Sinful Nights (55 page)

‘Open it!’ demanded Lucy impatiently.

All they had left to open were their large presents, hidden behind the tree, and so, bemusedly, Claire started to unwrap her gift. Inside the paper was a dark leather-covered jewellers’ box edged in gold. Claire felt her stomach clench in shock as she fumbled with the fastening and got it open. On the bed of dark velvet lay a necklet of milky pearls, supporting a heart-shaped emerald surrounded by diamonds. It was the most exquisite thing she had ever seen, and she touched it tentatively, too stunned for words.

‘Jay … it’s …’ She looked up at him and swallowed. ‘You shouldn’t have bought me this! It must have cost a fortune!’

‘The emerald reminded me of you,’ he said quietly. ‘Cool, and as clear and honest as a mountain spring that refreshes and revives. Beautiful and rare.’ He saw she was abut to interrupt and said softly, ‘You are all those things to me, Claire, and if it had cost ten times what it did, it still wouldn’t be adequate recompense for all that you’ve done.’

Recompense. She tasted the word and found it bitter. She didn’t want to be recompensed. She wanted … she wanted to be loved, she realised shockingly, unaware that her face had lost all its colour, or that her eyes had a blind terror in their depths.

She heard Jay’s sharply indrawn breath, but didn’t connect it with her own reaction to his gift, and then Lucy was saying excitedly, ‘Aren’t you going to kiss him, Mummy?’ And somehow, reacting automatically, she was touching her cold lips to his warm skin, and feeling his sharp recoil with a pain that hurt so much,
she couldn’t believe she had ever thought she had known pain before.

It was a relief to escape to the kitchen to see to the lunch. Jay took the girls outside on their new sledge, while she worked like an automaton, wondering why it was that she should be condemned to loving a man who could give her only gratitude. And he wouldn’t even want to give her that, if he knew the truth. In that moment she knew that she must conceal for ever how she felt about him. If she didn’t … if she didn’t their marriage would be a nightmare. He wouldn’t divorce her for the girls’ sake, but if she told him how she felt she would lose his friendship, lose those precious confidences he gave her, those evenings together when he talked to her about his work, when she felt as though they met as equals. She would lose all that, without any hope of ever gaining what she really wanted. And what did she want? For him to love her, yes, but how—in the way that he loved the girls, or in the way that he had loved his first wife?

Did she want his tenderness or his passion? She didn’t know, she had only known in that blinding moment of revelation that she loved him totally.

‘W
ELL, HERE WE ARE, LADIES
—Dallas!’

The faint air of constraint that had sprung up between them after Christmas Day still lingered, despite her forcedly cheerful attempts to dispel it and appear normal, and Claire couldn’t help noticing how careful Jay was not to touch her as they disembarked from the plane that had brought them from Heathrow.

She didn’t think Jay had actually guessed how she felt about him, but she knew that he sensed something. She often found him watching her in an assessing, almost withdrawn way. Assessing and finding wanting, perhaps? A cold fear dug icy fingers into the pit of her stomach.

‘Are you all right?’ he queried.

‘Just getting used to feeling firm ground underneath my feet again.’

The Goldbergs had sent a chauffeur-driven car to pick them up, and as they drove from the airport and through the city itself Jay pointed out several landmarks to them. It was the flatness of the countryside and the expected and yet awesome vastness of everything that
she noticed most, Claire thought as she listened to the girls’ excited chatter.

She knew that the Goldbergs owned a house on the outskirts of Dallas and that it was here that Jay’s firm had done the work which had won them the contract for John Goldberg’s prestigious building developments.

The Goldberg house was built in what Jay had described as a Neo-Colonial style, and featured a large enclosed patio in the manner of the French Creole houses of St Louis. Claire was looking forward to seeing it, but the ten-foot-high brick wall and the security guard on the gates came as rather an unpleasant shock. The man was cordiality itself as he let them through, but Claire couldn’t repress a small shiver as she noticed the gun he was wearing.

‘John’s a millionaire,’ Jay told her quietly, ‘and these days I’m afraid that means taking certain security precautions.’

Claire knew that the Goldbergs had two almost grown-up children: a son at Yale and a daughter at Vassar.

