The Disobedient Wife
‘So what if you win?’ Chrissie was leaning back against the cushions, playing with an overhanging leaf from one of the plants that grew in abundance around the room. ‘You’ll just be a single mum in a strange country. And, looking at it from a rather selfish point of view, when will I ever get to see you?’
Kendal gave her a dry smile. ‘You can come with me,’ she invited gently—tentatively—but Chrissie merely grimaced.
‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ she stated in a rather flat tone, and, sadly, Kendal realised that all her sister wanted—hoped for—was a reconciliation with Ralph.
‘You’ll be working flat out. You’ll have to—to keep yourself and Matthew, ’cos I know you’ll never accept a penny from Jarrad. You’ve said so often enough,’ Chrissie expressed. ‘Though I can’t think why! He’s rich enough to keep you, Matthew and half of London besides!’
And clever enough to know that if I take anything from him I’ll be surrendering my independence to him, Kendal thought, which is what he wants. But she didn’t say it.
‘I don’t mind working. I need it,’ she tagged on, unable to add, I need it to help me forget him. To stop driving myself mad with thinking about him. And if I’m abroad he can’t find me so easily. Can’t hurt me any more.
‘It’s not just Matthew. He wants you as well. You know that, don’t you?’ Chrissie interrupted her thoughts as if she had read them. ‘Oh, Kendal, you could have so much if you’d only swallow your pride and give him another chance.’
Her cup suspended in mid-air, Kendal stared at her sister aghast. ‘Go back to him, you mean? Take him back? Like Mum did with Dad!’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! Jarrad’s nothing like him!’ the younger girl stated adamantly. ‘You could do worse, you know. And it would be a proper family life for Matthew. I don’t suppose you can blame him for wanting that.’
Kendal looked down at her son, who was chewing the cover of his book and gurgling contentedly to himself. Wasn’t that what she wanted for her child? A stable home? She wanted it more than anything. Did her sister imagine that it had been easy these past twelve months? Because it hadn’t been. It had been hell…
‘And what about me? What are you suggesting, Chrissie? That I shouldn’t have left him? That I should have been content to be his housemaid and his dutiful little sex slave while he carried on with that patronising Lauren Westgate behind my back?’
‘Of course I’m not suggesting you should be that,’ Chrissie was quick to respond. ‘Although I don’t think you should pretend you didn’t enjoy the role, or that part of it at any rate—sleeping with him, I mean—because you were besotted with him. Everyone could see it. You worshipped the ground he walked on!’
A flame, which Kendal had thought successfully banked down until she’d faced Jarrad in his office today now leapt to sudden, vibrant life again, way down in her loins.
‘More fool me!’
‘And you were hardly his housemaid.’
No. There had been the long-standing Teeny Roberts to cook and clean. He hadn’t intended her to do all that—even if she had had the time. And perhaps that might have been the problem, in part…
‘As for Lauren, she did rather throw herself at him,’ Chrissie reminded her. ‘And a man with his looks is going to get that every day of the week! It would take a monk to resist that constant barrage from the opposite sex. And I’m not prepared to believe he was even having an affair with her. He’s never actually admitted it, has he?’
No, he hadn’t, Kendal thought. But she had found those receipts in his study from the hotel where they had stayed when he had told her simply that he was away working, had led her to believe he’d gone alone. Oh, they’d been under separate names—and in separate rooms—it was true. But then anything else wouldn’t have looked too good if those receipts had wound up in his accounts office for Ralph to find! Only they hadn’t needed to. Being caught together in Jarrad’s office, as they had been by her brother-in-law that night, was all the evidence that mattered!
‘He’s never actually denied it either.’ How could he? When such a denial would have been a blatant lie! ‘I don’t know how you can defend him, Chrissie! After what he did to Ralph!’
Chrissie lowered her gaze, looking so unhappy suddenly that Kendal wished she hadn’t said anything.
‘I’m sorry,’ was all she could utter, wishing she could wave a magic wand and make everything all right, for her sister at least.
‘Oh, that’s all right. I’m getting used to it now,’ Chrissie expressed resignedly, although Kendal knew she was just putting on a brave face. ‘Perhaps he did fire Ralph because he thought he was checking up on him. I don’t know,’ she went on to remark disconsolately. ‘But I think a lot of the blame for what happened has to rest with Ralph himself.’
