PENNY JORDAN - Mistress To Her Husband

Fine shudders of eager longing were already surging rhythmically through her. If she slid her hand down from his back she could touch the hard readiness of him, stroke her fingers along it, tormenting him, tormenting them both until he picked her up and—

‘Mummy…?’

The sound of Oliver’s voice from the other side of the back door jolted her back to reality.

Immediately Kate pulled back from Sean, and equally immediately he released her, so that when the door opened and Oliver came in, followed by Carol, they were standing three feet apart, ignoring one another.

‘Ollie wanted to come home, so—’ Carol came to a halt as she saw Sean, and looked uncertainly at Kate.

‘Thanks, Carol.’ Kate bent down to receive the full weight of Oliver’s compact sturdy little-boy body as he ran towards her, only too glad of an excuse to conceal her face. Picking up Oliver, she avoided looking at both her neighbour and Sean.

‘Er…I’ll be off, then,’ she heard Carol saying hurriedly as she backed out of the door.

Sean stared at the child in Kate’s arms in shocked disbelief. She had a child—it was her child; he knew that. She had a child, which meant…Which meant that some other man must have…

Oliver was wriggling in her arms and demanding to be put down. Reluctantly Kate gave in and did so. The moment his feet touched the floor he turned to look at Sean, and Kate felt as though her heart was being clenched in a hard, hurting fist when he demanded, ‘Who are you?’

‘Ollie, it’s bedtime,’ she told him firmly, and without looking at Sean she added, ‘I would like you to leave.’

‘I meant what I said about working for me, Kathy,’ Sean responded grimly.

‘Don’t call me Kathy!’

Too late Kate realised that Oliver was reacting to the anger in her voice. His eyes rounded and he put his hand in hers and stared at Sean. But her distress at upsetting him was nothing compared to the rage she felt when Sean told her curtly, ‘You’re upsetting the boy!’

To her shock, and before she could voice her fury, Sean bent down and picked Ollie up in his arms.

Kate waited for her son to struggle, as he always did when anyone unfamiliar touched him, but to her chagrin, instead of pulling away from Sean he leaned into him, looking at him gravely in silence before heaving a huge sigh and then saying determinedly, ‘Story, please, man!’

Kate felt as though her heart was going to break. Her ex-husband was holding their son, and Oliver was looking at his father as though he were all of his heroes rolled into one. The pain knifing into her was unbearable. She wanted to snatch Oliver out of Sean’s arms and hold him protectively in her own. Her poor baby didn’t know that his father had rejected the very idea of him even before he was born!

‘Oliver’s friend’s father reads him a story when he comes home from work,’ she told Sean in a stilted voice, in explanation of her son’s demand.

Oliver! She had even called the child by the name he had…And yet as he looked into the little boy’s solemn eyes Sean found it impossible to resent or hate him.

‘Story?’ he enquired, smiling at him and ignoring Kate.

Oliver nodded his head enthusiastically. ‘Mummy—book,’ he commanded imperiously, turning his head to look at Kate.

‘Please use proper sentences, Oliver,’ Kate reminded him automatically.

‘Mummy, give me book for man to read, please.’ Oliver smiled winningly and Kate could feel her whole body melting with love.

‘Sean has to go,’ she informed Oliver, automatically using Sean’s name without thinking. ‘I will read you a story later.’

‘No. Sean read Oliver story!’

The frowning pout he was giving reinforced Kate’s awareness that her son was overtired, and all too likely to have one of his rare tantrums if he was thwarted—the very last thing she wanted him to do in front of Sean, who would no doubt enjoy seeing her in such an embarrassing situation.

‘Why don’t you just give me the book?’

The quiet voice and its soft tone made Kate turn her head and stare at Sean in surprise. Oliver was already lying against Sean’s shoulder.

‘It isn’t really his bedtime yet,’ she said.

‘Is there a law which says he can only have a story at bedtime?’

Mutely Kate shook her head, too caught up in the heart-wrenching sight of her son in his father’s arms to protest any further as she went to get Oliver’s favourite story book.

Half an hour later Sean nestled Oliver deeper into his arms and told Kate, ‘By the looks of him he needs to be in bed.’

‘Yes. I’ll take him up.’

Automatically she moved to take Oliver from him, but Sean shook his head.

‘I’ll take him up. Just tell me which room.’

Weakly, she did so.

As he laid Oliver down on his small bed Sean felt the ache of an old and powerful emotion he had thought safely destroyed. Kathy’s child. He could feel his eyes starting to blur and he blinked fiercely.

As he left the room he hesitated outside the other bedroom door, and then quickly opened it.

‘Where are you going? That’s my bedroom!’

He hadn’t heard Kate come up the stairs, and they confronted one another on the small landing.

‘And you sleep there alone?’ He couldn’t stop himself from asking the question he knew he had no right to ask.

‘No. I don’t!’ Kate turned her head, not wanting him to see the expression in her eyes and therefore missing the one in his. ‘Sometimes Oliver comes in and gets into bed with me,’ she continued.

