Guilty - Anne Mather

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you?’ Jake looked down at her, and, despite the fact that she had always considered herself a tall woman, he was still at least half a foot taller. ‘I think you know very well. You resented my remarks about your daughter. You don’t consider I have any right to criticise the way she treats you.’

      Laura took a deep breath. ‘All right,’ she said, deciding there was no point in lying to him. It wasn’t as if she wanted them to be friends, after all. If Julie married him, the greater the distance there was between them the better. ‘I don’t think anyone who doesn’t have a child of their own can make any real assessment on how a parent ought, or ought not, to behave.’

      ‘Ah.’ Jake inclined his head, and Laura was intensely conscious of how she must appear to him. The Aran sweater was not flattering, and she was sure her face must be shining like a beacon. ‘But I do have a daughter. Not as old as yours,’ he conceded, after a moment. ‘She’s only eight years old. But a handful, none the less.’

      Laura swallowed. ‘You—have a daughter?’

      He could apparently tell what she was thinking, for his lean lips parted. ‘But no wife,’ he assured her gently. ‘Isabella—that was her name—she died when our daughter was only a few months old.’

      ‘Oh.’ Laura’s tongue appeared to moisten her lips. ‘I—I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

      ‘How could you?’ Jake responded. ‘Until tonight, we had never even met.’

      ‘No.’

      But Laura was embarrassed nevertheless. Julie should have told her, she thought impatiently. If she knew. But, of course, she must. She had the feeling it was not something Jake would try to hide.

      She half stepped forward, eager to get past him now, and put the plates away, so that she could escape to the living-room. The kitchen was too small, too confining, and that awful panicky feeling she had felt in the hall earlier was attacking her nerves again. He was too close; too familiar. He might not be aware of it, but she most definitely was.

      But Jake moved as she did, probably with the same thought in mind, she guessed later, and unfortunately he chose the same direction as Laura, so that they collided.

      The shock jarred her, but her first instincts were to protect the plates. She clutched them to her, instead of trying to save herself, and it was left to Jake to prevent her, and her burden, from ending up on the floor. Almost instinctively, his hands grasped the yielding flesh of her upper arms, and for a brief moment she was forced to lean against him.

      Afterwards, she realised that the incident couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds. It was one of those accidents that in retrospect seemed totally avoidable. Only it hadn’t happened that way. Almost as if she was moving in slow motion, Laura was compelled into Jake’s arms, and for a short, but disruptive period she was close against his lean frame.

      And, during those nerve-racking seconds, when the world seemed to falter around her, her body came alive to every nerve and emotion she possessed. Her skin felt raw; sensitised; as if someone had peeled away the top layer, and left her weak and open to attack. She had never experienced such a shattering explosion of feeling, and her mind reeled beneath its implications.

      She jerked away from him, of course, more violently than she should have done, and one of the plates went flying. But it wasn’t the sound of the china splintering on the tiles that first made her face burn, and then robbed it of all colour. It was the fact that the ball of Jake’s hand brushed her breast as she rebounded, and in the sudden narrowing of his eyes she saw a reflection of her own awareness.

       CHAPTER THREE

      LAURA slept badly, and it wasn’t just the unfamiliar experience of sharing her bed with her daughter. She was hot and restless, and although she longed for it to be morning, she was not looking forward to the day ahead.

      Of course, it didn’t help that Julie had appropriated at least two-thirds of the space, and every time Laura moved she was in fear of waking her. Indeed, there were times during the night when Laura half wished she had not been so adamant about the sleeping arrangements. If Julie had been sharing Jake’s bed, she would not have been so conscious of him, occupying the room on the other side of the dividing wall.

      As it was, her senses persistently taunted her with that awareness, and images of Jake’s dark, muscled body, relaxed against the cream poplin sheets, were a constant aggravation. It was pathetic, she thought, disgusted by her thoughts. Apart from anything else, he was Julie’s boyfriend, her property—if a man like Jake Lombardi could ever be regarded as any woman’s possession. Somehow she sensed he was unlikely to let that happen. Nevertheless, whatever label she put on it, he was the man her daughter intended to marry, and any attraction she felt towards him was both loathsome and pitiful. For heaven’s sake, she chided herself, he was probably ten years younger than she was, and, even if Julie hadn’t been involved, he simply wasn’t the type of man she attracted.

      She was just a middle-aged school-teacher, who had wasted any chance of happiness she might have had by getting herself pregnant, when she should have been old enough to know better. And since then, she had never felt the need for a serious relationship. Over the years, there had been one or two men who had attempted to push a casual association into something more, but Laura had always repelled invaders. Only Mark had stayed the course, and that was primarily because he made no demands on her. She had actually begun to believe that, whatever sexual urges she had once possessed, they were now extinct, and it was disturbing, to say the least, to consider that she might have been wrong.

      And what was she basing this conclusion on? she asked herself contemptuously. It wasn’t as if anything momentous had happened to shatter her illusions. How stupid she was to read anything into Jake’s almost knocking her over, and preventing it. It was what anyone would have done in the same circumstances, man or woman, and she was fooling herself if she thought his brief awareness of her had been sexual.

      But he had grabbed her, she argued doggedly. He had propelled her into his arms. It didn’t matter that on his part it had been a purely impersonal reaction. She could still feel the grip of his fingers, and the taut corded muscles of his legs…

      God! She turned on to her back and gazed blindly up at the ceiling. How old was she? Thirty-eight? She was reacting like a sixteen-year-old. But then, she thought bitterly, her sexual development had been arrested around that age, so what else could she expect?

      She was glad Julie had known nothing about it. By the time her daughter came down from her bath, clean, and sweetly smelling of rosebuds, her slender form wrapped in a revealing silk kimono, Laura had swept the floor, and restored the kitchen—and herself—to comparative order. That disruptive moment with Jake might never have been, and she was able to excuse herself on the pretext of being tired, without revealing any of the turmoil that was churning inside her. She left them sharing the sofa in the living-room, where Jake had been sitting since she had insisted on clearing up the broken china herself.

      She got up at six o’clock. She had been wide awake since five, and only the knowledge that she would have no excuse for being up any earlier had prevented her from going downstairs as soon as it was light. But six o’clock seemed reasonably acceptable, and as the others hadn’t come to bed until some time after midnight Laura doubted she would disturb anyone.

      Drawing the blind in the kitchen, she saw it was a much brighter morning. The sun was sparkling like diamonds on the wet grass, and the birds were setting up a noisy chatter in the trees that formed a barrier between her garden and the lane that led to Grainger’s farm.

      The cottage was the second of two that stood at the end of the village, the other being occupied by an elderly widow and her daughter. Laura knew that people thought she was a widow, too, and she had never bothered to correct them. In a place as small as Burnfoot, it was better not to be too non-conformist, and, while being a one-parent family was no novelty these days, people might look differently on someone of Laura’s generation.

      After

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