Cruel Legacy (67 page)

Philippa's eyebrows rose and he laughed.

'Mmm... that thought has crossed my mind too,' he admitted, making her laugh with him. 'Fascinating, isn't it, how our choice of language often betrays us even when we think we've got everything under control, all our secrets safely hidden?'

'Yes, well, never mind about your hidden motives,' Philippa mock scolded him. 'What concerns me most is your use of the word "ghosts" in the plural.'

'There is no plural,' Blake assured her, 'only one single, very singular, very special, very, very real and alive ghost who...'

Philippa laughed again, teasing him until he reached out for her and wrapped his arms round her, silencing her as he had once done a long, long time ago, only this time there was no anger in the fierce passion of his kiss, no pain or threat, no bitterness, only the long, slow sweetness of a love that had come to full maturity.

When he had finally released her Philippa asked him huskily, 'What were you really expecting to find when you came back, Blake...?'

'Not this,' he admitted quietly. 'I imagined that if we did happen to meet it would not be the girl I loved I would see, but a comfortably married woman whose main concerns in life were her family. The sort of woman who diligently involved herself in local charities, who would not have much time at all for a man who had once behaved so badly towards her; the sort of woman who was far too sensible and content to even want to think about resurrecting such a painful past.

'I pictured you comfortably ensconced in your home, surrounded by your family and friends...'

'You're talking about me as though I'm closer to fifty-odd than thirty-four,' Philippa protested indignantly, her expression changing and becoming very sad as she added quietly, 'You're drawing a picture of a woman like my mother, Blake... not me...'

'Yes. I know,' he agreed. 'But don't you see., .if I hadn't done that I couldn't have come back? It was safer to

imagine you like that, Pip, than to risk visualising the truth... safer for me and safer for you as well. After all, what right did I have to come back and disrupt your whole life? I guessed from what Michael told me how much I must have hurt you but it was too late then to do anything about it. You were married, you had the boys, and Michael had stressed to me how loyal you were to Andrew...'

'I never
loved
Andrew,' she told him quietly. 'I married him because he was my escape route and he married me because I was my father's daughter; both of us were too cowardly, too afraid to reach out for what we really wanted from life; too insecure in one way or another to believe that we could stand alone and be valued for what we were. I've learned that since Andrew's death, and I've learned as well that it's much easier to forgive another's weakness than it is your own.

'It doesn't feel very good looking back and seeing myself as others do...' She heard the small sound of denial Blake made and a faint smile touched her mouth. 'I've begun to learn to accept Andrew's weaknesses, so hopefully it shouldn't be too long before I can accept and forgive my own, and in truth, compared with some marriages, ours wasn't so bad. Andrew was never abusive or unkind. His work, worldly success—they were what mattered most to him; sexually...' She gave a small, revealing shrug. 'When he first died I felt so angry with him because of what he had done, the way he had locked me out of his life and left me so unprepared for living on my own, for coping with the mess he had left behind; but then I started to see that I had
helped
him to lock me out, even encouraged him in some ways.

'I didn't
want
our marriage to be any different because I didn't want that kind of intimacy with Andrew. Quite what that makes me...'

'It makes you human, and honest,' Blake told her huskily, 'and it makes
me
glad.'

When he saw the questioning look she was giving him he told her, 'It makes it easier for me to deal with my jealousy of him and of the years he had with you knowing that you didn't really love him, knowing that when you and I marry we'll be making a completely fresh start; that he won't be a ghost in our lives or our bed.

'With a bit of luck we should be able to arrange things so that we can get married before Christmas. I don't know how you feel about it, but a holiday away somewhere with the kids over the Christmas break rather than a honeymoon might...'

'I can't marry you, Blake.'

'What?'

The look in his eyes made her reach out towards him, gripping his hands tightly in her own. Had she ever really thought this man unemotional, cold, hard? How blind... how juvenile... how self-obsessed she had been!

'I don't mean not ever... I just mean not yet.'

'Not yet? But you said you loved me. If you're not sure about how you feel...'

'I am sure. It isn't anything to do with how I feel about you.' She touched his face lightly. 'There's nothing I want more than to marry you, Blake, to commit my life to you and to know that you've committed yours to me, but if I marry you now, with the company's bankruptcy and my own financial problems still hanging over me, unresolved...'

'You're afraid of what people might say.. .that they'd think you married me for my money?' he asked her roughly.

'No, of course not. It isn't anything to do with what other people might think, it's us, Blake. You and me... I want us to be equals in our relationship, not me some pathetic Cinderella needing to be rescued from the mess she's made of her life by you, her prince. I want to participate actively in our future together, not sit back passively and let you take all my problems off my shoulders. I.. .please try to understand.' Her voice shook slightly, betraying the depth and intensity of her emotions. 'I need to prove to myself that I have learned something from this whole mess, that I have grown.. .that I have coped. I want to be for you the woman that you deserve,' she told him softly, 'for you
and
for myself.'

Blake groaned. 'You already are that woman More

woman than I ever thought I would be lucky enough to find.'

'To marry you now would be a betrayal not just of my love for you but of myself as well. I don't want to come to you burdened by the detritus from my and Andrew's marriage, either emotionally or financially,' Philippa told him firmly, but she couldn't quite keep the small tremor out of her voice. It told him not just how important what she was saying was, but how important
he
was as well.

