Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author

PENNY JORDAN

Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!

Penny Jordan’s novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.

This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan’s fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.

About the Author

PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Marriage Make-up
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

‘MUM…’

Abbie Howard frowned as her twenty-two-year-old daughter’s slightly hesitant voice interrupted her concentration on the accounts on which she was working. She had promised her accountants she would let them have them by the end of the week, but so much had happened since her daughter and her boyfriend had announced their engagement the previous weekend that she was now rather behind. Not that she minded Cathy interrupting her; the two of them had always had a very close relationship and everyone knew how much her daughter meant to her—too much, some people were occasionally inclined to say.

‘You’re not going to believe this,’ Cathy informed her, perching on the edge of her mother’s desk, swinging her long leg, which was still brown from her summer holidays.

People often remarked on how very dissimilar in looks mother and daughter were. Abbie was small, barely five feet two, and very fragile-looking, with delicate bones and an air of vulnerability about her that drew men to her like bees to honey—only for them to be both astonished and then huffily offended as she made it plain that playing the helpless little woman to their big strong man was the last thing she needed or wanted.

Her straight silky hair was naturally blonde, her eyes a deep and mesmerising blue-green, and at forty-three she could easily, had she wished to do so, have laid claim to being no older than a mere thirty-three and have been believed—not just by the male sex but by her own as well.

Not that she was likely to do any such thing. Abbie had no inhibitions about being open about her age, nor about the fact that she had a grown-up daughter.

Cathy, on the other hand, whilst she possessed her mother’s entrancing blue-green eyes, was tall, with long bones and a mane of wild, tumbling deep brunette curls. As a child she had been inclined to be clumsy, and had even gone through a stage of secretly wishing she were more like her mother, of almost hating her own taller, stronger body, until Abbie had guessed what was happening and very quickly put a stop to it, making sure that her daughter, instead of rejecting her body shape, came to appreciate it.

‘But I look just like Dad…you said so yourself when you showed me his photograph.’ She had said so, Abbie remembered, and she also remembered how upset she had been when Cathy had told her that she didn’t think she had ever had a daddy because she had never seen a picture of him. Abbie had shown her then the few photographs she had of Sam which she had not destroyed, hating having to look at them herself because of all the memories they brought back, all the pain.

Cathy had protested further. ‘And he was horrible and you hate him…’

‘But you aren’t horrible and I don’t hate you,’ Abbie had comforted her, hugging and kissing her. ‘I love you, and even though you have inherited your father’s bone structure and colouring you’re still your own person, Cathy, and I promise you that when you grow up you’re going to love being so tall and elegant.’

‘But at school they call me beanpole and beanie,’ Cathy had wept.

‘When I was at school they called me tiny,’ Abbie had told her. ‘But it doesn’t matter what other people say or think, my darling. What matters is what you think, and I promise you that when you grow up you are going to be very glad that you are you…’

And her mother had been right. Cathy was now the first person to acknowledge that. Just as she was always right…well, almost always. There were some things…

Hastily Cathy dismissed the disloyal thought she could feel forming. How was her mother going to take what she had to say to her? She had been marvellous when she and Stuart had told her about their engagement, insisting only that she be allowed to indulge herself as befitted the prospective mother of the bride.

Stuart had been more than willing to agree. He himself came from a large family and was comfortable with the idea of a large wedding.

And, despite the unhappiness and trauma of her own marriage, her mother had never tried to put her off getting married herself, Cathy acknowledged. Not that it would have done much good. She had fallen in love with Stuart virtually the moment she had seen him, and he with her, so he had told her later.

‘What’s wrong?’ Abbie asked her daughter, pushing away her papers and turning to look up at her.

‘I know you’re not going to believe this,’ Cathy responded nervously. ‘But…I think…I think…’ She looked down and started fidgeting with the laces on her boots. ‘I think I…’

‘Yes, go on…you think what?’ Abbie encouraged her wryly.

‘I think I saw Dad today…’

As she finished speaking she looked up warily to meet her mother’s eyes.

The shock was rather like believing you were crossing a completely empty road and then suddenly realising there was a ten-ton truck bearing down on you at high speed, Abbie recognised, and she felt her body’s adrenalin system surge to fight off the blow she had just been dealt.

‘You’re right,’ she agreed flatly, when she thought she had her voice under control. ‘I don’t believe you. Cathy, It’s impossible for your father to be here,’ she added more gently, when she saw her daughter turn her head away and bite her lip. ‘Your father is in Australia. He emigrated there just after…just after you were born, and there’s no reason—’ She stopped.

But Cathy picked up her unfinished sentence for her and supplied harshly, ‘There’s no reason for what? No reason for him to come back? No reason for him to want to see me…to know me…?’

Abbie could feel the lump forming in her throat. It hurt her unbearably that she who had learned to be so tough and protective of her child, who had thought she had done so well in making herself independent, in supporting them both, in giving her precious little girl all the love and security she could, had still somehow failed her.

She knew what it was, of course. Now that Cathy and Stuart were planning to get married, now that she had seen at first hand how Stuart’s happily married parents related to one another, now that she was no doubt thinking of the future, and the children she would have herself, her natural curiosity about her father had risen to the surface of her consciousness. It was making her more curious about him, making her want to know more about him and no doubt making her wish that he felt the same way about her.

When Cathy had still been a small baby, Abbie had made a vow that she would always be honest with her about her father, that she would never lie to her about him or what he had done, but that at the same time she would do her best to protect her from the hurt she was bound to suffer once she was old enough to understand the truth.

And she had stuck by that vow, even though at times it had been very hard, and of course the older Cathy had got, the more aware, the harder it had been to protect her from what Abbie knew her daughter’s own intelligence and emotions must tell her about her father.

How could she…how could anyone protect a child from the pain of knowing that its father didn’t want it? She had done her best to make it up to Cathy, and she had been so proud when people commented on how well adjusted, how happy her daughter always seemed, but now she was wondering if she had congratulated herself too soon.

Because of that, because of her fear that she might not have been enough, that Cathy might still yearn for the father she had never had, she was less understanding and gentle with her than she might otherwise have been, telling her almost harshly, ‘Forget about your father, Cathy. He doesn’t have any place in your life. He never has had. I understand how you feel, but—’

‘No, you don’t. How can you?’ Cathy interrupted her passionately. ‘How can you understand?’ she repeated, tears filling her eyes. ‘Gran and Gramps love you. Gramps never, ever turned round and told Gran that you weren’t his child, that he didn’t want you… You never went to school and listened to all the other children talking about their fathers. You didn’t have to walk down the aisle without—’ Cathy broke off and whispered apologetically, ‘I’m sorry, Mum…I didn’t mean…I know it’s not your fault…it’s just…’

Abbie slid off her chair. With Cathy perched on her desk and her standing on her feet they were almost the same height. She wrapped her arms around her daughter, holding her close, comforting her just as she had done when she was a little girl, and for what felt like the hundred-millionth time she silently cursed the man who had brought them so much unhappiness.

