A toning button-through gauzy cotton skirt and matching short-sleeved jacket made her look decent. But she left all of the skirt buttons undone, apart from the top two, just to be provocative. She pushed her feet into thonged sandals, crammed a floppy-brimmed straw hat on her head, found another for Catherine and was ready to face Jed again.
She found him blandly urbane, excessively polite as he drove them down the mountain, following Elena’s directions as they skirted the tiny red-roofed, white-walled village that clung to the lower hillside and spilled down into the valley.
He was showing her that two could play games. His features had lost their earlier tension, and she couldn’t see his eyes behind the wrap-round dark glasses he was wearing. Thankfully, Catherine’s non-stop commentary on all she was seeing made any conversational efforts on her own part redundant, and her ‘Oh! I could stay here for hours!’ when they were in the crowded, exotic market made Elena want to hug her.
‘I have a better idea.’ Jed’s mouth quirked humorously as he regarded the flushed, happy face of his parent As his arms were full of bundles and carriers of fresh produce, he dipped his head to indicate a pavement café on the edge of the colourful, bustling market square. ‘Wait for me there while I go back to the car and put this lot in the cool-boxes. Then we’ll find somewhere nice for lunch.’
He treats her as if she were a child, Elena thought, a traumatised child who has to be handled with great care. And she was guilty of that, too, she realised, as she found herself tucking Catherine’s arm through the crook of her own and murmuring cajolingly, ‘We’ll have coffee, shall we? It’s nothing like the weak apology for the stuff you get back home!’
She registered Jed’s nod of approval just before he turned away, shouldering his way through the noisy crowd of vendors and shoppers. So he approved the way she was doing as she was told, treating Catherine with kid gloves. His second order, that she act like a besotted new wife—which she had every intention of obeying to the letter when his mother was around—would, she vowed with a tight little smile, be something he was going to regret. She was sure he already was!
As soon as she and Catherine were settled with their café solo Catherine cast her eyes around the shimmering heat of the square, the shady orange trees and the golden stone of the high, balconied buildings. ‘It’s all so beautiful and vibrant, isn’t it? I can understand why you choose to live here—I hope you won’t miss it too much when you go back to Netherhaye. But I’m sure you and Jed will spend as much time as possible at Las Rocas.’
As things stood, she wouldn’t be going back to Netherhaye, and Jed would certainly not be spending time with her at Las Rocas. But of course Catherine couldn’t know that; she
would only be allowed to learn the truth once she was more settled herself.
So Elena merely smiled and sipped her coffee, and tried not to think of the way her marriage had foundered, the emptiness of the loss of love, and Sam’s shadow reaching from beyond the grave, casting a blight over what had once been so bright and beautiful.
Yet it wasn’t Sam’s fault, and it wasn’t hers. They had done what they’d done for what had seemed to be sane and rational reasons at that time, and she’d truly, truly believed that they’d failed.
No, the fault was Jed’s for refusing to listen, for thinking foul things about her, for not loving her enough—
‘Try not to be upset over your mother’s decision to make her home with me.’ Catherine interrupted the desolate drift of Elena’s thoughts, thoughts she told herself to put on the back burner for the time being, obviously mistaking her moment of solemn silence for something else.
‘I could see it came as a shock to you last night. I know Susan intended writing to you about it, but she obviously hasn’t got around to it.’ She patted Elena’s hand comfortingly. ‘She was grateful and touched when you offered her a home here with you several years ago—she told me so. But, as she said, Spain seemed a long way away, and you’d flown the nest, made a huge success of your life, and she didn’t want to cramp your style! She and I both agree that the younger generation don’t want an old mother sitting up in a corner, probably getting in the way. Which is why I decided to move out of Netherhaye. Less responsibility for me—and lots of privacy and leeway for young lovers! And Susan and I get on famously, so I shan’t be in the least bit lonely.’
How long would Catherine and her mother remain bosom friends? Elena brooded uncomfortably. When the marriage breakdown became public knowledge they would be bound to take sides—
‘Why the long faces?’ Jed had appeared from nowhere. He was smiling, but his tone had been tough, as if, Elena thought, he suspected her of taking this opportunity to come out with all the nasty facts of one hideously wrecked marriage.
‘Girl-talk!’ Catherine said brightly, standing up and tucking her handbag under her arm. ‘Let’s find somewhere to eat—I’m starving! And don’t look so quelling.’ She prodded Jed’s broad chest with a forefinger. ‘We girls are entitled to have our secrets!’
The wrong thing to have said, Elena thought. Jed smiled for his mother, but his eyes, when they glanced her way, were full of contempt. He was thinking about the child she was carrying. Sam’s child.
Suddenly she wanted this day to be over. Wanted Catherine safely back in England. Wanted Jed to love her again, wanted to turn the clock back...
But what she wanted she couldn’t have. She followed the other two into a shady warren of narrow cobbled streets. Her spine felt like wet string and her heart felt like a lump of sludge, low down in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t know how she was going to get through the rest of the day because she was hurting so much.
She had two options, she decided bleakly. One, she could drag along, looking and feeling like a wet weekend, making Catherine suspect something was very wrong, because she wasn’t a teenager in a sulk but a mature woman on her honeymoon. Or, two, she could act the part of the besotted new bride, just as Jed had told her to!
Pride made her decide on the latter. Taking a deep breath, blinking away the threat of tears, she caught up with the other two, slipped between them and took Jed’s arm, leaning against his shoulder, her hip and thigh brushing his as they walked.
She felt a shudder rake through his body, noted the way he tensed, and turned her grin of satisfaction into, ‘There’s a gorgeous restaurant overlooking the sea. We could eat outside, catch the breeze.’
Jed grunted and Catherine cried, ‘Sounds good to me! Lead the way!’
Elena did, keeping up the body pressure, reminding herself that she was punishing him, repeatedly reminding herself of just why she was having to stoop to that—to take her mind off the effect the closeness of him was having on her.
When they’d seated themselves at an open-air table in a discreetly secluded corner—deliberately chosen because if she was going to make an exhibition of herself she didn’t want it to be public—shaded by an awning of clambering vines, cooled by the breezes from the Atlantic, Elena could see that Jed was having a hard time controlling his temper.
The look he gave her as she slid into the seat beside his, allowing the unbuttoned edges of her skirt to fall apart to display every last inch of her long tanned legs, told her he was bitterly regretting having ordered her to pretend to be a loving wife!
Good! She gave him a brilliant smile and did her best to convince herself that she was enjoying this, getting under his skin, making him want her and despising himself for doing it, livid with her for doing it to him.
She put her hand on his arm and trailed her fingers down his skin. She felt his muscles tense and knew he wanted to brush her hand away, but he couldn’t do anything of the sort under Catherine’s fond maternal eye.
‘Perhaps I should order, darling?’ Elena murmured. ‘Very few people here speak any English at all—Cadiz isn’t one of those heaving internationally orientated tourist spots.’