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‘Your late husband’s first wife?’
Claire paused as Brad stepped past her and picked up the photograph she had just moved.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Sally, my stepdaughter, is very like her mother...just as pretty, although John would never have it. In his eyes no one could ever measure up to Paula...’
She missed the frowning look that Brad gave her as he heard the conviction and warmth in her voice.
Didn’t it bother her to know that her husband had loved her predecessor so much and, if not, why not? She was either an extraordinarily unusual woman or...
As he glanced around the beautiful, serenely immaculate room his eyes were caught by something that looked glaringly out of place—a very amateurishly stitched sampler which was framed and had pride of place on one of the walls.
Intrigued, he moved closer to study it.
‘Paula’s hobby was tapestry work,’ Claire told him quietly. ‘She stitched the cushions in here whilst she was pregnant with Sally. There were complications with her pregnancy which meant she had to rest.’
A small shadow touched her face. ‘Unfortunately it wasn’t enough and after Sally’s birth... John lost her when Sally was less than three days old. It was the most terrible tragedy...’
So tragic, Brad thought, that her husband had never got over it, even though, eventually, he had found and married her, and even though, from all that Irene and Tim had told him, and from what he could see with his own eyes, she was very obviously the kind of woman whom it would be easy for any man to love... Too easy...
Brad’s frown deepened. He didn’t like the direction his thoughts were taking—and kept taking, in fact, ever since that incident in the park when, for God alone knew what mad, impulsive reason, he had seized hold of her and kissed her. Kissed her and felt her mouth soften into the kind of quivering, softly feminine response that he couldn’t remember experiencing since he had left the heady days of his early teens behind...
‘We were all thoroughly’ relieved when he married Claire,’ Irene told him. ‘There was a time when we were beginning to worry that John was trying to turn Sally into a carbon copy of Paula.’
‘He was just trying to do his best for her,’ Claire protested. ‘He loved Paula so much...thought she was so perfect—’
She broke off as she saw the way that Brad was looking at her—the mingled pity and curiosity she thought were in his eyes. Pride and rejection of his unwanted compassion sparkled in her own eyes as she lifted her head and looked back at him.
Her upbringing had had its share of pain, like Sally’s. Orphaned whilst she was still a toddler, she had been brought up by a maiden aunt of her father’s—a retired schoolteacher who had had very strong views on the way that children and most especially girls should behave.
Under her tutelage Claire had developed into an intelligent but socially shy and uncertain girl with very little in common with her peers.
Her great-aunt had died unexpectedly from a fatal heart attack whilst Claire was coming to the end of her teacher training. She had first met John a few weeks later, just after...
Brad, who was still watching her, wondered what it was that had suddenly made her look so haunted.
Despite the obvious tension it was causing between them, he couldn’t bring himself to regret totally what had happened at their first meeting, but the passionately vibrant woman she had been then seemed curiously at odds with the woman she appeared to be now—a woman who seemed quite content passively to accept her role as a very poor second best to her husband’s first wife.
She was such an obviously sensual and loving woman that he couldn’t imagine how she could ever have been happy with a man who, from what he had heard about him, could not possibly have met and satisfied her emotional needs—or her physical ones either.
He frowned, angry with himself for the probing intimacy of his thoughts.
But he had seen for himself how warm and womanly she was, both with the children and with Tim, her gentle smile taking the edge off Irene’s almost acerbic comments to her husband.
It was, perhaps, no wonder that Tim should choose to spend so much of his free time helping Claire with her gardening.
His frown deepened as he wondered if the relationship between them was as innocent as it had first seemed.
There had been nothing so far in Irene’s manner towards either her husband or her sister-in-law to suggest that she suspected anything, but she was being remarkably insistent that Claire’s home was the perfect place for him to lodge. Why? Because she felt that a third party living there would put a stop to any untoward intimacy between her husband and Claire?
If Claire was having a relationship with Tim, that would explain her shocked reaction to her brief response to his kiss—and the anger he had sensed in her both at dinner and again now.
He frowned again, unwilling to delve too deeply into why he should feel almost a personal sense of disappointment and loss at the thought of her being involved with another man.
What was really bugging him? The thought that his own judgement was at fault, that his first impression of her as a warm, open and very loving woman was wrong, or was it something more than mere pique at the possibility of having misjudged her?
What was Brad thinking about? Claire wondered as she saw the way he frowned. Did he, perhaps, not care for the house, or was it her he didn’t like?
‘If you’d like to follow me...’ she told him, determined to sound businesslike and in control.
As he followed her up the stairs and along the landing Brad acknowledged that there was something about Claire that he found profoundly compelling; there was such a dramatic contrast between the warm, emotional woman who had flown at him with such fury to protect the feelings of her young charges and the cool, hostile person he was seeing now.
Claire had stopped outside one of the bedroom doors and was waiting for him to join her. Irene and Hannah had both come with them and Irene frowned as she saw which door Claire had opened.
‘But that’s your bedroom—yours and John’s,’ she protested. ‘I thought you were going to give Brad Sally’s bedroom.’
‘This is larger and more...more suitable,’ Claire told Irene quietly.
‘But where will you sleep...?’ Irene demanded.
‘I—’
‘Look, the last thing I want is to deprive you of your bedroom...’ Brad began.
But Claire shook her head quickly, her face flushing slightly as she told him, ‘I...I had already decided to...to move to another bedroom. This one...John’s...John’s and mine,’ she amended quickly, ‘is too... The decor is much more suitable for a man. It has an ensuite bathroom and there’s already a desk in the dressing room. John sometimes worked in there himself... I—’
‘You’ve moved out of your own bedroom?’ Irene was persisting, apparently oblivious to Claire’s lack of enthusiasm for pursuing the subject. She looked, Brad decided, rather like a guilty schoolgirl caught out in some forbidden act.
Why? Why shouldn’t she change bedroom if she wished? It was, after all, her home...er house. He remembered the look in her eyes as she had talked about her late husband’s love for his first wife, the woman whose “home” it had actually been.
‘I was thinking of having it redecorated. It’s never been my favourite room, and—’
‘But it’s the master bedroom,’ Irene protested.
‘Yes,’ Claire agreed with a quiet irony in her voice which was obviously lost on Irene but which Brad picked up on. So she was passionate and quick-witted too—a dangerously alluring combination in a woman—or so he had always felt.
The room was a good size, he acknowledged as he stepped into it, with what looked like plenty of solidly built dark wood closet space and a generously proportioned, sensibly constructed bed. As he studied it Brad let out a small sigh of relief. British standard-sized double beds did not easily accommodate a man used to the luxury of an American king-size, as he had already discovered. This b
ed was the only one he had seen in Britain so far that came anywhere near the spacious comfort of his own at home, even if it was a little on the high side.
