A Forbidden Loving

COLLECTOR’S EDITION

Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

HAZEL glanced nervously at the clock. Only another half-hour or so and they should be here. A pretty, dark-haired woman of thirty-six, she tried to hide her irritation as best she could when well-meaning people described her as ‘petite’ and exclaimed that she looked far too young to be her claimed age of thirty-six, never mind the mother of an almost-nineteen-year-old daughter into the bargain.

But that was exactly what she was, and it was as the mother of that very pretty, intelligent and popular nineteen-year-old that she was fretting anxiously about the arrangements she had made for Katie’s first proper visit home since she had left for university at the end of the summer.

It had been all very well to gulp, hold her breath and exclaim as calmly as she could that there would be no problem when Katie had rung up three days ago and announced breezily that when she came home for the weekend she would not be alone, but would be bringing a friend with her. After all, she had had nineteen years in which to get used to the fact that Katie was an inveterate people collector, but what she hadn’t expected was for Katie to continue excitedly, ‘I know you’re going to like Silas, Ma. He’s a very special person and I can’t wait for the two of you to meet.’

Her heart had plummeted immediately Katie had finished speaking, and, although she had successfully managed to hide it from her daughter, she had been overwhelmed by a sharp sense of fear.

And yet Katie had had boyfriends before, of course; several of them in fact; gangly, sometimes spotty young men, who blushed and stammered, or adopted an unwittingly touching and amusing male machismo which sat very uncomfortably on their as yet still boyish shoulders. But this time it was different. This time … This time she felt all the apprehension and alarm of a mother who felt that her child was threatened in some way.

She had sensed just from the way Katie spoke his name that this Silas was important to her. Too important … She gave a tiny shiver, frowning unseeingly around her small sitting-room.

She could never really understand those women who claimed that their teenage daughters were their best friends. She felt far too great a sense of responsibility and awareness of life’s cruelties and un-kindnesses ever to relax her maternal vigilance enough to make that claim.

She hoped she wasn’t a possessive mother. All through Katie’s growing years she had worked hard at making sure that Katie never became distanced from her peers or from other adults, or suffered the kind of aloneness and isolation which she had suffered as a child.

The trouble was that Katie had been so vague about this Silas Jardine, and she had not liked to question her too deeply. All she knew about him was that Katie had met him at the university and that she was sure that he and her mother were going to get on like a house on fire. It sounded very ominous to Hazel. She had been all too maternally aware that, behind her insouciance and bright chatter, Katie was hiding something.

Biting her bottom lip, Hazel checked round the sitting-room again.

A warm fire burned in the grate, and logs were heaped up in the basket beside the fire, logs which had been supplied by Tom Rawlins from the farm, about whom Katie was always teasing her by describing him as her adoring swain.

It was true that she and Tom occasionally went out for a meal or to see a show. He was a widower with two grown-up children; she was … Well, she was the mother of an almost grown-up daughter and it was only natural that they should have things in common. But that was as far as any relationship between them went.

Fortunately Tom was far too gentlemanly to make the kind of sexual demands she so dreaded and detested receiving.

It had shocked her three years ago, when Katie had coolly announced that it was high time that her mother stopped behaving as though she ought to be punished and despised simply because she had given birth to an illegitimate child, and started feeling proud of herself instead for all that she had done for that child.

‘Ma, every time a man looks at you, you shrink visibly. You’re a very attractive woman. Everyone says so, and I for one certainly wouldn’t object if you decided to provide me with a stepfather, providing of course that I liked him.’

‘Well, for your information, I have no intentions of doing any such thing,’ Hazel had retaliated sharply.

‘Why not? You should think about it,’ Katie had told her smartly, adding critically, ‘Just look at you. As long as I can remember it’s just been you, and me, and of course Gramps. I know it must have been awful for you, losing Dad like that in such an awful accident and then finding out about me. But I don’t see why just because of that you’ve got to spend the rest of your life hiding away from men. You can’t get pregnant just by smiling at them, you know,’ she had added with typical teenage scorn. ‘You can’t want to spend the rest of your life alone. With Gramps gone …’

‘It’s all right,’ Hazel had told her shakily but drily. ‘If you’re worried about having a geriatric parent on your hands cramping your style, I assure you that you need not be.’

That had made Katie laugh and the subject had been dropped, but Katie had resurrected it with uncomfortable frequency as the time drew nearer for her to leave home and go to university.

‘You’re so young, Ma,’ she had expostulated more than once. ‘Men fancy you. I’ve seen the way they look at you, but you … Well, you behave like—like a shrinking virgin.’

When Hazel had flushed and protested, Katie had grimaced and added, ‘Look at yourself now and you’ll see what I mean. Anyone would think you were totally sexually inexperienced, like … like a nun or something.’

‘Katie,’ she had protested crossly, for once silencing her ebullient offspring, but later, alone in her bedroom, staring out of the window at the pretty Cheshire countryside which gave her so much inspiration for her work as an illustrator of children’s books, she had been forced to concede that Katie had a point. She did tend to shrink away from unknown men. She was shy and rather withdrawn, unlike Katie, who, thank goodness, seemed to have much, much more self-confidence.

And as for her sexual experience … Remembering this last conversation with her daughter now, Hazel sighed to herself, automatically plumping up one of the pretty needlepoint cushions she had worked the previous winter, and settling it back on the old-fashioned brocade-covered chair, which had been her father’s.

Even now after five years it still seemed odd to her to look at the chair and see it empty.

The stroke which had semi-paralysed her father four years after they had moved north from London had meant that in the last years of his life he had needed her in almost constant attendance. It had seemed a small enough way of repaying everything he had done for her and Katie.

Left alone with a four-day-old daughter at the age of forty-two, he couldn’t have found it easy to bring her up alone. His wife, her mother, had died following complications with the birth. As he had once explained uncomfortably to her, neither he nor her mother had ever expected to have a child. They had married late in life, and her arrival had come as something of a shock.

Nevertheless he had loved her and done his best for her. His practice as a solicitor had demanded a great deal of his time, but he had been scrupulous about spending weekends with her, and a conscientious if somewhat over-protective housekeeper had been hired to take charge of the old Victorian house where she had grown up, and of her.

She had had a very protected and sheltered growing-up; a very lonely and isolated one in many ways, attending a very small girls’ school from which she was picked up every day by Mrs Meadows, so that she was not given much opportunity to mingle with the other girls and make the friendships which might have drawn her out of her shell.

