Penny Jordan - Wedding Nights

Brad, who was still watching her, wondered what it was that had suddenly made her look so haunted.

Despite the obvious tension it was causing between them, he couldn’t bring himself to regret totally what had happened at their first meeting, but the passionately vibrant woman she had been then seemed curiously at odds with the woman she appeared to be now—a woman who seemed quite content passively to accept her role as a very poor second best to her husband’s first wife.

She was such an obviously sensual and loving woman that he couldn’t imagine how she could ever have been happy with a man who, from what he had heard about him, could not possibly have met and satisfied her emotional needs—or her physical ones either.

He frowned, angry with himself for the probing intimacy of his thoughts.

But he had seen for himself how warm and womanly she was, both with the children and with Tim, her gentle smile taking the edge off Irene’s almost acerbic comments to her husband.

It was, perhaps, no wonder that Tim should choose to spend so much of his free time helping Claire with her gardening.

His frown deepened as he wondered if the relationship between them was as innocent as it had first seemed.

There had been nothing so far in Irene’s manner towards either her husband or her sister-in-law to suggest that she suspected anything, but she was being remarkably insistent that Claire’s home was the perfect place for him to lodge. Why? Because she felt that a third party living there would put a stop to any untoward intimacy between her husband and Claire?

If Claire was having a relationship with Tim, that would explain her shocked reaction to her brief response to his kiss—and the anger he had sensed in her both at dinner and again now.

He frowned again, unwilling to delve too deeply into why he should feel almost a personal sense of disappointment and loss at the thought of her being involved with another man.

What was really bugging him? The thought that his own judgement was at fault, that his first impression of her as a warm, open and very loving woman was wrong, or was it something more than mere pique at the possibility of having misjudged her?

What was Brad thinking about? Claire wondered as she saw the way he frowned. Did he, perhaps, not care for the house, or was it her he didn’t like?

‘If you’d like to follow me …’ she told him, determined to sound businesslike and in control.

As he followed her up the stairs and along the landing Brad acknowledged that there was something about Claire that he found profoundly compelling; there was such a dramatic contrast between the warm, emotional woman who had flown at him with such fury to protect the feelings of her young charges and the cool, hostile person he was seeing now.

Claire had stopped outside one of the bedroom doors and was waiting for him to join her. Irene and Hannah had both come with them and Irene frowned as she saw which door Claire had opened.

‘But that’s your bedroom—yours and John’s,’ she protested. ‘I thought you were going to give Brad Sally’s bedroom.’

‘This is larger and more … more suitable,’ Claire told Irene quietly.

‘But where will you sleep …?’ Irene demanded.

‘I—’

‘Look, the last thing I want is to deprive you of your bedroom …’ Brad began.

But Claire shook her head quickly, her face flushing slightly as she told him, ‘I … I had already decided to … to move to another bedroom. This one … John’s … John’s and mine,’ she amended quickly, ‘is too … The decor is much more suitable for a man. It has an ensuite bathroom and there’s already a desk in the dressing room. John sometimes worked in there himself … I—’

‘You’ve moved out of your own bedroom?’ Irene was persisting, apparently oblivious to Claire’s lack of enthusiasm for pursuing the subject. She looked, Brad decided, rather like a guilty schoolgirl caught out in some forbidden act.

Why? Why shouldn’t she change bedroom if she wished? It was, after all, her home … her house. He remembered the look in her eyes as she had talked about her late husband’s love for his first wife, the woman whose “home” it had actually been.

‘I was thinking of having it redecorated. It’s never been my favourite room, and—’

‘But it’s the master bedroom,’ Irene protested.

‘Yes,’ Claire agreed with a quiet irony in her voice which was obviously lost on Irene but which Brad picked up on. So she was passionate and quick-witted too—a dangerously alluring combination in a woman—or so he had always felt.

The room was a good size, he acknowledged as he stepped into it, with what looked like plenty of solidly built dark wood closet space and a generously proportioned, sensibly constructed bed. As he studied it Brad let out a small sigh of relief. British standard-sized double beds did not easily accommodate a man used to the luxury of an American king-size, as he had already discovered. This bed was the only one he had seen in Britain so far that came anywhere near the spacious comfort of his own at home, even if it was a little on the high side.

As he cast his eye appreciatively and approvingly over the immaculate percale bedlinen, he acknowledged that it would be hard for him to find anything to surpass the comfort that such a bed promised. From behind him he could hear Irene saying almost accusingly to Claire, ‘You’ve changed the bedding …’

He could sense from Claire’s response that Irene’s comment had embarrassed her and guessed that the new bedlinen had been bought specifically for him. She really was the most extraordinarily sensitive woman, he thought as she showed him through to the well-planned bathroom with its large bath and separate shower.

The dressing room was small, but plenty large enough for the desk and chair already installed in it, and as she waited for him to rejoin her on the landing he admitted to himself that in terms of comfort and convenience it wouldn’t be easy to match the facilities of this house.

From the bedroom window he could see out into the garden. Long and wide, it was split into a series of areas by a variety of cleverly intermingled structures and plantings, and a rueful smile curled his mouth as he espied the smallest of the enclosed gardens with its swing and scuffed grass.

There was an area of equally stubborn baldness on his own lawn back home. When he had threatened to have the swing removed and the area reseeded the previous fall, the whole family had been up in arms, protesting against the removal of one of their sacred childhood haunts. The house was far too large for him now, of course. He really ought to sell it …

Outside on the landing Claire could feel her face start to flush defensively as Irene reiterated, ‘Claire, I thought you were going to give him Sally’s old room …’

‘I … I didn’t think it would be very suitable. The decor is so very feminine,’ Claire told her, unwilling to admit that she had not wanted her stepdaughter to return from her honeymoon to find that someone else had taken over her old bedroom.

Sensitively she wanted Sally to be able to feel that the house was still her home, that her room was still her own and that she could return to it whenever she wished. Not that she anticipated that Sally would ever do so—nor did she want her to: her place, her home now was with her new husband.

‘But to move out of your own bedroom …’ Irene protested.

‘It isn’t my room,’ Claire told her. ‘It was John’s room—our room,’ she amended hurriedly as she saw Brad walking towards them. How could she explain to Irene—to anyone—how, after John had died, instead of finding comfort in remaining in the room—the bed—that they had shared during their marriage she had found it … empty and that she much preferred the smaller, prettier, warmer guest room that she had now appropriated as her own?