Wedding Nights: Woman to Wed?

‘Claire, don’t,’ he begged her. ‘You’re wrong. It wasn’t—’

‘They used to be good music-hall fodder, didn’t they—middle-aged virgins, repressed, dried up, fossilised …?’

He could hear in her voice the tears she wouldn’t let fall and he ached to reach out and take hold of her, but she was already stepping back from him, her eyes wild and angry, warning him not to come any closer.

‘This is all my own fault,’ Claire told him bitterly. ‘I should never have given in to Irene and agreed to let you stay here. I never wanted—’ She stopped but Brad knew what she had been going to say.

‘You never wanted me here in the first place,’ he guessed wryly.

‘Why can’t you all leave me alone to live my life the way I want to?’ she demanded fiercely. ‘You … Irene … even Sally with that ridiculous trick to force us to catch her bouquet. As though anyone gives any credence to that ridiculous superstition these days …’

‘What superstition?’ Brad asked her curiously.

‘The one that says the girl who catches the bride’s bouquet will be the next to marry,’ Claire told him angrily. ‘Sally arranged it so that both of her bridesmaids and I were tricked into catching it. She even put something about it on her postcard.’

The postcard … Suddenly Brad understood. So that was what the reference to Claire having a part-share in a man had meant.

Claire glowered at him furiously as she saw the way he had started to grin.

‘Look, I’ve got to go,’ he reiterated, ‘but I am coming back, and when I do don’t even bother to think about running away, Claire,’ he warned her firmly.

‘This,’ he told her softly, reaching out and touching her lips lightly with his fingertips before she could stop him, ‘is just the beginning …’

Claire stared at him, transfixed by the sheer intensity of the jolt of sensation that had run through her at his touch.

She wanted to tell him that he was wrong, that she didn’t want whatever it was that he thought they had started to continue, but somehow the words just wouldn’t come and she had to watch in tongue-tied silence as he headed for the door.

The plaintive mewing of the kitten broke the heavy silence of the kitchen. Claire went automatically to pick her up, stroking the soft baby fur and marvelling at the little creature’s capacity to trust and survive as she started to purr noisily.

She was still semi-dazed by disbelief at everything that had happened—not just the intimate physical sensuality she had shared with Brad and her unexpected response to him but, even more unbelievably, the fact that she had actually told him about her past, revealed to him the secret shame and shock she had felt and the way it had affected her whole life and her feelings about herself and her sexuality.

Not even to John had she confided her fear that she somehow had been responsible, had invited in some way that young man’s assault on her, but somehow it had almost been as though Brad had known what she was thinking, what she was feeling … had known just how to encourage her to reveal that hidden fear to him.

And as for what had happened afterwards … Could it have been the result of the release of all the emotions she had repressed by locking away her fears about what had happened and her dread that she had somehow been responsible for it?

It was a well-known fact that emotional trauma could have an extremely odd effect on human behaviour.

But what about the fact that the night before last she had been dreaming about Brad in the most erotic way?

The kitten gave a sharp howl of protest, making Claire realise that the eye-dropper was empty of milk.

Apologising to her, Claire refilled it, smiling at the way the little creature clung to the dropper with her front paws as she sucked on the teat.

Sally had already told her that she intended to wait until she was at least thirty before she and Chris started their family. She was twenty-five now, which meant that she was going to have a long wait before she became a grandmother, Claire acknowledged.

A grandmother … A rueful, slightly sad smile touched her mouth as she admitted to herself how much she would secretly have liked to have children, a family of which Sally would always have remained her eldest and most specially loved daughter.

It was not too late, of course. Women of her age and even older were having babies every day, many of them without the support of a husband or partner, but, having been brought up solely by her great-aunt, Claire had very ambivalent feelings about having a child on her own. Of course, if she were ever to find herself in a situation where for some reason she’d conceived accidentally, then there would be no question but that she would have her child and love him or her.

She bent her head protectively over the kitten as she realised the direction her thoughts were taking and just why the thought of an accidental pregnancy should have crossed her mind.

It wasn’t going to happen, of course. She must make sure that it did not happen, she told herself sternly.

Outside it had started to rain, the wind gusting fiercely against the window.

