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