Lingering Shadows
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

EPILOGUE

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

‘SO, MY clever little brother has succeeded where our late father could not and has persuaded the Americans to cede manufacturing control of our medicines to us. And how did you manage that? By employing the same means you used to persuade our father to change his will in your favour?’

Beneath Wilhelm’s sneering contempt, Leo could hear the bitterness in his elder brother’s voice.

There was no point in reminding Wilhelm that he himself had been just as stunned, if not more so, to learn that their father had left outright control of the Hessler pharmaceutical corporation to him and not, as everyone had expected, to Wilhelm.

Leo relaxed his grip on the telephone receiver. He had flown in to Hamburg from New York earlier this morning and had gone straight to the Hessler Chemie offices from the airport, to report briefly to the board meeting he had had his assistant convene.

Wilhelm had not attended that meeting, but he had obviously heard what had happened.

Leo knew he had every right to be pleased with what he had achieved in New York, and every right to be annoyed with Wilhelm. Before he left his office to come home he had informed his assistant that he was not to be disturbed—by anyone.

So Wilhelm’s call was not welcome.

‘Father must have been out of his mind when he made that will,’ he heard Wilhelm claiming furiously now. ‘I was the one he wanted to take over from him. He always said so … I was always his favourite.’

Leo gritted his teeth, letting his brother’s vitriol pour viciously out of him.

His favourite. How many times when he was growing up had he heard those words from his brother? Leo wondered, when Wilhelm had finally hung up. How many times had he suffered the pain of paternal criticism and rejection, until he had finally realised that he had a right to define his own view of life; that there were other worlds, other values than those to which his father had laid claim?

He glanced tiredly at the telephone. He and Wilhelm had never really got on. There had always been rivalry and resentment between them; divisions which it had sometimes seemed to Leo their father had deliberately fostered. Wilhelm was obsessively, compulsively possessive. Perhaps it came from being the eldest child and from believing that he would always be an only child.

After all, with fourteen years between them, he had for the majority of his formative years been an only child. And certainly while he was growing up Leo had never been in any doubt as to who was their father’s favourite.

A weakling, his father had once called him as a child, although now, with his six-foot frame, Leo could hardly be regarded as weak. With his amber-gold eyes that matched the thick texture of his gold-brown hair, one of his lovers had once likened him to a lion. He possessed the same powerful fluidity of muscle and tone, she had said, the same sleek goldness, but, as she had also laughingly noted, without the lion’s desire to hunt and maim.

Certainly physically he took after his mother’s family, Leo acknowledged. Physically and, he sincerely hoped, mentally and emotionally as well. He wanted no part of any genetic heritage from his father. And no part of any material inheritance either?

He moved uncomfortably to the window, staring out towards the river. This was a quiet, affluent part of Hamburg, his tall, narrow and relatively small house squashed in between its much grander neighbours. It was an old house with creaking timbers and awkwardly shaped rooms.

Wilhelm had tried to get their father’s will overset on the grounds that he could only have made it if he had either gone insane or somehow Leo had blackmailed him into doing so.

The corporation’s lawyers had warned Wilhelm that it was a court case he could only lose, reminding him that right up until he had had his fatal heart attack their father had remained omnipotently in control of Hessler’s and his sanity.

Of course, it hadn’t helped that Leo had been the one to find him, collapsed on the floor of his study, but still alive … just. None of them had known he had a heart condition. He had kept it a secret. Leo had rung for an ambulance immediately, but seconds after he had replaced the receiver his father had suffered a second and fatal attack.

In those few seconds his father had spoken to him.

‘My son …’ he had said thickly. ‘My son.’

But there had been no love in the words. No love, only the same furious, bitter rejection Leo remembered so well from his childhood.

On the floor beside his father had been a small, battered locked deed box. The safe in the wall was unlocked, and the doctor had suggested that maybe the effort of removing the box from the safe had been what had triggered the first attack.

Leo wasn’t so sure. The box wasn’t heavy.

He turned round abruptly now. The box was still on his desk, where he had deposited it six weeks ago, intending to open it but somehow never being able to find the time.

Well, he had that time now, he reminded himself.

He looked at the box. This should have been Wilhelm’s task and not his.

