AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘I had help. My father was wonderful. He supported us both financially. Gave us a home.’
‘And forced you to live like a nun?’ Silas asked her grimly.
Hazel chewed her lip defensively.
‘He thought he was doing the best thing for all of us. And I can see his point of view…’
And you never, never once, wanted to break out of the strait-jacket he locked you in? You never once wanted to—?’
‘To what?’ Hazel demanded harshly, her sensitivities bruised by the anger she could hear in his voice. ‘To have some sort of wild sexual fling? No. I never wanted to do that. I’d better go and get your breakfast,’ she added shortly, changing the subject. ‘I have to go shopping later this morning, once I’ve got this room sorted out. Will you be using a computer or a word processor?’
‘Yes. But you can leave me to sort all that out. I do know how to use a duster and a vacuum cleaner, you know.’
As she made to walk past him, it seemed as though he was going to reach out and stop her, but when she froze and stared at him he said simply, ‘There’s no need for you to put yourself out on my account, you know.’
‘No need at all,’ she agreed curtly. ‘Which is why I don’t intend to do so.’
She was angry with him and punishing him because of her own folly, because somehow or other he had drawn her out to such an extent that she had confided in him, telling him things she had never ever told anyone else.
She ought to be punishing herself and not him, she recognised as she headed for the kitchen. It wasn’t his fault that she seemed to find him so…so easy to talk to, so…so easy to confide in.
And what on earth he must think of her idiotic admission that she had lived a completely celibate life since Katie’s conception she had no idea. He probably pitied her, thinking she was virtually devoid of any kind of normal sex drive. He was probably thanking his lucky stars that he had found out the truth about her before it was too late. She had no doubt that he would most definitely keep his promise to her now.
So why, as she prepared another fresh jug of coffee, did she feel more like bursting into tears than being relieved?
CHAPTER SIX
‘GOOD heavens, you’ve been busy, haven’t you?’
Hazel gritted her teeth inwardly, and smiled mechanically as Sheila Simpson stared curiously at her loaded shopping trolley.
Of all the people for her to bump into in the supermarket, Sheila was the very last one she would have chosen. Sheila was the local gossip and busybody, an angular woman of forty-odd who ruled her own apparently perfect family and husband with a rod of iron, and who continually and loudly disparaged those who could not match her own exacting standards.
Hazel had always been aware that Sheila was deeply suspicious of her, both because of her single state and apparently because she considered that Hazel looked far too young to have a daughter of Katie’s age.
‘Expecting visitors, are you?’ she questioned now with false friendliness, her glance fixed on the contents of Hazel’s well-filled trolley.
‘Not exactly,’ Hazel told her coolly.
‘Oh, doing a bit of early shopping for Christmas, then, I expect,’ Sheila hazarded. ‘Of course you’ll have Katherine home, won’t you?’
It was one of Sheila’s many affectations that, as she piously informed everyone, she refused to shorten people’s names to some corrupt derivative of the original, and Hazel had never bothered to inform her that Katie had in fact been christened exactly that. Her full name was Katie Georgina, the Georgina being for Jimmy, whose second name had been George.
Without vouchsafing her a yes or a no, Hazel determinedly pushed her trolley past her. It was ridiculous that she should feel guilty for withholding the truth from Sheila, and even more ridiculous that she should feel uncomfortably aware of how avidly curious the other woman would have been had she told her the truth.
She was thirty-six years old, for heaven’s sake, and if she chose to invite a member of the opposite sex to lodge with her for a short space of time that was no one’s business other than her own.
Besides she could just imagine how Sheila would embellish and extend the truth, how she would serve it up to others, dressing it up with a sauce of sexual innuendo while virulently protesting that of course she knew there was nothing in it and that the relationship was totally innocent.
Hazel had heard Sheila in action before. She specialised in stirring up trouble.
But what did it matter if people did gossip about her? she asked herself later as she drove home. Her father was dead and could no longer be hurt by that sort of thing. Katie was far too modern and youthful in her outlook to do anything more than laugh her head off at the suggestion that her mother was involved in a sexual liaison with someone, and, as for her own feelings, she was of course concerned what her friends, her real friends, thought of her, but they knew her far too well to judge her on Sheila’s gossip, and besides she had been urged more than once by all of them to stop hiding herself away, to go out and enjoy herself, to, as one of them had very bluntly put it, ‘Go out and find yourself a man, and use what nature has so generously endowed you with before it’s too late.’
And after all, who knew? Perhaps they were right and she was wrong. Perhaps she had lived with her father for so long that she had unconsciously adopted his views as her own.
Several of her unmarried and divorced friends cheerfully and frankly admitted to brief affairs, and even in some cases to the odd one-night stand, and evidently felt no shame or embarrassment in doing so, and after all why should they? They were, much as she was, accountable only to themselves. Her lifestyle was an unusual one for a healthy woman of her age. Perhaps if she’d been older when Katie was conceived, perhaps if her experience of sex with Jimmy had been different, she might not have found it quite so easy to fall in with her father’s wishes, to suppress her own desires almost before they were born, to relentlessly control every impulse towards expressing her sexuality which she had experienced, so much so that it was now almost second nature, rather like being taught to sit up straight or hold your tummy in—it had become something she did without even having to think about doing it any longer.
Or at least she had. Perhaps in the years since her father’s death she had not kept such a careful guard on herself, because she had fooli