He had no valid reason to feel the way he did right now, Sean acknowledged, and no valid right either!

‘How do you manage on your own? I know you work full-time.’ He was frowning, looking as though he was genuinely concerned, and Kate turned away from him quickly and hurried towards the stairs. She wasn’t going to make that mistake again—thinking that Sean had real feelings.

‘I manage because I have to, for Oliver’s sake. I’m all he’s got—’

‘You mean his father abandoned you?’ His voice was harsh and almost condemning. ‘He left you?’

Kate could hardly believe the censure she could hear in his voice. ‘Yes, he did,’ she agreed as calmly as she could, once they were both back downstairs. ‘But personally I think that Ollie and I are better off without him.’

She walked purposefully to the front door and unlocked it, pulling it open and making it clear that she wanted Sean to leave.

‘I want you back at your desk tomorrow morning,’ Sean warned her curtly.

‘Well, I’m afraid I’m not going to be there,’ Kate responded, equally curtly.

‘I warned you, Kate—’ Sean began.

‘Tomorrow is Saturday, Sean,’ she reminded him dryly. ‘We don’t work weekends.’

There was a small, telling pause, during which Kate wondered what the woman who now shared his life thought about the fact that he obviously worked seven days a week, and then he said, ‘Very well. Monday morning, then, Kate. Be there, or face the consequences.’ He walked past her and out of the door.

‘NO!’ ANGRILY Kate sat up in bed. It was three o’clock on Monday morning and she needed to be asleep, not lying there thinking about Sean, remembering how it had felt when he—

‘No!’ she protested again, groaning in anguish as she rolled over and buried her face in her pillow. But it was no use; neither her memories nor her feelings were going to be ignored.

Well, if she couldn’t ignore them then at least she could use them to remind herself of how Sean had hurt her. To inoculate herself against him doing so again, because on Friday, when he had kissed her, she had nearly forgiven him…

She could feel the sharp quiver of sensation aching through her body. So her body remembered that Sean had been its lover, she acknowledged angrily—well, her heart had an equally good memory, if not an even better one, and what it remembered was the pain he had caused it.

But the love between them had been so…so wonderful. Sean had been a passionate and exciting lover who had taught her things about her own body, as well as his, and their mutual capacity for pleasure had been something she had never even dreamed could exist.

Why was she torturing herself like this? And if she was doing it then why didn’t she do it properly and remember just what it had felt like that first time he had made love to her?

After she had left her aunt and uncle’s house—she had never thought of it as home—she had moved into Sean’s small flat, but he had told her that he was not going to make love to her properly until they were married. Through the weeks and months when he had courted her he had steadfastly refused to take their passionately intense love-play to the conclusion she ached for, warning her thrillingly—for her—that he was afraid that if he did so she would become pregnant.

‘There’s no way my baby is going to be born a bastard like I was,’ he had said grimly.

He had been reluctant to talk to her about his childhood at first, but she had slowly coaxed the painful truth out of him, and they had shared with one another their dream of creating for their own children the idyllic, love-filled childhood neither of them had known.

‘But we could use some contraception,’ she had suggested, pink-cheeked.

‘We could, but we aren’t going to,’ Sean had replied with that dangerously exciting hunger in his voice. ‘Because when we make love, when you give yourself to me, Kathy, I want it to be skin to skin, not with a damn piece of rubber between us,’ he had told her earthily.

They had married in the small country town where her own long-dead mother had originally come from—a wonderfully romantic gesture on Sean’s part, so far as Kate had been concerned. And in order to marry there they had had to live in the town for three weeks prior to the wedding. The completion of some work project had given Sean enough money to rent a small house for them.

Three weeks was an eternity when you were as passionately in love and as hungry for one other as they had been then, Kate acknowledged. But Sean had made sure that they did wait. He had had that kind of discipline and determination even then.

They had spent their wedding night completely alone in the small rented house. And it had been so perfect that even thinking about it now she could feel her eyes filling with tears of emotion.

‘Mummy.’

The voice interrupted her wayward thoughts. Immediately Kate got out of her bed and hurried into Oliver’s room.

‘What is it, darling?’ she asked him lovingly.

‘My tummy hurts,’ he complained.

Kate tried not to sigh. Oliver was prone to upset tummies. Having checked that he was okay, she sat with him and soothed him, tensing when unexpectedly he asked her, ‘Mummy, when’s Sean going to come and see us again?’

This was the first time Oliver had mentioned Sean, and she had managed to convince herself that her son had completely forgotten about him.

‘I don’t know, Oliver.’ That was all she could find to say. She felt unable to tell Oliver that he would probably never see Sean again, even though she knew she ought to do so. She had always tried to answer his questions honestly, but this time she could not, and the reason for that was the look of shining anticipation in her little boy’s eyes.

By the time Oliver had gone back to sleep she was wide awake herself, her heart jumping uncomfortably inside her chest.

It couldn’t be possible for Oliver to somehow sense that Sean was his father, could it? Her little boy couldn’t have taken so uncharacteristically well to Sean because he felt some kind of special bond between them?