About the Author

PENNY JORDAN is one of Harlequin Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged 65. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over 100 million books around the world. She wrote a total of 187 novels for Harlequin Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A PERFECT FAMILY, TO LOVE, HONOUR AND 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.

More titles by PENNY JORDAN

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TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY

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POWER GAMES

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For a full list of Penny Jordan’s titles go to www.millsandboon.com

Now or Never
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

1

‘You’re sure? I mean, it couldn’t possibly be a mistake?’

Maggie Rockford’s voice trembled. She could feel Oliver’s warm, protective grip of her hand tightening as she looked away from the doctor to exchange anguished glances with him. There had been so many visits here to see this highly acclaimed specialist over the months—visits prior to which she had swung perilously from hope to fear and then back again. Visits involving what had seemed like an unending raft of tests and medical procedures backed up with counselling sessions, and questions that had sometimes seemed even more invasive than the physical side of what she had been undergoing.

Crossing London this morning in their taxi, Oliver Sanders had held both her hands in his as he had told her emotionally, ‘Whatever happens this morning, whatever we hear, I want you to know that it will make no difference to the way I feel about you. About the way I love you, Maggie.’

But of course it would. How could it not?

Anxiously she refocused on the doctor, who was frowning.

Maggie shivered, her eyes blurring with the tears she had sworn she would not cry.

‘This mascara cost a small fortune and no way am I going to waste it by crying,’ she had insisted to Oliver when he had stood looking at her put it on.

‘Stop watching me,’ she had demanded uncomfortably in the early days of their relationship. Her ex-husband Dan used to lie on the bed watching her dress and put on her make-up, it was true, but things had been different then, she had been different, and in the newness of her relationship with Oliver she had felt acutely self-conscious sharing such intimacy.

‘There’s no need to be defensive with me,’ Oliver had told her gently. ‘All I want to do is love you, Maggie.’

‘There is no mistake.’ The specialist was assuring her soberly, his voice breaking into her thoughts. ‘The blood test is totally conclusive.’

‘No mistake!’

Immediately she turned towards Oliver.

His face had lost its colour, his eyes dark with emotion as he reached for her. Now she could see in his expression what secretly she had already known. Now she could see just how much this did matter to him. Her already knotted stomach tightened.

Patiently the doctor waited for his words to sink in.

After all, delivering news like this was part of his job, and he had learned just how to say the words so that they were properly absorbed and their meaning retained; words that could give hope, or totally destroy it. Words that in effect held the gift of life!

When he judged that he had given them enough time, he continued.

‘The procedure has been successful.’

As she focused on him Maggie could see Oliver wiping his eyes as they brimmed over with tears.

Surely she was the one who should be crying? But somehow she felt unable to do so. The tension inside her was too great, the enormity of what lay ahead of her too big for the easy release of crying.

‘There is no mistake,’ the specialist repeated and this time he smiled at them both. ‘Congratulations, Maggie. You are quite definitely pregnant.’

Pregnant! The innovative, hugely expensive private treatment she had undergone had worked, and she was carrying Oliver’s baby!

She, who until Oliver had come into her life and believed that she had managed to come to terms with the fact that she would never have a child.

Somehow Maggie realised that they had both stood up, and that Oliver was hugging her, his voice thick with emotion as he thanked the specialist.

‘Maggie you’ve done it. You clever, wonderful girl,’ he praised her emotionally.

Just for a second Maggie felt the darkness of the familiar shadow hovering. Determinedly she pushed it away. She wasn’t going to allow it to spoil this special moment.

Even so, her natural honesty forced her to point out to him quietly, ‘I’ve had a lot of help.’

The specialist was opening the door and showing them out, reminding Maggie that she would need to make a series of appointments so that the progress of her pregnancy could be carefully monitored.

Maggie eyed him anxiously.

‘There’s nothing to worry about, is there?’ Oliver asked the doctor, immediately reacting to her body language.

‘No. But of course, in view of the circumstances of this pregnancy, Maggie will need to be careful.’

‘I’ll make sure that she is,’ Oliver was responding fervently.

‘You heard what the doctor just said,’ he reminded Maggie, two minutes later, after they had checked through her appointments and were on their way out of the clinic.

‘Oliver,’ Maggie told him quietly. ‘There is no way I am going to do anything that might jeopardise this pregnancy. Whatever it takes for your baby to be born safely and healthily, I am going to do it.’

‘My baby? This is our baby,’ Oliver told her fiercely.

Their baby. Conceived with Oliver’s sperm and another woman’s—a fertile woman’s—donated egg!

‘Maggie,’ Oliver challenged her insistently when she made no immediate response. ‘This is our baby.’

The look in his eyes made Maggie give herself a small warning mental shake, but before she could give him the response she knew he wanted a door opened and a dark-haired, heavy-set woman burst into the corridor.

‘Don’t lie to me!’ she was screaming at the white-coated man following her. ‘I know what you’ve done. You’ve stolen my babies … You promised me …’

Wildly she turned towards Maggie, who instinctively placed her hand protectively against her still-flat tummy. Just as instinctively the woman’s gaze honed in on Maggie’s betraying gesture, her eyes narrowing, an angry flush of colour staining her pale skin.

‘They’re liars in here. Murderers,’ she hissed, staring at Maggie whilst she demanded,

‘Is it you they’ve given them to? Whoever it is I shall find out.’

Shocked, Maggie stepped back from her.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw that two nurses had quietly entered the foyer and were approaching the woman, taking a careful hold of her. As she was firmly but gently led away, still screaming and sobbing, the man who had been with her, whom Maggie recognised as one of the clinic’s medics, apologised.

‘I’m sorry about that.’

As he turned to follow the nurses the receptionist shook her head and whispered confidingly to Maggie and Oliver.

‘Heavens knows how she got in. The commissioner has got strict instructions not to admit her. She’s a bit of a crank.’

Although Maggie managed a polite smile the incident had upset her. Was this what motherhood was all about? Seeing danger everywhere and feeling fiercely determined to protect one’s child from it? One’s child. Oliver’s child … Her child!

‘Are you all right?’

Maggie could see that Oliver was frowning as he stepped protectively close to her. ‘I’m fine.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘Being pregnant must be making me feel extra sensitive,’ she told him lightly, trying to shrug off the feeling of disquiet the other woman’s behaviour had caused her.

‘I just wish …’ She paused, her expressive eyes shadowing. ‘It’s silly of me, I know, but I wish that hadn’t happened. She looked so … so anguished, Oliver. I know that everyone who comes here for help doesn’t get to be as lucky as we have been. And the only reason we have been so lucky is because of the generosity of the woman who donated her eggs.’

Although naturally it was against the clinic’s protocol for them to have met her, they had been given sufficient information to know that in build and colouring she was very similar to Maggie.

When Oliver had first told her that he wanted them to have a child, she had thought that he was joking.

‘I can’t,’ she had reminded him.

‘You were made to be a mother,’ he had insisted. ‘And there are ways.’

That had been over a year ago but she could still remember the fierce, thrilling jerk of emotional response her heart had given to his words. It had been as though he had uncovered a truth about herself that she had previously kept hidden, a sore place she had refused to acknowledge.

And then she had happened to read an article about the clinic and the controversial pioneering work it was doing, using eggs donated by fertile women to help women who could not possibly conceive naturally to have a child.

Right from their first visit to the clinic she had refused to allow herself to be optimistic, to hope too much.

Oliver had been the one who had been convinced she would conceive, who had carried the hope for both of them.

Watching Oliver as he hailed a taxi to take them back to their hotel, Maggie felt a resurgence of her normal self-confidence. She had booked them into the Langham, one of London’s most prestigious modern designer hotels, mainly for sentimental reasons. The Langham was the hotel where they had spent their first night together. ‘Remember the first time we stayed here?’ she asked Oliver half an hour later as they crossed its foyer.

At six feet one he towered over her. She was only five feet two without the heels she always wore. Dan, her ex, had been even taller at six feet two, his hair so deep, dark brown it was almost black, thick, his olive-tinged skin in direct contrast to her red-gold curls and celtic paleness, where Oliver’s hair was a much softer brown, bleached blond at the ends, a legacy he claimed from his days spent surfing in Australia during the year out he had taken following his degree, to heal himself emotionally from the pain of his mother’s death.

‘Of course.’ He grinned, answering her question. ‘I’d been working for you for more then twelve months, every second of which I’d spent wondering just how I was going to get you into bed, and then we came here and …’

‘And you said to the receptionist behind my back that there’d been a mistake and that we only needed one room. You were lucky I didn’t sack you on the spot when I found out,’ she told him mock severely.

She had been suffering from a bad bout of uncharacteristic vulnerability prior to the fateful first night she had spent here with Oliver; going through a period when she had been questioning her own satisfaction with her life and secretly comparing it with the lives of her friends; envying them their secure relationships with their male partners; the closeness and intimacy they shared; the children they had together, things that she had believed were permanently going to be denied to her.

‘I was lucky, full stop, the day I met you,’ Oliver corrected her softly. ‘You are so special, Maggie,’ he told her emotionally, raising her hand to his mouth and tenderly kissing her fingers. ‘So special, so perfect; so irreplaceable. So very, very much the woman I want to be the mother of my baby.’

Maggie shivered a little. It scared her sometimes when he spoke like this. No one was perfect, least of all her.

She could remember when she had first introduced him to Nicki, her best friend.

‘He worships you,’ Nicki had told her wryly. ‘You’ll have to be careful never to disillusion him, Maggie,’ she had added warningly.

Thinking of Nicki reminded Maggie of the fact that she was going to have a considerable amount of grovelling and apologising to do when she broke the news of her pregnancy to her close circle of lifelong friends. They would want to know why they had not been let into her plans, allowed to share the trauma of what she had been going through with her, no question. Especially since …

‘Come back.’

Ruefully she smiled at Oliver as he ushered her into the lift.

The first time they had stayed here together, they had barely left the suite, making full use of its luxurious, opulent fittings, including the private Jacuzzi. Oliver had poured champagne over her naked body, licking it ardently from her skin, touching her until they had both been high on the pleasure of the intensity of their desire for one another.

But tonight there would be no marathon sex session, and nor would there be any champagne or long soak in the Jacuzzi. But then sex wasn’t high on her list of priorities right now, Maggie acknowledged as they walked into their suite.

‘You do realise that we’re going to have to buy a proper house now, don’t you?’ she challenged Oliver. ‘A house with room for a nursery, and with a garden and …’

‘I know,’ Oliver agreed. ‘The apartment will definitely have to go.’

Maggie watched him indulgently. Oliver had fallen in love with the apartment the first time they had viewed it. On the top floor of the building, it was a modern conversion designed to imitate the loft apartments so popular in New York. Privately Maggie would have preferred something a little bit more traditional, and rather more comfortable, but Oliver, with his designer’s eye, had laughed at her and so she had kept to herself her no doubt old-fashioned fears about the practicality of keeping the immaculate stainless steel kitchen in its gleaming clutter-free state, and her concerns about just how the contents of her extensive designer wardrobe were going to fit into and remain crease-free in four artistically stacked woven storage trunks. In the end the conversation of the apartment’s third bedroom into a dressing room with fitted wardrobes had solved the clothes storage problem, but the kitchen was not and never would be her own ideal of what a kitchen should be.

She had been living in the small cottage she had bought after the breakup of her marriage to Dan. They had sold the family home, and she had used the money she had received from her share of it to finance her expansion of the small business she and Dan had originally started together.

‘Oh, Maggie … Maggie …’

As he wrapped her in his arms and kissed her Maggie could feel the emotion emanating from Oliver. Whilst not perhaps strictly good-looking in the movie-star sense, he possessed a special something that was all his own, a sweetness of nature that shone from his steady-gazed warm brown eyes, an attraction that went way, way beyond mere good looks.

A woman, any woman could look at Oliver and know immediately that he was a man who liked women, genuinely and wholeheartedly liked them. And in addition to that …!

He was gorgeous. He was sexy! He was tender and loving and good-humoured. He possessed an almost telepathic ability to guess how she was feeling and the love he gave her flowed from him with a generosity she sometimes had to pinch herself to believe was real.

There had been a special rapport between them from the moment he had first walked into her office, even though initially Maggie had fought hard to both deny and deride it. She hadn’t been in the market for a relationship. The breakup of her marriage had left her too wary, too self-protective to want one.

Oliver had told her that he had read about her company and that he hoped to persuade her to commission him to do some conceptual design work for them. Her company planned and designed office interiors, providing a highly personal and tailored environment for those fortunate enough to be able to afford their services.

The business did not make a vast profit, but it did make a very comfortable one and, more importantly so far as Maggie was concerned, she considered running it to be both challenging and satisfying.

It had amused and delighted her a great deal earlier in the year to read a newspaper article claiming that to be able to have the forward-thinkingness, the taste and the money to afford a Rockford interior for one’s offices was to truly have arrived!

Maggie had looked at Oliver as he’d stood there in her office—her own design team’s work, of course with just enough witty touches of feng shui, colour planning and atmospherics to whisper a discreet statement about her to those in the know. Maggie herself was not a designer, but she was an administrator par excellence, a woman with extraordinary ‘people’ skills and she had found herself thinking enviously of the woman who must inevitably share Oliver’s life—and that alone had been enough to shock and frighten her.

Even so it had taken Oliver a good many months to wear down her resistance and her objections to the point where she’d been prepared to admit how much she cared about him, and even longer for her to agree to going public on their relationship.

She suspected the turning point had been when she had finally started to open up to him about her marriage to Dan.

Unlike her, Oliver had had no hesitation in telling her about his life. She had ached for him when he had told her about his childhood, and the years spent worrying about and caring for his mother who had suffered badly from MS. From the day his father had walked out on them shortly after Oliver’s sixteenth birthday, until his mother’s death whilst he was at university, Oliver had virtually become her sole carer.

‘What do you think we’re going to have?’ Oliver was whispering to her now as he took her back in his arms. ‘A boy or a girl?’

‘I don’t mind,’ she told him. And it was the truth. Right now it was enough just to know she was carrying his child. She felt as though she had successfully negotiated a gruelling obstacle course, and all she wanted to do now was enjoy the respite of having done so.

‘I hope it’s going to be a girl, just like you,’ Oliver told her.

Immediately Maggie stiffened and pulled away from him.

‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ she challenged him. ‘This baby isn’t going to have any of my genes, Oliver.’

To her chagrin Maggie could feel her voice starting to thicken. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t do this; that she wouldn’t allow herself to be tormented by what by rights should now be an old and bearable pain. She didn’t want to remember now the days … the nights when she had endured the ferocious, savage agony of it, tearing at her. She had known grief in her life; many times; the deaths of her parents, the breakup of her marriage, but this grief had been like none other she had experienced. It had been terrifying in its enormity, its inescapability, its finality.

‘Not your genes,’ Oliver agreed softly. ‘But our baby will have your love, your mothering, Maggie.’

Our Baby. Maggie could feel the yearning aching deep inside her.

‘I suppose now that it’s actually official you’ll be wanting to tell The Club,’ Oliver teased her, pulling a face.

‘Don’t call them that,’ Maggie protested, but she was smiling too. ‘They are my best and closest friends, The four of us have known one another since we were at school.’

‘And you share a bond that no mere male can possibly understand,’ Oliver interrupted her. ‘Yes, I do know that.’

‘I have never said that,’ Maggie denied.

‘You don’t need to,’ Oliver told her wryly.

‘They aren’t going to be very pleased with me for keeping it a secret from them,’ Maggie admitted. ‘Especially Nicki. After all, I was the first to know when she was pregnant with Joey. In fact I knew even before Kit! And they still haven’t really forgiven me for not telling them about you sooner.’

‘So the phone lines are going to be burning, once we get home?’ Oliver smiled.

Maggie shook her head vigorously, her curls dancing.

‘No. We’re due to go out for a meal together, on Friday. I think I’ll wait until then when we’re all together.’

It would be a relief to tell them, to bask in their amazement and excitement. She had never let any of them know just how much she had envied them as one after the other they had given birth to their babies, partially because she hadn’t wanted their pity and partially because of Dan, and by the time she had realised that they had come to assume that she simply did not want children it had been too late to correct their misconceptions.

Even in a friendship as close as theirs there were sometimes secrets, Maggie acknowledged.

‘What’s wrong?’

They had had dinner an hour earlier and were just preparing for bed. Maggie was more tired than she wanted to acknowledge—because of her pregnancy or because …

‘I just hope that we’re doing the right thing,’ she answered Oliver quietly.

