3
Uneasily, Garth glanced at his watch as he replaced the receiver following yet another unanswered call to Claudia.
It was now gone one o’clock in the morning. Claudia might have been going out but … At this time of the night, with the roads almost empty, it would take him less than two hours to drive to Upper Charfont. He was sorely tempted to do so, but he knew perfectly well how Claudia would react to his unheralded arrival at that time of night. And someone who knew them both was almost bound to see his car there—Upper Charfont was that kind of town. Not that he minded, but he knew that Claudia would.
He would ring her first thing in the morning, he promised himself—if indeed she was there to be rung and not … not what?
Not with Luke Palliser.
Irritably, Garth stretched his now-tense body, wincing as he heard the tell-tale crack of his neck. Without being vain, he knew he was in damn good shape for his age. He looked after himself, ate well and sensibly, exercised moderately, regularly counted his blessings amongst which Tara had to be close to the top of the list of the most valued and precious of all the good things that life had given him. The price of having her in his life had come so high, though, that there had been times when to his own shame he had almost wished she had never come into being and times, too, when he had been acutely and ridiculously jealous of the intensity and immensity of Claudia’s love for her, but then he suspected he had always been far more passionately in love with Claudia than she had been with him.
He could still remember the sense of dismay he had experienced when his then commanding officer, Claudia’s father, had announced that he wished Garth to escort his daughter to the regimental ball. He had known only that the brigadier had a daughter and that she was away at university and he wasn’t quite sure what he had expected.
What he had known was that he would much rather his partner had been the long-legged ‘model’ he had been introduced to at a London party and whom he had been discreetly pursuing for the previous six weeks. Not so much, he had to admit, because of her good looks and ‘model’ status—Garth had always preferred his women curvaceous rather than bone thin and the ‘model’ had had a hectic, frenzied air about her, which, coupled with the slight gauntness of her body, had even in those relatively innocent pre-anorexia-and-bulimia days hinted that the soft drugs then fashionably in vogue amongst London’s trendy young set might be more than a mere fashion appendage for her—but, if he was honest, because of the hints the acquaintance who had introduced them had dropped about her sexual availability.
For Garth, a single young man with a healthy sex drive, the opportunity to escort to the ball a young woman he was pretty sure he had a strong chance of ending up in bed with afterwards was far more appealing than the prospect of an evening spent dutifully making polite conversation with the brigadier’s no doubt plain and dull daughter.
Only Claudia hadn’t been plain and she had certainly been far from dull, and when he went to pick her up he had realised at once that she was as pleased at the prospect of an evening spent with him as he had been with her.
Petite and blonde, with the kind of curvy feminine figure that made Garth instinctively want to wrap his hands around her waist just to test his belief that it was small enough for them to encompass it, physically she was enough and more to make him drool with longing. But there was a lot more to Claudia than her delicate physical beauty as he had quickly discovered, and by the end of the evening he had known that she was the girl he wanted to be his wife.
Claudia herself had taken rather more persuading. Not because she didn’t share his feeling as she had told him seriously the first time he proposed to her—she did—but because she had seen too many army marriages founder on the rocks of misunderstanding and conflicting pressures to want to entrust the future of her children, their children, to a marriage that might not last.
Even then, her priority had been the security of the family she so much wanted to have, the children she so much wanted to bear.
‘How can you say you love me?’ she had raged at him when she found out what had happened. ‘How can you claim that you love me when you’ve slept with someone else?’
He had tried to explain, make her understand, tell her that it had been a mistake … an accident almost, but she had refused to believe him, refused virtually to listen.
He had always known that beneath her outer softness and apparent vulnerability, she had unsuspected strength, but he had never imagined that that strength could be turned against him. He had tried to get her to change her mind, but she had refused to listen, and in the end he had had to accept the fact that their marriage was over, that her pride would not allow her to understand or forgive what he had done.
In the first couple of years after the divorce, he had done what all men in his position did, trying to disperse the pain and sense of loss in the arms and beds of other women.
It hadn’t worked, but then he hadn’t really expected it to, and at least being single and determined to stay free of any new emotional entanglements had meant that he was able during the lean years of the economic crisis to concentrate all his time and attention on his business. It had come through the recession relatively unscathed and they were, in fact, now rather unexpectedly very much to the forefront of their field.
Like Claudia, he had met and known about Tara’s involvement with Ryland but like her he had been caught off guard by Tara’s announcement that she and Ryland planned to marry.
An hour later, still unable to sleep, Garth looked at the luminous dial of his wrist-watch. Two-fifteen a.m. He could try Claudia again and he was sorely tempted to do so, but if she still hadn’t returned home, if she was still perhaps with Luke Palliser, he knew he didn’t want to know.
It was ten years now since they had separated and while Claudia wasn’t and never had been the type of woman to want a merely sexual relationship, nor to publicly flaunt an emotional one, she was very much a woman whom men automatically found attractive and wanted to get closer to—wanted to protect, if that wasn’t too politically incorrect and chauvinistic a thing to profess.
During their marriage, he had seen the admiring looks other men had given her and the envious ones they had sent him too often not to know that if Claudia was still on her own it was because that was her choice.
‘Get involved with someone else … marry again? No, never,’ she had told him quietly when he made the mistake of venting his bitterness on her shortly after their divorce had been finalised. ‘I loved you, Garth,’ she had told him. ‘I loved you and I trusted you, I believed in you … in us, but you betrayed me.’ With quiet, dignified sorrow, she had gone on to ask, ‘If I can’t trust you, what man can I trust?’ Answering her own question, she had added, ‘I can’t and I don’t intend to try.’
‘You mean you don’t want to try, just as you don’t want to try to understand, to accept,’ Garth had returned hotly, still half-unable to believe that she had gone through with it and that they were actually divorced. ‘You’ve got all the emotional commitment you want, Claudia, all the emotional commitment you can give. You’ve got Tara. I wonder what would have happened if during the early days of our marriage we’d discovered that I couldn’t father children. How strong would your adherence to our marriage and your marriage vows have been then?’
He had told himself in the bitterness of his loss that the pain he had seen burning in her eyes as she listened quietly to his angry outburst—a pain he had caused—was justified and that so were his accusations.
‘You’re not divorcing me because I’ve slept with someone else,’ he had told her angrily during one of their pre-separation quarrels. ‘You’re doing it because I’m simply surplus to requirements, because you don’t want me any