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