She hated herself for letting it happen. And she hated Daniel for forcing her to see her own faults, because that meant she had to shoulder some of the blame for what was happening to them.
Rachel was inexplicably relieved that Daniel’s black BMW was not on the drive when her taxi dropped her off at the house well after six o’clock that evening.
She struggled up the drive with her arms so loaded with carrier bags and parcels that she had to ring the doorbell with her elbow.
‘Good heavens!’ Daniel’s mother exclaimed when she opened the door, a look of complete disbelief on her face as Rachel staggered inside the house. ‘And—good heavens again!’ she repeated when she lifted stunned eyes from the tumble of packages Rachel dropped at their feet and looked—really looked—at Rachel instead.
‘What do you think?’ Rachel quizzed uncertainly.
The Rachel who had left the house only an hour after her husband that morning was not the one now waiting anxiously for her mother-in-law’s opinion.
Gone was the long mass of pale blond hair. It had been cut, ruthlessly cut, and styled to fall in a fine silken bob on a level with her small chin. Her face had been expertly made-up to enhance those good features Rachel did not believe she had. Everything had been kept so cleverly natural that it was almost impossible to tell what the difference was about her eyes and mouth, only that suddenly they leapt out and hit you in a way Jenny found wholly disturbing.
But that wasn’t all. Gone was the baby-blue woollen duffle coat and faded jeans Rachel had gone out in, and in their place was the most exquisitely tailored pure wool coat-dress in a soft and sensual mink colour which followed her slender figure from lightly padded shoulders to the delicate curve of her calf. It fastened on two rows of large brown saucer-type buttons down its revered front, and again in a single row of three along the deep cuffs at her wrists. Her new three-inch-high brown suede ankle boots and purse matched the buttons.
‘I think,’ Jenny Masterson murmured, eventually, ‘that we had better have a stiff drink ready for my son when he gets home.’
Jenny couldn’t know it, but she had given the most satisfying reply Rachel could have wished for. But that was because she was still running on full pistons of defiance, and the longer she had been out today the stronger that defiance had become.
The sitting-room door came flying open and Sammy’s gasped ‘Wow!’ made Rachel grin like an idiot. But if she had worried a little bit about how the children were going to react to this new mother they’d got, then it was a worry wasted.
‘What’s in the parcels?’ he demanded, dismissing the new Rachel as if she was no different from the one he was used to seeing. And within ten minutes the sitting-room floor was littered with half-open packages, and Kate was strutting around in a set of red beads that Rachel had bought on impulse—along with the set of building bricks for Michael, who was now engrossed in tearing up the cardboard box they came in, and a new computer game for Sam, who had already shot off upstairs to try it out—when Daniel walked in.
He stopped and stared. And, with that, the room seemed to come to a shuddering halt as Kate stopped strutting to view his reaction, and his mother stopped trying to tidy up some of the mess to eye him warily while Rachel, caught in the middle of coming to her feet, had to force her suddenly shaky limbs to finish the move, then stood staring at Daniel in a mixture of mutinous defiance and helpless appeal.
It was his mother who broke the spell, bustling forward to scoop Michael up from the carpet, then grab Kate’s hand to hustle them all from the room.
‘Children see and feel more than grown-ups give them credit for,’ Jenny had told Rachel only a few days earlier. No more, just that candid one-liner, but it had been enough. Rachel received the message. The children had obviously been saying things to their grandmother they felt they could not say to their parents.
But at this moment Rachel was not thinking of her children; her attention was turned entirely on Daniel’s perfectly inscrutable expression as he ran his narrowed gaze over her.
As she watched him in growing tension she saw a small smile twist his lips. It jolted her because she recognised it as the same smile he had used on entering the disco all those years ago when they first met—one she read as rueful and cynical—and it had the effect of pushing up her chin and adding a touch of challenge to her expression.
‘Well, well,’ he murmured eventually. ‘Stage two has begun, I see.’
Stage two? Rachel frowned. What was he talking about?
‘Going somewhere nice?’ he asked before she could question him. ‘You’ll have to forgive me, Rachel, but if you did warn me that you’d made plans to go out tonight, they seem to have completely slipped my mind.’
Her frown deepened, and the way he clipped out the ‘nice’ was enough to make her bristle. He was a man who never let anything slip his mind! It was like a bank vault; nothing that went into it got out again without his say-so! He knew damned well she was not going anywhere, so what was he getting at with his cryptic ‘stage twos’, and ‘going somewhere nice’?
And it was obvious he wasn’t going to make a single remark about her new look—the rotter! Perhaps he didn’t like it—perhaps he preferred the boringly plain other version who wasn’t likely to cause him much trouble, the one who knew her place in his well-ordered life and never thought of stepping beyond it!
Or perhaps he wasn’t so sure of this Rachel! she then mused on a growing sense of triumph. Perhaps the enquiry was really genuine and he was wonder
ing if she was going out somewhere!
‘And if I am considering going out, what would you do about it?’ she demanded.
That smile tilted his mouth again and sent a trickle of angry frustration shooting down her spine. ‘I would have to ask you who you are going with, I suppose,’ he drawled, better at this game than she could ever be.
‘So you could vet him—or her—to see if they’re suitable company for your little wife?’
‘Him?’ He grabbed at that and threw it back sharply, sharply enough to make her sting in satisfaction. ‘And just who is—he?’ he demanded softly.
‘I don’t remember your having to inform me of every person you’ve ever gone out with,’ she countered coolly.
His face tightened, grey eyes flashing a brief warning at her before he hooded them again. ‘Humour me,’ he requested. ‘Give me a name—that’s all—a name.’