Название: Forbidden Loving
Автор: PENNY JORDAN
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
isbn: 9781408998403
isbn:
‘I really am grateful to you, Hazel. I must admit when Katie first suggested I base myself here with you while I worked on my new book I was a little dubious. Of course, it was marvellously kind of you to offer to put me up, but writers aren’t the easiest of people to live with, especially when they’re working, and I was afraid that Katie might have unwittingly painted an over-glamourised version of what having me staying here would be like. But I must say that having met you I realise how uncomplimentary those fears were. It’s obvious to me that you are an eminently sensible lady, despite the rather contentious comments to the contrary made by your daughter.’
Hazel gaped at him, blinking in disbelief as she listened to what he was saying.
‘Great,’ Katie beamed happily. ‘I’m glad that that’s all settled, although you’ll have to move bedrooms, Silas. I was saying to Ma that you’d be much better off using Gramps’s old room. It’s got its own bathroom for one thing and a huge bed,’ Katie informed Silas breezily, turning away before she saw the painful flood of colour that burned her mother’s face.
Silas saw it though, and through the tremor that convulsed her, and the tears of shame and self-dislike that stung her eyes, she could feel his steady regard.
Dear God, don’t let him guess what she was thinking. Katie was too young, too blind, too selfish as the young were selfish, to suspect what she was going through, to guess at the bitter, envious thoughts distorting her mind, to even think in the most fleeting fashion that she, her mother, might feel the most acute despair at the thought of Katie and Silas sharing the old-fashioned double-bed which had been so well designed to accommodate the bodies of two eager lovers.
But her despair was not, as she had first believed, generated by mere concern for her daughter’s emotional safety. No; it was generated by a far less palatable and acceptable emotion. It was generated by jealousy.
There, she had admitted it! Made herself confront it. When she pictured Katie and Silas together in bed, she was jealous of her daughter. She was envious of the fact that Silas desired her, that Silas wanted her. What was the matter with her? Did she really want to trade places with Katie? Did she really imagine for a single second that Silas would find her in any way attractive or desirable? One only had to compare her with Katie to realise the impossibility of that.
Katie was young, nineteen. She was thirty-six, her body not a girl’s any longer, but a woman’s.
She had given birth, produced a child. This child, who now stood in front of her, a fully formed and very beautiful young woman, poised on the threshold of her most sexually powerful years, while she … while for her those years were over. Her figure was still trim enough, enviably so according to most of her friends, but it was not a girl’s body. Her skin did not have the clear bloom of youth that belonged to Katie’s … her face did not have the soft youthful plumpness that still clung to Katie’s bones. No man in his right mind comparing them could possibly prefer her physically to Katie, especially not a man who had already made it obvious that he preferred the allure of young flesh.
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