Cruel Legacy (64 page)

'I could go back to working part-time,' Sally had interrupted him.

'Not unless it's what you want,' Joel had told her quietly after a small pause. 'I'm not trying to dictate to you what you should and shouldn't do, Sal. I've already made that mistake once. You have as much right to what you want from life as the rest of us. I've realised while I've been at home with the kids how much of yourself you've sacrificed for them... for us. All I want now is for you to have a choice... If you want to work full-time, fine; if you don't...'

'Oh, Joel...'

'Now what have I said?' he had demanded as she'd collapsed in tears against him, soaking his chest with them as she'd hugged him with fierce joy and genuine emotion.

Some time she would have to tell him about Kenneth, to try to explain, and perhaps, if she was brave enough, to ask him where he had learned that new sexual gentleness and patience that was so unfamiliar to her.

She had shivered a little before curling up in his arms.

She had come far too close to losing what she now recognised was so important to her to want to risk spoiling this new harmony between them before it had had time to grow into something a little bit stronger.

In her sleep, Sally gave a small, sharp, frightened cry. Instantly Joel's arms tightened around her.

'It's all right, Sal... everything's all right,' he whispered to her.

'Joel.' She turned her head to look at him, her voice trembling slightly as she told him, 'I dreamed that you weren't here...'

'Of course I'm here,' he reassured her. 'Where else would I be...where else would either of us be? We belong together, you and I, Sal... here with each other... with the kids..

'Joel!' Sally sat bolt upright in the bed. 'Cathy...Paul— where are they...?'

'Come back here and kiss me,' Joel demanded, grinning at her. 'Otherwise I'm not going to tell you...'

'Joel,' Sally threatened.

'No kiss... no kids...' Joel threatened back, straight-faced, laughing as Sally picked up her pillow and hit him with it.

'Things are going to be all right, aren't they, Joel?' Sally asked him, her face suddenly grave and anxious.

'Of course they are,' he told her, pushing aside the pillow. 'Of course they are.'

And he prayed that his words would prove true.

'Not
too close to the house,' Philippa called out warningly through the kitchen window as she watched Rory and Anya setting up their tennis net.

It was just over two months now since she had moved into Blake's large, comfortable house to take charge of Anya. Two months... in some ways it felt as though she and the boys had lived here forever; in others...

Outside, Rory was patiently demonstrating to Anya how to hold her racket. It had been an unexpected bonus, this rapport which had developed between her elder son and Anya.

It amused her to watch the protective fraternal manner he had adopted towards her and to observe Anya's very determined insistence that he should treat her as an equal.

After an initial three weeks on her own with Anya, gently and compassionately trying to help her to adjust to her new life, she had been very anxious about how her sons, who had after all never had to share her time or attention with another child, especially a female one, would react to Anya's presence.

'Stop worrying,' Blake had instructed her quietly when they'd gone to collect the boys from school. 'You can't protect them from all of life's hazards, you know, and it wouldn't be good for them if you could. They'll find a way of co-existing...'

'I was thinking of Anya just as much as the boys,' Philippa had defended herself.

'I know you were,' Blake had told her.

When she'd shot him a surprised look he had turned his head and smiled at her.

'You ruffle up like a protective mother hen the moment you feel that anything threatens her...'

'It's my job,' Philippa had protested, unconvincingly, she knew.

Looking after Anya, helping her to make the adjustment from her old life to her new one, could never be just a job to her, and hadn't been from the first moment she had set eyes on her.

Temperamentally and in almost every other way as well they were poles apart, and yet she had sensed in Anya a loss of personal identity similar to her own as a girl; she was determined that Anya, unlike her, would never be forced into a mould of someone else's making.

The look in Blake's eyes had shown her that he knew the truth just as well as she did herself.

'Your
job?'
he had repeated, his eyebrows lifting. 'Who are you trying to convince, Philippa, me or yourself? If it's me you're wasting your time. Do you know what I see when I watch you with Anya?'

She had shaken her head.

'I see love... love in its purest, most selfless and giving form, and I see Anya growing in the warmth of that love like a starved plant.'

'She has grown, hasn't she?' Philippa had agreed quickly, anxious to change the subject. His compliments warmed her heart in much the same way that his presence warmed her life, and that knowledge, that admission was something far too dangerous for her to dwell on...

'I think she's put on weight as well,' she had continued, speaking, she knew, far too quickly. 'I was going to ask you if it would be all right to buy some new clothes. I expect I'll have to buy the boys some things anyway...'

But the boys' clothes would be second-hand, while the allowance Blake had set aside for her to use for Anya's needs was so generous that she could buy an entire new wardrobe without making much of a dent in it.

Blake had already told her that he was perfectly happy to leave it to her discretion how much she spent and on what, but she was scrupulously careful about checking with him first before she bought anything, something which she felt sometimes irritated him for some reason.

'Fine,' he said now. 'Why don't you leave it a few days, though, until they've all settled down, and then I'll take a day off and we'll have a proper shopping trip?'

Philippa glanced across at him, digesting his suggestion in silence. Blake had revealed several unexpected traits over these last few weeks, not the least his desire to be involved not just with Anya's day-to-day life, but, it seemed, with her sons' lives as well.

He had already mentioned taking time off to take them all out on various day trips to enliven the long summer holiday, and when Philippa had demurred that there was no need for him to feel he had to include her sons in his plans he had reminded her of his original conversation with her. 'It will be good for Anya to mix with her peers in a family situation.'

'We don't know how well they get on with one another yet,' she had reminded him.

'Probably not very well at first,' he had surprised her by saying. 'Learning to interact with others in a close family unit isn't easy even when you've been doing it from birth.'