‘Of course we are,’ he reassured her robustly. ‘Why shouldn’t we be?’

Silently Maggie looked at him.

‘You know why,’ she told him. ‘I’m fifty-two years old Oliver. A woman who has gone through the menopause, who without the intervention of modern science and the gift of another woman’s eggs could not be carrying your child. You, on the other hand, are a young man in the prime of your life. You’re in your thirties, with a whole lifetime of impregnating younger fertile women ahead of you.’

‘Maggie. Stop it! The fact that we are different ages, the fact that you went through an early menopause, they mean nothing in comparison to our love.’

Maggie looked away from him. They had argued so many, many times before about this. She might not feel her age, she might not even look it—certainly Oliver had flatly refused to believe she could possibly be a day over thirty-five when they had first met, just as she had initially completely believed him when he had told her that he was in his late-thirties—but the cruel facts were that there were an inarguable, an inescapable sixteen years between them.

She had known, of course, that he was younger than her—but she had assumed the age gap was much less than it actually was. She had been in her mid-forties then, and had Oliver been speaking the truth when he had claimed to be in his late thirties she could just about have persuaded herself that the difference between them was acceptable.

Had she known then just how great it was she would never, ever have allowed a relationship to develop between them.

‘He’s how old?’ Nicki had demanded in disbelief when Maggie had finally, at Oliver’s insistence, told her friends about him.

She had to admit that once they had got over their shock her friends had been very supportive.

As she remembered that conversation a small secret smile curved Maggie’s mouth. They had teased her a little, asking her if it was true what was said about the sex between an older woman and a younger man, and mock primly she had refused to either encourage or answer them.

They had laughed at her, of course, and she had laughed with them, knowing, as Nicki had openly told her, that the air of suppressed sensuality that surrounded her told its own story.

‘You positively glow with it,’ Nicki had remarked ruefully.

‘You were the same when you first met Kit!’ Maggie had reminded her friend.

Suddenly Maggie longed to be able to talk to her friends. She, Nicki, Alice and Stella had been friends since their schooldays and their regular once-a-month evening out together to share a meal, a bottle of wine and their hopes and fears was so sacrosanct that only births and deaths had been allowed to interrupt them.

Oliver had nicknamed them ‘The Club’ or sometimes ‘The Coven’, claiming that between the four of them they had both the talents and the power to make magic, and that she, his wonderful, wise, wicked Maggie, was the witchiest of all of them.

The girls, her friends, Maggie knew, would understand all the things she had not been able to bring herself to admit to them before. All those feelings and fears she had experienced when, soon after her fortieth birthday, her doctor had had to explain that the cause of the health problems she had been suffering was the onset of a premature menopause. Nothing had prepared Maggie for the realisation that nature was closing certain doors against her; that shockingly an era of her life she had somehow believed would last for ever was over; or for the despair and anguish that realisation had so unexpectedly and uncontrollably brought her.

At the time she had been too overwhelmed by her own feelings to admit them to anyone. But she could admit to them now just how awesomely miraculous it was for her that, because of Oliver, she had found a way to halt nature in its tracks. To snatch from its closing, grinding jaws that which it was relentlessly taking from her.

Motherhood. She had told herself when she and Dan had split up that it just wasn’t meant to be for her, and she had believed truly that she had accepted that situation. It had taken Oliver to show her just how much she had lied to herself. And how very much a part of her still ached for that fulfilment. Why had she never realised until it had been all but too late just how important, how elemental, how essential such an experience would be to her?

Silently Oliver watched her. Why couldn’t she accept that the difference in their ages meant nothing to him; that he loved her as she was and for what she was?

He truly believed that in spirit Maggie was far younger than he was himself; she had the enthusiasm for life of a young girl and a rare kind of physical beauty that would never age.

He had always been drawn to older women. He liked their emotional maturity; he felt at ease with them.

Maggie’s achievements filled him with pride for her; he loved being able to claim her as his partner and he knew she was going to be a wonderful mother.

Oliver loved children. And he loved even more knowing that Maggie was going to have his child … their child.

So she was over fifty. What did that mean? Nothing as far as he was concerned! The specialist at the clinic had agreed with him that Maggie was in perfect health; he had even offered the information that had Maggie not experienced an early menopause she could have become pregnant naturally and that it was not unusual for women of her age to do so.

‘Maggie,’ he begged her now. ‘Please don’t make age an issue between us.’

‘I’m old enough to be your mother, never mind this baby’s!’ Maggie couldn’t help reminding him.

‘And I’m old enough to know that you are my love, the love of my life,’ Oliver told her softly.

Cupping her face in his hands, he added, ‘I have waited for you a long time, Maggie. You are everything to me. You and our baby.’

The tenderness with which he kissed her made Maggie’s throat ache with emotion.

She had loved Dan passionately, too passionately and too intensely perhaps, but it was Oliver who had shown her just what a generous gift love could be.

Here in the shared darkness of the bed as he drew her down against his side there was no age gap between them; here they were equals, partners, lovers.

2

‘Alice, it’s Nicki. I’m just ringing to check that you’re still okay for tomorrow night?’

Tucking the telephone receiver into her shoulder, Alice Palmer deftly retrieved the small toy the elder of her two small grandsons was trying to push into the ear of the younger.

‘Yes. I’m fine. Do you want me to ring Stella to make sure she’s still going?’ she volunteered.

‘If you would.’

‘I expect you’ve already spoken to Maggie?’

‘Yes. Yes, I have.’

It was an accepted fact amongst the four of them that Maggie and Nicki shared an extra-special closeness, so Alice frowned as she registered the unexpected constraint in Nicki’s voice.

‘Nothing’s wrong, is it? Maggie’s okay, isn’t she?’ she asked in concern. ‘I mean, everything’s all right with her and Oliver?’

‘Oh, yes, they’re still totally besotted with one another,’ Nicki Young answered her wryly. Alice laughed.

‘Stella was saying the other day that it’s not so much that Maggie is behaving as though she’s still a young girl that makes her feel old, as the fact that she can actually get away with it!’

‘Well, I dare say a good helping of the right kind of genes, a size eight figure, and the kind of glow a woman gets from regular helpings of orgasmic sex have something to do with it, although in all fairness Maggie has always looked young.’

‘Mmm … well, you’re looking pretty good yourself,’ Alice told Nicki, adding ruefully, ‘I am at least ten pounds overweight, and Zoë refuses to believe that I could ever possibly have had a twenty-four inch waist. Actually what she said was, “Mother, are you sure you aren’t losing your memory along with your waistline?”

‘Being slightly plump suits you, Alice,’ Nicki offered comfortingly. ‘It makes you look …’

‘Grandmotherly?’ Alice supplied dryly. On the other end of the line she could hear Nicki laughing.

‘I’ve got to forewarn you that Maggie has some news … something she wants to tell us when we are all together. Whatever it is, she’s obviously very excited about it.’

There was a note in her voice that Alice couldn’t identify. Nicki had always been the calmest of all of them, careful both with her opinions and her emotions. Unlike Maggie, who was always so wildly passionate about everything.

‘Perhaps she and Oliver have decided to get married,’ Alice suggested, hopefully.

‘I don’t know. She said that there was no point in me asking her any questions because she wasn’t going to say another word until we’re all together. Which reminds me, I’ve booked us into that new place that’s just opened in the high street.’

‘You mean where the wet fish shop used to be? Honestly!’ Alice protested. ‘Since the new supermarkets opened on the outskirts of town, nearly all the old local shops have closed down and the high street now is virtually one long chain of coffee shops and restaurants.’

‘Mmm. I know, but since the motorway turned the town into an up-market dormitory area for the city, eating out has become the new trendy thing to do. Not that I should be complaining. The demand for extra staff has meant that we’ve been so busy at the agency that I’m going to have to take on someone new full-time to deal with the increase in business.’

‘I wish you’d tell me how you manage to do it,’ Alice said half ruefully, and half enviously. ‘You’re running your own business, being a full-time mother to a nine-year-old, and a wife. Which reminds me, Stuart said he bumped into Kit at the golf club the other day, and Kit said something about Laura giving up her job in the city and coming home to live with you.’

There was a brief pause before Nicki responded with telling feeling, ‘Don’t remind me! I can’t wait for our get-together and the chance to let off steam! Look, I’d better go, I’ve got to collect Joey from school in fifteen minutes.’

‘Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow night, then.’

As she rang off Alice reflected sympathetically on the situation that existed between Nicki and Laura, her husband Kit’s daughter from his first marriage.

Ten years ago when Kit and Nicki had married, Laura had been sixteen and still at school. Right from the start Laura had made it plain that she did not want her father to remarry, and no amount of olive-branch offering on Nicki’s part had softened her attitude.

‘Grandma, biscuit … biscuit!’

‘Biscuit—please.’ Alice automatically corrected George as she went to get him and his younger brother William some of the homemade biscuits she made especially for them.

They were adorable little boys, who reminded her very much of her own twin sons at the same age, and she loved them to bits, but there was no getting away from the fact that, after a full day of looking after them, she was more than glad to hand them back to their mother, her daughter Zoë.

Thinking of Zoë caused her forehead to wrinkle in an unhappy frown. Like her, Zoë had married young. Too young? Alice was increasingly feeling that that was what she herself had done.

Zoë wasn’t going to be pleased with the news Alice had to tell her. And what about Stuart? He wasn’t going to be very happy about her plans, was he? He had never encouraged or wanted her to be independent or to strike out on her own, and she knew that he was not going to understand, never mind approve of, the need that was motivating her now. She was going to have to be very strong, very single-minded if she was to be successful in reaching her longed-for goal, she knew that. But she knew too that her friends would support her. After all, they had always supported one another, been there for one another. She was looking forward to the excitement of breaking her news to them as much as she was dreading revealing it to her husband and daughter.

Quickly she went to check on her grandsons before going to telephone the fourth member of their quartet.

‘Stella, it’s Alice,’ she announced when Stella answered her call. ‘Do you still want me to pick you up tomorrow night?’

‘Could you? The only problem is that I don’t want to get back late. Hughie’s coming home from university today—just for a couple of days. Apparently there’s a break in lectures he can take advantage of. He says he has run out of clean clothes, but I’m not falling for that one. No doubt the real reason he wants to come home is to see Julie.’

The energetic sound of Stella Wilson’s voice reflected her personality, Alice thought. An almost frighteningly well-organised, no-nonsense person, she ran the lives of her husband and her son with streamlined efficiency. There was no agonising from Stella about a creeping band of weight transforming her body from that of a young woman to an older one; no soul-searching, or insecurities; no doubting or dithering; no hint, in fact, of any of the doubts and anxieties that so beset her, Alice recognised ruefully. But then Stella was one of those women who suited middle age.

The plainest of their foursome when they had been girls, Stella had grown from a girl whose looks, brisk manner and sensible, practical outlook on life had meant that she’d often been left in the background into a woman whose forthright manner and confidence in her own beliefs meant that she was now recognised as a valuable asset of the many committees she sat on and by those whose causes she championed. There was no sentimentality about Stella; she was not flirtatious or playful, and could when offended retreat into an awesomely dignified silence, but she was tremendously loyal and could always be relied on to offer straightforward advice and practical help. When it came to problem-solving Stella had no equal, and she was dearly loved by all of them.

‘Julie’s a great girl,’ she pronounced. ‘But she’s still at school, and Hughie has only just turned nineteen. I’m having to bite on my tongue not to sound like an over-anxious mother, but the last thing either of them need right now is an intense, emotional, long-distance relationship when they should be concentrating on their studies. I haven’t forgotten all the problems you went through with Zoë, when she was so determined to marry Ian that she threatened to drop out of university.’

Alice bit her lip. Stella never meant to be tactless, it was just that sometimes she forgot that others had less robust sensitivities than she possessed herself.

‘Zoë doesn’t know how lucky she is,’ Stella was continuing affectionately. ‘If anyone was born to be a wife and mother, it was you, Alice. How are the twins, by the way?’

‘Still in South America, so far as we know,’ Alice replied. It was far easier to talk to her friend about her twin sons than her elder daughter. ‘Stuart was saying only the other night, he doesn’t know which is going to prove the more expensive, financing their studies, or paying for their gap year! To be honest I think he’s a little bit envious of them. I mean, in our day, “gap years” were more of a rare luxury than an accepted fact of life. Stuart went straight from university into his career. We were married two years after that and then Zoë arrived and then of course the twins.’

‘Mmm. I know what you mean. Richard tends to grumble that Hughie has life far easier than he did at his age, but I suspect that really he’s a little bit jealous of him. After all, he’s just about to start out in life, and he’s got everything ahead of him, whereas for most of our generation the best thing that lies ahead is early retirement and the worst the threat of redundancy!’

Whilst Alice was wincing inwardly at the unwittingly brutal picture Stella had just drawn, Stella added wryly, ‘Unless of course you’re fortunate enough to be someone like Maggie! Richard was saying only the other day that it didn’t surprise him that she should end up with a younger man. He said that she’s always been the sort of person who challenged the status quo; a sort of minor social revolution in her own right, and at the forefront of new trends. And of course it’s true! Do you remember how she used to shock us when we were girls? How daring we thought she was, and how inside we all ached to be like her?’

‘Yes,’ Alice conceded. ‘It hasn’t all been easy for her, though, has it? She and Dan were so much in love when they got married. I never thought that they would split up.’

‘Well, no, but Nicki let it slip in a moment of weakness—you know how, normally, she’s always the first to leap to Maggie’s defence—that she wasn’t totally surprised, because she knew that Dan had always wanted children. Nicki dated him first, didn’t she? And apparently he had told her then that he wanted a family. I know that Maggie has never really talked about their divorce, but she did once say to me when I asked if they were planning to have children that the business was her “baby”. With her feeling like that I suppose it’s not surprising that Dan left her!’ Stella pointed out.

‘Well, at least she’s happy now with Oliver,’ Alice intervened pacifically. ‘I must say that when she first told us about him, I was a bit concerned. Especially when she admitted that he was much younger than she had at first realised. But you only have to see them together to see how much he loves her.’

‘Alice, you are such a romantic.’ Stella laughed.

Was it because she was just that little bit younger than the others that they always tended to treat her as though she were someone who was somehow not quite as up to speed as they were themselves? Alice wondered. There was a very fine line between affectionate indulgence, and patronising indulgence and sometimes she felt that her friends unwittingly crossed it. Or was she being over-sensitive?

Of course they had all been to university—had those life-shaping years in common—whilst she had not.

‘There isn’t any point, or any need,’ Stuart had told her, at the time. ‘I’m in love with you, Alice, and I don’t want to wait three years to marry you whilst you get a degree you’re never going to use. I can think of a much better way for you to occupy your time,’ he had added, with the powerful sensuality that had originally swept her so easily off her feet. At nineteen she had been impressed and awed by such a macho attitude.

At nearly fifty-one, though, she was beginning to feel that it was not so much sexy and sensual as domineering and selfish. Beginning to? Or had she in reality thought it for quite a long time but pushed the thought away, burying it rather than confronting it? Guiltily Alice reminded herself that Stuart was a good husband and father who worked very hard to provide them all with financial comfort and security. And who enjoyed a career that took him all over the world, whilst she stayed at home being a dutiful wife and mother …

‘Oh, I nearly forgot,’ Alice told Stella, hastily dragging her thoughts back to the present. ‘Apparently Maggie has told Nicki that she’s got something to tell us. Wedding plans, do you think?’

‘I hope not,’ Stella responded forthrightly. ‘I mean, I know it’s all roses and romance now, but if you want my honest opinion it can’t last! Of course, the press has got a lot to answer for. It’s impossible to pick up a newspaper these days, even the sensible ones, without reading some hyped-up article about how our generation has still got the bit firmly between its teeth and is totally refusing to let go, and be turned out to grass gracefully as previous generations at our age would have done. The mystique we’ve managed to attach to ourselves is the most disgraceful propaganda really.’

‘But it is true that we have pushed back an awful lot of boundaries,’ Alice felt the need to point out.

‘Indeed, but although we might have convinced ourselves that we can hold back time, we still can’t actually turn it back,’ Stella told her dryly. ‘Oliver is well over a decade younger than Maggie and sooner or later that is bound to cause them problems.’

‘Mmm! And how are my two special boys?’

Alice stood to one side as she watched her daughter kneel down to hug her two young sons.