And then when she was sixteen she had met Jimmy.

He went to a nearby boys’ school. He almost ran her down on his bicycle, and their friendship developed from there.

Jimmy was as ebullient and outward-going as she was shy and introverted, which was no doubt where Katie got her lovely laughing personality from.

Hazel adored and worshipped him, blindly following his lead in everything he suggested.

He wasn’t a cruel or unkind boy; far from it, but he had a resilience which she lacked, and he was far, far too young to have the wisdom to look into the future and see the risks they were taking.

Looking back now, it seemed difficult for her to understand how at sixteen she could ever have believed she had fallen in love. With hindsight, she suspected that in Jimmy she had believed she had found the answer to her loneliness and that he was in many ways the friend, the brother, almost in fact the mother, she had never had.

Jimmy knew everything and everyone … Jimmy opened her eyes to so many things about life. Jimmy encouraged her to take advantage of her father’s preoccupation with his work, to meet him illicitly in the evening … to spend long hours with him in the bedroom of the home he shared with his parents and brothers and sister.

The Garners were a large and very casual family. Ann Garner was an actress, Tony Garner a director; they were seldom at home, their five children left to the casual and careless discipline of a transient population of au pairs and relatives.

Ann Garner smiled at her in a preoccupied and busy fashion whenever she saw her in the house, but Hazel doubted if she even knew her name in those days and she was certainly not the kind of mother to make strenuous and exhaustive enquiries into her children’s friendships. She was there, and she was accepted, and that was all there was to it.

But there was no point in trying to shift the blame, the responsibility on to Ann Garner’s shoulders.

Hazel might have been naïve, she might have been stupid, but she did know what she was doing, did know the risks she was taking.

The first time Jimmy touched her, kissed her, she had been shocked—had withdrawn from him. She wasn’t used to any kind of physical intimacy from others. Her father simply wasn’t that kind of man, and Mrs Meadows had never encouraged what she termed ‘soppiness’.

So she withdrew from him and Jimmy let her, watching her with curious, amused eyes. He was only twelve months older than her, but, in his knowledge of life, twenty years older.

‘What’s the matter? Don’t you like it when I kiss you?’ he asked her cheerfully.

She shook her head, flushing.

‘That’s because you don’t know how to do it properly,’ he told her with male assurance. ‘You’ll soon get to like it.’

And she soon did. She also liked the sensation of being physically close to him, of being held in his arms; of having someone special of her own in a way that her father and Mrs Meadows could never truly be hers.

The truth was that Jimmy filled a need in her life, healed a wound … gave her a special sense of identity and importance that made it impossible for her to think of refusing him anything. Even when that anything was the one thing she knew she ought to refuse.

But he was so tender, so coaxing. And even if, afterwards, she was forced to admit to herself that the experience had been more uncomfortable and embarrassing than anything else, at least she had the joy of knowing that she had pleased him. She knew that because he had told her so, kissing her with almost clumsy tenderness as he helped her to dress afterwards, and then taking her home on the new motorbike which he had bought himself with his birthday money.

His parents had been away for his birthday, his mother touring in the first run of a new play, his father directing a TV movie in Greece, but they had both sent him cards, and there had been a generous cheque to go into his bank account.

That cheque had bought the motorbike of which he was so proud. A huge, powerful thing which privately Hazel didn’t like, but which she was far too loyal to criticise. Jimmy loved the bike; she loved him; therefore the bike was wonderful.

As he dropped her off outside her house that Saturday afternoon, he teased her by dropping a quick kiss on her lips before she could turn her head to look anxiously towards the house, terrified that her father might have seen them.

Jimmy was vastly amused by this fear of hers that her father might see them together.

‘What if he does?’ he asked her, genuinely curious. ‘Does it matter? Has he forbidden you to go out with me?’

She was forced to shake her head. Boys and whether she might or might not go out with them was simply a subject that could not be raised with her father. The thought of her even beginning to do so made her quail, and yet her father was not overly strict, and was certainly not unkind. Just the opposite; he was gentle, if somewhat remote. So why did she feel it was so impossible to tell him about Jimmy? She had no real idea—she just knew that it was, just knew with instinctive feminine wisdom that, to her father, she was still very much a little girl and that that was how he wished her to stay.

Even though he had promised to telephone her, she didn’t hear from Jimmy that evening, nor all of the next day, and it wasn’t until she was back at school on Monday that she heard the gossip running round the playground.

Jimmy was dead … Killed in an accident when he had lost control of the new motorbike of which he was so proud. His sister wasn’t at school.

A note had been sent to the headmistress hurriedly explaining the facts. Jimmy’s parents had been sent for … Everyone who ought to know what had happened had been informed—apart from her.

Somehow or other she made it through the day, going home to be violently sick in her bathroom, unable to take in what had happened … unable to accept that she would never see Jimmy again.

She didn’t go to the funeral—didn’t feel able to intrude on the family in their grief, even though she visited the cemetery the following day herself to lay a small floral tribute there and to say a special prayer for him.

It wasn’t until almost four months after Jimmy’s death that she realised she was pregnant and even then it had taken someone else, one of the teachers at school, to gently question her and elicit the truth.

To their credit, both families took the news of her pregnancy very well, and when she announced that she wanted to keep her baby, Jimmy’s baby, there were no attempts at forcing her to do otherwise.

Even so, despite his kindness and concern, she was sensitively aware that she had shocked her father, and guiltily she felt that she had somehow let him down; that her behaviour had not been what he had expected in his daughter.

Her guilt was intensified when, within a month of Katie’s birth, he announced that he was selling his practice and retiring and that the three of them would be moving away from London.

Despite the fact that he never once reproached her, even despite the fact that he had already told her that she was still his daughter and that her place and her child’s would still be under his roof, she knew intuitively that it was because he felt embarrassed and let down in having an illegitimate grandchild that he felt compelled to make these changes in their lives.

But she was still barely seventeen, and a very young seventeen at that, far too young to even think of leaving home and living by herself even if she had the means to do so.

There could be no question of her continuing at school, of course, and once Katie was born she had no real desire to do so. Her little daughter became the focus of her whole world.