Sam come back…? He wouldn’t dare…Not after what he had done. She had made it more than plain to him the last time she’d seen him that henceforward she wanted nothing more to do with him, that he could keep his name, his money, his house and every other damn thing he had ever given her…except for his child. The child he had refused to accept could be his, the child she was claiming for herself and whom she would never, ever allow him to see again.

He had accused her of having sex with someone else, of conceiving her child with another man; had even had the gall to blame poor Lloyd. Lloyd, who would never…

He had started to say something else to her but she hadn’t let him finish, pushing past him and preparing to walk out of the house she had shared with him for such a brief period of time.

That had been just after she had learnt she was pregnant, and she hadn’t seen him since.

Abbie gave a pleased smile as she totted up the final column of figures some time later and closed the account book, placing it on top of the pile of other papers she had prepared for her accountants.

She knew how dubious several of her friends had been all those years ago—ten years ago—when she had announced that she was going to set up her own employment agency, but after fifteen years of experience of working in the hotel and catering trade, doing everything from waitressing and chambermaiding right through to being asked to take responsibility for organising a conference, she had learned enough to take such a big step and, more importantly, in her mind at least, she had the contacts on both sides of the business to succeed.

And she had been proved right; some of the staff who had been with her at the very start were still on her books. Her reputation had been passed by word of mouth to others. Along with her honesty and her loyalty to her staff, she was known never to supply staff to anyone she felt would abuse their position of authority over them in any way.

Her rates of pay were good and she explained firmly to anyone who quibbled about the amount she charged that she supplied the best and paid them accordingly. Abbie could supply catering staff right across the range, from a butler to lend gravitas to a formal private affair to a French chef to step in at the last minute and provide a buffet for five hundred people at an important convention, and everything in between.

Cathy, just as soon as she herself had been old enough, had been encouraged to earn her own extra pocket money by waiting at tables and serving behind a bar, just as her mother had once done. It didn’t matter that once her daughter was at university Abbie could quite easily have afforded to supplement her grant very generously indeed; she’d wanted Cathy to have the independence and pride of knowing she could earn something for herself—just so long as her part-time work didn’t detract from her studies, of course.

Abbie’s own parents had offered to help her when her marriage had fallen apart, and had even begged her to move back home with them, but she had stubbornly insisted on supporting herself and now she was glad that she had done so, that she had made an independent life for herself here in this middle-sized, middle England town, where Sam had brought her as a new bride. Then they had both planned to make their future here—Sam as a university lecturer, with plans to become a writer one day, and Abbie also working at the university, in the archive department.

She glanced at her watch. Abbie had promised a friend who had become an aficionado of car-boot sales that she would go through her attic and see if she could find anything she wanted to dispose of. She had just enough time, if she was quick, to do so before her evening appointment with the manager of the new luxurious conference centre which had recently been opened as an extension of a local hotel.

Abbie herself had actually been approached to see if she would be interested in taking up the appointment as manager of the centre, but she had declined. She preferred being her own boss, being in charge of her own life. It might sometimes be lonelier that way, but it was also much safer—and safety when it came to her relationships, be they professional or personal, was something that was very, very important to her.

Not even her closest women-friends were allowed to get too close to her, just in case they might hurt her in some way, and as for men…

It wasn’t that she was a man-hater, she denied as she made her way up the narrow flight of steps that gave her access to the attic space, no matter what some men might think. It was just that having been hurt very badly once, having been called a liar and worse, she was not about to give any man the opportunity to do so a second time. Why should she? She would be a fool if she did. That didn’t mean there hadn’t been times…men who had tempted her, but the memory of the pain Sam had caused her had always held her back. He had told her he loved her, that he would always love her, that he would never hurt her, but he had lied to her and she had believed him. How could she allow herself to trust another man after that? And not just for her own sake, for her own protection, but for Cathy’s as well. Letting herself be hurt was one thing—she was an adult capable of making her own choices and of paying the price for them—but Cathy was more at risk. Cathy needed love and security.

Abbie pushed open the loft door, wrinkling her nose against the smell of stale air and dust. She hadn’t been up here since just after Cathy had left home for university.

That was where Cathy had met Stuart, who had been taking a postgraduate course, and for a while, during the early stages of their relationship, Abbie had been worried that history was going to repeat itself.

It had been Fran, one of her oldest friends, who had warned her that she was in danger of alienating Cathy and damaging their relationship by becoming almost fixated on the belief that Stuart would hurt Cathy as Sam had hurt her.

‘Stuart isn’t the same,’ Fran had told her, ignoring Abbie’s refusal to discuss the subject with her. ‘And even if he was,’ she had added hardly, ‘it’s Cathy’s right to make her own mistakes and her own choices. Sometimes the hardest thing about being a parent is letting go,’ she had added wisely. ‘I understand how you feel about Cathy, we all do, but she’s an adult now, Abbie, and she’s in love—’

‘She thinks she’s in love,’ Abbie had interrupted angrily. ‘She’s only known him a matter of months, and already she’s talking about moving in with him and—’

‘Give her a chance,’ Fran had counselled her. ‘Give them a chance.’

‘It’s all right for you,’ Abbie had grumbled. ‘Your two are still only teenagers…’

‘And you think that makes things easier?’ Fran had rolled her eyes theatrically.

‘Lloyd and Susie haven’t been speaking all week. Lloyd caught her in a passionate embrace on the front doorstep the other night, and, predictably, he’s suddenly turned into a protective, outraged father. And, of course, Susie’s just at that age where she thinks she’s old enough to make her own decisions—even though she isn’t—and then she had to go and make matters worse by telling Lloyd that she was the one who snogged Luke, and not the other way round.’

‘Hmm…’ Momentarily Abbie had been diverted from her own problems.

Susie, Lloyd and Fran’s elder daughter, was her godchild and back then had been a formidably feisty fourteen-year-old.

Along with Michelle, Fran and Lloyd’s younger daughter, she had inherited her father’s striking red hair and there was certainly no way that there was any remote resemblance between Lloyd’s two daughters and her own, Cathy; if Sam had stayed around long enough he would very quickly have been forced to withdraw his accusation that Lloyd was Cathy’s father.

Poor Lloyd. He hadn’t met Fran when she and Sam had split up, and he had been wonderfully supportive in the early months when she had first been on her own, even hesitantly suggesting that perhaps they should marry. She had refused him, of course. She had known that she didn’t love him, nor he her, even if everyone else had considered them to be a pair before Sam had appeared in her life.

Gingerly kneeling down in the only space she could find in the piles of stuff heaped all over the loft floor, Abbie started moving things out of the way so that she could get to the boxes of bits and pieces she knew were stored up there, and which she intended to hand on to her friend for her car-booting sorties.

As she did so she knocked over a pile of children’s books. She paused to straighten them up, her eyes misting unexpectedly with tears as she recognised Cathy’s first proper reading books.

How well she remembered the thrill of wonder and excitement she had felt when Cathy read her first proper word, her first full sentence. How proud she had been, how sure that her daughter was the cleverest, prettiest little girl there ever was, how humbled by the knowledge that she had given birth to this special, magical little person—the same special, magical, perfect child who had refused to eat her supper and later thrown a tantrum in the supermarket of blush-making proportions!