‘I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to collect them until eight tomorrow evening, Ma,’ Zoë announced, not quite meeting Alice’s eyes as she informed her, ‘I’ve arranged to get together with some of the girls at the wine bar after work. If you could bathe these two for me, so that I can just put them straight to bed when I get them home, that would be great. They’ll be good company for you with Dad away, and—’

‘Zoë.’ Alice interrupted her. ‘I can’t have them tomorrow evening.’

‘What? Ma, I can’t possibly cancel now, it would make me look totally unprofessional. This isn’t a social thing, it’s more of a networking meeting, and I could make some important contacts.’

Claiming that she was bored stuck at home with two small children whilst her husband worked a ten-hour day, Zoë had used the lever of her degree and the danger of her brain ‘rotting’ to pressure Alice into agreeing to look after her sons for her whilst Zoë worked part-time for a local estate agent.

‘I do understand,’ Alice tried to placate her. ‘But surely Ian could look after the boys for once. He is their father, after all.’

‘Oh, yes, that’s right, pick on Ian.’

Alice’s heart sank as she saw the tell-tale spots of angry red colour burning in her daughter’s face.

‘You’ve never liked him, have you? You never wanted me to marry him. And don’t think I don’t know why. Just because he supported me. Sided with me and told you that he could see how much you favoured my brothers above me.’

‘Zoë, that isn’t true,’ Alice tried to protest.

The real reason she didn’t much care for her daughter’s husband was because she felt that, far from supporting Zoë, Ian actually secretly undermined her and subtly played on her insecurities.

Of course, there was no doubt that financially Ian was a good provider. As an investment banker he earned more than enough to keep his family in considerable comfort, which in turn meant—although Alice would never have dreamed of risking alienating her daughter even further by saying so—that if she chose to do so Zoë could quite easily have stayed at home full time with her children, as Alice herself had had to do.

‘Anyway, why can’t you have the boys?’ Zoë was challenging her suspiciously. ‘Dad’s away.’

‘It’s my regular night out with Maggie and the others and—’

‘Oh, of course, I should have known,’ Zoë exploded angrily, her normally pretty face contorting into an ugly mask of temper. “‘Maggie and the others,’” she mimicked, her voice rising. ‘And, of course, they are far more important to you than William and George.’ The sheer unexpectedness of Zoë’s attack left Alice breathless. The unexpectedness of it, and the unfairness!

‘Zoë, that simply isn’t true—’ she began.

But Zoë refused to listen to her, immediately cutting her short as she burst out, ‘If you’d rather be with your precious friends than with your grandchildren, then you go right ahead!’

‘Zoë …’ Alice protested, but it was too late. Zoë was already scooping up her sons and heading for the door, refusing to listen to her.

It seemed to Alice that it had always been like this between them—antagonism and misunderstanding where there should have been love and harmony. Was it all her fault, as Zoë always insisted? ‘Perhaps she feels jealous of you,’ Nicki had suggested, softening the words by adding, ‘Sometimes it happens.’

‘No,’ Maggie had argued. ‘I think it’s her brothers she resents, and that she blames you for their unwanted presence in her life.’

‘Sometimes mothers are harder on their daughters than their sons,’ had been Stella’s practical contribution.

Alice suspected that Maggie had come closest to recognising the cause of Zoë’s behaviour. She had been six when the twins had been born, pretty, strong-willed, and perhaps a trifle spoiled, and certainly well able to articulate her angry resentment of the two babies who were taking her parents’ attention away from her.

The adored only child of elderly parents herself, and with a far gentler nature than her assertive daughter, Alice felt that she had somehow failed Zoë, in not being able to satisfy her emotional hunger. Just as she herself had turned to Stuart for the security of his love and protection, his ability to take control of her and of her future, so she felt had Zoë turned to Ian to provide the intensity of emotion she sought.

‘Mum, will Laura be there when we get home?’

One hand on the passenger door of her car, Nicki turned to look at her young son, Joey.

He was scuffing his new school shoes in the dust, as reluctant to meet her eyes as he obviously was to go home.

Joey was the image of his father, with Kit’s wheat-gold hair and toffee-brown eyes, and Nicki’s heart melted with love every time she looked at him.

Melted with love, and, increasingly lately, tensed with guilt.

‘She might be,’ she confirmed, forcing herself to sound jolly and unconcerned. ‘After all, she is Daddy’s daughter.’

‘She’s grown up and I don’t like her. She’s always cross with me,’ Joey responded with the unimpeachable logic of a nine-year-old. ‘Why does she have to be with us? Why can’t she go back to her own house?’

Nicki sighed.

It was impossible to explain the complexities of the situation to a child of Joey’s age, and impossible too to let him see what she was really feeling. She certainly shared her son’s dislike of Laura’s presence in their home, although, of course, she could not voice it quite so openly.

In the early days when she and Kit had first started cautiously dating, she had been at pains to show every consideration for the feelings of his teenage daughter. The tragic death of her mother after a long-drawn-out illness was bound to have traumatised her, and Nicki had recognised that fact, but, no matter how slowly and discreetly Nicki had tried to progress, Laura had flatly refused to accept that her father could possibly want any kind of relationship with Nicki, or allow her into his life.

At one point Laura’s hostility towards her had become so great that Nicki had declared wearily to Kit that, for everyone’s sake, she felt they ought not to see one another any more.

That time apart from Kit had been one of the worst periods of her life, and if anyone had told her then that ultimately she and Kit would be together and that she would have Joey she would have refused to believe them.

It had been Kit who had insisted that they should marry, and that Laura would eventually come to accept the situation, and Nicki had made a mental promise to herself that she would be the most understanding, the most caring stepmother there was, if only Laura would allow her to be.

After all, Laura was a part of Kit, and Nicki had been prepared to love her for that alone! She was also, Nicki had reminded herself determinedly, a teenager who had lost her mother at a very vulnerable time in her life. She needed and deserved to have her feelings recognised, and Nicki fully intended to do that and to assure her that there was no way she wanted to deny her mother’s role in either her life or that of Kit. And she had done her best, her very best, but Laura had simply refused to reciprocate.

Less than four months after their marriage Laura had walked out, announcing that she was going to live with her godmother, and in the end it had been agreed that she should be allowed to do so, although Kit had told her over and over again that she must always consider the home he and Nicki shared to be her own.

She had returned briefly between leaving school and going on to university, to spend the summer with them, but if anything her hostility and resentment towards her stepmother had been even more marked in Nicki’s opinion, and she had been relieved to see Laura go.

That had been seven years ago. Seven years during which Laura had grown up and made her own life, only now she was back. And just thinking about her and what she had done filled Nicki with tension and seething anger.

‘Why? Why has she come here to us?’ she demanded angrily, pacing the kitchen floor as Kit sat and watched her. ‘It’s not even as if this has ever been her home, in any real sense! You sold your family home when we got married and the money was invested for her. We bought this house together.’

And she had supplied the bulk of the down payment and paid the mortgage, Nicki could have added, but of course she did not.

‘Because we’re her family,’ Kit answered her.

‘No!’ Nicki denied bitterly. ‘We are not her family, Kit. She has never wanted to be a part of this family. She has never accepted me as your wife or Joey as your son. You are her family. And that’s why she’s come here. To claim you, to cause discord between us and—’

‘Nicki, you’re reacting over-emotionally,’ Kit protested.

‘Me over-emotional?’ Nicki challenged him angrily. ‘The truth is that you just don’t want to accept the facts about Laura and her behaviour. You’d rather blame anyone than her! You just won’t see what she’s doing!

She’s already upset Joey. He’s the one you should really be protecting, and not her,’ she threw at Kit, tears burning her eyes. ‘He’s only a little boy and she’s an adult. Why has she come here? Has she told you yet?’

The look on his face was its own answer.

All Laura had said was that she had handed in her notice at work and given up the lease on her flat and that she needed to give herself a breathing space before she decided where she wanted her life to go.

It was incomprehensible to Nicki that a young woman in her mid-twenties should behave in such an irresponsible way, and had Laura actually been her child she would have been insisting on being given some answers to some far more pertinent questions than Kit seemed disposed to ask. Not for her the slightly nervous, conciliatory attitude adopted by Alice towards her aggressively determined daughter!

But, of course, Laura was not her child.

‘She’ll talk to us when she’s ready, Nicki, and until then we have to respect her privacy,’ Kit had told her firmly. ‘Right now, Laura needs our love and support just as much as Joey does, but in a different way.’

Laura was a bone of contention between them that was never going to go away, Nicki acknowledged grimly.

Where was Kit? Nicki wondered irritably five hours later. He knew she had work to do tonight and he had promised to be home early, but there was no sign of him.

Angrily, she remembered the row they had had last night. An exchange of destructive hissed whispers in the darkness of their bedroom, both of them tensely aware that they might be overheard.

The result had been an ‘atmosphere’, which had been still hanging over them like a black cloud this morning.

Even before Laura’s arrival they had been having problems. Kit’s business as an independent insurance broker and financial adviser was suffering badly in the current economic climate—a reflection on the general situation and not on him personally, as Nicki had already pointed out to him.

Part of the trouble was that she was simply not the kind of woman who was prepared to spend her time propping up a male ego, even when that ego belonged to the man she loved. She had gone down that road with her first marriage and all she had got from it had been a bullying, violent husband, from whom she had been glad to escape through divorce.

But when she had fallen in love with Kit he had been in no need of any ego massaging. He had applauded the fact that she was a successful businesswoman in her own right, just as she had admired his uncomplaining shouldering of the responsibility of caring for his terminally ill wife and his teenage daughter.

She and Kit had originally met when he had approached her agency wanting to find a part-time housekeeper to help him with the responsibility of caring for his wife, Jennifer, and providing a home for Laura, then thirteen years old.

There had been an immediate spark of attraction between them, which they had both equally immediately and separately chosen to ignore. After all, Kit had been a married man. And she had been still bruised from her first marriage, with a young and fragile business to nurture, and no place and even less need in her life for the emotional trauma of falling in love with a man in Kit’s position.

The agency was to be her life, she had insisted to Maggie.

It had been thanks to Maggie that Nicki had set up the agency in the first place. After the breakup of her first marriage and before she had met Kit, Nicki had done temping work. When the agency she had worked for had announced that it was closing down, she had been panic-stricken, knowing how much she’d needed the money she’d been earning.

‘So set up your own agency,’ Maggie had told her.

‘I can’t,’ Nicki had protested. ‘I could never run my own business. I don’t know how.’

‘Yes, you do,’ Maggie had contradicted her firmly. ‘You just don’t realise that you do.’

And somehow or other Maggie, being Maggie, had managed to chivvy and downright bully her into taking what had then, to Nicki, seemed to be an impossibly dangerous step.

To her own surprise, what had started out as a small venture run from her own home had now become a very demanding and thankfully healthily profitable business. And what had been even more surprising had been the discovery that as the business had grown so had she; that she positively enjoyed the challenges it had brought her and that she was far more business-minded than she had ever known she could be. Or at least she had been until Joey had been born.

‘You’re pregnant. But you can’t be. You’re too old. It’s disgusting. You’re disgusting!’ had been Laura’s furious reaction when they had told her the news about Nicki’s pregnancy. ‘You’re being such a typical second wife,’ she had taunted Nicki when Kit had not been there. ‘They always rush to get pregnant. I’d hate to be in your position. Always feeling you’ve got something to prove, always knowing that someone else had been there before you. It isn’t my father who wants this baby, no matter what you say. It’s you. After all, he already has me!’

It had been just over a week after they had broken the news of her pregnancy to Laura that she had announced that she intended to leave. By then Nicki had had enough of trying to placate her. Overwhelmed with ‘morning sickness’ that lasted virtually all day, beset by anxieties about her agency, and worrying herself sick about the wisdom of her actually having a child who had not been planned, she had been in no fit state to cope with Laura as well.

The peace that had descended on the household after Laura’s departure had given Nicki a blissful taste of pure and absolute happiness, as within days of her stepdaughter going so had her morning sickness. But with that happiness had also come a bitter aftertaste of guilt, from knowing how badly Kit felt about Laura leaving. His anxiety for her had overshadowed Nicki’s pregnancy and Joey’s birth—so much so that Nicki had suffered a severe and unexpected bout of depression following the birth. Laura, predictably, had refused even to acknowledge the baby, never mind come and see him, and Joey had in fact been walking before Laura had met her new half-brother for the first time.

Nicki tensed now, collecting her thoughts as the kitchen door opened and Kit and Laura came in.

‘Where’s Joey?’ Kit asked as he looked round the kitchen.

‘In bed,’ Nicki told him sharply. ‘It’s past his bedtime and, as I told you this morning, I have work to do this evening.’

Nicki paused deliberately before reminding him, ‘You were supposed to be reading him the next chapter of his book.’

‘Oh, Dad, remember when you used to read my bedtime story?’ Laura smiled, interrupting Nicki, one hand on her father’s arm. She threw Nicki a smugly triumphant look before adding, ‘You never missed a single evening, no matter how busy you were. But of course things were different for us. With Mummy being so ill I really only had you. I expect that’s why we’re so especially close.’

As Nicki listened she could feel herself starting to grind her teeth. She itched to be able to tell Laura that she’d made her point and that there was no need for her to over-egg her bread, but if she did she knew that Laura would immediately turn to Kit for support. The last thing Nicki wanted right now was to be humiliated in front of her stepdaughter!

‘You mustn’t blame Dad for being late, Nicki,’ Laura was saying mock apologetically now. ‘It’s my fault! I wanted to have a daddy and daughter chat with him. Private stuff …’

As Laura leaned into Kit’s side Nicki tried to control the fury building up inside her. She knew that Laura was deliberately manipulating the situation, and trying to cause an argument between them.

‘I loved driving the new BMW,’ she added enthusiastically, ignoring Nicki to speak to her father. ‘And thanks for letting me have the spare set of keys, Dad. I promise I’ll check with you before I borrow it.’

Nicki had had enough.

‘Actually, Laura, I am the one you should be checking with,’ Nicki told her stepdaughter with icy rage. ‘The BMW is actually my car.’

Nicki could feel her face burning with resentment and guilt as she saw the look Kit was giving her.

* * *

Nope, she still appeared the same, Laura acknowledged derisively half an hour later as she peered at her reflection in her bedroom mirror. She had not suddenly turned back into her pony-tailed fifteen-year-old self, even if she had just given a pretty good display of that self to her stepmother.

What was it about the relationship between oneself and one’s family that somehow meant that within minutes of being with them one reverted to childhood, not to mention childish habits? Laura knew that she was not alone in experiencing this unpalatable phenomenon, just as she also knew she was not alone in being guilty of still enacting in adulthood the travails of her teenage step-parent wars!

It was a subject her generation were experts on and a powerful bonding agent. ‘Show me a person who can put their hand on their heart and honestly say that they accepted and welcomed their step-parents from the word go, and I’ll show you an alien. It is a universally accepted truth that a child in possession of two parents is not in need of a step-parent,’ one of Laura’s friends was fond of saying facetiously. But there was a certain black-humoured element of truth in her statement.

Laura wasn’t exactly proud of the way being in her stepmother’s presence made her revert with dizzying speed back to the mindset of her teenaged self, employing deliberately contentious tactics as only teenage girls knew how. It gave her no pleasure now she was back in her adult skin to recognise how quickly and effectively she had stoked the fires of Nicki’s hostility and resentment.

As a girl she had told herself that it was her duty to show Nicki to her father in her true colours, and to show Nicki herself that there was no way she or Joey could ever match, never mind usurp, the place she and her own mother held in her father’s heart.

What must it be like to always have to live with the knowledge that your husband had previously been legally committed to another woman, another family? Was there always a fear lurking on the edge of one’s awareness that one might be less loved … the lesser loved?

Laura knew that her stepmother was hardly likely to give her the answer to such questions!

And as to seeking her input, her guidance, her support on the matter that had brought Laura here, running for cover, seeking safety … A mirthless smile curled her mouth, her grey eyes shadowing.

Her hair, like her father’s, was wheat-gold and thick, just like Joey’s. She shared other similarities with her half-brother as well, she recognised, not least a tendency to be wary of anyone trying to push their way into their family life!

She had felt very sorry for her father earlier when Nicki had made that acrid comment about the BMW. Her smile gave way to a frown. Did Nicki habitually humiliate him like that? Did he always allow her to?