When Mrs Meadows, outraged to learn that she was pregnant, had handed in her notice, she had taken over the running of the house, surprised to discover how much she had learned from the older woman, who had not been above insisting that she helped her out with the chores. The housekeeper, before she had left, had told Hazel in no uncertain terms how fortunate she was in having so kind and generous a father.

Phrases such as ‘if you had been my child’, and ‘your father, poor man, I don’t know how he can bear the disgrace’, had been freely bandied about and after Mrs Meadows had gone Hazel had sworn passionately to herself that from now on she would do everything she could to make amends to her father for all the pain she was causing him.

Quite why her father chose to move to Cheshire, he never actually explained, but Hazel was beyond caring where they went.

As it happened, she liked the quiet Cheshire village with its pretty fields and distant views of Alderley Edge and the Welsh hills, but when her father suggested rather awkwardly that she might prefer to pretend to people that she and Jimmy had actually been married, she uncomfortably shook her head.

Not even to please her father could she live that sort of a lie. She knew now that there would always be those who would condemn and vilify her for Katie’s birth, just as there would always be those who would reach out to her with understanding and compassion, generously accepting that Katie’s conception had been a pitiful accident rather than the result of a depraved lifestyle.

But it wasn’t until Katie was just five years old that she fully realised just how sensitive her father was about her unmarried state.

Since it was something he never referred to, she had hoped that he, like herself, had come to accept that, while Katie’s conception was not the best thing that could have happened to a sixteen-year-old, Katie herself was a beloved bonus who more than made up for her mother’s disgrace in conceiving her. But one afternoon, when she was collecting Katie from school, she fell into conversation with another parent who was also collecting his child.

Robert Bolton was an outwardly pleasant man, a few years older than she was herself, whom she understood to be divorced from his wife, and who had custody of two young sons.

The thought that he might possibly misconstrue their few moments of idle conversation outside the school gates never even crossed Hazel’s mind, never mind the thought that, because of her unmarried state, because Katie was illegitimate, he might jump to the assumption that, having already had one lover, she might welcome another.

But when he turned up at the house and asked her out, her father was so disapproving and so upset that even though she had no intention of accepting the invitation she felt compelled to ask her father why he objected so strongly.

At first his response was evasive.

She had to be careful, he told her uncomfortably. It wouldn’t do to have people gossiping.

‘Gossiping about what?’ she asked him, genuinely not understanding.

For the first time that she could remember, he lost his temper with her.

Did she not remember that she had an illegitimate child? he demanded tersely. Did she not remember that the disgrace of that had driven them away from London? But that kind of disgrace could never be totally evaded. People talked, people knew … If men started calling here at the house for her …

And then Hazel understood, and quietly but firmly she closed the door in her heart which might have led to an adult relationship with a man. The kind of relationship which might ultimately have brought her true sexual and emotional fulfilment as a woman, the kind of relationship she had sometimes yearningly daydreamed of, the kind of relationship she had envied other women sharing with their men, but which she now understood could never be for her.

In her father’s eyes she would always be branded by Katie’s birth. Who knew how many other men might feel the same way, might feel that she was sexually available and easy, because of that?

Because that was what her father had been trying to say to her, even though he had been too embarrassed to put it quite so plainly. As the mother of an illegitimate child, she had a reputation. Men approaching her would only be doing so because of that reputation, because they wanted sex from her. And even if that was not true, she could not risk hurting and upsetting her father again by inviting what he would see as speculation and gossip about her morals.

She reminded herself that she was very fortunate, very lucky in that her father was prepared so generously to house and support her. That without that support her precious Katie would never have had the lifestyle she now did. A lovely home, the security that was provided by her grandfather’s money, the lovely surroundings in which she was growing up. Without her father to provide these things for them, their lives would have been so very different. Hazel wasn’t sixteen any more. She knew quite well how difficult life was for other single mothers, how very fortunate she was. The least she could do was to repay her father by respecting his wishes. And, after all, were they so difficult to live by? All right, so there was no man in her life, no lover, no husband … but she had her precious Katie. She had her father, she had her lovely home, and she was slowly making new friends.

And if sexually she was still as unawakened as she had been when Katie was conceived, well, was she really so very bothered? She could barely remember what it had felt like when Jimmy made love to her. What she could remember was that she had not been particularly enthralled by the experience; that she had not had a physical desire to repeat it. What she had enjoyed, though, was the closeness it had brought between her and Jimmy, the tenderness with which he had kissed her afterwards. But these were very dim memories now, the memories of a child, not a woman … and if the price she must pay for Katie’s security and her father’s peace of mind was her own celibacy, well, so be it.

Over the years she had kept in contact with Jimmy’s family, who had all accepted Katie as his daughter. She and Katie had spent several holidays with Jimmy’s mother, who was now divorced from Jimmy’s father, and as the rest of the family grew up, married and produced children, Hazel made sure that Katie knew her aunts and uncles and her cousins.

She didn’t want Katie to suffer as she had done through being too isolated and over-protected. She didn’t want Katie to repeat her mistakes, to yearn, without knowing she did so, for contact with her peers to such an extent, to yearn for love so much that she mistook a healthy male teenager’s natural desire to express his sexuality for that love and responded to it with the same disastrous results as she, Hazel, had done.

But Katie wasn’t her, as Katie herself had gently pointed out to her when she had first started going out on dates. Guiltily Hazel had acknowledged that she was glad in many ways that her own father had died before Katie had reached this stage in her life, because she would not have wanted him to inflict on Katie the mental and emotional taboos he had inflicted on her. It would not be right for her own sins to be visited upon her precious daughter. All she could do was to pray that Katie was strong enough, mature enough, happy enough not to need to make an intense emotional commitment to a member of the opposite sex until she was old enough to handle any potential sexual consequences.

So far she had been lucky, she acknowledged, restlessly smoothing another cushion. So far none of Katie’s relationships with the opposite sex had been remotely serious. But she herself had an almost morbid fear of Katie repeating her mistakes.

She didn’t want Katie’s freedom, Katie’s joy, Katie’s life curtailed in the way in which her own had been curtailed. For Katie, she wanted everything she had not had herself.

For Katie, she wanted the very best that there was: a good education; the strength and self-confidence that came from knowing she could support herself.

A sad smile crossed her face. Art had been her own best subject at school. She had once hoped to go on to college to study it further, but Katie’s arrival had put paid to that. Nevertheless, she had found a way of using that talent, even if she had discovered it rather late in life.

