PENNY JORDAN - To Love, Honour & Betray

The last time she had taken them had been towards the end of last year. Garth’s birthday … his fiftieth.

Tara had thrown a party for him. She had begged Claudia to go, but as she had quietly explained to Tara at the time, Garth was hardly likely to want her to be there.

‘But we’re still family,’ Tara had protested stubbornly while Claudia had shaken her head.

‘You and Garth are still family, Tara. You and I are still family, but the three of us …’

‘You were both there for my twenty-first and for my graduation,’ Tara had reminded her mother, ‘and everyone said then that both of you …’ She stopped.

What everyone had said at the time was that it was a shame that her parents had split up and even more of a shame that they couldn’t get back together, but Tara knew that to say as much to either her father or her mother was to court one of their rare displays of anger—a defensive anger in her mother’s case and a protective one in her father’s.

‘Gramps and Nan will be there and so will the Brig and Nannie,’ she had coaxed, referring not only to her paternal grandparents but her maternal ones, as well, but still Claudia had refused.

She had known perfectly well, of course, having been told by her mother, that they had accepted Tara’s invitation to celebrate their ex-son-in-law’s fiftieth birthday.

‘We could hardly refuse, darling, and in fact, your father simply wouldn’t have heard of it. You know how much he thinks of Garth.’

‘Yes, I know, and there’s certainly no reason why you shouldn’t both go,’ Claudia had assured her mother quietly.

‘It will seem so odd without you being there….’

‘It won’t seem odd at all, at least not to me or to Garth,’ Claudia had had to point out to her mother as she reminded her gently, ‘We are divorced and have been for a full decade now.’

‘Yes, I realise that,’ her mother had fretted, ‘although I’ve never really understood why.’

‘I told you at the time. Garth had … there was—’

‘Garth was a little bit naughty, I know that, darling, but men are sometimes like that,’ her mother had interrupted her. ‘That’s just the way they are. Even your father … not that he ever … not that there was … but Garth is such a very handsome and charming man that—’

‘I’m not going,’ Claudia had told her mother firmly and she hadn’t done so.

Instead, she had gone to bed early with her sleeping tablet and her unwanted memories. On that occasion, the tablet hadn’t worked, but her memories had. Perhaps tonight she ought to take two instead of her usual one.

When the telephone rang an hour later, Claudia was deeply asleep.

Frowning, Garth replaced the receiver and then dialled the number of his daughter’s London flat.

‘Daddy,’ Tara exclaimed, her voice full of love and warmth as she recognised his voice. ‘I’m glad you rang.’

‘Oh, have you been trying to get in touch with me?’

‘No, it’s not that. It’s just that I drove over to see Ma this afternoon. There was something I wanted to tell her. She’s had the most fabulous write-up in the local rag. Have you seen it?’

‘Yes, I have,’ Garth agreed curtly.

He had seen, as well, the photographs accompanying the article. In one of them, a man was standing close to his ex-wife’s side, his expression as he looked at her both predatory and betrayingly indulgent.

Garth knew him by reputation. He had downsized his business interests, moving out of the city and back to his roots where he was apparently intending to run his computer-based business from his old home town. Claudia, if what he had heard on the grapevine was true, had been approached by him for her views and advice on the type of problems likely to be faced by potential home computer workers he might employ. Garth had his own ideas about why Luke Palliser might be interested in his ex-wife, and they had nothing whatsoever to do with her professional expertise.

‘Whatever you wanted to say to your mother must have been important if it necessitated driving all the way to Gloucestershire and then back again without staying overnight,’ Garth commented as he switched his thoughts back from his ex-wife to his daughter.

‘Well, yes, it was, but I couldn’t have stayed anyway. There wouldn’t have been any point. Ma was going out for the evening. Daddy …’

Garth waited. He knew of old that particular note in his daughter’s voice. It had accompanied every minor and sometimes not-so-minor mishap in Tara’s life, from the collision that had bent the front wheel of her first proper bike to the less dire but far more expensive bump that had damaged the small car he had given her for her eighteenth birthday.

‘You know I told you that I needed to take all my holiday allowance because I was planning to spend time in Boston with Ry?’

‘Yes …’

‘Well, I didn’t want to say anything to you at the time—not until I’d told Ma—but Ry and I … it could be more than just a few weeks I’ll be spending in America.’ She paused, allowing her words to sink in, but Garth wasn’t in need of any extra time to assimilate what she was telling him. He had known … guessed … sensed already, his guesswork keeping pace with her carefully delivered words.

As his hand gripped the telephone receiver, he could feel his palm starting to sweat. At the same time, a cold shock of nausea was gripping his stomach. Now he knew why Claudia had been trying to get in touch with him.

‘Daddy, are you still there?’ he heard Tara demanding uncertainly.

‘Yes, I’m still here,’ he told her, praying that his voice sounded far calmer than he felt.

