both little girls did as he instructed leaving Claire with no alternative but to invite him into her small sitting-room.
Once inside the room, he dwarfed it. He must be well over six feet, Claire thought absently, watching as he took the chair she indicated, sinking down into it in a way that suggested an exhaustion his face did not betray. How old was he? Somewhere in his early thirties, probably. What did he do for a living? He certainly wasn’t her idea of a businessman. He looked too fit, too physically hard for that …
‘I’m sorry you’ve been landed with Heather,’ he said distantly at last, reaching inside his jacket and extracting his wallet. ‘If you will …’
He was intending to give her money? Claire could hardly believe it. Instantly she was furiously outraged. Why, the man was positively feudal!
‘It was no trouble,’ she told him tightly. ‘Lucy wanted to invite Heather back for tea. I thought it best to check with your housekeeper before I agreed.’
He put his wallet away, but his hard expression didn’t relax. ‘You’re a single parent, I believe,’ he said tautly, the sharp question making her frown.
‘Yes, but …’
‘Let’s get one thing straight then, Mrs Richards. I don’t care what Mrs Roberts may have told you; I’m not in the market either for a mother for Heather, or a second wife for myself.’
It took her several shattered seconds to assimilate the meaning of what he was telling her, but once she had, Claire felt her face flame with furious resentment. What on earth was he trying to imply? Surely he didn’t think that she had invited Heather to come and have tea with Lucy as a … As a what? As a step towards getting to know him better, and through that …
But yes, he had. She could see it in the bleak grey eyes watching her with hard determination. He was a wealthy and successful single man with a young daughter to bring up. No doubt he had been the victim of some degree of matchmaking, but that was no reason for him to think that she …
The red tints in her chestnut hair weren’t there for nothing; her temper, normally well controlled and kept in check, refused to be subdued. She opened her mouth to tell him just what she thought of him and his insinuations, but found the hot words stifled in her throat as he suddenly forestalled her and demanded icily,
‘Have I made myself clear, Mrs Richards?’
He was standing up now. Business concluded, interview over, Claire thought acidly.
‘Explicitly,’ she told him in a voice as cold as his own, a spark of rage intensifying the greeny gold of her eyes. Although she didn’t know it, her anger had left a soft flush staining her cheekbones, and had brought a slight quiver to her mouth. She looked more vulnerable than fierce, but since she could not see her own expression she was unaware of the reason for the cynical and faintly brooding expression in those cold grey eyes,
However, even if she didn’t know the reason for it, she knew that it existed and that was enough to make her say bitingly, ‘I assure you you have nothing to fear from me. I’m no more in the market for a husband than you are for a wife, Mr Fraser. Believe me, a man in my life is the very last thing I want. Lucy and I are perfectly happy as we are.’ Her flush deepened betrayingly as she saw the way he looked around her small and rather shabbily furnished sitting-room, and instinctively her fingers curled into her palms. One of the disadvantages of being only five-foot-one was that people sometimes tended to forget that she was a fully grown adult. The look Jay Fraser was turning on her now was one he might have given a slightly dim adolescent. Maybe her home wasn’t much by his standards, but she loved it, and whatever he might choose to think there was no way she would ever want to change it for something like Whitegates.
Her resentment against him incited her onwards.
‘If you must know, I invited Heather to come back and have tea with us because I felt sorry for her.’
She had got him on the raw there, she saw with a pleasurable stab of satisfaction.
‘Oh, I can see you find that hard to believe, Mr Fraser. Heather might have all the comforts a wealthy father can provide, but a busy businessman doesn’t always have time for the little cares and worries of a small child. Mrs Roberts didn’t strike me as a particularly sympathetic mother-substitute …’ She took a deep breath and then rushed on, ‘In fact it seemed to me that Heather is frightened of her.’
She saw from the white line of rage circling his mouth that he was furious with her.
‘Heather doesn’t need your pity,’ he told her sharply, ‘and now if you wouldn’t mind calling her in for me, I think it’s time that both I and my daughter left.’
It was perhaps unfortunate that Heather chose to give her a brief and very shy hug before she left, but there was no way she was going to reject the little girl’s hesitant affection, Claire told herself as she bent down to hug her back. She didn’t like the bitter glance that Jay Fraser gave her as he took Heather’s hand and led her away, but if he thought he could simply walk into her house and insult her the way he had …
It was perhaps just as well that tomorrow was Saturday, she reflected later, listening to Lucy’s chatter as she got her ready for bed. The little girl was full of her new friend and all the things they were going to do together, happily oblivious to the fact that her new friend’s father was probably telling his daughter right at this moment that the friendship was over.
In a way his insinuations were almost laughable. Any sort of involvement with any man was so totally opposite to what she wanted …
There had only ever been one sexual experience in her life, and that had led to Lucy’s conception, and while Claire loved her child with all her heart, the manner of her conception was something that still caused her nightmares. She had no desire for any sort of intimacy with a man; quite the opposite, and so for her, marriage was something that was completely out. Her fear and abhorrence of sex went very deep and was something she normally avoided thinking about. It was less painful that way.
After Lucy’s birth her doctor had suggested some sort of counselling, but she had refused. She hadn’t been able to bear to discuss her feelings with anyone. She couldn’t even examine them in the privacy of her own thoughts.
On Saturday morning Claire had to call at the post office to buy some more eggs. They were delivered fresh each day from one of the local farms, and were a relatively inexpensive and nourishing source of healthy food for both her and Lucy. Fortunately the little girl adored them, and Claire left her examining the treats on the sweet counter while she went to pay for her purchases.
She was just moving away from the counter when she recognised one of her neighbours standing in the queue behind her—nothing moved quickly in the post office; it was the local centre for receiving and sorting gossip.
Her neighbour was an overweight, untidy woman in her late sixties with a faintly overbearing manner. She had come round to introduce herself just after they had moved in, and had almost immediately informed Claire that she was likely to have a problem with her roof. It seemed that most of the cottages had had their roof timbers and slates replaced the previous winter, and that Claire’s had been one of the few that had not. She herself had already noticed several loose slates, and she was still worrying about the horrendous expense that would be involved.
Now Mrs Turner smiled eagerly at her and commented in a loud voice, ‘Wasn’t that the little Fraser girl I saw
