‘I’m sorry to be such a wet lettuce, Jan, but you know…’
‘Yes, I know,’ Janet agreed sympathetically.
‘I just wish that Lloyd was earning enough for us to be able to employ you,’ she added with a grin. ‘He keeps complaining that he’s getting sick of microwave cooking. I think, of course, he’s using that as an excuse for getting me to go to his parents’ for Christmas. Not that I mind. I get on really well with his family. Have you made any plans yet? After all, it’s only next week…’
Heaven shook her head.
‘Mum and Dad have offered to pay for me to fly out to Adelaide with them. They’re off to spend Christmas and all of January with Hugh.’
Hugh, as Janet knew, was Heaven’s married brother who lived in Australia with his wife and children.
‘Why don’t you go with them?’ Janet urged her. ‘Who knows? You might even find you like it so much that you decide to stay there.’
‘Shipped off to Australia, like the family black sheep?’ Heaven countered painfully. ‘No… that isn’t what I want, Jan, even if the days are long gone when someone in disgrace was sent away from home. I feel that if I run away now people will think I’m running because I’m guilty, because I was to blame for the break-up of Harold’s marriage, because all those things he said…’ She stopped and gulped in a steadying breath.
‘I was not having an affair with him,’ she told her friend fiercely. ‘And even if he hadn’t been the completely loathsome and reptilian thing that he is I still wouldn’t have been tempted… not with another woman’s man. That just isn’t me, Jan… Mind you, some of it was my own fault,’ Heaven admitted with what Janet privately considered was far too much generosity; she had her own opinion of Harold Lewis and it wasn’t good—creep was far too kind a description of him, so far as she was concerned.
‘I should have guessed what lay ahead when he pretended he didn’t have enough cash to reimburse my travelling expenses when I went for the initial interview, but I was still green then and the job seemed such a good one. Residential, with summers with the family in Provence and the opportunity not just to cook for him and his wife and the two girls and do all their private entertaining, but also to cook for his business lunches and dinners as well…’
‘I do understand how you must feel,’ Janet consoled her. Heaven gave her a small smile.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to rant and rave at you. It’s just the unfairness of it all that gets to me still. He deliberately used me, set me up, lied about me by pretending that we were having an affair to Louisa, his wife, so that she would walk out on him, so that he could then divorce her and get away with keeping the house and hardly give her any proper settlement. She’s the one I should be feeling sorry for…’
‘Have you seen anything of her since?’
‘Since I so publicly got the sack and my name and my supposed role in their divorce, not to mention his bed, got so much media attention?’ Her pretty mouth twisted. ‘No, not really. Oh, she did try to make amends; she apologised for the fact that I’d been dragged into things and she told me that she recognised with hindsight just how cleverly she’d been tricked into believing I was having an affair with her husband.
‘Apparently he’d been dropping hints about “us” virtually even before I’d gone to work for them and had, in fact, insisted on employing me above her head; and he’d then gone on to deliberately arouse her suspicions and undermine her by letting her think that he was attracted to me.
‘You’d never think he was virtually a millionaire, would you—not after the way he’s been so mean with Louisa?’
‘Sometimes the richer a man is the meaner he is,’ Janet pointed out.
Heaven grimaced in distaste. ‘If you ask me Louisa is well rid of him, and I suspect from what she hinted at that she has started to feel the same way since their divorce. She did say that she had tried to tell her friends that Harold had lied about me and about my role in the break-up of their marriage, but let’s face it, no one is really going to believe her.’
As she saw the way Heaven’s expressive eyes filled with sad tears, Janet felt her own eyes fill up in sympathy.
It wasn’t just her job she had lost, Heaven reflected inwardly as she determinedly pulled the pudding mixture towards her and started to finish a fresh batch of puddings. The money she was earning from the small classified ad she had taken, offering ‘Mrs Tiggywinkle’s traditional figgy puddings by post’, had brought her a much needed small income even if she was beginning to get sick of the sight and smell of her very saleable and mouthwatering puddings.
No, it wasn’t just the job she had lost. Not even Janet knew about those delicate, fragile private hopes that had begun to grow after Louisa’s brother had casually asked if she would like to take up a spare ticket he had for one of London’s newest plays.
Jon Huntingdon, Louisa’s brother, was an eminent financial consultant. Tall, dark-haired and suavely handsome. He had set Heaven’s all too vulnerable heart beating just that little bit too fast the very first time she had been introduced to him by Louisa, several days after she had first taken up her new job. Unmarried and in his thirties, Jon Huntingdon was almost too swooningly male, too darkly handsome, with a heart-melting sense of humour betrayed by the twitch of his mouth as he gently teased Louisa’s daughters, his nieces.
Heaven had prepared for their date in a fever of excitement; she had even cajoled an early birthday cheque out of her father in order to splash out on a new outfit. A Nicole Farhi dress and jacket, the dress a silver shimmer of thick matt jersey cut in a halter-neck style and supported simply by a thin silver collar.
She hadn’t really needed to see the appreciative male gleam of sensual pleasure in Jon’s eyes the evening he had picked her up to know that the dress looked good on her, but she had enjoyed seeing it there none the less.
After the play had ended he had taken her out for supper at a small French restaurant she had never even heard of, but when she had ordered and tested the French onion soup she had known that his taste in good food was as impeccable as his taste in well-made clothes.
After dinner he had driven her home, parking his silver-grey Jaguar discreetly in the drive of the Lewises’ house and then switching off the lights.
Heaven, who had been awaiting this moment ever since he had made his casual invitation to take up his spare ticket, hadn’t been sure if it was exhilarated excitement that was churning her stomach so nervously, or pure fear.
She had been out with good-looking men before, but she had never previously met anyone who’d affected her as quickly and overwhelmingly as Jon had done, and she had known even then, with that heart-deep instinct that all women possessed, that he was a man who could be something very special in her life… perhaps even be the man.
And then he had kissed her.
Briefly, decorously, unthreateningly… the first time!
After the world had stopped turning around her, after she had stopped feeling like one of those small figures in a child’s toy snow storm, he had kissed her again.
And she had responded, totally unable to stop herself from letting her emotions show.
‘I’m
