father was mainly in a world of his own, and might not think to enquire what she was doing home so early, but her stepmother, who only a few days ago had lost yet another housekeeper, would not only have a string of chores lined up for her—and another string of complaints—but would have a string of questions too. Sometimes—in actual fact quite often—Taryn found her stepmother hard to take.
Taryn suddenly realised she must have been sitting parked in her car for quite some while, as her agitated thoughts jumped around in her head. Gradually, though, she grew calmer, and began to recover from the shock of Brian Mellor kissing her the way he had.
While her thoughts were still in some sense of disarray, she began to ponder on her flight from Brian’s arms. Perhaps it was the total unexpectedness of what had happened that had knocked her sideways? Should she have handled it differently? Could she in fact have handled it differently? Maybe.
Though, on thinking about it—and she had thought of little else since it had happened—what else could she have done but get out of there? Had she not loved Brian there might well have been a chance she could have given him a shove—along with a few choice words—and that would have been that.
But she did love him, and owned with painful honesty that when he had kissed her she had been on the verge of responding. And she, Taryn knew, would have found it impossible to live with that. How would she have been able to live with herself? How would she ever have been able to look Angie Mellor in the face again? Because, no matter what had gone wrong between Brian and Angie, they were still married and, Taryn was certain, still very much in love.
It did not make her feel any better to know that she had done the only thing she could have. But, as Taryn accepted she could not sit there much longer, she still did not want to go home.
She could, she supposed, go and have a cup of tea somewhere. But she did not want tea. She did not know what she wanted. Oh, why had Brian spoilt it all? While nothing especially exciting was happening in her life, she had been enjoying her job.
The word ‘job’ reminded her of her aunt’s temping agency. Taryn and her aunt got on extremely well, and her aunt Hilary, her father’s sister, ran Just Temps, not so very far from where she was.
On impulse Taryn took out her phone. ‘Are you busy?’ she asked. Her aunt had inherited the same workaholic streak that ran all the way through most of the Webster clan. Taryn herself had inherited it from her father.
Hilary Kiteley, as she now was, had been on her own since her husband had died some thirty years previously. Financially she’d had no need to work. But, because she had needed something challenging to fill her days, she had learned all she could about a business she had taken on and expanded, and which was now very well respected.
‘You’re not in your office?’ Hilary asked.
‘Can I come and see you?’
‘My door is always open to you, Taryn, you know that.’
Half an hour later Taryn was sitting in her aunt’s office, having explained that she had just walked out of a job which her aunt knew full well she had thoroughly enjoyed.
‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’ she asked gently.
Taryn shook her head. ‘I—can’t,’ she replied, and loved her aunt the more that Hilary Kiteley did not pester to know—as Taryn knew her stepmother was going to—but smiled encouragingly.
‘Perhaps, when you’ve had time to think about it, you’ll go back?’ she offered.
‘I won’t,’ Taryn answered, and knew it for a fact. That kiss had changed everything. She loved him, and had been tempted. The risk of giving in was too great. He and Angie must sort out whatever crisis was going on in their marriage. They had to!
‘Well, you’re obviously very upset, whatever it was.’ And, with a far more logical head than Taryn felt she had at the moment, ‘Would you like me to find you something temporary while you sort out something more permanent?’ Hilary Kiteley enquired.
What she would do next had not occurred to Taryn. She would get another job; it was in her nature to work. But she wasn’t ready yet to be PA to someone other than Brian Mellor; she did not know when she would be.
‘I don’t know that I want to be a PA again,’ she confided.
‘You’d be good at anything you tackled.’
‘Oh, Auntie, you always were good for my self-esteem.’
‘With just cause! Remember that spell of waitressing you did for me when you were at college? They would have taken you on permanently, had you wished.’
As perhaps she had hoped, that comment drew forth a smile from her anguished niece. ‘Perhaps I’ll try waitressing again,’ she said with an attempt at lightness. And, realising she had taken up enough of her aunt’s time, ‘I’d better be making tracks for home.’
‘I hear Mrs Jennings left rather abruptly?’ Hilary commented, referring to their last speedily departed housekeeper.
‘You’ve been speaking to my father.’
‘You’re cook tonight, I take it?’
Taryn knew that she would be. Her stepmother was not much interested in food. And, even though she had at one time been their housekeeper, she was even less interested in matters domestic. If Taryn’s father was to eat—and his own culinary skills came in the ‘couldn’t boil an egg’ category—then it went without saying that his daughter had been elected.
‘We’ll get a replacement housekeeper soon,’ Taryn said hopefully, and was grateful that her aunt did not state her opinion that her stepmother would be wasting her time applying to Just Temps for someone to fill in meanwhile.
Instead she asked about the much discussed issue. ‘When are you going to leave home? You’ve been going to for years,’ she reminded her.
‘I know, and I really would like to move out. But every time I mention it something seems to go wrong at home.’
‘Like the time your stepmother had a fall the night before you were due to move out? Like the next time you came home to find her with a bandaged foot and barely able to hobble about? Not forgetting the time she thought she needed an operation—only then discovered the problem had miraculously cured itself?’
‘You’ve got a good memory.’
‘Eva Webster may be your stepmother, but I’ve known her for longer,’ Hilary stated, having known Eva Brown, as she had then been, for years.
She had known her long before Taryn’s mother, a gentle soul, had decided she could no longer put up with her husband’s long term neglect and, the day after Taryn’s fifteenth birthday, had explained to her daughter that she had fallen out of love with Horace Webster and in love with someone else. She had left, and Eva Brown, a widow in reduced circumstances, had moved in—as housekeeper. The day she had married Horace Webster, however, was the day she had determined that her housekeeping days were over.
‘That woman uses you like a skivvy,’ Hilary Kiteley went on. ‘And expects you to be grateful to be living under the same roof.’
Taryn, feeling a touch disloyal to Eva, even if her aunt was
