To Love, Honour & Betray. Penny Jordan

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СКАЧАТЬ of him was the image she had created out of the darkest depths of her imagination of him with her, of him loving her, of his face contorted with passion and need as he possessed her, and that image was like a sickness buried deep inside her that surfaced through all the smothering layers of rigid self-control she had placed over it to reduce her to a pulsing, aching, dying thing of burning acid jealousy and bitterness?

      ‘Claudia, look, I know how you must be feeling.’

      Instead of leaving, he had walked up behind her, and Claudia tensed as she felt his breath against her hair.

      ‘No, you do not know how I’m feeling, Garth,’ she snapped. ‘How can you? How can anyone know?’

      Claudia could hear hysteria edging up under her voice. Damn Garth. Why had he had to do this, come here like this and undermine her previous self-control?

      ‘Tara is my daughter, too, and I’m going to miss her as well—’

      ‘Miss her? It isn’t because I’m going to miss her that …’ Gulping in air, Claudia shook her head, unable to go on any further. ‘I don’t know what brought you here, Garth,’ she continued when she had finally regained control of herself. ‘I’ve got a very busy day ahead of me and right now I’d like to get dressed.’

      ‘Why did you ring me last night?’

      Somehow or other, Claudia found the strength to turn round and face him. ‘That was a mistake,’ she told him quietly. ‘I … I—’

      ‘Dialled the wrong number?’ Garth suggested harshly.

      Claudia shook her head. He knew perfectly well she hadn’t done that; they both did.

      ‘It was a mistake, Garth,’ she repeated.

      ‘No, it wasn’t,’ Garth contradicted her. ‘You rang me because for once your emotions, your real emotions got the better of you. You rang me because you were afraid, because you needed me.’

      ‘No,’ Claudia denied. ‘I don’t need you, Garth. I stopped needing you a long time ago, and—’

      ‘You needed me as Tara’s father,’ Garth continued as though she hadn’t spoken, as though she hadn’t uttered those passionate words of denial and fury. ‘Clo …’

      The unexpected use of his old pet name for her was like a sawtooth file being used on an oversensitive raw nerve ending, and Claudia flinched, visibly unable to suppress the tears that suddenly filled her eyes. Garth reached out and caught hold of her, drawing her close.

      She still smelled the same as she had always done, of vanilla and soft clean skin and something that was and always would be essentially her. She still felt the same, too, feminine, womanly, all the woman he had ever really wanted although he knew that she would never believe that.

      ‘Clo, it’s all right, it’s all right,’ he told her huskily. Unexpectedly, uncontrollably, he was transported back to another place, another time, another life, when he had had the right to hold her, to touch her. ‘Claudia …’

      Memory … instinct … could be a dangerously powerful and unmerciful force. Her eyes closed, her body taut with anger and rejection, Claudia’s senses registered the tone of his voice, recognised its hunger, and like Garth, she was transported back to a time when all that it had taken to arouse her had been that particular note in his voice, that special touch of his hands caressing her body.

      As he felt her body relax, Garth automatically closed the gap between them, bending his head to cover her quiescent mouth with his own.

      She felt so good, so right … so Claudia. As his hands sensuously kneaded the warm flesh of her arms, he started to circle her lips with the tip of his tongue, waiting for her lips to part in their private sexual signal, their special shorthand message passed from him to her and back again that very soon the hungry, urgent thrust of his tongue within her mouth would be echoed by the even more hungry, urgent thrust of his body within hers.

      Outside in the street, a car door slammed abruptly, bringing Claudia back to reality. Hot-faced, she tried to thrust Garth away.

      She was forty-five, damn it, and even if she hadn’t, even if she wasn’t … even if they didn’t … there was no way she considered the kind of openly sexual way Garth was behaving acceptable in a relationship between people of their age. It just wasn’t … it just didn’t …

      ‘Let me go,’ she demanded freezingly, pushing him back more defiantly. ‘Let go of me, Garth! I can’t bear your touching me … I loathe your touching me,’ she told him vehemently, the flustered colour burning even more hotly in her face.

      ‘No,’ Garth challenged her furiously. He knew that he was deliberately feeding his own anger and using it to mask very different, far more complex emotions.

      It had shaken him badly to discover just how frighteningly easy it had been to allow his emotions to work that time trick on him, that subtle but volatile and dangerous mirage that exchanged reality for fiction.

      ‘Yes,’ Claudia insisted icily.

      Freezing her feelings, numbing herself, had been the only way she had of denying her pain, of escaping from it all those years ago when …

      ‘I can’t bear it when you touch me, Garth,’ she reiterated quietly. ‘I can’t bear it because every time you do, I see her. I see you touching her and I feel sick … I am sick,’ she told him expressionlessly.

      ‘I’m sick, too,’ Garth retorted bitterly. ‘Sick of being treated like a leper, sick of being made to feel that I’m some kind of lowlife who doesn’t … I’ve tried to tell you. It wasn’t like that, Claudia. It just wasn’t like that. I thought … I can’t even remember touching her, never mind—’

      ‘Really … you can’t remember?’ Claudia could hear her voice rising, cracking under the strain of trying to maintain her self-control. ‘You can’t remember making love to her in our home … our bed? You can’t remember that you …’

      She was screaming the words at him, Claudia recognised in horror, shouting them, as out of control now as she had been all those years ago when she had first realised, first acknowledged the truth.

      ‘Claudia …’ Garth protested, swearing under his breath with male impotence in the face of so much female fury.

      ‘Get out,’ Claudia demanded. ‘Just go, Garth. You may have come here to gloat, to—’

      ‘To what? Just what the hell do you think I am?’ Garth demanded. ‘Claudia, I didn’t—’

      ‘To remind me that you warned me that something like this might happen. How that must please you, Garth. How happy it must make you—’

      ‘Claudia. I didn’t come here to gloat. I came because I thought you might need someone to talk to … because I was concerned.’

      ‘Concerned.’ Claudia froze. ‘Concerned,’ she repeated, her voice metallic and sharp with disbelief. ‘Concerned for whom, Garth? Certainly not for me, the woman, the wife, you betrayed so easily. Did you talk about me when you were in bed with her? Did you discuss your concern for me with her? Ah, СКАЧАТЬ