Abbie’s smile faded as she also remembered how it had felt to have no one to share the special moments with, to have to wait until she could telephone her parents to tell them of Cathy’s wondrous achievement.

Firmly she resisted the temptation to indulge in nostalgia. She was a busy career woman with a full diary and very little time; the daydreamer who went soft-eyed and emotional over every small incident in her life had been firmly suppressed and controlled. Another Abbie had had to develop and take shape. An Abbie whom people respected and sometimes even found slightly formidable, an Abbie who had learned to deal with life and all its small and manifold problems by and for herself…An Abbie who could and would, if necessary, fight like a tigress to protect her child, an Abbie who had no need of sentiment or regrets about the past, and who had certainly no need for a man in her life to mistrust her and hurt her.

She crawled across the floor to where she thought the boxes were stored, cursing as the dust made her cough and then cursing again and trying to ignore the ominous pattering and scuffling sounds she could hear in the rafters above her. Birds, that was all…nothing to worry about.

She reached the boxes and pulled the first one out, reaching for the one behind it. Only it wouldn’t move; it appeared to be wedged against something. Gritting her teeth, Abbie felt behind it and then froze as her fingers curled round a piece of net fabric.

She knew immediately what it was, but, even though caution warned her to leave well alone and ignore it, for some reason she didn’t.

Instead…Instead, her fingers trembled as she tugged harder on the fabric, clenching her teeth as she heard it rip slightly and the balled-up grey-white bundle of fabric finally came free of the small space she had jammed it into.

Once it had been pristine white, the tiny crystals sewn onto it glittering just as much as the diamonds in her engagement ring as she’d pirouetted around the fitting room, turning this way and that, her face flushed a delicate, happy pink as she waited for her mother to admire it.

She had been a fairy-tale bride, or so the report in the local paper had said, her wedding dress every little girl’s dream and most big girls’ as well—at least in those days. She had felt like a princess—a queen—as she’d walked proudly down the aisle on her father’s arm. And when Sam had finally raised her veil after the vicar had married them, and she had seen the look in his eyes, she had felt as if…as though…She had felt immortal, she remembered. Adored, cherished…loved…And it had never even occurred to her that there might come a day when she would feel any different, when Sam wouldn’t continue to look at her with that mixture of adoration and desire.

How naive she had been…How…how stupid.

Her mother, her parents, had tried to warn her that she was rushing into marriage, that she and Sam barely knew one another, but she wouldn’t listen to them. They were old; they had forgotten what it was like to be in love, how it felt to be wanted, to want to be with that one special person so much that you actually hurt when they weren’t there.

She and Sam had met by accident…literally…She had been riding her bicycle illegally through a part of the university campus which was prohibited to students, taking a short cut to a lecture.

At first when she had cannoned into Sam, almost running him down, she had assumed he was a fellow student—although she hadn’t recognised him from her own political history course—albeit rather older than her. And, whilst she had laughed and flushed as she’d apologised, her embarrassment had been caused not by the fact that she had nearly run him down, and certainly not by the fact that she was doing something prohibited, but by the way he had made her feel, by the way her body and her emotions were already reacting to him, by the sudden rush of sensation flooding her mind and her body.

She had later admitted to him that if he had taken her there and then, in the middle of the quadrangle on the short, sweet grass, she doubted that she would have made any move to stop him. That was the kind of effect he had had on her, even though at the time she had still been a virgin and her experience of the opposite sex had been limited to Lloyd’s chastely explorative kisses and attempts at a bit of mild petting.

When she had discovered that Sam was not, as she had assumed, a fellow student, but a newly appointed junior classics lecturer, who had just completed his doctorate at Harvard, she had been completely mortified and shocked.

He had read her a mild lecture about riding her bicycle through a prohibited area and then sent her on her way, and she had not expected to see him again.

Only two days later he had turned up at her lodgings, carrying a book which had fallen out of the basket of her bike. She could remember how embarrassed she had been about the fact that he had discovered her almost in tears over a newspaper story she had been reading.

The article had been accompanied by heart-and conscience-rending photographs of grave-eyed starving children in the Third World, which had made Abbie exclaim passionately to Sam, once he had discovered the reason for her tears, that she could never bring a child into a world where so many, many children were so desperately in need.

‘I expect you think I’m being over-emotional, don’t you?’ she had asked him self-consciously when she had herself back under control, but he had shaken his head.

‘No, I don’t,’ he’d told her sombrely. ‘As a matter of fact…’

He had never finished what he had been about to say because one of Abbie’s fellow lodgers had returned, bounding into her room to request Abbie’s assistance in the search for a borrowed book she had misplaced.

Sam had refused her offer of a cup of coffee, but it had been close to the beginning of the summer recess at the time, and to her astonishment, two weeks later, when she was lying in the garden of her parents’ home sunbathing, he had turned up and invited her out.

He had explained later that he hadn’t felt he was in a position to ask her out before, bearing in mind the fact that she was a student and he a lecturer. When he had explained that he’d felt uncomfortable about being thought of as the kind of lecturer who took advantage of his position to coerce young female students into sexual relationships with him, she had fallen even more deeply in love with him. He was so straightforward, so honest, so moral…Too moral on occasions…like the time he had refused to take her back to his rooms with him and make love to her.

‘You don’t want me,’ she’d accused him tearfully.

In reply he had taken hold of her hand and placed it on his body. The strength and size of his erection beneath her hand had both shocked and excited her, and when he had seen the way her face flushed and she couldn’t quite meet his eyes he had laughed and then sighed, gently lifting her hand away as he’d told her softly, ‘You see, it’s too soon and you’re—’

‘Don’t you dare tell me I’m too young,’ she had interrupted him passionately. ‘I’m twenty…almost…’

‘And I’m twenty-six…almost,’ he had told her.

‘That’s only a difference of six years,’ she had protested.

‘You’re a virgin still, and I’m not,’ he had told her implacably. ‘You’re still playing in the shallows, whereas I—’

‘I can learn. You can teach me…’ she had told him fiercely. ‘You…’

He had closed his eyes then and taken her in his arms.

‘Oh, God, don’t tempt me like that,’ he had whispered to her, and his voice had been shaking—not with laughter, as she had first suspected, but with a mixture of emotions so potentially awesome and mind-blowing that she had trembled with excitement merely to think about them.

She had trembled as well when he had kissed her properly the first time, and for many, many times after that.

But it hadn’t just been sex…desire between them…

Abbie closed her eyes as the still painful memories engulfed her.

The first time Sam had kissed her properly had been on their second date. She had happened to mention that she wanted to go and see A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was being performed traditionally at Stratford, not intending to hint and certainly not expecting him to offer to take her there. The play had simply been extremely well reviewed and she had semi-hoped that her parents might offer to take her as a special treat.