The long drive curved through immaculately kept gardens, with sprinkler systems to keep the lawns green and fresh, and the house stood at the end of the drive, its long, symmetrical windows gazing out over the grounds.

A double flight of marble steps led up to the colonnaded Palladian-style entrance. The car stopped, and the chauffeur opened the doors. Claire noticed how subdued the girls were as the four of them climbed the steps.

‘I had no idea it would be so big!’ she whispered to Jay as they approached the front door.

She just had time to catch his grin, and to hear him whisper in a mock American drawl, ‘Honey, this is Texas,’ before the massive double doors were opened.

The couple who came out to greet them could have starred in any glamorous American soap opera. John Goldberg was tall, his face tanned, his hair just touched with distinguished wings of silver. Celeste Goldberg was petite and blonde. Her silk pants and top shrieked Milan, and there could be no doubting that those pearl and diamond earrings she was wearing were real. Even so, her smile of welcome was warm and genuine, her manner towards the girls, instantly putting them at ease.

They were ushered into a rectangular hallway; a flight of marble steps at the far end rose to a galleried landing. The soft, green-washed walls were embellished with gilded plasterwork, which Claire instantly recognised.

‘It looks wonderful!’ she told Jay impulsively.

‘We certainly think so,’ said Celeste. ‘And so do all our friends. We’ve given you a suite of rooms overlooking the patio; I’ll show you to them now. I know you must be tired.’

Claire was. In fact, she was finding it hard to understand why sitting still for so long should be able to induce such numbing exhaustion.

‘It’s this way.’

Claire and the girls followed their hostess upstairs, while Jay lingered to talk to John Goldberg. At the top of the stairs a pair of double doors in white and gold opened out on to a galleried walkway that went all the way round an unroofed quadrangle.

‘All the bedrooms have access to the pool and patio
area from this gallery,’ Celeste told Claire, indicating a flight of steps that went down to the ground below.

As she gazed over the iron railings, Claire could see the rich blue shimmer of the pool. Built in a traditional shape, it was ornamented with a piece of marble statuary, and the patio itself was flagged in white marble diamond-shaped tiles, interspersed with smaller dark blue ones to match the tiles in the pool. White marble columns supported the walkway and a wide variety of exotic climbing plants curled green tendrils around them. The whole effect was one of cool richness, right down to the birds Claire could not see, but could hear singing.

‘It’s a recording,’ Celeste told her, laughing when Claire commented on it. ‘John wanted to create the old St Louis-style family patio, but I drew the line at caged birds, so this was a compromise. We do have a much larger pool and barbecue area in the grounds, of course; but we only use it when we’re having large parties. John had a tented pavilion area made next to it where we can put down a dance floor and serve a buffet. Ah—this is your suite here.’

She was way, way out of her depth here, realised Claire, marvelling at her hostess’s casual acceptance of her possessions and lifestyle.

Celeste opened a door. ‘I’ve given you two rooms, and a small sitting-room.’

All three rooms were decorated with French Empirestyle furnishings and fitments; all three were luxurious and glamorous, as were the two
en suite
bathrooms, but it was not the luxury of her surroundings that made Claire go tense with shock; it was the realisation that
Celeste had given her and Jay a bedroom that possessed an enormous king-sized bed.

The girls’ room had two twins, but she could hardly suggest that she and Jay sleep in there, and there was certainly no question of anyone sleeping on the delicate chaise-longue at the bottom of the bed.

‘Dolores will unpack for you; she and her family have been looking after us for the last ten years. It was Thomas, her son, who drove you here. We don’t have dinner until eight, and you’ll want to rest before then. Shall I send up some tea for you now, and leave you to settle in?’

Claire was too strung up now to rest, so she shook her head. ‘I’m tired,’ she admitted, ‘but if I let the girls sleep now, they’ll never want to go to bed.’

‘Well, if I’m any judge, the men will be talking business in John’s den. We’ll go down there and rout them out, and then we’ll have tea in the courtyard. The air-conditioning keeps it lovely and cool, and the fact that it’s enclosed protects it from the dreadful winds we get here.’

