for him to meet you and for you to make arrangements to show him the house …’
‘Irene …’ Claire started to remonstrate, but it was too late. Her sister-in-law was already beating a strategic retreat.
‘What on earth are you doing?’
Claire raised her flushed face from her kneeling position in the bathroom adjacent to the spare bedroom and put down her damp cloth.
She hadn’t heard her friend and next-door neighbour Hannah come in.
‘Clearing out this room ready for my new lodger,’ she told Hannah breathlessly, and quickly explained to her what had happened.
‘Oh, trust Irene; she really has pulled a fast one on you this time, hasn’t she?’ Hannah commented wryly. ‘A lodger, and single too, I imagine, otherwise he would be looking for a house to rent. Mmm … that’s going to cause a bit of excitement in the close … Wonder what he looks like …?’
‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ Claire told her firmly, standing up and surveying the tiles she had just finished polishing with an abstracted frown, pushing one hand into her hair to lift its heavy weight off the nape of her neck.
Thick and naturally curly, its rich dark exuberance was the bane of her life. Sally often teased her enviously that, with her petite, small-boned frame and her small, heart-shaped face, framed by her glossy chestnut curls, she looked young enough to be her peer rather than almost a decade her senior.
‘You should be being one of my bridesmaids,’ Sally had teased her. ‘You certainly look young enough to get away with it.’
Claire had shaken her head over such foolishness. She was, she had reminded her stepdaughter, a mature woman of thirty-four.
‘A mature woman?’ Sally had scoffed unrepentantly. ‘You look more like a young girl. It’s odd, you know,’ she had added more seriously, ‘but, despite the fact that you’d been married to Dad for over ten years when he died, there’s still something almost … almost—well, virginal about you.’
She had given Claire a wry look as she’d spoken. ‘I know it sounds crazy but it’s true, there is, and I’m not the only one to think so. Chris noticed it as well …’
‘You’re unreal, do you know that?’ Hannah told her fondly now. ‘Here you are, an adult, fully functioning woman in the full power of her womanhood … without a man, and you turn round and tell me …’
As she saw the look Claire was giving her Hannah backed off, apologising.
‘All right, all right … So I know how close you and John were and how much you must still miss him. It just seems such a waste, that’s all. One thing does puzzle me, though; if this guy is Tim’s boss, what on earth is he doing looking for lodgings? Why doesn’t he—?’
‘He wants to live in a family home,’ Claire explained patiently, repeating what Irene had told her.
‘Apparently he’s used to having a large family around him. According to Irene, he and his brothers and sisters were orphaned when his parents were killed in an accident. He was just eighteen at the time and he stepped in as a surrogate parent, put himself and all of them through college, then took a job locally with the family business to keep the family together.’
‘Oh, I see, and I suppose he was too busy taking care of his siblings to have time to marry and have his own family … Mmm … I wonder what he is like? He sounds …’
‘Incredibly dull and worthy,’ Claire supplied wryly for her.
Both of them started to giggle.
‘I wasn’t going to say that,’ Hannah protested. ‘Oh, by the way, what’s all this about you and Sally’s two bridesmaids making a pact to stay single?’
‘What?’
Claire gave her a confused look and then realised what she meant.
‘Oh, that … It wasn’t so much of a pact, rather an act of feminine solidarity,’ she explained ruefully.
‘I felt so sorry for poor Poppy, Hannah. It’s no secret how she feels about Chris. Sally was in two minds about whether or not to ask her to be her bridesmaid, not because she didn’t want her, but because she was worried about the strain it would place her under. But, as she and Poppy agreed, for her not to have done so could have placed Poppy in an even more invidious position.
‘And as for Star—well, you know her background; her mother has been divorced several times and is currently having an affair with a boy who’s younger than Star and her father has, at the last count, nine children from four different relationships, none of whom he seems to have any real time for. It’s no wonder that Star is so anti-marriage …’
‘So it isn’t true, then, that the three of you took a vow to support one another in withstanding the famous power of the bride’s wedding bouquet?’ Hannah teased her archly.
Claire stared at her.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Ah … so it is true … Someone—and I’m afraid I simply cannot reveal my source—happened to be walking past the door and overheard you.
‘I don’t know if it’s true, but I have heard rumours that there are plans to run a book on the odds of the three of you being unattached by the time Sally and Chris celebrate their first anniversary.’
‘Oh, there are, are there?’ Claire retorted fiercely. ‘Well, for your information … I shall never marry again, Hannah,’ she said, more quietly and seriously. The laughter died from her friend’s eyes as she listened to her. ‘John was a wonderful husband and I loved him dearly.’
‘You’ve only been widowed for two years,’ Hannah reminded her gently. ‘One day some man is going to walk into your life, set your heart pounding and make you realize that you’re still very much a woman. Who knows? It could even be this American,’ she teased wickedly.
‘Never,’ Claire declared firmly, and she meant it.
She had her own reasons for knowing that there could never be a second marriage or any other kind of intimate relationship for her, but that was something she could not talk about to Hannah, or to anyone else. That was something she had only been able to share with John, and was just one of the reasons why she still missed him so desperately.
John had known her as no one else, man or woman, had or ever could, especially no other man—most especially another man.
As he boarded his flight for Heathrow Brad Stevenson was frowning. He hadn’t wanted to take up this appointment in Britain; in fact he had done every damn thing he could to try to get out of it, and in the end it had taken the combined appeal of the president of the company himself and the retired chairman to persuade him to change his mind.
As he had faced his two uncles across the boardroom table he had protested that he was quite happy where he was, that the last thing he wanted was to be sent across the Atlantic to sort out the problems they were having with the British-based offshoot of their air-conditioning company, which they had insisted on buying into, against his advice.
‘OK,’
