PENNY JORDAN - Wedding Nights - Woman to Wed?

‘Lovers?’ Claire repeated in astonishment.

But before she could continue Brad was demanding angrily, ‘When did it start? After your husband’s death …? Before it?’

An affair! Brad thought she was having an affair with Tim.

‘OK, I can understand that your … marriage may not have … satisfied you, but hell … surely a woman like you could have found a man who was free to have a relationship and not one …’

Claire stared at him in shocked disbelief. ‘You have no right to make those kinds of assumptions about me,’ she told him stiffly. ‘You know nothing about me … or about my marriage.’

Even though she would rather have died than admit it to him, his comment about her marriage had hit a painful nerve, but not for the reason that he imagined.

‘I would never have an affair,’ she told him with passionate sincerity. ‘Never … I couldn’t.’

The vehemence in her voice fuelled Brad’s fury. How could she deny it when he had seen the evidence with his own eyes, heard it with his own ears? And if she had to have an affair with someone, surely she could have found someone more … more worthy than her poor, downtrodden brother-in-law?

‘“Couldn’t”?’ he challenged her contemptuously. ‘Oh, come on. You’re an adult, mature woman; you’ve been married … Your body knows how it feels to experience sexual desire, sexual fulfilment … sexual need; you must—’

‘No,’ Claire protested frantically. ‘No, that’s impossible; I could never … I have never …’

Something in her voice, in her face made Brad pause and look searchingly at her. She looked haunted, her eyes shadowed, her voice shamed … bruised.

‘What is it?’ he asked her. ‘What is it you’re trying to say?’

‘Nothing,’ Claire denied rigidly, starting to turn away from him.

But he reached out and caught hold of her arm, preventing her, telling her, ‘No, you can’t leave it like that. You could never … have never … what?’ he pressed.

He could feel the slight tremor that she tried to suppress run down her arm as she refused to look at him.

It was no use, Claire acknowledged fatalistically. Brad wasn’t going to give up until she had told him the truth. She closed her eyes, fighting back the engulfing wave of panic that threatened her. How on earth had this happened? How on earth had she got herself in such a situation, betrayed herself to such an extent?

As a child she had learned that the easiest way to deal with her aunt’s displeasure whenever she provoked it was simply to take a deep breath and submit to it, rather like taking a nasty dose of medicine all in one big swallow, so that she could get the whole thing over and done with.

‘I could never take a lover, have never had a lover,’ she emphasised with quiet dignity, fiercely ignoring her voice’s struggle not to wobble and the fact that she knew that her face, her whole body in fact, was burning with humiliated colour as she made herself admit the shameful truth to him—not that he had any right to demand it or any right to make her reveal it …

‘John … our marriage … John married me because he wanted a stepmother for Sally. I knew … he told me … that he could never love anyone the way he had loved Paula, but that for Sally’s sake he felt that he ought to provide her with a substitute mother.’

‘And you were happy with that … you accepted that?’ Brad persisted. There was something here that he didn’t understand. Had she, perhaps, been so desperately in love with her husband that she had hoped that he would change his mind … that he would fall in love with her? His heart ached with pity for her, and anger as well.

‘Yes,’ Claire confirmed.

‘But why?’ Brad probed. ‘Why? Why marry a man who you knew did not love you? A man who could never be a proper husband to you … never give you children … never share with you the pleasure of sexual fulfilment and commitment, the emotional …’ He paused as he saw the way she shuddered at his mention of her lack of sexual fulfilment.

‘What is it?’ he asked her curiously. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I didn’t mind the fact that John only wanted me as a stepmother for Sally because I didn’t want to have a sexual relationship with him … or with anyone,’ she told him doggedly.

For a long moment they looked at one another.

‘You didn’t want a sexual relationship … with anyone,’ Brad repeated.

Something here was eluding him. There had been no sexual revulsion or rejection in her reaction to him when … Shock, yes … anger too. Shock, anger and arousal. He listed them carefully in his mind a second and then a third time just to be sure that he was not making a mistake and letting his own emotions and responses obscure hers.

He looked away from her and started to release her arm, too stunned by what she had said to know what to say or do, and then he looked briefly back at her and saw that her eyes were brimming with huge tears which she was struggling desperately to control.

‘Oh, hell, come here,’ he muttered roughly under his breath, reacting instinctively to her distress, reaching for her and wrapping her in his arms in a fiercely protective hug, rocking her against his body as he held her tight with one arm and smoothed the silky fineness of her hair with the other and tried to comfort her.

‘It’s OK … It’s OK,’ he told her gruffly. ‘I’m sorry as hell that I upset you. I didn’t … What I said was out of line.

‘Talk to me, Claire,’ he groaned as he felt her body tensing under her attempts to stifle her sobs. ‘Talk to me … Let it all out … Tell me what it’s all about.’

‘I can’t,’ Claire sobbed. ‘I can’t …’

‘Yes, you can … Of course you can … Whatever it is you can tell me …’ Brad crooned the words in much the same way as he had once crooned similar reassurances to his brothers and sisters, comforting them through their childhood woes. Only Claire wasn’t a child, and she certainly wasn’t one of his siblings; his body was telling him that much.

Claire, thank the Lord, was too caught up in her own emotions to be aware of his arousal.

‘Tell me,’ he insisted, and then added with a smile, ‘I shan’t let you go until you do.’

‘There was a man,’ Claire told him reluctantly. ‘Another graduate. Three of us were sharing a rented house. It was my first time away from home … I … I suppose I was very naïve … My great-aunt was very strict; I … I didn’t have very much experience, didn’t know …

‘He … he came to my room. He said the gas in his own meter had run out and he had no money to replenish it. He asked if he could study with me … He offered to make our supper … I … I had just had a bath … Our rooms were very cold and I was wearing my … my nightdress and my dressing gown … I didn’t know … I didn’t think.

‘I … I went over to my bookshelves to get a book I needed. He followed me over. He was standing behind me … He put his arms round me …’ Claire moistened her upper lip, her eyes darkening as she relived what had happened.

‘At first I was too surprised to realise … I thought … I asked him to let me go but he wouldn’t; he just laughed. He started … he started …’ She stopped and swallowed painfully.

‘He started to kiss the side of my neck.’ She gave a small shudder. ‘I didn’t want him to … I tried to move away but he wouldn’t let me go. He started pulling at my dressing gown and …’ Her voice faltered to a standstill.

Brad’s arm tightened slightly around her. ‘It’s OK. Take your time,’ he told her softly.

‘I … Well, I’m sure you can guess the rest. He thought that by agreeing to him coming in I was … I was agreeing to have sex with him. He was furious with me when I refused—told me … called me … I … I thought he was going to force me … rape me …