The Beautiful Widow

‘What?’ She jumped as though he’d walked into the sitting room, smoothing down her hair hastily.

‘I—I wanted to be near you,’ he said hoarsely.

Oh, Steel, Steel. You are going to break my heart. ‘Fancy a coffee?’ she whispered. ‘But you’ll have to be quiet. The girls have got elephant ears.’

‘A mouse wouldn’t make less noise,’ he whispered back.

‘I’ll let you in.’ She could tell he was smiling.

Hastily switching the light on, she delved into her handbag for her brush and brought some sort of order to her hair. Her face was shiny with sleep and devoid of make-up but she couldn’t do anything about that, she reflected as she stared into the sitting-room mirror. Reaching for her thick towelling robe, she pulled it on over her thin silk pyjamas, knotting the belt tightly. She had cried herself to sleep last night, wondering how she was going to cope with seeing him at the office with other people around for the first time since his amazing declaration, but now at least there was only the two of them and Annie’s baby would break the ice. Not that there was ice between them. Just the opposite. It was fire every time their lips touched. Which was the cause of all her problems.

‘Hi. Thanks for letting me come in.’

She had opened the door to find him on the doorstep, incredibly sexy if a little tired, black stubble coating his chin and his hair falling across his forehead. He looked … She gave up trying to find a word that encapsulated heaven on earth and prayed for self-control. ‘Hi yourself.’ She swung the door wide as she turned and walked through the hall to the kitchen. ‘I’ll put the coffee on.’

‘I woke you,’ he murmured as he stood in the kitchen doorway.

‘Considering it’s five o’clock in the morning, is that surprising?’ She turned and smiled to soften the words. ‘Sit down, you look exhausted.’ And what power decreed that when men looked all in they were ten times more sexy, whereas women just looked haggard? Few things in life were fair.

He didn’t sit down. Instead he walked across and drew her gently into his arms. They stood quietly, in benign contrast to all their earlier blazing embraces, as he said, ‘She’s so tiny and so vulnerable, a little scrap of nothing and yet a person with eyelashes and fingernails. And she looks like Annie. I can remember when Annie was born and I went to see her with my father. I was twelve years old at the time and thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And Miranda is like her. I’d forgotten about that time until today.’

‘And Annie’s OK?’ she asked unsteadily, touched at his emotion.

‘She’s euphoric. On cloud nine and refusing to come down.’

Toni nodded. ‘I can remember when the twins were born, I was the same. And yet scared too. Suddenly I had these two little people who were wholly dependent on me and I was terrified I’d let them down.’

‘And you coped with them on your own,’ he said, very softly.

Toni had wrapped her arms round his waist and now it took a great deal not to pull away and defuse what was a deeply personal memory. A host of memories. ‘Yes, I did, from day one,’ she said after a moment or two. ‘Richard didn’t even come into the hospital with me when I gave birth; he said hospitals made him feel sick. It was a full twenty-four hours before he saw the girls and I found myself making excuses for him to the other women in the maternity unit, pretending he’d been called away at work. The first time he saw them in their little plastic cots by the side of my bed, I could tell he didn’t know what to say. For months, years, I tried to tell myself he’d been overcome with the miracle of it, at these two little people who were now suddenly in the world, but in actual fact he felt nothing. In fact the whole business repelled him.’

‘Did he say that?’ Steel’s arms had tightened round her as she’d been talking.

‘Yes, one night when we were having a fight about how little he was at home. He—he called them parasites.’

‘Hell.’ Steel jerked against her.

‘It was a couple of months before he died, and from that night I knew our marriage was over. But there were the girls and he was their father … I didn’t know what to do.’

‘It’s OK.’ His arms tightened still more and she felt his lips against her forehead.

‘They are my beautiful, precious girls, Steel, and he spoke about them as though …’ She dragged in a breath. ‘I could have killed him that night. If I’d had a weapon in my hands I would have used it.’

He moved her slightly, cupping her face in his hand, his thumb stroking the pure line of her silky cheek. ‘Broken kneecap job at the very least, I’d say.’

She gave a damp smile. ‘I’m sorry, you don’t want to hear this now, not when you’re so pleased about Annie.’

He ignored this. ‘How come you’re not still hating the guy?’ he asked quietly. ‘Because you don’t hate him, do you?’

‘I did for a while, even after he’d died. And then one day I realised he was the one who had missed ou

t. The girls had done or said something, I can’t even remember what now, and it dawned on me I meant the world to them. For every little bit of love I gave them I got it back tenfold, and Richard had never, would never, experience that. They didn’t miss him—in fact they barely noticed he’d gone. And that was terribly sad. He was a stranger to them, a distant cold stranger who had as little impact on their lives as the man in the moon. It—it made me all the more determined to make sure no one would ever let them down again. They deserve the best.’

‘Hence the repelling of all boarders on the good ship, Toni George?’ The words could have been taken as light; the way he was looking at her was anything but.

‘I guess.’ She smiled wanly. ‘Yes.’

He stroked the tears from her face with large male hands. ‘You’re some woman.’ He pulled her into him again, his voice a rumble above her head as he said, ‘We came across each other too soon, didn’t we? You’d barely had time to come to terms with the fact you were free and then I was there.’