Just as Hessler’s should have been Wilhelm’s … Just as their father’s love had always been Wilhelm’s. Or, rather, their father’s approval. He doubted if his father had ever loved anyone. He was simply not that kind of man. Why had he left control of Hessler Chemie to him, when for years he had been grooming Wilhelm to take his place? His new will had been dated shortly after their mother’s death.

Tiredly Leo reminded himself that there was no point in constantly asking himself questions he knew he could not answer.

He glanced at the deed box and frowned, his brain, freed briefly from the inevitable strain imposed upon it by his responsibility for Hessler’s, suddenly prodding him into a sharp awareness of the incongruity of the box’s shabbiness, of the fact that it had been on the floor alongside his father at the moment of his death.

Curiosity stirred inside him, curiosity and something else.

He walked over to his desk and touched the box reluctantly.

He had the keys. They had been in his father’s hand. He opened his desk drawer and removed them, looking at them with a frown. Like the box itself, they were worn and shabby and of poor workmanship, and hard to equate with the kind of man his father had been.

Still frowning, he reached for the box, and then hesitated, unwilling to touch it, to unlock it.

Grimly he reminded himself that he was exhibiting the very qualities his father had most detested in him: emotion, imagination, fear. Fear of what? Not of his father. He had lost that fear at the same time as he had forced himself to accept that, no matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried, nothing he did would ever earn his father’s love and praise.

There was nothing to be gained by going over the past, he reminded himself firmly. He was thirty-eight years old, an adult now, not a child.

He inserted the key into the box’s lock and turned it firmly, pushing back the lid.

The only thing the box contained was an envelope. Leo picked it up, tensing a little as he felt the old, worn, and somehow unpleasant texture of the paper.

He reached inside the unsealed envelope and removed its contents, placing them on the desk in front of him.

There was a notebook, and several newspaper cuttings printed in English. As he picked up the notebook he glanced at the headline of the top one. It was an article describing the work of some British servicemen in a German hospital. Glancing at the date, Leo saw that it had been written shortly after the Allies had entered Germany.

There was a photograph: a gaunt, emaciated man lying in bed, arms outstretched in supplication to the man leaning over him.

Leo felt his stomach muscles contract at the sight of the gaunt figure. A victim of one of the death camps, quite obviously; beside him in the next bed lay another man, who, according to the writer, had not been so fortunate. He was dead.

The dead man, the article continued, had confided to Private Carey before he died the names of certain German SS officers and undercover agents who had sanctioned the use of prisoners as guinea-pigs for medical experiments. Acting on this information, the Allies had then rounded up a number of these men and arrested them.

Grimly Leo looked away and then forced himself to look back again. When he picked up the small bundle of clippings his hand was trembling. He flicked back the first one and read through the others quickly.

They were all in English and they all related to a small British pharmaceutical company—Carey Chemicals. The name of the private in the first yellowing article, Leo noted absently.

They charted Carey Chemicals’ meteoric rise just after the war when it had patented the formula of a heart drug which had revolutionised the treatment available for people with heart problems, and they also charted the company’s decline.

Carey Chemicals … These clippings. What did they have to do with his father? Why had he collected them … kept them?

Leo frowned and picked up the notebook. His father had started Hessler Chemie after the war. The Allies had been keen to re-establish order in the chaos of post-war Germany, and because his father had had no part in the war or its atrocities—he had left Germany shortly after war had originally broken out, to live in neutral Switzerland—he had been allowed to return and establish his company. That company had produced a new drug, a tranquilliser which had helped to ease the suffering of many victims in the aftermath of the horrors of war.

Leo picked up the notebook and opened it. He had studied chemistry at university—his father’s choice and not his. He was, after all, a von Hessler, even if he did not look or behave like one, his father had told him sneeringly, and as such he must play his part in the corporation’s continued success.

Now, as he stared at the faded handwritten chemical equations and notes, Leo recognised immediately what they were.

What he was reading were the original notes for the tranquillising drug on which Hessler’s had been founded.

Leo looked closely at them. There were a variety of stories about how the notes had come into his father’s possession. The official version was that his father had been given them by a dying man whom he had visited at the request of the allied soldiers to whom he had been attached as a translator.

From time to time, far less flattering stories had surfaced, but by then Hessler’s had been too powerful for anyone really to challenge them or their founder.

