To Love, Honour & Betray

Above the fireplace was a portrait of her father in his full regimentals. It had been presented to him on his retirement and her mother had insisted that she had spent enough of her life looking at him in his uniform and that Claudia and Garth should have it.

On the stairs, Claudia had a further collection of family portraits, some simple pencil sketches, others more detailed, along with the totally un-recognisable ‘picture’ that Tara had drawn of her parents in her first term at school.

On the opposite wall from the fireplace above the pretty antique side table that Garth’s mother had inherited from her own family and passed on to Claudia hung a portrait of another man in regimentals.

Instinctively, she walked over to it, switched on the picture light above it and studied it sombrely.

Garth had been twenty-seven when it had been painted and it had been a wedding gift from the regiment to them—a surprise wedding gift as the artist had painted the portrait from photographs. It was still a good likeness, though, with Garth’s face turned slightly to the left so that the clear thrust of his jaw could be seen along with the aquiline profile of his nose.

Put Garth in a Roman centurion’s outfit and he would immediately fulfil every Hollywood mogul’s ideal of what a sexy man in uniform should look like, a friend had once commented to Claudia, and it was true. Garth’s predecessors had originally come from Pembrokeshire in Wales and there was a joke in the family that it wasn’t merely driftwood washed up from the shipwrecks of the fleeing remnants of the Spanish Armada that his ancestors had salvaged from the Pembroke beaches.

Clearly, Garth’s skin tone and thick dark hair suggested that he could have Latin blood somewhere in his veins, and those who knew the family history had been very quick to point out that Tara’s lustrous dark curls could also be a part of that inheritance.

Fact or fiction, what was true was that Garth was a stunningly handsome man, an outrageously sexy man, so Claudia had been told enviously at their wedding, but oddly enough, it wasn’t Garth’s strongly sensual physical appeal that had initially attracted her.

Perhaps because of his career and his knowledge of the more base and raw instincts of the male sex, her father in particular had always been very protective of her, over-protective perhaps in some ways. Certainly it had taken a good deal of persuasion and coaxing on both her own part and that of her mother to gain his approval when she had wanted to go to university.

Garth, as one of her father’s junior officers, had been deputised to escort her to a regimental ball. He had called to collect her in the shiny, bright red Morgan sports car that had been his parents’ twenty-first birthday present to him and Claudia remembered that she had found both the car and the man rather too over the top, too stereotypical and obvious in many ways for her own taste.

It had been a warm June night and still light as they set out for the ball. They had had the country lane that led from her parents’ house to the main road to themselves, and typically, or so she had decided, Garth had insisted on driving his car rather fast if admittedly very dexterously. Then, just as they had straightened out of a sharp bend, Claudia had seen a hedgehog crossing the road. Her immediate instinct was to call out in protest as she anticipated the animal’s fateful demise, but to her astonishment as he, too, spotted the small creature, Garth had immediately taken evasive action, braking and turning the front of the car away from the road and plunging it instead nose first through a muddy ditch and up a bank into a thorny hedge.

Neither the hedgehog nor Claudia and Garth themselves suffered any physical damage but the same could not be said for the car. Along with the mud spattering its immaculate paintwork, Claudia had also been able to see the long and quite deep scratches the sharp thorns of the hedge had inflicted. But it wasn’t the state of his precious car and its paintwork that had Garth virtually leaping out of the car the moment he had it back on the road. No, it was the still dazed and obviously petrified little animal that he ran to rescue from its plight. He carefully picked it up and, opening a nearby farm gate, carried it to a much safer environment.

It had been then that she had fallen in love with him, Claudia remembered. Not because of his astounding good looks, nor even because of the way he apologised to her for the fact that they would now be rather late arriving at the ball, but because of the completely natural and instinctive way he had put the hedgehog’s safety above the value of his clearly very personally precious car, and it had been an honest and automatic reaction, Claudia had known, not something showy and false done simply to impress her. And she had loved him for it … for the personality, the warmth, the genuine caring and concern she had felt it revealed. The same love and caring he had always shown to Tara.

