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John had originally bought the house on his marriage to Sally’s mother, and, as he had explained to Claire, since it had always been Sally’s home he felt it would be unfair to her to sell it and move somewhere else, especially since it was such a large and comfortable house situated in the most sought-after area of the town.
Claire had agreed with him—genuinely so. She herself had liked the house from the first moment she had walked into it, from that very first night when John had taken her there. It had felt right somehow—welcoming, warm, protective, reaching out to hold her in its sturdy Edwardian embrace.
She had known, of course, that there were other reasons why John didn’t want to move. He had loved his first wife very, very much indeed. The house was a part of her, her home. Even now there were still photographs of her in the drawing room, and an oil painting of her hung at the bend in the stairs, revealing how very like her Sally was.
Some of the rooms were still furnished with the pieces of antique furniture she had inherited from her family.
Down the years Claire had lovingly cared for and polished them and when Sally had announced her engagement she had immediately offered them to her.
‘No, thanks,’ Sally had told her, wrinkling her nose. ‘Just thinking of how much it would cost to insure them makes me feel ill.’
‘But they are yours,’ Claire had insisted. ‘Your father left them to you. They were your mother’s...’
‘The best and most important gift my father ever gave me, the most valued asset he left, is you,’ Sally had told her emotionally, hugging her fiercely, making them both cry.
‘Until you came into my life, into this house, I can only remember how dull and dark my life was—how shadowed. When you came you brought the sunshine with you. When I hear people talking about wicked stepmothers I want to stand up and shout that it doesn’t have to be that way, that there are “steps” who are genuinely loved and valued.
‘Don’t you dare even think of going out of my life, Claire,’ she had told her stepmother fiercely. ‘When I eventually have my children I want you there for them just like you were there for me. You will be their grandmother... you...and I will need you to be there for me and for them so much.
‘I still wish that you and Dad had had children of your own, you know. I know that Dad always felt that it wasn’t fair to me but he was wrong. You were the one he wasn’t fair to, and I would have loved a brother or a sister or, even better, both...’
‘Sometimes these things just aren’t meant to be,’ Claire had told her huskily.
She loved her stepdaughter as though she were her own child—had loved her from the moment John had introduced them. Sally had then been a solemn, too serious and mature child, who had stood out from her peers with her too big school uniform and the neat plaits which John had copied from photographs he’d had of Sally’s mother at the same age.
It had been left to Claire to explain gently to him that Sally felt self-conscious and different because of them, that such a hairstyle was out of date and could tempt other children to pick on her and bully her.
Those first years of her marriage had been happy, productive years. Years when she had eagerly reached out to embrace the opportunity to put the past behind her—something she felt she had done very successfully and thoroughly.
So why had it now started to force its way past all the careful barriers she had erected to protect herself from it? And, more importantly, why was it Brad who was somehow responsible for the unwanted turbulence and disturbance of her normally calm and easily controlled emotions?
CHAPTER THREE
‘SO COME on, then, tell me. What was he like...?’
‘You’ll be able to judge for yourself soon enough,’ Claire told her neighbour placidly. ‘Irene’s bringing him round at eleven to look over the house.’
Hannah had called round ostensibly to show Claire a photograph of the hotel where she would be staying on holiday in Turkey, but Claire was more amused than deceived by her old friend’s ploy to satisfy her curiosity.
‘I’ll go if you want me to,’ Hannah offered, but. without making any real attempt to dislodge herself from her comfortable seat at Claire’s kitchen table.
In order to dispel some of her unwanted nervous energy Claire had been trying out a new biscuit recipe. The results of her work would be eaten by the children at the school, but there was a deeper purpose to her self-imposed task than merely the execution of her culinary skills.
The school, which was privately and voluntarily funded, with some council aid, took, in the main, children from backgrounds where for one reason or another there were certain social deprivations.
In many cases these sprang solely from the fact that the child’s mother had to work and could not be there full-time, and one of the things Claire enjoyed doing was showing the children and teaching them when she could, the kind of simple domestic tasks which they would have learned as a matter of course in a different age.
The biscuit recipe she had been trying out this morning was of the very simplest variety and one she was sure that her children would thoroughly enjoy trying for themselves.
‘Mmm...these are good,’ Hannah opined as she sampled the first of the batch to be removed from the oven.
‘I thought you were supposed to be on a diet,’ Claire reminded her.
‘Tomorrow,’ Hannah muttered through a second mouthful of warm biscuit, turning her head in the direction of the kitchen door as they both heard a car pull up onto the drive.
‘Oh, Hannah...were you just about to leave?’ Irene demanded bossily as Claire opened the door to let her and Brad into the kitchen.
Hannah and Irene were old adversaries, probably because Irene knew that she couldn’t boss the other woman about in the same way as she could Claire, Claire admitted wryly, mentally acknowledging that that was, perhaps, one of the reasons why she had not encouraged Hannah to leave. She didn’t care to think of herself as being manipulative, but there were times...
‘You must be Brad,’ Hannah announced, ignoring Irene’s suggestion to get up and go and shaking Brad’s hand. ‘I’m one of Claire’s neighbours... Your neighbour too, I understand. You’ll love living here with Claire; she’ll spoil you to death,’ she declared. ‘She’s a wonderful cook.’
‘Mmm...smells like it,’ Brad agreed pleasantly.
He was more casually dressed this morning, although not in the jeans and T-shirt in which she had first seen him. This time he was wearing a pair of plain, casual, neutral linen trousers with a white linen shirt and a soft knit neutral unbuttoned waistcoat. On another man such clothes might have looked too stylish and uncomfortable but Brad wore them so easily that they seemed; to be an intrinsic part of him.
There was something about a man who took an interest in his appearance but at the same time managed to look as if he didn’t care if sticky little fingers touched his clothes that was infinitely appealing, Claire recognised. Too appealing, she warned herself hastily as she became aware that Brad had turned his head and was watching her watching him.
/> ‘I...er... Where would you like to start...? The bedroom?’ she suggested quickly, and then for no reason that she could think of immediately blushed so hard and so colourfully that she felt completely humiliated by her ridiculous reaction.
What on earth had got into her? She was behaving like a...like a... She didn’t know what she was behaving like, only that she didn’t care for it, she acknowledged as Irene frowned at her and told her firmly, ‘Brad will want to see the whole of the house, of course.
‘My brother bought this house in the early days of his first marriage,’ she told Brad informatively as Claire dutifully walked towards the kitchen door. ‘It was very run-down then and he and Paula completely renovated it. Paula had very, very good taste and of course John was well off enough to indulge her.
‘It was her idea to use some of the spare bedroom space to give each of the four main bedrooms its own bathroom, wasn’t it, Claire?’ Without waiting for Claire to reply she continued talking to Brad.
They were in the hallway now, all of them, Claire noticed in mild exasperation as she opened the double doors into the drawing room so that Brad could see for himself the colour scheme that Irene was describing.
Claire could remember the first time she had walked into this room—how overawed she had felt by its pristine beauty and, at the same time, how protected and at peace. The whole room breathed serenity and beauty.
Without being conscious of what she was doing Claire frowned as she realised that the large, silver-framed photograph of John and Paula’s wedding had been pushed to the rear of the display on the pretty Regency sofa table and her own much simpler wedding photograph pushed to the fore.
Sally, had done that, of course; she had had a bit of a thing about her father’s insistence on giving prominence to his first wife’s photographs, but Claire hadn’t minded.