As a teenager Leo had heard rumours that his father had secretly been employed as a spy for the SS, based in Switzerland but travelling throughout Germany and the Continent, and that because of this he had had access to the information produced by the laboratories of the notorious death camps.

Foolishly he had dared to challenge his father with what he had heard. His father had said nothing to him, neither denying nor verifying his challenge, but the next day Leo had discovered his mother in bed, her body so badly beaten that Leo had insisted, against her frantic pleas not to do so, on sending for their doctor.

He had never raised the subject of the rumours with his father again.

He turned the pages of the notebook and then tensed.

There was a second set of equations here, together with notes in the margins and a doctor’s signature—a doctor who, Leo was sure, had been tried for his part in a certain camp’s medical atrocities.

He read through them once quickly, and then a second time slowly and carefully while his heart turned over inside his chest and his body became heavy and cold with the weight of the knowledge descending on him.

These further pages showed detailed study and a formula proposed for a heart drug—a heart drug like the one that the British company Carey Chemicals had produced.

Like a dealer with a pack of cards, Leo slowly and carefully fanned out in front of him the separate newspaper clippings, and then above them he placed the notebook, his eyes bleak.

Had his father died trying to carry the deed box, or had he tried to reach it only after he had had his first attack, knowing what it contained and what it betrayed, knowing that it must be destroyed? Leo looked at the newspaper cuttings and the references to Private Carey. Was the young man’s rise in the field of pharmacy after the war linked at all to his father’s notes? Why had his father kept them in the first place? Were they a form of insurance against Carey, the medical-orderly-turned-blackmailer who knew the truth about the German’s secret SS dealings and had been paid off with that second formula?

But the man Carey had died several years before his father. The relevant newspaper notice was here. Why had his father not destroyed the contents of the box then, if they were as incriminating as Leo suspected?

Had Carey confided what he knew to someone else before he died: passed on the secret? It stated that the business was now being run by his son-in-law. Had he handed on to him more than just control of the business?

Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps it was all merely coincidence. Every instinct he possessed howled in derision at the thought.

He knew, he thought, knew in his bones, in his soul that what he had in front of him was evidence of the man his father had actually been; that he was now closer to the essence of him, the true nature of him, than he had ever been during his lifetime.

No need now to question the animosity that had always existed between them, nor his own awareness of and aversion to that darkness he had always sensed within his father.

As a child he had feared that darkness; as an adult he had been shudderingly grateful that it was a genetic inheritance which had passed him by, just as his father had always despised him for his lack of it.

And yet his father had left him control of the corporation.

‘My son … My son …’

Those had been his last words to him and they had been full of bitterness and hatred.

Surely he could not deliberately have left this grim evidence for him to find; a final act of cruelty, a final reminder of the blood he carried in his veins?

No … Because how could he have known that Leo would be the one to find him? No, he had been trying to destroy the evidence, Leo was sure of it.

The evidence …

He looked down at the papers on the desk. Odd to think that they had the power, the potential to damage the mightiness of Hessler Chemie; that they could potentially be more powerful than ever his father had been.

Was he right? Were his father, working as a translator, and Carey, the medical orderly, linked by mutual greed in a tangled skein of murder, theft and blackmail—and worse?

The man who had died, the man who had confided to Carey the names of those men secretly working for the SS … had one of those names been his father’s? Had Carey recognised it … approached his father, threatening to expose him? Had his father bought him off with that second formula?

The links were tenuous; frail and perhaps unprovable, but they were still strong enough to rock Hessler’s, and still strong enough to fill Leo with such revulsion, such anguished pain and reflected guilt that he knew somehow he had to at least try to discover the truth.

Had things been different … had Wilhelm been different, this was a burden he could have shared with him.

Another thought struck him. Had his mother known the truth? Was that why she had stayed with his father, despite his physical and emotional abuse of her—because she had been too afraid to leave? Because she knew she could never reveal the truth knowing what it would do to her sons … to him?

Wilhelm had never been as close to her as he had. Like their father, Wilhelm had treated her with contempt and cruelty.

Slowly Leo picked up the newspaper cuttings. He glanced towards the fire and then looked at the papers in his hand.

His mouth grim, he replaced them in the envelope along with the notebook. Perhaps he should destroy them, but he knew that he would not do so, could not do so until he had discovered the truth. Or as much of it as there was left to discover. And somehow he must find a way of discovering it without implicating Hessler’s, not for his own sake and certainly not for his father’s, but for the sake of all those who worked for the corporation, all those who depended on it for their livelihood.

