After The Loving

Why bother to count in weeks when she knew Raff could end it in days? Maybe even today.

‘So will you talk to Daddy about it?’

Bryna blinked at the pretty girl who sat opposite her at the restaurant table. Lunch had been the last thing she had felt like after leaving the doctor’s surgery, but she had promised to have lunch with Kate, and somehow she had managed to drive herself to the restaurant. How, she didn’t know, not recalling the drive here at all, but she had already been seated at the table when Kate had breezed into the room five minutes ago, her hair a mass of glossy black curls, grey eyes gleaming with determination.

It was that gleam of determination that warned Bryna she had better be more on her guard and pay closer attention to what Kate was saying; this young lady could be deviously charming when she chose to be! And lack of attention when Kate’s eyes were gleaming like this could have dire results. This young lady could be every bit as manipulative as her father when she was set on a course of action.

‘Talk to him about what?’ Bryna prompted guardedly, listening intently now.

Irritation flickered in the dark grey depths. ‘What’s the matter with you today, Bryna? You haven’t heard a word I’ve said since I arrived!’

Bryna gave a half-smile as Kate displayed another characteristic of her father: impatience with anyone who didn’t pay complete attention to what concerned them at any given moment. In the father it was part of his strength of character, in this eighteen-year-old girl it appeared merely petulant. But she didn’t doubt Kate would be every inch the matriarch in her later years.

‘Sorry. I—I’ve had a busy morning,’ she dismissed with a shrug.

‘Hm,’ Kate gave her a censorious look. ‘Well, I’d like you to talk to Daddy on my behalf about the idea of my sharing a flat with Brenda next term.’

Bryna’s brow cleared at the explanation. ‘I thought you’d already discussed it with your father and he’d said no,’ she returned drily, knowing all about the conversation between father and daughter, also knowing the outcome would be inevitable.

‘Not a definite no-more-discussion-on-the-subject no.’ Kate sat forward eagerly. ‘I’m sure that if you told him you think it’s a good idea he might be more—open-minded.’

Bryna wasn’t sure she did think it was a good idea. Oh, she understood Kate’s wish to leave the home she had shared with her family the last eighteen years, but she wasn’t altogether sure Kate was up to setting up home on her own just yet, especially with Brenda Sanders.

Kate had become friends with the other girl when she had started college the previous term, but Brenda seemed to have a different boy in tow each time they met, and the one time Bryna had been to the flat Kate proposed sharing it had been very untidy, with a sleepy-eyed, completely naked young man emerging from Brenda’s bedroom. That way of life might be Brenda’s choice, but for all her outward sophistication she was sure Kate was still very much an innocent. And her father would like her to remain that way a little while longer!

‘I don’t think my opinion, favourable or otherwise, would make the slightest difference to his decision,’ she told the younger girl coolly, sipping her mineral water, having realised just in time before she ordered her drink from the waiter that she shouldn’t really drink alcohol in her condition.

‘Oh, but I’m sure—— Oh,’ Kate broke off as realisation dawned. ‘You aren’t saying that your affair with Daddy is almost over?’

Candour, cruelly blunt or otherwise, was something neither of the Gallagher children lacked, neither Paul at twenty, or his young sister Kate. It was something Bryna had been made aware of the first time Raff had introduced her to his two children from his very young marriage and they had asked why she and Raff didn’t just live together and have an open affair, assuring them that they were both adult enough to accept the situation.

They might well be, but neither she nor Raff had wanted that close a relationship, she because she liked having her own home and independence, Raff because he never became that intimate with the women he was involved with, and both of them were happy to continue as they were. Or they had been.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Kate dismissed before she could answer her. ‘You and Daddy have been together for over six months now; that’s at least three months longer than any of the others!’

Tact and diplomacy seemed to be traits the Gallagher children hadn’t received when virtues were being given out!

Bryna was well aware of the fact that her affair with Raff had lasted twice as long as they usually did, just as she had been aware of his increasing irritability the last month or so, knowing it was only a matter of time now before he ended things between them.

Until today, until an hour ago, she had been grateful for each extra day she had lasted than his other women; now she knew she would have no choice but to end things herself if he didn’t do it soon.

‘All the more reason for him to feel enough is enough,’ she gave a tight smile.

‘I don’t believe it,’ his daughter scoffed. ‘Paul and I have been laying bets on how soon he would marry you!’

Bryna gave the younger girl a pitying look. ‘You should both know better than that.’

