by Penny Jordan
‘For Anya’s sake I don’t want you to leave. She needs the stability you’ve given her more than what I can offer her on my own. I’ve decided that the best thing to do would be for me to move into rooms at the hospital, temporarily at least…’.
‘You can’t do that,’ Philippa protested. ‘This is your home—if anyone leaves it should be me…’
‘It’s Anya’s home as well,’ Blake pointed out quietiy, ‘and she needs you here with her.’
‘She needs you as well,’ Philippa told him.
He turned round. She could see the stress in his eyes and on his face, and guilt was added to all her other burdens.
She had done this… She, with her stupid unwanted betrayal of a love she already knew he didn’t want.
‘She loves you, Philippa, and to be honest I’m not too sure that the Social Services would allow me to bring her up alone. No. The best solution is for me to move out.’
No, she wanted to protest, the best solution is for you to be here where you’re loved and needed. I should be the one to go, to pay the price of loving you, not the other way round.
‘I think it best that for the time being at least we tell the children that it’s only a temporary arrangement…’
‘Lie to them, you mean?’ Philippa asked harshly.
‘I don’t like doing it any more than you do, but this isn’t something we can explain to them, you know that…’
‘You don’t have to go…’
Oh, God, why had she said that? In her own voice she had heard the forlorn cry of a frightened child.
‘We could… I could…’
‘No,’ Blake stopped her. ‘No, Philippa… You see, I couldn’t.’
Tears filled her eyes; fiercely she blinked them away.
Well, she had asked for it, she told herself grittily. It wasn’t Blake’s fault that she had pushed him to the point where he had to be so blunt.
‘When… when will you go…?’ Her voice was a croaky whisper forced past the huge, painful lump in her throat.
‘Tomorrow.’ He ignored her small, shocked protest. ‘There’s no point in delaying things. I’ll tell the children in the morning at breakfast.’
* * *
Tiredly Philippa picked up the cup of tea she had just made for herself and wandered into the sitting-room, switching on the television and then curling up on the sofa.
It was now almost two weeks since Blake had left and if anything she was missing him more rather than less.
Tomorrow was Saturday. He had telephoned her during the week to say that he would be coming home for the weekend and she had determinedly made plans to spend as much time as she could away from the house while he was there. It seemed the only decent thing to do.
The agents had apparently had two separate people showing interest in her own house, or rather the bank’s house, and the bank had informed her that it was optimistic about an early sale.
It seemed there was also a small… a very small possibility that a buyer might be found for the company, but she was not to get her hopes up too high, the bank had told her—any sale would only be for a very modest figure and it was by no means definite that the business would be sold. If it was started up again it would certainly only be with a very much reduced workforce, Neville Wilson had told her in response to her query.
She had gone up to bed over an hour ago, but lying there unable to sleep had brought her down again to make herself a cup of tea. Now, too restless mentally to focus on the television she had switched on, she closed her eyes.
Her body was tired even if her mind wasn’t.
* * *
The house was almost completely in darkness, only a small light showing through the window of Philippa’s sitting-room, Blake saw as he stopped his car and got out.
Originally he had not planned to come home until the morning and he was still not sure why he had been foolish enough to give in to the savage clamouring of the needs which had driven him away in the first place and come back now.
He had never really thought of himself as a masochist, enjoying self-inflicted pain for its own sake.
He unlocked the front door and then stood for a moment in the hallway. From Philippa’s sitting-room he could hear the subdued murmur of the television.
It was hardly surprising that she had not come out to greet him, he reflected with self-contempt, but who could blame her for avoiding him? How arrogant he had been, assuming just because he was over fifteen years older that he was also fifteen years wiser.
But then fifteen years ago his reasons for refusing to give in to temptation had been reinforced by his knowledge of her own youth, his awareness of how limited her real experience of life actually was, his fear that she would be damaged in the inevitable battle between him and her father.
And of course then he had been afflicted with all the arrogance of his own youth, the magnanimity of his own noble rejection of his own needs in favour of hers.
He pushed open the sitting-room door and then stopped.
Philippa was not watching the television, as he had imagined, but was instead fast asleep on the sofa, curled up on it like a small child—only the slim bare legs and the softly curved body revealed by the thin nightshirt she was wearing were not those of a child.
The speed of his physical response to her caught him off guard. What had happened to the self-control his lovers had congratulated him on—and complained about when their relationships had drifted to their inevitable close?
He started to back out of the room, but something had obviously alerted Philippa to his presence, for her eyes opened. She focused on him and then blinked slowly.
‘Blake.’
