‘You can accuse me of many things, Rachel,’ Daniel was murmuring roughly. ‘And most of them I probably deserve. But you cannot accuse me of not loving our children!’
‘Really?’ she questioned in sarcastic scorn. ‘You only married me in the first place because you got me pregnant with the twins! And even little Michael was a mistake you took your time coming to terms with—!’
His fist slamming down on the table-top stopped her in mid-flow, and her eyelashes flickered nervously as she watched him swing his long body around the table, shifting the heavy pine a good foot off its usual setting when his thigh caught the corner in his haste to reach her. The violence in the air was tangible. Rachel could taste it on her suddenly dry lips as he approached her with his hands outstretched as if he intended throttling her.
As the very last second he changed his mind and grabbed her shoulders instead. It cost him an effort; she could feel him trembling with the need to choke the bitterness right out of her even as he suppressed the urge. ‘He’s too young to understand the implications of what you’ve just said,’ he rasped out harshly, nodding towards a fascinated Michael. ‘But if the twins overheard you, if you’ve given them any reason at all to think I don’t love them, I’ll…’
He didn’t finish—didn’t need to. Rachel knew exactly what he was threatening. He glared at her for a moment longer, then unclipped his hands from her and turned to walk out of the room.
Rachel gulped in a deep breath of air and it was only as she did so that she realised she had stopped breathing altogether. It was pure instinctive need for comfort that made her pick Michael up and cuddle him close.
She felt ashamed of herself, and angry, too, because in lashing out wildly at Daniel like that she had given him the right to attack her when, until that moment, she’d had everything stacked her way.
CHAPTER THREE
IT WAS the weekend before the twins really began to notice that things weren’t quite as they were used to seeing them. And as usual it was the sharp-eyed and more outspoken Kate who wanted to know the reason why.
‘Why are you sleeping in Michael’s room, Mummy?’ she demanded on Sunday morning while they all lingered around the breakfast table, as was their habit on the one day they had to be lazy in the morning.
They had only discovered her new sleeping arrangements because Michael had slept later this morning and, stupidly, Rachel had overslept along with him. Several nights of restless turning in the small bed while her mind tormented her with everything painful and self-pitying it could throw at her had left her exhausted, and last night when she had crawled beneath the Paddington Bear duvet she had achieved—to her relief—an instant blackout, which remained deep and dreamless right up until Sammy came to bounce on her to wake her up.
She still felt haggard, because what the sleep had made up for in hours, it had not made up for in spiritual relief. Wherever her dreams had gone off to last night, they had not eased her aching heart, or her anger, or the waves of bitterness and the soul-crushing self-abhorrence she was experiencing at the way she was letting the whole thing just drag on without doing something about it. Daniel had advised her to make no decisions until she was feeling less emotional and, like the pathetic creature she was, she had used that advice as an excuse to fall into a state of limbo where life had taken on colourless shapes of muted greys and nothing came into full focus any more.
Daniel looked no better, the same strain pulling at the clean-cut lines of his face too. He had been home by six-thirty every night since their cosy world had exploded around them. She suspected that the reason for this was her criticism of him as a father rather than a means to prove to her that his affair was over. She knew she’d hit him on the raw there.
So now he came home early enough to take over the bathing and putting to bed of the children while Rachel prepared their dinner. And on the surface everything appeared perfectly normal, as they both made an effort to hide their colossal problems from their children.
Until quietness engulfed the house—then they would eat their prepared meal in stiff silence, Daniel’s few attempts at conversation quashed by her refusal to take him up on them. So he would disappear into his study as soon as he possibly could, and she would clear the remnants of a poorly eaten meal, feed her bleeding emotions on unreserved bouts of self-pity, then go to bed in Michael’s room, feeling lonelier and more depressed as the days went by.
She was still labouring beneath the weight of a nullifying shock. She could acknowledge that even as she continued in her zombie-like existence. And Daniel just watched, grim-faced and silent, waiting, she knew, for the moment when she would crack wide apart.
Now she had her daughter’s curious enquiry to deal with, and as the truth flooded into her mind and sent what vestige of colour she had left fleeing from her face, she managed an acceptable reply. ‘Michael is teething again.’
The corner of Daniel’s Sunday paper twitched, and Rachel knew he was listening, maybe even watching her over the top of that twitched corner. She didn’t glance his way to find out. She didn’t really care what he was doing.
Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, the uncanny image of her mother, Kate nodded understandingly. Michael’s teeth had been the scourge of their nights’ rest before— although Rachel had not so much as considered swapping beds to be closer to him then. But that did not seem to occur to Kate, who was already turning her attention to her darling daddy.
‘I bet you miss having Mummy to cuddle, Daddy,’ she remarked, getting down from her chair to go and climb on to Daniel’s knee, her long hair flying as she blithely shoved his newspaper aside and made herself comfortable in those big, infinitely secure arms, with the certain knowledge that she was welcome. ‘If you’d just told me,’ she murmured, with typical Kate guile, ‘I would have come and cuddled you instead.’
Tension leaped to life, unspoken words and acid replies flying about the room without being captured.
‘That’s nice of you, princess.’ Daniel folded his paper away so that he could give his adored daughter his full attention. ‘But I think I can manage for a little while longer without feeling completely rejected.’
If that last remark had been meant as a message to Rachel, she ignored it, and sat there sipping at her coffee without revealing the effort it cost her to do it.
He was sitting there dressed only in his blue towelling robe, and the cluster of dark hair at his chest curled upwards from between the gaping lapels. He dropped a kiss on his daughter’s silky cheek, his smile so openly loving that Rachel felt her stomach tighten then sink, as jealousy, like nothing she had ever experienced before, shot through her, forcing her abruptly to her feet, appalled by what was going on inside her!
Jealous of your own daughter! she castigated herself. How bitter and twisted can you get?
Sheer desperation made her start gathering pots together. Daniel’s watchful gaze lifted to her face, and she couldn’t stop herself from looking back at him. Something must have shown in the bitter blue glint of her eyes, because his own narrowed speculatively before she spun away and deliberately ruined the relaxed atmosphere by banging around the kitchen, clearing up.
She became even more embittered when her tactics to shift them all didn’t work. In fact they simply ignored her as Sam was drawn into conversation with Kate and Daniel, and even Michael, when he insisted on coming out of his high-chair, was promptly placed on Daniel’s spare knee where he chattered blithely away to them all in his usual gibberish.
She couldn’t stand it. Something in the cosy little scene gnawed into her ragged nerves. She felt left out, alienated by her inability to go over there and join in as she would normally have done. Lydia stood in her way like some huge unscalable wall, blocking her off from her family, from the love and affection she had always taken for granted as her right.
Giving up on clearing up before she broke something, she turned and left the room with a mumbled, ‘I’m going to make the beds,’ knowing no one heard her, and feeling
even more cast out.