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‘What’s the matter?’
‘I know … I’m not Susie,’ she said painfully. ‘It can’t be much … fun for you coming home to me, Jay …’
‘Fun?’ His mouth twisted bitterly. ‘Is that what you think Susie and I had, Claire? There’s nothing fun about coming home to find your wife’s out enjoying her
self with another man, while your child is left all alone. There’s nothing fun about knowing she’s being unfaithful, about knowing she doesn’t give a damn. I never caught an early flight to come home to Susie, Claire, because I never knew what I was coming home to. If you want the truth, I dreaded coming home.’
His mouth compressed, his eyes focusing on the leaping flames of the fire, as he looked back into the past.
/> ‘Don’t ever thing I’m comparing you with Susie—there is no comparison.’
No, there wasn’t, Claire realised. He had loved and desired Susie, while she was just someone whom he had chosen to marry because of Heather.
‘I have to go back to Dallas after the New Year, and I want you and the girls to come too. John and his wife want to meet you.’
‘Me—but …?’
‘It’s the American way,’ he told her laconically. ‘They’re throwing a big party to celebrate the signing of the contract and we’re invited to be their house guests. It will be during the school holidays, so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.’
Jay moved to pick up his mug of chocolate, the muscles down his back and arm tautening. His skin where it was exposed by the collar and cuff of his shirt was brown and firm, his wrist very sinewy in comparison to hers.
‘This will be Heather’s first real Christmas; Susie always preferred to go away somewhere.’ He put down his empty mug and relaxed back against the cushions. Somehow he seemed to have moved closer to her, but she felt no compulsion to move away.
‘You look tired.’
He turned his head and she saw the small darker flecks in his eyes. ‘I am,’ he admitted. He closed his eyes and sighed. ‘It was quite a shock to come home and find snow.’
‘My first white Christmas.’
He made a sound in his throat that might have meant anything and Claire turned to look at him. His eyes were closed and she sensed that he was on the verge of falling asleep.
She got up to take their cups to the kitchen, and when she came back he was fast asleep, sprawled out against the sofa. She leaned over him shaking him gently.
‘Jay …’
‘Mmm.’
The shock of his arms coming round her and pulling her down against the relaxed warmth of his body was totally unexpected. Her knees had caught against the edge of the sofa so that she had collapsed on to him, and how he was burrowing his face into the curve of her neck, his breath triggering off tiny convulsive waves of sensation where it touched her skin.
After her initial moment of panic, what she felt was nothing like the terror and disgust she had experienced before. Being held in Jay’s arms was so totally different from that. She felt at once both safe and yet deliciously trembly, her body fitting softly against the hard planes of his.
He was cuddling up to her in much the same way that Heather held on to her teddy, she thought with shaky amusement, and she had no doubt that he was totally oblivious to what he was doing. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to wake him up and break out of his hold of her, but for some reason she felt no compulsion to do so. Instead she raised her hand tentatively and touched the stubbly line of his jaw, held deep in thrall to a curious need to know more of the alien maleness of him. He muttered something in his sleep, releasing her momentarily as he raised his hand to cover hers, his head turning so that he could caress the soft skin of her palm with his mouth. The sensation that shot through her was so totally unexpected, so thoroughly unnerving, that she jerked back instinctively.
Instantly Jay was awake, his eyelids lifting, although he didn’t move. His cheekbone pressed hard against her shoulder, and she was acutely conscious of him in a thousand previously unknown ways. As though some deep inner part of her was waking from a long sleep, she felt the first stirrings of what she sensed instinctively was her suppressed sexuality.
Fear, joy, an exhilaration beyond anything she had previously known quivered through her; she felt as though she wanted to get up and dance, to burst out into a song of pleasure, to open her heart to him and tell him about the miracle his touch had somehow achieved. Because to her it was a miracle that for the first time since she was attacked she had felt like a woman.
A great flood of joy filled her. She wanted to reach out and touch him to communicate to him in all the ways there were her sense of release and freedom, but already he was withdrawing from her, his expression shuttered, as he said curtly.
‘ Sorry about that, Claire. I didn’t mean to touch you.’
It was like someone cruelly puncturing a gaily coloured balloon. One moment it was a thing of joy and beauty floating free; the next it was gone. She came down to earth with his curt words ringing in her head, and she shivered violently, suddenly realizing her own folly.
Jay had married her because she wasn’t a sexual woman, and she must not let herself forget that. He didn’t want the complications of any sort of emotional relationship with her, and for her a relationship in the physical sense would have to contain an element of emotional commitment as well.
A physical relationship? What on earth was she thinking? Her face went white with the shock of the realisation that hit her. She licked her lips nervously, unaware of her state of frozen tension or of the interpretation Jay was putting on her stiff silence.
‘Look, Claire, it won’t happen again. It was a momentary aberration, nothing more.’ He got up and paced the floor tensely. ‘Try and put it out of your mind.’