Resurrecting the battle between Nicki and herself had been the last thing on her mind when she had made her decision to come here; she wasn’t an insecure teenager any more, after all, terrified of losing her father as she had already done her mother, and resentful of the woman who in her eyes had been the catalyst for that loss. But listening to the way her stepmother had spoken to her father had swamped her good intentions and reawakened all her old bitterness and hostility.

A little ruefully, she reflected on the generous company car allowance she had given up when she had given up her job. With a little careful handling it would just have stretched—just—to the pretty BMW convertible she had had her eye on!

Still, with her qualifications and CV she knew she would not have too much trouble in getting another job, but not yet … not until … Instinctively she reached into her bag for her mobile, and then grimaced. She had handed it in along with her notice. Much better that way. After all, her mobile, like her job, would be easy enough to replace.

Even so, she couldn’t resist working out just how long it would be before he realised what she had done … Quickly she calculated. He was still away and not due back for another couple of days, and … Stop it! she warned herself, quickly clamping down on the thought and on the sudden give-away surge of her heartbeat.

‘Was that really necessary?’ Kit asked Nicki grimly when he walked into their bedroom, having finished reading Joey his belated bedtime story.

‘Was what really necessary?’ Nicki asked him defiantly, but of course she knew what he meant.

‘That dig about the car,’ Kit told her. ‘You were the one who insisted that I should drive it.’

‘That you should drive it, yes,’ Nicki agreed. ‘But there is no way I am prepared to have Laura driving it.’

‘Nicki!’

The very way he said her name was a weary sigh. Ridiculously, Nicki could feel tears pricking the backs of her eyes. She was a grown woman, for heaven’s sake, and not a teenager!

‘Oh, Nicki … this is crazy,’ she heard Kit saying in a much warmer voice as he walked over to where she was standing, brushing her already neatly glossy nut-brown bob. Standing behind her, he wrapped his arms around her, nuzzling the exposed curve of her throat. Immediately Nicki stiffened and tried to pull away.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Kit demanded.

In the mirror their glances met. Nicki looked away first.

‘I’m tired of having to cope with Laura. You know how I feel about her living here, Kit. About the way she’s upsetting Joey.’

She shivered as she saw how Kit was looking at her, his voice tense as he told her, ‘This isn’t just about Laura, is it, Nicki? This goes back to before Laura’s arrival.’ He paused. ‘Look, if it’s because …’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Nicki denied, jerking frantically away from him. ‘Just like you didn’t want to talk about it when … All I want is for you to leave me alone.’

She could feel the emotions surging up inside her with frightening force. Pain; guilt; the horrible tormenting, debilitating fear that robbed her of the ability to think or function properly, and with it the full force of her anger against Kit, and against life itself.

‘Nicki …’

She could hear the anxiety in his voice, but she felt too isolated and distant from him to want to respond to it. It was safer feeling like this, she recognised. Safer and easier. Let him turn to his precious daughter if he wanted someone to sympathise with him. She no doubt would fully endorse his feelings—his behaviour!

‘Look, Nicki, what happened happened to both of us.’

Nicki gave him a bitter look.

‘Oh, really? You can say that now, Kit, but at the time, according to you, it was my problem … my decision.’

‘Your decision, yes. But …’

They both tensed as Laura knocked on their bedroom door and called out, ‘Dad, are you in there? Can I have a word?’

‘You’d better go,’ Nicki told him fiercely, and rejectingly. ‘Laura needs you!’

‘No Hughie? I thought you said he was coming home today?’

Accepting her husband’s perfunctory kiss on her cheek, Stella nodded. ‘I did and he has. He’s gone round to see Julie,’ she told Richard wryly. ‘He seemed to be a bit on edge before he left, and he’s lost weight.’

‘Students always do,’ Richard pointed out equably, ‘and I shouldn’t worry too much about Julie. To be honest I rather got the impression that things had cooled off somewhat between them.’

‘I’m not worried,’ Stella denied. ‘But it has occurred to me that Hughie might have given us that impression deliberately, because he knows it’s what we want to hear. He’s an intelligent boy, after all. I mean, it’s like I was saying to Alice earlier. It’s not that I don’t like Julie, I do. I just want them both to be sensible and look beyond the here and now, the immediacy of the moment, and think about the future. Hughie is far too young to even think of tying himself down to a steady relationship. Apart from anything else, with him away at university and Julie here, it just isn’t practical!’

As she spoke Stella suddenly heard Maggie’s voice from their own teenage years, teasing her. ‘Oh, Stella! Miss Practicality, that’s what I think we should call you!’

Funny the things one remembered … and why. At the time she had found nothing wrong in Maggie’s comment, even preening herself a little for it, telling herself that she had more common sense than the other three put together, and that without her to put an end to some of their more outrageous exploits and sometimes too silly attitude towards life they would have been in a sorry mess indeed. They needed her to remind them of what was what—to stop them behaving foolishly. Yes, she had prided herself on her role within the quartet—the sensible one, the cool, non-flirtatious one whom boys knew better than to approach with too-familiar overtures. The one whom, in fact, the male sex tended to treat more as a pal and an honorary member of their own sex that they could confide in, rather than a mysterious and exciting object of desire and lust. And she had continued to pride herself on it, feeling both empowered and ever so slightly superior to the other three because of her foresight, her ability to rationalise and plan, her sheer sensibleness.

But just lately …

‘Are you in this evening or out?’

Although Stella no longer had any paid employment, having given up her social services job after Hughie’s birth, over the years she had been co-opted onto the committees of a variety of voluntary organisations, starting with the Parent-Teachers Association of Hughie’s junior school, and picking up along the way a position on the Board of Governors for his senior school, an appointment as a local JP, and three local charity organisations, all responsibilities on which she had thrived, with which she dealt with her famed efficiency, and which kept her just as busy as Richard since his promotion to Chief Clerk of the Local County Council.

‘In but I’m out tomorrow,’ she told him pragmatically. ‘Dinner with Maggie and the others. Apparently Maggie has something she wants to tell us!’

Richard shook his head. He was a hard-working, honest, but unimaginative man who found it hard to get to grips with the emotional intensity of the bond the four women shared. For a start they were all so very different. Alice, the quiet, gentle, stay-at-home mother; Nicki, the glossy, immaculate businesswoman; his own Stella with her formidable efficiency and practicality, and who—thank the Lord!—had never and would never exhibit any of the passionate intensity that was so much a part of Maggie’s vibrant personality. But that was women for you. And Richard, one of the last of a dying race of a certain type of man, was quite happy to openly admit that, so far as he was concerned, the female sex was a complete enigma!

‘So why couldn’t Maggie tell you whatever this news is before tomorrow night?’ Richard asked.

‘You know Maggie,’ Stella responded wryly. ‘Typically, Alice is convinced that she’s going to announce that she and Oliver are planning to get married.’ She gave a small exasperated shrug. ‘I hope she’s wrong. You’d think after what she went through when she and Dan split up that Maggie would be very wary about inviting any more emotional pain—and that’s what she’s going to get ultimately, because, no matter what he feels about her now, sooner or later Oliver is going to want a younger woman.’

‘Mmm. I always thought that was a rum business—Maggie and Dan splitting up. I mean, you never saw them apart. Whenever we went out together, they were always all over one another.’

‘Well, according to Nicki, Dan wanted children and Maggie didn’t, so—’

‘I thought they split up because Dan had that affair,’ Richard interrupted her, looking confused.

‘Well, yes, they did, but we always knew that there had to be a reason why he had the affair. I mean, Dan just wasn’t that kind of man.’

‘He was a damn good-looking chap,’ Richard mused.

‘Very good-looking,’ Stella agreed ruefully.

All of them had at one time or another been a little bit in love with Dan, even her, although she had kept her feelings determinedly to herself, firmly lecturing herself against being foolish.

People might nowadays describe her approvingly as a striking looking and confident woman, but in her youth she had quite definitely been plain. Yes, she had had regular features, healthy, clear skin, and good teeth, but what they had added up to had always fallen short of the head-turning male-attention-getting looks the other three had in their different ways possessed.

Not that she had minded. Prettiness had been in her opinion, then, a dangerously two-edged sword, in that it encouraged her sex to rely on it and, if they were weak and silly enough, to trade on it. Not that any of her friends had ever been guilty of that!

At the time she had calmly accepted her position in the foursome as the plain one, the sensible one, without resentment; it was only recently that she had begun to look back and feel resentful, to feel that somehow she had been cheated of the right to something—a certain femininity and sensuality—that the others had openly enjoyed.

Deep down inside she knew that these feelings were somehow connected to the very obvious air of sexual and emotional happiness that surrounded Maggie. Somehow it disturbed her; made her feel that she was less of a woman than the others, especially in the sexual sense. And yet that was ridiculous, surely, because she had never once experienced those kinds of feelings when they had been young. In fact, it had been her friendship with Richard that she had prized most in their marriage, the interests they had in common—which had never included a desire to spend hours in bed indulging in sexual Olympics. If anything she had actually pitied Alice for having such an obviously highly sexed husband as Stuart, just as she had pitied Maggie when Dan had had his affair, and Nicki when she had fallen so passionately in love with Kit.

So why was she now feeling that somehow she had missed out?

And more importantly why was she wasting time brooding on it? She had always been a doer not a dweller, dealing in realities and practicalities rather than the vagueness of emotions.

Her only womanly vanity was her hair. When she was a girl it had been long and lustrous, and for years she had worn it in a neat chignon. Just recently, though, for some reason she had decided to have it cut, and she still wasn’t totally used to the unfamiliar feel of it on her face, even though everyone had been extremely complimentary about it. Her good teeth and good skin had accompanied her into middle age, and she was now, according to her hair stylist, an extremely handsome woman.

No one would ever describe Maggie as ‘handsome’.

No, Maggie was stunning. Sexy … vibrant … fun. The thought lingered in her head with a slightly bitter mental aftertaste.

Although Nicki had never said so, it must have been hard for her when Dan had ended their relationship and started dating Maggie.

‘He went off to the States, didn’t he, after the divorce?’ Richard commented, breaking into her thoughts.

‘Yes.’

Stella gave Richard’s downbent head an exasperated look as he spoke to her without looking up from his paper. His bald patch was growing larger, she noticed absently.

‘I hope that Hughie doesn’t come in too late. I didn’t get a chance to ask him how he’s liking his course,’ she commented, relieved to have a reason to dismiss her unwanted and discomforting thoughts.

‘Well, he’s got a long slog in front of him, especially if he goes on to take a PhD as he plans,’ Richard reminded her.

‘What the devil’s going on?’

The acerbic note in the voice of the head of the clinic caused the security officer to wince a little.

‘I’m sorry, sir, but we felt we ought to call you out. Just to be on the safe side. It’s Ms Lacey.’

‘Charlene Lacey?’ Graham Vereham frowned.

‘Yes,’ the security officer confirmed. ‘We found her in your secretary’s office, going through some files.’

Graham Vereham sighed heavily.

Working in the field he did, he was used to emotional traumas, and at first he had simply assumed that Charlene’s distress was caused by the fact that they had been unable to help her to conceive, compounded by the breakdown of her relationship under the stress of the situation, but then she had started coming to the clinic and complaining bizarrely that they had stolen her ‘babies’.

Since Charlene had been the recipient of another woman’s eggs, rather than a donor of her own, her claims had absolutely no basis in reality. They had tried to help her, he had even personally recommended a psychiatric colleague for her to consult, but all to no avail. Charlene had continued to haunt the clinic, making her outrageous claims.

By rights they should send for the police and have the matter dealt with by them, but they were in a very sensitive business, and the last thing he wanted was any kind of adverse press. He would have to talk to her himself.

‘Where is she?’ he asked the security officer wearily.

‘In your secretary’s office, sir.’

3

‘So come on, then, what’s this exciting news?’ Stella demanded, once they were all sitting down and their drinks and food had been ordered.

‘Not yet. You’re going to have to wait,’ Maggie teased them mischievously.

‘I don’t want to spoil your surprise—’ Alice laughed ‘—but I think I may know what it is.’

When they all looked at her, she gave Maggie a semi-apologetic smile.

‘Zoë saw you and Oliver in the estate agents. She said you were asking about some of their properties.’

Much to Alice’s relief, her daughter had rung her with this news earlier in the day, their row of the previous afternoon apparently forgotten.

‘You’re planning to move house?’ Nicki gave Maggie a wry look. She was still feeling bruised from her row with Kit, and Maggie’s obvious euphoria was jarring on her slightly.

She loved Maggie, of course she did, but sometimes … Sometimes it seemed to Nicki that life wasn’t always as fair to her as it was to her closest friend. Caught up in the excitement of her new love affair, Maggie hadn’t even noticed the problems that she had been having!

‘Is that it?’ Nicki couldn’t resist demanding acerbically. ‘Honestly, Maggie, you …’

‘Well, no, as a matter of fact it isn’t,’ Maggie defended herself. ‘Yes, we are looking for a new house. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you. Well, it’s a part of it … the result of it, so to speak, though, and not the cause.’

She was glowing with happiness, positively bubbling over with it, Nicki recognised enviously, and it was perhaps no wonder that the group of business-suited men at the adjacent table were watching her in admiration.

Nicki’s head was aching with tension. Laura had disappeared shortly after lunch, announcing that she was going for a walk. She had still not returned when Nicki had come out and of course Kit had been concerned.

‘She’s an adult, Kit,’ Nicki had told him angrily. ‘If it was Joey who was missing I could understand your concern, but, of course, you would never be as concerned for Joey as you are for Laura, would you?’

‘That’s not fair, and it isn’t true either!’ Kit had exploded.

You’d have thought after the trauma of her first marriage that she would deserve to have some happiness in her second, Nicki reflected angrily, and she had thought that she did have until …

Stop it, she warned herself. The feelings of despair and panic that she was suffering were indications of a lack of ability to be in control of herself and her life of which she felt ashamed. But she couldn’t help the way she felt; couldn’t help agonising over Joey and what would happen to him if she weren’t there to love and take care of him. He wouldn’t be able to rely on his father. Kit, after all, had other responsibilities … more important responsibilities … Kit had Laura to worry about …

‘Nicki, is something wrong?’ she could hear Maggie asking with concern.

‘Laura has come home and she’s moved in with them,’ Alice replied for her.

‘Oh, Nicki, no. When did that happen? And why?’

Brusquely Nicki gave them an abbreviated outline of what had happened.

‘Laura hasn’t said why she’s here—at least not to me, and if she’s discussed it with Kit, he isn’t saying. All I do know is that she felt she needed to “take time out and reassess where she’s going”. It’s so ridiculous!’

They could all hear the frustration and anger in her voice.

‘She’s twenty-six, after all, and more than old enough to already know where she wants to go, but of course Kit can’t see that! She knows exactly how to press all the right buttons and make him feel guilty, about his precious little girl and the stepmother he inflicted on her, and of course she’s loving every second of it! Poor Joey can’t understand what’s happening and why his father suddenly doesn’t want to be bothered with him any more. Why he’d rather spend time with his daughter. She even had the gall last night to suggest that Kit was working too hard, and to drag up the fact that when she was younger Kit had talked about selling up here and going to live in Italy! She claimed it had been his cherished dream! And of course she was making it all too clear that Joey and I were the reasons he hadn’t been able to follow it!

‘Naturally, all this is music to Kit’s ears, and he’s revelling in having an adoring daughter to sympathise with him—instead of a nagging wife who doesn’t,’ she finished bitterly.

She could see that the others were watching her with varying degrees of compassion, but, predictably, it was Maggie who reached across the table and took hold of her hand.

‘Don’t let her get you down,’ she counselled her gently. ‘And try not to blame Kit too much. He’s a man, after all, and as we all know even the best of them can be emotional cowards.’

‘Oh, spare me the homily, Maggie!’ Nicki snapped. ‘Just because you’re deep in the throes of a fantasy romance, that doesn’t make you an expert on human relationships, you know!’

Nicki knew that she was being unfair, but the words of apology she wanted to give were somehow stuck in her throat.

She tensed as Maggie squeezed her hand before releasing it, whilst Alice burst into animated chatter, exclaiming, ‘Stella, you haven’t told us how Hughie is doing. Is he enjoying his course?’

‘Mmm … he says so,’ Stella replied cautiously. ‘But … you know what boys are like.’ She gave a small shrug, but there was a little frown of anxiety between her brows. Something was worrying Hughie, she could tell, no matter how heroically he pretended that it wasn’t.

