A Convenient Husband

The memory of the bruises she’d once seen on his back when they had all gone swimming popped into her head. Suddenly all those times he’d refused to take off his heavy, long-sleeved sweater on a hot summer day made horrible sense. Everything clicked into place and she felt sick.

Tess forgot her throbbing head; she jerked herself upright.

Outrage glowed in her eyes. ‘He hit you!’ She thought of Guy Farrar with his mean little mouth and big meaty fists and her skin crawled. ‘You never said!’ she began angrily.

Nobody, not her dimly remembered parents or dear gran Aggie had ever laid a finger on her. Her chest felt tight and her eyes stung. She knew now what should have been obvious to her ages ago: their efforts to force Rafe to fit the mould of a perfect Farrar had gone beyond the verbal chastisements she’d heard often enough for herself…they’d tried to beat him into submission!

‘Leave it, Tess,’ Rafe said curtly.

‘But—!’

‘You’re hyperventilating,’ he told her, studying with clinical interest the agitated rise and fall of her small but shapely breasts. So, he’d noticed she had breasts! It was no big deal. However, noticing was one thing, staring was another. He firmly averted his eyes.

Tess wasn’t about to apologise for her emotional response; she couldn’t understand his lack of it! ‘I’m not!’ she denied breathlessly. ‘Doesn’t it make you mad?’ she persisted incredulously.

For a long time it had, but Rafe had no intention of explaining how much effort and determination it had taken him to finally shelve the resentment that had simmered for years.

Her firm jaw tightened and her smouldering eyes narrowed. ‘I’d like to—!’ she began hotly.

Rafe took hold of her hands and, inserting his thumbs inside her clenched fingers, slowly unfurled her white-knuckled fists. ‘I can see what you’d like to do…’ he remonstrated softly.

Rafe frequently thanked his lucky stars that his only personal legacy from a father who’d automatically raised his fist on the frequent occasions when his troublesome younger son had annoyed him was a deep revulsion for violence and individuals who used it to control those who were weaker and more vulnerable. He was well aware that all too often the pattern repeated itself in each successive generation.

There had only been the one occasion when he’d used his physical strength to punish someone else—actually there had been three of them, sixth formers who had been making the life of another fourth former a living hell.

It was a sad fact of life, he reflected, but some kids had victim written all over them, and bullies of all ages could smell fear. You only had to be a little bit different—different but desperate to be the same as everyone else.

Rafe had walked into the common room one day to find them holding the kid up against a wall taking it in turns to punch him. He’d literally seen red; a red haze had actually danced before his eyes. That day he’d rid himself of several devils, and got expelled.

The touch of his thumb against the skin of her palm made Tess grow very still. The odd shivery sensation deep inside brought a troubled frown to her smooth wide brow as, warily, her eyes encountered his rather dark, rather luscious velvety orbs.

She hadn’t been prepared to discover this sort of intensity in the searching quality of his dark glance. Quite suddenly the quality of the tension that gripped her altered. If anything, this fresh, tingling jolt of sexual awareness was even more intense than before. It left her incapable of doing anything but staring dry-throated and breathless back at him.

‘I know you’re aching to ask…’

Tess ignored the melting sensation low in her belly. It was perfectly understandable—Rafe’s low drawl was pitched at an intimate, toe-curling level guaranteed to bemuse, bewilder and befuddle just about any female with a hormone to call her own. Tess’s hormones, after years of wilful neglect, were staging an ill-timed comeback. She was aching all right, in ways she didn’t want to think about; it was all extremely embarrassing.

‘But, no, I didn’t accept your drunken invitation. However, I couldn’t leave you asleep in that chair so I carried you up to bed.’

‘I didn’t invite you into my bed!’ Fists clenched, she robustly rejected his gentle taunt.

Stomach lurching horridly, she glanced uncomfortably at the solidity of his biceps. It wasn’t difficult to see how he’d carried her up the stairs. It was so easy, in fact, that a ridiculously romanticised version of this event was playing in her head at that very second. The only thing that was difficult to see was how she’d forgotten it…

‘No,’ he agreed with a grin that was slightly strained around the edges. The frequent occasions in the night when she’d cuddled up to him couldn’t legitimately be called invitations—they could be called extremely…provoking, however, and they had been a reminder that, though his heart might be broken, his more basic bodily functions were still in full working order!

The enigmatic quirk of his sensual lips sent her tummy muscles into a fresh series of uncomfortable fluttery acrobatics. Tess ruthlessly gathered her straying wits and recognised that this was only half an explanation. Rafe had carried her up, but that didn’t mean he’d had to stay—in fact if he’d been a gentleman the idea would have occurred to him!

‘And you were overcome by exhaustion…?’ she suggested tartly.

‘I guess I was,’ he conceded, not responding to the challenge in her eyes.

Tess permitted herself a little snort of disbelief. He didn’t look exhausted; in fact, she decided crankily, it ought to be illegal for anyone to exude that sort of vitality this early in the morning.

‘Trust you to turn out to be a morning person,’ she grumbled.

‘Not exclusively,’ Rafe corrected her solemnly.

Tess’s puzzled frown encountered the sensual, amused gleam in his eyes; a few seconds later heat washed over her as the meaning of his smutty innuendo hit home.

‘You always did have an overdeveloped opinion of your own abilities.’ She aimed for amused but tolerant and almost made it.

Rafe heard the almost and grinned as he defended himself. ‘I’ve had some very positive feedback,’ he reflected innocently.

Tess could imagine but she tried not to. ‘I don’t require references, glowing or otherwise. What time is it?’

He told her and with a yelp she leapt out of bed. ‘Chloe and her boyfriend are coming this morning.’

‘What are you going to do—roll out the red carpet?’ he drawled.

His critical tone really got under Tess’s skin. He made it sound as though she had a choice. ‘I know what I’m not going to do and that is resort to covert dirty tricks and manipulation.’

‘Have it your own way.’

She shot him a sweetly malicious smile. ‘I will,’ she assured him calmly.

‘I don’t understand it,’ she continued fretfully as she pulled a motley assortment of garments from deep drawers in the heavy old mahogany chest. ‘Ben always wakes up before seven.’ She’d found that having a baby made her alarm clock redundant.

Rafe’s hand shot out and he caught the latest garment she’d carelessly flung over her shoulder in the general direction of the bed. It turned out to be a flimsy bra. A passing glance told him his educated guess had been bang on size-wise.

There had been a plus side to his sleepless speculation: he hadn’t thought too much about Claudine. An arrested expression crossed his face when he realised how little he’d been thinking about her.

‘Ben did look in earlier.’

‘He what…?’ she snapped, stomping towards the bed, hands on her hips.

‘I suppose he decided there wasn’t much room this morning,’ Rafe speculated, gazing at the narrow stretch of tumbled bed she’d just vacated. On impulse he reached out and felt the warmth that still lingered from her body on the cotton bed linen. ‘He tootled off. I did go check on him—he seemed happy playing with his toys so I left him to it.’

She gazed at him incredulously. ‘Didn’t it occur to you he must have climbed over the bars of his cot?’ She’d known for some weeks that the cot’s days were numbered. Ben had been eyeing up the bars lately with a very determined eye, and she’d already foiled a couple of abortive escape attempts.

‘And that is…?’

His laid-back approach was intensely irritating. ‘Dangerous!’ she snapped.

‘Well, he looked fine to me.’

‘I can’t believe you just let him wander around unsupervised! He could have fallen down the stairs!’ she cried out, her voice rising sharply in alarm.

‘Calm down, there’s a gate thing over the top of the stairs. I should know—I nearly killed myself trying to step over it while I was carrying you last night.’