There was a telephone on the small coffee-table next to the fire. She walked over to it and, before she could change her mind, quickly dialled the number of Garth’s London penthouse. After their divorce, he had bought a small property on the other side of the town but during the week he stayed in London in order to be close to his work.

The phone rang five times and then the receiver at the other end was lifted and an attractively husky female voice that Claudia didn’t recognise said hello.

Without responding, Claudia replaced the receiver. Her hand was trembling and for some ridiculous reason she could feel the aching sensation at the back of her throat that presaged tears.

Why on earth should she cry just because a woman answered Garth’s phone? They had been divorced for years and she, after all, had been the one to agitate for the divorce. She knew that there had been other women in Garth’s life since they went their separate ways and she knew, too, that …

Straightening her spine, she readjusted several stems of the lilies she had already perfectly arranged earlier in the day. She was at a very vulnerable age, she reminded herself, that certain age where, while physically her looks might say that she was still a very attractive and sexually valuable woman, her hormones were beginning to tell her a different story. How many times lately had she heard other women of around the same age or slightly older bemoaning the fact that it wasn’t just in their almost-adult offsprings’ lives that they now felt redundant but in their partners’ beds, as well? ‘I still want sex,’ one had complained frankly to her only the other day. ‘But somehow these days I feel that it doesn’t want me very much any more.’

Claudia sympathised. She didn’t have a man, a lover, in her life. She had had offers, of course, approaches … men who had hovered on the edge of her life during the years of her marriage to Garth, moving a little closer, making their intentions, their desires, a little bit plainer, some of them married, some of them not. No, she certainly needn’t have gone short of sex and perhaps even love if she had wanted it … them. But she had been too busy with other and more important concerns. Tara for one … and then there had been her business, her charity work, her friends.

‘Don’t you miss it?’ someone had asked her curiously in the early years after the divorce. ‘The sex. The having someone to snuggle up to in bed, the comfort of having someone there to hold you. You must get—’

‘Frustrated,’ Claudia had supplied calmly for her before shaking her head and denying, ‘No, not really … I don’t have the time.’

And it had been true, and besides … besides … Her sex drive had always been inextricably linked to her emotions, driven by them almost; love for her was even more important, more driving, than lust.

And after Garth—well, after Garth it wasn’t just that she couldn’t ever imagine wanting another man, loving another man the way she had loved and wanted him, she had actively not wanted to become so emotionally involved with anyone else again.

The devastation upon discovering that Garth had been unfaithful to her had quite simply been so complete, so overwhelming, that she had never wanted to allow anyone else close enough to risk it again. Her love for Garth might have died, been destroyed, annihilated, by her discovery of his infidelity and the fact that, for so many years, she had been living a lie, a myth—believing in their marriage, in him—but her fear of the pain it had caused her had certainly not died.

She did have men friends, yes, and she went out on dates with them; but she had certainly never come anywhere near close to wanting to share anything more than friendship with them. Or at least she hadn’t until she met Luke Palliser.

Was that further confirmation of the fact that she had reached the treacherous choppy waters of middle age, the fact that she was physically attracted to a younger man?

As she left the drawing room and turned to go upstairs, Claudia paused by Tara’s picture of her parents. Neither of them was, of course, remotely recognisable if you discounted the colour of their hair—hers yellow, Garth’s black and straight.

Tara!

Claudia bit her lip as she felt the familiar surge of love thinking about Tara always brought flooding through her, but this time it wasn’t just love she felt. This time there was fear and dread, as well. And guilt, too. Oh, yes, there was guilt.

2

‘I thought I heard the phone ring,’ Garth Wallace commented as he walked into the sitting room of his London apartment carrying the papers he had been to retrieve from the briefcase in his bedroom.

‘You did,’ Estelle Frensham agreed. She had been working for the firm as a temp, filling in for Garth’s personal assistant who was on maternity leave. ‘But whoever it was rang off without speaking. I did a check on the number, though. This is it.’ Silently, Garth studied the piece of paper she had given him. Apart from his eyebrows snapping together in a frown, his expression gave nothing away to Estelle as she watched him. He had recognised the number right away. How could he not do when for over ten years it had been his own? There was only one person who was likely to ring him from Ivy House, and so far as he knew, Tara, his daughter, was presently in London.