Grey eyes, so much like her father’s it was unnerving, looked Bryna over speculatively. ‘I somehow never expected the woman to turn Daddy down when he finally decided to take the plunge again.’

She turned away. ‘One has to be asked in order to give a refusal.’

‘You’re so beautiful, Daddy is sure to ask you soon,’ the younger girl said with certainty.

As if beauty had anything to do with it! Oh, she was well aware of her own looks, she had to be in the profession she had chosen to enter on leaving school eight years ago. She knew how well her long mane of white-blonde straight hair and wide, dark-lashed, violet-coloured eyes photographed, not to mention the slender length of her body.

Her looks had been her stock-in-trade for six years, and could have continued to do so for many years after that, but two years ago she had decided to open her own modelling agency, where her looks and appearance were still very important, but she no longer had to watch everything she ate, or look anxiously in the mirror each morning as she searched for those tell-tale lines on her face that would tell her the choice was no longer hers to make.

It had been a successful move, both financially and personally, and she had also met Raff through the agency. But while her beauty might have attracted his attention initially, it certainly wasn’t enough to hold his interest for any length of time; there had been too many beautiful women before her for her to ever believe that.

‘I don’t think so, Kate,’ she dismissed as gently as she could, liking the young girl for all her brashness. How could she not like the daughter who looked so much like the man she loved!

No ties, no commitment, they had said at the start of their affair, and Bryna had meant to keep to those rules. But it had been impossible for her not to fall in love with Raff, although she had taken care not to let him even guess at the emotion, knowing it would precipitate the end of their relationship. She had broken all the rules, but Raff had kept to every one of them, and she had no illusions why.

Would the child she carried look like him as Kate did? They were both tall, so the child was sure to inherit that trait from one of them, but Raff was so dark against her blondeness, and surely that would be the more dominant of the two. How strange to look at her child and see Raff in every glance!

‘Bryna? Bryna!’ Kate repeated impatiently at her second lapse into unattentiveness. ‘Are you sure? I mean——’

‘I’m sure. And I accept it,’ she huskily assured the young girl. ‘Now let’s order lunch, shall we?’ she added briskly as the waiter approached their table. ‘It hasn’t happened yet, and until it does we can enjoy each other’s company.’

She was well aware that when her affair with Raff ended he wouldn’t be the only one to leave her life, that, fond as she had become of Kate and Paul, they could hardly keep up a friendship with one of their father’s ex-mistresses!

Kate gave her a frowning look once they had ordered their meal. ‘You don’t seem exactly heartbroken.’

Bryna gave rueful grimace. ‘Would it do any good if I screamed and shouted?’

‘Well … no,’ Kate admitted moodily. ‘But it might make you feel better.’

‘Believe me, it wouldn’t,’ Bryna drawled.

‘You’re always so cool and controlled,’ the girl rebuked. ‘Don’t you care for Daddy at all?’

Her heart felt heavy at the irony of that. ‘I don’t think you really want me to answer that——’

‘But I do,’ Kate insisted earnestly. ‘Daddy tells me that I shouldn’t even think about going to bed with someone unless I’m absolutely sure I’m in love with them, and yet Daddy isn’t in love with the women he goes to bed with.’

Bryna picked uninterestedly at the prawns she had chosen as her appetiser. ‘It doesn’t seem very fair, does it?’ she acknowledged, her cheeks pale beneath their light dusting of blusher.

‘He told me there’s a certain type of woman a man would never contemplate marrying,’ Kate added with a bitchiness unusual for her.

Bryna swallowed hard, recognising the accusation for what it was. Except that she knew Raff didn’t mean her. He had been her first and only lover.

After her parents had told her she could never have a child she had deliberately set out to attract men to the sensuous sway of her body, always drawing back before any physical commitment had been made, believing they would realise she wasn’t a complete woman if they ever made love to her. By the time she realised that wasn’t true she had earned herself the reputation of being icy and aloof. And the ice hadn’t begun to melt until she met Raff. If he had been surprised to find her virginity intact he had never said so.

The bitchy comment hadn’t been worthy of Kate, with her forthright manner and lack of guile. Bryna guessed that the girl was fond of her too, and would miss her when the time came.

‘He was right,’ she told the younger girl.

Only six years separated them in age, and yet at eighteen Bryna had already been mature beyond her years, scarred by what she believed to be her inadequacy. God, how she wished she could share the life growing within her with someone! Preferably Raff.