When Sam had rung and said that he had got two tickets, and asked if she would like to go with him, she had been too breathless with excitement at the thought of seeing him again to co-ordinate her thoughts and ask any kind of logical or practical questions. So when he had arrived to collect her, fortunately a little early, dressed in all the formal elegance of a dinner suit, her mouth had parted in a soft ‘oh’ of surprised shock whilst her eyes had registered her shy but very wholehearted and feminine approval of his sensually male elegance.

‘I thought we could go somewhere and have some supper after the play,’ he had suggested, as much to her parents as to her, Abbie had recognised, watching as her mother beamed her approval and her father coughed and muttered something about being sure he could trust Sam to get her home at a decent time.

Fortunately, long, floaty cotton dresses had been ‘in’ that year, and worn for everything from casual pub drinks to far more formal affairs. Hers had been new, the soft mixture of greens setting off her fair skin and blonde hair and matching her eyes quite spectacularly—or so the sales girl in the shop had told her. It had had a little high round neck, with cut-away sleeves and a keyhole cut out at the back, the soft cotton falling into a floaty A-line skirt.

The pretty white silk wrap her mother had rushed upstairs to lend her had given the dress a more formal and elegant air, and Abbie remembered how she had blushed to the tips of her ears and curled her toes in her shoes as she’d felt her body’s dangerous reaction to the way Sam had glanced oh, so briefly at her body, in such a way that it made her feel sure that he knew just how, beneath the thin cotton of her dress, her breasts were bare, her nipples tightening and pushing wantonly against the fine fabric…

It was over an hour’s drive to Stratford, and for the first half of the journey Abbie had sat in blissful silence, too excited and overwhelmed by Sam’s presence to make any attempt at conversation.

Later, she had managed to relax enough to comment that it had been a lovely day, and Sam had replied, equally gravely, that, yes, it had and that the rest of the week promised to be equally fine. Had she been sunbathing? he had asked her casually.

‘Yes,’ she had agreed, adding that she had to be rather careful about going out in the sun because her skin was very fair and sensitive. She would never, she had admitted ruefully, have the wonderful golden tan that other girls seemed to get so easily and which was so fashionable.

They had been on a quiet stretch of road at the time, and Sam had turned his head and looked gravely at her before reducing the car’s speed and reaching out to gently run his fingertips the full length of her bare arm. It was a gesture that had had her trembling with pleasure even before he had encircled her wrist and lifted it to his lips to caress the sensitive area where her pulse thudded visibly just beneath the surface.

‘Your skin, like you, is perfect as it is,’ he had told her huskily, and as his gaze had once again moved briefly to her breasts she had had a shockingly vivid mental image of his dark head bent over their nakedness whilst his mouth suckled first one sensitive tip and then the other.

Hurriedly she had looked away from him, half afraid that if he looked into her eyes he might actually read her thoughts.

The intensity of her own desire for him was still something she had not wholly come to terms with. By mutual consent she and Lloyd had agreed that, whilst they wanted to remain friends, friends was all they wanted to be; they still went out together occasionally, and they still enjoyed one another’s company, but she had needed no proof that she had made the right decision in admitting to herself that, much as she liked Lloyd as a person, for them to have become lovers would have trapped them both in a relationship which could never go anywhere. She had found that out in the way she felt about Sam. Nothing had prepared her for physically reacting so intensely to a man, or her own growing emotional dependence on him.

She was already half afraid that she was in danger of falling in love with him. What else could explain her immediate and overwhelming attraction to him?

It had been a perfect summer’s evening, the air sweet and balmy, the feel of Sam’s dinner-suited arm against her bare skin as he helped her with her wrap and they walked away from the car towards the theatre deliciously exciting and sensual.

Very much aware of the interested and appreciative looks Sam was attracting from the female halves of other couples heading in the direction of the theatre, Abbie had felt proud and elated that he had chosen her as his date, as well as just a little bit wary that some other woman might try to take him away from her. He was, after all, a very compellingly attractive and male man: tall, broad-shouldered, with just a hint of muscle beneath his well-tailored suit, his dark hair thick and shiny, his eyes a bright, laughing blue and not cold at all, but rich and warm and full of silent messages she was half afraid to interpret.

The discovery that he had booked a private box for them had made Abbie stare at him in stunned delight.

‘I’ve ordered us some champagne,’ Sam whispered to her as they were shown to their seats. ‘I hope you like it…’

‘I love it,’ Abbie fibbed, not wanting to admit that the only time she had really tasted it was at weddings, and then only the odd half-glass.

Her parents had been rather uneasy at first when, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, she had got herself a job working in a local hotel serving at the tables in the restaurant, but Abbie had insisted that she wanted the independence of feeling she was contributing towards her own upkeep, even though she knew they were more than willing, as well as able, to support her through university.

Once she had left home for university she had not told them at first that she had got herself a part-time job working in a small local pub, sensing that they would be concerned.

They knew now, though, but knew also that Abbie still avoided drinking alcohol herself. It was too expensive for one thing, and for another she didn’t seem to have much of a head for it. But she would rather have died than confess to Sam that the champagne with which he had filled her glass just before the curtain went up tasted far too dry to her uneducated palate, and was already making her head swim slightly.

During the interval he took hold of her hand and asked her if she was enjoying herself and then added semi-harshly, ‘I shouldn’t be doing this. You do realise that, don’t you?’

She wasn’t really sure what he meant until he explained.

‘You weren’t meant to arrive in my life like this, not now…It’s too soon and I’m not prepared, although how the hell can anyone ever be prepared for…? You’re such a baby still,’ he groaned as he removed the champagne glass from her trembling hand and took her in his arms. ‘And the last thing I need is the kind of havoc that falling in love with you is going to cause in my life.

‘I had everything so carefully planned,’ he whispered against her lips as he caressed them gently with his own mouth, teasing them with light, delicate butterfly kisses which for some reason caused a dark flush to run up under his own skin, and his grip on her wrists as he held her away from his body tightened so much that it almost hurt.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ he whispered remorsefully to her as he raised each wrist to his mouth in turn and kissed it gently. ‘It’s all your fault that I’m feeling like this…behaving like this,’ he told her rawly. ‘I’ve always thought of myself as sensible and level-headed, too cautious and logical to get involved in…You’ve made me realise that I hardly knew myself at all.’

‘You can’t be in love with me,’ she had protested shakily, but her eyes had given away her real feelings and she had seen the way his own reflected that knowledge.

‘No, I can’t, can I…?’ he drawled self-derogatorily. ‘After all, I hardly know you…you hardly know me, and we haven’t even been to bed together yet…How can I possibly be in love…?’

As she looked at him, her inhibitions relaxed by the cocktail of the champagne she had drunk and her own emotions, she told him bravely, ‘I…I haven’t been to bed with anyone. But…but I know I want to go to bed with you, Sam…I want it to be you who…I want it to be you,’ she had finished in a soft, quavery little voice, and that was when he had kissed her properly for the first time in the darkened shadows of their box. Kissed her with his arms wrapped tightly around her, his body pressed against hers as his hands caressed her, his mouth hard and hot on hers, his tongue stroking her lips, coaxing them apart whilst she shivered with emotion and arousal, willing to give him anything, everything, if only he never took his mouth away from hers again.