Tara. His daughter. Their daughter, his and Claudia’s. Despite the fact that physically she resembled him much more than she did Claudia, Tara was in every other imaginable way so much more Claudia’s child. Every mannerism, every mere inflection of her voice to him were copies of Claudia’s, and sometimes watching her, he wasn’t sure if those similarities made him hate himself more or loathe himself less. One thing was sure; they certainly didn’t alter his love for Tara herself, nor change the way he felt about her mother.

If Tara was in London and Claudia had rung him, it could only be because her need to talk to him was desperately important. Claudia would never ring otherwise.

He glanced at his watch and then announced, ‘Look, Estelle, I’ve changed my mind. We’ll leave it for this evening, I think. I want to spend a little more time on this one. I’ll ring the client in the morning and put off my meeting until later in the week.’

Estelle gave him an assessing look. They had been working all out at the agency to get some kind of campaign down on paper for the new client who had approached them to take on his business, which was why she was working here this evening instead of working out at the gym. Not that she minded—Garth’s company was preferable any day of the week, any time of the day or night, to going to the gym, even if all he had in mind was work. At least for now.

From the moment he had first interviewed her for the temporary vacancy at the agency eight weeks ago, Estelle had decided that just as soon as she could arrange it, she and Garth were going to be lovers. Just the thought of it, of the pleasure she had promised herself that lay in store for her, made her start to ache deep down inside, the kind of ache she knew from long experience could only be soothed by the release of a full orgasm.

She wondered what Garth’s reaction would be if she came right out with it now and told him how she felt, what she needed. Some men liked women who were totally up front and unashamed of admitting their sexual needs, but Garth, she suspected, was not one of them. And so far he had certainly neither said nor done anything to suggest that he was sexually attracted to her. Still, there was no other permanent woman in his life, apart from occasional dates with one of the agency’s account executives—a woman in her thirties who Estelle knew would be no competition for her! She had managed to ascertain that much and she had checked, as well, that he was as heterosexual as he looked—no doubts there, either.

So far, it appeared he hadn’t recognised her deliberate sexual come-ons to him or he had recognised them but was ignoring them—and of the two Estelle knew which one she preferred. And tonight she had hoped … but obviously tonight was not going to be the night. Estelle was no fool and she calmly gathered up the papers she had spread out on the workmanlike desk-cum-table that dominated his large square sitting room. All right, so things might not be ending as she had hoped and planned, but if she couldn’t have Garth then there was always Blade. Oh, yes, there was always Blade. Blade who would happily provide her with whatever kind of sex she wanted, Blade with whom her relationship was not so much one of love and hate, as mutual dislike and contempt and mutual need and lust, as well. As she collected her belongings, she was already planning how she would spend the rest of the evening.

Watching her, Garth wondered what she was thinking. She had made it clear right from their first interview that she found him sexually attractive, but Garth was used to women coming on to him, and if necessary he could always tell the agency who had supplied her to find the firm an alternative.

She wouldn’t be the first young and not-so-young female employee they had taken on who had made it plain she was attracted to him, but over the years he had learned to recognise all the warning signs and to deflect potential pitfalls in plenty of time to negotiate a way around them.

‘I’ll call you a cab,’ he told her crisply, reaching out to pick up the phone.

That was one thing about Garth, Estelle recognised. He was quite definitely very much the old-fashioned sort when it came to the way he took what he saw as his responsibility towards his female employees. Very protective, very gentlemanly, in the very best senses of both words. Unfortunately.

As she bent down to retrieve an errant piece of paper, she deliberately allowed the long wrap skirt she was wearing to part, showing him the slender gym-honed full length of her thigh and revealing, if he should be interested, the fact that what she was wearing underneath it was either extremely brief or totally non-existent. But as she glanced towards Garth, Estelle saw that he was looking the other way, his mind plainly on other things. Never mind, she promised herself as her taxi arrived, there would always be another time, and for now her growing frustration and need called out for Blade.