The weather forecast had warned that they were in for a stormy evening with heavy rain and gale-force winds. As she returned Felicity to the new basket that Brad had bought for her and glanced out of the window at the lowering sky, Claire was thankful that she didn’t have to go out.

CHAPTER SEVEN

BRAD grimaced in disgust as he realised that one of the tyres on his hire car had developed a slow puncture and was now flat. Cursing under his breath, he glanced from the car window to the bleak, empty landscape and the heavy rain. It was barely six o’clock in the evening but the sky was so overcast that it was already almost dark.

There was no one else around, the desolate area that the local council had designated as a new industrial complex as yet little more than a vast sea of mud, broken here and there by sets of footings.

It had been a chance remark during his interview with their potential new customer—an official from the head office of a locally based insurance broker which was thinking of installing air-conditioning in all its offices—that had led to his trip out here to look at the new industrial site.

He hadn’t realised, until the other man had mentioned it, that the existing warehouse was built on a piece of potentially very valuable land. The town had expanded rapidly in the years after the warehouse had first been constructed—adjacent to the original owner’s home—and although Brad had been aware that virtually all the property surrounding the warehouse was residential he hadn’t appreciated the significance of this fact until the other man had brought it to his attention.

He had a client, he had told Brad, a well-known local builder, who he suspected would be very interested in acquiring the land for development if it ever came onto the market. After he had gone, a few brief enquiries by Brad had elicited the information that as prime residential building land the warehouse site was very good indeed, and, moreover, that if they were to move to a new purpose-built unit the savings they could make would more than offset the cost of such a move.

On impulse Brad had decided to drive out and look at the new industrial complex that the local council were building, but what he hadn’t bargained for was the fact that his hire car was going to get a puncture.

It was still raining very heavily but there was no help for it—he was going to have to get out and change that tyre, Brad acknowledged, removing his suit jacket and opening the car door.

Ten minutes later, his hair plastered wetly to his scalp, his back soaked to the skin through the inadequate protection of his shirt, Brad had managed to remove the spare wheel from the trunk—the boot of the car, he amended grimly—and to locate the jack.

The unmade road along which he had driven to inspect the site was rapidly changing to a thick mush of sticky mud beneath the lashing downpour. Removing the rubber-backed lining from the boot floor to use as a kneeling pad, Brad started to jack up the car.

Half an hour later, so wet that he might just as well have been standing naked under a shower, and perspiring heavily from his efforts to release the wheel-nuts, Brad gave in. What he wouldn’t give now for a can of lubricant, he thought, but the nuts, fitted by machine, were simply not going to budge.

He reached into his car for his phone and punched in the number of the car-hire firm.

It was over an hour and a half before he finally saw the headlights of the breakdown vehicle coming towards him through the heavy downpour of the continuing rain.

He had been reluctant to run the car engine for too long in case he ran out of petrol and his wet shirt, still clinging clammily and coldly to his skin, coupled with the sharp drop in temperature which had accompanied the driving rain made him shiver and sneeze as he stepped out of the car to greet the mechanic.

‘Better watch it, mate,’ the mechanic told him cheerfully as he sprayed the stubborn wheel-nuts and waited for the lubricant to take effect. ‘Sounds like you’ve got yourself a nasty chill there.’

It was another half an hour before the wheel was finally changed, the wheel-nuts proving recalcitrantly stubborn but eventually coming free.

Thanking the mechanic, Brad climbed back in the car and restarted the engine.

Claire glanced uncertainly at the kitchen clock. Where was Brad? She had assumed, obviously erroneously, that he was going to be back in time for dinner but it was after nine now and she had long since disposed of the meal she had prepared for him.

When Brad hadn’t returned when she had expected she had been tempted to phone the office, but she had reminded herself fiercely that he was simply her lodger and that was the only relationship between them—the only relationship she wanted there to be between them.

It hadn’t been easy to ignore the mocking laughter of the inner voice that had taunted her, Liar, but somehow she had made herself do so. If she’d wanted or needed any confirmation that what had happened between them this afternoon was something that Brad very definitely did not want to take any further, she had surely had it in the very fact that he had delayed his return for so long.

Don’t run away, he had told her, but perhaps, like her, he too had been caught up in the intensity of the moment, suspending normal, rational judgement and reality.