She couldn’t remember sitting through the rest of the play, but they must have done, and she couldn’t remember much about the meal they’d had afterwards either. All she could remember was how much she had wanted to be alone with Sam, how much she had ached and yearned for him; how she had felt as he’d gently coaxed her to eat some of the dessert she had ordered and then felt unable to eat, lifting the spoon to her mouth, watching her whilst her lips parted and her face flooded with colour as her body and her senses recognised the sensuality, the sexuality of what he was doing, even whilst mentally she was still a stranger to such intense intimacy.

He had taken her straight home that evening, and on the evenings that had followed, but then, one Thursday, he had asked her how she and her parents would feel if he asked her to go away with him for a weekend…

‘When?’ had been her single, breathless response.

‘I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning,’ he had told her.

Downstairs the telephone rang, but although she heard it she was still lost in the past. Abbie made no attempt to go and answer it. She didn’t want to remember all this, she told herself frantically. She didn’t want to relive it all again…to experience the pain of it all again. Not even from the safe distance of the years and the knowledge that separated her from it. But it was too late to hold back the memories, too late to stem the rushing tide sweeping down over her.

Please, no, she protested silently, but she knew it was no use. She had already allowed herself to remember too much, and she would now have to endure what she herself had set in motion. Her body trembling, she closed her eyes and gave in.

CHAPTER TWO

‘I JUST can’t believe this wonderful weather that we’re having, and the forecasters are predicting that the heatwave is going to last at least another week…’

As Sam turned his head to look at her Abbie realised, with indignation, that he was laughing at her. He had picked her up from her parents’ house half an hour ago, as arranged, firmly refusing to tell her where they were going as he placed her case in the boot of his car.

It had given her a funny little feeling inside to see her case nestling next to his, her heart giving a fierce, excited skip.

‘What are you so nervous about?’ Sam was asking her now.

‘I’m not nervous,’ Abbie denied untruthfully.

‘Oh, yes, you are,’ he told her softly. ‘You always talk about the weather when you’re nervous…’

‘No, I do not,’ Abbie protested, and then she looked at him and her heart melted, along with her nerves and her last-minute doubts about what she was doing.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ Sam told her gently, the laughter disappearing from his eyes to be replaced by an emotion that made her head pound dizzily. ‘No one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to do…’

‘But I do want to,’ Abbie told him, and then blushed hotly and tried valiantly to hold his eyes as he looked straight into hers, praying that he wouldn’t further tease her by demanding, You want to what? He didn’t, but the look he was giving her was far more toe-curlingly explicit than any words could ever have been.

She still couldn’t quite believe that he wanted her so much…that he was, as he’d told her himself, falling dangerously and completely in love with her.

Once during the journey, when she turned to look at him, her eyes widening as she saw the way his hands tightened slightly on the steering wheel, he told her huskily, begged, ‘Please don’t keep on looking at me like that. If you do I’m going to have to stop the car and take you in my arms and kiss the hell out of you, and once I start to do that…’

Abbie could feel her whole body, her face, starting to burn with the heat of what she was feeling. She could sense, see how dangerously close to losing control he was, and along with her instinctive sense of awe and virginal fear she also experienced a sharp thrill of feminine power and pleasure in the knowledge that she could have such an effect on him.

‘The first time we make love I want it to be perfect for you, on a bed heaped high with the softest down and feather pillows, in a room that smells of roses and summer. I want to watch the sunlight on your body, high up in a turret, somewhere where we can be completely alone, just us and the sounds of nature and the living, breathing universe around us reaching us through narrow-latticed paned windows.

‘Way, way below us there’ll be a river, wide and slow-moving, the water soft and clear, and in the pool that it forms we’ll swim together under a moonlit sky, and then we’ll make love again on the grassy bank, still warm from the day’s sunshine.

‘The moonlight will turn your body to lissom silver. I’ll follow its path with my hands and my lips. Your body will welcome mine with a sweet mixture of semi-pagan innocence and knowing that is in all women, a gift, but most especially in yours. Your skin will feel as cool as silk and only the hunting owl and the night sky will hear us when we cry out the unbearable ecstasy of our mutual need.’

‘Stop it…stop it…’ Abbie whispered shakily. Her whole body was on fire with arousal and desire for him, and she had a mad urgent impulse to beg him to stop the car and make love to her there and then.

There was a tight, aching need deep within her body, a pulsing that brought a hot flush of colour to her skin. How much further was the hotel he was taking her to? How much longer before…?

‘Are you hungry? Would you like to stop somewhere for a drink and something to eat?’ Sam asked her ten minutes later.

The prosaic question after the sensual seduction of his earlier words caught Abbie off guard. She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak. Surely he knew, must know, that the only sustenance she needed was him; the only appetite she had was for him.

Such wild and wanton thoughts were still unfamiliar enough to her to make her catch her breath and shyly avoid looking directly at him.

The road they were on had started to climb now; the countryside around them was changing. They were, Abbie recognised, driving through the Welsh borders, a wild, almost pagan part of the countryside she had secretly always thought incredibly romantic.

Here in this land once called the Welsh Marches, which still bore the visible scars of its medieval history in its ancient castles, it wasn’t hard to mentally picture the armoured knights who had once patrolled these borders, to imagine one could still hear the faint clash of steel upon steel, the mingled cries of the injured and the victorious, to imagine as one drove past the derelict and sightless arrow slits of the castles that one had almost caught a glimpse of a pale, feminine wimpoled face watching anxiously from above.

‘This is one of those places where the past feels very, very close, isn’t it?’ Sam’s quiet comment, so closely echoing her own thoughts, made her shiveringly aware of how easily he could attune himself to her, of how much they seemed to share above and beyond the urgency of their sexual desire for one another.

She was still too young to fall in love helplessly and for ever, to commit herself to one man, one relationship for life and beyond, but she suspected that that was exactly what was going to happen to her.

It was not too late for her to change her mind, to call a halt to what was happening, she comforted herself; there was still time.

‘Almost there now,’ Sam told her.

The hotel was a fairy tale thing set in an almost magically perfect wooded valley, a cream stone, early Edwardian folly mansion designed as perfectly and as irresistibly as a Walt Disney castle straight out of Sleeping Beauty. A breathtaking jewel of a building, with its pale cream turrets and lichen-green tiled and scalloped roofs, set against a stunning backdrop of gently sloping protective hillsides clothed in softer green trees, surrounded by immaculately cared for lawns and flowerbeds dropping away to the river which ran through the bottom of the valley.

They had had to drive across a bridge over it to get to the main gates of the hotel and then up a sweeping cream stone drive. The hotel itself was hidden from view until the very last minute, Abbie’s only sightings of it the tantalising glimpses she had caught of it as the road into the valley had spiralled down from the surrounding hills.

‘It…It’s…’ She looked at Sam as he brought the car to a halt in the discreetly concealed car park to the rear of the hotel, which had obviously at some stage been a private home.