Garth waited until he had seen Estelle stepping safely into the taxi he had called—the same reliable firm the business always used. Garth had heard too many scary stories of women being abused by unauthorised cab drivers to take any risks with the safety of his employees. Then he reached out to pick up the telephone a second time, punching in the number Estelle had written down for him.

After she had undressed and showered, Claudia opened the drawer of her dressing-room cupboard, pausing as she stared down at the small bottle of sleeping tablets she kept there. Her doctor had prescribed them in the early weeks after she asked Garth to leave. She rarely used them now, but at the same time she was never without a bottle. Just occasionally there were nights, a week or more of them at times, when something would happen, trigger her memory, and she would know that sleep was going to be impossible … unwanted even, because if she did sleep, she would be haunted by her nightmares, her fears, her guilt, and then and only then did she resort to the awful and frighteningly empty oblivion of drug-induced sleep as an escape.

The last time she had taken them had been towards the end of last year. Garth’s birthday … his fiftieth.

Tara had thrown a party for him. She had begged Claudia to go, but as she had quietly explained to Tara at the time, Garth was hardly likely to want her to be there.

‘But we’re still family,’ Tara had protested stubbornly while Claudia had shaken her head.

‘You and Garth are still family, Tara. You and I are still family, but the three of us …’

‘You were both there for my twenty-first and for my graduation,’ Tara had reminded her mother, ‘and everyone said then that both of you …’ She stopped.

What everyone had said at the time was that it was a shame that her parents had split up and even more of a shame that they couldn’t get back together, but Tara knew that to say as much to either her father or her mother was to court one of their rare displays of anger—a defensive anger in her mother’s case and a protective one in her father’s.

‘Gramps and Nan will be there and so will the Brig and Nannie,’ she had coaxed, referring not only to her paternal grandparents but her maternal ones, as well, but still Claudia had refused.

She had known perfectly well, of course, having been told by her mother, that they had accepted Tara’s invitation to celebrate their ex-son-in-law’s fiftieth birthday.

‘We could hardly refuse, darling, and in fact, your father simply wouldn’t have heard of it. You know how much he thinks of Garth.’

‘Yes, I know, and there’s certainly no reason why you shouldn’t both go,’ Claudia had assured her mother quietly.

‘It will seem so odd without you being there….’

‘It won’t seem odd at all, at least not to me or to Garth,’ Claudia had had to point out to her mother as she reminded her gently, ‘We are divorced and have been for a full decade now.’

‘Yes, I realise that,’ her mother had fretted, ‘although I’ve never really understood why.’

‘I told you at the time. Garth had … there was—’

‘Garth was a little bit naughty, I know that, darling, but men are sometimes like that,’ her mother had interrupted her. ‘That’s just the way they are. Even your father … not that he ever … not that there was … but Garth is such a very handsome and charming man that—’

‘I’m not going,’ Claudia had told her mother firmly and she hadn’t done so.

Instead, she had gone to bed early with her sleeping tablet and her unwanted memories. On that occasion, the tablet hadn’t worked, but her memories had. Perhaps tonight she ought to take two instead of her usual one.

When the telephone rang an hour later, Claudia was deeply asleep.

Frowning, Garth replaced the receiver and then dialled the number of his daughter’s London flat.

‘Daddy,’ Tara exclaimed, her voice full of love and warmth as she recognised his voice. ‘I’m glad you rang.’

‘Oh, have you been trying to get in touch with me?’

‘No, it’s not that. It’s just that I drove over to see Ma this afternoon. There was something I wanted to tell her. She’s had the most fabulous write-up in the local rag. Have you seen it?’

‘Yes, I have,’ Garth agreed curtly.

He had seen, as well, the photographs accompanying the article. In one of them, a man was standing close to his ex-wife’s side, his expression as he looked at her both predatory and betrayingly indulgent.

Garth knew him by reputation. He had downsized his business interests, moving out of the city and back to his roots where he was apparently intending to run his computer-based business from his old home town. Claudia, if what he had heard on the grapevine was true, had been approached by him for her views and advice on the type of problems likely to be faced by potential home computer workers he might employ. Garth had his own ideas about why Luke Palliser might be interested in his ex-wife, and they had nothing whatsoever to do with her professional expertise.

