To Love, Honour & Betray

Was that further confirmation of the fact that she had reached the treacherous choppy waters of middle age, the fact that she was physically attracted to a younger man?

As she left the drawing room and turned to go upstairs, Claudia paused by Tara’s picture of her parents. Neither of them was, of course, remotely recognisable if you discounted the colour of their hair—hers yellow, Garth’s black and straight.

Tara!

Claudia bit her lip as she felt the familiar surge of love thinking about Tara always brought flooding through her, but this time it wasn’t just love she felt. This time there was fear and dread, as well. And guilt, too. Oh, yes, there was guilt.

2

‘I thought I heard the phone ring,’ Garth Wallace commented as he walked into the sitting room of his London apartment carrying the papers he had been to retrieve from the briefcase in his bedroom.

‘You did,’ Estelle Frensham agreed. She had been working for the firm as a temp, filling in for Garth’s personal assistant who was on maternity leave. ‘But whoever it was rang off without speaking. I did a check on the number, though. This is it.’ Silently, Garth studied the piece of paper she had given him. Apart from his eyebrows snapping together in a frown, his expression gave nothing away to Estelle as she watched him. He had recognised the number right away. How could he not do when for over ten years it had been his own? There was only one person who was likely to ring him from Ivy House, and so far as he knew, Tara, his daughter, was presently in London.

Tara. His daughter. Their daughter, his and Claudia’s. Despite the fact that physically she resembled him much more than she did Claudia, Tara was in every other imaginable way so much more Claudia’s child. Every mannerism, every mere inflection of her voice to him were copies of Claudia’s, and sometimes watching her, he wasn’t sure if those similarities made him hate himself more or loathe himself less. One thing was sure; they certainly didn’t alter his love for Tara herself, nor change the way he felt about her mother.

If Tara was in London and Claudia had rung him, it could only be because her need to talk to him was desperately important. Claudia would never ring otherwise.

He glanced at his watch and then announced, ‘Look, Estelle, I’ve changed my mind. We’ll leave it for this evening, I think. I want to spend a little more time on this one. I’ll ring the client in the morning and put off my meeting until later in the week.’

Estelle gave him an assessing look. They had been working all out at the agency to get some kind of campaign down on paper for the new client who had approached them to take on his business, which was why she was working here this evening instead of working out at the gym. Not that she minded—Garth’s company was preferable any day of the week, any time of the day or night, to going to the gym, even if all he had in mind was work. At least for now.

From the moment he had first interviewed her for the temporary vacancy at the agency eight weeks ago, Estelle had decided that just as soon as she could arrange it, she and Garth were going to be lovers. Just the thought of it, of the pleasure she had promised herself that lay in store for her, made her start to ache deep down inside, the kind of ache she knew from long experience could only be soothed by the release of a full orgasm.

She wondered what Garth’s reaction would be if she came right out with it now and told him how she felt, what she needed. Some men liked women who were totally up front and unashamed of admitting their sexual needs, but Garth, she suspected, was not one of them. And so far he had certainly neither said nor done anything to suggest that he was sexually attracted to her. Still, there was no other permanent woman in his life, apart from occasional dates with one of the agency’s account executives—a woman in her thirties who Estelle knew would be no competition for her! She had managed to ascertain that much and she had checked, as well, that he was as heterosexual as he looked—no doubts there, either.

So far, it appeared he hadn’t recognised her deliberate sexual come-ons to him or he had recognised them but was ignoring them—and of the two Estelle knew which one she preferred. And tonight she had hoped … but obviously tonight was not going to be the night. Estelle was no fool and she calmly gathered up the papers she had spread out on the workmanlike desk-cum-table that dominated his large square sitting room. All right, so things might not be ending as she had hoped and planned, but if she couldn’t have Garth then there was always Blade. Oh, yes, there was always Blade. Blade who would happily provide her with whatever kind of sex she wanted, Blade with whom her relationship was not so much one of love and hate, as mutual dislike and contempt and mutual need and lust, as well. As she collected her belongings, she was already planning how she would spend the rest of the evening.

Watching her, Garth wondered what she was thinking. She had made it clear right from their first interview that she found him sexually attractive, but Garth was used to women coming on to him, and if necessary he could always tell the agency who had supplied her to find the firm an alternative.

She wouldn’t be the first young and not-so-young female employee they had taken on who had made it plain she was attracted to him, but over the years he had learned to recognise all the warning signs and to deflect potential pitfalls in plenty of time to negotiate a way around them.

‘I’ll call you a cab,’ he told her crisply, reaching out to pick up the phone.

That was one thing about Garth, Estelle recognised. He was quite definitely very much the old-fashioned sort when it came to the way he took what he saw as his responsibility towards his female employees. Very protective, very gentlemanly, in the very best senses of both words. Unfortunately.

As she bent down to retrieve an errant piece of paper, she deliberately allowed the long wrap skirt she was wearing to part, showing him the slender gym-honed full length of her thigh and revealing, if he should be interested, the fact that what she was wearing underneath it was either extremely brief or totally non-existent. But as she glanced towards Garth, Estelle saw that he was looking the other way, his mind plainly on other things. Never mind, she promised herself as her taxi arrived, there would always be another time, and for now her growing frustration and need called out for Blade.