No, this was a problem he must deal with himself. Quietly … discreetly … secretly. He grimaced over that last word. It reminded him too much of his father.

Secretly.

It left an acrid, sour taste in his mouth and shadowed his soul with bleakness.

CHAPTER TWO

‘I MUST say I’m a little surprised by your attitude, Saul.’

The voice, the smile were benign, almost avuncular. They were also, as Saul knew quite well, a complete deceit.

He said nothing, simply waiting.

‘Of course I realise that Dan Harper is a friend of yours,’ Sir Alex Davidson commented kindly, and then when Saul remained silent he added less kindly and very smoothly, ‘After all, weren’t you sleeping with his wife at one time?’

Saul hadn’t been, but he let the comment pass. He knew enough of his boss’s tactics by now to know how much Sir Alex enjoyed the feeling that he had touched a raw nerve; that he had succeeded in slipping his knife into an unprotected and vulnerable organ.

‘However, business is business, and it was your responsibility to me to see that the take-over of Harper and Sons went through smoothly and discreetly, and not instead to warn Harper that we intended to buy him out and then to strip his company of its assets, and to close it down after dismissing its entire staff. Which, unless I am mistaken, is exactly what you did do.’

Now Saul did speak, simply saying calmly, ‘A rather dramatic interpretation of events.’

His eyes were cold. He was a very formidable-looking man despite the fact that he was twenty-five years his boss’s junior, despite the fact that he was merely an employee in the company Sir Alex headed and owned. An employee whom Sir Alex had been grooming to take his place.

‘But you did warn Harper what was in the wind.’

‘I didn’t warn him about anything,’ Saul responded in a clipped voice. ‘I simply pointed out to him what might possibly happen if he sold out.’

‘Semantics,’ Sir Alex accused. He wasn’t smiling now and his voice most certainly wasn’t kind. ‘Absolute loyalty, that’s what I demand from my employees, Saul, and most especially from you. You are my most trusted employee … I pay you extremely well.’

Under his breath Saul murmured cynically to himself, ‘Caveat emptor,’ but there was self-contempt in the words as well as cynicism.

Sir Alex was still talking and hadn’t heard him.

‘As I said, I was very disappointed. However, something more important has cropped up now. I want you to go to Cheshire. There’s a company there called Carey Chemicals. I want it.’

‘Carey Chemicals?’

‘Mm.’ Sir Alex picked some papers off his desk. ‘A small one-man-band company … or at least it was. The man in charge died fairly recently. The company is in trouble, sinking fast, and all too likely to go under. We are going to perform a rescue operation.’

‘Really? Why?’ Saul asked him sardonically.

Sir Alex looked at him and then asked acidly, ‘Before I tell you, can I take it that you don’t have a close friend or a mistress working for them?’

Saul gave him a cold close-mouthed stare, which for some reason made Sir Alex’s own gaze waver slightly.

‘All right,’ he said testily, even though Saul hadn’t said anything. ‘Carey’s is a drug-producing company; not that they have produced anything remotely profitable for the last few decades. The widow who has inherited the business is bound to want to sell out.’

‘And you want to buy.’

‘At the right price.’

‘Why?’ Saul asked him.

‘Because a little bird has told me that the government is making plans to offer very generous, and I mean very generous incentives to British-owned drug companies that are prepared to invest in drug research. In turn, if those companies succeed in producing a marketable drug they will repay the government’s generosity by providing the National Health Service with their drugs at a lower than market price.’

‘Thus wiping out the benefit to the company of the government’s financial incentives,’ Saul said drily.

‘Well, there would always be the profit from overseas sales,’ Sir Alex pointed out, ‘but, in essence, yes.’

‘So why are you interested?’ Saul asked him.

‘Because if the research does not produce a marketable drug, the government cannot claw back any of its investment.’

‘Ah, yes, I think I begin to understand,’ Saul said. ‘You buy the company, fund what on the surface looks like a genuine research department, with very generous assistance from the government, of course, but, as we know, with the complexities of modern company finance, a good accountant can quite easily lose large, if not vast sums of money by moving it from one company to the other, and, if ultimately the research fails to produce any marketable results, well …’

Sir Alex smiled at him.

