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She looked at her watch again. Almost a quarter to three—he would definitely have gone by now.
She was doing the right thing, she told herself fiercely as she left the building. For Kenneth’s sake… For all their sakes.
She thought fleetingly of Joel who never seemed to have time for anything but the leisure centre these days. Once he would have known, sensed immediately that something was wrong. Look at the way he had objected at first when she’d insisted she was going to work full-time, and yet now, when she told him she was going to work a double shift…
She had been so nervous after she had told him, nervous and somehow elated at the same time, half afraid that he would accuse her of lying to him; that he would demand to know what she was really doing.
Perhaps because all he wanted from her was sex it never occurred to him that another man might fall in love with her.
Even the kids seemed to have changed towards her recently; it was Joel they talked to now… confided in… laughed with… She had seen the way they went quiet when she came home from work; the way they removed themselves from the room whenever she and Joel argued.
Perhaps Kenneth was right when he said that they were almost adults… that they no longer really needed her… except financially.
Tears blurred her eyes. Fiercely she blinked them away as she stepped out into the spring sunshine.
‘At last… I was just beginning to worry that I’d missed you.’
Her body froze, her heart stopping and then starting to race.
Kenneth.
He had waited for her after all. Dismay warred with pleasure. She truly hadn’t expected him to wait, she assured herself. She had genuinely believed that he would have gone, but she knew that the smile curling her mouth was telling him how pleased she was to see him, and the feelings bubbling up inside her and making her feel almost as though she could walk on air betrayed the truth.
She had wanted to see him… to be with him… It was only her conscience, her awareness of what was right and what was wrong that had made her decide that she shouldn’t.
‘Now,’ Kenneth was saying, ‘where would you like to go…?’
To go? Sally gave him a startled look. She had been so convinced that he would have left that she hadn’t thought any further ahead than that.
‘After all, we’ve got plenty of time, haven’t we…? Although eight hours is a mere tithe of the time I’d actually like to spend with you,’ he added caressingly. ‘A lifetime… no, several lifetimes would hardly be long enough. See how trite you’re making me,’ he added. ‘It’s a universal truth that a man in love becomes so besotted that he’s reduced to the mere banal to express his emotions because he cannot find words magnificent enough to do his feelings justice…’
His hands touched her arm lightly, his fingers gently warm through the sleeve of her jacket. She liked the way he didn’t make a grab for her, didn’t make her feel sexually pressured or oppressed, Sally admitted.
It was reassuring to know that even if anyone had seen them together they would have found nothing to remark on in the way he was touching her; it was the polite gesture of any man to a woman he knew.
What he was saying to her, though, was a different matter altogether. It was exciting, enticing, flattering, giving without demanding any response from her, this verbal love play, reawakening echoes of the early days of Joel’s courtship of her. Then Joel had treated her as carefully as though she were as fragile and precious as expensive glass.
He had dated other girls before her, girls who were far more sexually aware and experienced than she, but on their first date he had done nothing more than hold her hand…
‘I don’t like you seeing him,’ her mother had told her angrily. ‘They’re all the same, boys of that type… all after one thing…’
‘He’s not like that,’ Sally had protested, blushing furiously at what her mother was implying. Sex was something that had not been openly discussed in their household apart from stern assertions from Sally’s mother that she didn’t want either of her daughters getting themselves into trouble.
Then Joel had loved her carefully and lovingly, but now…
When had he stopped courting her for sex, and started treating it instead as though it were a right…?
She could never imagine Kenneth behaving like that.
Eight hours… Eight hours alone with him… Her heart flipped over, her hands trembling. Where did she want to go?
‘I… I don’t know,’ she told him. ‘I… I hadn’t really thought…’
‘I had,’ Kenneth told her softly. ‘But if I told you where I’d really like to take you…’
He stopped speaking, his eyes darkening, and Sally felt her face flushing as she recognised the sexual innuendo and promise in his words.
‘It’s too soon for that yet, though, isn’t it?’ he asked her ruefully.
