To Love, Honour & Betray

Maxine had said that Claudia was working from home, but there was no sound of any kind of activity coming from the room where he knew she worked, and a sharp prickle of atavistic emotion jarred up his spine.

The mere fact that Claudia had actually telephoned him last night was a clear indication of just how distraught she must have been, not that he had needed any telephone call to warn him of the devastating effect Tara’s news would have on her.

The house felt alien and alarmingly silent, a house he remembered being filled with the sounds of Tara’s childhood. Suddenly impelled by a sharp sense of urgency, he started to take the stairs two at a time, calling her name as he did so.

Later, Claudia told herself that her instinctive automatic response to the sound of Garth’s voice—a response that had her racing to her bedroom door and flinging it open, ignoring the fact that she was still only wearing the towel she had wrapped around her naked body after her shower—was simply a reflex action and nothing more. Just in time, she realised what she was doing, and as Garth reached the landing, Claudia took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway.

‘Garth, what are you doing here?’ she demanded unsteadily, an uncomfortable colour flooding her face and then slowly spreading to her body as she recognised how betraying her presence here at home and still not being dressed must be—especially to someone who had once known her as well as Garth did.

The relief Garth had felt when he first saw her evaporated as he saw the way she was reacting to his presence, her obvious discomfort, the way her face and body had coloured, the way she was looking almost furtively back into the bedroom, as though …

‘Why didn’t you go into work this morning?’ he demanded suspiciously.

Claudia stared at him.

‘That’s none of your business,’ she told him crisply, turning on her heel dismissively and walking back into her bedroom.

Garth followed her.

‘Isn’t it?’ he demanded, and then stopped. The bed was made up, no sign of an alien male presence to sully its immaculate neatness. Claudia’s hair-dryer lay on a chair on top of the clean underwear she had obviously put out to wear.

‘Garth, what are you doing … what are you looking for?’ Claudia demanded sharply as she quickly checked the bedside table, thankful to see that there was no sign of the bottle of sleeping tablets—not that it was any business of Garth’s what she did, not any more, but she knew him and knew he would fuss if he thought …

‘I’m not looking for anyone … anything,’ Garth denied quickly, catching himself up as he realised how much he had betrayed himself and the reason for his male aggression and hostility. Had he really expected to find someone else in Claudia’s bed?

Logically, perhaps not, but emotionally, even after so many years apart, he wasn’t ready for that, for another man in Claudia’s life.

‘You rang me last night,’ he told Claudia as he felt his blood pressure and his heartbeat start to return to normal.

Claudia avoided meeting his eyes, giving a small, oddly girlish shrug as she responded, ‘Did I? I …’

‘Claudia, don’t play games with me,’ Garth warned her. ‘I’m not asking you a question. I’m making a statement. You rang me and I know why. Tara’s told you that she’s going to marry Ryland.’

‘She has told me, yes,’ Claudia agreed, still refusing to look at him, ‘and yes, I did ring you, but why on earth that should bring you rushing down here behaving like some character out of a bad play, I really don’t know.’

‘You’re lying, Claudia. For God’s sake, I know you rang and I know why. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. If you needed—’

‘I need nothing and no one, but most of all, I do not need you,’ Claudia interrupted him with a fierce passion. ‘I would never let myself need a man I can’t trust, a man who—’

‘Let yourself need,’ Garth broke in. ‘Hell, Claudia, there’s no shame in being afraid … in being vulnerable … human … in turning to someone else for help.’

‘I want you to leave, Garth. I want you to leave right now,’ Claudia told him, then walked away from him and went to stand in front of the window. Dear God, she couldn’t bear this. She simply didn’t have the emotional reserves to cope with it, not right now, not after last night. She could feel her heart starting to beat furiously fast. She tried to swallow and found that she couldn’t. Her palms felt damp and she knew that any minute now she was going to start to visibly betray what she was feeling—the panic, the fear, the despair—and the last person she wanted to see her doing that was Garth, the very last.

Didn’t he know, couldn’t he understand, that superimposed over every memory she had of him was the image she had created out of the darkest depths of her imagination of him with her, of him loving her, of his face contorted with passion and need as he possessed her, and that image was like a sickness buried deep inside her that surfaced through all the smothering layers of rigid self-control she had placed over it to reduce her to a pulsing, aching, dying thing of burning acid jealousy and bitterness?

