The Flawed Marriage

by Penny Jordan

  Amber acknowledged that she did. She had noticed it in the girls she had seen, a leggy, fresh beauty combined with a studied carelessness that achieved a healthy, glowing attraction denied to girls living in cooler climates.

  ‘We must get you a new dress as well,’ Edie told her. ‘Unless you’ve brought something with you?’

  Amber shook her head. She hadn’t anticipated being invited out anywhere, and she had intended to ask Edie about going shopping. Julie’s remarks about her leg still rankled, and she had come to a decision about what she intended to wear.

  ‘Right, we’ll pay a visit to Bel Air tomorrow. Fairlea is okay, but you don’t get the same class of shop as you do in Bel Air.’

  Just after an hour after they had left the Haines’ home they were drawing up in the car park of the modern Fairlea hospital, and as she joined Paul on the tarmac Amber admitted to nervous butterflies clamouring for release in her stomach.

  Schooling her features, determined not to alarm Paul, who must also be feeling nervous, Amber followed Edie into the large foyer, as different from the hospital where she had once worked as it was possible to imagine. Here the nurses were wearing attractive crisp uniforms; taped music filled the reception area; a girl beautiful enough to be a model sat behind the imposing desk, one wall of the reception area made of glass behind which tropical fish swam lazily.

  One thing was the same, though; the dedication and experience etched in the features of the doctors and nurses passing through the foyer, barely sparing a glance for the trio waiting anxiously by the desk.

  Paul had an appointment with the paediatricians’ department which the girl confirmed, before smiling at Amber and telling her that Doctor Randolph was expecting her.

  Amber’s heart almost missed a beat. Dr Randolph was the specialist whose work had pioneered the new treatment for her condition, and although she had hoped to talk to one of his staff she had never dreamed that she might be seen by the great man himself.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Edie smiled at her. ‘I’ll take Paul up to the children’s unit.’

  A nurse appeared from nowhere to whisk her discreetly down a gleaming white corridor to a plainly furnished office, which reminded Amber all too unpleasantly of the specialist’s room at home and his final prognosis on her hopes of full recovery.

  ‘Well now, Mrs Sinclair,’ Dr Randolph asked, ‘suppose you tell me about your injury and then I’ll examine you.’

  Dr Randolph had come as quite a shock. For one thing, he was much younger than she had visualised; somewhere in his mid-thirties, with a shock of springy brown hair and kind brown eyes. He was also far more approachable than she had expected, but even that didn’t stop the waves of nausea washing over her as his white coat and the austere room brought back memories she would much rather had remained buried.

  ‘Say,’ he said kindly, on her third stammered attempt to explain to him how she had damaged her leg, ‘why don’t we just take a stroll through the park and you can tell me all about it.’

  As he spoke he stood up and shed his white coat, taking her arm and gently urging Amber through the door and back down the corridor.

  Outside the sunlight was almost painful in its harshness, and Amber had to reach inside her bag for the protection of her glasses.

  ‘You must take care that you don’t burn,’ Dr Randolph warned her. ‘With that lovely fair skin you can’t be too careful.’

  The park he had mentioned was on the other side of the road from the hospital, a pleasant open space dotted with trees and benches. As they walked Amber found herself describing her accident, her reaction to the news that she would probably never fully regain the full use of her leg and her consequent determination to come to the United States to see what could be done there.

  ‘Umm, and yet Mrs Haines told me over the phone that it had been difficult persuading you to come in and see me, which suggests that somewhere along the line you had a change of heart. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Amber admitted. She had never felt happy about taking Joel’s money, even in the very early days when she had justified her decision to accept his proposition by telling herself that she needed the money and that if she didn’t accept someone else would, but she had come to realise that her willingness to fall in with his proposal had sprung not so much from a desire for the twenty-five thousand pounds but from the instinctive attraction towards him she had felt right from that first meeting. The money and the use she intended to put it to had merely provided a convenient cloak for her real and irrational desire to prolong their contact.