As she glanced towards the delicate turrets Abbie remembered how he had described making love to her. Then she had thought he was simply using his imagination. Now…

‘I heard about it from one of the senior lecturers,’ she heard him telling her quietly, answering her still unspoken question. ‘He brought his wife here to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary.

‘It was originally built by a very wealthy heiress as a secret hideaway where she could meet her lover. She came from a titled family connected to royalty and was destined for an arranged marriage. Her lover came from a different social circle. They would never have been allowed to marry, but every summer, from the year she married to the year he died, she came here to spend time with him.

‘When he died she shut the house up, unable to endure it without him; she left it as a gift to his family.’

‘How awful,’ Abbie protested. ‘To love someone like that all of your life and yet never be able to be truly together, to share. But always to have to keep your love a secret…’ She shivered suddenly.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Sam asked her in concern.

‘Nothing,’ she fibbed. How could she tell him that the story he had told her had cast a cold little shadow over her own happiness, that she felt that somehow the place, beautiful though it was, was haunted by the unhappiness of a woman forced to hide her love and publicly deny it? It was as though somehow her unhappiness threatened to taint Abbie’s own joy…as though her blossoming love would be spoilt and endangered.

Her thoughts were ridiculous, she told herself fiercely, especially when Sam had gone to so much trouble to make this, their first time together, as special and memorable as possible.

‘Would I be correct in guessing that you’ve booked us a tower room?’ she quizzed him, striving to throw off her sense of sadness and unease by smiling brightly at him.

‘Now, why, I wonder, should you think that?’ he teased her back as he removed their luggage from the boot of the car and then locked it.

It wasn’t just a room he had booked for them, Abbie discovered ten minutes later, it was an entire suite with, she noticed, wide-eyed, not one but two bedrooms.

When she looked questioningly at him after the porter had left them, he explained quietly, ‘I didn’t want you to feel pressured in any way.’

‘I don’t,’ Abbie told him equally gravely, her earlier mood forgotten now as her excitement at being with him filled her and her body started to react familiarly to his proximity to her.

‘I want us to be lovers, Sam,’ she told him shakily. ‘I want it more than…I want you more than I ever imagined I could want any man. I want you so much that it hurts…here,’ she told him breathlessly, hesitantly touching her body just above the small swell of her pubic bone. ‘Here, where—’

She gave a small, half-protesting gasp as the rest of what she had been about to say was smothered by the fierce pressure of Sam’s kiss.

Abbie felt herself start to tremble and then shudder in shocked delight as her body responded to his passion. She clung to his shoulders, her eyes glazed and her face flushed with the intensity of her own equally strong desire.

Sam lifted his mouth from hers to look down into her eyes, his hand cupping her face, his touch blissfully cool against her hot skin. Her senses were preternaturally attuned to him, and she could almost hear the rapid thud of his heart as well as see the swift rise and fall of his chest. She could feel the heat coming off his body, although, unlike hers, it was not so obviously nor hectically flushed, just a tell-tale burn of colour along his cheekbones coupled with the warm, musky smell of his arousal.

Did her own skin, her own body, smell equally sexually stimulating to him? she wondered dizzily. Did he breathe in the scent her desire had created and ache to press his lips, his open mouth, to her throat, her breast, her belly…her thighs?

A small sound, half protest, half ecstasy, caught in her throat, causing Sam to stroke her face tenderly and shush her, saying softly, ‘It’s all right. It’s all right. I promise there’s nothing for you to fear. I’ll try not to go too fast…too—’

‘I’m not afraid,’ Abbie interrupted him, her body shaking as much as her voice. ‘At least not of you…’ Her eyes darkened, her mouth trembling slightly as she went on huskily, ‘I’m afraid of what I feel, Sam, of how I feel. How much…how intensely. I’m afraid of being out of my own control and losing myself in what I feel…of wanting you so much…’

‘I know, I know,’ Sam groaned, wrapping her in his arms, her head against his chest as he rocked her gently. ‘I feel the same way, and more. I’m afraid of not being able to give you the pleasure I want to give you, of not being able to hold back, of becoming so aroused that I can’t hold back…’

‘Do you wish that I wasn’t a virgin?’ Abbie asked him shakily. She felt him move as he cupped her face again and looked down at her.

‘What on earth makes you think that?’ he demanded huskily. ‘Do you know how much I love the fact that you’ve chosen me to be your first lover? Even though I’m half terrified of disappointing you. Selfishly, I like knowing that you’re not comparing me to someone else, wishing perhaps that I was someone else.’

He checked the protest she was about to make and told her warningly, ‘I’m a man, Abbie, with all that that implies—possessive, even jealous sometimes, wanting my woman to be mine exclusively. I know—I know that once you are mine I will never, ever want another man to touch you…love you. Once you are mine…

‘I’m twenty-six years old, and not inexperienced sexually, but when it comes to love…when it comes to love I’m as virginal as you, my sweet. Does that put you off me?’

Abbie’s shining eyes gave him his answer.

‘God, don’t look at me like that,’ he groaned. ‘Not now. Not yet…I’d planned a walk through the gardens—the hotel is famous for them—afternoon tea on the lawn, a lazy, relaxing evening together, dinner with champagne, and—’

Abbie tugged impatiently on his sleeve and lifted her mouth to his.

‘Kiss me, Sam,’ she begged him huskily. ‘Please, please, please kiss me.’

Ten minutes later, lying on the bed, her clothes—their clothes—strewn haphazardly all around them, Abbie watched anxiously as Sam studied her naked body. This was the first time he had seen her without all her clothes, and she had to fight an instinctive urge to wrap her arms around her breasts and roll over onto her stomach.

He was naked too, even if he had had to abandon his whispered instructions to her to remove his clothes and finish the task himself.

His body thrilled and excited her, and awed her slightly as well, reminding her that at twenty-six Sam wasn’t a boy but a man.

She had seen Lloyd in his swimming trunks on countless numbers of occasions over the years, had seen his body develop from that of a gangling boy into that of a well-muscled nineteen-year-old, but he didn’t look like Sam. No way did he look like Sam, whose shoulders were broad and whose stomach was flatter, whose body hair was…

Abbie could feel the heat rising through her body as she acknowledged what that soft covering of dark hair was doing to her insides. She wanted to reach out and touch it with her fingertips, to stroke it, to bury her face in it and breathe in its scent, to lick and kiss the skin it covered and, if she could actually be daring enough, to let her hand and her lips wander down along that straight dark path to its final destination. She wondered if Sam would be pleased or shocked by her wantonness, her desire to touch and taste the pure male essence of him.

But right now it was Sam who was looking at her, studying her, touching her, she realised, and a pulse jumped frantically in her throat as his fingertips pushed the long straight swathe of her hair out of the way and then traced the delicate shape of her collarbone.

To her chagrin she could see as well as feel that her nipples were already peaking, aching, her breasts, normally quite small and soft, suddenly much, much harder and fuller.

Did Sam like them? she wondered. Did he think they were too small, her nipples too little-girlie, all pink and tender, still those of a virginal girl rather than a woman? He was not without sexual experience, he had said, and…

She tensed a little as Sam’s hand cupped her breast, her head lifting so that she could look uncertainly into his eyes.

