How would she really fare in his world? How would she adapt to wearing cheap chainstore clothes, to having to economise, having to go without?
He had left that evening while Philippa was out with her parents, but he hadn’t given up hope… not then… Then he was still convinced that she loved him, that somehow he would find a way of breaking the hold her parents had on her.
But then his mother’s debilitating condition had worsened and he had had no option other than to finance round-the-clock care for her. Struggling to make ends meet and to keep on with his studies as well as worrying about his mother, he had recognised grimly that Robert was quite right. There was no way he could afford to have Philippa in his life.
And then she had come to see him, just when he had reached rock-bottom, when he was wondering whether he would have to abandon his training completely and find work—any work just so long as it earned him enough to pay to make his mother’s life just a little more comfortable.
He had had no alternative other than to send her away, to deny them what he knew they both wanted. To have even tried explaining to her would have strained his fragile self-control well beyond his limits; he had known quite well that one soft helpless look… one single tear… one small plea from her and he woul
d have been lost, unable to deny any longer what he felt for her…
And then she had told him that she wasn’t going to go to university because ‘Daddy’ wouldn’t let her and to his own shock he had found himself wondering if after all Robert hadn’t been right… if she was after all far more her father’s daughter than he had ever imagined.
He had watched her driving away in the car ‘Daddy’ had given her and he hadn’t been sure which of them he had hated the most—her father or himself.
He had seen how much he had hurt her, but he was hurting as well. A part of him still hurt.
His mother’s condition had worsened over the following six months and it had been a release for her, and for him, he acknowledged sadly, when she’d died. Michael had attended the funeral. Philippa had been away on honeymoon with her new husband, Andrew Ryecart.
Angry and embittered, he had left for the States just as soon as he had completed his studies. Once there, he had continued training and working with furious energy to prove to the Ryecart family in general and Philippa in particular that when it came to earning power and status he was streets… leagues ahead of the man she had married.
It had taken Michael to bring him to his senses and show him what he was doing to himself.
It had taken Romania to show him how man’s cruelty and greed for power and wealth brutally destroyed the innocent and unprotected.
It had taken meeting Philippa again to show him just how much he had lost… denied himself… out of false pride and lack of faith.
He had come back expecting to find a dull, ageing woman passively accepting her role in life, devoting herself to it, tied securely by loyalty and habit to her husband—by them and their children. But instead he had found… instead he had found Philippa…
And this time… this time… Anya cried out in her sleep, disturbing the silence of the house. When he went up to see what was wrong she was sitting up in bed awake.
‘Where’s Philippa?’ she asked him. ‘I want her…’
‘She’ll be here tomorrow,’ he assured her. How easy to be a child and to have no inhibitions about stating one’s desires… one’s needs.
Tiredly he got up and went back downstairs.
CHAPTER THIRTY
SALLY stiffened guiltily as she heard Joel coming upstairs. Her hand was trembling so much that she had deposited more mascara on her skin than on her lashes. She reached for a tissue to clean it off, glancing anxiously over her shoulder as Joel walked into the bedroom.
‘I thought you were going out.’
Joel’s mouth tightened as he heard the accusatory note in her voice. Cynically he noted the way Sally reached for her dressing-gown, quickly pulling it on over her underclothes.
She still had a good figure, slightly softer now than it had been when they had first married, rather more curved, but then she was a woman now, not a girl.
‘I am,’ he told her curtly in response to her comment. ‘I just came up to get my jacket.’
In the early days of their marriage he had watched, entranced and fascinated, as she went through the routine of putting on her make-up, sometimes sneaking up behind her to wrap his arms around her and start nuzzling the side of her neck, teasing her with light kisses until she had abandoned her task and turned round in his arms.
Then, the last thing she would have wanted to do would have been to conceal her body from him; and now, although she didn’t know it, it was the last thing she needed to do.
The comparison between her coldness towards him and her rejection of him and Philippa’s warmth twisted into an aching pain of resentment inside him.
Sally watched him as he opened the wardrobe door and removed his jacket, holding her breath. He had made no comment when she had told him she was spending the afternoon with her sister and brother-in-law. As she watched him shrug on his jacket she tried not to glance betrayingly at the clothes she had laid out on the bed… her best ones.
She felt uncomfortable and uneasy with Joel in the bedroom with her while she was getting ready to see another man.