After her father’s death, and because she had felt so guilty, so uncomfortable in the now empty house during the day, she had started taking adult education classes.

Her art teacher had been so impressed with her skill that she had recommended her to an agency she knew who specialised in supplying illustrators for writers.

For the last two years, Hazel had worked exclusively for one particular writer, supplying all the illustrations for her very popular younger children’s books.

Had she discovered this talent when she was younger, who knew what might have happened. Given the freedom of financial independence, she might have felt able to go out more, to meet people, to perhaps even meet a man … But then what would have happened to her father? After his stroke he had never fully recovered. He had needed her then as she had needed him after Katie’s birth and she had always been grateful that fate had given her the opportunity to show him her love and her gratitude.

Now financially and physically she was free, but she was thirty-six years old: far too old to be thinking of romance, of love. And besides these days when she looked around, when she looked properly at the men around her, she saw with distaste that many of them, while smiling and flirting with women who were not their partners, were hurting those partners and seemed not to care that they were doing so. That many of them were weak and vain; that others were like dependent children, greedily taking everything their women had to offer and giving precious little back; and she had come to the conclusion that, for every happy couple she knew, she knew three who were not, and that perhaps after all fate had not truly been punishing her in denying her the right to her sexual and emotional fulfilment as a woman.

The very firm distance she had initially learned to keep between herself and the male sex, to please her father, had become a defence mechanism behind which she retreated for safety, causing Katie to tell her sternly that she was behaving more like a woman of seventy than one of half that age.

‘You’re really attractive, Mum,’ Katie had told her fondly. ‘Far too attractive to be living on your own.’

‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that I might want to live alone?’ Hazel had retaliated. ‘Lots of women do. Take Jessy Finlay, for instance.’

Jessy was a forty-year-old redhead, who owned a small cottage on the outskirts of the village, and who worked as a freelance reporter for a local TV station. She was outrageously extrovert, and very popular with all the local men, if somewhat less popular with their wives.

‘Jessy might live alone, but she does not sleep alone,’ Katie had informed her mother brutally, softening a little to add quietly, ‘It’s not natural, Ma. I know there isn’t any man in your life. I know you don’t have a discreet lover tucked away somewhere. Has there ever been anyone apart from Dad?’

Much as she longed to tell her that that was none of her business, Hazel had found herself admitting that there had not. What Katie did not seem to realise and what she had no intention of telling her was that she herself was the result of her own single and unmemorable sexual experiment. And, uncomfortable though it made her feel to contemplate it, Katie at eighteen probably had a good deal more sexual experience than she had at nearly twice that age.

Although she had always been scrupulous about making sure that Katie was as well informed on sexual matters as she could be, Hazel had always felt lamentably aware of her own inability to convey to her daughter that, exciting though sexual experimentation might be in one’s teens, true fulfilment, true sexual pleasure was something one could only truly appreciate with maturity.

All she had felt able to say to Katie was that she must always do only what felt right for her; that it was her own feeling of self-worth, her feeling of self-respect that was important, far more important than giving in to peer pressure or the importunings of some callow boy.

But how could she discuss with her daughter adult sex, adult emotions, a woman’s emotions, a woman’s needs, when she herself had no knowledge of these things?

Since Katie had left school at the beginning of the summer, Hazel had gradually begun to feel that she was the child and her daughter the parent. Katie now seemed so grown-up, so mature, so much better able to handle herself than Hazel.

Hazel had watched in awe and pride as Katie parried the over-fulsome compliments of the older men among their acquaintance, who were suddenly claiming that she was becoming very grown-up, and very, very attractive. Firmly but pleasantly Katie had let them know that she considered their interest to be avuncular. Firmly she had made it clear that she was not interested in their heavy-handed flirtation. And she was just as adept at dealing with her own peers.

Hazel had seen her off for university with a heavy heart, acknowledging that the child had gone and a woman had taken her place. She was so proud of her daughter. Proud of all that she was and all that she would be, and she had prayed desperately that Katie would get safely through university and launch herself in her chosen career before she fell deeply in love.

Now it seemed as though in making those prayers she, her mother, had brought down on her the very fate she had wanted her to escape.

True, Katie had said nothing about being in love with this Silas. Silas … what sort of name was that? It was far too theatrical, far too … too male. But the very way she said his name, the very hesitation in her voice, the very fact that she, Hazel, her mother was so acutely aware of these things, made Hazel desperately anxious to make the acquaintance of this man who, it seemed, had become so important to her daughter. And equally it made her extremely reluctant to get to know him, as though in doing so she was acknowledging his importance in Katie’s life.

It wasn’t just maternal jealousy either; it wasn’t that she resented someone else becoming more important to Katie than she was herself … well, not entirely.

Guiltily she tugged at her own swollen bottom lip.

Upstairs two immaculate and comfortable bedrooms were waiting for their arrival.

Two bedrooms. Katie would sleep in her own bedroom, of course. Her friend, this Silas …

Gnawing on her swollen lip, Hazel stared unseeingly across the pretty sitting-room, for once not seeing the charm of its exposed timbers, its low ceilings, and its deep stone-framed windows.

The house was old, very old, and she had fallen in love with it the first time she had seen it. She suspected that if her father hadn’t been in such a hurry to move them out of London he would have waited until something more modern came on the market, but as it was he had bought this pretty half-timbered Cheshire farmhouse with its large gardens and its wonderful aspects over the surrounding countryside, and gradually over the years Hazel had put her stamp on it, had brought it to life with all her gentleness and artistic skill, so that people coming into it for the first time caught their breath in pleasure as they studied its colour-washed rooms with their faded chintzes and brocades, its air of homeliness and comfort, its gentle warming welcome to everyone who walked into it.

Perhaps she should have taken hold of her courage and asked Katie outright if she expected this Silas to share her room, her bed. But then Katie’s room still only had the small single bed she had all through her teens.

That was no excuse, she told herself severely. The house had five bedrooms and two bathrooms. The room she had made up for Katie’s friend was the smallest of these, right next door to her own room. It had a tiny dormer window, and a polished wooden floor. It also had a large double bed. All the rooms apart from Katie’s and her own did, and she could hardly have moved out of her own room, not without causing Katie to make some comment.

