Phantom Marriage

‘I know because they’ve spent all afternoon with my housekeeper, too damned frightened to come home to you, and all over some crazy teapot they broke!’

Anger and pain rushed over her in a massive, turbulent wave. ‘All afternoon?’ Her voice registered shock and bitterness. ‘You mean you’ve known all afternoon and not let me know? Is this your idea of some sort of punishment for being an unfit mother, do you…’

Chas silenced her, his face nearly as white as her own.

‘If I weren’t a civilised human being I’d throttle you with my bare hands,’ he told James slowly. ‘Have you any idea of the agony you’ve caused her, of what she’s had to endure today? To say nothing of the fact that half the local police force is out looking for those two kids? You ought to be locked up!’ he finished in disgust.

‘Uncle Chas, I take it?’ James sneered back. ‘Comforting the grieving mother. All this performance today has nothing to do with the fact that those two kids don’t want you as their father, of course?’

Tara felt Chas’s surprise and looked up at him despairingly. He responded with a quick smile and a tiny squeeze of her arm.

‘It’s what Tara wants that concerns me,’ he replied smoothly. ‘And I think we’d better telephone the police. You’ll have some explaining to do,’ he warned James. ‘I’m not sure about the law concerning minors, but I would have thought simple common sense would have led you to report the fact that they were with you…’

‘I’m sure it would,’ James agreed quickly, ‘if I’d known. I was out of town for the day, and the first I knew of their arrival was when I got home. They refused to tell Mrs Hammond their surname or where they came from—my stepdaughter, who would have known, is away at the moment and she was obliged to wait for my return. When I did return I lost no time in coming straight round.’

‘You could have telephoned,’ Chas pointed out, reaching for the telephone as he spoke.

‘So I could,’ James agreed smoothly, ‘but the twins seemed rather reluctant to face their mother, so I decided to drive round instead in the hope that I could persuade her to return with me so that we could sort this whole mess out.’

Right at that moment Tara would have promised to go to the ends of the universe with the devil himself if it meant getting the twins back safely.

Refusing Chas’s offer to accompany her, she waited impatiently for him to finish reporting the twins’ safety to the authorities, so that they could leave.

‘They want to speak to you,’ he told James, handing him the receiver.

‘I’d better go, love,’ he told Tara in a low voice. ‘Unless you want me to come with you?’

‘No, thanks.’ Tara smiled up at him, kissing his cheek affectionately unaware of the fact that James was watching him or that his eyes had darkened furiously.

‘You just can’t leave him alone, can you?’ he threw at her when Chas had gone and they were on their way out to his car. ‘What’s so special about him? Or is it simply that he’s good in bed?’

Tara refused to respond to his taunts, huddling as far away from him as she possibly could as he slid into the Rolls.

He drove in silence through the London traffic, and just before they drew up in front of it, Tara recognised the mews block she had seen him emerging from with the dark-haired woman.

Something must have registered on her face, because he grasped her arm as she reached for the door, forcing her round to face him.

‘Something wrong?’

Some devil prompted her to say coolly, ‘Perhaps I object to my children being exposed to the sort of careless morals you seem to favour.’

She had expected him to let the subject go, but instead he prompted in a dangerously quiet tone, ‘I could say I find that remark extraordinary coming from you, but instead I’ll ask you to elucidate. Meaning what exactly?’

‘Meaning that I saw you leaving this mews yesterday with a woman,’ Tara told him proudly, refusing to be quelled by the rage she could sense boiling up inside him but kept tightly battened down.

‘She’d called on me to talk to me about some investments she was worried about.’ James shrugged broad shoulders. ‘An innocent enough meeting, and very far from your fevered imaginings of the two of us making love in my bedroom.’

But not from hers, Tara thought inwardly. She had desired James, and she hadn’t bothered to hide that fact from her.

‘Any more nasty cracks like that and you’ll have me thinking you’re jealous,’ James taunted as he took her arm and directed her up the four steps to the dark green front door, his threat leaving her speechless with fear.

Inside the house was far less grand than she had

anticipated.

Several panelled doors led off the small square hall with its polished parquet flooring and single oval table holding a pot-bellied brass container and an attractive arrangement of flowers.

A flight of stairs led upwards, but it was on the opening door in the hall that Tara concentrated.