‘Whatever you wanted to say to your mother must have been important if it necessitated driving all the way to Gloucestershire and then back again without staying overnight,’ Garth commented as he switched his thoughts back from his ex-wife to his daughter.

‘Well, yes, it was, but I couldn’t have stayed anyway. There wouldn’t have been any point. Ma was going out for the evening. Daddy …’

Garth waited. He knew of old that particular note in his daughter’s voice. It had accompanied every minor and sometimes not-so-minor mishap in Tara’s life, from the collision that had bent the front wheel of her first proper bike to the less dire but far more expensive bump that had damaged the small car he had given her for her eighteenth birthday.

‘You know I told you that I needed to take all my holiday allowance because I was planning to spend time in Boston with Ry?’

‘Yes …’

‘Well, I didn’t want to say anything to you at the time—not until I’d told Ma—but Ry and I … it could be more than just a few weeks I’ll be spending in America.’ She paused, allowing her words to sink in, but Garth wasn’t in need of any extra time to assimilate what she was telling him. He had known … guessed … sensed already, his guesswork keeping pace with her carefully delivered words.

As his hand gripped the telephone receiver, he could feel his palm starting to sweat. At the same time, a cold shock of nausea was gripping his stomach. Now he knew why Claudia had been trying to get in touch with him.

‘Daddy, are you still there?’ he heard Tara demanding uncertainly.

‘Yes, I’m still here,’ he told her, praying that his voice sounded far calmer than he felt.

‘Can you talk to Ma for me?’ Tara was asking him. ‘I know she’s upset and the last thing I want to do is to hurt her, but I love Ry so much…. I just wish there was some way we could all be together, but it’s a bit like it was when you and Ma told me that you were going to divorce, isn’t it? Sometimes you just can’t have all the people you love with you.

‘Ryland’s family, his work, are in Boston. He’s always known that it’s expected that he’ll go back to take his place in the family firm and it’s what he wants to do. You and Ma will be able to come over for holidays. I’ve already told Ma that … and we’ll be able to come over here, and besides, nothing is settled yet. I’ve still got to go through the grilling process,’ Tara went on mock-humorously. ‘And according to Ry, a full investigation by the FBI is nothing to what his aunt is going to put me through. She’s going to want to see family trees, proof of a clean bill of health and a total lack of any inherited disruptive genes before she’ll even call me by my first name, never mind accept that Ry wants to marry me, according to him. Not that Ry cares whether or not she does approve, but he says that won’t matter to her. Once she realises how we feel about one another, she’ll set the full investigative process into motion whether we agree to it or not.

‘She’s the main shareholder in the family business—her late husband, Ry’s father’s brother, was the elder son. When Ry’s uncle died, naturally his controlling share of the business passed on to her. Ry’s father has some shares and like Ry he works for the business. From what Ry has told me about her, she’s terribly starchy. Apparently she’s going to want to know all about my own family background. Not that I’m worried, really. It will be easy peasy. Gramps and Nan go way back and the Brig knows the name and address and how many fillings every single member of the clan has ever had. Daddy, are you still there?’

‘Yes, I’m still here,’ Garth confirmed quietly.

‘You will speak to Ma for me, won’t you?’ Tara coaxed. ‘I know that secretly she was hoping I’d marry a nice local boy and settle down within pram walking distance of Ivy House and I’d have liked that, too, but … I really do love Ry.’

‘Have you applied for your visa yet?’ Tara heard her father asking her sombrely.

‘I’ve filled in the forms, but Ry says there won’t be any problems putting down that this is a holiday and we can sort the rest out over there. That’s funny. Ma asked me exactly the same question.’

After he had finished speaking with Tara, Garth tried Claudia’s number again even though it was almost midnight.

Once more there was no reply. Where was she? Tara had told him she was going out. Out where and with whom? The man in the newspaper, Luke Palliser, whose expression and body language had made it so plain that he wanted far more than a mere business relationship? Was she even now in his arms … in his bed? Stop it, Garth warned himself as he paced the floor. What the hell was happening to him? Surely he knew Claudia better than that. The last thing that would be on her mind right now would be sex, as he ought to know. The only thing, the only person, on her mind right now would be Tara. Even when Tara was a baby, he had once half-jokingly told Claudia he felt she loved her more than she had ever loved him or could ever love him.

