Handing Josh over to the other woman, Taylor couldn’t look at Jared, but she could sense clarity dawning on that sharp brain. ‘Craig told me to tell you he’d be late tonight.’
She was too aware of Jared listening to every word, as conscious, no doubt, of her tense discomfort as he was of the other woman hugging and kissing the happy, gurgling Josh.
‘I can do that now.’ Taylor was disappointed when Charity readily took the baby bottle from her. She would have preferred to deal with the feed herself, desperate, at that moment, for something to do. ‘You didn’t tell me you knew Jared.’
Not sure what to do with her hands, now that she had nothing to hold, Taylor uttered an awkward little laugh, reaching for her coat. ‘No.’ She wondered how Charity knew him, but was too disconcerted to ask.
‘Hardly a reflection on you, Charity.’ Moving towards them with that lithe grace of his, on the surface Jared oozed irresistible charm. ‘It seems she decided to keep us both in the dark,’ he breathed with the flash of a smile. His eyes, though, pierced like rods of steel. There was a flush lying along his cheekbones that hinted at some fervent emotion, but one that vied with something like satisfaction that said he had the upper hand and was enjoying every minute of it.
‘In what capacity do you two know each other?’ Charity asked, balancing Josh on a curvy hip while she started to warm his bottle, adding laughingly, ‘Or is that rather an indelicate question?’
Dark head tilted, Jared’s eyes met Taylor’s in penetrating enquiry. It was strange, she thought swallowing, how he had made all the wrong assumptions, and she was the one left feeling like a fool.
Her small breasts lifted as she caught her breath, wondering what to say. She hadn’t told Charity she was married and she didn’t want to spring the truth on her friend like this. And whether Jared was surprisingly sensitive to that fact, she wasn’t sure, but swiftly he was answering, ‘Let’s just say we go back quite a way.’
‘Really?’ Bustling around the worktop, Charity sent an enquiring glance at each of them over her shoulder, bouncing Josh on her arm as he suddenly started crying again. But then obviously sensing that she was treading on uneven ground, quickly she went on, ‘Jared’s a friend and business associate of Dad’s. I met him first when I came home one hols from university and he was staying with them, and in those days I must admit to having had a glorious crush on him.’ The contentment and security in her marriage gave Charity the freedom to declare it so openly, Taylor realised, although the hint of colour in the woman’s cheeks assured her that where Jared Steele was concerned, even the most fulfilled of women weren’t entirely immune. ‘Will you let me make him some tea? Or are you keen to have him all to yourself? Take him upstairs?’
Exchanging glances with Jared, Taylor clung to her coat as though to a protective shield.
‘Well?’ she asked, hoping he wouldn’t accept Charity’s offer, yet wanting to delay the inevitability of being alone with him again.
‘I think,’ he said, dropping a glance at Thai who, having wolfed down his meal, suddenly shot out of the room as if he’d been startled by some unseen horror, ‘tea would be very nice—some other time. But right now Taylor and I do have things to discuss.’
Do we? she thought, watching the smaller, more subdued Asia delicately picking at her food, and feeling something like cold desolation trickling through her. Surely there could be only one thing he would want to discuss after the tumultuous peaks and troughs that had been their marriage?
‘I’ll look in before I leave,’ he promised Charity, before Taylor guided him back into the hall and up the stairs leading to the top floor.
‘So the cats aren’t yours. The baby isn’t yours. And your lover’s somebody else’s!’ he comprehended as soon as he was in her flat. There was a marked silence about the place after all the domesticity downstairs.
‘I never said anyone was my lover! Unlike you, I do have some respect for other people’s marriages!’ she flung at him, tense from the effort of trying to stay in control.
The hard masculine face was etched with some harsh emotion and anger darkened his eyes to slits of jet, but he said nothing.
‘I work with Craig,’ Taylor continued then, ‘and he took Josh to the studios today because Charity’s mother had a fall and needed her there. You saw us together and just assumed what you wanted to. Like you were so quick to assume that Josh was mine!’ she accused, tossing her coat over the back of one of a pair of matching sofas which, though in immaculate order, she had managed to pick up cheaply at a clearance auction.
‘A natural deduction, in the circumstances,’ Jared muttered, ‘as I think you’ll agree.’ He was standing in the middle of the impeccably furnished room, looking around him, and even its generous proportions couldn’t detract from his magnificence, or that air of innate authority that was as much a part of him as his shadow. ‘I should have known better, shouldn’t I? Somehow that delightfully homely scene downstairs didn’t quite gel with my memory of the girl I knew.’ His gaze was still raking over her carefully chosen belongings; over the sparse but tasteful ornaments and co-ordinating pictures, the flawless rugs and sofas and the low-level bookcases with their immaculate veneer. ‘Now this is more like it,’ he breathed heavily, making her wonder what he was thinking because, after the domestic chaos to which he had just referred below, the flat only seemed to emphasise the ordered isolation of her own existence. ‘This is much more in keeping with the Taylor Steele I knew. Or is it back to Taylor Adams now?’ He didn’t need to ask if she was using her maiden name. If she hadn’t been, then Charity might have guessed the truth. ‘Why didn’t you tell her you were married?’ he demanded with some unfathomable emotion burning like dark fire in his eyes.
She shrugged. ‘The question never came up.’
As she made to move past him, hard fingers closed around her upper arm. ‘It just did.’
He looked so angry that beneath the pale sweater, Taylor shivered. ‘I don’t know.’ Disconcerted, she pulled herself out of his grasp.
In truth, she hadn’t told her friend and landlady—or indeed anyone who didn’t need to know—that she had been married—and certainly not that her marriage had broken up. She didn’t like the sense of personal failure it implied.
She went across to the window, drew the heavy curtains before turning back to him. ‘You said we had things to discuss.’
‘We most certainly have.’
Tension coiled in her stomach. ‘Like what?’
He didn’t answer for a moment. Then in that deep authoritative way of his he advised, ‘Sit down, Taylor.’
An ache seemed to start somewhere in the middle of her chest as she did as he suggested, dropping down onto one of the sofas. It was her flat, yet even here he was the one giving the orders, the one in control, she acknowledged grudgingly, when he remained firmly on his feet.
‘I know we made a hash of our marriage. And I can see you’ve picked yourself up…’ he sent another glance around the room ‘… sorted your life out quite admirably. It almost makes a man feel… superfluous, especially when all the funds paid into your account were returned in full.’
‘What did you think I’d do, Jared? Take it all with undying gratitude? Did you think I wouldn’t be able to manage on my own?’
‘I didn’t think anything. I didn’t want you to have to— manage, as you put it—or to experience any unnecessary difficulty. Not when I could make life easier for you, even if you weren’t living under my roof any more.’
‘Well… as you can see…’ a small gesture indicated the modest comfort of the flat ‘… I’m not exactly living in squalor or abject poverty.’ Returning her gaze to his, she wished she hadn’t when the dark penetration of his eyes sent a weakening torrent of emotion through her. Quietly, through lips that seemed not to want to move, she murmured,