  ‘At one time the thought of having my leg restored to what it had once been was all that mattered; it occupied every single thought I had, but then time passed. I married Joel, and suddenly…’

  ‘Suddenly you realised that whether or not you had one leg stronger than the other mattered very little,’ Dr Randolph supplied for her, suddenly dropping on his knees in front of her, pushing up the leg of her jeans in a purely professional manner to examine the fading scars.

  ‘Mmm, they seem to be healing very well,’ he pronounced, examining the muscles with probing fingers, his forehead drawn into a concentrated frown.

  Feeling that they were being observed, Amber raised her head, and saw that someone was walking towards them; a tall, slender woman with a cloud of raven black hair, and features which were somehow familiar. Her breath caught in her throat. Teri! Her mouth went dry, the colour left her face. The photograph Edie had shown her didn’t do the other woman justice. She was truly lovely.

  ‘Something wrong?’

  Dr Randolph stood up, dusting off his trousers, watching her with concern, his fingers encircling her wrist to test her pulse.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she assured him. ‘I just thought I saw someone I know. I’m fine… Oughtn’t we to be getting back to the hospital? Edie and Paul might be waiting…’

  ‘Okay.’

  All the way back Amber was in a fever of impatience. Did Edie know that Teri was in Fairlea? Julie had said that Teri would be at her party, but what was Teri doing in Fairlea? The suspicion that Teri’s presence in the town was somehow connected with Paul couldn’t be dismissed. Edie could easily have mentioned it to Julie, who in turn could have passed on the information to her friend.

  ‘Hey, slow down!’

  She hadn’t realised that she was practically running, until she heard the amused complaint.

  ‘Steady on… you’ll tire yourself out in this heat.’ As they crossed the road Dr Randolph took Amber’s arm protectively. He was a nice man and she felt drawn to him. He would be good with his patients, she thought intuitively, free to admit now that she would never be one of them no matter what his verdict. When her marriage to Joel came to its inevitable end she would refuse the money he had promised her, and if he drew the correct conclusions from her refusal and guessed that she loved him; well, she would rather be remembered as a romantic fool than an avaricious one.

  When they reached the hospital Paul and Edie were waiting for them. Amber’s relief at seeing the small boy overwhelmed every other emotion. She longed to rush up to him and hug him to her just to prove that he was not merely a figment of her imagination, but she knew to do so would only embarrass him. He reached that age where in public at least he disdained such displays of affection. At bedtime, when she tucked him in and read his story, it was a different matter!

  ‘Well?’ Edie asked Dr Randolph eagerly, ‘what do you think?’

  ‘It’s certainly feasible that we could restore a good deal more muscle tone to the leg,’ he pronounced cautiously, ‘and of course any scarring could be reduced by plastic surgery. I’ve certainly dealt with worse cases, but it would be a lengthy and expensive process. Think about it,’ he advised Amber, smiling at her, and then dropping down on his haunches to chat to Paul.

  Over their heads Edie murmured to Amber that the paediatrician had pronounced that Paul was doing extremely well and that if he continued with his exercises they should find that the
injured leg developed as strong a muscle tone as the uninjured one by the time he was a couple of years older.

  Amber was thrilled. She had known that Paul had improved tremendously, and she flushed a little with pleasure when Edie told her that the doctor had announced that Paul’s improvement was due in no small measure to whoever had kept him at his exercises.

  ‘I told him about the walks and the swimming, and he was full of praise for you,’ Edie told Amber.

  As they walked out to the car she asked, ‘Are you going to tell Joel you want to go ahead with the operation?’

  Amber hesitated. ‘I don’t know,’ she lied, knowing full well that she would say nothing to him. ‘I think I’d rather consider it for a while first.’ She bit her lip and ventured, ‘Would you think it dreadful of me if I asked you not to mention my seeing Dr Randolph? The thing is, the operation would be expensive, and I would hate Joel to think…’

  ‘That you married him because you saw him as a means of meeting your medical bills?’ Edie supplied with a smile. ‘My dear, of course I’ll keep quiet. You needn’t be afraid that the truth will hurt me,’ she added quietly, ‘I know quite well how avaricious Teri was, and still is, and that Joel felt very bitter about her reckless extravagance. Every man has a blind spot; Joel isn’t mean by nature, but I can quite understand that you feel you have to win his trust on that score. Loving someone is easy, but trusting them requires an act of faith, especially when you’ve already learned not to trust.’

