A Reluctant Wife

‘But…?’ He didn’t stand up and when their eyes met she could see that all traces of amusement had vanished. She caught a glimpse of the man who had built an empire, who was worth millions. She wondered, fleetingly, how many women he had bowled over, how many women had responded to that air of ruthlessness which lay so close to that charming exterior. Even though she was immune to that combination, she wasn’t an idiot. She could see the attraction there, as glaringly obvious as a beacon on a foggy night.

‘But,’ she said, slinging her bag temporarily on the kitchen counter so that she could give him the benefit of a reply, ‘you strike me as the sort of man who lives hard and plays hard. Ashdown isn’t the sort of place where either gets done. Life here is conducted at an easy pace, Mr Wallace—Gregory. No clubs, no fancy restaurants, no theatres.’

‘In which case, why do you live here? You’re a young woman, unmarried. Surely the bright lights have beckoned?’

Sophie afforded him a long, even stare.

‘That is my business. Thanks for showing me around your house and thanks for the tea. I’ll be on my way now.’

Before he could respond she turned her back on him and headed out of the door, out of the house, back to the safety of her bicycle which was lying where she had left it.

As she cycled back to her cottage, she tried hard to capture her wayward thoughts and lock them into a compartment in her head. She thought about Christmas, lurking around the corner, about whether she should take advantage of Kat’s offer for Jade and her to come to her parents’ for lunch, about whether she should do more days at the library now that Jade was at school full time.

But Gregory Wallace kept getting in the way. Admit it, she thought irritably to herself, the man has got under your skin and you resent it because it’s something that hasn’t happened since Alan. Even with Alan it had been different. Gregory Wallace, she decided, got on her nerves as well as under her skin. Her own in-built suspicion of men, born of bitter experience, managed to deflect some of the forcefulness of his personality, but she was uncomfortably aware of it lying there, waiting to spring out at her.

She spent the next week keeping her head well down and her thoughts on other matters. She had started to accumulate presents for Jade and some of her friends. Jade’s she concealed in the attic, and every time she went there to deposit another small something she was startled at quite how much she had managed to collect over a period of weeks. Thank goodness Christmas Day is only a matter of a few weeks away, she thought. Much longer and she would be able to open a small toy shop with the amount of stuff she had bought over time.

She had realised a long time ago that she overcompensated for Jade’s lack of a father, but somehow she never managed to deal with the knowledge by cutting back on presents. Christmas was always a time of excess.

She was on her way out of the house two days later when she picked up the mail and opened the one letter to find an invitation inside.

You’d think they would have given up on me by now, Sophie thought, tucking the invitation into her skirt pocket and cycling to the library. It was so cold that she had been forced to wear a jacket over her jumpers. She wished that she had driven her car, which was probably in the process of seizing up due to lack of use.

By the time she got to the library the invitation in her skirt pocket had been completely forgotten, and it remained forgotten until later that evening when Kat came around to dinner and asked in passing whether she had been invited.

‘Oh, yes,’ Sophie said, tucking into a concoction of rice, vegetables and seafood, which tasted good but had the unfortunate look of something slung together randomly by a child.

‘And…?’ Kat looked at her expectantly. ‘You are going to come, aren’t you?’

‘No.’

Kat rested her head in the palms of her hands and groaned theatrically. ‘Have you ever considered that a social life might be quite a good thing for you to have?’

‘I had a social life, Kat. In London. I found that it disagreed with my system.’ Alan had loved nothing better than socialising. He had adored it, and he had been in great demand. Sophie had found herself catapulted out of her natural reticence into a whirl of activity which she had initially found invigorating, then boring and finally horrendously intrusive.

She had hated the false gaiety of everyone she met, the constant surreptitious competition with the other women, the lack of personal time it afforded her with her husband. It had been a subject of incessant, corrosive argument. Now the thought of dipping her toes into that again filled her with dread.

‘Besides,’ she said defensively, when her friend continued to stare at her in silence, ‘I have a social life. Of sorts.’

‘You occasionally see a mum from Jade’s school for lunch.’

‘Sometimes for supper,’ Sophie protested, knowing that she was on weak ground because to escalate her social life into anything resembling what a woman of her age should be doing would have necessitated more than simply an exaggeration of the truth.

‘Oh, well, I’m surprised you can contain your excitement at it all.’

‘That’s not fair.’

‘You never go to London. When was the last time you met your group of friends from there?’

‘A few months ago,’ Sophie admitted, stabbing the remainder of her rice with her fork.

‘You used to invite them down for weekends now and again. Well, that certainly went out the window.’

‘It’s hard, doing stuff like that. I’m a mother. What am I supposed to do with Jade?’

‘Get someone to babysit?’

‘Who? Oh, all right. I know there are people willing to babysit, but—’

‘But nothing. Are you busy on the night of the thirtieth of November?’

‘I don’t believe I am,’ Sophie said.

‘Then I’ll expect you to come. I mean, have a heart, Soph. Who am I supposed to chat to for an entire evening at Annabel Simpson’s house? You know the place will be heaving with all her smart London set and her parents’ smart country set. I’ll be like a fish out of water.’

‘Oh, please!’ Sophie said, laughing. ‘You are never like a fish out of water. You can talk to anyone about anything, even if you know absolutely nothing about the subject in question. Why do you think you’re so good at selling houses? You can persuade someone with five homes that they’re in dire need of another.’

‘So, you’re coming, then?’

‘What exactly is it in aid of?’ Sophie asked, as they rose to clear the table, deciding as she eyed the counter buckling under the weight of unwashed dishes that she would do the lot in the morning.

‘Usual pre-Christmas bash,’ Kat said airily. ‘An opportunity for Annabel and her friends to bedeck themselves in splendid designer clothes and show the rest of us country bumpkins just how drab we all are.’

‘Oh, well, that really sounds like the sort of fun social occasion I should be cutting my teeth on.’

‘The one last year wasn’t too bad,’ Kat conceded, making them both a cup of coffee then searching through the cupboard until she located a bar of chocolate. ‘There was limitless champagne. I drank enough to see me through the next twelve months.’ She bit into her chocolate and looked at her friend thoughtfully. ‘Also, I think it’s a sort of party to welcome the new boy in town.’

‘New boy?’

‘The divine Gregory Wallace. You remember him. He was the one who showed you around his house.’

Sophie blushed and wished that Kat would stop staring at her in a suggestive, raised-eyebrows, there’s-a-story-here kind of way.

‘Which is one reason for me to avoid any party at all costs.’

‘Oh, yes? Mind explaining to me?’

Actually, Sophie found that she did mind as she couldn’t quite explain it to herself. ‘I just don’t like him,’ she said nonchalantly. ‘He rubs me up the wrong way. He’s too much like Alan.’

‘He’s nothing like Alan. OK, I’ll admit that they have the money thing in common, but that’s where the similarity ends. Alan, if you don’t mind me speaking ill of your ex, was in love with himself. He thought that he was the sun and everyone else just revolved around him. He also had no time for anyone who didn’t pander to his ego, make him look good or could do something for him.’

‘And Gregory Wallace is different?’ Sophie asked, bitterly aware that the criticism, uncannily accurate, still managed to reflect badly on her.

‘You could come and find out. Besides…’ Katherine afforded her friend a long, speculative look ‘…he might just get the wrong impression, you know.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Well, you know the saying that the lady doth protest too much. He might just think that he has the opposite effect on you if you’re anything but indifferent.’