She glanced away, picking distractedly at the edging of one of the plump multi-floral scatter cushions, looking decidedly uneasy. ‘I think it got to the stage where he couldn’t—couldn’t cope with—things…’
‘What sort of things?’ Kendal enquired, frowning. She knew her sister wasn’t the easiest of people to live with.
‘Oh…just things in general,’ Chrissie remarked evasively, continuing to pick at the blanket-stitched cushion with unusual agitation. But then Matthew ran up to her, waving one of his little striped socks, and laughingly she hauled him up onto her lap.
‘Anyway, what I’m saying is I don’t think you should blame him entirely for Ralph losing his job—even if you’d like to.’ She was bent in concentration over the gurgling Matthew, diligently pulling the sock over a tiny foot. ‘And what if he did have one fling? It isn’t the end of the world. And perhaps he did feel neglected. After all, the more he told you he didn’t like you working, the more contracts you seemed determined to take on just to show him—out of sheer defiance.’
Kendal bit her lip. Did Chrissie really think that?
‘I did it for my own sanity,’ was all she could say. Because the truth was that if she hadn’t resumed her profession after Matthew had been born—plunged herself wholeheartedly into her work—she would have gone mad, crazy with doubt and suspicion.
It had been bad enough that she hadn’t felt needed in the home, without Lauren constantly flaunting her success and her very enviable working relationship with Jarrad whenever Kendal, with silent reluctance, had had to preside over dinner parties that included the other woman. It had only just been bearable at first, when she had had her own job, her own career. But those years of domesticity and studying when she had been looking after her sister hadn’t prepared her for the condescending confidence of women like Lauren Westgate.
Consequently, when she’d surrendered her self-sufficiency to have Matthew, and had been insecure as a new mother, Lauren’s belittling remarks about women who were ‘stuck at home’, and Kendal being ‘just a housewife’—coupled with Jarrad suddenly spending more and more time away from home—had all helped drive her back into the safe, secure world of her beloved decor and design. She had wanted to prove herself, and not only to herself but to her husband and the world that she could be just as shining and successful in her own way as Lauren Westgate could. And not only that, but that she could be a success—needed—as a wife and mother as well. And all she had got for her trouble—her foolish, impetuous naivety—was the proverbial slap in the face when her efforts only succeeded in driving her husband right into the other woman’s arms!
‘Anyway,’ she attempted to say lightly. ‘I suppose it’s only natural you should defend him, knowing what you think of women with children working!’
Chrissie clung fervently to the belief that being a housewife and mother was a full-time job, and Kendal knew her sister had settled down enough to take on both roles with avid dedication, which made that last miscarriage and subsequent break-up of her own marriage such a tragedy.
With one shriek their attention was drawn to Matthew who, having pulled off the sock which had been painstakingly restored to his foot, now held it up triumphantly. He squealed a protest as Chrissie tried to clasp him to her, grizzling until she released him, so that he could run on unsteady little legs across the carpet, arms outstretched, to his mother.
‘You’re a scamp!’ Kendal breathed, hauling him up onto her lap. ‘First Chrissie. Now me. You don’t know who you want, do you?’
‘Kissie,’ he gurgled in his baby mimicry, then rewarded Kendal with a chop to the nose with his little flying fist, still tightly clenched around the sock.
Both girls laughed.
‘I don’t know where you get your energy from,’ Chrissie told him as he strained round to look at her, and stuck a determined little foot into Kendal’s groin in the process.
‘Oh, I do,’ Kendal exhaled, wincing, putting a hand under his bottom to transfer him gently to a less sensitive area of her body. He shrieked a protest at even that small amount of restraint. ‘Believe me, I certainly do!’
Because, whether she wanted to admit it to anyone else or not, she couldn’t help but admit to herself that he was very much Jarrad’s child. From that crop of brown hair—growing darker by the day—to the very feet of the long little body that determined that one day he would be tall, like his father, to that burgeoning self-sufficiency that was apparent even in his babyhood. She almost imagined she could already feel that restless determination and energy in him that was so characteristic of Jarrad Mitchell—so characteristic it scared her that she might never be free of the man’s memory.