‘They feel perfect,’ he told her, his voice thick and slurred like melted honey, answering the question she had not yet asked.

‘They are perfect,’ he added even more throatily as he bent his head and gently kissed the hot, tight nipple sheltered by his hand, and then kissed it again, much less gently, much, much less gently, but oh, oh, so pleasurably, Abbie acknowledged as he slowly drew the taut point into his mouth and then sucked on it slowly, rubbing it with his tongue, making her feel…making her want.

Whimpering softly, she pressed closer to him, wanting him to repeat the caress, wanting to feel again that hot surge of pleasure his suckling had given her, which had arched right from the centre of her breast to her stomach, her womb, her thighs and that special, secret place she had tentatively explored in the early years of her sexual awakening, intrigued by and yet fearful of her dimly sensed awareness of its capacity for pleasure.

Instinctively she reached out to hold Sam’s head against her breast, gasping in fresh excitement as she felt him stroking her stomach, his touch nerve-wrenching—tantalising, causing her to hold her breath and wonder if she dared reach out and urge his hand a little lower, or if—And then he moved slightly, one arm beneath her to lift her, the other brushing accidentally against the soft baby-fine blonde hairs that covered her sex.

Immediately she tensed, her body made rigid by the hot shaft of pleasure that jolted through her. She felt Sam freeze and knew that he was looking at her. When she raised her eyes to look at him she saw him shudder, his whole body heaving as he took a deep breath and demanded thickly, ‘Already…You want me already?’

She didn’t have to answer. His hand, his fingertips deft and yet oh, so tormentingly gentle were touching her, opening the outer lips of her sex, stroking her, feeling the warm wetness of her body’s welcome and the eager way she pressed herself against his hand, mutely imploring him to touch her more intimately, to ease the ache that he himself had aroused within her with the rhythmic caress her body so urgently desired.

When he didn’t she could actually feel herself starting to grind her teeth. His hand still covered her sex protectively but that wasn’t what she wanted. What she wanted was…

She gave a small protesting moan of denial when he released her, reaching behind her for one of the pillows, easing it under her hips.

‘This will make it easier, better,’ he told her softly. His hands were shaking, she noticed, and the most sensitive part of his body was now stiffly erect. The sight of it made her want to reach out and run her fingers lovingly over its taut-skinned surface. The sight of it, of him, gave her a delicious, dangerous thrill of pleasure.

‘Bend your knees,’ Sam instructed her, showing her what he meant as he knelt between her open thighs, knelt between them and then, before she realised what he intended to do, bent his head and gently rubbed his face against her soft down.

The sensation of his tongue moving caressingly over her caused a scream to rise involuntarily in her throat. Automatically, Abbie tried to clamp down on it, but in the end she had to give voice to her sexual arousal and pleasure as Sam continued delicately to love the most intimate heart of her body, moving closer and closer to the tiny nub of flesh which was already pulsing and aching so tormentingly. She needed to feel him deep inside her, moving within her, slowly at first and then…

‘Sam—Sam,’ she protested chokily. ‘I can’t…I don’t…Please…now…I…I want you. I want you inside me…very deep inside me. Now, now…now. I want you there now…always and for ever. I want—’

Abbie gasped as the rhythmic chant of her desire was suddenly cut off by the pressure of Sam’s mouth against her own, his tongue flicking in and out of her lips as his hands held her, guided her, gentled the frantic movements of her body as she arched her back to meet and welcome the carefully protective invasion of his body.

It was just as she had wanted it to be, slow and sweet. A long, languorous pleasure, with her body drunk and dazed with sensual delight, her senses awash, flooded with the feel and heat of him so that even the tightness of his fit within her was somehow an extra small physical pleasure as she urged him deeper and deeper within her, finding from somewhere the knowledge to wrap herself around him and hold him, to move with him.

She climaxed before him, crying out in shocked pleasure and then later crying in earnest in his arms as the full emotional impact of what had happened overwhelmed her.

They spent almost the entire weekend making love, both in their room and, as he had whispered to her in the car on the way there, in the moonlight on a grassy bank beside the river.

By the end of the weekend they both knew there was no going back, that their love for one another was more powerful than anything they had ever experienced before. Too powerful for them to ignore or control.

‘I didn’t want it to be like this,’ Sam told her. ‘You’re so young…too young…’

‘We could just be lovers, and—’ Abbie began, but he interrupted her immediately.

‘No…’ he said harshly, and then, more softly, ‘That isn’t what I want; you know that, Abbie. This isn’t just about sex. It’s about…It’s about finding the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with. It’s about loving you so intensely that I want to keep you here with me and never let you out of my sight. Falling in love with each other like this might not be what we planned, but…’

‘Take me back to bed,’ she whispered coaxingly, her voice shivering with desire. ‘We’ve still got time before we have to leave…’

They were married three months later, in spite of her parents’ pleas to her to wait and Lloyd’s dogmatic assertion that she was a fool to tie herself down so young.

Lloyd and Sam did not like one another. Lloyd felt that Sam was rushing her into marriage and Sam, rather to Abbie’s secret feminine delight and amusement, was intensely jealous of Lloyd, seemed unable to believe that there had never been anything other than the mildest boy-and-girl affection between them.

‘You say that now, but he loves you and you must have felt something for him, otherwise you wouldn’t have gone out with him for so long.’

‘We’re friends, that’s all,’ Abbie told him lovingly. But she could see that he wasn’t entirely convinced.

Four months after they had first met they were married, and two months after that Abbie discovered that she was pregnant.

A few months of happiness—a happiness so intense that she had foolishly believed that nothing could ever damage or destroy it. But she had been wrong, and the pain she had suffered because of that misjudgement had been far, far more intense than the pleasure that had gone before it.

It had left her scarred and damaged, unable to take the risk of ever trusting another man, and hating her ex-husband with a hatred that still burned just as strongly in her today as it had done on that day all those years ago, when he had stared at her across the kitchen of the pretty house he had bought them close to the university and told her harshly, ‘You’re pregnant? But you can’t be. It’s impossible.’

CHAPTER THREE

‘IMPOSSIBLE…wh-what do you mean?’ Abbie had stammered, her face white with shock and disbelief. She had been so thrilled when the doctor had confirmed what she had secretly already suspected to be true—that she had conceived Sam’s child.

They hadn’t talked about having a family as yet, but of course she had believed that ultimately they would have children.

If her timing was right, she would at least just about be able to get through her finals before the baby’s birth. She had chuckled out loud as she’d left the doctor’s surgery, her face bright with love and joy as she’d hugged the pleasure of her news to herself.

She couldn’t wait to tell Sam. He would be a wonderful father. She could see him now, his large hands cradling their child.

She hoped it would be a boy…at least this first one. They could turn the small fourth bedroom into a nursery. All right, so maybe she wouldn’t take up the career she had originally planned, but Sam earned more than enough to support both of them. All of them, she’d amended, and at least she would have her degree.

