Accidental Mistress

by Williams Cathy

  ‘We can work it out ourselves,’ she replied, depressed because suddenly everything seemed to be not quite the right way up. After their heated confrontation, after his astounding proposal, his calm acceptance now was something of an anticlimax. Then she told herself that she was being utterly stupid. He would have to have access to their child, whether it disrupted her life or not, so wasn’t it preferable that any such access was achieved with the least acrimony possible?

  But at the back of her mind there was the niggling thought that he had surrendered awfully quickly once she had informed him that she wouldn’t marry him. No protestations, no attempts to persuade her to change her mind. He must be relieved, she thought, with a stab of bitterness. Relieved that she had not taken him up on his offer, relieved that he had squared it with his conscience, had been seen in his own eyes to have done the right thing, so that now he could carry on with his life knowing that he had tried his best.

  ‘Good,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ll be in touch.’ And he turned away, letting himself out of the flat without a backward glance.

  It was only when he had gone that she realised how drained she was. She switched on the television set and pretended to watch something but she was too fraught to concentrate.

  Now that he had come and she knew that he would be back again, if only to sort out things, she was back on that tightrope of suspended animation. Doing normal things, like reading her book, washing the dirty mugs in the kitchen sink, carrying on except that her mind had been frozen in some dreadful time warp, dwelling obsessively on him, desperately looking forward to the next encounter. She would have to fight very hard if she wasn’t to go through the next few months or years leaping from one emotional encounter to the next and only managing to exist in between.

  If only she could do the sensible thing and dislike him. There were, after all, a million reasons why she should. If only, even, she could put him in some sort of perspective, but she couldn’t. He overwhelmed her. Even when they were arguing, even when bitterness filled her mouth and her head and her thoughts, even when he alarmed her in a way no one ever had before, he still excited her. She found it hard to tear her gaze away from him, and when she did she could still see his face reflected in her mind.

  On Monday, Paul, surprisingly because he normally respected her need for privacy, asked her about him. He didn’t ask whether Angus was the man responsible for the pregnancy, but she told him anyway since there seemed little point in hiding it.

  ‘And is he going to support the baby?’ he asked casually. They were sitting in his office, going through the books, with a plate full of sandwiches between them and two cups of coffee. He was busy poring over the figures, frowning because his mind, which was so tuned in to anything to do with plants, found it almost impossible to piece together anything that involved numbers, and she hesitated, wondering whether to change the subject tactfully or not.

  ‘He wants to contribute,’ she said honestly. ‘He wants to take some responsibility.’

  ‘And you find that surprising?’

  ‘No, not really,’ she answered, thinking about it.

  ‘In that case, why didn’t you approach him from the start?’

  ‘Because...’ she said, faltering. He looked up at her thoughtfully. ‘Because I didn’t want him to feel obliged to...’

  ‘But he is; of course he is.’ He was looking at her and his pleasant, open face was speculative. ‘He struck me as a very aggressive type. The sort of man who wouldn’t do anything in half-measures.’

  ‘He has a very fast, very high-profile lifestyle. There’s no room in it for anyone else.’

  ‘And you resent that.’

  ‘Of course I don’t!’ Lisa exclaimed.

  ‘I don’t mean to pry, Lisa,’ he said a little tentatively, because her personal life was an area into which he had rarely ventured in the past, ‘but if you were indifferent to him it wouldn’t matter a jot to you whether you disturbed his lifestyle or not. Your only thoughts would be for the baby and you would probably find it easy to accept that he was duty-bound to share the responsibility.’

  She didn’t say anything. She knew what he was getting at but she couldn’t put it into words; she couldn’t come right out and admit that she was frantically in love with Angus Hamilton. To voice it would make it more real; it would be as though there was no turning back, no more hiding from the truth. She would have to don the public face of her private life, and, however much she had opened up with Paul recently, she still wasn’t prepared to go that far.

  ‘If you ever need somewhere to go,’ he said, after a while, ‘to think things over, the cottage is empty and you’re welcome to it.’

  He owned a two-bedroomed cottage in the Lake District. Lisa had been there once for a long weekend and she had rather enjoyed it, even though it was in a fairly sad state of repair, despite Ellie’s brave attempts to hide it with new curtains and scatter cushions on the sofas. Paul had been given it by his father and apparently it had been in his-family for years and years and years, and since each successive inheritor had done minimal work on it the task of now overhauling it would cost a fair penny.

  She didn’t think she would be needing to think anything over. She wouldn’t need the cottage. There was, really, not much thinking over to be done. The fact was that Angus Hamilton would see his child and her only protection lay in her ability to forge ahead with her life and close her eyes to the effect he had on her. Time had a way of sorting things out, of putting things into focus.

  ‘Thanks, Paul,’ she said obediently, then she lowered her eyes and steered the subject back to work and he accepted the change without batting an eyelid. It was one of the things that she had liked about him from the very start. He had never allowed curiosity to dictate to him. He had left her to her privacy, the way she had liked it. Once. Sometimes, now, she wasn’t entirely sure.

