Mistress by Agreement

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘SO WHEN are you seeing him again?’

It was the following night, and, lo and behold, Beth had turned up on Rosalie’s doorstep as soon as she’d got in from work. Her aunt had apparently come into town to do a spot of shopping—believe that, believe anything, Rosalie thought irritably. As soon as she’d answered the door to Beth the one and only topic of conversation had been a tall, dark American, and it was clear Beth had been completely bowled over.

‘I told you, I don’t know.’ The two women were sitting having a relaxing glass of wine whilst they waited for the pizza Rosalie had ordered to be delivered, or at least it would have been relaxing but for Beth’s one-track mind.

‘But you are going out together, officially, I mean? It’s not one of these horrible modern arrangements where each party is free to do this, that or the other?’ Beth asked anxiously.

‘Beth—’

‘Oh, it’s not! Tell me it’s not, Lee.’

‘I can’t get a word in edgeways to tell you anything.’ Rosalie softened the words with a smile, but inwardly she was wondering how on earth to explain her relationship with Kingsley to Beth, when she didn’t know if she was on foot or horseback herself. ‘I told you how we met and that I’m doing the quantity surveying for Ward Enterprises,’ she said carefully, ‘and we’ve agreed to date a little when he’s in England and see how it goes from there.’ And it would go absolutely nowhere.

‘So he’s not going out with anyone in the States in the meantime?’ Beth leant forward, her eyes on Rosalie’s face.

Good question. ‘I assume not,’ Rosalie said even more carefully. But who knew with a man like Kingsley Ward?

Beth wriggled a little, the way she did when she wasn’t totally satisfied about something. ‘Lee, he’s absolutely gorgeous, the most divine man since…since—’ words evidently couldn’t adequately express Kingsley’s divinity ‘—since ever, and you haven’t even set up ground rules?’ Beth wailed.

‘It’s not like that.’

‘It never will be like that with a man as sexy as him if you don’t insist on it being so,’ Beth said anxiously.

‘I’m not sure I want a relationship with Kingsley.’ There, she’d said it, and now she waited for the storm to burst over her head as she stared straight at her aunt.

Surprisingly Beth just slumped back in her seat before reaching across and pouring herself another glass of wine, drinking half of it before she sighed, long and loudly. ‘It’s him, swine face, isn’t it?’ Swine face had been Beth’s nickname for Miles since the divorce. ‘You aren’t still thinking about him, are you? In any fond way, I mean?’

Funny how she had been asked that twice in as many days. ‘Memories softened by time and made sentimental?’ Rosalie asked evenly. ‘Beth, that just doesn’t apply where he was concerned.’

Beth leant forward. ‘It’s probably the wine talking on an empty stomach,’ she said earnestly, ‘

but has whatever went on between you and Miles put you off trying with someone else, Lee? Because if it has, don’t let it. Not now, not with Kingsley. Men like him come along once in a blue moon.’

Rosalie hesitated, and then she said, very quietly, ‘Marriage to Miles was a living nightmare, Beth. You don’t know the half.’ She took a big gulp of the wine.

‘Oh, Lee.’ Beth gazed at her, her plump, pretty face tragic.

Rosalie took a deep breath. ‘I know the family don’t like to talk about my mother and father, but compared to Miles my father was positively normal.’

Beth stared at her. ‘It’s not that we, me and George, don’t want to talk about your parents, but we thought you didn’t want to. You never have.’

‘Because it was always an absolute taboo. I thought you were all too ashamed of what had happened.’

‘No, no.’ Beth was clearly horrified. ‘But Mum and Dad, all of us, weren’t sure of how much you actually saw and what you remembered, you were only a little dot after all, and Mum thought if we didn’t harp on you’d get over everything quicker.’

‘Oh, Beth.’ Rosalie shook her head slowly, and then as she began to talk it all came out. All the doubts and fears and shame and guilt that had been shut away in her head for so many years, and the more she talked, the more Beth responded until the pair of them were crying on each other. But the tears were healthy and cleansing.

‘Your father adored you, Lee,’ Beth said at one point. ‘Never think otherwise. We all used to say how strange it was that he was never jealous of you in spite of the way your mother loved you, whereas the rest of us… We had a job to get over the threshold. But he looked on you as an extension of himself and your mother, I think. That was the thing.’

Rosalie felt like a great weight had been lifted off her shoulders. ‘What made you mention your mum and dad like that tonight anyway?’ Beth asked suddenly.

Now it was Rosalie’s turn to wriggle a little. ‘I was talking to Kingsley about them at the weekend,’ she admitted.

‘Ah, yes, Kingsley. Where had we got to on that subject?’ Beth said immediately, homing in with the single-mindedness that often caused her offspring to turn tail and run.

‘Leave it, Beth.’ Rosalie eyed her aunt warningly.