'I need to be able to respect myself, and I still have to earn that respect,' she told him.

'The way we feel about one another is bound to show,' Blake pointed out. 'Others will see it and you know what they're going to say, don't you?'

'That you're sleeping with the hired help?' Philippa hazarded. She gave a small shrug. 'Other people's words and opinions can't hurt me any more, Blake, but if you're concerned that that kind of gossip might affect your career...'

He shook his head. 'No. But your family won't like it. Your parents, your brother Robert...'

'Tough. Their likes and dislikes are their own problem, not mine,' Philippa told him squarely. 'When you and I marry, become partners, I want us to become
equal
partners; I want to show my sons and Anya, by our example, all the good ways in which a man and a woman can relate to one another. I want Anya to grow up with the self-respect and the self-confidence that 1 never had. I want her not just to believe it but to accept without question that a woman has the right sometimes to be selfish about her own needs, to put herself first, and that those who genuinely love her will accept her as she is; that in a good relationship both partners make sacrifices for one another sometimes and, equally, both partners put themselves first sometimes. I want my sons to grow up with a respect and admiration for my sex... I want our children, if we should have any...'

She stopped when she saw his face...

'What is it—don't you want children?' she asked him hesitantly.

'Not
want
them...your children...
our
children...? Oh, my God, Philippa...'

As he reached for her and then withdrew she leaned forward and told him huskily, 'As a teenager I wasted so many hours fantasising about what it would be like if you and I were lovers. I don't want to waste any more hours fantasising, Blake. I want to know
now...'.

After he had finished kissing her, he warned her ruefully, 'I'm only a man, you know... Those teenage fantasies... I'm not sure I'm going to be able to live up to them...'

The uncertainty, the vulnerability, the love in his voice made her heart and her body ache with answering emotion. How well she knew what it was like to feel that vulnerability.

She cupped his face in her hands and looked up into his eyes.

'I am,' she told him softly, and suddenly, gloriously, unequivocally and irrevocably, she knew she was.

'Mmm—what time is it?' Sleepily Blake lifted his arm from around Philippa's waist to look at his watch. 'I suppose I'd better make a move and get back to my own bed before the children wake up and find me here with you.'

'Mmm,' Philippa acknowledged, but instead of moving away from him she curled herself more securely round him, her mouth lifting in a smile he couldn't see as he gave a soft groan and his hand cupped and stroked her breast.

It felt so right being here with him like this, so natural. Last night, after they had made love, she had told him about Joel, banishing the look she had seen in his eyes with a tiny shake of her head.

'I thought I might fall in love with him, but in reality both of us were looking for someone to displace our individual pain.' Her face had clouded a little. 'I hope he and his wife resolve their problems.'

She had enjoyed making love with Joel, discovering her sexuality, feeling desired and wanted, but from the first moment that Blake touched her she had known she need have no fear that Joel's ghost would ever come between them in any sexual sense.

It wasn't a matter of degree of experience or expertise, it was much simpler than that—and much, much more complex as well.

It was the difference between knowing that Joel was not her man and that Blake was. A 'coming home' that both heightened her sexuality and her responsiveness to him and deepened it, so that the emotional rapport between them was as intense as the sexual one.

'Don't go yet,' she whispered to Blake as she removed his hand from her breast and slowly started to lick and then suck his fingers.

It was surprising how sexually inventive and instinctively knowing you could be once you had the confidence of being certain you were wanted, desired... loved... your feelings and needs reciprocated.

'You do understand why I can't marry you yet, don't you?' she asked Blake gravely just before he pulled on his clothes to go to his own room.

'I understand, yes,' he agreed. 'But that still doesn't stop me from wishing you'd change your mind.'

'No,' Philippa told him firmly.

'No,' he agreed ruefully, 'but you can't blame me for trying, especially not now.'

From her bed Philippa smiled at him.

'I love you,' she told him.

In the bedroom next to her, Anya coughed sleepily. 'We aren't going to be able to keep this a secret for long, you know,' Blake warned her.

'I don't want to,' Philippa told him, and it was only when she saw the way he looked at her that she realised how afraid he had actually been, despite her reassurance, that a part of her was holding back from committing herself to him.

As she held out her arms to him and he came into them he told her thickly, 'I love you too much to bear the thought of losing you now, but...'

'You won't lose me,' she promised him.

When he held her face in his hands and pushed her hair back off her face, cradling her jaw as he bent to kiss her, she was filled with a sense of strength and purpose, an awareness of being in control of her own destiny; of knowing that Blake loved and accepted her as she was, unconditionally and without any reservation.

As she loved him.

The future they would all share was there waiting for them, but to reach out greedily for it, to act in panic rather than in the sure knowledge that their love would endure, would be a step backwards in time for her, back to the old insecurity and lack of self-esteem she was only just beginning to recognise and push aside.

Their love would be all the better, all the stronger, all the more mature if she listened to what her intelligence was telling her as well as her heart—and so would she.

Knowing that Blake understood and accepted how she felt made her feel, not insecure that because he wasn't trying to push her into an immediate marriage he didn't love her enough, as the old Philippa would have felt, but aware instead of just how deep his love actually was.