Cruel Legacy

‘All right, Sal,’ he told her quietly. ‘I’ll do it. You…’

Angrily Sally whirled round. ‘Oh, no, you won’t,’ she told him. ‘Do you think I’d risk letting you touch that wallpaper after what you did the first time?’

She was over-reacting, Sally knew, but she couldn’t help it. She was so tired and so confused that all she wanted to do was to spend the day in bed, safe from the rest of the world and all her problems. She knew that a part of her had been deliberately trying to goad and force Joel to do the wallpapering for her, and yet now that he had said that he would she felt irrationally angry with him, as though somehow by giving in to her he was in some way letting her down. As though he cared so little for her that it was easier to give in to her than to ask her what was wrong.

Joel did not care… it was like receiving an electric shock direct to her heart; it jerked violently against her breastbone and then started to thud frantically at high speed.

‘I don’t want you going anywhere near my sister’s wallpapering,’ she heard herself saying shakily to him. ‘And I don’t want you coming anywhere near me either,’ she added, checking him as he took a step towards her.

She waited for Joel to say something, to explode and demand an explanation, but instead he simply looked at her. At her and then through her, she recognised numbly, as though she were a stranger—no, she corrected herself, as though she simply did not exist.

And then he turned away from her and walked over to the table, picking up his jacket and his car keys.

‘Joel, where are you going?’ Panic sharpened her voice but Joel didn’t even turn round to look at her as he responded flatly,

‘What the hell do you care?’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

JOEL drove around for two hours before finally giving in and doing what he had wanted to do, ached to do from the moment he had closed the back door behind him and driven away.

He saw the shock on her face as Philippa opened the door to him—and he saw something else as well.

She made no attempt to resist him as he took her in his arms, gathering her up against himself with gentle care. She felt slender and fragile, warm and softly woman-scented.

His body trembled with the fight to control his emotions as he kissed her with tender restraint and then kissed her again with no restraint at all when he felt her response to him.

‘I had to see you,’ he told her as he held her, kissing the top of her head, wrapping her tightly in his arms as though he never intended to let her go. But ultimately he would have to let her go, Philippa recognised; ultimately they would have to let one another go.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she told him. ‘We agreed——’

‘That we couldn’t be lovers,’ Joel interrupted her. His hands cupped her face, tilting it upwards so that he could look down at her. ‘But we can still talk, can’t we? Still be… friends…?’

‘Oh, Joel. This… this thing between us isn’t really real, you know,’ she told him sadly. ‘It’s… it’s just a… a fantasy… a… a mirage we’ve both conjured up because…’

‘Oh, it’s real to me,’ Joel said fiercely. ‘As real as the way I feel when I hold you in my arms… as real as the ache in my body when I lie awake wanting you at night…’

‘You mustn’t say that to me… You’re married… No matter how strong my feelings for you were, I couldn’t live with the knowledge that I’d broken up your marriage…’

‘What marriage?’ Joel asked her bitterly. ‘Sally and I don’t have a marriage any more. You can’t break up something that no longer exists.’

Philippa could feel herself weakening. The feel of his body next to hers, the now dangerously familiar male scent of him, the warmth of him, his need and emotion were like a drug to her senses, senses which she was only just beginning to recognise that she had deliberately denied and starved into virtual non-existence for years in an attempt to conform to others’ demands of her; a betrayal of herself as a woman.

She knew how much she wanted Joel, but she knew as well how vulnerable she was; habit had made her cautious, wary of expecting too much for herself.

Instinct told her that, no matter how much Joel might believe now that he wanted her, no matter how strongly he might believe that his marriage was dead, he still loved his wife. He had released her face and was holding one of her hands, lifting it to his mouth, gently caressing her palm and then her wrist with his lips.

‘Don’t send me away,’ he begged her.

‘Come into the kitchen,’ Philippa told him, weakening, hoping that the more mundane workaday atmosphere there might ease the intensity of the sexual tension she could feel building between them. Here in the hallway with the stairs behind her and her mind and body already flooded with awareness of him, as well as the potency of her memories of their previous lovemaking, it would be all too tempting to turn round and take him by the hand, to give in to the need she knew they were both feeling.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Joel told her drily as she offered him a cup of tea. ‘But I didn’t come here looking for sex. No matter what Sally seems to think, that’s not… Every time I try to touch her or hold her she accuses me of wanting sex, as though it’s some kind of punishment

I’m inflicting on her… some kind of payment she has to make…

‘She lies there next to me, her body tense and unmoving, willing me to get it over with. That’s sex; that’s what our relationship has been reduced to. What you and I shared…

‘I’d forgotten how good it feels to hold a woman who’s warm and responsive, who wants you as much as you want her, who doesn’t turn her head away when you kiss her, or tense her body when you touch her.’