So what would she do if Katie gaily announced that she would move into the spare-room with their guest for the duration of his visit? What would she do if this Silas chose to insist that Katie show her mother just how committed she was to him by sleeping with him?

Hazel had heard enough horror stories from other parents, other mothers confronted with just this sort of situation to feel more than mere apprehension. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to admit that her daughter was an adult, a woman. Of course she knew, of course she accepted … but it was one thing to accept that Katie was old enough to have a sexual relationship with someone, and quite another to be forced to witness that relationship, to be forced to have all her fears and anxieties revived right under her nose. It was bad enough worrying about Katie when she couldn’t see what she was doing …

If only they would arrive. Or, even better, if only they would ring and say they’d changed their minds. She was dreading meeting him, dreading it …

But for Katie’s sake she would have to pretend that she was happy for her. She would have to pretend that she liked him.

Stop it, she warned herself. He’s probably a very nice boy. He’s probably just as much in love as Katie is. He’s probably just as vulnerable, and he’s also probably got a mother somewhere dreading meeting Katie as much as I’m dreading meeting him.

CHAPTER TWO

SURELY they couldn’t be much longer? About four o’clock, Katie had said. Now it was almost five. Hazel’s stomach knotted and churned. What if there’d been an accident? History repeating itself—Katie dying as her father had died …

Once again she had to stop herself from allowing her imagination to run away with her.

She had prepared Katie’s favourite supper, including a pie made from their own Bramley apples. She had enough carefully stored to take her over Christmas and into the new year.

Secretly she had been looking forward to Christmas, to having Katie home, treasuring the thought of it like a child with an illicit hoard of sweets, because she knew that after this first term, after this first year, Katie would make her own friends and would naturally want to spend future holidays with them. So deep in her heart lurked the knowledge that this coming Christmas could be their last together. Now she wondered, shivering in the chill of the thought, if she would be expected to share Christmas with this Silas, or, even worse, if he would take Katie away from her completely, if the two of them would spend their Christmas somewhere alone, while she …

As she heard the sound of a car drawing up outside, her stomach muscles tensed and she froze, and then forced herself to walk as calmly as she could towards the front door.

As she passed the mirror hanging over the fireplace, she glanced surreptitiously into it. What would he see, this Silas, who threatened her peace of mind so much? She frowned at her own reflection, wondering if he would notice or even care that she and Katie shared the same heart-shaped face, and the same slightly almond-shaped eyes, but where hers were an uncertain, hesitant greeny-brown—hence her name—Katie’s were a brilliant laughing blue, just as her curls were mere brunette, where Katie’s were glossily and extravagantly black.

Katie’s colouring, like her height, came from her father, but they shared the same fine bone-structure, the same delicacy of wrist and ankle. One thing she did envy Katie, though, was her height. Hazel hated being so small, barely five feet two, and so slender with it that there were still occasions when people called at the house and found her dressed in jeans and a T-shirt working in the garden and, seeing her from the back, made the mistake of assuming that she was still a child.

Perhaps if she wore her hair in a different style, but it was so curly and untameable that there was little she could do with it other than to have it go its own wayward way.

The front door of the house was wooden and solid. She could see nothing through it as she unbolted and then opened it, but already in her mind’s eye she could see her daughter: laughing, exuberant, flinging herself into her arms, and almost knocking her over as she did so—only when she did open the door, there was no sign of Katie.

Instead a man was climbing out of the car parked on her drive, smiling slightly at her as he acknowledged her presence.

Disappointment mingled with relief. Whoever this man was, he could not be Katie’s precious Silas. He was too old, for one thing, closer to forty-five than twenty-five.

He was probably a stranger who had lost his way. Certainly he wasn’t anyone she knew she had ever met. Had she done so she would have been bound to remember him. He was far too attractive, far too male for any woman to be able to forget. Her heart gave a tiny unsteady thump as her brain acknowledged what her senses had already registered; namely that this stranger walking towards her was an extremely virile and masculine man, whose casual attire of well-worn jeans and soft denim shirt revealed a body packed hard with muscle and male strength.

Hazel could feel the most odd sensation burgeoning into life in the pit of her stomach. She wanted to wrap her arms tightly around herself as though doing so would control this strange, unnerving feeling.

‘Miss Partington?’ he queried, coming towards her.

His voice was deep and pleasant. The way he spoke her name made Hazel feel faintly dizzy. Her name. How had he known her name?

‘Er—yes. I’m afraid I don’t know …’

He was extending his hand towards her, so that she automatically reciprocated the gesture, her eyes registering the shock caused by the brief physical contact between them. What was the matter with her? She had shaken a man’s hand before, for heaven’s sake.

Feeling thoroughly flustered, she looked uncertainly at him.

‘I’m sorry. I haven’t introduced myself.’ He smiled at her. ‘I’m Silas Jardine. I dropped Katie off in the village. She said something about wanting to buy something. She told me not to wait, said she might be a little while, and told me to come and introduce myself. She said something about wanting to catch up on some gossip. It really is kind of you to put me up like this.’

Hazel wasn’t listening any longer. She was staring at him in shocked disbelief.

This man could not be Katie’s Silas. This man could not be Katie’s boyfriend. Boyfriend! This was no boy. Outrage mingled with her shock. How could he stand there, glibly carrying on a conversation with her, when all the time he must know how shocked she was, how stunned, how … yes, how disbelieving that he could …? That he could what? Love her daughter? She caught herself up on the thought. What was that feeling beginning, like a cold, sharp dagger in her middle? That wasn’t maternal protectiveness, was it? That was … That was …

It was nothing, she told herself quickly. It was nothing at all, and it certainly wasn’t an uncomfortable and impossible stab of something almost approaching betrayal.

Her smile had turned to a frown now, as her shock registered all too plainly on her face. She could almost feel him withdrawing from her, distancing himself from her with cool reserve. Panic clawed at her. This was a situation she simply could not deal with, did not know how to deal with. When she had envisaged Katie’s Silas, she had envisaged a younger man—a much younger man. This man was far too old for Katie. Far, far too old.

She started to tremble, suddenly feeling incredibly weak and sick. Tears of shock blurred her eyes, causing her to clench her jaw and hurriedly blink them away.

‘I’m sorry. I seem to have given you something of a shock.’