The only part of her it seemed her son had inherited was those green-flecked, big, beguiling eyes—eyes that Jarrad had once jokingly announced could ‘smite a man at twenty paces’. And with that combination of physical assets and character Kendal could see that Matthew was already destined to break a few hearts.
‘Just like his dad,’ Chrissie supplied—reading her thoughts again, Kendal thought, startled, until she realised her sister was still referring to something they had been saying a moment ago.
‘No, not like his dad,’ she couldn’t help responding nevertheless, on the smallest note of panic, and she clutched her son tightly to her—ignoring his flailing fists now, his straining efforts to free himself—as though she would protect him from the world and anything that threatened to taint him with the same ability to hurt and wound as Jarrad Mitchell had hurt and wounded her. As, similarly, her own father had hurt and destroyed her mother.
‘I’ve got to take that job, Chrissie,’ she breathed over her son’s angry, lemon-clad little shoulder. I’ve got to get away from him. And more determinedly, aloud again, she uttered, ‘I’ve got to go.’
CHAPTER TWO
AFTER dropping Matthew off with her child minder later that afternoon, Kendal drove out to see some clients for whom she had agreed to do some freelance work, her first since coming back to London. The woman and her husband had approached her through her old firm, having been pleased with the work she had done for them in the past.
She hated leaving her son, particularly twice in one day, because every time she watched him toddle away from her it was like losing a part of herself. But she knew what the alternative would mean—being beholden to Jarrad. Oh, she didn’t mind that for Matthew’s sake, because she knew her husband wouldn’t stop short of providing more than a generous allowance for his son.
But she needed to keep herself too. The savings she had accumulated before leaving the matrimonial home a year ago were now nearly exhausted, and there was no way that she intended to take any money from a man who not only flaunted his mistress openly in her face but who could be so callous as to do what he had done to Ralph—because it had been callous, no matter what Chrissie said.
Forcing herself to forget Jarrad, she focused her thoughts on the job ahead. She had her sketchbook, notepad, colour charts…
She made a quick note in her mind of everything she would need, after negotiating one particularly busy junction, and by the time she pulled onto the drive of the large mock-Georgian house she was mentally as well as physically prepared.
Jill and Peter Arkwright were a middle-aged couple, with two golden Retrievers who sat obediently looking at Kendal from a hopeful distance as she nibbled the oversized slice of rich sponge cake that Jill had insisted Kendal have with her coffee. At the same time, diligently she sketched her plan for the ornamental mouldings and alcoves she had suggested for the lounge, to help take the squareness off the large room.
By the time she left she had a very clear picture of what they needed. An overall classic but country feel that would give the prestigious yet modern estate house some individuality.
Keen to get started, so that the job would be completed if Jarrad did back down and let her take Matthew away—which she very much doubted—she drove straight back home, deciding to pick the little boy up within the hour. In the meantime she had colours to decide on, fabrics to order, painting contractors and carpenters to organise.
Home was a furnished ground-floor flat in an Edwardian terraced house which she was renting on a month-to-month basis until she knew what her definite plans were, therefore the furnishings weren’t at all what she would have chosen herself. It was, however, situated in a quiet street, in a reasonably quiet suburb of the city.
As it was a pleasingly warm day she had the French windows open while she worked, and was enjoying the lucid song of a blackbird above the more distant sounds of afternoon traffic, above the sudden low drone of a car pulling up somewhere along the road.
She answered the phone breezily when it rang. ‘Kendal Mitchell.’
’How did you get on with the Arkwrights?’
The pleasant male voice brought an instant smile to her lips.
‘Tony! Hi!’
‘Was she still as generous with the cake rations?’
Kendal laughed. ‘You’d better believe it!’ She liked Tony Beeson. They were roughly the same age and had worked together at the same design firm until Kendal had married. In fact Tony still worked for them, and it was he who had told her about the job that was going in the States, after visiting his brother’s family in Philadelphia.
‘Made up your mind yet whether you’re going to be leaving us?’ He sounded tentative. In a way he had opened this opportunity for her, but, now that it looked as if it might materialise, Kendal knew he didn’t really want her to go.