Whilst the baby—the babies—were young, she wanted to be at home with them, but later, even though by then she would be positively ancient, close on thirty, she could, if she wanted, embark on a career—just so long as it wasn’t something that conflicted with her family life, her husband, their children. They would always come first.

She’d been so happy she could have burst. She’d wanted to go to Sam right then and tell him their wonderful news, but he would have been right in the middle of a lecture, and besides…she’d wanted to have him to herself when…

Pregnant…a baby…Sam’s baby. She was the luckiest, luckiest girl in the whole wide world.

Suddenly she’d felt ravenously hungry. Sardines…sardines on toast; that was what she wanted—yes, and then an enormous sticky bar of chocolate fudge.

She would, of course, have to start eating very carefully. She had the baby to think of now, she’d warned herself sternly, but for now…for today she could afford to be a little self-indulgent…just as she probably had been when this baby had been conceived. She’d given a small chuckle. When the doctor had asked her if she had any idea when conception had taken place she had furrowed her forehead and frowned.

‘When did you last have sex?’ he had asked her patiently.

‘This morning,’ she had answered promptly, and had then flushed a brilliant shade of pink as she’d realised what he was getting at.

‘Er…I’m not sure. It could have been…I missed my first period three weeks ago…’

She had been taking the pill, but she had been so busy that for two consecutive nights she had forgotten to take it. This baby was obviously meant to be…just like the way she and Sam had met—just like their love. Oh, God, she’d been so happy…so very, very happy…

‘I mean that it’s impossible for you to be pregnant—at least not with my child,’ Sam told her now, harshly.

Abbie looked at him in mute disbelief. Where her face had originally been flushed with excitement and happiness it was now bone-white. Sam’s, on the other hand, bore the tell-tale signs of male anger in the dark colour staining his cheekbones and the clenched tightness of his jaw.

‘What do you mean, not with your child? Is this some kind of joke?’ Abbie whispered in confusion.

She didn’t know what Sam meant; she couldn’t understand what he was saying. How could her baby, their baby, not be his? Of course it was his—theirs. What on earth was he trying to do to her? If this was his idea of some kind of teasing game…

Anxiously she searched his face, but there was no sign of any good humour or amusement in it. Just the opposite.

‘A joke? My God, I wish it was,’ Sam told her harshly. ‘You cannot be carrying my child, Abbie, because I cannot give you a child. I’ve had a vasectomy.’

‘You’ve what? You can’t have done. Not without telling me. Not without…’

‘I had it done several years ago, when I was in India with VSO. I was working in a small village; a young man I met there, a young man of my own age, the son of the head man, who had taken me under his wing, told me that he intended to have a vasectomy. I was shocked at first, wondering how on earth he could contemplate such a thing, but then he took me on a tour of Bombay and pointed out to me the number of children who had been abandoned because their parents could not afford to feed them. He told me the basic economics of what happened in a world when there were too many mouths to feed, when the land itself could not support them.

‘“What is best?” he asked me. “That I prevent conception now or that I wait until my children are one, four…seven, and watch them die slowly of malnutrition?”

‘What he said, what he showed me, shocked me, made me realise that to father a child when there were already so many, many children in the world in need was an act of selfishness which would simply push those children even further down the poverty scale.

‘I decided to have a vasectomy myself.’

Abbie stared at him.

‘You’re lying,’ she told him flatly.

‘No,’ Sam denied. ‘You are the one who is doing that, Abbie, when you claim that you are carrying my child.’

Abbie licked her lips nervously. She couldn’t believe this was happening. How could it be happening? How could she possibly be carrying Sam’s child in her womb when he…? Tears filled her eyes, a mixture of anguish, anger and panic exploding inside her.

‘You must have known I would want children, and yet you married me without telling me that you couldn’t give me any. Why? Why…?’

‘Would you believe me if I told you that I was so much in love with you…wanted you so desperately that the thought of children or anything else other than our love simply never occurred to me? And for your information I did not know you would want children. I thought you possibly shared my feelings about the world not being able to support the children it already has. It hasn’t ever been something we’ve discussed.’

‘Because there hasn’t been any time…any need. But you must have known…must have realised…’

‘Why?’ Sam demanded more harshly. ‘Because it’s what everybody does…what everyone wants?’

‘You lied to me…you deceived me,’ Abbie wept.

The look he gave her was full of bitter contempt.

‘And you haven’t done the same to me? Tell me something, Abbie,’ he demanded savagely. ‘How long exactly was it after I had had you that you went crawling into his bed? A month, a week…less…?’

‘What…what do you mean? I haven’t…’ Abbie protested hotly, her face flushing as she realised what he was saying.

How dared he accuse her of sleeping with someone else? How dared he accuse her of anything?

‘Oh, come on; don’t play the innocent. It’s hardly an appropriate role for you now, is it? You might have fancied passing yourself off to me and the rest of the world as an innocent young madonna, but what you actually are is little better than a whore, passing off her bastard child on someone else—or, rather, trying to. Unfortunately for you it’s just not going to work.

‘It’s his, I imagine? Dear, wonderful Lloyd? I saw him driving away the other evening just before I got home. Does he know you’re carrying his child yet? Does he…?’

‘I’m not carrying Lloyd’s child,’ Abbie denied, shocked. What was Sam trying to imply? She and Lloyd had never been lovers. The very thought of having a sexual relationship with him filled her with the same kind of horror she would have felt had he actually been her brother. She and Lloyd were close, yes, but not in any sexual way. Lloyd had simply called round to see her to talk to her about some problems he was having with his university course.

He had stayed longer than he had intended and had then had to dash off without waiting to say hello to Sam.

That Sam or anyone else should even remotely consider that she and Lloyd would have an affair and that, even worse, she would try to foist his child off on her husband was so totally and utterly ridiculous an idea that she instantly, once again, wondered if Sam was trying to play some kind of bizarre joke on her.

He did like to tease her occasionally, she knew, because—or so he said—he loved watching the pink colour flood her face when he did. But so far he had certainly shown no inclination to play the kind of elaborate and cruel practical joke on her which would give rise to his denial of their child. To do so would have been totally out of character for him, she was sure. But then she had not really known him so very long, had she? And, like her assumption that they would have children together, she had taken his gentleness and lack of any cruel or malicious streak on trust.

But surely she would have known, sensed, guessed if…

But she hadn’t known that he had had a vasectomy, had she? And, if he hadn’t thought it necessary to pass such a vital fact about himself on to her, what other vital information might he also be concealing?

‘Y-you can’t possibly believe that Lloyd and I are anything other than friends,’ she stammered chokily. ‘I’ve told you…’

‘Why not? Someone has to be the father of this child you thought you’d pass off as mine…’

‘But you’re the only man I’ve ever slept with…the only man I’ve ever loved,’ she could have added. But for some reason she held the words back. To talk of love in the present circumstances would be not just acutely painful but almost an act of sacrilege.

‘I know how hot in bed you are—after all, I’ve had more than enough proof of it,’ he added cruelly. ‘But if I wasn’t satisfying you you should have said—’

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