He was too astute, saw too much, and suddenly she was desperately frightened of him. What if he should sense her anger, her shock, her disgust, her outrage, and punish her for them by trying to turn Katie against her? Once she would have said that could never happen but then once she would have said that Katie would never have any need in her life that would lead her to imagine herself in love with a man old enough to be her father.

‘Look, I think we’d better get you inside. Katie warned me that you hate people saying you look fragile, but …’

Katie had told him that. What else had she told him? Hazel wondered achingly as she stepped back into the hall, fighting to get her shock under control.

She hated him, she decided fiercely as he followed her inside. She hated him already. How could she not do when she looked at him and saw in his face, in his eyes, all his years of living, and then compared those years, that maturity with Katie’s youth?

She knew all about men like him. Men who were too insecure to love women who could match them in terms of age and experience. Their vanity led them to feed off youth, like leeches. Oh, yes, she knew the type all right and she despised it, but she had never, ever envisaged that Katie would fall prey to such a man, no matter how good-looking he might be—and this man was certainly that, she acknowledged grudgingly, trying to ignore the frisson of sensation that danced over her skin as she looked up and discovered that she was being studied with gravely thoughtful interest by Silas Jardine’s disturbingly perceptive cool grey eyes.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ he asked her quietly. ‘Katie—’

Whatever he had been about to say was forgotten as the front door was flung open, and Hazel heard her daughter calling out cheerfully, ‘Ma, Ma … where are you?’

‘Noisy lot, aren’t they, the young?’ Silas Jardine remarked easily as she hurried towards the door. His comment made her check and turn to give him an indignant look. What on earth was he trying to do, aligning himself with her? Did he honestly think that she was stupid enough to fall for such a ploy or that it would endear him to her, or incline her to accept him as her daughter’s lover?

The sickening sour scald of revulsion that burned through her at the thought turned her indignation to self-disgust, and she turned away from him quickly before her face could betray her.

She was becoming frighteningly aware that if he chose to do so this man could drive a wedge between her and her beloved daughter that might never be removed.

Hopefully, please God, there would come a time when Katie would open her eyes and see him for what he undoubtedly was; a forty-odd-year-old man who was bolstering his ego, his machismo by feeding off her youth. And when that time came he would no longer have a place nor a role in her life, but by then Hazel suspected that it would be too late to heal the rift which he could cause between them.

She would have to be careful, so very careful not to betray to Katie how shocked and distraught she felt, she acknowledged as she hurried into the hallway and was immediately taken hold of and swung off her feet as Katie gave her an enthusiastic hug.

‘You’ve lost weight,’ she scolded her mother maternally as she set her back on the floor and studied her critically, and then, turning to Silas who had also come out into the hall, she demanded happily, ‘Isn’t she everything I told you she was?’ Without waiting for a response, she turned back to Hazel and grinned at her.

‘He wouldn’t believe me when I told him I had a mother who looked like a teenager and not a fully grown-up one at that,’ Katie teased.

To her intense mortification, Hazel discovered that she was actually blushing, something she’d thought she had successfully got under control years ago.

Katie laughed and teasingly tousled her curls, telling her, ‘I stopped off in the village to buy this. I’ve got you a proper present, of course, but I thought we could have this tonight to celebrate.’

When Hazel didn’t say anything, she added in a more gentle voice, ‘You didn’t think I’d forgotten, did you, Ma? I shan’t embarrass you in front of Silas by mentioning the fact that you’re thirty-six years old today.’

‘Katie!’ Hazel expostulated weakly. To tell the truth, she herself had almost forgotten that it was her birthday in the anxiety of worrying about her daughter, but now that Katie had reminded her of the date she wished that she hadn’t. It wasn’t the thought of adding another year to her age that bothered her. No, it was the quiet, assessing way that Silas Jardine was continuing to study her that made her feel so uncomfortable. His mouth twitched a little as she removed the bottle of champagne from Katie’s exuberant grasp, and told her as firmly as she could, ‘Katie, you know quite well that I gave up celebrating my birthday years ago.’

‘You may have done so, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us have to follow suit,’ Katie informed her, adding, ‘What time are we eating, Ma? I’m starving. I wanted to stop off on the way, but Silas said there was no way he was going to poison his insides with the stuff they serve in motorway fast food outlets. He’s even worse than you,’ she added grumbling, while Hazel gave a doubtful look in Silas’s direction, wondering how he was taking this criticism.

A little to her surprise he seemed more amused than annoyed, his manner more that of an indulgent uncle than a passionate lover. It seemed oddly out of keeping, because this man would be a passionate lover. A tiny thrill of shock tingled down her spine, a sensation almost of actually being touched. She shivered under it, sensitively cringing from the intimacy of her own thoughts. Thoughts she had no right to have, no right at all. Silas Jardine was her daughter’s lover and not …

Not what? she asked herself shakily. Not an exceptionally virile and male man, whose simple presence in her home was making her feel as nervous and on edge as though she were the one who was the teenager?

It was all his fault. If he had arrived, as he had been supposed to do, with Katie, she would never … he would not … She bit her bottom lip hard.

What on earth was the matter with her? She had seen good-looking men before, talked to them, spent time with them, without going to pieces like this.

And she was going to pieces. She only had to look at him and she could feel herself disintegrating inside.

This is ridiculous, she told herself firmly. She had to pull herself together. What on earth was happening to her? Surely—she could feel herself going hot with self-disgust at the thought—surely she wasn’t about to turn into one of those dreadful women who in middle age seemed to develop an embarrassing need to prove themselves by flirting very desperately and very obviously with their daughters’ boyfriends?

Desperately she tried to concentrate on what Katie was saying to her, telling her nervously, ‘Well, I’ve made your favourite for supper: roast beef with all the trimmings and apple pie.’

She couldn’t bring herself to look at Silas, and so, instead, she said to Katie, ‘I should have checked with you that your friend—er—Mr … doesn’t mind such plain fare …’

When she had envisaged Katie’s ‘friend’, she had been thinking in terms of a much younger man with far less sophisticated tastes than the very obvious man of the world who was now addressing her, telling her smoothly, ‘Please call me Silas—and to tell the truth a home-cooked meal will be rather a treat for me.’

Katie gave him a dancing look of amusement.

‘Don’t listen to him, Ma. He’s got females queuing feet deep, just longing to offer him all the home comforts.’

She could just bet he had, Hazel reflected acidly to herself, and she doubted that it was just their cooking that they wanted him to sample.

