They're Wed Again

‘Mum, I really don’t mind,’ Belle reassured her mother. ‘After all, I’m only Joy’s aunt, not her mother or her bridesmaid…’

‘I can’t believe the last wedding we had in the family was yours and Luc’s. I saw him earlier. He made a point of coming over to talk to your father and me…’

Belle smiled and waited patiently, knowing what was coming next. Her mother had never made any secret of the fact of how much she had liked Luc.

‘I hate to say it, Belle,’ she had told her younger daughter unhappily after the divorce, ‘but this is what happens when a woman puts her job before her husband.’

‘Mum…I’m the one who wanted the divorce, not Luc,’ Belle had reminded her mother sharply. ‘And as for putting my job first—’

She had stopped, knowing that there was no point in arguing with her mother and upsetting her. She was a woman of her time and had what Belle considered to be antiquated, old-fashioned views about a woman’s role in life. She had worked as a secretary until Carol had been conceived, and after that she had stayed at home to look after her daughters and her husband. Not out of any sense of duty, but because that was what she had wanted to do.

‘Carol’s put you on a table with—’

‘Great-Aunt Alice. I know,’ Belle acknowledged, dutifully smiling at her father as he came over to join them.

Joy had opted for informal round tables for seating her wedding guests. Belle’s was in the middle of the room, commanding an excellent view of the other guests, but as she approached it her eyebrows lifted slightly in amused surprise as she saw Luc standing beside the chair next to her own—the chair which should have been occupied by Belle’s Great-Aunt Alice.

As she joined him, Belle cast a discreet look at the place-cards. They read ‘Mrs Isabelle Crawford’ and ‘Mr Lucius Crawford.’

‘Another demonstration of Aunt Alice’s handiwork,’ Belle murmured to Luc as the other guests sharing their table reacted to their joint presence with varying degrees of astonishment and confusion.

‘Well, let’s just say that she was certainly the inspiration for it,’ Luc responded in an amused undertone.

Her eyes brimming with laughter, Belle looked at Luc. ‘Where is Aunt Alice, by the way?’ she asked him.

‘Er…I was to have been seated with my godfather. …’

‘Admiral Rogers?’

‘Mmm…’

‘Well, I hope you aren’t going to regret your moment of Machiavellian interference with Joy’s table plan,’ Belle warned him, ‘because I’m certainly going to. People are going to think it very odd to see us seated together in apparent amity…’

‘Mmm… But after all, it isn’t as though this is the first time lately that we’ve shared a meal on… amicable terms…is it?’ Luc reminded her.

‘No,’ Belle agreed, shaking her head at him as a secret amused smile passed between them.

* * *

It had been late in the evening when Luc had eventually left. They’d talked, but by mutual agreement they’d avoided going too deep into painful areas on this occasion. He’d cooked them both a meal, and then insisted that the two glasses of red wine he had coaxed Belle to drink would be good for her and help build her up.

‘Red wine is good for you,’ he had insisted when she had raised her eyebrows.

‘And chocolates,’ she had semi-mocked him as she’d popped one of the delicious hand-made truffles that were her favourites into her mouth.

‘The Aztecs considered chocolate to be an aphrodisiac,’ he had continued blandly. ‘And I’ve certainly no reason to argue with that.’

Belle remembered how she had blushed—and why. Long, long before the current fad for chocolate body paint there had been a certain occasion when, as a result of a cosy winter evening spent in front of an open fire, Luc had insisted on licking away the remnants of the melted chocolate she had dropped first from her fingers and then from the vee of flesh exposed by her robe where it had fallen open.

The sizzling sensuality she had experienced beneath the lazy, deliberate brush of his tongue against her skin had driven her to a frenzy of need which had resulted in her punishing him for his slow, lingering tantalisation of her body and her senses with an equally intimate exploration of his body with her own fingers and lips.

After that, the gift of chocolates between them had possessed a special intimacy and meaning, although she had assumed when he produced them this evening that he must have forgotten this.

Now, as he looked from her mouth to her fingertips, and then back to her mouth again, Belle knew that whilst he might not have bought the chocolates to remind her of that occasion—why, after all, should he have done so?—she had been reminded of it, was being reminded of it, and extremely forcibly, by a body and a set of emotions which, no matter how strictly she had fought to control them, had never truly forgiven her for denying them, and certainly had never, ever forgotten just how intense and magical the sexual rapport between her and Luc had been.

Every day for a week after that Luc rang her to see how she was feeling.

By the third day she was back at work, unofficially, at least, working from home, her body tensing every time the telephone rang in case it was Luc calling and then, abruptly, seven days after his initial visit the calls ceased.

Belle couldn’t believe how bereft she felt, or how much she missed the sound of Luc’s voice, as warm and rich as dark melting chocolate, touching her senses and unleashing emotions, longings, needs, she had thought long ago safely banished.

By the end of the second day without a call from him she was reduced to virtually willing him to ring, snapping unforgivably at both her mother and her sister for telephoning her and not being him.

‘You need a holiday,’ her mother chided her. ‘You work far too hard, darling. Which reminds me. Your father and I were wondering if you could possibly manage to house-sit for us whilst we go away. Carol would do it, but with the wedding so close…’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll do it,’ Belle confirmed. She had been thinking for some time of relocating, moving herself and her business outside London. After all, her parents weren’t getting any younger. Her sister and the rest of her family were all based in Cambridgeshire, her roots were there, and certainly with the aid of modern technology she could easily work from there. Besides which…

Belle wasn’t sure when she had realised she was tired of opening her eyes in the morning and only being able to see a small patch of clear sky, or when she had first had that sharp yearning for the familiar flatness of the fens, the wideness of its skies. She just knew that her city life had somehow or other lost its appeal.

It was ironic to remember now how she had berated Luc, before they had found their pretty cottage, for refusing to transfer to the LSE so that

they could both be based in London.

‘I’m not a city person, Belle,’ he had told her quietly, looking at her. ‘I want our children to grow up in the same country environment that we both enjoyed.’

Their children… It had been on the tip of Belle’s tongue to remind him just how impossible it was for her to even think of taking time out to have one child, never mind children… But instead she had demanded tartly, ‘You’re running ahead a little, aren’t you, Luc? I can’t afford to finance a nanny as well as your studies.’

It was a comment that she had bitterly regretted once she had made it. It had shamed both of them, and she had hated herself for the look she had seen in his eyes, but the thought that Luc was already planning ahead for their family, when she felt under so much pressure at work, when she had so little time and so many responsibilities, had panicked her into lashing out verbally at him.

Now things were different. Now career women of her age, all too conscious of the fast ticking of their biological clocks, were choosing the option of children without even a permanent partner, never mind the burdens on their careers, rather than miss out on the maternal boat. She envied them the single-mindedness that enabled them to make such a decision. Perhaps her own deep-rooted belief that a child thrived best surrounded by the love of both its parents sprang from the nurturing she had received in her own very happy childhood.

But that hadn’t stopped her thinking sometimes that if she and Luc had had a child—children—it might have compelled them both to work a little harder at protecting their marriage. Or, conversely, it might have led to her being a single parent, struggling to bring up a child and manage her career as well.

She had surprised herself two years before when she’d discovered how easy it was to make the decision to downsize her business life, to leave behind the hectic life she had lived for so long and set up in business on her own, on a much smaller scale, with only a handful of carefully picked clients—clients who shared her own view that with wealth came a certain moral responsibility not to abuse those who did not possess such assets.