The Flawed Marriage

‘EVERYTHING is arranged. I’ve fixed the ceremony for Tuesday, which gives us the weekend to get organised. First on the agenda, I suspect, will be a shopping trip. You’ll need a wedding ring,’ Joel informed Amber dryly, ‘and new clothes.’ His eyes slid assessingly over the plain grey skirt and dull white blouse she had been wearing for her interview, and which were still the only clothes she possessed, after two days in his home, having vetoed her suggestion that she returned to Birmingham to collect her others. There were things she had to do, she protested—her mother to tell; her landlady.

All tasks which which could be attended to by telephone, Joel had reminded her, letting her know that he wasn’t going to give her the opportunity to back out of their arrangement.

They were in his study, an attractive masculine room at the back of the house furnished with comfortable leather chairs, a desk, some beautiful reproduction Georgian filing cabinets disguised as bow-fronted chests and bookcases containing a wide variety of books from novels to highly technical literature on computer technology which Amber had learned was the field in which his companies operated.

Tomorrow would be her first test as Joel’s fiancée. Mrs Downs, whom Joel had telephoned and asked not to bother to come in the other two days, was due to arrive in the morning. Joel had assured her that she would not find it difficult to keep up the pretence in front of the other woman, but Amber wasn’t too sure.

‘Worrying about tomorrow?’ Joel drawled, accurately reading her mind. ‘Don’t be. Just think of yourself as an actress hired to play a part, for which you’re being paid extremely generously. After that the rest should come naturally. All women are actresses at heart.’

His cynical observation jarred, even though she tried to pretend it left her unmoved. She glanced at her watch. Joel had arrived from Kendal half an hour before and it was now nearly seven.

‘It’s Paul’s bedtime,’ she reminded him. ‘I promised I’d read to him. Shall I wait until you’ve seen him?’

‘Why don’t we both go up together?’ Joel suggested. ‘That way we can break the happy news to him.’

Amber knew that Joel had been observing Paul’s reaction to her—and hers to him—but much as she liked the little boy, she had no intention of encouraging him to become too fond of her. It simply wouldn’t be fair either to him or to her. In some way she almost wished he had taken a dislike to her, but she knew beyond any shadow of doubt now that if he had Joel would have instantly abandoned his plans to marry her. Think of the money, she kept reminding herself; the money which was to be the instrument of her eventual revenge against Rob. If she closed her eyes and thought hard enough she could almost conjure up the image of how it would be; of her own unannounced arrival at wherever Rob was, and his astonishment when he saw her restored to full health, walking as gracefully as she had done in the past. She would be beautifully dressed, elegantly made up; and she would have the pleasure of watching him see what he had so callously thrown away.

As always the mental imagery helped to reinforce her determination. Paul wouldn’t be hurt, she promised herself. She wouldn’t allow that to happen. And Joel? She glanced sideways at him. Any man who could strike the type of bargain he had struck with her and demand written acknowledgement of that bargain wasn’t capable of being hurt.

But he must have been once, a tiny inner voice reminded her, otherwise he would never have married Teri in the first place. What was she like? Amber wondered.

‘So that’s settled,’ Joel said suavely, cutting through her thoughts, ‘Tomorrow we go to Kendal shopping. Mrs Downs will look after Paul. We’d better make a full day of it—and an evening as well. It will be expected; after all, it isn’t every day a man gets engaged.’

Not a woman either, Amber thought sadly, and this would be her first formal engagement. Rob had never given her a ring.

Paul was playing with some toy soldiers when they went up to his room.

He and Amber had grown quite friendly during the two days she had been staying at the house. He accepted her presence as a friend of his father’s without comment, but his mother and the life the three of them had shared before his accident were never mentioned. Amber understood. Like him she found the past still too raw a wound to discuss it with others, and perhaps because of their similar injuries a bond seemed to have been formed between them; to such an extent that Paul had begun to talk freely to her about his leg, comparing it to hers and asking her numerous questions about the operations she had undergone his favourite seemed to be whether Amber would ever get properly better, and recognising it as a plea for assurance that he would get better, she had lied and told him what he wanted to hear.

He asked her again, as she knelt awkwardly to help him pack away the soldiers.

‘I expect so,’ she lied, determinedly cheerfully, glad of the long sweep of her hair to conceal her expression from Joel.

‘Will I?’

This time it was Joel who answered, lifting the little boy up in his arms until the two male faces, so similar in features, were only inches apart. ‘Yes, you will, Paul,’ he assured him firmly. ‘But it won’t be easy. You’ll have to help—do those exercises Doctor Raines told you about.’