‘Yes, I think I do,’ Claudia had agreed seriously, ‘but it’s a very different kind of love. The love that perhaps only a woman who has already lost one child can know. It doesn’t take away from my love for you, Garth. It’s simply different … very different.’

After the taxi had dropped her off outside her apartment block, Estelle made sure it was well out of sight before punching a number into her mobile phone. Perhaps she was being overcautious but she had made it a rule never to mix her private and public personae, and Blade was very much part of the intensely private side of her life.

‘But that’s close to incest,’ a friend had gasped in shock when as a young teenager Estelle had boasted in lavish detail about just what kind of relationship she actually enjoyed with her stepbrother. The other girl had been shocked, but Estelle enjoyed knowing that what she and Blade did together would have been forbidden by their parents. It was all the more exciting and exhilarating knowing what secrecy and deceit they had to employ.

When she had told Blade what she had boasted to a friend, they had had an argument during which he had hit her once very hard across the mouth before forcing her to go down on him thirstily with her mouth as he swore at her and not stopping until he had finally come, his semen spilling from her mouth and running down over her naked body.

Estelle had found it one of the most thrilling, erotic things they had ever done and had her own orgasms without his even touching her, long before he had come himself. She had been thirteen then and Blade had been eighteen. They had continued their sexual relationship all through Blade’s years at university as well as her own—frantic, heated, obsessively driven sado-masochistic sex sessions interspersed with long time periods when they neither spoke nor even saw one another.

Estelle could remember one particular occasion when they hadn’t seen one another from the time Blade had returned to university at the end of the summer until his arrival at home just before Christmas. She had been out with friends when he arrived—a deliberate ploy—knowing how infuriated he would be when she wasn’t there waiting for him. But the party she had gone to had turned out to be rather wilder than she had expected. The school friend who was giving it had an older brother who had turned up with his friends.

Estelle hadn’t had sex with them; she had grown wary and wiser since the days when she had enjoyed confiding all her secrets to her friends. The outside world knew and saw one Estelle; she and Blade knew quite another. But she had enjoyed some pretty heavy snogging sessions and when she arrived home at one o’clock in the morning, very much on a sexually driven high, fuelled in reality far more by the knowledge of what potentially lay ahead of her with Blade than what had already happened, the thrill that had shot through her body as Blade unlocked the front door to her was almost orgasmic in itself.

He didn’t speak; neither of them did. Instead, he simply stood at the bottom of the stairs watching her while she walked up. By the time she reached the top, her nipples ached as though they were already raw, she felt wetter than she had ever felt in her whole life and her clitoris felt so swollen she could hardly walk.

Her bedroom with its own en suite bathroom was at the opposite end of the house from that of her mother and father. Her mother was fond of saying that she believed that teenage girls needed their privacy, but what Estelle knew she meant in reality was that she simply didn’t want to be bothered with her.

Estelle had learned long ago that her mother neither liked nor loved her—and she certainly hadn’t wanted her. It was no secret to Estelle that her conception had been an accident since her mother had never wanted children.

‘I’ll kill myself,’ Estelle had once threatened dramatically as a girl. ‘You just want to get rid of me!’

As she turned away from her, Estelle had heard her mother saying grimly, ‘Isn’t that the truth!’ But it had been another few years before Lorraine had bluntly told her that she had tried to abort Estelle in the early days of her pregnancy.

‘I believe a girl Estelle’s age is old enough to be trusted to make her own rules,’ Lorraine responded with a dismissive toss of her head when people commented on the amount of freedom she allowed Estelle. As if one difficult child weren’t enough, Ethian Morton, her second husband and Blade’s father, had been less than pleased when his first wife’s partner had declared that Blade was beyond their control thanks to the poor quality of the fathering he had received during his parents’ marriage and that they were passing the responsibility for the boy back to his natural father.