‘Yes, she does.’
The look he gave her was direct and determined, and ridiculously, Claire felt hot colour sting her face.
Luc’s impatient tug on her skirt caused a welcome diversion. ‘Mummy, what’s a woman?’
Claire was perplexed. She looked down at her daughter. ‘I’m not sure what you mean, Lucy.’
‘Well, when you were talking to Mrs Vickers after school yesterday and Heather and me went in the post office, Mrs Simmonds was there and she said that you were Lucy’s daddy’s woman.’
Over her daughter’s auburn curls Claire’s shocked eyes met the grim expression in Jay’s.
‘I …’
‘It means that your mummy and I are going to get married,’ Jay announced, ignoring the choked sound that emitted from Claire’s throat.
‘You mean like real mummies and daddies?’ Lucy was plainly ecstatic about the idea. ‘And we’ll live here for always?’
‘Something like that,’ he agreed urbanely. He was still watching her, Claire realised, a hard purposefulness in his eyes that warned her that he had made her decision for her, and he wasn’t going to let her back out of it.
She ought to have been furious with him for his highhandedness, but in reality it was a relief. Her decision had in fact already been made, but the knowledge that their relationship was the subject of village gossip and speculation wouldn’t have made it any easier for her to communicate it to Jay.
Feeling rather feeble, she said unsteadily, ‘Lucy, you’re covered in flour; why don’t you and Heather go upstairs and clean up?’
As Jay put her down, Heather put her hand on Claire’s arms and looked up at her. ‘Are you really going to be here for always?’
The expression in her eyes wasn’t something Claire had the strength to withstand. Going down on her heels so that her face was on a level with the little girl’s, she asked huskily, ‘Is that what you want, Heather, for me to be here for always?’
‘Yes … yes …’ A fierce hug accompanied the emphatic words.
‘Then I will be.’
Although she was speaking to Heather, Claire knew that her words were meant for Jay. As she stood up she looked at him and caught an expression on his face that puzzled her. He looked like a man who had been under almost unendurable pressure and who had now found it relaxed.
Claire waited until both girls were out of the kitchen before speaking to him.
‘You had no right to tell them that.’
He didn’t argue with her, simply flexed his body as though it ached. ‘It saves you from making any decision though, doesn’t it?’
Claire’s mouth compressed as she caught the tinge of contempt in his voice. Did he really think she was incapable of deciding for herself? On the verge of telling him that she had already decided to marry him for herself, she caught the words back, and said instead, ‘I shouldn’t have thought a little bit of village gossip would worry you to that extent.’
‘It doesn’t,’ he agreed flatly. ‘At least, not on my own behalf, and especially when there are no grounds for it—but I don’t want either of the girls to be subjected to the sort of sniggered whispers that go the rounds of every school playground. Okay, right now they’re too innocent to understand what’s being said, but for how long?’ He looked at her, and for the first time Claire saw the exhaustion in his face. ‘Before we go any further, can I take it that since you didn’t contradict what I said to the girls about our plans for the future, you are going to marry me?’
‘It doesn’t seem that I have much choice now, does it?’ Claire responded tartly.
Almost instantly his face closed up, his mouth going hard. ‘No, it doesn’t, does it?’ he agreed with more than a hint of acerbic grimness. ‘And since that’s settled, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go upstairs and have a shower.’
Seeing the weariness in his tense back, Claire wished her own part in their exchange unsaid. The problem was that she had been so shocked by Lucy’s innocent revelations that things had got out of hand. She had had everything carefully planned—a family meal over which she and Jay could relax in one another’s company, and then a quiet evening with the girls, followed perhaps by a chat together in front of the sitting-room fire, when she would have felt relaxed enough to convey her intentions to him. Now, abruptly, all her plans had been swept away, and far from being relaxing, the evening looked like being extremely tense indeed.
Still, looking at it from Jay’s point of view, it had hardly been a good homecoming. She could remember how tired and tense her father used to be after dealing with a difficult business meeting, and Jay had had a whole series of them. It could hardly have helped his frame of mind to be greeted by the artless announcement, the moment he stepped through the door, that the whole village was gossiping about them.
She was just about to clear the kitchen table when she suddenly remembered that she had forgotten to put clean towels in Jay’s room.
The airing cupboard was full of clean towels, and she selected a pile at random, pausing outside his bedroom door to knock.
She heard him call out, ‘Come in,’ and pushed open the door with her hip.
‘I just remembered that you don’t have any towels …’ She froze, her voice locking in her throat as she realised that she had interrupted him while he was getting undressed.