Still groggy with sleep and the shock of seeing him standing there, Philippa sat up, her face flushing as she realised how she must look, fair hair tousled, face free of make-up, and wearing nothing but a thin piece of cotton which had ridden up while she slept so that it was now wrapped tightly round her thighs, making it impossible for her to move properly without revealing far more of her body than Blake could possibly want to see.
‘I… I thought you weren’t coming back until tomorrow…’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘The children have missed you,’ she told him awkwardly, relinquishing her battle with her nightshirt to give in to her need to look properly at him.
He looked tired, haggard almost, and her heart ached with love for him.
‘I’ve missed them too.’ She could tell from his voice that it was true.
‘Blake, please come back,’ she begged him. ‘We can work something out; I’ll…’
‘Can we? How?’ he demanded harshly. ‘My God, I’ve been back in the house five minutes and already——’ He broke off abruptly, rubbing his hand along the side of his jaw in a betrayal of what he was feeling.
‘I can’t come back, Philippa,’ he told her roughly. ‘I thought being away from you would make it easier, not…’ When he saw the shock in her eyes his mouth twisted bitterly.
‘You see what I mean? Look at the way you’re reacting to just the words. How do you think you’re going to feel if I try to put them into action?’
Please, please don’t let me cry, Philippa begged herself. The smile she forced her mouth to frame felt as brittle as old glass, mirroring every aching crack in her heart.
‘You’re quite safe, you know,’ she told him, trying to keep her voice light. ‘I promise you that I’m not going to invade your bedroom the way I once invaded your flat…’
‘I’m quite safe? What the hell are you talking about?’
Strangely, his anger didn’t even make her flinch. She had come too far now for that.
‘I’m talking about us, Blake, you and me, and the fact that I’ve stupidly gone and fallen in love with you—again. But my feelings are my problem, my responsibility, and I promise you that… Blake, what are you doing?’ she protested huskily as he crossed the distance between them and physically lifted her off the sofa and into his arm
s.
‘I am doing,’ he told her thickly, ‘what I should have done years ago and what I’ve certainly wanted to do from the moment you opened your front door to me…’
There wasn’t any time for her to question or protest. Blake’s arms were wrapping her tightly against his body, his mouth touching hers, caressing it with delicate tenderness.
Caught between disbelief and desire, Philippa moaned his name against his mouth. She was trembling so violently she could hardly stand up. Blake was shaking as well. His mouth left hers, his lips whispering a husky reassurance before he reclaimed hers, his earlier delicacy abandoned as passion overwhelmed him.
His hands stroked her hair, her face, her body as he kissed her and told her how much he needed her, loved her and wanted her… how much he always had done, the words running helplessly into kisses that turned her responses into incoherent soft murmurs of pleasure and response.
‘I love you so much.’
His hand touched her breast and she shivered in anticipatory pleasure. ‘No, not yet,’ he told her thickly as he bent his head to brush his mouth against her cotton-covered nipple. Leaning against him, shivering in helpless delight, feeling the hard arousal of him against her, she closed her eyes on a shudder of sensual pleasure.
Blake’s mouth returned to her breast, his hand sliding the fabric aside.
As the sharp, high sound she made arced across the silence she could feel the deep shudders of response racking his body.
‘Eighteen years ago, I wanted you like this,’ he told her thickly. ‘You were sixteen, a child still, a child who looked at me with the eyes of a woman. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. The last thing I had expected, the last thing I had wanted was to fall in love, but it was too late. And so I waited and watched you, knowing that I had to give you time to grow up, that I couldn’t, must not take advantage of what I could see in your eyes.’
‘But you rejected me,’ Philippa reminded him huskily. ‘When I came to you, you sent me away…’
Blake’s heart ached as he caught the echo of her pain in her voice.
‘I know, I know… I didn’t want to hurt you, but…’
He released her slightly, holding her gently away from him, smoothing her hair back off her face as he looked down at her.
‘Believe me, my darling… hurting you was the very last thing I wanted to do.’
‘Then why did you?’ Philippa asked him simply.
For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to reply, but then he started to speak, choosing his words carefully, hesitantly almost.
