face felt as though it was burning hot with chagrined embarrassment and dismay and she knew too that he had recognised her just as instantly as she had him, even though he gave no indication to the others—thankfully—as he extended his hand towards her and said formally, ‘Mrs …?’
‘Oh, good heavens, there’s no need for such formality. Claire—Brad,’ Irene announced, quickly introducing them.
‘Tim, get everyone a drink, will you, whilst I go and check on dinner …?’
‘I … I’ll come with you and give you a hand,’ Claire offered, desperate to escape.
But Irene wouldn’t let her, shaking her head firmly and telling her pointedly, ‘No, you stay and talk to Brad. We’ll drive you over to see the house tomorrow,’ she told their other guest. ‘But in the meantime, if there are any questions you want to ask Claire …’
Claire could feel her heart starting to thump unevenly and heavily as he gave her a long, steady look. Her face, her whole body felt so suffused with colour that she was surprised that Irene hadn’t commented on it.
‘I understand you’re a widow …’ was his only comment as Tim, obedient to his wife’s commands, bustled about getting them drinks.
‘Yes … yes. John, my husband, died some time ago …’
‘And you’ve lived on your own since then?’
Claire gave him a sharp look, made faintly uncomfortable by some undercurrent to his words. What was he trying to imply? Did he assume that just because … just because he had caught her momentarily off guard this afternoon with his … his unforgivably arrogant male behaviour in taking hold of her and kissing her … and just because, for the briefest possible smidgen of time, she might actually have involuntarily and inexplicably responded to him … that she was some kind of … that she … that her widowhood had been filled with a series of relationships … men …?
Indignation as well as a certain amount of self-conscious guilt coloured her face a soft, pretty pink, but when she opened her mouth to refute his subtle condemnation to her own shock she heard herself saying almost coyly, ‘Well, no, as a matter of fact … until recently there was someone …’
It was left to Tim, returning with their drinks, to rescue her from the potential consequences of her own folly by picking up the tail-end of their conversation and telling Brad jovially, ‘Claire’s only been on her own a matter of days. Sally, her late husband’s daughter, was living with her until she got married—’
‘Your stepdaughter,’ Brad elucidated, turning to take his drink from Tim with a brief smile that was far, far warmer than the one he had given her but nothing like as warm as the one he had bestowed on Paul and Janey in the park this afternoon, Claire registered, wondering at the same time why on earth she should feel so ridiculously forlorn and shut out somehow because she was excluded from that warmth.
Well, at least one thing was pretty sure, Claire decided fatalistically; now that he had recognised her and knew who she was, Brad Stevenson was hardly likely to want to stay with her.
For some reason, instead of the security and relief she would have expected to feel at such knowledge she felt a small and astonishingly painful stab of regret.
Regret … for what? Or would it be more appropriate to ask herself for whom?
‘Yes … yes. Sally, my stepdaughter,’ she agreed, flushing a little more pinkly under the look he was giving her.
‘Claire is the sort of person that others just naturally gravitate towards,’ Irene added, coming into the room to announce that dinner was ready. ‘She always seems to have a house full of people. If John hadn’t been so much older than her I’m sure she would have filled their home with children—’
‘Your husband was a good deal older than you?’ Brad interjected, looking even more assessingly at Claire.
What on earth was wrong with the man? Why did he have to make every question he asked her sound not merely like an accusation but virtually like a denunciation? Listening to him just then, she had heard quite clearly the disapproval and the cynicism in his voice, and she could see herself quite clearly through his eyes: the young, calculating woman deliberately enticing a much more financially well off and vulnerably older man into falling for her.
The truth was that her relationship with John had been nothing like that … nothing at all.
‘He was older, yes,’ she confirmed quietly now. Suddenly she felt very tired and drained. She was the one who should be questioning him, not the other way round, she told herself indignantly. How could she possibly allow him to move into her home after what he had done?
But, no matter how hard she tried to stir up a sense of injustice as they made their way to the dining room, honesty compelled her to admit that the last thing she had experienced in his arms was her normal lack of interest in sensual intimacy between a man and a woman and that she had, disconcertingly, actually responded to him.
Brad might have broken all the rules by kissing her but, startled though she had been by his behaviour, it had been her own unfamiliar and totally unexpected response to him which had really thrown her.
After years of passively accepting that she was simply not a very sexual person it had not been a pleasant experience to discover that she was in danger of responding to a totally unknown man with the kind of sensual hunger that she had always associated with books and films and with having far more to do with fiction than reality.
She still wasn’t quite sure which aspect of her own behaviour she found the least palatable—the fact that she had been so unexpectedly sensually aware of and aroused by him or the fact that her behaviour had made her question if she knew herself as well as she had always thought.
Both led to the kind of in-depth thinking about herself and her past which she found easier to avoid than to face, which was probably why, right now, she found herself not just embarrassed to have met Brad again but almost antagonistic towards him as well.
Once they were sitting down and eating, to Claire’s mild irritation and embarrassment, Irene started to list enthusiastically Claire’s domestic abilities for Brad’s benefit.
‘Claire is a wonderful cook,’ she told him when he had commented on her own cooking. ‘Of course, my brother, John, was an extremely fussy eater and he never really approved of the fact that Claire insisted on growing her own vegetables …’
‘Oh?’ Brad gave Claire a curious look. ‘Most health-conscious people these days take the view that homegrown produce is the best.’
‘Oh, it wasn’t that he disapproved of that,’ Irene explained. ‘No, John simply thought that that kind of gardening wasn’t really suitable for a woman. He—’
‘My husband would have preferred me to hire someone to look after our vegetable plot.’ Claire felt compelled to interrupt Irene and explain. ‘He didn’t think that sort of gardening was … He felt I should confine myself to—’
‘John was a very old-fashioned man,’ Tim cut in, giving Claire an affectionate, supportive smile. ‘He believed that a woman’s role in the garden should be confined to the picking and arranging of flowers.’
‘John simply didn’t want Claire overtaxing herself.’ Irene bristled, quick to defend her
