiments,’ Marcus scoffed, ‘and so very naive. Richard may have been your husband, Polly, but I suspect he never really awakened you as a lover, because if he had—’
‘How dare you?’ she almost screamed at him, backing away from him like a threatened hind fearing the approach of the hunter. ‘Of course Richard was my lover. How else do you think that Briony…?’
She stopped, almost choking on her own tears, suddenly realising that Briony could see and hear everything they were saying to one another.
‘He was your husband, yes, and you conceived his child, yes, but that was a long time ago and in many ways Richard was only a boy,’ Marcus agreed flatly, before continuing in a soft, almost mesmeric voice, ‘But look at you now; you’re trembling like a virgin confronted with her first experience of an adult man and all because I kissed you. Is that how a woman who has experienced a lover’s—a man’s—passion would react?’
He started to shake his head but Polly wasn’t prepared to listen to any more. Reaching out protectively to draw Briony closer to her, she told him shakily, ‘You have no right to say such things to me. I loved, still love, always will love Richard more than someone like you could possibly understand.’
The look he gave her before he walked past her and out of the room lived with her for a long time afterwards, long after Marcus himself had left again on his travels.
Well, at least Briony had been right about one thing, Polly reflected a couple of hours later, her kitchen cupboards restored to their normal immaculate order: the hotel was relatively quiet at the moment. Not that she minded. They had a very busy season coming up, with Christmas to contend with. They had guests who regularly booked themselves into Fraser House for Christmas and the New Year, and if the conversion of Marcus’s room was finished in time for the Christmas season they had a respectably long list of guests already for their occupancy. Christmas at Fraser House was, Polly acknowledged with her customary modesty, something a little bit special.
Yes, she was glad that Marcus had decided to give up his rooms here, she told herself firmly as she glanced round her now immaculate kitchen, and not just because of the extra guests it would allow them to have. The architect they had hired had made the suggestion that the stable block could perhaps be renovated and extended to provide even more rooms, but for once Polly had demurred, explaining that she felt it would detract from the hotel’s unique ‘feel’ if they expanded too much. A little to her surprise, Marcus had actually endorsed her opinion. She hadn’t as yet been to see the house he had bought nearby, although Briony had, returning to tell her mother enthusiastically that it was ‘ace’.
Built in the early days of Victoria’s reign it had originally been a part of the Fraser estate, built to house the widowed mother of the then owner.
Whilst not a dower house in the traditional sense of the word—Fraser House was not a great house in the style of Chatsworth and its ilk—it had been built in a similar if later style to that of the main house and was less than a mile away from it. After the end of the First World War the family had sold off the house, but now the opportunity had arisen for Marcus to buy it back along with the small acreage of land which had been sold with it.
In some ways Polly quite envied him the opportunity to bring the pretty ivy-clad house back to life again—its last owner had been elderly and after her death the house had been left empty for some time whilst her executors decided what to do with it.
Its five bedrooms and spacious ground floor meant that it would make an ideal family house. Was Marcus perhaps thinking of settling down at long last? At forty-two he was very visibly in the prime of his life. His career and financial future were assured, his physical appearance such that no right-thinking, intelligent, heterosexual woman would hesitate to snatch him up as potential-mate material and father to her unborn children. The current scientific evidence was that a woman naturally and instinctively chose the strongest and best-looking mate she could find in order to secure the best genes possible and thus the best chance of survival for her offspring. And no doubt Marcus would be similarly influenced when he chose the woman he wanted to marry. She would be young, intelligent and, of course, stunningly beautiful. According to Briony, her candidate filled all of those requirements.
Lost in thought, Polly made her way slowly to what had always been her favourite spot in the house’s grounds—a small dell surrounded by mature trees and with its own natural pond. It was off limits to their guests and could only be reached by a narrow private footpath. It was a spot that Richard had loved, and his last gift to her before his death had been a painting of it done in the spring when the bluebells were out. Now it was autumn and the trees were shedding their leaves, giving the small, enclosed space a haunting, almost melancholy air that was so much in tune with her own mood that Polly could feel her always easily aroused emotions bringing unwanted tears to her eyes.
She had brought so many of her problems and her heartaches, large and small to this spot over the years, but none had come anywhere near the magnitude of the agonising despair she was suffering now.
So much in her life was changing…Briony had already left home and was quickly becoming an adult and no longer in need of her in the way she had once been. Her staff were so well trained that sometimes she felt almost as though they didn’t need her either. And then there was Marcus…
Marcus…
She closed her eyes and leaned against the thick trunk of one of the trees.
Of course she had always known that one day Marcus would get married.
Hadn’t she?
That he would meet someone…fall in love with them…
‘Polly.’
Her eyelids swept up in shock, revealing the tears dampening her eyes as she stared in mute distress at the man who had been the focus of her thoughts.
‘What are you doing out here without a coat?’ she could hear him demanding disapprovingly. He, of course, was wearing a coat—or rather a jacket…the soft, well-worn leather one that she and Briony had bought him together one year for his birthday.
‘Marcus,’ she croaked when she had managed to find her voice, and then shivered, idiotically justifying his sharp criticism of her.
‘You are cold,’ she heard him say grimly. ‘Here, take this…’
Before she could stop him he was removing his jacket and wrapping it around her. It drowned her, its warmth enveloping her—and not just its warmth. Weakly Polly closed her eyes as her vulnerable senses were assaulted by the unmistakable scent of him.
‘No, I don’t want it,’ she denied, thrusting it off and turning her back on him as she walked quickly away from him.
She could hear the faint exclamation of exasperation he made as he bent to retrieve it, and she wasn’t surprised when he told