to mother her in much the same way she had mothered her own four children. It wasn’t that Kate wasn’t mature and capable. She was both. The way she had brought up Sophy was testimony to that. No, it was her vulnerability—that and the youthfulness of her face and figure. No one looking at her would ever have imagined she was a day over thirty.
‘We’d like you to come and spend a couple of days with us when you can spare the time. We feel we’ve hardly had an opportunity to get to know you yet.’
There was no doubting the sincerity and warmth of the invitation, but Kate could barely respond to it. The moment she was dreading was fast arriving, and it was too late now to bitterly regret that Sophy had ever opted for the formality of a receiving line.
There was no way of avoiding it. She and Joss were going to come face to face.
Face to face with the man who twenty-one years ago had given her her dearly beloved daughter, and who had then walked out on her without even knowing that she had conceived.
The garden was everything a country garden should be, the scent of roses, from the traditional walkway bisecting the lawn, heady with musk. All around her Kate could hear people commenting appreciatively as they congregated on the drive. A light breeze stirred the blue and white awnings of the marquee.
The staff she and Lucy had hired to serve the meal were moving deftly among the guests, gently encouraging them on to the lawns as they circulated offering pre-wedding breakfast drinks.
James took her arm and gently guided her towards the marquee where it had been decided they would line up to receive the guests. Slowly the guests filed past, all of them beaming their pleasure and enjoyment of the day. Old friends, whose faces were as familiar to her as her own…strangers, people who belonged to John’s side of the family, but who nevertheless were reaching out to her with warmth; all of them passed her in a blur, until the shocking moment she had been waiting for, and she heard John’s mother exclaiming warmly, ‘Joss! It’s lovely to see you. We weren’t sure you could make it…’
And then she heard the familiar timbre of a voice she had never, ever forgotten. A voice that had whispered such things to her that she had shivered in unbearable pleasure and arousal, now saying mundanely, ‘We only just made it, but it’s lovely to be here.’
Sophy was speaking to him, flirting lightly with him, and then it was John’s turn…John who was turning to introduce her to him.
‘You won’t believe it, but Kate is my new mother-in-law,’ he said gallantly, and the whole world stood still as they looked at one another, and she saw from his face that this meeting was as much a shock to him as it was to her.
‘Kate,’ he said hoarsely, and the hand touching hers gripped her so tightly that she actually winced with pain.
He had aged, but only slightly. He was no longer a young boy, but a man…tall, dark, powerful, his jaw lean and clean-cut, bearing no trace of too selfindul-gent living, his skin bronzed and his grey eyes as clear as those of his daughter.
His hair was just as thick and dark as she remembered, and his body as he had walked towards her had moved lithely and easily.
He was a man in his sexual prime, she recognised numbly, and it didn’t need the sidelong looks the other female guests were giving him to tell her so.
Shock absorbed her and held her, and then abruptly released her so that she started to shake and her eyes stung with tears. Totally unable to hold on to her composure, she tugged her hand from his and looked past him to the woman accompanying him. Her mouth had tightened into an unattractively thin, tight line. She glared pointedly at Kate as she stretched out her hand, and Kate said mindlessly, ‘Mrs Bennett.’
John waited until they had gone past to chuckle and say to her, ‘Not Mrs Bennett as yet, although I suspect she’s hoping to be. She’s Joss’s secretary.’
His secretary. A cold, sour sickness rose up inside her. So he hadn’t changed, she thought bitterly. He was still the same lying cheat who had deceived her. And yet outwardly he looked too uncompromisingly honest and steadfast…
His appearance was as deceitful as his nature. Where were his wife…and his child? Something inside her twisted painfully as she stopped concentrating on the line-up of guests waiting to smile and shake her hand, and remembered instead the shocking agony of that cold, blustery September day when, not having heard from Joss for almost twenty-four hours, she had gone round to his lodgings to find out why he had broken their date. She had discovered from his landlady that he had packed his bags and gone…‘Gone back to his wife and child,’ she had told her maliciously, leaving only the cursory message that their affair was over and that she was not to try to get in touch with him.
She could remember even now the pebble-hard acidness of the woman’s cold eyes…and how, despite her casual attitude, she had sounded as though she had enjoyed delivering Joss’s message.
She had only met the woman on a couple of previous occasions. Normally she and Joss met just outside the village on the cliff-path. She hadn’t liked his landlady then, and she had liked her even less at that moment.
Joss, married. She had hardly been able to take it in. He was still only a student, in his last year at Oxford and, although she had surmised from the odd comments he had made about them that his family had money, he had said nothing to her to indicate that his family consisted of anything more than parents, and various aunts, uncles and cousins. He had certainly never intimated that he was married…and not just married, but a father as well.
His landlady had watched her unkindly, callously smiling at the tears she had been unable to stop stinging her eyes.
‘What did you expect?’ she had scoffed. ‘He was just using you, that’s all. Did you really think he intended it to be anything more than a brief fling? He’s told me not to give you his address. So don’t bother asking for it,’ she had added brutally and triumphantly, starting to close the door.
Numb with pain and shock, somehow or other Kate had managed to drag herself back to the cliff-path which had been their trysting place. She still could not take it in. Only forty-eight hours ago he had held her, kissed her, whispered to her that he loved and wanted her…and she had thought that implicit in those words was a promise for the future. And now…
She started to tremble violently realising what she had done. She had given herself to him with joy and fervour…given herself to a man who was already committed elsewhere…a man who was married with a child.
Mercifully, then, she hadn’t known that it wasn’t only a broken heart he had left her with.
She had only discovered she was pregnant six weeks after she had returned home. Shocked and bewildered, she had made no attempt to hide the truth from her parents; they, having observed the stunned, silent state in which she had returned to them after her holiday, had already guessed that some emotional trauma was at the root of her distress.
It had not occurred to them that it might be more than a mere holiday romance that was making her so pale and listless until she started being so violently ill.
After that…she had told them haltingly and miserably what she had done, how she had betrayed the mores they had taught her, how defiled and unhappy she felt, not at making love with Joss—that she could not regret—but at having made love with him believing him to be free when he wasn’t…at having participated, however innocently, in the breaking of marriage vows she considered to be sacred.
Her