‘Not yet,’ she parried, not wanting to go into detail. Tony knew she was separated, but that was all. She didn’t see any point in discussing the obstructions that Jarrad might throw in her way.
‘Have you ever thought about a partnership?’ Tony surprised her by suddenly asking.
Kendal frowned, hesitated. ‘A partnership?’
‘Yes, dumbo. A partnership. You and me. Just say the word and I’d come with you. We’d make a very good team, you know, with your creative flair and my cock-eyed business sense. What do you say? Just the two of us?’
Kendal laughed awkwardly. She had never actually dated Tony and wasn’t sure whether he was serious or not.
‘You mean you running the business side and me showing all those Yankees what an English home really should look like?’
‘Why not?’ he suggested, sounding even more serious. ‘No strings attached. Unless, of course, you wanted there to be.’
She laughed again because she didn’t know what else to do.
‘I can’t wait to see that!’ she jested, ignoring that last bit about strings. But, no, she decided. Partnerships, of any kind, were out. Two healthy, attractive people of opposite genders couldn’t work closely together without sex getting in the way. Jarrad and Lauren were evidence of that. Besides, she had been wary of men before marrying Jarrad—and with good reason—and she intended being nothing but wary ever again.
‘Come with me by all means, but let’s just stick to the wildly passionate affair we’ve got now, shall we?’ she continued to jest, hoping she was letting him down lightly. ‘A working relationship will only taint it. I’ve seen it happen so many times.’
She heard Tony’s deep, expressive sigh. ‘Alas, so have I.’ She could almost picture him then, with his hand on his heart. ‘Well, after that very positive rebuff I’d better go, angel.’ So he was only half joking. ‘I’ll call you again—if my wounded pride will let me. Love you.’
Kendal beamed into the mouthpiece. ‘I love you too,’ she breathed out of sheer relief as she heard his end of the line go dead.
She replaced the receiver, a soft smile touching her lips as she glanced absently towards the patio doors. And then her smile faded, every nerve seeming to freeze, as she met the hard features of the broad-shouldered man standing there, framed by the aperture.
‘Jarrad!’
His shoes made no sound on the carpet as he came in, danger in every lean inch of his arrogant frame and in those determinedly slow strides.
’So that’s why you’re headed off halfway across the world. You’ve got yourself a boyfriend. Is that why you’re looking so shocked, darling?’ Mockery couldn’t soften those austerely beautiful features. ‘What were you hoping? That I wouldn’t find out?’
From behind the large old table that served as a makeshift desk, Kendal stared up at him, her pale skin drained of colour. ‘I—I didn’t expect you.’
A muscle pulled beside that strong jaw. ‘Didn’t you?’ he asked roughly, picking up a rubber and tossing it down on the table again. ‘I would have thought it was obvious even to you that I’d want to see my son.’
Well, of course it was. And she had known he would call. That was why she had been so reluctant to let him have her address that morning. She just hadn’t anticipated that it would be so soon, that was all.
’You—you can’t.’ The shock of seeing him made her voice falter, and something tightened her already clenched stomach muscles as she saw those dark masculine brows draw together.
‘I beg your pardon?’
Kendal swallowed. He seemed so dauntingly big, even in the fair-sized, high-ceilinged room, that she struggled to her feet so as not to feel at such a disadvantage.
‘I mean…he’s with Valerie—my child minder. I haven’t picked him up yet.’ And that was the worst thing she could have said, she realised, when she saw the thunderous look that crossed his harshly sculptured face.
‘Of course. Ever the dutiful mother.’ Distaste twisted those grim lips as he glanced down at the emulsion charts, swatches and sketches she had been labouring over. ‘I thought you said you hadn’t been working.’
’I needed—’ The money, she’d been about to say, but stopped herself in time. ‘I found I needed to,’ she corrected as calmly as she could, although she guessed he had realised why when she saw his critical appraisal of the room, with its rather world-weary-looking furniture and the plain and jaded decor.
‘You bring our child from our home into a run-down place like this!’ He swore rather savagely.
‘It’s clean and it’s paid for!’ Quickly Kendal hastened to defend her rather modest home. ‘Anyway, it isn’t going to be for very long.’