  ‘You’re very understanding,’ Amber told her, deciding on impulse not to mention seeing Teri in Fairlea. To do so would probably only upset Edie, who had mentioned calmly after Julie’s visit that it was typical of Teri to arrive in California without letting her parents know and without making any attempt to visit them.

  ‘Perhaps it’s because we’re here,’ Amber had ventured, thinking that Teri might have refrained from visiting her parents for that reason, but Edie had shaken her head.

  ‘Hardly,’ she had told Amber. ‘She would revel in exactly that sort of mischief-making, which is why I suspect Julie has invited you to her party. She knows it will cause a certain amount of embarrassment.’

  ‘And as you said,’ Amber had replied, ‘if we don’t go, it looks as though we’re frightened of meeting her, or rather that I’m frightened of Joel meeting her,’ she had amended.

  Edie had reassured her. ‘You have nothing to fear,’ she had told her. ‘Joel realised exactly what Teri was a long time ago—almost as soon as he married her.’

  But Amber wondered if that was strictly correct. Joel had loved Teri enough to marry her; she was still the same extremely beautiful and desirable woman who had left him to go off with someone else. Was the love Joel had borne her completely dead?

  * * *

  Dinner that night was an informal family meal, with Paul chattering away about his visit to the hospital and Lee Haines almost outdoing him with his tale of the fish that got away.

  ‘Amber and I are going shopping tomorrow,’ Edie announced when they had finished eating, ‘so you boys will have to entertain yourselves.’

  Although Amber and Joel retired to bed together as they had done ever since they arrived in California, tonight Joel didn’t adopt his normal practice of opening the french windows and strolling round the gardens while she prepared for bed, and Amber could tell that there was something on his mind.

  ‘Look,’ he said abruptly, almost as soon as he had closed their bedroom door behind him, ‘we don’t have to go to this damned party if you’d rather not.’

  There was a peculiar sinking sensation in her stomach. Was Joel ashamed of her? Frightened of how she would compare with Teri?

  ‘I thought you wanted to go,’ Amber said as lightly as she could.

  Joel grimaced. ‘I don’t believe I ever used the word “wanted"—I thought it politic perhaps, but then I hadn’t given enough thought to the strain it might place on you.’

  Or how it might affect him seeing Teri again, Amber wondered. Calling an old love dead with several thousand miles between the lovers was one thing, continuing to do so when in the same room was quite another.

  ‘We’ll have to go,’ she said quietly. ‘You said yourself it would look as though we had something to hide, as though we were running away if we don’t, and… Oh!’

  She gasped in surprise as Joel suddenly crossed the small space between them and took her in his arms, his mouth against her hair. ‘It’s all right,’ he told her, ‘there’s someone outside in the garden watching us.’

  He continued to hold her, and Amber remained frozen within the circle of his arms, fear coiling through her stomach like a snake poised to strike.

  ‘Joel, I’m worried about Paul,’ she told him. ‘Suppose Teri were to try and do something underhand? She’s an American citizen, after all, and you’re not, and…’

  ‘If you’re thinking she’ll try to snatch Paul, forget it,’ Joel reassured her, adding more gently, ‘Look, don’t let your imagination run away with you. I don’t know yet why Teri wants Paul, but one thing I am sure of is that her wanting has nothing to do with mother love, and that’s normally the emotion behind child-snatching.’

  Amber couldn’t agree, but she felt too weak to argue with Joel’s arms still around her, the warmth of his body touching hers setting off traitorous impulses.

  ‘Whoever was watching us seems to have gone,’ he remarked at last. ‘I’d better go and close the curtains.’ He started to release her, and Amber trembled convulsively.

