Second-Best Husband Read online

  It was only later as she was eating her supper that she realised that the only occasion during the day on which she had thought about Ian had been in conjunction with her awareness and responsiveness to Stuart, which must surely mean that she had made the right decision in returning home; that it was going to be easier to put the past behind her here than it would have been in London.

  Stuart’s offer of a job was an additional bonus which she had not expected. Not only would it help to pass the time, it would also give her an outlet for her mental energy; give her something on which to focus other than Ian and the pain he had caused her.

  And as for her extraordinary and embarrassing reaction to Stuart as a man… Well, that would begin to fade, she was sure, once her emotions began to recover from the blows they had been dealt.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ONE week passed and then another. Her parents had returned, and her mother had been delighted to learn that she intended to stay at home for an indefinite period and even more delighted with the information that she was working for Stuart.

  Her mother, as Sara quickly discovered, liked Stuart very much indeed. She had never met Ian, but Sara knew from her reaction to the news that she had given up her job with him that her parents were not sorry that he was no longer a part of her life.

  Nothing had been said about her real reason for handing in her notice. If her parents had guessed how she had felt about him they were being very tactful in not saying so.

  For the first few days after their return home, the new baby and their existing two grandsons had been the main topic of their conversation.

  They had taken photographs so that Sara could see her new niece who, her mother assured her, was the very image of how she herself had been at exactly the same age.

  Privately Sara suspected that her mother was exaggerating, but wisely she said nothing, carefully returning the photographs to their wallet, and trying to suppress the tiny ache in her heart. She loved her sister and liked her brother-in-law, but this was the first time she had actively found herself envying her sister. Two healthy boisterous sons and now a little girl, and Jacqui was after all only five years her senior.

  She reminded herself that she was still not thirty, and that there was plenty of time for her to settle down and marry, but the ache inside her body when she looked at the photographs of her new niece warned her that her instincts were growing impatient with her…that her need and desire for children were daily growing more urgent, more powerful. So much so that more and more often she found she was turning over in her mind Margaret’s advice to her. She had loved Ian all her adult life, but Ian didn’t want her, would never want her, and she could not in all honesty visualise herself allowing herself to fall in love again. It had proved too painful, been too self-destructive. No, she didn’t want to take the risk of falling in love again, but neither did she want to give up her dreams of having children. Which meant…which meant that perhaps she ought to take Margaret’s advice: to start thinking seriously about a relationship founded on something that would be far less exciting, far less idealistic than falling in love with Ian.

  She frowned, remembering how at Christmas, before the blow had fallen, when she had returned from her parents’ to London and had been invited round to Margaret’s to view the children’s Christmas presents, Ben had remarked what a good mother she would make, and she had admitted how much she loved and wanted a family. Obliquely, or so it had seemed then, Margaret had commented that she could not see Ian taking well to fatherhood.

  Then her denial of Margaret’s comment had been instinctive and automatic, but now she was forced to realise that it had been the truth, and that a part of her had always known this, and yet despite that, despite the fact that in so many ways their outlooks on life were totally in conflict, she had stubbornly gone on clinging to her idiotic daydreams, to her hopes.

  She had been a fool, she recognised, and worse…she had stubbornly and self-destructively ignored what her common sense had often tried to tell her: that Ian, no matter how much she was in love with him, was not really someone with whom she could ever truly live in harmony.

  Well, one thing was certain, she told herself humorously. She wasn’t going to have much chance of finding herself a potential husband and father for her children while she was working for Stuart.

  She had now reduced the chaos of his paperwork to something approaching order. She was waiting for him to produce for her written lists of his stock, which she intended to categorise into type, age, height, et cetera, so that in future when he received enquiries for trees a mere flick on the computer would be able to furnish him with a printed list of this information on demand.

  When she had pointed this out to him, he had grinned at her, and pointed out that he already carried all this information in his head.

  It had been hard not to share his amusement. She had told him severely that he wasn’t superhuman and that there might well come a day when for one reason or another he was not available when such information was required.

  She was getting on better and better with him as she came to know him better. They shared a similar sense of humour; a deep love of the countryside, and the need to preserve and maintain it. Stuart had already been approached to sit on several local conservation committees, and, as he had told her, now that she had tamed his paperwork he hoped to have the time to play a much larger part in the affairs of their small community.

  Somehow or other, the four hours a day which they had agreed Sara would work had extended to six and then sometimes closer to eight, as she willingly took on more and more of the indoor running of the business. It pleased her that Stuart was so prepared to trust her, and she found she enjoyed the challenge of expanding her knowledge and making use of it.

  By the time she had worked with him for a month, she was able to talk with awareness and authority to would-be customers about the feasibility of transplanting a variety of trees, calmly soothing their fears that such mature wood could not be safely moved.

  A date had been fixed for the christening of her new niece, and, a little to her consternation, her mother had insisted on issuing Stuart with an invitation to share in the celebration with them.

