&
nbsp; Ryan put down his cutlery. ‘Is that what you want?’ he asked her quizzically. Deborah laughed. Even now he still could not resist flirting with her.
‘It’s certainly a step in the right direction,’ she agreed demurely.
‘Mmm…’ he agreed softly. ‘I thought it might be.’
Careful, Deb, Deborah warned herself as she caught the undertone in his voice, but before she could make any comment he had started outlining what he planned to do, the staff he intended to put under her authority.
‘This one might seem easy, but that doesn’t mean it will be,’ he warned her. ‘There’s going to be a lot of bad feeling stirred up locally; the widow doesn’t have a clue about what’s going on or the fact that she’s virtually going to be out on the street. Luckily there’s family money there.’
They discussed the procedures involved over the rest of their lunch and when they finally got up to leave Deborah’s heart was singing with excitement. She couldn’t wait to get home and tell Mark her good news. They had made a rule not to have any contact with one another at work of a personal nature, and she knew what he would say if she broke it, even for something as important as this. Unlike Ryan’s, Mark’s ethics were fixed and wholly reliable.
‘There will be an increase in salary, of course,’ Ryan told her as they left the restaurant. ‘Oh, and a new company car. What’s Mark got?’ he asked casually. Absently Deborah told him, cars were not something that interested her very much.
‘Ah, well, yours will be the more upmarket model, but I’m sure you’ll be able to find a way of soothing any hurt male pride.’
Deborah looked at him. What on earth was he talking about? Mark simply wasn’t that kind of man. No, Mark would be as thrilled for her as she would have been for him if their positions had been reversed. She and Mark had a totally equal and loving relationship in which neither of them competed with the other, but supported and protected one another instead.
Mark… Mark. Oh, she couldn’t wait for tonight… They would really celebrate… not at some expensive restaurant, but at home, together… in bed. She hugged the anticipatory pleasure of what she was thinking to herself as Ryan drove them back into town.
CHAPTER THREE
‘IF DAD’S really dead does that mean that we can come home and live with you and go to school there?’ Daniel said to her.
Philippa closed her eyes as she felt the weakening rush of relief surge inside her. All the way on the drive up here to their school she had been worrying about the boys’ reaction to Andrew’s death, but now as she stood with her arms around both of them, her face resting protectively against Daniel’s head, she was forced to recognise that the distance and uninterest with which Andrew had always treated his sons was reciprocated in their calm acceptance of his death.
She had gently urged Andrew repeatedly to spend more time with them, to involve himself more in their lives, but he had dismissed her fears about the gulf she could see between them as typical feminine over-reaction.
‘Boarding-school will be good for them,’ he had insisted. ‘It will teach them how to be men. You’re too soft with them. Always kissing and cuddling them.’ The rest of the family had supported his decision.
‘Boys need discipline,’ her elder brother had told her, adding disapprovingly, ‘You’re far too over-indulgent with your two, Philippa. If you’re not careful you’re going to turn them into a pair of——’
‘Of what?’ she had challenged him quietly. ‘A pair of caring, compassionate human beings?’
She had regretted her outburst later, especially when she had walked past the open study door and heard Robert telling her husband, ‘That’s the trouble with Philippa; she’s always been inclined to be over-emotional; but then that’s women for you, bless ‘em.’
The condescension in her brother’s voice had made her grit her teeth, but years of being told as a child that girls did not argue or lose their tempers, and that pretty girls like her should be grateful for the fact that they were pretty and not go spoiling themselves by being aggressive and argumentative, had had their effect.
She often wondered what her parents would have said if she had ever turned round and told them that she would cheerfully have traded in her prettiness for the opportunity to be allowed all the privileges of self-expression and self-determination that her brothers possessed. That her blonde hair and blue eyes, her small heart-shaped face with its full-lipped soft mouth, her slender feminine figure and the fact that by some alchemic fusing and mixing of genes she had been given a set of features that combined to make her look both youthful and yet at the same time alluring were not in fact assets which she prized but a burden to her. People reacted to the way she looked, not the person she was, and she found this just as distressing; it made her feel just as vulnerable and undervalued as it would have done a girl who was her complete physical opposite. People only saw her prettiness; they did not see her; they did not, she suspected, want to see her. It had been her father who had been the strictest at forcing on her the role model of pretty, compliant daughter, praising her when friends and family commented on the way she looked and curtly reprimanding her when her behaviour did not conform to that visual image of sweet docility.
‘Oxford… are they out of their minds?’ her father had demanded when the head of the small all-girls’ school she had attended had written to him suggesting that she felt that it might be worth while, that with a little extra coaching she believed that Philippa could win a place there.
And after that Philippa had found that the precious time she had needed for that extra study was somehow whittled away with family duties she wasn’t allowed to evade.
There were other limitations imposed on her as well. Her father did not approve of girls or women who were self-confident and noisy, women who held opinions and freely voiced them, women who took charge of their own lives.
Philippa had felt very angry sometimes when she was growing up, not just with her father but with her mother as well, who stood by her husband and agreed with everything he said.
Philippa had realised even before her younger son’s birth that her marriage had been a mistake, an escape from her family which inevitably had been no escape at all, but simply a deeper entrenchment in the role her father had already cast for her. But by then it had been too late to do anything about it. She had her sons to consider and she was determined that somehow she would provide them with the happy, secure, enriching childhood she herself had been denied. And for boys especially a father was an important, an essential part of that childhood.
Now, as she realised how little emotional effect the news of their father’s death was actually having on them, she wondered if perhaps after all she might have been wrong, and that maybe if she had been strong enough to brave the avalanche of family disapproval a separation from Andrew would have caused she might have found that not just she, but the boys as well would have had easier, happier lives.
Because there was no getting away from it: life with Andrew had not been easy. Materially comfortable, yes; easy, no, and happy—never.
And yet she had married him willingly enough.
Yes, willingly, but lovingly… She flinched a little. She had believed she loved him at the time… had wanted to love him, had looked upon marriage to him as a secure haven after the pain, the agonising misery of…