Shadows Of Yesterday

Shadows Of Yesterday
CATHY WILLIAMS

I'm not looking for love. Those words shattered Claire. How could she have been so naive as to assume that she would be the one to break through James Forrester's cool, arrogant exterior? She should have known better, but instead had hoped that their wild, tempestuous affair would at least count for something… .However, now she was well aware that James viewed her with cynicism, wanting yet despising her youthful innocence. So what chance did they have - particularly when James seemed determined not to lay to rest the ghost of his dead wife?Cathy Williams creates a "mix of volatile emotion and steamy sensual tension." - Romantic Times

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#u8be24f62-f8fd-5256-9887-912d5c8f9e50)

Excerpt (#ue21afcfc-2ccd-5fdf-ba12-0ab7ffeaf507)

About the Author (#u6097727b-edfb-5e17-80a3-f4725bc36b1b)

Title Page (#u4ebe67dd-153e-5f6d-92f4-76bf61f85f5a)

Chapter One (#u8a66e764-c1b4-53f4-ac46-e5d75ada7c9a)

Chapter Two (#u002b97ef-7d68-56d9-8722-e0ec461ae8e7)

Chapter Three (#u497badd4-bb69-52a5-a9a1-b1cc5c61ec57)

Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

“This is a picture of my wife.”

“So I’ve been sleeping with a married man for the past nine months!”

“I’m not married,” James said. “The thought of adultery leaves me with a very sour taste in my mouth. My wife died ten years ago.”

“I had no idea,” Claire whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“Claire, let me make one thing absolutely clear between us. I want you. But if you’re looking for commitment, then you’re looking at the wrong man. My capacity for love was well and truly expended on Olivia.”

CATHY WILLIAMS is Trinidadian and was brought up on the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago. She was awarded a scholarship to study in Britain, and went to Exeter University in 1975 to continue her studies into the great loves of her life: languages and literature. It was there that Cathy met her husband, Richard. Since they married, Cathy has lived in England, originally in the Thames Valley but now in the Midlands. Cathy and Richard have two small daughters.

Shadows Of Yesterday

Cathy Williams

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_e9afcbbf-6f99-5c61-a131-9a4426ccaaf1)

CLIAIRE’S hand was trembling. There had to be some kind of mistake, some kind of dreadful mistake.

That didn’t go very far towards making her feel any better, though, and she subsided into the leather chair by the window with a sick, faint feeling.

She leaned her head against the palm of her hand, her eyes flicking around the small, exquisite study, but not really seeing it at all.

She would have to wait for him. He was due back any minute now, and everything would be neatly explained.

She breathed a little sigh of relief at the thought of that and settled back in the chair, her eyes half closed. Outside, it was pitch dark, and freezing cold. It was March, but a bitterly cold March, with forecasters reminding them every day that England had not seen a spring like this for decades.

Inside, however, the study was warm, as was the entire place. That had been one of the first things that had struck her when she had started working at Frilton Manor nearly a year ago. This was not one of those splendid country mansions which were breathtakingly beautiful to look at but dismally archaic inside. No, James Forrester was a man who liked his creature comforts, and he was wealthy enough to ensure that every one of them was indulged at the snap of a finger.

Not for him vast, unheated rooms, threadbare carpets and unflattering portraits of deceased ancestors. The place was entirely heated, the carpets were luxuriously deep-piled and the unflattering ancestral portraits were confined to the gallery in the left wing. In their place an assortment of mostly Impressionistic masterpieces adorned the walls.

It wasn’t so long ago that she had wandered through the rooms, lost in speechless wonder. Everything had been a revelation of good taste.

Right now, with that little seven-by-five photo clutched in her hand, she felt as though all that impressionable, youthful ingenuousness had finally been killed off and she had to insist to herself that she was being prematurely pessimistic, that James would be able to explain away that cool blonde, with her arm linked through his, dressed in an ivory suit and holding a bunch of some unidentifiable flowers against her stomach.

Next to him, with his impossibly impressive, dark and slightly cruel good looks, she was like an ice maiden, tall, pale and with a peculiar, frozen beauty of her own.

Her fingers tightened on the photo and she found that she was breathing quickly, nervously, like a scared wild animal that had wandered into an unsuspected trap.

Maybe, she thought with a rare stab of bitterness, this fear was simply a culmination of what she had been feeling, deep inside, for the past nine months, ever since she had begun sleeping with him. What, after all, had she to offer a man like James Forrester—someone with power, wealth and looks, a man who could crook a finger and have any woman he wanted running to him? She was no great beauty with her uneventful brown hair, blue eyes and pale complexion, a brunette who couldn’t tan, of all things.

And she certainly did not inhabit his rarefied world of the rich, the privileged and the powerful. Her roots were humble ones, her parents both teachers and both now retired, safely tucked away in deepest Devon, a thousand light-years away from stocks and shares and the cut-throat concrete jungle which was his life blood.

Which brought her to the photo and the inevitable question it raised: where was their relationship going? She was desperately in love with him, and she knew that he was fond of her and was attracted to her, that much had always been obvious in the flare in his eyes whenever they were together, but there it ended. He did not want commitment. That was something which had needed no explanation. It was evident in every caress, every touch that was unaccompanied by the declarations of love she longed to hear. It was as intangible but as powerfully present as the air she breathed.

And for the past nine months she had, with increasing unease, played the game by his rules; but now, she thought, staring at the photo in front of her, things were going to change. She was not going to become one of those women who spent years miserably devoted to a man who had no intention of offering anything beyond the occasional meal out and sex on demand.

God only knew why she had stuck it out for so long. It was completely out of character. She frowned, and in the dim recesses of her mind she wondered whether there wasn’t some inevitable logic to her behaviour after all. She had had boyfriends in the past, but they had never measured up to the hopelessly impossible standards which she had set in her imagination. I’ve spent my life searching for a fairy-tale, she thought bitterly, looking for some dark, dramatic knight in shining armour. How could college boys and local lads ever have filled the role? None of them had fuelled her imagination.

With James it had been different from the word go. He had been altogether different from the sort of boys she had been accustomed to, as different as a shark was from a goldfish. Underneath that sophisticated exterior, he possessed a rapier mind and a lean, predatory sex appeal which she had never in her life come across.

She had taken one look at him and she had been bowled over. Nothing in her life had prepared her for that heady rush of excitement which his mere presence could arouse in her, and she had done nothing to protect herself.

But then, looking back on it now, she had not realised just how quickly she would become engulfed, until he filled her every waking moment, until she only seemed to breathe, to come alive, when he was around. She had given everything of herself to him, without ever really stopping to realise that he had given precious little in return.

What a fool I’ve been, she thought with an angry stab of pain, throwing myself into bed with him, lapping up the crumbs he’s tossed out like a thirsty dog at a bowl of water. Where has all my pride gone?

Little wonder she had never mentioned him to her parents. Some instinct must have warned her that their relationship, if it could be called that, was far from satisfactory, and her parents would have had a fit if they had known what an emotional mess she was in. They were old-fashioned people with old-fashioned principles, and sleeping with a virtual stranger did not, by any stretch of the imagination, fit into the category of upholding old-fashioned principles.

All these things had been fermenting away in her head for some time now, but it was only here, sitting in this armchair, clutching this photo, that they all came together and filled her with horror. How could she have been so stupid?