In Katie’s shoes, she suspected that she would have felt far more concerned than her daughter obviously did.

Despite the fact that there was nothing remotely lover-like about their behaviour to one another, Katie must be very, very sure indeed of his feelings for her if she could afford to treat the subject so lightly. She looked at her daughter, rather wonderingly and wistfully. In Katie’s shoes, she doubted that she could have exhibited such self-confidence.

It was all very well for her to tell herself that he was a very lucky man to have the love of someone as precious and wonderful as her Katie, but Katie was, after all, not quite nineteen years old, while he … Oddly enough, he didn’t look like the kind of man who needed to bolster his ego by parading a much, much younger girl on his arm, but then neither had she ever imagined that Katie would look for a relationship with a man so much older than herself, a man more suited in age to be her father than her lover.

Guiltily she wondered if it was her fault; if it was because she had failed to provide Katie with a father that her daughter had now made the dangerous mistake of falling for this man.

‘How long will supper be, Ma?’ Katie pressed her.

‘Oh, not long—about an hour.’

‘Great. I’ll just take Silas upstairs and show him his room and then I’ll come down and give you a hand and we can have a natter. Which room is he in, by the way?’

In the shock of discovering how much older than Katie her lover was, Hazel had almost forgotten her anxiety over their sleeping arrangements.

Now they came back to her abruptly, and she discovered that it was impossible for her to look at Silas as she told Katie uncertainly, ‘I’ve put your—er—Mr … er—Silas in the spare-room; the one next to mine.’

Why oh why was she blushing when she said that? And why of all things was she so intimately and so wrongly suddenly mentally presented with a very disturbing and highly visual image of Silas’s broad-shouldered and very male form lying beneath the covers of her spare bed, his skin tanned and sleek, his …?

She swallowed visibly, weakly trying to dismiss such erotic and unwanted thoughts. Heavens, the man might not even have a tan, never mind …

‘The nursery, you’ve put Silas in my old nursery.’ Katie grinned. ‘If you can’t sleep, Silas, you’ll be able to entertain yourself reading my old books. Come on, I’ll take you up.’

Hazel was just about to go with them, and had even taken a couple of steps towards the stairs, when she suddenly realised that they would most probably want to be alone, and that even the most caring and concerned of mothers could hardly play gooseberry for twenty-four hours a day.

At least Katie had seemed to accept quite happily the fact that she had not put them in the same room.

She couldn’t help wondering if Silas himself had accepted this quite as readily.

He was a mature man, long past the stage surely of sneaking kisses, or anything else, behind the back of an ever-watchful parent.

She froze as he came towards her, and then flushed as she realised she was standing between him and the stairs, hastily stepping to one side.

The look he gave her unnerved her. It seemed to see right inside her skull and left her feeling as though he knew far too well just how ambivalent her feelings towards him were.

As she went into the kitchen, determined not to stand there watching them as Katie slid her arm through his and they went up the wide flight of stairs side by side, she acknowledged miserably that the last thing she had anticipated, when she had worried over the problems attendant on this visit, was that she herself might be physically aware of Katie’s lover, and in such an intense way that it suddenly felt as though her skin had become a little too tight for her body, as though somehow her flesh had become over-sensitive and slightly sore.

She hated knowing that she was so responsive to Silas. Hated realising that in some awful, dreadful way she was almost jealous of Katie’s relationship with him. And yet why should she feel like this? There had been times in the past, it was true, when she had yearned, ached almost if she was honest, for a man of tenderness and concern who would love her, physically and emotionally, but she had quickly learned to put such foolish daydreams from her and to concentrate on reality; those men had never been real, they had merely been vague, fictional characters—a focus for her needs. There had never been a man, a real-life man for whom she had felt the sharply dangerous stab of desire she had felt this afternoon. Perhaps naïvely she had never imagined there could be such a man. She had always imagined that, for her, sexual desire could only follow on from a long-established emotional rapport; and since she never allowed any man to get close enough to her to form that kind of bond she had felt herself safe from the sharp pangs of hunger which now clawed so shockingly at her.

She was standing stock still, staring unseeing into the Yorkshire pudding batter when Katie erupted into the kitchen, exclaiming excitedly, ‘Well, Ma, isn’t he the most gorgeous man you’ve ever seen?’

‘He seems very pleasant,’ Hazel responded colourlessly.

Katie frowned and demanded scornfully, ‘Pleasant? Come on, Ma. He’s as sexy as hell and—’

‘Katie, I must get the Yorkshires in,’ Hazel interrupted her frantically. The last thing she wanted was a blow-by-blow description of Silas’s sexual prowess, and not just because she felt he was totally wrong for her daughter. She didn’t want to hear it because … Because she was mortally afraid that she simply could not bear to hear it.

‘Ma, what’s wrong?’ Katie was frowning now, the happiness dying out of her voice and her eyes. She came over to the cooker, and removed the full tin of batter from Hazel’s hands, firmly putting it down and then turning her mother round to face her.

‘You don’t like him, do you?’ she accused.

‘No—yes. Of … I … Oh, Katie, I’ve only just met him, and—’

‘Ma, please,’ Katie begged urgently. ‘Just give it a chance. I know you’re going to love him.’

It was an unfortunate choice of verb to say the least, and part of her, a strange, unfamiliar and totally unwanted part, cried out rebelliously, Why should I love him? Because you do? Can’t you see how wrong he is for you?

‘What is it exactly about him that you don’t like?’ Katie demanded when she remained silent.

What could she say?

All she could manage was a strangled, ‘Well, it isn’t that I don’t like him, darling; it’s just that, well, he’s so much older than I’d imagined.’

‘Older.’ Katie’s frown deepened as she demanded almost aggressively, ‘What on earth has his age got to do with it? And anyway I think he’s just the right age.’

Hazel bit her lip, mangling its already sore swollenness between sharp teeth as despair flooded her. Already it was happening—already he was driving them apart. Of course Katie thought he was the right age and she had been stupid to bring up such a contentious subject.

Desperately she tried to find safer ground, asking as casually as she could, ‘You never said how long you intended to stay.’

‘Well, I can only manage a couple of days, but Silas will be here until Christmas if that’s OK with you.’

