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‘Philippa, wake up.’
Sleepily she opened her eyes, her face flushing as she saw Joel leaning over her. He was fully dressed, holding a cup of tea, which he handed to her, saying, ‘I… I brought you this…’
He watched her gravely while she struggled to sit up and take the tea from him and at the same time clutch the duvet protectively to her body.
Something in his eyes made her smile ruefully and let go of it.
‘You must go,’ she told him quietly. ‘We shouldn’t have…’
‘I shouldn’t…’ Joel corrected her.
‘It was an accident… a mistake…’ Philippa pressed on doggedly, ignoring what she could hear in his voice. ‘We must both forget that it ever happened. It should never have happened.’
‘No,’ Joel argued tensely, ‘it shouldn’t, but as for forgetting… do you know how long it’s been since I felt like that… since I…?’ He stopped abruptly and then told her, ‘Have you any idea what it does to a man when a woman responds to him like that… needs him… makes him feel that she-?’
‘Joel, you’re married,’ Philippa interrupted him desperately. ‘You’ve got a wife… children. What happened between us… it must never happen again. We mustn’t see each other again. I can’t…’ She stopped as she saw from the look in his eyes that a part of him was pleased by the knowledge that she feared his sexuality and her own responsiveness to it, and yet she couldn’t blame or accuse him for it. She had felt an equally atavistic female thrill of pleasure as she’d dropped the duvet and watched as his eyes and his body responded to the sight of her.
‘It was just sex,’ she told him huskily. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. Just sex, that’s all.’ But she couldn’t quite keep the forlorn note of loss out of her voice, and Joel, hearing it, leaned forward and touched her.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ he corrected her gently, holding her.
‘No,’ Philippa agreed. ‘But it still mustn’t happen again—for all our sakes. If it does, I might not be able to stop myself becoming emotionally attached to you,’ she told him with quiet honesty, ‘and Sally—your wife—you love her…’
‘Before today I thought I did,’ Joel told her. ‘But now…’
‘It was a statement, not a question,’ Philippa told him with a smile.
‘It would be very easy for me to love you, Philippa,’ Joel told her sombrely. ‘In fact…’
‘For a while,’ Philippa conceded. ‘And then it would be very, very hard… for both of us. We both know that if things were better for you at home you would never… Go home, Joel,’ she told him softly. ‘Go home and forget that this ever happened.’
‘And if I can’t…?’
‘You must.’
She would cry later, when he had gone, because she already knew what she was turning her back on and rejecting, and how much she wished that things were different; that he were free.
What had happened between them was like a summer storm, intense and shocking when it happened, overshadowing everything else, but quickly forgotten once it had passed.
Easier to let him go now than to risk the heartache and pain that an affair with him was bound to bring.
Easier…? Easier than what? she asked herself grimly after he had gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY
FROWNING, Elizabeth surveyed the clothes she had laid out on the bed: trousers to travel in, the suit she planned to wear for the conference, underwear, tights, shoes, a sweater ‘just in case’, and a thin silky shirt she could wear in the evening with her black trousers just in case she needed to look a little bit more dressed up. Or ought she perhaps to take a dress?
‘Richard, do you think I
should put a dress in for the evening…?’
‘It’s a conference you’re supposed to be going to, not a dinner party.’
The terseness of his reply startled her. He had been uncharacteristically irritable recently and she had put this down to the fact that she knew he was anxious about the siting of the new Fast Response Accident Unit. Now, however, her frown deepened slightly. A little wifely tolerance to oil life’s wheels was one thing; an irritable, bad-tempered husband venting those feelings on her without explaining what was causing them was another.
Firmly she checked through the items she had placed on the bed before turning round and asking quietly, ‘Something’s bothering you, Richard. What is it…?’
