Cruel Legacy

Fiercely Sally blinked away her emotional tears, laughter dancing in her eyes in their place as she teased him, ‘What you mean is you don’t want to miss out on our afternoons in bed …’

‘Who said I was going to miss out on them?’ Joel teased back. ‘There’s always my lunch-hour … I like it when we have the house to ourselves and we don’t have to worry about the kids overhearing us … I like it when you make those soft little noises when I touch you and I love it when …’

‘You love it, full stop,’ Sally told him forthrightly, giving him a little push, but she was still laughing and she didn’t move away when he pulled her closer to him.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ she murmured, teasing him provocatively. ‘Get them to write a two-hour lunch-break into your contract and …’

‘Two hours … Mmm … what a wonderful idea …’

‘The second hour is so that you can catch up on the chores you won’t have time to do if you’re working full-time,’ Sally told him severely.

Sharing their domestic responsibilities as well as then-leisure time had become part of the new way they lived their lives, the new intimacy they had carefully and sometimes very painfully built for themselves.

‘What will you do about coming here, though?’ she asked him thoughtfully. Joel had become involved in the fund-raising for the new children’s ward and had agreed that he would help with the children’s water therapy.

‘Colin isn’t retiring until the end of the year, which would give me time to sort something out.’ She heard him groan as he told her, ‘Here come Daphne and Clifford.’

As she glanced over his shoulder Sally could see her sister, resplendent in a far too fussy and frilly silk floral dress. Daphne had started to put on weight recently and the dress strained slightly at the seams.

Sally’s own linen-mix chocolate-brown chainstore jacket, worn with a white T-shirt and a pair of tailored shorts, had been bought under Cathy’s sternly critical eye. Sally had balked a little at first at the shorts, until she had seen the look in Joel’s eyes when she’d modelled the outfit for him. ‘You’ve got the figure for it, Mum,’ Cathy had told her. ‘Hasn’t she, Dad?’ The look in Joel’s eyes had made Sally laugh and flush a little.

‘She hasn’t seen us yet … We’ve still got time to escape …’ Joel whispered, grinning.

Sally looked over at Daphne, her face flushed with irritation and heat, and then she looked back at Joel. Daphne was her sister … but Joel was her husband.

‘You’re on,’ she told him softly. ‘Let’s go …’

* * *

‘Thanks.’

The photographer from the local paper grinned his appreciation as Stephanie and Deborah broke their pose. It would make a good front-cover print for their headline story: the local female businesswoman who had donated to the hospital the new children’s water-therapy pool, standing side by side with her assistant, both of them attractive women … very attractive women. He turned his head to watch as they walked away from him, deep in conversation.

‘That should get us some good free publicity,’ Stephanie commented.

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nbsp; Deborah laughed. ‘Which of course was why you decided to give Mark a fit and donate the money in the first place …’

Her boss grinned back at her. ‘Well …’

‘You could have bought full-page space in all the glossies for less,’ Deborah pointed out to her, still smiling.

‘Mmm …’

Both of them looked towards the pool.

‘André says I’m getting soft in my old age,’ Stephanie said.

She and her French supplier, much to everyone’s surprise, but most especially to Stephanie’s, had married the previous year.

‘I don’t want to get married,’ she had wailed to Deborah on the morning of her wedding. ‘Why am I doing this … why are you letting me do this …?’

‘Because you love André and he’s told you that unless you make an honest man out of him he’s going to leave,’ Deborah had told her forthrightly.

‘You realise that Mark was threatening to get you to sack me for letting you do this, don’t you?’ Deborah pointed out severely to her now.

‘Sack you? No way. Taking you on was the best decision I ever made … correction—the best decision Mark ever made … Where is he, by the way …?’