She didn’t blame Marcus for what he had done. She never had. The blame and the fault were hers, and though there had been many, many times when she had ached to come home, when she would have given her soul for Marcus’s forgiveness and warm smile, she had forced herself to remain in exile until now.
Her concern for Susie had brought her north on a fast-flowing flood of emotion which was now starting to ebb, leaving her feeling vulnerable and defenceless. In the heat of the moment she had told Marcus that she intended to stay, virtually challenging him to stop her.
The house was centrally heated, the evening balmy and warm, but she was still shivering as she reached the bottom of the stairs and made her way to the study door.
It was closed, and she rapped on it tentatively.
‘Yes?’ Marcus looked up, frowning as she walked in, his voice terse. His desk was covered with files. He had always worked hard, first as a junior partner in the estate agents and auctioneers he had joined after leaving university, and then when he’d set up his own estate agency.
The harshness of the desk lamp illuminated the lines of tension on his face, cut sharply in grooves that ran from his nose to his mouth. Lines which were new to her, she recognised sadly.
‘You wanted to see me,’ she reminded him.
A gas fire burned in the Adam grate and she went over to it, holding out her hands to the flames, even though they gave off little heat.
‘Cold?’ he asked her sharply.
She was, but not in any way that had anything to do with the temperature of the air. No, the chill eating away inside her came from years of guilt and pain…from knowing just how much she had wronged him…from carrying the anguish of remorse and regret as her constant burden.
‘Not really. I thought for a moment the fire was real.’
‘Mrs Nesbitt, our last housekeeper, told me that there was no way she was going to clean out coal fires, so I had that installed. It’s far from an adequate substitute.’
‘It looks effective, though.’
‘Maybe, but as you’ve just discovered, there’s nothing more disappointing than discovering that your eyes have deceived you into believing an attractive and welcoming exterior means there’s going to be something equally warm behind it.’
He sounded very tired, and as he got up from behind his desk he half stumbled, bumping into it, and sending a silver photograph frame clattering down on to its wooden surface. As he picked it up, Maggie saw the photograph it held and her lungs seized up in a paroxysm of shock.
It was her. Taken on her seventeenth birthday, a formal photograph commissioned by her grandfather.
‘You’ve still got that,’ she whispered huskily, the words scraping her tense muscles.
‘Yes,’ Marcus replied tersely, without looking at her. ‘It serves to remind me…’ He broke off and looked directly at her, shocking her into frozen immobility. She had forgotten the effect those hypnotic grey eyes could have… She had forgotten how it could feel when he looked at her like that…as though he could see right through to her soul.
Once she had fantasised about seeing those eyes grow warm and then burn with desire. Had mentally visualised them darkening with passion, as he held her and touched her, her imaginings as wild and feverish as only those of teenage girls can be…her knowledge of sex gleaned more from what she had read than anything she had personally experienced.
And she didn’t have much more experience than that now, she reminded herself grimly. The only difference was that now she realised that there was far more to loving someone than sexual desire.
‘So you still do that?’
The harsh words shocked her, and she focused abruptly on him, staring at him in confusion.
‘What?’
‘Do you really not know? It used to infuriate me, that ability of yours to drift off into your private world where no one could follow you. I thought you must have grown out of it.’
Her face flamed the guilt that was never far away from surfacing painfully. ‘I have,’ she told him shortly. ‘What do you want to talk to me about, Marcus? It’s getting late, and I have to be up early in the morning to drive the girls to school. I’m hoping to get something organised on a rota basis once I’ve found my feet, but I thought it might be an idea to see if I can arrange to see the headmistress and have a chat with her. What’s she like?’
‘So you still intend to go through with it?’ Marcus demanded ignoring her last question.
Maggie tensed. This was it. This was what she had been dreading…why she had been putting off this confrontation all evening.
‘Hadn’t I already made that clear?’ she answered obliquely, feeling her nerves tighten when he remained silent, staring, not at her, but out of the window into the dusky twilight of the June garden.
‘I thought perhaps once you’d had time to reflect you might…’
‘Change my mind? No, Marcus,’ she told him, shaking her head. ‘Susie and Sara need me here. Even you can’t deny that. They don’t like Isobel, and from what I’ve heard her say I judge that she doesn’t care much for them…’ She saw that he was about to interrupt and held up her hand, continuing challengingly, ‘You’re going to deny it! Why—when we both know that it’s true? Look at it this way: my staying here to look after the girls will free you and Isobel to make your own lives.’