  If she hadn’t clung so tenaciously to her security, would she have been better prepared for the earthquake that had turned her tidy, ordered world upside down when Angus Hamilton had entered it? Brick by brick she had built the fortifications around her to protect her from life’s slings and arrows, yet when he had come along it had taken only a puff to blow them all away.

  If she had never tried to cling to the illusion that stability was somehow a controllable commodity, then wouldn’t she have been less vulnerable in the end? Better prepared to cope with a man like Angus Hamilton? If, if, if. She could drown thinking about all the ifs in her life.

  Still, she would have to learn to cope with her emotions, learn not to give herself away when she was with him, however infrequently that might be.

  It was a week before she next saw him and this time when the doorbell rang she knew it was going to be him before she even got there. She composed her face suitably and opened the door, quite prepared to talk through the visiting rights issue in a dispassionate manner.

  It was not quite seven and he had obviously come straight from work. He was still wearing his suit, which was dark grey, with his coat, which was black, and she looked at him politely, expecting him to get straight down to business, but when she invited him inside, in a voice which neither wavered nor stumbled, he asked instead whether she had eaten yet.

  ‘I...was about to,’ Lisa said hesitatingly.

  ‘Get your coat. I’ll take you out for a meal.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked, and he smiled at her with the speculative, amused charm that reminded her of how he used to be months ago on that holiday.

  ‘That’s not a very gracious response,’ he murmured.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I just thought that we might as well discuss whatever terms of visiting that you’d like right here. There’s no need to take me out.’

  ‘No, you’re right, there’s none, but the way I look at it is that we’re going to be seeing one another on a regular basis for an indefinite length of time, even if it is only in passing. We might as well get accustomed to some sort of relaxed, amicable relationship.’ He
was still smiling, though the temperature in his voice had dropped by a few degrees. ‘Or is that asking too much?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ He was right, and maybe a politely friendly arrangement was the way to go, after all. She smiled and said, ‘I’ll get my coat; I won’t be a minute.’

  They went to an Italian restaurant, which was lovely because she hadn’t eaten out in a restaurant for ages, and over the meal he showed her photos of the Caribbean islands they had visited, which Liz had sent to him because, he explained, he never remembered to carry a camera anywhere.

  ‘I think the problem,’ he said lazily, ‘is that the damn thing’s just too complicated. It was my mother’s. She used to take impressive shots of flowers. My problem is that I’m fairly useless when it comes to gadgets like that. Too many dials to twist.’

  When he chatted like that, easily and without any of that cold cynicism which he was capable of, she could feel her guard dropping. She had to remind herself that charm was a commodity at his disposal, something he pulled out at will.

  It was only when they were standing outside her flat that she said, with surprise, ‘What about arrangements to see the baby? We haven’t discussed it at all.’

  ‘Oh, no, we haven’t, have we?’ he answered, as though startled himself by the omission. ‘Perhaps I could call by next week and we can discuss it then. What about next Saturday?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lisa said uncertainly. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Why?’ He looked at her with a slight frown. ‘Are you going somewhere? We could make it another day if you’d prefer.’

  ‘No.’ Her face cleared. ‘Saturday will be fine.’ She decided that she was being foolish, that they had just spent a perfectly enjoyable evening together with no angry exchanges or bitter accusations.

  ‘Right, then, I’ll call for you around seven-thirty?’

  She nodded, and watched him as he walked to his car, gave her a wave and then drove off.

  She didn’t quite know why but she felt unsettled by the evening. It didn’t make any sense because when she sat down and thought about it she had nothing to feel unsettled about. He had been pleasant and charming in a totally unthreatening way. He had displayed the same polite, almost brotherly concern that he had shown towards her at the very start of that holiday, when he had been at pains to make her feel at ease.

  It was a good thing, she told herself over the next few days, that they could relate to each other in a civil, adult fashion. What kind of life would it be for a child to be torn between two warring parents? And she would never be able to conduct her life in a state of constant emotional upheaval; she would end up having a nervous breakdown.

  He had been angry and upset, she realised, when he had first found out about the pregnancy, but now he had had time to think things over and in his usual firm, calculating way he had taken the reins and was steering them in the most sensible direction.

  He had offered marriage, but had not tried to fight her objections. No, he had wanted marriage as little as she had and now that that idea had been squashed he intended to conduct a courteous, occasional-dinners-out type of relationship with her so that when they met they would at least be able to exchange conversation without arguing.

  She couldn’t find fault with that, could she?

  She was now nearly eight months pregnant. She didn’t need to cope with unnecessary strain. Very shortly, she would be stopping work, and counting down the days on the calendar. She had already had a tour of the maternity section of the hospital where she would be having the baby, and it had had quite an impact on her. She needed to feel reasonably relaxed and it would help if she didn’t have to do battle with a man whose presence was enough to throw her time and again.

