‘Mmm … smells like it,’ Brad agreed pleasantly.
He was more casually dressed this morning, although not in the jeans and T-shirt in which she had first seen him. This time he was wearing a pair of plain, casual, neutral linen trousers with a white linen shirt and a soft knit neutral unbuttoned waistcoat. On another man such clothes might have looked too stylish and uncomfortable but Brad wore them so easily that they seemed; to be an intrinsic part of him.
There was something about a man who took an interest in his appearance but at the same time managed to look as if he didn’t care if sticky little fingers touched his clothes that was infinitely appealing, Claire recognised. Too appealing, she warned herself hastily as she became aware that Brad had turned his head and was watching her watching him.
‘I … er … Where would you like to start …? The bedroom?’ she suggested quickly, and then for no reason that she could think of immediately blushed so hard and so colourfully that she felt completely humiliated by her ridiculous reaction.
What on earth had got into her? She was behaving like a … like a … She didn’t know what she was behaving like, only that she didn’t care for it, she acknowledged as Irene frowned at her and told her firmly, ‘Brad will want to see the whole of the house, of course.
‘My brother bought this house in the early days of his first marriage,’ she told Brad informatively as Claire dutifully walked towards the kitchen door. ‘It was very run-down then and he and Paula completely renovated it. Paula had very, very good taste and of course John was well off enough to indulge her.
‘It was her idea to use some of the spare bedroom space to give each of the four main bedrooms its own bathroom, wasn’t it, Claire?’ Without waiting for Claire to reply she continued talking to Brad.
They were in the hallway now, all of them, Claire noticed in mild exasperation as she opened the double doors into the drawing room so that Brad could see for himself the colour scheme that Irene was describing.
Claire could remember the first time she had walked into this room—how overawed she had felt by its pristine beauty and, at the same time, how protected and at peace. The whole room breathed serenity and beauty.
Without being conscious of what she was doing Claire frowned as she realised that the large, silver-framed photograph of John and Paula’s wedding had been pushed to the rear of the display on the pretty Regency sofa table and her own much simpler wedding photograph pushed to the fore.
Sally, had done that, of course; she had had a bit of a thing about her father’s insistence on giving prominence to his first wife’s photographs, but Claire hadn’t minded.
‘Your late husband’s first wife?’
Claire paused as Brad stepped past her and picked up the photograph she had just moved.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Sally, my stepdaughter, is very like her mother … just as pretty, although John would never have it. In his eyes no one could ever measure up to Paula …’
She missed the frowning look that Brad gave her as he heard the conviction and warmth in her voice.
Didn’t it bother her to know that her husband had loved her predecessor so much and, if not, why not? She was either an extraordinarily unusual woman or …
As he glanced around the beautiful, serenely immaculate room his eyes were caught by something that looked glaringly out of place—a very amateurishly stitched sampler which was framed and had pride of place on one of the walls.
Intrigued, he moved closer to study it.
‘Paula’s hobby was tapestry work,’ Claire told him quietly. ‘She stitched the cushions in here whilst she was pregnant with Sally. There were complications with her pregnancy which meant she had to rest.’
A small shadow touched her face. ‘Unfortunately it wasn’t enough and after Sally’s birth … John lost her when Sally was less than three days old. It was the most terrible tragedy …’
So tragic, Brad thought, that her husband had never got over it, even though, eventually, he had found and married her, and even though, from all that Irene and Tim had told him, and from what he could see with his own eyes, she was very obviously the kind of woman whom it would be easy for any man to love … Too easy …
Brad’s frown deepened. He didn’t like the direction his thoughts were taking—and kept taking, in fact, ever since that incident in the park when, for God alone knew what mad, impulsive reason, he had seized hold of her and kissed her. Kissed her and felt her mouth soften into the kind of quivering, softly feminine response that he couldn’t remember experiencing since he had left the heady days of his early teens behind …
‘We were all thoroughly relieved when he married Claire,’ Irene told him. ‘There was a time when we were beginning to worry that John was trying to turn Sally into a carbon copy of Paula.’
‘He was just trying to do his best for her,’ Claire protested. ‘He loved Paula so much … thought she was so perfect—’
She broke off as she saw the way that Brad was looking at her—the mingled pity and curiosity she thought were in his eyes. Pride and rejection of his unwanted compassion sparkled in her own eyes as she lifted her head and looked back at him.
Her upbringing had had its share of pain, like Sally’s. Orphaned whilst she was still a toddler, she had been brought up by a maiden aunt of her father’s—a retired schoolteacher who had had very strong views on the way that children and most especially girls should behave.
Under her tutelage Claire had developed into an intelligent but socially shy and uncertain girl with very little in common with her peers.
Her great-aunt had died unexpectedly from a fatal heart attack whilst Claire was coming to the end of her teacher training. She had first met John a few weeks later, just after …
Brad, who was still watching her, wondered what it was that had suddenly made her look so haunted.
Despite the obvious tension it was causing between them, he couldn’t bring himself to regret totally what had happened at their first meeting, but the passionately vibrant woman she had been then seemed curiously at odds with the woman she appeared to be now—a woman who seemed quite content passively to accept her role as a very poor second best to her husband’s first wife.
She was such an obviously sensual and loving woman that he couldn’t imagine how she could ever have been happy with a man who, from what he had heard about him, could not possibly have met and satisfied her emotional needs—or her physical ones either.
He frowned, angry with himself for the probing intimacy of his thoughts.
But he had seen for himself how warm and womanly she was, both with the children and with Tim, her gentle smile taking the edge off Irene’s almost acerbic comments to her husband.
It was, perhaps, no wonder that Tim should choose to spend so much of his free time helping Claire with her gardening.
His frown deepened as he wondered if the relationship between them was as innocent as it had first seemed.
There had been nothing so far in Irene’s manner towards either her husband or her sister-in-law to suggest that she suspected anything, but she was being remarkably insistent that Claire’s home was the perfect place for him to lodge. Why? Because she felt that a third party living there would put a stop to any untoward intimacy between her husband and Claire?
If Claire was having a relationship with Tim, that would explain her shocked reaction to her brief response to his kiss—and the anger he had sensed in her both at dinner and again now.
He frowned again, unwilling to delve too deeply into why he should feel almost a personal sense of disappointment and loss at the thought of her being involved with another man.
What was really bugging him? The thought that his own judgement was at fault, that his first impression of her as