Second Best Wife by Isobel Chace Page B

happens to you. I'm not the type of man who competes for the favours of his wife, Georgina, and you are my wife, whether you like it or not.'
    'Only because —'
    'You can't argue your way out of this one, Mrs. Ayres. You're caught in a snare of your own making when you said the words that made you a wife. My wife!'
    'I didn't have much choice,' she protested, but there wasn't a great deal of conviction in her words. Nobody could have made her say the words, nobody but herself, so why had she?
    'Your jealousy of Jennifer made you,' he countered dryly. 'You never count the cost when it comes to the long-standing rivalry between you! However, I'm not complaining. Haven't you promised me that you're better than she is?'
    She flushed. ‘I only meant —' She broke off, finding it impossible to discuss with him whether she or Jennifer had the better figure. When one was loved such things hardly mattered, and if one was not loved it mattered even less.
    ‘Yes?'
    ‘I'm not jealous of Jennifer!' she protested in a whisper. ‘Why should I be? She hasn't anything I want and she never has had!'
    ‘Not even the ability to attract every man in sight?' he put in dryly. ‘When she was around nobody ever looked twice at you, did they, Georgie, not unless you forced yourself on their attention with your fists! Going away to college should have given you the space to find yourself. I wonder why it didn't. Away from your sister, you're not as strident as you are in her company. When you hold on to that temper of yours you're quite an attractive girl. Why didn't you take the opportunity to make your own friends?'
    She uttered a mirthless laugh, hunching up her shoulders and refusing to answer. How could she tell him that most of the friends she had shared with Jennifer had been hers in the first place? He would never believe that it wasn't she, but Jennifer, who had resented her popularity and had done everything she could to subvert her friends to herself. Georgina had never cared sufficiently to bother about her sister's activities, but now she wished she had. She would have liked to have flung half a dozen potential lovers in William's face! It would have given her a most rewarding pleasure to have flicked her fingers at him and gone off with somebody else — somebody who would have more charm in his little finger than William had in his whole body, a fact she would have brought home to him with the kind of insolent derision to which he frequently treated her!
    When the haze of tears cleared from her eyes she found the car had stopped and they were parked in the centre of a town whose buildings could only have been built by the British but which, nevertheless, was completely foreign to the English high streets it so closely emulated. Of course the people who thronged the pavements could never have been English. There were the men, spare and narrow hipped in their sarongs, and the women as bright as butterflies in their distinctive saris if they were rich enough to wear such a costume; some of them seemed to have no more than a much washed skirt, similar to those worn by the men, and a bolero top that accentuated their very feminine figures.
    'Never mind,' said William, 'you have me now.'
    She jumped, wringing her hands together. 'What?'
    'You may have few friends, but you've landed yourself a husband, Georgie Porgie.' He stroked her cheek with his forefinger. 'Wake up, Madam wife, this is Kandy. Are you hungry?'
    She stared at him, not really seeing him at all. 'Really, William, how Victorian can you get? Madam wife, indeed!'
    'Why not?' His smile forced a shiver up her spine. 'I have very Victorian ideas about marriage. He for God only; she for God in him! It goes with the decor the British Raj left behind!'
    'That was in India,' she pointed out in husky tones. The shiver had settled into a space round her heart, increasing in intensity until she was afraid it would explode inside her. 'Yes, let's go and eat! And may we stop for a