Nicki’s outburst had somehow cast a shadow over the evening that echoed her own inner feelings. The friendship between them all, which had trundled along so comfortably for so long, suddenly seemed to be showing signs of fracture and stress strains, of not being what it had once been. Alice’s desire to please, Maggie’s euphoria, Nicki’s outburst—tonight all of them had irritated her.

The relationship between them that had always been so supportive suddenly felt constrictive, restrictive. It compelled each of them to play a preordained role, and somehow Stella wasn’t sure she wanted to play her designated part any more. It was all right for the others—rather like certain members of the local am-dram group she helped to manage, her friends had chosen the plum roles for themselves, leaving her to play the part no one else wanted!

The thought of them all not sharing their close friendship was unthinkable, and yet wasn’t there a secret, dangerous allure to it—to the thought of being free to write her own role, to finally be that person she had recently come to feel she had always been denied the chance to be?

‘Tell us a bit more about this house move you’re planning, Maggie,’ Alice was demanding predictably pacifically. She hated arguments and upset, and felt very sorry for Nicki. ‘I thought that Oliver loved the apartment?’

‘Well, yes, he does,’ Maggie acknowledged. ‘But …’

‘But you’ve finally convinced him that your clothes need a proper home,’ Nicki interjected dryly, wanting to make amends for her show of bad temper.

All of them, including Maggie, laughed. Her weakness for designer clothes had always been the subject of good-natured teasing between them.

‘Well, you’re sort of on the right track,’ Maggie agreed. ‘Although it isn’t my clothes we are going to need the extra space for. In fact …’

‘Zoë said something about you wanting a property with some land attached to it,’ Alice offered.

‘Oh, no.’ Stella groaned, stifling her own inner critical voice to follow Nicki’s lead. ‘Don’t tell us, Maggie. You’ve got the “must eat organic, back to the land and grow your own” bug. Well, let me tell you, if you are thinking of dragging us into it, you can definitely count me out! I know you and your wild ideas …’

‘Yes,’ Alice chimed in. ‘Like the time when you enrolled us all in the local theatre group, and we all ended up having to dress up as men!’

‘It wasn’t my fault they were doing Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and they were short of male actors.’ Maggie defended herself indignantly.

‘And then there were the salsa classes,’ Alice reminded her.

Maggie grinned. ‘They were fun. Especially that weekend we spent in Barcelona!’

‘Oh, yeah! Terrific fun,’ Nicki agreed drolly, rolling her eyes. ‘I have particularly happy memories of having to prise that ardent Spaniard off you, the one who said—’

‘Yes, yes, don’t remind me,’ Maggie pleaded, covering her eyes, her face suddenly deep pink.

Alice looked round the table in fond happiness. For all that Nicki and Stella tended to tease Maggie, she did have a way of lifting everyone’s spirits and injecting adventure and laughter into their lives.

‘Come on, then,’ Nicki demanded, determinedly putting her own problems to one side and entering into the spirit of things. ‘Stop keeping us in suspense. What exactly is this good news you’ve got for us?’

They were all looking at her. Maggie felt her heart give a funny little thump, almost as though the baby knew just how important this moment was; how important these women were going to be in its life. Her closest friends and supporters, the women who had shared her life’s sadnesses and joys with her, its failures and triumphs; the honorary family, she would be gifting to her child; three women who between them had enough experience to see any baby safely on its way to adulthood even if she, its mother, did not.

It would be a relief to unburden herself to them, to tell them how wobbly and uncertain she felt, to tell them how much she needed their support.

Maggie took a deep breath and looked round the table, at Stella who was so sanely calm and well balanced, Alice so maternal and protectively loving, Nicki who had her own problems, Maggie knew, but who out of all of them would surely understand her feelings. Joey after all had been born when Nicki had been in her early forties …

‘I’m pregnant,’ she told them shakily. ‘Oliver and I are going to have a baby.’

The silence that had seized her audience made Maggie smile.

‘I’m impressed,’ she laughed. ‘You’re speechless. I …’

‘No! It isn’t possible! You can’t be!’ White-faced, Nicki had pushed back her chair and was standing up. ‘You can’t be!’

Maggie’s smile wavered as they all looked at Nicki. Her face was suddenly as pale as Nicki’s, but where anger burned hotly in Nicki’s eyes, in Maggie’s the other two could quite plainly see the sheen of shocked tears.

Helplessly Alice watched them both, struggling with her own shock and discomfort. Both Maggie’s disclosure and Nicki’s announcement had left her lost for words, and she guessed from Stella’s stiff expression that she felt the same.

‘You can’t be pregnant,’ Nicki was continuing. ‘You’ve been through the menopause, we all know that and—’

‘I’ve had special treatment … special help!’ Maggie interrupted her. ‘And … And it’s because of the baby that we need to move house.’

She was very obviously and very visibly distressed, Alice recognised.

‘Nicki, please,’ Maggie heard herself begging shakily. This was the last reaction she had been expecting and she was trembling with the shock of it.

She could hear herself gabbling the words a little as she hurried to fill the uncomfortable silence left by Nicki’s refusal to respond to her. ‘The apartment wouldn’t be suitable. I think I knew just how much having a baby meant to Oliver when he agreed to give the apartment up.’

She had meant it as a joke, a means of lightening the taut, uncomfortable silence surrounding her, but instead of laughing her friends were regarding her with differing degrees of incomprehension.

Alice, she recognised, simply looked shocked. Stella was frowning, and avoiding meeting her eyes, whilst Nicki …

Her mouth suddenly dry, Maggie could feel herself flinching as she searched Nicki’s stonily silent features.

‘I thought you’d be pleased for me,’ she told them. Like a child seeking adult approval, she recognised miserably as she heard the pleading note in her own voice.

‘Well, yes, of course we are. It’s just that it’s such a shock.’

That was Alice typically trying to ease things and be tactful.

‘It certainly is.’ True to form, Stella added bluntly, ‘I just can’t see you as a mother, Maggie. You’ve never seemed the type. Are you sure …?’

‘Of course she’s sure, aren’t you, Maggie?’ Nicki cut in, her voice sharply acid. ‘Maggie is always sure about what she does. At least, at the time she decides to do it she is. Of course, she doesn’t always stop to think about anything other than the moment, do you, Maggie? How pregnant exactly are you?’

‘It’s … it’s just about a month …’

‘A month?’ Nicki stopped. An expression Maggie couldn’t recognise crossed her face. ‘Four weeks! Have you any idea just how vulnerable a pregnancy is in its early stages, Maggie, especially at your age?’ They could all hear the bitterness and the fury in her voice as she warned, ‘You could quite easily wake up tomorrow morning and discover that your dreams of a baby are over!’

‘Nicki!’ Alice stopped her quickly, giving Maggie’s white set face an anxious look. The open and unexpected hostility in Nicki’s voice had shocked them all, especially Maggie, who started to protest shakily.

‘Nicki! What are you saying? What’s wrong?’

Nicki knew that she was overreacting; that she was letting the anger she felt against Kit spill over into a safer escape by venting it on Maggie, and that she should have found a kinder way of expressing her feelings. But it was too late to call back her sharp words now. And besides …

She could feel her stomach churning with a mixture of moral outrage, shock, and anger at Maggie’s blind selfishness, and, worst of all, sheer, raw jealousy, streaked with a pain she had told herself she had managed to control.

Out of the corner of her eye she registered the silent looks that Stella and Alice were exchanging, whilst Maggie looked at her as though she couldn’t believe her ears. Her red-gold curls were a wild halo around her head, her delicately boned face almost childishly flushed, the dark blue eyes that Nicki had secretly envied all the time they were growing up rounded with shock.

‘What’s wrong?’ Nicki repeated, her voice brittle. ‘Do I really have to tell you? Maggie, you are fifty-two years old! During the thirty-odd fertile years you had in which to become pregnant you chose not to do so. You weren’t into babies, you told us all—remember? I’ll bet that Dan does. He would have given anything to have a child, but you didn’t want one! Then!

‘But now things are different—apparently. Now, when you’re in a relationship with a man who is considerably younger than you are, you’ve changed your mind! I don’t want to be unkind, but, let’s be honest, statistics prove that such relationships rarely endure. I’m not saying that Oliver doesn’t love you now, we can all see that he does. But when you bring a baby into the world, if you have any forethought, any maturity, you surely want to provide it with the best emotional environment you can, and once again statistics prove that this entails a baby having two parents in its life. Yes, countless thousands of children have been brought up successfully and happily by heroically selfless and devoted single parents, but those parents often did not have a choice! You do. And not only do you have freedom of choice, Maggie, supposedly you also have wisdom and maturity as well. If you were a young girl … but you aren’t, no matter how much you might be trying to behave like one.

‘Which brings me to something else. Doesn’t the fact that nature has declared that she no longer considers you physically able to produce a child mean anything to you?’

‘What are you trying to say, Nicki?’ Maggie interrupted her with quick defensiveness. ‘That only naturally fertile women have the right to have children?’

‘Of course I’m not, but you have to admit that there’s a huge difference between a woman who is medically unable to conceive, and one who has rejected the opportunity to have children, until she is through the menopause and then decided, Oh, I’ve changed my mind. I want a baby after all. What do you think a baby is, Maggie? Some kind of status symbol? The fertility equivalent of a course of Botox and a face-lift? A way of gaining instant youth?’

‘That’s not fair,’ Maggie protested. ‘This has nothing to do with anything like that!’

‘No? I’m sorry but I don’t believe you! I think the only reason you’re having this baby is because of Oliver. Because you think …’

‘Because I think what?’ Maggie challenged her angrily. ‘Because I think that by having Oliver’s baby I’m going to keep him?’

As their glances clashed it was Nicki who looked away first. A dull flush had spread up over the smooth column of her throat. As she reached out for her wineglass her fingers trembled slightly when she picked it up, the immaculate glossy darkness of her manicure reflecting the richness of the red wine.

As she took a deep swallow Alice murmured, ‘When is the baby due, Maggie?’

‘October. Not for another eight months. They do a blood test a fortnight after … after. I was very lucky. Some women go through several unsuccessful attempts before they actually become pregnant.’

‘I’ve read about the procedure,’ Stella commented, resorting to practicality in an attempt to lower the emotional intensity level a little. ‘But what is actually involved?’

‘What is involved is that a healthy, young fertile woman is tricked into believing that her voluntarily given eggs are going to be donated to another young woman,’ Nicki told them angrily before Maggie could respond.

‘The woman whose egg I received had made no stipulation about the age of any donee,’ Maggie informed them all quietly.

‘It’s a very big step to take,’ Alice said gently.

‘I know,’ Maggie agreed, with quiet dignity. ‘That was why I was counting on having your support, and your help.’

There was a look in her eyes that made Alice ache for her.

‘Of course we’ll help you,’ she assured her.

‘I’m sorry, but I just don’t want anything to do with this,’ Nicki exclaimed, finishing her wine and putting her glass down. Beneath her immaculate make-up her face looked strained.

‘Nicki,’ Alice intervened softly, ‘I’m sure that Maggie has considered everything.’

‘Has she?’ Nicki’s voice was cynical. ‘Or is she simply following another trend? What is it exactly that you want to prove, Maggie? Or can we guess? First a young lover, and then a baby. It’s all so easy for you, isn’t it? You just decide what you want and then you go out and buy it, whether it’s a new car, a new man, or a new life!

‘Has it occurred to you to wonder how this baby is going to feel when he or she gets laughed at and taunted at school for having such an old mother? Has it even occurred to you that you might not be there when he or she most needs you, when they reach their teens?’

Alice couldn’t bear to look at either Maggie or Nicki. The silence between them was bad enough, armed with spikily dangerous emotions. Stella, she could see, was frowning, and looking as though she was about to give them both a lecture.

Desperate to avert the disaster she could see looming Alice burst out frantically, ‘I’ve got some news to tell you all as well!’

‘Don’t tell us that you’re pregnant too!’ Stella demanded, giving her a wry look. ‘Mind you somehow in your case it wouldn’t be that surprising, Alice. You’ve always had that earth mother look about you, and as we all know your Stuart is very highly sexed!’

Whilst Alice blushed, Maggie made a brave attempt at a slightly crooked smile, but Nicki’s face still looked as though it had been turned to stone.

‘We always used to have to ring you before coming round, in case Stuart had slipped home and taken you to bed,’ Stella reminded her dryly.

‘Yes, he put a lock on the inside of the bedroom door to keep the children out,’ Maggie agreed.

‘Remember that water bed he wanted to buy?’

‘Stop it, all of you,’ Alice protested, but she was smiling now as well. ‘That was years ago, when we were young,’ she reproved them all mock primly. ‘Anyway, I’m not pregnant! It’s nothing like that. I’ve applied for and been accepted on an Open University course.’

There was a small silence whilst they all looked at her with varying degrees of amused kindness.

Because they thought her news wasn’t important, or because they thought that she simply did not have what it took to carry her plans through?

Why, when they were her friends, did she sometimes feel as though secretly, inwardly, they felt that she was inferior to them; that they treated her more as a junior member of their group than an equal? Why was it that people just never seemed to show respect for her and for her needs?

‘Goodness, Alice, if I’d known you’d got that kind of spare time I’d have co-opted you onto one of my committees,’ Stella was saying briskly.

‘What good news. I’m so pleased for you,’ Maggie offered warmly.

‘You’re a lot braver than I am,’ was Nicki’s slightly terse contribution. ‘I find it hard enough keeping up with Joey’s homework—just one of the pleasures of motherhood that’s going to come as quite a culture shock to you, Maggie,’ she added grimly.

‘Well, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time,’ Alice admitted, valiantly trying to ignore Nicki’s barbed comment. ‘More for my own satisfaction than anything else.’

Her own satisfaction; those years and that sense of self she had suddenly started feeling that her early marriage had robbed her of? Once she would have immediately expressed those feelings to the others, but now somehow she felt reticent about doing so, and about revealing her small dreams for their probably critical inspection. After all, they had hardly greeted her news with any degree of awe or admiration, had they? If anything, it had fallen rather flat.

‘I need the loo,’ Maggie announced, pink-faced, as she stood up. As she made her way across the restaurant she refused to allow herself to mourn the little daydreams she had been entertaining of having her friends reminisce about their pregnancies, bonding with her in her joy and excitement; teasing her for her shy uncertainty about things they were experts on.

Tensely Nicki watched her go.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said grimly to Alice and Stella. ‘You know I’m right! If Maggie had wanted to be a mother she had ample opportunity to do so when she was married to Dan. Look, I’m going to go. Here’s enough to cover my share of the bill,’ she told Stella, pushing some money towards her.

‘Nicki …’ Alice protested unhappily, but Nicki simply shook her head and got up.

‘Oh, dear,’ Alice sighed, watching her leave.

‘I can understand how she feels, but she did go a little bit over the top,’ Stella pronounced judicially. When Alice looked uncertainly at her, she explained, ‘The probabilities are that Maggie is having this baby for all the wrong reasons. She has always been inclined to be impetuous, we all know that. She should be acting her age.’

Alice frowned as she caught the note of angry bitterness in Stella’s voice. What was wrong with them all tonight? Why did they seem to be so at odds with one another?

‘It would be awful if Maggie and Nicki quarrelled,’ she said, searching Stella’s face for signs that she shared her anxiety and disquiet. ‘She and Maggie have always been so close. We’ve all always been so close. Our friendship is a very important part of all our lives, isn’t it?’ she pressed.

In the ladies’ room, Maggie ran cool water over her wrists and tried to compose herself.

Her face was burning with pain and anger. This was not how she had envisaged her news being received. There was no laughter or sense of closeness bonding the others to her now, Maggie recognised. And for Nicki, Nicki of all people, to react in the way that she had!

As she returned to their table Alice told her awkwardly, ‘Nicki said to say goodbye. She had to go. I think she was worried about Joey. He doesn’t like Laura, apparently.’

Alice was lying to her, Maggie knew. Nicki had left because of her! Because of her baby!

As though she sensed what she was feeling Alice told her, ‘Don’t be upset by what Nicki said, Maggie. You’ve given us all a shock and Nicki …’

‘And Nicki is the same age as me and the mother of a nine-year-old son, but, of course, it’s different for her. After all, we all know how much Nicki wanted to have children; she even stayed with that rat of a husband of hers long after she should have left because she wanted to conceive so much. Now there’s irresponsibility for you, if you like. Nicki was being physically abused by Carl, and we all suspected it, but she lied to protect him, and she would have had his child, even though the statistics she’s so fond of quoting prove that physically abusive men often abuse their children as well as their wives!’