‘Claudia, look, I know how you must be feeling.’

Instead of leaving, he had walked up behind her, and Claudia tensed as she felt his breath against her hair.

‘No, you do not know how I’m feeling, Garth,’ she snapped. ‘How can you? How can anyone know?’

Claudia could hear hysteria edging up under her voice. Damn Garth. Why had he had to do this, come here like this and undermine her previous self-control?

‘Tara is my daughter, too, and I’m going to miss her as well—’

‘Miss her? It isn’t because I’m going to miss her that …’ Gulping in air, Claudia shook her head, unable to go on any further. ‘I don’t know what brought you here, Garth,’ she continued when she had finally regained control of herself. ‘I’ve got a very busy day ahead of me and right now I’d like to get dressed.’

‘Why did you ring me last night?’

Somehow or other, Claudia found the strength to turn round and face him. ‘That was a mistake,’ she told him quietly. ‘I … I—’

‘Dialled the wrong number?’ Garth suggested harshly.

Claudia shook her head. He knew perfectly well she hadn’t done that; they both did.

‘It was a mistake, Garth,’ she repeated.

‘No, it wasn’t,’ Garth contradicted her. ‘You rang me because for once your emotions, your real emotions got the better of you. You rang me because you were afraid, because you needed me.’

‘No,’ Claudia denied. ‘I don’t need you, Garth. I stopped needing you a long time ago, and—’

‘You needed me as Tara’s father,’ Garth continued as though she hadn’t spoken, as though she hadn’t uttered those passionate words of denial and fury. ‘Clo …’

The unexpected use of his old pet name for her was like a sawtooth file being used on an oversensitive raw nerve ending, and Claudia flinched, visibly unable to suppress the tears that suddenly filled her eyes. Garth reached out and caught hold of her, drawing her close.

She still smelled the same as she had always done, of vanilla and soft clean skin and something that was and always would be essentially her. She still felt the same, too, feminine, womanly, all the woman he had ever really wanted although he knew that she would never believe that.

‘Clo, it’s all right, it’s all right,’ he told her huskily. Unexpectedly, uncontrollably, he was transported back to another place, another time, another life, when he had had the right to hold her, to touch her. ‘Claudia …’

Memory … instinct … could be a dangerously powerful and unmerciful force. Her eyes closed, her body taut with anger and rejection, Claudia’s senses registered the tone of his voice, recognised its hunger, and like Garth, she was transported back to a time when all that it had taken to arouse her had been that particular note in his voice, that special touch of his hands caressing her body.

As he felt her body relax, Garth automatically closed the gap between them, bending his head to cover her quiescent mouth with his own.

She felt so good, so right … so Claudia. As his hands sensuously kneaded the warm flesh of her arms, he started to circle her lips with the tip of his tongue, waiting for her lips to part in their private sexual signal, their special shorthand message passed from him to her and back again that very soon the hungry, urgent thrust of his tongue within her mouth would be echoed by the even more hungry, urgent thrust of his body within hers.

Outside in the street, a car door slammed abruptly, bringing Claudia back to reality. Hot-faced, she tried to thrust Garth away.

She was forty-five, damn it, and even if she hadn’t, even if she wasn’t … even if they didn’t … there was no way she considered the kind of openly sexual way Garth was behaving acceptable in a relationship between people of their age. It just wasn’t … it just didn’t …

‘Let me go,’ she demanded freezingly, pushing him back more defiantly. ‘Let go of me, Garth! I can’t bear your touching me … I loathe your touching me,’ she told him vehemently, the flustered colour burning even more hotly in her face.

‘No,’ Garth challenged her furiously. He knew that he was deliberately feeding his own anger and using it to mask very different, far more complex emotions.

It had shaken him badly to discover just how frighteningly easy it had been to allow his emotions to work that time trick on him, that subtle but volatile and dangerous mirage that exchanged reality for fiction.

‘Yes,’ Claudia insisted icily.

Freezing her feelings, numbing herself, had been the only way she had of denying her pain, of escaping from it all those years ago when …