When she had moved into Blake's large rambling house he had made over one of the downstairs rooms to her as her own private sitting-room, an act which Philippa had assumed was more to protect his privacy than hers.

But in the evening after supper, when she and the boys had retreated to this sitting-room, Anya had wanted to come too, and of course Philippa hadn't felt it was fair to exclude her, so that the room, instead of being somewhere where she spent the evening alone as befitted Blake's employee, had become instead the focal point of their joint lives.

And not just for Anya but for Blake too.

Of course it was only natural that he would want to spend time with Anya and develop his relationship with her, but some evenings it was her sons who gravitated towards Blake, bombarding him with questions about some apparently wholly masculine pursuit, while Anya curled up on the sofa with her.

It had amazed her to hear Rory talking quite openly and easily to Blake about his relationship with his father, amazed her and humbled her a little as well as she'd recognised the man already growing in her elder son in that he had quite obviously felt he had to protect her from the concerns she'd overheard him expressing to Blake.

Perhaps it was only natural that her sons should relate more easily to another male—they were, after all, used to being at an all-male school and used to relating to their male teachers—but she didn't want them to grow up isolated from contact and familiarity with her own sex. Perhaps now that she was going to send them to a local mixed school for their next school year, that would help redress the balance.

Although she had tried to insist on Blake's reducing her salary to cover the cost of the boys' food and board, he had been so grimly sarcastic about it that she had had no option but to give in.

'Oh, yes, feeding a couple of half-grown boys is going to make me bankrupt, is that what you think?' he had asked her, and then she had heard him curse as he saw her wince, and immediately apologise for his unfortunate choice of words.

'I'm sorry,' he had said. 'I didn't think...'

He had been standing close enough to her to catch hold of her hand, holding it between both of his own in a gesture of comfort and remorse.

For a moment she had been terrified that she might make a complete fool of herself and actually cry.

There had been no physical displays of affection for her from her father when she was growing up, and not really from her mother either, and, while she had made sure that both her sons knew what it was to give and receive spontaneous physical affection, Andrew had been cast in much the same mould as her father.

To be touched like this by a man in a gesture of physical apology and reassurance was so rare that she couldn't even remember the last time it had happened.

And, not for the first time since she had come to live with Blake, she had been starkly aware of the bleakness and paucity of her emotional life.

Watching him with Anya, and with Rory and Daniel, seeing the way all three of them responded to him and he to them, the natural gestures of affection and comradeship they exchanged, made her achingly aware of the difference between her and Andrew's relationship and the relationship a man like Blake would have with a woman with whom he was intimately involved.

'When's Blake coming home?' Rory asked her now, walking into the kitchen. 'He said we could play that new computer game he got us tonight.'

'I don't know,' Philippa responded, adding firmly, 'And when he does, you mustn't pester him...'

'Oh, he won't mind,' Rory assured her. 'He's not like Dad,' he added innocently. 'He likes being with us. What's for tea, Mum? I'm starving...'

Philippa closed her eyes on the wave of emotion.

Yes, it was all working out far better than she had imagined. Even her decision not to see Joel again had now become something she genuinely believed had been the right decision for both of them, her brief relationship with him something she could view with tender pleasure and not pain, instead of a forced acceptance of what she knew morally she ought to feel while privately wishing that things could have been different.

Blake had been generous in his praise for the way she was dealing with Anya, and Susie had commented only the previous day that she seriously ought to consider training for some sort of work with children.

Even her parents and Robert had not raised as many objections about her working for Blake as she had expected— probably far too relieved to be freed from any responsibility towards her, Philippa recognised drily.

So, given that everything was so perfectly wonderful and marvellous, why was it that she woke up in the morning with a feeling like a lead weight in her heart?

Why? What was it she had said to herself about only a fool falling in love with Blake a second time when she'd taken the job? she asked herself grimly.

But the emotions she felt now had nothing to do with those fevered teenage yearnings; now it was his tenderness, his warmth, his sense of humour that made her ache helplessly with longing; now it was the reality of him that she loved, not the fantasy she had conjured up for herself.

She didn't just love him, she admitted as she checked the oven, she liked him as well—liked the way he treated her as an equal, seeking her opinions and her views, discussing things with her, sharing... Showing her sons by his example that being a man was not about taking charge and being in control, that it did not involve the denial of one's emotions, the distancing of oneself from others, that it allowed for mistakes, errors and vulnerabilities in others as well as in himself; like the way he was setting down for Anya the pattern of the kind of man she would one day look for, a man who would value her and respect her, a man who would love her.

It was hard concealing her emotional responsiveness to him, and even harder sometimes concealing her physical desire.

All right, so she was no longer the teenager who had lain in her bed night after night imagining what he would be like as a lover, but that didn't stop her from having to fight against that betraying feminine ache deep within her body far, far too often.

No, it wasn't easy concealing her love for him. Not easy but essential.

It wasn't just the financial security of working for him she didn't want to lose. There was Anya to consider, and her needs had to come before her own.

So far, she congratulated herself wryly, she was rather proud of the very neat job of containment she had done on her emotions. Not even Susie suspected how she really felt.

'Mmm... he's definitely worth leaving home for,' had been her approving comment the first time she had met Blake. 'He's so sexy you could almost bottle it and sell it. God knows how he's managed to stay single... why is it that with some men you can just look at them and know that in bed and out of it they just can't help but turn you on?

'I mean, he isn't just sexy, he's old-fashioned nice as well. I'm glad I'm not in your shoes—I don't know how I'd be able to keep my hands off him...' she had added frankly, and then apologised quickly, 'Oh, hell, Pip, I'd forgotten for a moment what you told me...'

'It's all right,' Pippa had assured her. 'That was years ago, a teenage crush, that's all.'