  Ignoring her own protest to her mother that she was sure that Stuart had far better things to do, he calmly accepted. When he was free to do so, he had taken to picking her up in the morning and running her home at night, claiming that it was unfair to expect her to risk damage to her own car on the rough lane that led to the manor.

  She could of course have insisted on remaining independent, but the truth was that she enjoyed his company too much to do so, just as she enjoyed those evenings when work kept her at the manor until quite late, and Stuart insisted on making supper for them both.

  The evenings were growing lighter now, which meant that Stuart was out working on the estate for longer and longer periods of time, so that often during the day she found she was seeing less of him, although there were frequently occasions when he would arrive unexpectedly at the house and invade the office, demanding her company outside, so that he could show her some new aspect of his work which she hadn’t yet seen.

  She had grown so used to these excursions that she now kept a spare pair of Wellingtons and her old Barbour up at the manor, ready to put on when she accompanied him outside.

  Every morning Stuart received a delivery of national papers which included The Times, and Sara normally glanced through these while she was having her lunch.

  Initially it had been her intention to go home at lunchtime, since she was conscious of the fact that in addition to being his place of work the manor was also Stuart’s home, and that, no matter how politely he might deny it, he could well prefer not to find her curled up in a chair in front of the range eating her lunch on those occasions when he came back to the house for his. However, within a couple of weeks of her starting to work for him he had told her one day that if it was the thought of his presence in the house intruding into her
lunch-hour and her free time which was preventing her from staying then he was quite prepared not to return to the house during the day. By the time she had assured him that this was most definitely not the case she had also discovered that she had agreed that yes, it would be far more sensible for her to stay on at the manor during her lunch-hour, so that she was on hand to answer the phone should it ring.

  On this particular day she had found a very relevant and absorbing article in The Times on the global greenhouse effect, and the devastation wreaked by the previous spring’s storms on wooded areas of the country. Mention was made in the article of the fact that it was now possible to replace storm-damaged trees with mature broadleaved specimens, and it was just as Sara was searching for a pen to mark the article for Stuart’s attention that she happened to glance at the opposite page.

  Why, out of all the notices on that page, her glance should immediately fall on the announcement of Anna’s and Ian’s engagement and forthcoming marriage, she really had no idea, but once she had seen it she remained transfixed in her chair, unable to drag her gaze away from the heavy black print.

  She heard the back door opening as Stuart came in, but lacked the will-power to look up from the paper. She could feel her whole body trembling, but knew that she wasn’t cold.

  She heard Stuart speak to her, and was distantly aware of the sharpening concern in his voice as he repeated her name and then came striding across to where she was sitting, demanding, ‘Sara, what is it? What’s wrong?’

  The sound of his voice, the concern that roughened it, her awareness of his proximity, of the warmth and comfort of his physical presence, broke through her icy guard. She could feel the numbness which had frozen her when she’d read the announcement giving way to a deep welling of emotional release; to tears which clogged her throat and filled her eyes, so that when she tried to focus on him he gave a sharp exclamation, and then reached for her, homing in on what she had read before firmly removing the newspaper from her grasp and flinging it down on to the table before taking her in his arms as though it were something he had done on so many previous occasions that it was an automatic unthinking response to her pain.

  As though it were the most natural thing in the world, Sara clung to him, allowing him to draw her to her feet and wrap her in his arms, gently rocking her against him as he soothed her with rough words of compassion and comfort.

  ‘The man’s a fool,’ she heard him saying grittily. ‘He must be, to prefer someone else, anyone else to you…’

  That made her laugh, albeit rather shakily, as she struggled to deny his championship.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ he demanded, as he felt her shaking her head.

  ‘It isn’t Ian’s fault that he loves Anna and not me,’ she told him. ‘The blame’s mine, for allowing myself to believe…’ She bit her lip, unable to admit even to him how much the cruel truths Anna had told had hurt her and still continued to hurt her.

  ‘It isn’t just the fact that he’s marrying someone else, is it?’ he asked her perceptively.

  Sara stared at him, her eyes wide and questioning. How had he known?

  He was still holding her, her body pressed into the warmth of his as she arched her back so that she could look at him.

  ‘How did you know—?’ She broke off, flushing a little. ‘I… It’s the things Anna said to me. Realities…truths.’ She gave a small shudder and felt his arms tighten as though he wanted to absorb the pain from her.

  ‘What realities? What truths?’

  She turned her head away from him and into his shoulder. Caution and shyness made her hesitate a fraction before responding to him, but the shock of seeing the announcement had weakened her defences, strengthened her fears, her self-doubts.