As they went back downstairs, Claire learned that this evening they would be dining alone with their host and hostess, but that for the rest of their stay the Goldbergs planned to entertain and introduce them to several of their friends.

‘John is so thrilled with the work Jay has done for him. Initially he was worried that such a small company wouldn’t have the manpower to cope with a large contract, but Jay’s dedication and know-how has finally convinced him. I think it was the news that Jay had remarried that finally convinced him,’ Celeste added with
a brief sideways look at Claire. ‘John is a keen advocate of the benefits of a secure and strong marriage. I think it’s very romantic how the two of you met and married.’ She looked meaningfully at Lucy and Heather, who were preceding them down the stairs. ‘And anyone can see how happy those two little girls are. I scarcely recognised Heather. She used to be such an unhappy, withdrawn child.’

‘You’ve met Heather before?’

‘Only briefly, when John and I were visiting London. Jay invited us back to the house for drinks, only when we got there it was plain that Susan wasn’t at all pleased. Poor Jay—I felt terribly embarrassed for him, and we weren’t really surprised when he heard that they’d split up, but John believes that divorce has a very unsettling effect on a man; it stops him from concentrating totally on business.’ Celeste added the last few words with a wry grimace. ‘I’m afraid my husband is something of a workaholic, but having said that, I wouldn’t swop him for anyone else. Come on, we’ll go and rout them out of John’s den.’

As she listened to the conversation flowing around her, Claire could see what Celeste meant about John being a workaholic, but at least he did not, as many men did, presume that because they were female they could have no conceivable interest or worthwhile comments to add to the conversation, and she could see that he valued Celeste’s opinion.

It had been rather a shock to hear Celeste describing their marriage as ‘romantic’. Did she think that she and Jay were wildly in love, then? Obviously she must do. Even more disquieting, though, had been her innocent
revelations about John’s views on men and marriage. Was it possible that Jay had married her not just for Heather’s benefit, but possibly for his own?

It was too late by a long time to start querying his motives now, she told herself, and anyway, what did it really matter? It mattered because, having discovered that she loved him, she found that it hurt to think that to him their marriage was just a sensible business manoeuvre. She had thought, before Christmas, that there was a closeness developing between them, a closeness which she had foolishly cherished.

‘I think I’ll take the girls upstairs now. It’s gone six o’clock and they’re both beginning to look tired.’

‘They’ll want something to eat …’ began Celeste, but Claire shook her head. ‘No, the sandwiches they’ve just eaten and the food they had on the plane will be enough. If they have another meal now, they won’t sleep.’

‘I’ll come and give you a hand.’ Jay smiled easily at John Goldberg. ‘I miss out so often on saying goodnight to them that I like to share their bedtime whenever I can.’

‘Yes, they grow up all too quickly,’ John Goldberg agreed. ‘I often regret that I didn’t have more time to spare for our two when they were kids.’

Claire was surprised by Jay’s behaviour. After all, this was essentially a business trip, even if the Goldbergs had specially wanted him to bring his family to meet them, and she had expected Jay to remain downstairs talking to John while she got the girls into bed.

She said as much as they went to their suite, careful to keep her voice down so that Lucy and Heather wouldn’t overheard her.

‘We’re here for four days,’ Jay pointed out. ‘Plenty of time to discuss business matters, and besides, John’s already told me that his advisers have finally agreed the contract. I’m not the sort of man who wants to sacrifice everything on the altar of material success, Claire. Oh, I enjoy my work: I like producing something that I know is good, and I like the success of selling it—but it isn’t the be-all and end-all of my existence. I don’t want either Lucy or Heather growing up thinking of me as a casual participant in their lives who can be relied on for expensive presents and not much else. Parenting is a dual role.’

They had reached the outer door to their suite. Claire hung back while the two girls rushed eagerly inside. Reluctantly she followed them.

‘Jay …’ she began.

‘Mmm?’

‘Celeste has only given us one room—with a double bed.’

His eyebrows lifted, and he asked in amusement, ‘For all four of us?’

Claire could feel the hot colour flooding betrayingly over her skin. ‘No, of course not.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ Suddenly for some reason his voice sounded clipped, angry almost. ‘If I know anything about American beds, it will be large enough for us and at least half a dozen bolsters.’