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‘After two marriages and two divorces what do you expect? Take my advice: never, ever expect anything but trouble from a man’s children, especially if they’re teenage girls.’
The weekend before last, white-faced with a tension-induced migraine, she had asked herself what it was she was doing wrong and why it was that Vanessa was so antagonistic towards her. After all, it wasn’t as though she was responsible for the break-up of her parents’ marriage.
Perhaps Marcus was right. Perhaps she ought to try to arrange things so that Tom and Gavin stayed with their father when Vanessa came to stay. At least it would stop the interminable quarrels that seemed to break out when they were all together. Was she being unfair in suspecting that it was Vanessa who deliberately provoked them? It was true that Tom, over-sensitive and too vulnerable, tended to over-react—a legacy of her divorce from his father? But Gavin had a far calmer temperament; phlegmatic and easygoing, he had been a placid baby and was now a placid, sturdily resilient child.
Yes, it would make life easier if they kept them apart, but it wasn’t what she had hoped for, what she had planned when she and Marcus had married. She had never assumed that merging their two families would be easy, but neither had she anticipated that her relationship with Vanessa would become so destructive. Her relationship? What relationship?
The last thing that Vanessa wanted was any kind of relationship with either Eleanor or her sons, but most especially with Eleanor. Sometimes she felt as though she and Vanessa were two rivals locked in a silent and deadly battle for Marcus. And yet the last thing she wanted was for Vanessa to feel that her marriage to Marcus in any way threatened his daughter’s position in his life.
In fact she had been the one who had suggested to Marcus that he see more of his daughter. It had disturbed her a little, when she and Marcus had first become lovers, to discover how little he saw of his child.
‘She’s happy with her mother,’ Marcus had told her.
‘But she needs you in her life as well,’ Eleanor had insisted gently.
‘You have a husband and children,’ she suddenly came out of her brief reverie to hear Pierre Colbert saying to her. ‘Does this not affect your work?’
Eleanor refused to react, to allow him to provoke her into becoming defensive.
‘I’m a woman, monsieur,’ she told him quietly. ‘And as such I am well used to balancing many demands upon my time.’
She saw from his expression that she had both surprised and amused him, and mentally congratulated herself for not falling into the trap of complaining that he would not have asked her such a question had she been a man. He was a Frenchman, undeniably chauvinistic and no doubt unashamedly proud to be. She would succeed far better with him by emphasising the virtues of her sex rather than by challenging him to accept her as the equal of any man.
She watched him thoughtfully as he smiled at her, and then said shrewdly, ‘My partner and I like to think that we offer a very skilled and competitive service, and I believe that you must think so too, monsieur, otherwise you would not be here. You are not, I think, a man who needlessly wastes his time.’
She watched the respect dawn in the clever brown eyes before he looked away from her.
‘You are one of several agencies recommended to me,’ he told her dismissively. ‘It is always wise to consider several options, even though some of them must always be more favourable than others.’
He was standing up, terminating the meeting. Eleanor rose too, still outwardly calm and relaxed, although inwardly she was wryly aware that he would probably prefer not to give them the business. Had she been a man… or French…
As she escorted him to the door, she tried not to dwell on how much they needed the extra income his work would have given them. She had known when he first contacted them that it was extremely unlikely they would get the business. It made her feel a little bit better knowing that she had subtly challenged his initial attitude towards her, drawing respect from him in place of his original hostility.
After she had seen him off the premises, she went back to her office and picked up his file. She needed to put Louise in the picture vis-à-vis her meeting with him.
She got up and walked into the foyer. ‘Is Louise in her office?’ she asked Claire.
‘Yes, she’s just come in,’ the receptionist told her.
Smiling her thanks at her, Eleanor walked across to her partner’s office.
Claire watched her enviously. Eleanor was everything she herself longed to be. Attractive, successful, married to a man who exuded an almost magical charisma of sex and power; a man who, although he might be well into his forties, still had such an aura of compelling masculinity about him that he made her go weak at the knees. Not that he ever gave her so much as a second look. And even if he had…
Eleanor was so… so nice that she couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt her.
Yes, they were an ideal couple, with an ideal relationship; an ideal lifestyle.
Marriage, career, motherhood—Eleanor had them all.
* * *
Although she had knocked on Louise’s door before going in, her partner obviously hadn’t heard her, Eleanor realised as she saw Louise’s dark head bent in absorbed concentration over some papers on her desk.
When Eleanor said her name she looked up, startled, quickly shuffling the papers out of sight, an embarrassed, almost furtive look crossing her face.
‘Nell, I didn’t hear you come in…’
‘So I see.’ Eleanor grinned at her. ‘Planning your summer holidays?’