‘Come on, Maggie. We understand how upset you are, but that’s not—’ Stella began.

‘It’s not what?’ Maggie demanded. ‘It’s not fair of me to criticise Nicki, but it’s perfectly acceptable for her to criticise me?’

‘Oh, Maggie,’ Alice begged unhappily. ‘That wasn’t what Stella was trying to say … We’ve been friends for so long, we can’t let a little thing like this—’

‘A little thing? Is that how you see my baby, Alice? As something little and unimportant? Is that how all of you see me? Well, let me tell you, this baby, Oliver’s baby, my baby, means more to me than anything else, and that includes your friendship!’

‘Maggie, calm down,’ Stella intervened. ‘This isn’t doing you or the baby any good. Look, let’s get the bill. Then we can all go home and sleep on things.’

‘Yes!’ Alice agreed with obvious relief. ‘You did say that you didn’t want to be late anyway, didn’t you, Stella?’

Outside the restaurant they exchanged their customary hugs and kisses, but Maggie could sense awkwardness and constraint in place of their usual closeness. And it was all her fault. At least, that was obviously what the other three thought!

‘You know, I can’t help thinking that Nicki might have a point,’ Stella commented as Alice drove out of the car park. ‘I mean, Maggie has never been maternal. And if she is doing this because of Oliver …’

‘She might never have said that she wanted children, Stella, but she was always terrific with ours. The twins in particular adored her. They thought she was so much fun.’

‘Fun, yes. Maggie has always been that,’ Stella agreed. Suddenly wanting to make amends to Alice for her earlier refusal to reassure and support her, she added reminiscently, ‘Remember our pop group—that was Maggie’s idea. A ground breaking all-girl band, even if we never made it beyond a couple of gigs at the local youth club. That was when you met Stuart, wasn’t it?’

‘Don’t remind me.’ Alice groaned. ‘Those outfits … and that make-up! The music lessons our parents paid for, delighted by our desire to learn an old-fashioned accomplishment!’

‘I know. My poor father’s face when he walked into the garage and found us practising with our electric guitars.’

As they both started to laugh Stella’s austere expression softened. ‘Those were good times …’ she had to acknowledge.

‘Mmm. We thought we were so wild and cool, and in reality compared with today’s youngsters, we were very naïve.’

‘We thought you were sophisticated when you and Stuart started going steady! How does he feel about you doing this Open University course? I know he spends a lot of time away …’

‘I haven’t told him about it yet,’ Alice confessed, starting to relax. This was better, more the kind of reaction she had expected, and Stella could always be relied on for her calm, practical advice. ‘You know how he’s always been, Stella,’ she said tentatively. ‘He’s a wonderful man, kind, generous, loving …’

‘But?’ Stella invited, recognising her cue. And her role?

Were things perhaps not as good in Alice’s marriage as they all assumed, Stella speculated inwardly. Certainly Stuart never made any secret of the fact that he had a high sex drive, and she had sometimes wondered if Alice ever tired of keeping up with a man who was so sexually demanding. Initially in a relationship no doubt having that kind of intensity focused on you was exciting and ego-boosting, but after thirty years of marriage?

‘But … But nothing.’ Alice shook her head.

It wasn’t fair to criticise Stuart behind his back, even to her closest friends. After all, what if she did sometimes find him over-controlling? And then patronising her because she was so dependent on him … Compared to the appalling life Nicki had had to suffer with Carl, though, she had nothing whatsoever to complain about.

‘Do you know,’ she told Stella, changing the subject, ‘I think that’s the first time Maggie has ever mentioned the way Carl abused Nicki.’

‘Well, it’s a subject none of us likes to talk about, isn’t it? I mean, we were there when they met, and when they got married, and none of us had any inkling of what he was really like. We saw Nicki every week, and yet none of us knew what he was doing to her, and we should have known.’

‘She felt too ashamed to tell us. Her self-esteem was so low she had begun to believe Carl when he told her that she was the one who made him hit her. It was Maggie who found out in the end, and who made her leave Carl, helped her.’

They were outside Stella’s house. Alice stopped the car.

‘What do you think we should do about Maggie and Nicki?’ she asked Stella hesitantly.

Stella’s reply was prompt and unequivocal.

‘Nothing! Except keep our fingers crossed and hope things sort themselves out.’

‘Do you honestly think that they will?’

As she opened the door of the car Stella turned to look at Alice. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, pulling the collar of her coat up around her neck against the chill of the sharp wind. Spring might only be several weeks away, but that didn’t alter the fact that right now they were still in winter.

Being optimistic too soon and with too little cause was never a good idea, even if someone like Maggie could never be brought to accept that fact!

4

‘Is Hughie back yet?’ Stella asked Richard, slipping off her coat and going to fill the kettle.

‘I heard him come in a few minutes ago. He went straight upstairs,’ Richard told her. ‘Pleasant evening?’

‘No!’

Putting down his paper, Richard looked at his wife. She had been a slightly bolshy, outspoken junior probation officer when he had first met her—they had both belonged to the same ramblers group—and he had courted her steadily for two years before asking her to marry him. His widowed mother had initially been slightly hostile towards her, but that hostility had melted when Stella had produced Hughie.

‘So what happened?’ he asked curiously.

Handing him the cup of tea she had just made him, Stella sighed. ‘Maggie announced that she’s pregnant!’

‘At her age!’ Richard looked appalled. Much as he loved Hughie he had never been a ‘hands on’ type of father, Stella reflected ruefully. Night-time feeds and nappy changing had all been left to her. Not that she had minded. If she was honest, the love she had felt for her son as a baby had been far more intense and passionate than the calm, relaxed emotion she felt for Richard. Which did not mean, of course, that she didn’t love him. She did.

‘I certainly wouldn’t want to be in that position,’ Richard told her.

‘Well, we aren’t likely to be, are we?’ Stella replied wryly.

She knew it was unfair of her to remind him of the growing infrequency of their sex life. He was after all fifty-seven, they had been married for twenty-seven years, and sex had never been high on their list of shared priorities anyway. And at her age …

But she and Maggie were the same age, she couldn’t help inwardly reminding herself. And the idea of Maggie deciding she was too old to merit a good sex life was as preposterous as … as Maggie’s pregnancy? And it wasn’t just Maggie, was it? There was Alice with Stuart, and Nicki with Kit. No, none of her friends lived a life where sex was reduced to a rare occurrence, that sometimes actually bypassed even ‘high days and holidays’. Only she was expected to be non-sexual and like it!

Her frown gave way to a smile as the door opened and Hughie came into the room.

She and Richard were both tall, but Hughie was over six feet three, his body well muscled from the rugby he played. To her, though, Stella acknowledged, there was still something that was almost little-boyish about his face at times.

‘Mum, have you and Dad got a minute?’ he asked.

He was nervous, Stella could see that. Automatically her stomach tightened. This was something Maggie was going to have to get used to, this never-ending, relentless awareness of the vulnerability of one’s child, coupled with the frightening realisation of how little one could do to protect them and keep them totally safe.

‘Of course. Do you want a cup of tea? I’ve just made some,’ she offered.

‘No. No … Look … there just isn’t any easy way to tell you this … I know you’re going to be … Julie is pregnant and the baby is mine.’

Somehow or other, Stella discovered that she was sitting down, whilst Richard in contrast was now standing up, his shock showing in his eyes as he stormed furiously, ‘What were you saying about him being intelligent? My God! How the hell much intelligence does it take to use a bloody condom?’

‘I did … It burst.’

Nicki could see the Adam’s apple moving in Hughie’s throat as he swallowed. He was still a boy, really. A baby. Her baby! A wave of fiercely protective maternalism struck her. He was looking at her, waiting for her to say something, his puppy dog eyes pleading with her … trusting her …

Trusting her, Stella recognised as she forced herself to bite back the words, Are you sure it’s yours?

Richard, though, felt no such restraint, or tact, she realised as she heard her husband bursting out with the words that were hammering inside her own head.

Instantly Hughie went white, his hands clenching as he stared accusingly at his father.

‘Of course I am sure. Julie was … I was her first,’ he mumbled, brick-red. ‘Not that it’s any of your business.’

‘Maybe not, but what is our business is that our son, our clever, clever son, has got his girlfriend pregnant while she is still at school and he is in his first year at university! I thought you told me it was virtually over between the two of you.’

Richard was shaking his head, as though he still couldn’t comprehend what he was hearing.

‘It was … it is.’

‘It’s over?’ Stella knew she would never totally understand the world of the modern young, where a couple could fall in love, and commit to one another sexually only to tire of the relationship within months, if not weeks, and decide to go their separate ways. It had been so different in her own day. ‘So … so what …?’

‘Our relationship is over,’ Hughie agreed. ‘But that does not alter the fact that I am the father of Julie’s baby. And naturally I want to do the right thing for them both,’ he added proudly.

‘Naturally,’ Stella agreed, a small spiky shoot of hope beginning to emerge through the shocked chaos of her anxiety.

‘Of course, Julie wants to have the baby.’

The spiky shoot withered.

‘Of course,’ Stella acknowledged hollowly. Well, they did, these modern girls, didn’t they?

‘I will have to help support it … financially, I mean.’

‘Yes, you damn well will,’ Richard told him savagely. ‘And if you think for one minute that I am going to put my hand in my pocket to pay for your—’

‘Richard!’ Stella interrupted him warningly. ‘Obviously, we’re still feeling the shock at the moment, Hughie, but tomorrow I think your father and I should get in touch with Julie’s parents to discuss things.’

‘No … you can’t. There isn’t any point.’

‘What? Why not?’ Stella asked.

‘Julie’s father refuses to accept what’s happened. He’s thrown Julie out. He says he never wants to see her again.’

‘What?’

Now Stella was shocked. She had seen enough of what could happen to girls under such circumstances during her probation service days to feel genuinely protective towards Julie, and outraged by her father’s attitude.

‘Well, where has she gone—where is she?’

‘Here,’ Hughie told them uncomfortably. ‘Upstairs in my room. Ma … what else could I do?’ he appealed to Stella. ‘She is my responsibility. They both are, at least until the baby is born. I couldn’t just leave her. I mean, it’s not as if she’s got any other family to go to!’

‘All right, Hughie. I understand. You’d better go upstairs and bring her down.’ Stella sighed.

As soon as the door had closed behind him Richard exploded. ‘No way. No way are we going to have her here. Stella …’

‘What else can we do?’ Stella asked him logically. ‘And anyway, I don’t imagine it will be for very long. Her father will probably come round. And since Hughie is the baby’s father, I feel—’

‘I doubt it, from what I know of him. He and I were both in a local “Think Tank Group” a couple of years ago. Originally he’s from somewhere in the North—a small, very strait-laced mining town. He’s still got an enclosed community mentality, he’s very narrow-minded—bigoted, I would say. He wasn’t a very popular member of our team, definitely got a chip on his shoulder from somewhere.’

Stella frowned. ‘I didn’t know you knew Julie’s father—you never said.’

Richard gave a brief shrug. ‘The project ended and we went our separate ways. Not the sort of chap one would want to keep in contact with, really. All I’m saying is that I wouldn’t think he’d be someone who would budge once he’d taken a stand over something. Bit of a soap-box operator when it comes to modern morals and so on. Likes to hold forth about the subject. He’ll consider Julie’s situation to be a serious loss of face.’

‘But that doesn’t alter the fact that she is his daughter …’

Stella stopped speaking as the kitchen door opened and Hughie ushered Julie in.

Dressed in baggy trousers and a huge loose top as she was, it was hard to tell that she was pregnant at all. Her face looked very pale, though, Stella acknowledged, and she could see the smudges of mascara on Julie’s cheeks where she had been crying.

In fact she looked as though she was about to start crying now, Stella recognised.

‘Julie, it’s all right,’ she said firmly, going up to the girl and putting her arms maternally around her. ‘Hughie has told us what’s happened. He says, though, that the relationship between the two of you is over … is that true?’

Ignoring the angry look Hughie was shooting her, Stella waited patiently for Julie’s reply. There was no way she wanted Julie to turn round at a later date and claim that Hughie had dropped her because she was pregnant. But, to her relief, Julie immediately nodded, her voice papery thin as she whispered, ‘Yes. I … we … I’m not going to keep the baby,’ she burst out tearfully, ‘but I couldn’t let my dad make me kill it and I know that’s what he would have tried to do.’

She was sobbing in earnest now, and Stella tried to calm her down.

‘Julie, it’s all right,’ she said reassuringly. ‘No one is going to hurt your baby. When is it due, by the way?’ she asked. ‘Do you know?’

‘Three months.’

Stella thought she must have misheard her.

‘Three months,’ she repeated. ‘No … I don’t think …’

‘It’s three months!’ Julie insisted stubbornly, shaking her head and begging Hughie, ‘You tell her.’

As she saw the confirmation in Hughie’s eyes Stella frantically grappled with the enormity of what she was facing.

‘Julie! Your parents … When did you tell them?’ she asked uncertainly. Three months! Had Julie registered with a doctor? The hospital? Had she …?

‘When Hughie came home. I couldn’t tell them before. I was too frightened … and I didn’t want to tell anyone until I knew it would be too late for anyone to make me do … anything.’ Her voice was stubborn, her facial expression saying that she felt proud of her actions, like a small child who thought she had outwitted the adults around her. Stella’s heart sank even further.

And it was certainly too late for anyone to make her do anything now, Stella acknowledged. Julie was seventeen, six months pregnant and still at school, and her father had thrown her out. Stella closed her eyes.

‘What am I going to do? I can’t go home! My dad …’ Tears were brimming in the huge washed-out eyes.

‘What you’re going to do for the time being is stay here with us,’ Stella told her as calmly as she could, firmly taking control of the situation. Over Julie’s downbent head she saw the look of relief and hope that Hughie was giving her, and her own eyes threatened to mist.

‘Thanks, Ma,’ he told her gruffly, coming over to give her a hug. ‘I told Julie you’d know what to do!’

Things would have to be sorted out with Julie’s parents, of course, a way found for her to go back home, but there was no point in them discussing that right now. Julie looked exhausted, and, now that she knew just how far advanced her pregnancy was, Stella felt seriously concerned for her.

Their house was an old Victorian three-storey one with plenty of bedrooms, and a granny suite on the top floor where Richard’s mother had lived whilst she had still been alive, so there was no problem in finding room for Julie. But the sooner she was back at home with her own family, the better, Stella resolved.

It was all very well for Hughie to face up to his responsibilities and to accept that he had them, but Julie’s parents had their responsibilities as well!

‘Mmm … I’ve missed you.’

‘I’ve only been gone for four hours,’ Maggie tried to protest, but Oliver was too busy kissing her to let her speak properly.

‘Four hours, fifteen minutes and several seconds,’ Oliver corrected her as he cupped her face and smiled down into her eyes.

Irresistibly his glance was drawn to her mouth. Maggie had the most wonderful, the most sexy, the most kissable mouth he had ever seen. In fact, so far as he was concerned, Maggie had the most wonderful, the most sexy, the most kissable, the most lovable everything any woman possibly could have.

‘How was The Club?’ he asked her teasingly as he drew her closer, one hand in the small of her back, the other resting on her still-flat stomach. ‘I suppose they’ve all rushed home to knit baby clothes.’

To his bemusement and her own chagrin, Maggie immediately burst into tears.

‘Baby hormones,’ she excused her reaction to Oliver, but as she said the words she could hear inside her head Nicki’s voice, taut with anger and contempt, insisting, ‘You can’t be pregnant!’

As he registered the brief look of betraying bleakness in her eyes, Oliver demanded gently, ‘Tell me what’s wrong.’

Maggie closed her eyes and took a deep, painful breath.

‘You are far too perceptive,’ she told him wryly.

‘We made a pact, Maggie,’ Oliver reminded her. ‘No game playing, no hidden agendas, no hidden anything between us.’ Lifting her hand to his lips and placing a kiss in her open palm, he added, ‘We agreed that our love deserves better than that.’

Now more tears were threatening her composure but for a different reason this time, brought on by a different emotion. Pain and joy—strange how in their intensity both could call forth the same physical response.

‘How could I ever forget us making that pact?’ Maggie answered him, her eyes luminous with her love.

Self-protection had been a necessity following the breakup of her marriage and had become a way of life for her. Strong, feisty, successful career women in their forties were vulnerable in a way that women one or two decades younger were not. All the more so when, like Maggie, they broke one of society’s taboos by falling in love with a younger man. Because of that, Maggie was very protectively careful of her emotional responses. It was rare for her to make such an open admission of her feelings. That alone was enough to alert Oliver to the fact that something—or somebody—had seriously hurt her.