‘Ah, no, I’d forgotten. And are you imagining you can allow another man into your life to take on the role of looking after my son?’
He had obviously overheard and misinterpreted her conversation with Tony, but she was feeling too weary to put him straight. Anyway, he had had no qualms about his own affair with Lauren.
‘And what if I am?’ she threw back at him, coming round the table and then suddenly wishing she had kept it between them—as a barrier against his pulsing anger—when he took a step nearer and breathed, ‘Over my dead body.’
His voice was low and threatening, and she sent a glance up at him from under her lashes, somehow unable to visualise him lying prostrate and helpless. It was Jarrad Mitchell who controlled, while others fell around him in obedient submission.
‘I just thought you ought to know, Jarrad.’ She was level with him now, a willowy, delicate figure beside his hard, intimidating masculinity, though her face was uptilted to his in challenge. ‘I’m going to fight you for him.’ Her voice didn’t falter. Somehow she had managed to sound miraculously calm.
Something leapt in the glacial blue of his eyes. Anger, but something else too. Something remarkably like admiration, she realised, amazed—because of course a man like him respected a healthy rival. It whetted his appetite, stimulated his competitive energies, his need to win. But all he said was, ‘You stupid little fool.’
A shudder ran down her spine from remembering something Chrissie had said about crawling back to him for mercy. Nevertheless, she was determined not to let that daunting male confidence undermine her resolve.
‘No, not any more, Jarrad,’ she taunted softly, making to brush past him, and paid for it when he grabbed her, his clasp bruising on her upper arm as he forced her back to face him.
‘Have you slept with him yet?’ It was an angry, relentless demand.
‘That’s none of your business!’ All decorum deserted her as she struggled to free herself—to no avail—from his tenacious, determined hold.
He laughed without humour. ‘Well that’s where you’re very wrong, Kendal. It’s very much my business. Particularly as it seems I have to remind you that you’re still my wife!’
‘I am?’ She tilted her head to gaze up at him with scathing incredulity. ‘That didn’t seem to worry you too much when you were off having your adulterous fling with Lauren!’
‘That’s your interpretation of it,’ he said grimly.
‘And Ralph’s! Were we both wrong?’ Unconsciously a small, injured note had crept into her voice. ‘Or are you one of these men who thinks wives should be faithful while husbands sleep with as many lovers as they think fit?’
Now mockery curled that rather cruel mouth, though his eyes were concealed by the dark sweep of his lowered lashes.
‘Is that what you imagined you were, Kendal? Part of some sort of exotic harem?’ His cold amusement was derisive. ‘Just now there was only one!’
Only the clean, clear notes of the blackbird’s song filtering in through the open doors broke the moment’s silence as she glared at him, dumbfounded. ‘My God! Isn’t that enough?’
He caught both of her arms now, and was holding her there in front of him, the shadow that crossed his face making those dark features appear sombre, almost pained, though she knew it was only the late afternoon sun playing tricks as it fell across the lawn.
’And isn’t it enough that I spent every energy I possessed in trying to make you happy? In pleasuring you, Kendal? Whatever you thought I felt for Lauren I still wanted to lose myself in you. Again and again and again. And you, you always responded to me like some crazed animal. Never able to get enough…’
She shut her mind to the images that were swimming before her eyes—the ultimate ecstasy of being dominated by the driving power of this man, the joy of being in his arms, of those pinnacles of pleasure that had had her sobbing, swept away on a tide of desire far beyond the reaches of any earthly plane. But that was before she had had positive proof that he found Lauren’s company so much more stimulating, before he had sacked Ralph and she, herself, had realised the hard way that she had been wrong ever to believe anything a man said—any man…
‘Things change,’ was all she said, brittly, not trusting herself to utter anything else.
‘Like hell!’ he whispered, and then, with one hand to the base of her spine, pulled her lower body against the hard, lean angles of his.
She gasped at the startling contact, shutting her eyes tight against the sensations that ripped through her at the shocking evidence of his arousal. But a slow, insidious heat was building in her, permeating her tissues, her cells and her very blood to make her breathing quicken and her breasts strain against the white cotton of the sleeveless blouse she was wearing with the chic, straight skirt of her green suit.