‘Until Christmas!’ Hazel gaped at her and discovered that she had to lean against the units for support. ‘But Katie, that’s impossible. I mean—’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Katie argued stubbornly. ‘Why shouldn’t he stay here? When he told me that he was setting his new book here in Cheshire and that he wanted to do some research in the area, I knew immediately that this would be an ideal base for him. He wasn’t so sure at first. It took me a while to persuade him that you wouldn’t mind.’

Hazel stared at her, unable to utter anything other than a rather numb, ‘Really?’

Giving her a sharp look, Katie acknowledged, ‘OK, so maybe I should have asked you first, but I know if I’d told you that one of your favourite writers was giving a brief series of lectures to us, and that I’d invited him up here because I knew he was looking for somewhere local to stay while he researched his next book, I knew you’d throw forty fits and raise all manner of objections, but you can’t let me down now, Ma, and he won’t be any trouble. I doubt if you’ll even know he’s here,’ she added with supreme disregard for the expression on her mother’s face.

‘I mean, he could have Gramps’s old bedroom. That has its own bathroom, and he could work in Gramps’s study. He’ll probably be out most of the time anyway. He said he wanted to visit Gawsworth, and just think how thrilling it will be when his book comes out, to know that it was actually written here.

‘You’ll have to pin up a huge notice outside saying, “Charles Kershaw wrote here”.’

‘Charles Kershaw?’ Hazel stared at her. ‘But his name’s Silas Jardine.’

‘Yes, that’s his real name, but he writes under the name of Charles Kershaw. Kershaw was his mother’s maiden name apparently, and Charles is his middle name. He told me that when he first started to write he was still lecturing full-time and that that was why he chose to write under a different name.’

Hazel raised her hand to her forehead in an unconscious gesture of confusion.

Silas was Charles Kershaw, one of her favourite authors, and Katie had invited him to stay here while he researched his latest book. Katie, her daughter, and Charles Kershaw were lovers …

She thought of the subtle and skilled sensuality of the romantic passages in his novels and was shaken by a surge of betraying envy for her daughter, coupled with a shocking conviction that that skill, that subtlety was completely wasted on someone as young as her ebullient, boisterous daughter.

Immediately she clamped down on such destructive thoughts. Thoughts she had no right to allow into her mind. Behind her she could hear Katie saying in bewilderment, ‘What’s wrong with you? I thought you’d be thrilled …’

Hearing the love and the anxiety in her voice, Hazel forced herself to put aside her own feelings to exclaim wryly, ‘Just as you thought I’d be thrilled when you brought all those snails in from the garden and set them free on the kitchen floor.’

‘Well, you complained because they were eating your delphiniums and you’d said you didn’t want to kill them. Although I do seem to remember you threatening to kill me instead.’

Suddenly they were both giggling, the release from her earlier tension bringing emotional tears to Hazel’s eyes.

‘Oh, Katie,’ she protested helplessly, sniffing them away. ‘I can’t—’

I can’t have your lover staying here, she had been about to say, but just as she spoke Silas himself walked into the kitchen, looking keenly at her and then just as keenly at Katie.

Conscious of her flushed face and tear-wet eyes, Hazel turned back to the oven, quickly opening the door and ladling the batter into the now almost over-hot fat.

While it spat its aggression at her, she heard Katie exclaiming brightly and falsely to Silas, ‘I’ve just been revealing your true identity to Ma, Silas, and although she’s too overcome with awe to tell you so herself, she’s thrilled to bits that you’re going to be staying here. She can’t wait to boast to all her friends about you, can you, Ma?’

‘Katie,’ Hazel protested, flushing angrily as she closed the oven door and rounded on her daughter. Perhaps her father had been right after all when he had accused her of being far too lenient and indulgent towards her daughter. Her indignation flashed brilliantly in her eyes as she turned towards Katie, but once again she was forestalled as Silas himself intervened pleasantly.

‘I really am grateful to you, Hazel. I must admit when Katie first suggested I base myself here with you while I worked on my new book I was a little dubious. Of course, it was marvellously kind of you to offer to put me up, but writers aren’t the easiest of people to live with, especially when they’re working, and I was afraid that Katie might have unwittingly painted an over-glamourised version of what having me staying here would be like. But I must say that having met you I realise how uncomplimentary those fears were. It’s obvious to me that you are an eminently sensible lady, despite the rather contentious comments to the contrary made by your daughter.’

Hazel gaped at him, blinking in disbelief as she listened to what he was saying.

‘Great,’ Katie beamed happily. ‘I’m glad that that’s all settled, although you’ll have to move bedrooms, Silas. I was saying to Ma that you’d be much better off using Gramps’s old room. It’s got its own bathroom for one thing and a huge bed,’ Katie informed Silas breezily, turning away before she saw the painful flood of colour that burned her mother’s face.

Silas saw it though, and through the tremor that convulsed her, and the tears of shame and self-dislike that stung her eyes, she could feel his steady regard.

Dear God, don’t let him guess what she was thinking. Katie was too young, too blind, too selfish as the young were selfish, to suspect what she was going through, to guess at the bitter, envious thoughts distorting her mind, to even think in the most fleeting fashion that she, her mother, might feel the most acute despair at the thought of Katie and Silas sharing the old-fashioned double-bed which had been so well designed to accommodate the bodies of two eager lovers.

But her despair was not, as she had first believed, generated by mere concern for her daughter’s emotional safety. No; it was generated by a far less palatable and acceptable emotion. It was generated by jealousy.

There, she had admitted it! Made herself confront it. When she pictured Katie and Silas together in bed, she was jealous of her daughter. She was envious of the fact that Silas desired her, that Silas wanted her. What was the matter with her? Did she really want to trade places with Katie? Did she really imagine for a single second that Silas would find her in any way attractive or desirable? One only had to compare her with Katie to realise the impossibility of that.

Katie was young, nineteen. She was thirty-six, her body not a girl’s any longer, but a woman’s.

She had given birth, produced a child. This child, who now stood in front of her, a fully formed and very beautiful young woman, poised on the threshold of her most sexually powerful years, while she … while for her those years were over. Her figure was still trim enough, enviably so according to most of her friends, but it was not a girl’s body. Her skin did not have the clear bloom of youth that belonged to Katie’s … her face did not have the soft youthful plumpness that still clung to Katie’s bones. No man in his right mind comparing them could possibly prefer her physically to Katie, especially not a man who had already made it obvious that he preferred the allure of young flesh.

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