  ‘Hey, what’s all this? You really are frightened, aren’t you?’

  ‘I hate the idea of someone spying on us,’ Amber told him huskily. ‘It’s horrible!’

  ‘I know. It’s an intrusion of privacy in the worst possible sense. Come on, he’s gone now.’ his lips touched hers in a comforting kiss such as he might have given a child, but she wasn’t a child,

  Amber thought wildly, and her body’s response to him proved it beyond all doubt. Against her will her lips seemed to cling persuasively to his, parting, so that he would have needed to be a saint to resist their innocent temptation. As the pressure of his mouth increased demandingly Amber’s arms crept round his neck, tiny tremors of sensual pleasure flickering across her nerve endings as restraint was swept away and Joel started to kiss her with the hungry intensity of a man at the edge of his self-control. And she did nothing to stop him! Her lips gloried in his fierce possession, her breasts taut with desire as she was crushed painfully against his male flesh, intimately aware of Joel’s arousal, her body melting, yielding, against the hard masculine outline.

  ‘Dear God, not again!’

  His mouth was torn from hers with a savagery that left her bereft and humiliated, a dark flush tinging Joel’s cheekbones as he turned to survey the hurried rise and fall of her breasts and the paleness of her skin beneath the electric light.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said tautly, pushing irritated fingers through his already dishevelled hair. ‘I didn’t intend that to happen, but where you’re concerned I seem to have a very low arousal threshold. You affect me as though I were a green boy,’ he laughed shortly. ‘God, if it wasn’t so damned ridiculous it would almost be amusing! Teri with all her wiles left me completely cold, whereas you…’ He swung round, eyes glittering as they probed the softly swollen contours of her mouth. ‘Whereas you,’ he groaned tormentedly, ‘you practically only have to touch me and I’m on fire for you.’

  ‘I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen again,’ Amber said huskily, sensing his implied accusation that she had been the one to blame for what had just happened. If she had allowed him to release her after that lightly comforting kiss, she wouldn’t now be experiencing the humiliation of being told that although Joel physically desired her, he despised himself for doing so.

  ‘You do that thing,’ he agreed wryly, ‘and then perhaps we’ll both enjoy some peace of mind. Thank God we don’t have to continue with this charade much longer. If I’d had any sense I
’d have stuck to my decision to bring it to an end back in England. Your boy-friend was a fool,’ he added abruptly. And then he told her, ‘And so are you, for going on loving him. If he can’t realise what he’s thrown away, he isn’t worthy of your love.’

  He was at the door before Amber could correct his misapprehension, and tell him that she had stopped loving Rob almost from the day she met him.

  ‘I need a drink,’ he said grimly from the door. ‘And if you’ve any instinct for self-preservation you’ll make sure you’re asleep before I come back.’

  Joel didn’t want her love, Amber reminded herself when he had gone. He desired her, by his own admission, but perhaps he would have desired any woman under the same circumstances. He was, after all, an intensely sensual man. How tempted she was to get up and go to him, to beg him to take her in his arms and make her whole again with the magic of his lovemaking, but pride and some inner instinct for self-preservation warned her that ultimately the result of such foolhardy actions could only be humiliation and shame.

  ‘The trouble with shopping here is that you’re spoilt for choice,’ Edie told Amber as she parked the car and they both emerged into the blazing midday heat of Beverly Hills’ most prestigious shopping centre.

  They sauntered past Gucci, closed for lunch—one of the few shops that did, Edie told her, because Gucci’s claimed that their clientele was such that it didn’t need to shop at lunchtime; it was far more likely to be lunching in one of the more exclusive restaurants in the city. Starlets and would-be actors thronged the busy boulevards, jostling shoulders with expensively face-lifted and made-up matrons, with figures so painfully thin that Amber found herself reflecting upon what had happened to the wisdom and dignity of maturity, and the folly of pursuing a youth cult so singlemindedly.

  Edie ignored the large stores, although they did stop to drool over the exclusive models in one of Marcus Nieman’s windows and took her instead to a small but very attractive boutique down a narrow side-street.