The Second Bride Read online

  Rufus ran an unsteady hand through his damp hair. 'Poor darling, she became obsessed—swallowed handfuls of vitamins, checked her temperature constantly so she'd know when she was most fertile, could hardly talk of anything else. She insisted we made love only when the time was right—' He shot a sudden, appalled look at Jo. 'Forgive me. You don't want to hear this.'

  'I knew some of it,' she muttered, staring down at her clasped hands. 'Not anything private, of course, but I knew about the ever present thermometer and the vitamin-E pills, the special diet. I looked on it all as another good reason for staying single.'

  Rufus frowned, his eyes questioning. 'But you were going to marry someone, Jo. I've only just discovered you called it off.'

  'Yes. It didn't work out.' She shrugged. 'I like men. They like me. But these days I enjoy coming home here and closing the door on the world.' She gave him a wry little smile. 'I was brought up in a household with a strong female majority. I adored my father, but other than him, a man has never been vitally necessary to my life.'

  'What about sex?' said Rufus baldly.

  'Well, yes. A man's necessary then, of course.' Jo looked away, colouring. 'But, since you've brought the subject up, I admit I can live quite happily without a sexual relationship.'

  'You're fortunate.'

  'Ah, but you're a man.'

  Rufus' dark, narrowed eyes met hers. 'You never seemed aware of the fact.'

  'Of course I was,' she said impatiently. 'You're not the sort of man to go unnoticed. But you were— well. . .'

  'Someone you disliked.'

  'No,' she said, with more truth than he knew. 'Just not my style, I suppose.'

  'You're very polite. Do you still feel the same about me, Jo?' he asked, surprising her.

  If she'd conned herself into thinking she didn't, one look at him tonight had demonstrated beyond all doubt that she did. 'I haven't thought about you in a long time,' she said, crossing mental fingers at the lie.

  'I think it was always your damnable honesty I couldn't cope with,' he said bitterly. 'It does damn all for a man's ego to know he's not worth a woman's consideration.'

  'I should imagine, Rufus Grierson, that you've had plenty of consideration from a great many women over the past year—an eligible widower in need of consolation,' she added deliberately.

  'The operative word, Jo Fielding, is widower,' he pointed out with stark emphasis. 'A grieving widower, I might remind you.'

  His reminder was hardly necessary, thought Jo miserably. After Claire he probably couldn't bear the thought of any other woman. 'But you must have been invited to a good many dinner parties in the past few months.'

  'Invited, yes. But unless the dinners were legal, all- male affairs I've rarely accepted.'

  'Why not?'

  'Apart from the obvious, old-fashioned reason of being in mourning for my wife, I prefer to avoid being paired with anyone, even at a dinner table,' Rufus said bluntly. 'I'm a normal sort of male. Among the things I miss from my marriage the sex is by no means the least. But I won't buy it. Nor will I mislead any woman who's convinced I'm contemplating marriage again.'

  Jo digested this in silence. 'But surely you will marry again, one day?' she asked eventually.

  'Who knows?' Rufus looked at his watch. 'It's late. I should go. But I dislike the thought of leaving you alone here in the dark.'

  'I'll be fine,' Jo assured him, though in her heart of hearts she wasn't relishing a night alone in the big old house without a light. But she wanted Rufus to stay longer for more reasons than a mere fear of the dark.

  'I'd prefer to wait for a while,' said Rufus abruptly.

  'Then by all means do.' She smiled a little. 'One of the advantages of my particular lifestyle is not having to get up at the crack of dawn if I don't want to.'

  Rufus subjected her to a long, dissecting scrutiny. 'You've changed a lot in a year, Jo. You look older.'

  'Gee, thanks! Maturity setting in,' she said flippantly.

  'I put it badly. You always looked years younger than Claire, though I knew you weren't.'

  'A year younger, to be precise. We're both September birthdays, but she was the oldest in the class and I was the youngest.'

  'And the cleverest, too, according to Claire. I was given chapter and verse about your exam results.'

  'No wonder you took a dislike to me!' Jo pulled a face. 'I don't know about the cleverest, but I was certainly the cheekiest. At home everyone was encouraged to have their say, even the youngest like me. At school this was a disadvantage. I was always being told to stop talking, behave myself, sit up straight, and so on. Claire was so different in every way—pretty as a picture, popular with staff and classmates, and as good as gold, always.'