Paul pulled a face.

‘I don’t like them,’ he protested. ‘They hurt!’

‘Only at first,’ Amber felt moved to say, adding to Joel, ‘I studied physiotherapy for a few months before I decided on general nursing, if you like I could help Paul with his exercises…’

‘We could do them together,’ Paul suggested, pleased, glancing at Amber’s leg. ‘Then we’d both get better.’

Amber already knew that exercises would do little to improve her own injured muscles; the only hope of full mobility she had was the American operation which replaced destroyed muscles with fresh tissue grafted from other parts of the body, a lengthy and expensive business; but she didn’t want to destroy Paul’s optimism, so she smiled and agreed that indeed it would.

‘Thanks for reassuring Paul like that,’ Joel said when Paul was asleep and they had returned downstairs. ‘One of the most difficult problems has been trying to get over his aversion to the exercises he has to do. The problem is he’s too young to understand the need for them properly, but Doctor Raines says that without them…’ he looked closely at Amber. ‘Can you help him with them?’

‘I think so. I’ll need someone to show me exactly what has to be done.’

‘Doctor Raines told me that swimming would help, but there just aren’t sufficient facilities locally, otherwise both of you…’

‘It wouldn’t do any good in my case,’ Amber began, breaking off as she realised how close she had come to confiding the truth to him.

‘Why not?’ His eyes sharpened and she felt a prickle of awareness as his eyes slid down her body to the leg she had tucked from habit behind the healthy one.

‘I… I have to have another operation,’ she prevaricated a little wildly, ‘in six months’ time.’

‘But you will recover fully?’

‘Oh yes.’ Her voice sounded brittle and false even to her own ears. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘No wonder you accepted my proposition so readily,’ Joel said grimly. ‘A ready-made comfortable existence until your operation; with the bonus of twenty-five thousand at the end of it.’

‘I didn’t ask you to pick me,’ Amber flared. ‘If you want to change your mind…’

‘Incredible,’ Joel muttered under his breath as he shook his head. ‘Who would have dreamed anyone so innocent-looking could be so hard?’

If I am it’s because that’s what your sex made me, Amber longed to scream at him, but the words were suppressed, her face a tight mask as she forced a smile almost as mocking as his own, and reminded him,

‘But that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? A gold-digger whom you could pay off with a clear conscience and no complications?’

Mrs Downs arrived in the morning just as they were finishing breakfast, a tall gaunt woman with greying hair and a forbidding expression, which belied the smile warming her eyes when Joel introduced her to Amber.

‘So it’s getting wed the two of you are, is it?’ she said forthrightly when Joel had broken the news.

‘We are indeed,’ Joel confirmed, smiling and slipping a hard arm round Amber’s shoulders, drawing her back against the firm warmth of his chest. In other circumstances she would have found something distinctly reassuring about the comfortingly steady thud of his heart, the calm way in which he dealt with Mrs Downs’ surprise, the aura of strength and reliability emanating from him and wrapping her in a protective embrace.

‘So, and you’ll want me to keep an eye on young Paul here while you’re off to Kendal?’

‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ Joel agreed courteously. ‘I should like to take Amber out to dinner tonight, if you’re able to stay with Paul. Everything has happened so quickly we haven’t even been able to celebrate our engagement yet.’

The tender look he gave her almost made Amber catch her breath in astonishment; it was so plausibly real. Her eyes widened, and like the skilled master tactician he was Joel was quick to take advantage of the moment, turning her gently towards him and rubbing his thumb provocatively across her parted lips before closing them with a light kiss.

Amber could almost see Mrs Downs’ reserve melting and read the other woman’s mind. It was obvious that Joel had convinced her that they were deeply in love, and her own wildly flushed cheeks and flustered manner would only serve to reinforce her belief.

Paul regarded them with interest from his chair.

‘Why are you kissing Amber?’ he questioned curiously.

He had already accepted Joel’s information that he and Amber were to marry, but still Amber found herself holding her breath, half expecting the little boy to protest about their intimacy.

‘Because she’s going to marry me,’ Joel replied evenly when Mrs Downs bustled out to remove her coat and outdoor shoes.

‘You and Teri were married, but you never kissed her like that,’ Paul remarked, startling Amber both by his use of his mother’s christian name and what he had said.

‘That was different,’ was Joel’s oblique comment, and Amber sensed from his withdrawn look that he was probably re-living certain intensely private moments of his relationship with his ex-wife; moments to which Paul would not have been privy. A kind of dull sickness took possession of her, and as she struggled to fight it off she heard Mrs Downs returning.