‘That last summer… the year you were eighteen… Robert told me that your father was… concerned about you and about the fact that you… about your feelings for me… He pointed out to me how young you were, how you had been brought up to expect a far different lifestyle from the one I could give you… He told me that your father wanted me to leave——’
Philippa had started to frown, and abruptly she interrupted him, demanding, ‘It was that afternoon, wasn’t it, the afternoon I came back from tennis? I thought then that you and Robert were quarrelling… but you denied it… you said you had to leave…
‘I had been so convinced that somehow things were going to change between us… that at last you were going to see me as a woman and not a child… that you were going to…’ She stopped speaking, swallowing painfully. ‘I loved you so much, Blake, and I thought that you…’
‘I know, I know,’ Blake groaned, taking her back in his arms, rocking her gently against his body, his voice muffled against her hair. ‘But I couldn’t stay, not after Robert had made it so plain that I wasn’t welcome…’
‘You could have written to me… telephoned…’
‘I wanted to, but everything that Robert had said kept coming back to me. I knew he was right, you see—I knew that I couldn’t provide you with the kind of lifestyle you were used to. I could barely manage to feed myself, never mind… I had to put my mother first, Pip… She was so ill…’
‘Yes, of course you did,’ Philippa agreed fiercely. ‘But surely you knew… must have known that you were far more important to me than material possessions?’
She saw his face and cried out in distress. ‘Oh, Blake. No… no… you must have known…’
‘Yes. Deep down inside I think I did, but at the same time… You were so very young, Pip,’ he reminded her gently. ‘So very vulnerable… so very dependent on your parents. I couldn’t——’
‘I made you think that, didn’t I?’ Philippa cut in painfully. ‘I only reinforced everything that Robert had said to you by not defying my father and going to university.’ She closed her eyes, trying not to think about how different things might have been if only she… ‘That’s why you were so angry with me, so harsh, when you claimed that if I’d really wanted to I could have worked to finance myself, wasn’t it…?’ Tears filled her eyes. ‘Oh, Blake… Robert had no right to interfere,’ she began bitterly, ‘to tell you…’
‘He thought what he was doing was best for you,’ Blake told her gently.
‘No, he didn’t,’ Philippa denied sadly. ‘He knew he was doing the best thing for him, for him and for my father… Neither of them ever…’ She bit her lip and looked up at him.
‘Do you know, after Andrew’s death, Robert actually tried to pretend that he had never wanted me to marry him in the first place? Andrew was Robert’s friend, you know… They were at school together. Robert was very impressed by Andrew’s expectations.’ Her mouth curled derisively.
‘Poor Andrew; nothing in his life quite ever lived up to those expectations—not his marriage to me, not his work… and certainly not the reality of his great-aunt’s will.’
Briefly she explained to Blake what had happened and then added quietly, ‘I didn’t marry Andrew for his money, though…’
‘I know that,’ Blake told her quietly. She stopped speaking and waited. ‘When I first heard about you marrying Ryecart, I almost hated you,’ Blake admitted gruffly. ‘I went to America determined to show you, to show your family just what a mistake you’d all made, that if it was money and status you’d really wanted, then I could have given you so much more; that I could be more successful than your father; richer than your husband.’ He looked at her sombrely.
‘I was a fool and worse in those days, Pip, and it took Michael to bring me to my senses.
‘He came out to visit me one summer and he made it obvious that he was shocked at how much I’d changed, at what I was doing to myself. His honesty forced me to be equally honest, and I found myself admitting how I felt… and most especially how I felt about you… how bitter your marriage had made me.
‘He told me the truth about your marriage. That he didn’t think you loved your husband. That you’d married him because it was what your father wanted, not because it was what you wanted. He said that you’d married him so quickly that it was almost as though you’d been running away from something, or from someone.’
He paused, and Philippa admitted shakily, ‘Yes… I was running away from you and from myself… from the pain of loving you and being rejected by you… I was so immature, Blake,’ she admitted honestly. ‘I should never…’
‘No… your father is the one to blame, not you,’ Blake corrected her. ‘He should never have allowed you to marry him, never mind pushed you into it.
‘Michael told me that he didn’t believe you were happy, but that he felt you would stay with Andrew out of loyalty and because of the boys… I was so tempted to come back then, to see you and… but I’d already hurt you once, and very badly; I knew I couldn’t do so a second time, so I stayed away… told myself it was time to make a fresh start. I threw myself into my work, not this time out of my desire to make money or achieve status, but simply as a means of drowning out all the things I couldn’t bear to think about.
‘And then I went to Romania… That changed everything, including me. It finally enabled me to leave behind my bitterness, my resentment against your fat
her… to put down the chip I was carrying on my shoulder. But it didn’t stop me wishing that things could have been different…’
He touched her face, his eyes so bleak with remembered pain that Philippa had to blink away fresh tears.
‘When I heard the news about Anya’s parents I knew that I had to come back. When I was looking for a suitable post and I saw the job at the General advertised it seemed as though fate was urging me to make a final attempt to get my life in order, finally to draw a line under the past.
‘I told myself that it would be churlish, and worse still, cowardly to refuse that chance; that I had to come back and lay a few old ghosts…’
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.