  'Always,' he agreed, then smiled crookedly. 'You know, it's good to have her name crop up naturally; I'm grateful for your forbearance, Jo. A late-night visitor must be the last thing you need after your stint at the Mitre. I caught sight of you there and acted on impulse.'

  'Impulse isn't something I associate with you, Rufus.'

  'No,' he agreed. 'Not my style. Not that you have the least idea of what I'm really like.'

  'You always disapproved of me—admit it!'

  Rufus shook his head, frowning. 'I didn't, you know. Though I admit I couldn't see why you and Claire were so close. Two more contrasting types would be hard to find.'

  'True. But somehow we just gelled from the moment we met, that first day in school. Where appearance was concerned, it was a different story. When we were in uniform it wasn't so bad, but out of school hours the contrast was painful.'

  'Clothes don't interest you?' he asked curiously.

  Jo shook her head at him. 'Of course they do. I'm a normal female, Rufus!'

  'You always wore jeans a lot. I hardly recognised you tonight.'

  'If that's a compliment, thank you,' she said tartly, then glanced down disparagingly. "This is the type of gear I stick to for my job at the Mitre. Tailored shirt, respectable dark skirt, discreet make-up, hair braided back.'

  'Otherwise the punters get familiar?' he queried drily.

  She nodded. 'It's been known.'

  'But do you keep all men at arm's length, Jo?'

  'No, not at all. I have several men friends,' she said with emphasis. 'Not lovers, boyfriends or prospective husbands. Just friends.'

  'If you were any other woman I wouldn't believe you,' said Rufus in a considering tone, as though he were weighing up some legal problem. 'Personally, I've never been a believer in truly platonic relationships between the sexes.'

  'No,' she said coolly. 'A man like you wouldn't. Nevertheless, it's perfectly possible, I assure you.'

  'From your point of view, perhaps. I doubt if the men in question agree.'

  'Whether they do or not they keep their opinions to themselves,' she said flatly. 'I've no intention of falling in love. Ever. I'm just not the type to get wrapped up in a man the way Claire was in you. You were the centre of her universe. Her life revolved around you. I can't imagine feeling like that about any man. The only other male she was ever interested in was her horse—' Jo went cold, cursing her unruly tongue. 'Oh, Lord, I'm so sorry, Rufus.'

  'Don't be. It's the truth.'

  Jo sighed. 'Well, as we're on the subject, I could never understand how her horse came to throw her. Claire was such a good horsewoman.'

  'She must have lost her concentration,' said Rufus, the Unes deepening from nose to mouth. 'She was in a state that morning because nature had just informed her she wasn't pregnant. Every month it was the same, and there was nothing I could do to comfort her. To "blow the blues away", as she put it, she'd go off on that damned horse and gallop up on the heath until she felt better.'

  'Yet she wasn't on the heath when it happened,' said Jo sadly.

  'No.' His eyes darkened. 'She was just hacking along a bridle-path she'd used for years. Something spooked the horse—a squirrel probably, or a rabbit. Claire was thrown, the strap of her hat snapped and her head struck
an outcropping of rock. Death,' said Rufus, his voice cracking, 'was instantaneous.' He shuddered. 'I was told to be grateful for that.'

  'Don't.' Impulsively, Jo jumped from her chair and went to sit beside him, putting her hand on his. Rufus took it, holding it so tightly that she thought the bones would crack.

  'I shouldn't have said that.' He frowned as he saw the glimmer of tears on her cheeks in the candlelight. 'Hell, I've made you cry. Jo, I'm sorry. Come here.' He drew her into his arms and held her close, her face against his shoulder.

  'Do you know, I've never cried for Claire before?' she said, her tear-thickened voice muffled against his jacket. 'I longed to. But I never could.'

  'Then it's time you did,' he said huskily, and smoothed a hand over her hair. The light, delicate touch snapped her self-control. Jo sagged against him, racked by sobs, and Rufus Grierson held her tightly, his own body taut with answering emotion as he waited for the storm to pass.

  'I'm ruining your jacket,' Jo said hoarsely at last, and Rufus sat her upright and stripped the jacket off, before returning her to her place against his shoulder.