  So when she next saw him she was prepared to make an effort and she did.

  They went out for a meal, this time at another restaurant where the music was a bit louder and the atmosphere a little more hectic, and when he asked her questions about what she had been doing for the past week she didn’t frown and wonder whether there was anything more meaningful behind the questions; she just answered with a smile.

  She told him that she only had a little over a week to go before she gave up working, but that she would be back again almost as soon as she’d had the baby because she needed the money, and it only occurred to her much later, when she was in bed, that he had not argued the point.

  He had not informed her that she would have no need to return to work if she listened to him and accepted the money he wanted to give her. He had not pointed out that she had chosen not to marry him, that instead she had picked the harder of the paths to follow. There had been no recriminations and none of the terse, vaguely threatening accusations with which he had initially confronted her.

  Instead he had nodded understandingly, moved on to discuss the maternity benefits in his company, which he was hoping to upgrade within the next year, while she ate and listened and was hardly aware of how fundamental his change in attitude towards her appeared to be.

  Now, with the lights in her bedroom off, lying on her side with a pillow angled by her stomach, she realised that what was now missing between them was that spark which had manifested itself in passion when they had been on holiday and which had still glowed when they had argued heatedly over the fate of the baby.

  They had reached some kind of even keel and she said to herself that nothing could be better. She even wondered whether her violent attraction towards him was beginning to ebb away. She had certainly relaxed enough in his company not to feel permanently on edge every time he looked at her. She could meet those blue eyes evenly and she had even stopped apologising in that automatic way of hers which appeared to have been a habit cultivated over a lifetime.

  She also realised that they had discussed nothing practical, which had supposedly been the object of the exercise.

  She decided that the next time she saw him she would insist that they reach some sort of agreement as to how often he would want to see the baby. She would do that before they went anywhere or did anything. She couldn’t continue to see him as though they were friends.

  She wouldn’t allow herself to be lulled into some kind of false security. He didn’t love her and he had nothing to lose, but she couldn’t afford to become too dependent on his kind, solicitous visits because there would come a time when she would find that she couldn’t do without them.

  The next time she saw him, she would lay the cards on the table.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  LISA had, stupidly, she now realised, left almost everything till the last minute. Her friends had given her bits and pieces over the months, which she had stored away in a cupboard, out of sight, but she had bought hardly anything herself. The cot, the pram, and all the other things which she vaguely assumed a baby might need, she had left to the very end.

  At first, because she had not wanted to think about things like that, and anyway nine months seemed such a long time, she had kept telling herself that there would be more than enough time.

  Later, when she had found herself unconsciously growing more and more attached to the baby inside her, she had held back because of some irrational fear of preempting fate by going out and buying things.

  Then she had told herself that she would do it all when she gave up work, except that she had never really anticipated staying at work for quite as long as she had. Keeping busy had seemed so much more preferable to staying inside her house, day after day, preparing for the baby, being constantly reminded of how lonely it was going to be giving birth, then looking after a baby, all on her own.

  The only thing she hadn’t quite foreseen was how tired she would be in the latter stages of pregnancy.

  But it’s got to be done, she told herself after she had picked off some breakfast on the Saturday morning. The thought depressed her for no reason that she could put her finger on.

  It wasn’t as though she had no money in the bank because she had. She had been diligently saving ev
ery month. She could easily afford the cot and the pram and she hardly needed to buy any clothes at all because her friends had bought quite a few for her, though she hadn’t looked at them for so long that she could hardly remember what exactly they were. All she could remember was holding them up, exclaiming with the right degree of pleasure in her voice, and then stuffing them away because the sight of them had made her feel like bursting into tears.

  She cleared away her plate and cup slowly. Her pregnancy had been an easy one, with no complications. For the first few months she had felt sick occasionally, but then that had cleared and almost up until a couple of weeks ago she had felt perfectly fine.

  Now it irritated her that she had to move so lethargically. Everything took three times longer than it normally would have. She never complained to anyone, though. She felt that she had no one to blame for getting herself in this situation and there was no way that she was going to moan about anything at all.

  She brushed her hair, looked at herself in the mirror and decided that, all told, she didn’t look too bad. Apart from her stomach, everything had remained more or less the same size.

  She could remember Ellie telling her proudly that she had swollen to the size of a barrage balloon with each of her pregnancies, because she just couldn’t stop eating and putting on weight.

  Lisa’s arms and legs had remained thin and her face looked healthy but that was all.

  She sighed, gathered up her bag and slung it over her shoulder, then went to the front door and pulled it open.

  Angus was standing outside and because she had had absolutely no warning that he would be there she very nearly yelped in shock.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ she asked. She hadn’t spoken to him since she had made the decision to get this visiting business sorted out and to stop meandering into some kind of frightful, dangerous friendship with him.

  She only wished that her body could be as pragmatic as her mind. She looked up at him and her heart fluttered at the dark sexiness of his face and the taut lines of his body.