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Philippa’s heart sank. She should have been expecting something like this, she recognised; the headmaster had after all told her himself that her sons weren’t the only boys in the school in families which were suffering financial setbacks.
‘His cousins had to go and live with their grandmother…’ Rory added.
Philippa closed her eyes. ‘Darling, you mustn’t worry,’ she told him gently. ‘I promise you that you and Daniel won’t have to go and live anywhere you don’t want to or with anyone you don’t like,’ she added.
Was it her fault that there was this distance between her sons and their grandparents? She had tried not to let her own feelings colour the relationship between them, but young children were very good at picking up on unexpressed adult emotions.
‘And we’ll be able to come home for the summer holidays—we won’t have to stay at school?’ Rory pressed her.
‘Yes,’ Philippa promised, superstitiously crossing her fingers.
Why hadn’t the bank been in touch with her yet about her proposal that she be allowed to stay on in the house? She suspected that they were playing a game of cat and mouse with her, testing her strength and determination, and for that reason she could not be the one to get in touch with them. Whatever happened with the house she would somehow find a way of keeping her promise to Rory, she decided fiercely; she could not, would not allow her sons to suffer.
As she replaced the receiver, she saw the piece of paper on which she had written Blake’s number. That job would have been ideal for her. She liked children, of all ages, and found it easy to get on with them, perhaps because her memories of her own childhood made her sensitive to their emotional needs.
Had things been different she would have liked a larger family—two girls, perhaps… four was a good well-rounded number.
Visiting the hospital with Susie, she had always found herself drawn towards the children’s wards. The little ones were especially heart-aching, but it had been the teenagers who had moved her the most with their strength and their vulnerability.
If her prospective employer had been anyone other than Blake Hamilton she would have welcomed both him and his job with open arms.
‘He’s got a large house with plenty of room to spare,’ Elizabeth had told her.
Rory’s anxiety still at the forefront of her mind, she started to hurry back to the kitchen to write him a letter, but the doorbell ringing stopped her. She had very few visitors these days apart from Susie, who she knew was over at her mother’s and wouldn’t be returning until the morning, and so her heart thudded against her chest wall and then started to race.
Had Joel ignored what she had said and come back? And, if so, would she have the strength to send him away again?
Unsteadily she went to open the door.
For a moment, when she saw who her visitor actually was, she almost started to panic and close the door in his face, until she registered his expression. Her recognition of his grim determination and her relief that he was not, after all, Joel gave her the strength to say quietly and somewhat to her own surprise, ‘Hello, Blake. You’d better come in.’
Blake was caught off guard by her reaction as well; she could see it in his eyes.
What had he been expecting? she wondered—that she would blush like a schoolgirl and fall at his feet in a fit of swooning adoration? She wasn’t that idealistic, infatuated teenager any more.
‘You sound as though you’ve been expecting me.’
His voice sounded deeper, harsher than it had done on the answering machine. She could hear his emotions in it: tension, impatience, irritation… Tension? Why should he be tense?
‘Not really,’ she told him, responding automatically to his question.
‘No? But you did recognise my voice on the answering machine.’
‘Yes, I did,’ Philippa agreed. What was the point in lying?
‘And, having recognised it, you decided not to bother going ahead and making an appointment to see me.’
‘It seemed the best thing to do,’ Philippa told him.
It came to her suddenly that this was not the man she remembered, the all-powerful, godlike hero-figure she had worshipped and adored; this was a human being who right now seemed more thrown off guard by the situation than she was.
It was a disconcerting sensation recognising that fact; it gave her a dizzying, unfamiliar sense of freedom, changing things so that the balance of power between them had swung slightly in her direction, bringing home to her the fact that she was after all no longer that shy, adoring girl whose image had remained trapped in her memories, but an adult woman with far more important things to concern her than the urgings of her immature adolescent emotions and body.
Physically Blake might hardly have changed at all; his body, she recognised, was still as lean and powerfully male as she remembered, even if now he was dressed in the imposing formality of a dark suit and an immaculately ironed white shirt rather than the T-shirt and jeans she remembered. His eyes were just as clear and assessing as they had been, the dark, almost black iris banded by a rim of much clearer pale green; the high cheekbones still gave his face a faintly austere aura of sexual masculinity; and his mouth still possessed that full bottom curve of sexuality and passion. But she had changed, without knowing it, without even recognising it until now, because, although she was aware of all those things about him which had once made her heart and pulse race and her fevered sensual imaginings a physical torture to live with, now they no longer had any power to affect her.
Yes, she was aware of him as a very sexually powerful man, but it was her memories of Joel’s lovemaking that made her body ache with sweet heaviness, not Blake’s presence here in her house.
It was an odd, disconcerting feeling, a combination of relief and foolishness, like waking up from a terrifying nightmare to discover that the shadow which had haunted her sleep had been nothing more than a dress hanging on the wardrobe door.
