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But it wasn’t just she who had changed. Jay had changed too: he had become remote and withdrawn. Sometimes she found him watching her with a brooding expression in his eyes, and she thought she knew the reason. Whatever he might have said to her, or told himself, he still loved Susie, and it had been that day when he held her in his arms and realised that she was not his first wife that he had discovered this. She was convinced of it.
Now, hearing him say that they needed to talk made her heart bump and jolt with shock and fear. What was he going to say to her? She looked at him out of the corner of her eye and saw that his face was wearing the blanked-off, almost bitter look that had become so familiar to her recently.
‘They’ve gone up to have their baths now,’ she told him tonelessly. ‘They were both tired tonight.’
Even so, it was over an hour before both girls were settled. ‘I’ll go down and make some coffee.’
Jay shook his head. ‘I’ll do that. You do enough.’ His mouth compressed slightly. ‘You go and sit down.’
She was too nervous to sit down, and instead she paced the sitting-room floor nervously. Next week the workmen were due to start; she had shown Jay the colour schemes she had chosen, but his response had been abstracted and remote. Perhaps he was regretting giving her carte blanche with the décor, and that was what he wanted to talk to her about. Perhaps he had now decided that he wanted the house to remain as it was—as Susie had decorated it.
When he came in with the coffee, Claire was staring unseeingly out of one of the windows.
‘Come and sit down.’ His voice sounded rough and he looked tense. ‘Please come and sit down, Claire,’ he amended, mistaking the reason for her frozen stance. He ran impatient fingers through his hair and added rawly, ‘This is bad enough as it is. When we married I made you certain promises and …’
‘And now you’re having second thoughts.’ She marvelled at her own calm. How cool and controlled she sounded; she was really quite proud of herself. Inwardly she was awash with intense pain and agony. She knew now what Jay wanted to say to her; he wanted to tell her that their marriage wasn’t working out, that he couldn’t live with her any more because she wasn’t Susie.
‘How did you know?’ He was frowning heavily and looked pale. ‘I thought I’d …’
‘Hidden how you feel?’ She smiled mirthlessly. ‘Some things can’t be hidden, Jay.’
‘I see.’ His voice was heavy. ‘I hadn’t realised you’d guessed how I felt. Well, since you have, what do you suggest we do about it?’
‘What do I suggest? She stared at him. ‘There’s nothing I can do, Jay.’
For a moment he just stared back at her, and then his face tightened and he was walking towards her, quickly and almost menacing, his whole body taut with tension.
When his fingers curled round her arm she tried to jerk away, but he wouldn’t release her. Instead he shook her, the aura of suppressed violence emanating from him so totally alien to his normal manner that she couldn’t take it in properly.
‘Nothing you can do? Nothing you will do, don’t you mean?’ he grated bitterly. ‘For God’s sake, Claire, you must know what it’s doing to me living with you like this!’
‘Of course I know! Do you think I can’t see the changes in you? But what can I do? I can’t bring her back for you, Jay! I can’t be Susie.’
‘Susie?’ He released her so quickly that she half stumbled against the sofa. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
His face had gone white with rage, the anger glittering in his eyes making her take a step back.
‘Jay, you know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the fact that you’re having second thoughts about our marriage because you’ve discovered you still love Susie.’
There was a long, long silence and then, speaking slowly and spacing the words out as though he was having the greatest difficulty in forming the words, Jay said thickly, ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this. Are you for real?’ He shook his head. ‘You’re way, way off beam!’
‘But you agreed that you were having second thoughts …’
‘About the terms of our marriage, not what happened in the past. I’ve fallen in love with you, Claire,’ he told her flatly, ‘and I want you in all the ways a man wants the woman he loves. I want to feel your skin against my hands, I want to touch it with my lips, I want to spread your hair out over my pillow and thread it through my fingers. Just the way you turn your head is enough to burn me up, do you know that? I want this, Claire,’ he told her roughly, taking her in his arms and bringing his mouth down hard on the softness of hers.
The kiss took her by surprise, her mouth tremulous and soft beneath his, her tongue retreating shyly from the fierce invasion of his. She could feel his heart thudding furiously against her body. She could feel the tension in him—and the arousal, she acknowledged as she shook with shock and disbelief.
Abruptly his mouth left hers and she was free. Free to stare wide-eyed at him, to touch tremulous fingertips to her mouth. She saw his eyes darken and a hot flush of colour burn along his face, and her stomach lifted and plunged.
‘But you can’t love me …’
‘Why not?’ he laughed hollowly. ‘Because you don’t love me? Life isn’t like that, Claire.’
‘But you didn’t love me when you proposed marriage.’
‘No,’ he agreed, dragging in a lungful of air and fighting for self-control. More calmly he continued, ‘No, I didn’t, but I did like you very much, both as a woman and as a person. I liked your quick intelligence, your interest in other people, your compassion, your womanliness. A womanliness it seemed a miracle you had kept when I knew what had happened to you. I saw the love and caring you gave Lucy, and I wanted that caring for my own child—and then for myself. After Susie left me I swore I’d never enter a permanent romantic relationship with any woman again. I knew I couldn’t put up with the sort of infidelity and cheating I’d had with Susie. It was my own fault; I should never have married her. I should have let her have her abortion and we should have gone our separate ways, but I couldn’t believe she meant it. I couldn’t believe she didn’t want our child. I thought she was just being independent and proud and that really she wanted marriage. I threatened to tell her parents what she was planning to do if she didn’t marry me, and she never forgave me for that—or for making her have Heather. When you told me how Lucy was conceived and how you felt about sex I knew you’d never be unfaithful to me. I knew then that I desired you, but I told myself I could control it. It was only later after we were married that I realised I couldn’t, and with that realisation came others, like how much happiness and extra dimensionality you’d brought to my life; like how eager I was to come home to you and the girls; before I knew it, I’d made the transition from liking to loving …’
‘And does loving me mean that you want me physically?’ Claire asked him.
