had been someone she had resolutely shut away in a dark corner of her mind, refusing to allow herself to think about.
Except when Sophy was born…except when her parents died…except this morning, dressing for the wedding and grieving for all that might have been.
Seeing him had shaken her out of those idiotic daydreams, reminding her of what reality was. Reality was a man who had cold-bloodedly seduced her knowing that he was committed elsewhere, and who, it seemed, still continued to break those same marriage vows he had broken with her.
No wonder he had been so shocked to see her. He was probably wondering how quickly he could make his excuses and leave.
As the thought formed, she looked across the flower-decked marquee and saw him standing with a group of people, but slightly to one side of them, as though apart from them. He was looking directly at her, the grey eyes focusing on her with such intensity that for a moment she actually took a step towards him.
‘Kate, the girls are getting twitchy about serving the buffet,’ Lucy came up to warn her.
Thankfully Kate turned aside and glanced at her watch.
‘Yes. We’d better get everyone sitting down.’
Sophy and John had opted for an informal arrangement of round tables in the marquee, apart from the top table for close members of the family, and as James tactfully organised the ushers into making sure that everyone found their tables and sat down Kate turned her back on Joss and escaped.
The meal was a blur of tension and misery. Conversation hummed around her, Sophy and John as euphoric as the bubbles in the champagne. Someone—one of John’s married sisters, she thought vaguely—complimented her warmly on the food. She smiled, feeling as though her whole face had become frozen.
Joss was sitting right in her line of vision; the redhead clawed possessively at his arm whenever his attention wavered from her, and Kate thought viciously that he deserved the other woman’s petulant possessiveness.
All through the toasts and speeches she was conscious of growing tension, of an anxiety that balled in her stomach and made it impossible to concentrate on anything bar the dark-haired man sitting just within her vision.
Afterwards, while Sophy and John circulated among their guests, she tried to escape, but she had barely reached the opening of the marquee when Joss stopped her.
Her heart lodged painfully in her throat, her pulses hammering frantic messages of fear.
‘Your daughter looks very beautiful,’ he told her gravely. ‘John is a very lucky man.’
Stock compliments and phrases, with no nuance in them to make her muscles tense and her eyes flicker with distraught dread…nothing in his eyes to warn her that he had guessed that Sophy was his child…just a fine hardening of his mouth that made him suddenly look older and very bitter as he added devastatingly, ‘And so is James.’
James…She looked round wildly, her heart hammering with frantic, desperate ferocity. James was standing several yards away, talking to John’s mother.
‘Joss, there you are. It’s time we left.’ The redhead drew level with them and glowered warningly at Kate. ‘You know you promised we wouldn’t be staying long.’
Kate winced at her lack of manners, wondering faintly if the woman realised that she was doing her a favour and that the last thing she wanted was for Joss to linger.
She gave them both a polite, controlled smile and said brightly, ‘It was good of you to come. Please do excuse me,’ and quickly sidestepped them both, heading for the house and security.
It was a good half-hour before she was able to accept that they had actually gone and that she was safe, but the shock of Joss’s unexpected appearance had taken its toll, and it was impossible for her to relax and enjoy what was left of the day.
By the time the last of the guests were leaving she had a pounding headache, and the last thing she wanted to do was to join John’s family for the celebratory meal they had organised at the Fleece.
Sophy and John had gone. They were flying to Antigua for a three-week honeymoon, and Sophy’s face had been blissfully rapt as she and John left for the airport.
‘Takes you back, doesn’t it?’ John’s mother had sighed…and had then bitten her lip in embarrassment and apologised.
‘Heavens, I’m sorry…that was tactless.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Kate had assured her, and then, because of the pity she could see in her eyes, she had added firmly, ‘And besides, the relationship I had with Sophy’s father was as important to me as though we were married. It was only later when I discovered that he already had a wife and a child.’
Mary Broderick bit her bottom lip guiltily. She hadn’t meant to raise unhappy memories for Sophy’s mother, and, despite her initial shock at discovering that her son’s mother-in-law was a woman of thirty-seven who looked barely thirty, and who had conceived her daughter outside marriage when she was only sixteen during a relationship with an already married man, once she had met Kate she had quickly realised that, however deplorable the circumstances of Sophy’s conception, her mother was not to blame for them.
‘Do you never see him…hear from him?’ she asked awkwardly, wanting to fill the painful silence.
Kate shook her head quickly and lied, ‘And nor do I want to.’
Her head was pounding with sickening intensity. All she wanted to do was to go and lie down on her bed, but instead she had the evening to go through.
When it was all over, she would sleep for a week, she promised herself tiredly as she forced a smile to her lips and tried to appear as though she was enjoying herself.
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