‘Tell me,’ he insisted.

‘It’s Nicki,’ Maggie admitted shakily. ‘She hates the idea of me having this baby.’

‘She what?’ Oliver frowned. He knew how important Maggie’s friends were to her; he had heard the full history of their relationship, their shared traumas, and the way they had always supported and protected one another. He knew too how excited Maggie had been about telling them the news, and he could see beneath the brittle bravery of her smile just how hurt and shocked she was.

‘She says that I’m too old,’ Maggie told him. ‘She says that I’m depriving another younger woman of the chance to have a child. She says that I’m doing it to … to keep you—’

‘To keep me!’ Oliver interrupted her. ‘Maggie, there is no way on this earth that you could ever or will ever get rid of me. You know that. You know how much you mean to me. How much I love you. You know what I think … what I believe.’ He looked at her, holding her gaze with his own. ‘You … us … our love, they are my destiny, Maggie. You are the woman I have longed for all my adult life. If one of us deserves to be accused of holding the other to our love via our baby, then that one is me.’

Maggie felt the tight lump of anguish inside her easing. This conviction that Oliver had, and spoke so naturally and easily to her about, that he had been destined to love her, which he made sound so down-to-earth, so much an irrefutable fact, was something she simply could not discuss with anyone else. Because she was afraid she, they, Oliver would be laughed at?

Her friends were mature women and mature women did not believe in fate. Or that love could transcend time, cross the generation barrier? Why? Because she herself dared not allow herself to believe it, no matter what Oliver might say? Because she suspected that had any other man but Oliver spoken to her in such a vein she would have dismissed him as being some daydreaming crank?

‘Nicki’s main concern is that I’m not aware of the problems of being an older mother. She says she can’t understand how I can claim to want a child now when I refused to have one with Dan.’

Now it was her turn to look into Oliver’s eyes.

‘Isn’t it time you told her the truth about that?’ he suggested gently.

Restlessly Maggie moved away from him.

‘It isn’t as straightforward as that. Nicki has always thought a lot of Dan. He was her friend before he and I started dating. She actually introduced us. I don’t want to …’

‘Destroy her illusions?’ Oliver supplied.

He had a habit of lifting one eyebrow when he asked a question and Maggie found herself wondering if it was a mannerism his son or daughter would inherit. Just to think about the coming baby made her heart turn over and melt with love and yearning.

‘Which do you least want to destroy, Maggie? Her illusions or your friendship? Which do you think she values the more? Which would be most important to you? Don’t you think she might even feel a little insulted to know that you believed both her friendship and her ego to be so fragile? Or are you afraid that she will be offended that you have withheld the truth from her for so long?’

‘It wasn’t a deliberate decision,’ Maggie defended herself. ‘And it wasn’t so much that I wanted to withhold the truth from my friends …’

‘No, what you wanted to do—your prime concern,’ Oliver emphasised, ‘was to protect Dan.’

‘It wasn’t his fault that he was infertile,’ Maggie protested. ‘He was devastated when we learned that the problem lay with him …’

‘So devastated that he went out and had an affair!’ Oliver agreed dryly.

‘Oliver, you aren’t being fair! Try to put yourself in his position. He desperately wanted us to have children. He had always wanted to have a family, and when nothing happened, he was wonderfully supportive of me.’

‘Until he found out that he was the one who couldn’t give you a child and not the other way round.’

‘I think he had the affair to … to test out what he had been told,’ Maggie responded quietly. ‘I think it was a form of denial, coupled with a feeling of shock and bereavement, of grieving … and that afterwards he simply couldn’t bear to stay with me because of the destruction of the hopes we had both shared for so long and because …’

‘Because you knew the truth,’ Oliver inserted grimly.

‘Because he was afraid that my love might become pity,’ Maggie corrected him gently.

‘How long is it since he left you, Maggie?’ Oliver demanded.

Would it ever go away, this tiny, gritty piece of jealousy over the man who had shared so much of her life before him; who had had so much of her, with her, before him? He knew how much she had loved her husband and how much she had suffered when their marriage had broken up, but his anger against Dan went deeper than jealousy. Dan was, so far as Oliver was concerned, responsible not just for hurting Maggie, but for undermining her, for letting her take the blame for the failure of their marriage and, even more importantly, for their failure to have children.

Maggie watched Oliver warily. In her younger days she knew she would have been tempted to feel flattered by such evidence of jealousy, but Dan was an important part of her past and of herself, and not even to please Oliver could she deny what she and Dan had once shared. What they had once shared … but what about her ongoing protection of him?

That was merely a habit, and nothing more, Maggie immediately reassured herself. But nonetheless, Oliver had raised an issue that Maggie knew she ought to deal with.

No matter what she might have said in the heat of her distress earlier, the friendship she shared with the others meant far too much for her to see it damaged. Nicki’s reaction to her news had hurt her, yes, but that did not mean that she no longer valued what they shared.

She could tell Nicki that, but somehow she did not feel able to tell her the truth about Dan. Why? To protect Nicki, or to protect her ex-husband?

‘I’m sorry,’ she heard Oliver apologising ruefully.

A little guiltily Maggie shook her head. Oliver had obviously mistaken her absorbed silence in her own thoughts for anger and punishment.

Immediately she went towards him, leaning her head on his chest and wrapping her arms as far around him as she could. He had done so much for her; given her so much. After Dan she had believed there would never be another man she could love, another man who would love her enough to heal the pain of her loss.

‘You should tell Nicki,’ Oliver was insisting.

‘I think there’s more to her reaction than just the fact that Dan and I never had children,’ Maggie responded. ‘I’m concerned about her, Oliver. She was so wrought up, so … so unlike her normal self.’

‘Maybe so, but my concern is all for you and our baby,’ Oliver informed her.

Their baby … The baby her best friend felt she had no right to have!

These years of their lives they were going through now were, Maggie knew, a very, very dangerous rite of passage; a rite of passage that in many ways had become the last female taboo.

Maggie felt strongly that it was the responsibility of her own generation—the generation that had so successfully pushed back so many boundaries, and gifted so many freedoms to the decades of women following in their footsteps—to take up this challenge as they had done so many others.

This treacherous passage across the turbulence of the deep, dangerous emotional waters of these years were in their way as traumatic and life-defining as, perhaps even more so than, those of being a teenager.

Certainly no one—as far as she knew—wrote witty diaries featuring the hormone-induced miseries of her age group. Women of a ‘certain age’, to use a phrase that Maggie detested, had, it seemed, to be divided into two very different groups: those who clung gamely or ridiculously to the wreckage of their youth (depending on which paper and magazines one read) or those who simply opted to disappear and become ‘past it’ secondary people, useful only for the support they gave to others.

But why should this be the case? Maggie questioned. Where was it written down that it had to be so? Was it that women stripped of their youth but left with their power were such a strong force that they had to be mocked and reviled, taunted and made to feel that they were now second-class citizens? Maggie didn’t know. What she did know was that she was there in the vanguard, holding her breath, cheering on her own generation, waiting to see if they could perform the same transformation on this age that they had performed on every other they had passed through.

Her peers, her co-baby boomers, bulge yearers, were an awesomely powerful force, a huge wave of humanity, conceived in hope and celebration, a generation born into peace and prosperity, given unique gifts by their parents and their memories of those who had sacrificed their lives and freedoms.

Truly, if one wanted to look at it in such a way, a very special ‘Fairy Godmother’ had stood silently, rejoicing and hoping, in the wings at their births.

They’d been sprung free of the destructive trap of war that had snared their parents and grandparents, and no limits had been set on what they could achieve or what they could be.

Their lives had been a whole new learning curve for humanity, and, yes, there had been mistakes, foolishness, vanity, but also there had been spectacular life-changing, life-enhancing steps forward, ‘giant leaps’ for mankind of many different types, and this, their move forward into something so reviled and feared by folklore, was surely in its own way one very giant leap.

Get it right and, not just her own sex, but men and women alike of future generations would only look back in fond amusement that there could ever have been a time when a woman’s fiftieth birthday was something she suffered in fear and shame. Get it wrong and they would be consigning not just themselves, but heaven alone knew how many future generations to a life as medieval in its way as that of refusing to allow women to learn to read and write.

And, Maggie felt, it was men like Oliver who would share and rejoice in her sex’s crossing of this Styx-like river of fear.

The change of life! It was a turbulent and on occasion even frightening time, no one could deny that, but the strength it took to grow through it was life-enhancing and life-giving. Maggie knew far more about herself and her needs, her realities now than she had ever done as a girl. The things she had taken for granted then were infinitely more precious to her now, and those precious things included her friends. And her memories.

That her fellow humans had given her this chance to have the child she had so much yearned for, and with the right man, was surely something that should be celebrated, a glorious, wonderful gift that she had made a vow to appreciate and treasure, to love and send out into the world knowing how generously and with how much love he or she had been given life.

‘Let’s go to bed,’ Oliver was whispering sexily in her ear.

Maggie hid a small smile. How many times in the early days of their marriage had she and Dan exchanged those very words? Young lovers did make up in bed. And Oliver was young—at least compared to her. On the list of dos and don’ts they had been given by the clinic had been the information that sex was okay, so long as they were careful.

When she had learned about Dan’s affair her sex drive had deserted her completely, and she had believed that it had gone for good, destroyed by her pain, until Oliver had shown her otherwise! With him she had discovered the zest and excitement she remembered from her youth; she had relearned the pleasure of being physically loved, of giving and sharing that love. And she had also learned that perhaps the strongest aphrodisiac in the world was to be loved and desired by someone who simply wanted to put her needs first.

Dan had been a sexy, skilful, passionate lover, but it was Oliver who had shown her what sensitivity could bring to desire.

‘Mmm …’ she agreed, her eyes glinting with tenderness and teasing as she added insouciantly, ‘They did say at the clinic that I should make sure I got enough sleep.’

‘Sleep. That wasn’t …’

As she started to laugh Oliver grinned at her.

‘Okay, but just you wait until later,’ he mock threatened her as they went upstairs, their arms around one another.

The sight of Stuart’s car parked outside the house as she stopped her own made Alice’s stomach clench a little. She had known he was due to return home this evening, but she had not been sure when.

The others had thought it very glamorous when she had first met Stuart and she had learned that he was an airline pilot, and if she was honest so had she! He had stood out dramatically amongst the boys who formed part of their extended crowd of friends, tall, tanned from his stopovers abroad, blue-eyed, blond-haired and so good-looking that Alice had wondered why on earth he’d been singling her out.

‘Because you are stunningly pretty, and good and sweet, and he’s fallen in love with you, stoopid,’ Nicki teased her gently.

‘Yeah, and he’s seen how sexy you look in those hot pants.’ Maggie laughed, ignoring Alice’s pink-cheeked protests.

The outfits Maggie insisted they wore for their ‘gigs’, Alice suspected, got them far more attention than their music.

Stuart obviously thought so, because one of the first things he did was ask her not to wear them.

‘There’s only one man I want you to look sexy for and that’s me!’ he told her with the same dizzyingly masterful maturity with which he swept her off her feet.

Stuart no longer flew commercial flights. Instead he worked for the airline as an instructor, flying only as a relief pilot when necessary, which was what he had recently been doing.

‘Don’t you ever worry about him … I mean, mixing with all those air stewardesses?’ She was asked that question so many times over the years that she had her response off pat. A smile, a gentle laugh and small shake of her head. But of course she worried. Especially in the early years of their marriage. Stuart was after all a highly sexed man. But he was also a man who showed in many different ways that he loved her.

This house, for instance, that he insisted on buying when they first knew that her second pregnancy was twins. She was horrified at the cost of it—a very large detached house, set in its own immense garden, with an adjacent paddock. She protested that they could not possibly afford it, but Stuart was equally insistent that he wanted them to have it.

When the twins arrived, Stuart changed his own expensive car for a much smaller model and bought her a top-of-the-range four-wheel drive so that she could transport the children in comfort and safety. Zoë’s riding lessons and her pony and all the other extracurricular activities the children wanted, Stuart paid for without complaint. The allowance he insisted on giving her was a generous one, and the presents he brought her back from his trips drew the envious admiration of her friends.

No, Stuart never neglected her either in bed or out of it, something for which, if the stories she heard from other women were to be believed, she ought to be extremely grateful. And of course she was.

But the house, the allowance, the car, all of them were things she sometimes felt she would gladly have bartered just for the opportunity to sit down with Stuart and talk to him, to have her opinions sought and valued, to feel that he regarded her as an equal partner in their relationship, and that she mattered to him not because she was his wife, but because she was herself!

He was in the kitchen when she walked in, still an extraordinarily handsome man, his thick once-blond hair silver-grey now, the reading glasses he still pretended he did not really need adding an extra touch of subtle sexuality to his features. He always had been and always would be the kind of man who drew women’s glances, and, although he might deny it, Alice knew that there was that little touch of vanity in his make-up that meant that he needed their female recognition of his maleness.

As he saw her he shuffled the papers he had been reading and stood up.

‘Have you been in long?’ Alice asked.

‘A couple of hours. When I realised it was your night out with the others, I went down to the gym for an hour.’

Unlike her, Stuart was something of a gym fanatic, his body still lean and muscular. Alice had at one stage endeavoured to become more exercise conscious, but Stuart had laughed at her, refusing to take her seriously.

‘I love you just the way you are,’ he had told her fondly, spoiling his compliment slightly by adding, ‘Every single bit of you!’

He looked tired, Alice recognised, but diplomatically she did not say so. She had learned early on in their relationship that Stuart hated to admit to any kind of vulnerability or weakness, no matter how small. She suspected that this had a lot to do with the fact that his father had been a high-achieving, very macho man, a Second World War fighter pilot, decorated for bravery and revered by his wife and Stuart’s three older sisters. Stuart had been reared in a family where his maleness had elevated him to almost godlike status, but the price for this had been that he’d never been allowed to show himself as mortal.

Her own father had fought in the same war, but the experience had affected his nerves in some way, and Alice could remember her mother’s constant anxiety that Alice did not make too much noise or do anything that might upset her father, around whom their small household had revolved every bit as much as Stuart’s had revolved around his.

To some extent Alice knew that she and Stuart had repeated this pattern. Stuart’s job had meant that when he had been at home there had been times when she had automatically kept the children away from him so that he could catch up on his sleep. Times when she had in a number of small ways protected Stuart from the children and the children from him!

So, rather than commenting on his tiredness, and mindful of the news she had to give him about her plans, she said instead, ‘I’m glad you’ve got some leave days now—’

‘I wish!’ Stuart interrupted her grimly. ‘I’ve got a series of meetings coming up in the city.’

He had his back to her as he was speaking and Alice suddenly had the feeling that for some reason he didn’t want her to see his face. A tiny sharp spike of unease touched her, like the beginnings of an unwanted spot, as yet unseen, but still felt beneath the outer skin.

And yet there was no reason for her to feel like that. Stuart was frequently away on business after all. Perhaps it was because she had been building herself up to telling him about her OU plans, waiting for the right moment. Yes, that was probably what it was, she reassured herself.

‘How long do you think you will be away?’

‘For heaven’s sake, Alice, I just don’t know. As long as it takes, however long that is. What is this anyway? What’s all the fuss about?’

His irritation made her clench her stomach muscles defensively.

‘I wasn’t making a fuss,’ Alice protested. ‘It’s just that … Well, there was something I wanted to discuss with you.’

‘If it’s about that idiot you hired who claimed he was a gardener, then we don’t need to discuss anything. Sack him.’

‘Stuart, it isn’t about the garden! It’s—it’s about me!’

Now that she had his attention, Alice felt her apprehension increasing.

‘You?’ He was frowning. ‘What do you mean it’s about you? Look, Alice, can’t we leave this for another time? Right now the last thing I want or need is an in-depth discussion on anything!’

He was getting annoyed, Alice recognised silently, registering all the tell-tale signs.

Her heart sank, but she was not going to back down.

‘No, we can’t leave it, I’m afraid, Stuart. It’s too important for that. I … I’ve enrolled for an Open University degree course.’

‘What?’

He was, Alice noticed, staring at her blankly, as though he hadn’t properly taken in what she had said.

‘I thought you said it was something important,’ he challenged her. ‘For God’s sake, Alice! Don’t you ever listen to anything I say? I’ve just told you that I’m up to my eyes in it at work and you’re prattling on about some blasted college course.’

