‘And you could be getting paranoid inside your guilty conscience,’ she threw back. ‘Don’t tar me with the same brush as yourself.’ And once again she deliberately ignored that little voice that was telling her she wasn’t being entirely truthful.
‘I wasn’t doing that,’ he sighed, going over t
o pour himself a stiff drink.
‘Then what were you doing?’ she snapped.
‘Actually—’ on another sigh, he shook his dark head wearily ‘—actually, I don’t know what I’m doing,’ he confessed. ‘Are you going to take the course?’
‘Are you going to play the domineering husband by telling me I can’t if I decide I want to?’ she countered, small chin coming up.
‘Will you listen to me if I do try to talk you out of it?’ he parried drily.
‘No.’
He shrugged. ‘Then it isn’t worth my trying, is it?’ he said, and walked out of the room, leaving her sitting there feeling angry and frustrated and a hundred other things that revolved almost entirely around one emotion. Hurt. Whether she fought with him or made love with him or simply ignored his very existence, she still hurt like a love-lost child whenever he walked away from her.
The trouble with you, Rachel, is you’ve gone so long living for him, you have no idea how to live for yourself!
Which was why she decided to go on the course when Zac rang to tell her it was all set up.
Daniel didn’t say a word—not a single word. But, good grief, she knew his opinion by the time she left the house for her first class a couple of weeks later. And when she came back he didn’t wait for the darkness to shroud their marriage-bed before he reached for her. He grabbed her hand almost as soon as she walked through the door and hauled her up to bed, staking claim over her senses in a way that left them both bitterly frustrated, because even while she went eagerly with him through the blistering avenues of sensuality, he still reached heaven alone.
Which, in the end, satisfied neither of them.
But at least her flair for caricature blossomed through the ensuing weeks. And even Daniel had to smile at the fun she made of them all with her pencil.
Zac was quietly encouraging. It helped that he never made any personal reference during the classes themselves but later, when they all retired to the pub across the road for a drink before going home, he would always make sure he sat next to her, his interest in her more than clear then. She tried to ignore it most of the time, wanting to learn all he had to teach her about drawing and frightened that, if he came on too strong with her, she would have to give it all up.
December loomed on the horizon: Rachel became engrossed in Christmas preparations. Shopping, planning, mad bursts of cooking and baking that filled the freezer to its limits and made everyone’s mouth water as the different rich and spicy smells permeated the house.
Daniel became even busier—and more preoccupied. His one real concession to Rachel’s restless need to be seen as an individual in her own right was to take her out on a regular basis. They went to the theatre, the cinema, to clubs and restaurants. Her wardrobe, by necessity, became filled with yet more elegant clothes, although she’d soon returned to wearing her casual stuff for the more mundane areas of her life. But she kept the new hairstyle because she liked it, and she found it easier to manage than the long, thick swath she used to have.
But the strain their marriage was putting on her began to tell in other ways. She tired easily, became fractious over the silliest things, and would burst into fits of weeping for no apparent reason, which troubled her family and made them yearn for the other sunnier Rachel they used to know.
Growing pains, she ruefully diagnosed her problem, after one such uncalled-for outburst had the children creeping around her warily and Daniel studying her through those hooded eyes which rarely looked directly at her these days.
Her car wouldn’t start one evening when she was about to go to her evening class. Daniel was in Huddersfield and not expected back until very late that night. Jenny was baby-sitting. It was sleeting heavily outside, and Rachel looked reluctantly towards the house she had just left, knowing she should go back inside and call a taxi but oddly unwilling to do so now she had escaped.
Escaped! It hit her, then, that she was beginning to see her home as some kind of emotional prison.
On a heavy sigh, she pulled her warm coat up around her ears and walked off down the drive to catch the bus.
She arrived at the centre soaked through to her skin, her hair plastered to her head and her face white with cold. The rotten weather had found its way right through to her clothes beneath and, on a mass cry of concern, the class set about helping her to get dry. Someone began rubbing at her hair with a paper towel while someone else pulled off her boots and wet woollen socks.
‘Socks!’ someone cried in mock horror. ‘The lady wears men’s woolly socks inside her dainty boots!’
Everyone laughed, and so did Rachel, light-hearted and suddenly feeling set free from something she had been dragging around with her for weeks now. Her blouse was wet, and Zac pulled off his own black woollen sweater for her to use. She took off her blouse and put it on while the other women in the class shielded her from interested male eyes.
By the time they had all finished with her her wet clothes lay across the warm radiators drying, and she was dressed in nothing more than her underwear beneath Zac’s big sweater which came down to her knees.
But her clothes were still very damp when it was time to leave, and swapping the warm sweater for her damp shirt and jeans gave her no pleasure. When Zac offered to give her a lift straight home, instead of going with the rest of them to the local pub, Rachel read the expression in his eyes but accepted anyway, stubbornly ignoring what the warning bells going off in her head were telling her.
He drove a new model Porsche which gripped the icy wet road like glue and surged off with a growling show of power. ‘Mmm,’ she murmured luxuriously as the car’s heater began to warm her cold legs.
Zac glanced at her and smiled. She had her eyes closed, a contented smile playing about her mouth. ‘Better?’ he asked.
‘Mmm,’ she murmured again. ‘Sorry you had to miss your pint.’