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He touched her face, his eyes so bleak with remembered pain that Philippa had to blink away fresh tears.
‘When I heard the news about Anya’s parents I knew that I had to come back. When I was looking for a suitable post and I saw the job at the General advertised it seemed as though fate was urging me to make a final attempt to get my life in order, finally to draw a line under the past.
‘I told myself that it would be churlish, and worse still, cowardly to refuse that chance; that I had to come back and lay a few old ghosts…’
Philippa’s eyebrows rose and he laughed.
‘Mmm… that thought has crossed my mind too,’ he admitted, making her laugh with him. ‘Fascinating, isn’t it, how our choice of language often betrays us even when we think we’ve got everything under control, all our secrets safely hidden?’
‘Yes, well, never mind about your hidden motives,’ Philippa mock scolded him. ‘What concerns me most is your use of the word “ghosts” in the plural.’
‘There is no plural,’ Blake assured her, ‘only one single, very singular, very special, very, very real and alive ghost who…’
Philippa laughed again, teasing him until he reached out for her and wrapped his arms round her, silencing her as he had once done a long, long time ago, only this time there was no anger in the fierce passion of his kiss, no pain or threat, no bitterness, only the long, slow sweetness of a love that had come to full maturity.
When he had finally released her Philippa asked him huskily, ‘What were you really expecting to find when you came back, Blake…?’
‘Not this,’ he admitted quietly. ‘I imagined that if we did happen to meet it would not be the girl I loved I would see, but a comfortably married woman whose main concerns in life were her family. The sort of woman who diligently involved herself in local charities, who would not have much time at all for a man who had once behaved so badly towards her; the sort of woman who was far too sensible and content to even want to think about resurrecting such a painful past.
‘I pictured you comfortably ensconced in your home, surrounded by your family and friends…’
‘You’re talking about me as though I’m closer to fifty-odd than thirty-four,’ Philippa protested indignantly, her expression changing and becoming very sad as she added quietly, ‘You’re drawing a picture of a woman like my mother, Blake… not me…’
‘Yes. I know,’ he agreed. ‘But don’t you see… if I hadn’t done that I couldn’t have come back? It was safer to imagine you like that, Pip, than to risk visualising the truth… safer for me and safer for you as well. After all, what right did I have to come back and disrupt your whole life? I guessed from what Michael told me how much I must have hurt you but it was too late then to do anything about it. You were married, you had the boys, and Michael had stressed to me how loyal you were to Andrew…’
‘I never loved Andrew,’ she told him quietly. ‘I married him because he was my escape route and he married me because I was my father’s daughter; both of us were too cowardly, too afraid to reach out for what we really wanted from life; too insecure in one way or another to believe that we could stand alone and be valued for what we were. I’ve learned that since Andrew’s death, and I’ve learned as well that it’s much easier to forgive another’s weakness than it is your own.
‘It doesn’t feel very good looking back and seeing myself as others do…’ She heard the small sound of denial Blake made and a faint smile touched her mouth. ‘I’ve begun to learn to accept Andrew’s weaknesses, so hopefully it shouldn’t be too long before I can accept and forgive my own, and in truth, compared with some marriages, ours wasn’t so bad. Andrew was never abusive or unkind. His work, worldly success—they were what mattered most to him; sexually…’ She gave a small, revealing shrug. ‘When he first died I felt so angry with him because of what he had done, the way he had locked me out of his life and left me so unprepared for living on my own, for coping with the mess he had left behind; but then I started to see that I had helped him to lock me out, even encouraged him in some ways.
‘I didn’t want our marriage to be any different because I didn’t want that kind of intimacy with Andrew. Quite what that makes me…’
‘It makes you human, and honest,’ Blake told her huskily, ‘and it makes me glad.’
When he saw the questioning look she was giving him he told her, ‘It makes it easier for me to deal with my jealousy of him and of the years he had with you knowing that you didn’t really love him, knowing that when you and I marry we’ll be making a completely fresh start; that he won’t be a ghost in our lives or our bed.
‘With a bit of luck we should be able to arrange things so that we can get married before Christmas. I don’t know how you feel about it, but a holiday away somewhere with the kids over the Christmas break rather than a honeymoon might…’
‘I can’t marry you, Blake.’
‘What?’
The look in his eyes made her reach out towards him, gripping his hands tightly in her own. Had she ever really thought this man unemotional, cold, hard? How blind… how juvenile… how self-obsessed she had been!
‘I don’t mean not ever… I just mean not yet.’
‘Not yet? But you said you loved me. If you’re not sure about how you feel…’
‘I am sure. It isn’t anything to do with how I feel about you.’ She touched his face lightly. ‘There’s nothing I want more than to marry you, Blake, to commit my life to you and to know that you’ve committed yours to me, but if I marry you now, with the company’s bankruptcy and my own financial problems still hanging over me, unresolved…’
‘You’re afraid of what people might say… that they’d think you married me for my money?’ he asked her roughly.
‘No, of course not. It isn’t anything to do with what other people might think, it’s us, Blake. You and me… I want us to be equals in our relationship, not me some pathetic Cinderella needing to be rescued from the mess she’s made of her life by you, her prince. I want to participate actively in our future together, not sit back passively and let you take all my problems off my shoulders. I… please try to understand.’ Her voice shook slightly, betraying the depth and intensity of her emotions. ‘I need to prove to myself that I have learned something from this whole mess, that I have grown… that I have coped. I want to be for you the woman that you deserve,’ she told him softly, ‘for you and for myself.’
Blake groaned. ‘You already are that woman… More woman than I ever thought I would be lucky enough to find.’
‘To marry you now would be a betrayal not just of my love for you but of myself as well. I don’t want to come to you burdened by the detritus from my and Andrew’s marriage, either emotionally or financially,’ Philippa told him firmly, but she couldn’t quite keep the small tremor out of her voice. It told him not just how important what she was saying was, but how important he was as well.
‘I need to be able to respect myself, and I still have to earn that respect,’ she told him.