Alice could feel her stomach muscles clenching, but not this time with tension. She very seldom got angry, it just wasn’t in her nature, but right now …

‘You don’t mind, then?’ she asked him quietly.

‘Mind?’ He gave a brief, almost contemptuous shrug. ‘I don’t really see the point, but it’s your choice.’

‘Yes,’ Alice agreed even more quietly. ‘It is.’

Changing the subject, she questioned, ‘You said you could be away for a few days?’

‘Yes.’ Stuart had turned away from her and was reshuffling his papers. His voice sounded muffled and strained.

‘It’s the way things are these days, Alice. It’s something to do with a new policy decision. Even you must surely be aware of the changes the aviation industry is undergoing? The pressures on it? I mean, you do read something in the papers, don’t you, other than the women’s pages? God knows we get enough of them, judging by the bill.’

Alice stared at his white-shirt-covered back, the words of rebuttal and anger log-jamming in her throat in their furious need to be heard, but protectively she held them back.

Stuart was normally a calm, logical man—his job meant that he had to be—but just occasionally he could explode into undeserved and lacerating verbal criticism that was as unprovoked as it was unfair. Backing him into a corner or demanding an apology only resulted in him retreating into an iron-hard sulk, from which she would patiently have to coax him and right now … Right now she simply did not feel like doing any such thing!

‘You’ll never guess what happened this evening,’ she said calmly instead, going to fill the kettle. ‘Maggie told us that she’s pregnant. She gave us all a shock, especially Nicki.’

Alice tensed as Stuart came up behind her, wrapping his arms around her and nuzzling the side of her neck.

‘You never change, do you, Alice?’ he told her as he bit sensually into her skin, oblivious to her rigid tension. ‘We could be invaded by green men from outer space and you would still be more concerned about your own little life.’

Alice could hear the familiar note of mockery in his voice. It seemed to her sometimes that Stuart had spent most of their married lives mocking her or putting her down in one way or another.

‘Come on,’ Stuart demanded. ‘Let’s go to bed. I’ve missed you.’

Just for a second Alice was tempted to refuse, to pull away from him, but he was already taking hold of her hand and tugging her towards the hall door. To challenge him to dare to mock her again! But typically she stopped herself.

And, after all, what was the point in deliberately creating a difficult mood between them? Didn’t it make more sense to give in, to keep him happy? Wasn’t that what her mother had always taught her by example? As she had taught Zoë. That men were people who needed to be pandered to and coaxed, pampered and protected. That either they or their love or both simply weren’t strong enough to bear reality …

‘You prefer the twins, you always favour them!’ How often had Zoë accused her of that? Had she ‘favoured’ them or had she in reality done them anything but a favour?

The others considered her to be a perfect mother, a role model, but what was a ‘perfect’ mother?

‘Where did you eat?’ Stuart was asking her.

‘The new wine bar. The food’s Italian,’ Alice replied.

As Stuart kissed her he smiled. ‘And you didn’t have garlic! Good girl!’

Good girl! Alice could feel her jaw tensing and her body chilling. But Stuart was as oblivious to the signals her body was sending out as he was to the fact that he was patronising her, Alice recognised.

‘No, leave the light on. Please,’ Oliver demanded softly as Maggie swung her legs out of their bed and at the same time reached out to dim her bedside lamp.

It had been Dan who had encouraged her to sleep naked, but, despite the praise Oliver heaped on her body and their lovemaking, she was still self-consciously uncomfortable about him seeing her unclothed in a way she had not been with Dan. Because she was older than Oliver and her body was no longer that of a young girl?

‘I’m only going to the bathroom,’ she told him.

‘Why is it that you always want to hide yourself from me, Maggie?’ Oliver asked her quietly. ‘I love looking at your body. I love looking at you.’

He watched as she veiled her expression from him, dropping her lashes. She had so many small endearing habits that entranced him. She called herself old, but she wasn’t. Her body was slender but softly curved, her skin creamily pale—as a redhead, she had told him ruefully, she had never been able to sunbathe successfully. The natural curves of her body aroused him in a way that shrunk, dieted-down, or unnaturally enhanced supposedly ‘perfect’ female figures never could.

When they had first become lovers he had tried to persuade her to wear soft loose clothes—and no underwear. Although she had tried to hide it, he had seen from her expression that he had shocked her. A little grimly, he had reflected then that at least there was something that she had not experienced with her ex-husband. His request had not been motivated by anything demeaning or controlling, but simply by his overwhelming feelings of love for her. Just to watch her move, just to see her lift her hand and grab at her wild curls—a habit she had—and to see her body move naturally and sensually flooded him with appreciation and desire. And now knowing that her body was holding and nurturing their child added a dimension to those feelings, to his love, that ran so deep and so powerfully that it went way beyond anything he had ever imagined he might experience.

In the bathroom Maggie looked silently into the mirror as Oliver’s reflection joined her own. Standing behind her, he wrapped his arms around her, bending his head to breathe in the scent of her skin.

‘I love you, Maggie,’ he murmured to her as he turned her round and kissed her. A slow, gentle, gifting kiss that melted away her hesitation.

‘I love you too,’ she answered, and meant it. How could she not love him? She closed her eyes as he stroked her skin. His hands cupped her breasts, his mouth caressing her throat. Desire ran through her veins, hot, heavy, drugging. In the mirror she could see her breasts swelling and lifting, her nipples taut. This pregnancy would change her body for ever. In about eight months a baby would be suckling greedily on the nipples Oliver was now gently plucking. The thought made her tremble with awe and excitement.

Here, protected by Oliver’s love and desire, she could ignore the outside world, but she knew that Nicki wouldn’t be the only person to criticise her.

There had been an increasingly antagonistic reaction to pregnancies like hers in the press over recent months, a passionately attacked and defended debate on the moral implications of such situations.

The irony of what she was doing was not lost on Maggie. As a girl, her generation had made full use of the contraceptive pill to prevent and delay pregnancy, thus interfering with the cycle of nature. And now that same generation was interfering with nature once again, only this time …

She heard Oliver groan as he reached for her hand and placed it against his body.

His erection was hard, his penis bulging and full, the veins standing out against his skin—a young man’s erection. The sight of it made her shiver with sensuality. Slowly she caressed him with her fingers, fiercely barricading her mind, her memory against the intrusion of another life and another man.

Without releasing him she knelt down and took him slowly and skilfully into her mouth, caressing the head of his penis with her lips as she savoured the taste and feel of him before sliding her tongue along its stiff length.

Above her Oliver groaned out loud, burying his hands in her hair without constraining her, allowing her the freedom to dictate their intimacy.

Still holding him, Maggie licked teasingly around the distended head of his erection, using her lips and tongue to deliberately make him shudder with need before she took him back in her mouth. Holding him in its wet warmth, she caressed him with increasing intensity, taking him deeper and deeper, relishing the feel and taste of his flesh in this the most intimate of lover’s ways. As she had known he would, he withdrew from her before he came, finding her own wetness with gentle fingers before he eased himself carefully into her.

No matter how often they made love it always surprised her that she climaxed so quickly and easily with him. Somehow it was as though the deepest part of herself and her body refused to accept the shackles of inhibition imposed by a society that said that she ought to feel ashamed of the maturity of her body.

Oliver had gathered her up before he entered her, supporting her body, and now as he let her slide back down to the floor he paused for a moment before finally releasing her to kiss her mouth with deeply tender passion.

In the early days of their courtship when she had often refused to allow him to give her oral sex, he had demanded, ‘Why won’t you let me?’

Somehow she couldn’t explain to him that for her generation such an act from a man to a woman had been a much rarer pleasure than it was for his generation; a gift given on special days, at heightened moments of desire, rather than an accepted part of a familiar lovemaking ritual.

‘I love the taste of you, the feel of you, the desire of you,’ Oliver had told her passionately. ‘Please don’t deny those pleasures to me, Maggie.’

Hand in hand they went back to their bed, Oliver insisting on tucking her carefully beneath the duvet before joining her.

‘Forget about Nicki and the others,’ he whispered to her as he kissed her goodnight.

Forget? Maggie wished that were possible!

‘Stuart …’

In the darkness of their bedroom, Alice tried to reach for Stuart’s hand, but he pulled away from her, turning over, his back to her.

‘Leave it, will you, Alice?’ he demanded brusquely. ‘For God’s sake, let’s not have an in-depth inquest. So I lost a bloody erection! So what? It happens all the time. You making a drama out of it isn’t going to alter anything.’

Her making a drama out of it? Alice suppressed her desire to point out to him that she hadn’t particularly wanted to have sex in the first place and that he had been the one to suggest it.

But she could feel Stuart’s tension, and instinctively she wanted to comfort him. To reassure him, to reach out and hold him; but just as instinctively she knew he would not want her to. She could feel how shocked and disbelieving he was.

On his own side of the bed, Stuart lay staring into the darkness. Never once in all the years they had been married had he suffered an erection failure. Never. Ever.

His eyes burned as though they were filled with grit, his body gripped by tension and a sickening sense of powerlessness. He knew why it had happened, of course. Of course! How could he not? It didn’t need a series of expensive counselling sessions with a shrink to tell him. The miracle was perhaps that it hadn’t happened before!

From his childhood he could hear his father’s voice exhorting him, ‘Be a man, Stuart.’

Be a man! His father had been a man. A very special man. Stuart had known all the time he was growing up that he could never hope to rival him, that his father belonged to a rare and exclusive club whose doors would be for ever barred to him. His father was, after all, a hero and he had the medals to prove it; the medals, and the stories, the reminiscences and tales of comrades who had not possessed his own luck and who had perished.

Stuart could still vividly remember how different his father had been when he had got together with his ex-comrades. At home he had been a distant, commanding figure, constantly exhorting Stuart to live up to his maleness. He had died shortly after the twins had been born.

‘A man needs sons, Stuart,’ he had pronounced approvingly after their birth. Sons … another marker of a man’s maleness.

It was all rubbish, of course, and his views would be ridiculed now—Stuart knew that. Men and women were equal now. Equal …

Stuart closed his eyes against the burning pain seizing him. Just for a second he longed to bury himself against Alice’s sleepy warmth, to take comfort from her and be comforted by her, but how could he, when he knew …?

What was she going to say when she found out? Would she despise him? Reject him? Blame him for letting her down?

Could he blame her if she did? He had tried to prevent it happening, but all the time, from the first moment he had met Arlette Salcombe, he had known it was inevitable. That single look between them, that meeting of glances. He had known then. And now there was no way out and no way back!

5

‘What do you mean, a man telephoned asking for me?’ The anger in Laura’s voice made Joey cower away from her.

‘What man, Joey?’ Laura demanded. ‘What did he say?’ She could feel the heat in her face. Her heart was hammering against her chest, driven by anger. Anger and not excitement, no way was she going to allow it to be excitement.

Her fingers curled into her palms, making tight fists. It had to be Ryan. It couldn’t possibly be anyone else. He must have got the number from Human Resources. He had no right to ring her. No right to …

‘What did he say? Did he tell you his name?’ Her voice rose, sharpening with each word, frightening Joey even more. He had intuitively picked up on Laura’s antagonism towards his mother and that increased his fear of her.

‘Did he tell you his name?’ Laura was shouting now, too wrapped up in her own fear to be aware of Joey’s. Right now he was just an irritating child who, through either malice or stupidity, was refusing to give her the information she so desperately needed.

‘Joey?’ Laura exploded, grabbing hold of him and giving him an impatient little shake before she could stop herself. Almost immediately she released him, but it was too late. Just as she did so Nicki walked into the kitchen.

‘Let go of him! Let go of him, Laura!’

Furiously Nicki rushed to protect her son, kneeling down to gather him up in her arms as Laura released him.

‘How dare you? How dare you touch my child?’ she blazed. ‘Joey, it’s all right, it’s all right, you’re safe now,’ she comforted her son, rocking him in her arms as Laura looked on in a mixture of contempt and bitterness.

‘That’s right!’ she threw at Nicki. ‘You rush to protect your precious child—but you can’t always be here to protect him, Nicki. After all, I haven’t forgotten that there was no one to protect me from you!’ Instinctively Laura tried to defend herself and her actions.

‘What? I never did anything to hurt you!’ Nicki denied immediately.

‘You’re lying,’ Laura spat out, giving her a thin-lipped, acid smile. ‘But then you would, wouldn’t you? Anyway, for your information, I wasn’t hurting Joey. And if I were you, instead of treating him like a baby, I’d spend a bit more time making sure he knows how to take a telephone message properly.’

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Joey protested from the comfort of Nicki’s arms. ‘The man didn’t say any name. He just asked if you were here.’

Laura had been terrifying her son half to death simply because of a phone call? Nicki’s mouth compressed.

‘Whoever he is, Laura, if he wants to speak to you enough he will ring back.’

Laura’s face burned even hotter as Nicki made no attempt to conceal the smugly superior tone of her voice. Immediately she reacted to it, saying fiercely, ‘It’s typical of you to think what you’re obviously thinking, but you’re wrong. I don’t want him to ring back. In fact, I don’t want to speak to him at all. To speak to him or to see him. You see, unlike you, I have no intention of becoming involved in an affair with a married man or having sex with him behind his wife’s back.’

As she listened to Laura’s outburst Nicki’s face went white. Releasing Joey, she told him huskily, ‘Joey, go up to your room and watch your videos for a while before it’s time for school, will you, darling?’

Over Joey’s blond head their glances fought, neither of them allowing herself to give way. As soon as the door had closed behind Joey Nicki demanded, ‘What is it exactly that you’re trying to say, Laura?’

Laura shot her a bitterly cynical glare, hating what was happening but powerless to stop it. The words, the pain, the anguish had been dammed up inside her for too long to be controlled, now that she had released them.

‘What do you think I’m trying to say? You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. And don’t bother trying to lie about it. I was there! I heard you. They’d sent me home from school because I wasn’t feeling well. I tried to tell them that there wasn’t any point because there wasn’t anyone there to look after me.’ She gave a mirthless smile. ‘After all, my mother had only been taken into hospital a few days earlier. To give my father a rest, that’s what they’d said when I went to see her. But it wasn’t a rest he was getting, was it, Nicki? He wasn’t resting on the bed in the guest room at all, was he? No. He was lying there whilst you—’

‘Stop it.’ Appalled and sick with shock, Nicki covered her ears, her shock increasing as Laura flew at her, tearing her hands from her ears as she screamed.

‘No! You will listen, just as I had to listen to the pair of you! Have you any idea how disgusting it sounds hearing your own father sobbing with sickening lust whilst his whore relieves him? I heard every word. Every sound … every sound,’ Laura stressed savagely.

Tears of rage were pouring down her face—a face that was contorted into an expression of fury and loathing, the strength of the emotion emanating from her such that Nicki could almost feel it heating the air between them.

In contrast she felt icy cold with shock. She could feel herself shivering as the nausea churned unpleasantly in her stomach. She tried to defend herself, to stop the flood of obscenity pouring from Laura’s mouth, protesting, ‘Laura, it wasn’t like that! You don’t understand …’

‘No, I don’t!’ Laura agreed furiously. ‘I don’t understand how my father could have possibly wanted to take you to bed in my home, my mother’s home, whilst she was dying in a hospital bed. I don’t understand how he can ever have wanted to touch you, never mind do the things he did to you.

‘You couldn’t wait, could you, Nicki? You wanted to desecrate my home, my mother, so badly that you couldn’t even wait for him to undress you. I heard you begging him, screaming to him to take you, to fill you. I heard him … My mother was dying and the pair of you were shagging each other like animals. You couldn’t wait for her to die, could you, Nicki? You couldn’t wait to take her place. You didn’t wait, did you?’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Nicki protested, white-faced. ‘Laura, please listen to me.’

‘Listen to you?’ She gave a mirthless laugh. ‘That’s what he wants me to do! My boss … the reason I have had to come here, the one place where I know I’ll be able to resist the temptation to give in to him, because you’re here, Nicki, and every time I look at you I remember what you did and how much I hated you then and still hate you now for it.

‘A married man with a dying wife. Was it good for you, Nicki, knowing that she was dying? Did that add that extra bit of something to your enjoyment? Did you think of her when my father was—?’

Laura gasped in shock as Nicki slapped her face. The sound ricocheted through the kitchen as her head snapped back.

Her eyes glittering with contempt, Laura ran to the back door, pulling it open.

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