Sinful Nights: The Six-Month Marriage/Injured Innocent/Loving

Heather had bought her body lotion and talc to go with Lucy’s soap and bath oil. Overcome with emotion, Claire held out her arms to both of them, hugging them tightly. Lucy, as always, was the first to break free.

‘Daddy hasn’t opened his present yet,’ she said severely.

‘Something tells me that Father Christmas has been extremely active on my behalf this year,’ drawled Jay, looking at Claire. It was true that she had found several small things to add to her original present, and then of course there was the girls’ contribution. They had bought him a leather wallet from their combined savings, and on impulse Claire had taken them both to have their photographs taken wearing their new velvet dresses.

In addition to the large photograph which she had had framed and which was now waiting to be unwrapped amongst his other presents, were two individual small ones, just the right size to go in his wallet.

She held her breath as he opened their present, but she needn’t have worried; his reaction was everything that was necessary to delight both girls.

It took another hour for them to fight the way through the rest of their presents, while Claire tidied up and collected the discarded wrappings.

She had kept back the filing system she had bought for Jay until last. He had already opened the Roger and Gallet toilet water she had bought him and unwrapped the navy jacquard sweater with its design in olive and maroon, and she held her breath as he now unwrapped her last gift.

For a moment the expression on his face confused her. He looked so strange that she wondered if she had somehow angered him.

‘If you don’t like it …’ she began, tentatively, but he shook his head.

‘I love it,’ he said simply. ‘Come here.’

She got up unsteadily, wondering what it was he wanted. Was he perhaps going to kiss her, the way he had done the girls? Her heart thudded shakily at the prospect, but when she reached him, although he took hold of her hand, it was just to tug her down beside him.

‘Here’s my present to you,’ he said softly, handing her a long rectangular parcel.

Claire frowned. She had already received several presents from him, including one of perfume, and an American cookery book, that a brief glance had told her she was going to enjoy. There had also been a much coveted decorators’ directory she had glimpsed in the window of an exclusive book shop in Bath, and, rather surprisingly, a silky camisole in softest peach, lavishly trimmed with lace.

‘Open it!’ demanded Lucy impatiently.

All they had left to open were their large presents, hidden behind the tree, and so, bemusedly, Claire started to unwrap her gift. Inside the paper was a dark leather-covered jewellers’ box edged in gold. Claire felt her stomach clench in shock as she fumbled with the fastening and got it open. On the bed of dark velvet lay a necklet of milky pearls, supporting a heart-shaped emerald surrounded by diamonds. It was the m

ost exquisite thing she had ever seen, and she touched it tentatively, too stunned for words.

‘Jay … it’s …’ She looked up at him and swallowed. ‘You shouldn’t have bought me this! It must have cost a fortune!’

‘The emerald reminded me of you,’ he said quietly. ‘Cool, and as clear and honest as a mountain spring that refreshes and revives. Beautiful and rare.’ He saw she was abut to interrupt and said softly, ‘You are all those things to me, Claire, and if it had cost ten times what it did, it still wouldn’t be adequate recompense for all that you’ve done.’

Recompense. She tasted the word and found it bitter. She didn’t want to be recompensed. She wanted … she wanted to be loved, she realised shockingly, unaware that her face had lost all its colour, or that her eyes had a blind terror in their depths.

She heard Jay’s sharply indrawn breath, but didn’t connect it with her own reaction to his gift, and then Lucy was saying excitedly, ‘Aren’t you going to kiss him, Mummy?’ And somehow, reacting automatically, she was touching her cold lips to his warm skin, and feeling his sharp recoil with a pain that hurt so much, she couldn’t believe she had ever thought she had known pain before.

It was a relief to escape to the kitchen to see to the lunch. Jay took the girls outside on their new sledge, while she worked like an automaton, wondering why it was that she should be condemned to loving a man who could give her only gratitude. And he wouldn’t even want to give her that, if he knew the truth. In that moment she knew that she must conceal for ever how she felt about him. If she didn’t … if she didn’t their marriage would be a nightmare. He wouldn’t divorce her for the girls’ sake, but if she told him how she felt she would lose his friendship, lose those precious confidences he gave her, those evenings together when he talked to her about his work, when she felt as though they met as equals. She would lose all that, without any hope of ever gaining what she really wanted. And what did she want? For him to love her, yes, but how—in the way that he loved the girls, or in the way that he had loved his first wife?

Did she want his tenderness or his passion? She didn’t know, she had only known in that blinding moment of revelation that she loved him totally.

CHAPTER NINE

‘WELL, HERE WE ARE, LADIES—Dallas!’

The faint air of constraint that had sprung up between them after Christmas Day still lingered, despite her forcedly cheerful attempts to dispel it and appear normal, and Claire couldn’t help noticing how careful Jay was not to touch her as they disembarked from the plane that had brought them from Heathrow.

She didn’t think Jay had actually guessed how she felt about him, but she knew that he sensed something. She often found him watching her in an assessing, almost withdrawn way. Assessing and finding wanting, perhaps? A cold fear dug icy fingers into the pit of her stomach.

‘Are you all right?’ he queried.

‘Just getting used to feeling firm ground underneath my feet again.’

The Goldbergs had sent a chauffeur-driven car to pick them up, and as they drove from the airport and through the city itself Jay pointed out several landmarks to them. It was the flatness of the countryside and the expected and yet awesome vastness of everything that she noticed most, Claire thought as she listened to the girls’ excited chatter.

She knew that the Goldbergs owned a house on the outskirts of Dallas and that it was here that Jay’s firm had done the work which had won them the contract for John Goldberg’s prestigious building developments.