  'Soak the shirt as much as you like,' he said gruffly, and Jo gave a strangled little sound, half-laugh, half- hiccup.

  Rufus held her closer and patted her back, his hand warm through the thin cotton of her shirt. Eventually the hand stilled and lay heavy between her should- erblades and Jo tensed and tried to sit up, but the hand was like iron on her back, holding her solidly against his chest.

  Jo raised her face in entreaty. 'Rufus—' She stopped, her heart thudding as her eyes met a look of such blind need that she trembled violently. Then his mouth was on hers, and she gasped and tried to push him away, but he held her fast, his mouth softening, coaxing, his tongue persistent. Her disobedient lips parted and, undermined by the rarity of her tears, Jo's resistance was nil when his arms tightened round her.

  The heat from his body ignited her response in a way he recognised and reacted to, nurturing the flame with caresses which took her breath away. A shudder ran through him, and his hands and mouth moved over her with such sure, importuning skill that she was defenceless, not only before the driving force of his need, but before her own, incontrollable response to it.

  She was where she'd always longed to be, and she shook from head to foot, vulnerable to his urgent, itinerant mouth and skilled, disrobing hands, with neither will nor desire to prevent the urgent male body when, at last, it sought the release denied it during the past lonely months. As they came together all the grief and pent-up emotions of the past year engulfed them, welding them together in a desperate need for consolation which quickly transformed into unimagined, overwhelming rapture and brought them rapidly to shared, gasping culmination.

  Then the overhead light came on.

  Jo wrenched herself free and dived for her clothes, her averted face scarlet with embarrassment as she fled, heart pounding, to the sanctuary of the bathroom. What, in heaven's name, had possessed her? She looked at herself in the mirror and shuddered, pulling on her clothes at top speed. Given the choice, she thought savagely, she would stay in the bathroom indefinitely, until Rufus took the hint and went away. But his manners were too good to allow him to do that, of course.

  It was a good ten minutes before she felt sufficiently recovered to emerge from the bathroom, fully dressed, face repaired, tangled hair brushed free of its unravelling braid, to confront Rufus Grierson.

  Instead of sitting on the sofa, superior and unmoved, without a hair out of place, as she'd expected, Rufus was in the kitchen, filling her kettle.

  'You said you were yearning for tea,' he said calmly.

  But Jo wasn't listening. Now Rufus' thick coppery hair had dried out a gleaming layer of silver lay over the surface, like a coating of frost on autumn leaves. The contrast with his bronzed face and dark eyes was dramatic.

  He smiled a little. 'I didn't turn white with shock while you were in the bathroom. The process started when Claire died.'

  Claire. A burning tide of colour swept up Jo's throat and face, then receded again below the blue and white stripes of her shirt, leaving her face sallow and colourless beneath a tan darker than Rufus Grierson's.

  He switched the kettle on, then leaned against the kitchen counter, arms folded as he watched her colour recede. 'You are now racked with guilt and about to hurl recriminations at my head.'

  Jo squared her shoulders. 'No. We're both adults, Rufus. We know that what happened was—was just a mutual need for comfort. You say you haven't slept with a woman since Claire died; tonight you were missing her more than usual, and when I cried you comforted me. I quite understand.' Which was true enough. She understood only too well. Her role in the proceedings had been as substitute for Rufus Grierson's beautiful, dead Claire.

  Rufus went on gazing at her with the same, disquieting look.

  Jo motioned him out of the way as the kettle boiled. She put teabags in a pot, poured in boiling water, put the lid on, then turned to look at him. 'Look, Rufus,' she said rather desperately, 'let's not beat about the bush. What happened tonight was the natural outcome of shared grief. The fact that we've never been—well, close before was irrelevant at that particular moment in time. It was your anniversary and you badly needed—'

  'I didn't come here looking for sex,' he said with sudden, fierce distaste. 'It never entered my head. I just came to hand over the earrings and maybe talk for a while. As I did until you cried.' He frowned. 'Claire told me often that you never cried over anything, even as a little girl.'

  'True. But I'm only human,' said Jo forlornly.

  'So am I, Jo Fielding, so am I!' Rufus caught her hand in his. 'Are you waiting for an apology for what happened just now? I'd be lying if I said I was sorry.' His eyes held hers intently. 'Deprivation obviously had something to do with it on my part, as did our emotions for both of us. Nevertheless, what we shared together was no run-of-the-mill sexual experience. For me, anyway.'