Garth waited until he had seen Estelle stepping safely into the taxi he had called—the same reliable firm the business always used. Garth had heard too many scary stories of women being abused by unauthorised cab drivers to take any risks with the safety of his employees. Then he reached out to pick up the telephone a second time, punching in the number Estelle had written down for him.

After she had undressed and showered, Claudia opened the drawer of her dressing-room cupboard, pausing as she stared down at the small bottle of sleeping tablets she kept there. Her doctor had prescribed them in the early weeks after she asked Garth to leave. She rarely used them now, but at the same time she was never without a bottle. Just occasionally there were nights, a week or more of them at times, when something would happen, trigger her memory, and she would know that sleep was going to be impossible … unwanted even, because if she did sleep, she would be haunted by her nightmares, her fears, her guilt, and then and only then did she resort to the awful and frighteningly empty oblivion of drug-induced sleep as an escape.

The last time she had taken them had been towards the end of last year. Garth’s birthday … his fiftieth.

Tara had thrown a party for him. She had begged Claudia to go, but as she had quietly explained to Tara at the time, Garth was hardly likely to want her to be there.

‘But we’re still family,’ Tara had protested stubbornly while Claudia had shaken her head.

‘You and Garth are still family, Tara. You and I are still family, but the three of us …’

‘You were both there for my twenty-first and for my graduation,’ Tara had reminded her mother, ‘and everyone said then that both of you …’ She stopped.

What everyone had said at the time was that it was a shame that her parents had split up and even more of a shame that they couldn’t get back together, but Tara knew that to say as much to either her father or her mother was to court one of their rare displays of anger—a defensive anger in her mother’s case and a protective one in her father’s.

‘Gramps and Nan will be there and so will the Brig and Nannie,’ she had coaxed, referring not only to her paternal grandparents but her maternal ones, as well, but still Claudia had refused.

She had known perfectly well, of course, having been told by her mother, that they had accepted Tara’s invitation to celebrate their ex-son-in-law’s fiftieth birthday.

‘We could hardly refuse, darling, and in fact, your father simply wouldn’t have heard of it. You know how much he thinks of Garth.’

‘Yes, I know, and there’s certainly no reason why you shouldn’t both go,’ Claudia had assured her mother quietly.

‘It will seem so odd without you being there….’

‘It won’t seem odd at all, at least not to me or to Garth,’ Claudia had had to point out to her mother as she reminded her gently, ‘We are divorced and have been for a full decade now.’

‘Yes, I realise that,’ her mother had fretted, ‘although I’ve never really understood why.’

‘I told you at the time. Garth had … there was—’

‘Garth was a little bit naughty, I know that, darling, but men are sometimes like that,’ her mother had interrupted her. ‘That’s just the way they are. Even your father … not that he ever … not that there was … but Garth is such a very handsome and charming man that—’

‘I’m not going,’ Claudia had told her mother firmly and she hadn’t done so.

Instead, she had gone to bed early with her sleeping tablet and her unwanted memories. On that occasion, the tablet hadn’t worked, but her memories had. Perhaps tonight she ought to take two instead of her usual one.

When the telephone rang an hour later, Claudia was deeply asleep.

Frowning, Garth replaced the receiver and then dialled the number of his daughter’s London flat.

‘Daddy,’ Tara exclaimed, her voice full of love and warmth as she recognised his voice. ‘I’m glad you rang.’

‘Oh, have you been trying to get in touch with me?’

‘No, it’s not that. It’s just that I drove over to see Ma this afternoon. There was something I wanted to tell her. She’s had the most fabulous write-up in the local rag. Have you seen it?’

‘Yes, I have,’ Garth agreed curtly.

He had seen, as well, the photographs accompanying the article. In one of them, a man was standing close to his ex-wife’s side, his expression as he looked at her both predatory and betrayingly indulgent.

Garth knew him by reputation. He had downsized his business interests, moving out of the city and back to his roots where he was apparently intending to run his computer-based business from his old home town. Claudia, if what he had heard on the grapevine was true, had been approached by him for her views and advice on the type of problems likely to be faced by potential home computer workers he might employ. Garth had his own ideas about why Luke Palliser might be interested in his ex-wife, and they had nothing whatsoever to do with her professional expertise.

‘Whatever you wanted to say to your mother must have been important if it necessitated driving all the way to Gloucestershire and then back again without staying overnight,’ Garth commented as he switched his thoughts back from his ex-wife to his daughter.

‘Well, yes, it was, but I couldn’t have stayed anyway. There wouldn’t have been any point. Ma was going out for the evening. Daddy …’

Garth waited. He knew of old that particular note in his daughter’s voice. It had accompanied every minor and sometimes not-so-minor mishap in Tara’s life, from the collision that had bent the front wheel of her first proper bike to the less dire but far more expensive bump that had damaged the small car he had given her for her eighteenth birthday.

‘You know I told you that I needed to take all my holiday allowance because I was planning to spend time in Boston with Ry?’