‘Can you talk to Ma for me?’ Tara was asking him. ‘I know she’s upset and the last thing I want to do is to hurt her, but I love Ry so much…. I just wish there was some way we could all be together, but it’s a bit like it was when you and Ma told me that you were going to divorce, isn’t it? Sometimes you just can’t have all the people you love with you.

‘Ryland’s family, his work , are in Boston. He’s always known that it’s expected that he’ll go back to take his place in the family firm and it’s what he wants to do. You and Ma will be able to come over for holidays. I’ve already told Ma that … and we’ll be able to come over here, and besides, nothing is settled yet. I’ve still got to go through the grilling process,’ Tara went on mock-humorously. ‘And according to Ry, a full investigation by the FBI is nothing to what his aunt is going to put me through. She’s going to want to see family trees, proof of a clean bill of health and a total lack of any inherited disruptive genes before she’ll even call me by my first name, never mind accept that Ry wants to marry me, according to him. Not that Ry cares whether or not she does approve, but he says that won’t matter to her. Once she realises how we feel about one another, she’ll set the full investigative process into motion whether we agree to it or not.

‘She’s the main shareholder in the family business—her late husband, Ry’s father’s brother, was the elder son. When Ry’s uncle died, naturally his controlling share of the business passed on to her. Ry’s father has some shares and like Ry he works for the business. From what Ry has told me about her, she’s terribly starchy. Apparently she’s going to want to know all about my own family background. Not that I’m worried, really. It will be easy peasy. Gramps and Nan go way back and the Brig knows the name and address and how many fillings every single member of the clan has ever had. Daddy, are you still there?’

‘Yes, I’m still here,’ Garth confirmed quietly.

‘You will speak to Ma for me, won’t you?’ Tara coaxed. ‘I know that secretly she was hoping I’d marry a nice local boy and settle down within pram walking distance of Ivy House and I’d have liked that, too, but … I really do love Ry.’

‘Have you applied for your visa yet?’ Tara heard her father asking her sombrely.

‘I’ve filled in the forms, but Ry says there won’t be any problems putting down that this is a holiday and we can sort the rest out over there. That’s funny. Ma asked me exactly the same question.’

After he had finished speaking with Tara, Garth tried Claudia’s number again even though it was almost midnight.

Once more there was no reply. Where was she? Tara had told him she was going out. Out where and with whom? The man in the newspaper, Luke Palliser, whose expression and body language had made it so plain that he wanted far more than a mere business relationship? Was she even now in his arms … in his bed? Stop it, Garth warned himself as he paced the floor. What the hell was happening to him? Surely he knew Claudia better than that. The last thing that would be on her mind right now would be sex, as he ought to know. The only thing, the only person , on her mind right now would be Tara. Even when Tara was a baby, he had once half-jokingly told Claudia he felt she loved her more than she had ever loved him or could ever love him.

‘Yes, I think I do,’ Claudia had agreed seriously, ‘but it’s a very different kind of love. The love that perhaps only a woman who has already lost one child can know. It doesn’t take away from my love for you, Garth. It’s simply different … very different.’

After the taxi had dropped her off outside her apartment block, Estelle made sure it was well out of sight before punching a number into her mobile phone. Perhaps she was being overcautious but she had made it a rule never to mix her private and public personae, and Blade was very much part of the intensely private side of her life.

‘But that’s close to incest,’ a friend had gasped in shock when as a young teenager Estelle had boasted in lavish detail about just what kind of relationship she actually enjoyed with her stepbrother. The other girl had been shocked, but Estelle enjoyed knowing that what she and Blade did together would have been forbidden by their parents. It was all the more exciting and exhilarating knowing what secrecy and deceit they had to employ.

When she had told Blade what she had boasted to a friend, they had had an argument during which he had hit her once very hard across the mouth before forcing her to go down on him thirstily with her mouth as he swore at her and not stopping until he had finally come, his semen spilling from her mouth and running down over her naked body.

Estelle had found it one of the most thrilling, erotic things they had ever done and had her own orgasms without his even touching her, long before he had come himself. She had been thirteen then and Blade had been eighteen. They had continued their sexual relationship all through Blade’s years at university as well as her own—frantic, heated, obsessively driven sado-masochistic sex sessions interspersed with long time periods when they neither spoke nor even saw one another.

Estelle could remember one particular occasion when they hadn’t seen one another from the time Blade had returned to university at the end of the summer until his arrival at home just before Christmas. She had been out with friends when he arrived—a deliberate ploy—knowing how infuriated he would be when she wasn’t there waiting for him. But the party she had gone to had turned out to be rather wilder than she had expected. The school friend who was giving it had an older brother who had turned up with his friends.

Estelle hadn’t had sex with them; she had grown wary and wiser since the days when she had enjoyed confiding all her secrets to her friends. The outside world knew and saw one Estelle; she and Blade knew quite another. But she had enjoyed some pretty heavy snogging sessions and when she arrived home at one o’clock in the morning, very much on a sexually driven high, fuelled in reality far more by the knowledge of what potentially lay ahead of her with Blade than what had already happened, the thrill that had shot through her body as Blade unlocked the front door to her was almost orgasmic in itself.