  'For me too,' said Jo, incurably honest. Her eyes fell. 'Which doesn't make it any easier. I feel so guilty.'

  'So do I.' He breathed in deeply. 'Even though I'm utterly certain Claire would understand.'

  'Probably she would,' said Jo wretchedly. 'She always had a much nicer nature than mine. Though she might have understood more easily if it was someone else. Not me.'

  Rufus made no attempt to deny it, and an awkward silence fell between them.

  'I'd better go,' he said at last.

  'Would you like some tea first?' she felt obliged to ask.

  He shook his head. 'No, thanks. Goodnight, Jo.'

  'Goodnight.' She walked with him to the door, feeling as gauche and awkward as a schoolgirl. 'Thank you for bringing the earrings. I'll take great care of them.'

  Rufus reached a hand inside his jacket and took out his wallet. He took a card from it and gave it to her. 'This is my new address and telephone number. If you need me call me.'

  Jo took the card without argument, but with no intention of ringing Rufus Grierson, ever. 'Goodbye, Rufus. The landing lights are automatic. They'll switch off once you've closed the outer door downstairs.'

  He looked down into her eyes for a moment. 'Are you sure you're all right, Jo?'

  She met the look squarely. 'Yes. I'm fine.'

  To her surprise he took her by the shoulders and kissed her cheek. 'Goodnight, Jo. Take care.'

  'You too,' she said huskily, and watched him as he went downstairs and out of sight. She waited until he'd reached the floor below, then locked her door, made sure all the candles were properly snuffed, picked up a cushion which had landed on the floor at some stage. She eyed it malevolently, then perched on a kitchen stool to drink the tea she'd made and sat staring into space, depressed and shaken, feeling as though life would never be the same again. At last she heaved a sigh and trudged off to have a bath, then groaned in frustration at the sight of Rufus Grierson's expensive raincoat hanging in the shower stall.

  Jo hurried through her bath, pulled on a T-shirt
and dived into bed, determined to erase the events of the past few hours from her mind. There was no point in dwelling on it, telling herself she should have protested louder, fought harder—done something. Because she hadn't. Quite simply, it had been impossible to resist the man she'd fallen in love with the first time she'd ever set eyes on him. She could only hope that after tonight he still had no idea how she felt.

  While Claire was alive she'd worked hard to preserve the fiction that Jo Fielding and Rufus Grierson would never be friends. On Rufus' part, of course, this had been true enough. He probably hadn't given her a thought all this past year while he was grieving for Claire. Jo shivered. The last thing Rufus Grierson had intended was making love to her tonight, she knew perfectly well. He had come to deliver the earrings and just talk about his dead wife with someone who— in an entirely different way—had loved Claire as much as he did.

  For a woman who cried once in a blue moon, Jo told herself bitterly, tonight, of all nights, had not been a good time to emote all over Rufus Grierson. Not that she'd chosen to cry. It had just happened. But if she hadn't cried Rufus wouldn't have taken her in his arms to comfort her, and she wouldn't have lost control—and neither would he. She groaned aloud and turned out the light, needing the dark.

  Sleep was hard to come by. To her fury the moment Jo closed her eyes she kept reliving the entire disturbing episode from beginning to end, and at last lay staring, wide-eyed, into the darkness, searching for something to occupy her mind, to blot out the sheer magic of a pleasure she'd never experienced before.

  In college there'd been Linus Cole, the postgraduate student who'd dazzled the little freshman with his attentions, and introduced her to what he'd referred to with relish as 'the pleasures of the flesh'. Then, instead of producing a ring as she'd naively expected, he went off to take up his fellowship at Cambridge without a backward glance. Thereafter Jo had firmly kept the rest of marauding student manhood at arm's length. It was much later on in her career that she met Edward Hyde, and for a while had even become engaged to him.

  Jo sighed. She'd been madly in love with Linus, and very fond of Edward, but neither of them had come remotely near giving her the pleasure experienced tonight with Rufus. She ground her teeth, tossed and turned, got up and made herself some tea, went back to bed, and still couldn't sleep. And in her efforts to blot out Rufus' lovemaking she let herself think instead of the last time they'd met—a harrowing occasion she normally tried not to think of at all.