  ‘When Anna…when she told me that Ian…that she and Ian knew how I felt about him, she laughed at me; told me that even if Ian had not fallen in love with her he would never have wanted me. That no man would ever want me…because…because…because I was sexless…undesirable…’ She broke off, her voice thickening with emotion, her head virtually resting on Stuart’s shoulder. She couldn’t bear to look at him, dreading the pity she suspected she would see in his eyes. He had become more than an employer to her now. He had become a friend, a very good friend…her first really close male friend, but, while she sensed that he would view her revelations with sympathy and compassion, she now felt embarrassed and confused by the fact that she had made them. What was happening to her? Had she really changed so much in such a short space of time? The woman she had always thought herself to be would never have dreamed of confiding such information to anyone, much less a man, and yet curiously, despite her embarrassment, there was a sense of relief, of release in having done so…a sense of having jettisoned a burden which had grown progressively heavier.

  ‘And you believed her?’

  The rough disbelief in his voice jolted her into turning her head to look enquiringly at him.

  ‘Can’t you see? She wanted to hurt you. She was lying to you.’

  ‘No. I—’

  ‘She was lying to you,’ Stuart insisted. ‘And I can prove it to you. You’re not sexless, Sara. Nor undesirable. In fact…’

  She felt the tremor that tensed his body, confusion shocking through her as he muttered something under his breath and then lifted one of his hands from her body to her face, sliding it along her jaw, angling her face towards his own.

  ‘Does this feel as if you’re undesirable?’ he demanded thickly against her mouth, and then he was kissing her with a sensual roughness that swept away her resistance.

  Once, a long time ago, she had dreamed of being kissed like this, her lover a faceless, formless figment of her teenage imagination, his touch, his kiss unknown and unexperienced, and yet she had known that it could be like this; that one day it would be like this…that one day he would come into her life, and that when he did his touch, his kiss would set a light to her sexuality, burning away her virginal fears and apprehensions; and then she had met Ian, and had put away such childish daydreams, focusing instead on the reality of the person with whom she had fallen in love.

  In those early years when she had first met him, she had ached for Ian to kiss her, yearned for his touch, imagining that when he did so it would be as it had been in her daydreams, and yet when eventually he had done so the reality had fallen so far short of what she had imagined she would feel that she had immediately decided that the fault lay with her in foolishly believing that it could be possible for a mere kiss to thrill her so much that it would be a complete ravishment of all of her being; that it would open for her a magic doorway through which she would step into a place that was a feast of all the senses.

  Instead she had found Ian’s kiss practised and polished, but somehow unexciting.

  She remembered this now while her senses spun and her heart leapt in shocked recognition of all that she was experiencing. She remembered as well how she had loyally denied reality and deceived herself into believing that Ian’s kiss had been all that she had wanted it to be.

  She remembered also how she had waited for him to follow it up with an avowal of his growing feelings for her and how cheated she had felt when, although he continued to tease and kiss her on odd occasions, he had never tried to take their relationship any further.

  His treatment of her had left her feeling cheated and insecure…unsure of herself and her femininity…guilty because she wanted so much more from him than he seemed to want to give…blaming herself with hindsight for not giving him more encouragement, clinging stupidly to her hope that one day things would change, that one day he would love her.

  For so long she had existed on mere crumbs that she might have felt that the feast of pleasure she was now experiencing was too rich a diet for her system, but her senses were overriding her mental warning of caution, hungrily feeding on the pleasure Stuart was giving them.

  He hadn’t done anything other than kiss her, but her body was responding to him as i
ntensely as though he had touched it so intimately that none of its secrets was unknown to him.

  That knowledge shocked her into tensing within his hold, causing him to lift his mouth from hers, and demand hoarsely, ‘Try telling me now that you don’t believe you’re desirable.’

  She moved restlessly against him, confused and shocked by what had happened. ‘There was no need,’ she began helplessly, hating the thought that he pitied her so much that he had somehow or other forced himself to simulate a desire for her which she knew he could not possibly feel…

  ‘On the contrary, there was every need,’ he told her flatly, confirming her fear.

  She wriggled free of him, and turned her back to him.

  ‘It was kind of you, but…’ Her stifled voice broke.

  ‘Kind of me!’ She winced as Stuart swore. ‘Are you really so obsessed by him that you can’t see, don’t know…? What is it you’re hoping for, Sara? That he’s going to change his mind? That he’s going to come looking for you, begging you—?’

  ‘No… No, of course I’m not,’ she denied truthfully, flinching back from the pain his curt words were causing her. ‘I’m not a fool. I know that isn’t going to happen. I know I’ve got to get on with my life. I’d even begun to decide that Margaret was right when she told me I ought to look round for some like-minded man to settle down with. Someone who, like me, wants a family and is prepared to accept—’

  ‘Second-best?’ Stuart supplied brutally for her, making her wince again.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ she told him unevenly, ‘providing we were honest with one another right from the start…providing we both knew and understood that—’

  ‘That you loved someone else. Do you really want children so much?’

  She paused, and then looked at him and said simply and bravely, ‘Yes. Yes, I do…’

  There was a small pause, and then he said heavily, ‘I’ve got to get back to the men, but first—’ He reached over to the table and picked up the paper, ripping the page carrying the announcement in two and then in half again, and then opening the door of the range and throwing the screwed-up sections into its heat.