‘I’m relieved to see that your recent attack of conscience and friendship hasn’t totally atrophied your brain, Saul. There are several other companies worth investigating, but none quite as perfect as Carey’s. It is a very shorn little lamb, so to speak, and I’m very much afraid that without our protection it could all too easily fall prey to the ravages of some hungry wolf.’

‘And you want me to find out as much as I can about how vulnerable this lamb is and how cheaply we can acquire it.’

‘Yes. You can be our wolf in sheep’s clothing. A role for which you’re admirably equipped.’

A wolf; was that how the other man saw him, a predator who enjoyed the terror, the mindless blind panic his appearance created in others? Saul wondered acidly.

As he took the executive lift down to the ground floor, a line from one of Byron’s poems came into his mind.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold.

The words, like the visual images it conjured up, disturbed him. He had been suffering far too many of these disturbances recently, of these unfamiliar attacks of conscience.

Of conscience or of rebellion—which? The thought flitted across his mind and was quickly dismissed. He had work to do.

The receptionist watched him as he walked past her desk. She sighed faintly to herself. He was one of the sexiest men she had ever seen. All the girls who worked for the Davidson Corporation thought so, and yet he never exhibited any interest in any of them. There was an austerity about him, a remoteness, that challenged her.

He would be a good lover, too, you could see that from the way he moved. She wondered if his body hair was as thick and black as that on his head.

His eyes were the most extraordinary shade of pale blue, his face hard-boned, like his body. There was a hunger about him, an energy, an anger almost, that stirred a frisson of sexual anticipation in her body.

Saul walked out of the building into the early summer sunshine. Cheshire. His sister, Christie, lived there.

Perhaps it was time that he visited her.

He would ring her this evening. He would have to ring Karen as well. It was over five weeks since he had last seen his children. He had had to cancel his last access visit. He frowned, his body tensing. He doubted that either his daughter or his son minded not seeing him. But he minded like hell. They were his children, for God’s sake. He remembered his own father, how close they had been.

Too close, Christie had once told him. He had accused her of being jealous and she had laughed at him. Theirs had been a turbulent relationship. They were alike in so many ways and yet so very different in their outlooks on life, so very, very different.

Again he felt the shadow of the malaise which seemed to be clouding his life, confusing and disturbing him. He, who had always seen his life’s objectives so clearly. And he had achieved them, hadn’t he? He had succeeded, fulfilled his promises to his father. So why did he feel this emptiness, this fear that somehow he had omitted something, neglected something, this hesitancy about reaching out for the trophy that was now so nearly within his grasp?

In another few years Sir Alex would retire and Saul would take his place. It was what he had worked for … what he had planned for … what he had promised his father.

But was it what he wanted? He cursed under his breath. Why the hell did he have to have this attack of mid-life crisis now?

Saul strode out into the street, joining the crowds, joining them but not becoming a part of them, nor being absorbed by them. He wasn’t that kind of man. His contemporaries, his peers, envied him, he knew that, and why shouldn’t they? The financial Press praised him, acclaiming his astuteness, his shrewdness. In the years he had been with it he had taken the company Sir Alex had founded to the very top of its league.

If Sir Alex was the old-fashioned type of entrepreneur, a buccaneer almost, then Saul was the financial diplomat, the man who had turned the raw materials of Sir Alex’s company into the sleekly powerful thing it was today.

Through Saul its growth had been planned, controlled. When the recession came, Saul had been prepared, Saul had looked ahead, and where Saul went, others followed.

He was a pioneer, admired and envied, and now he was virtually throwing it all away, breaking his own rules, the rules laid down for him by his father.

Even he wasn’t sure why he had warned Dan Harper that Sir Alex wanted to take over his company. They were friends, it was true, but not close friends. Saul did not allow anyone to get close to him. Not any more.

Not men, nor women. Since the break-up of his marriage there had been women, relationships. Discreet, orderly, controlled relationships that threatened no one, and he had certainly not had an affair with Dan’s wife, despite Sir Alex’s comment.

There was no one at the moment, but he had a single-minded ability to dismiss sex from his life when he felt it necessary. He had never been driven by his appetites, nor controlled by them.

Sometimes, when watching a competitor greedily consuming the meal he was paying for, greedily consuming the bait he was putting down … greedily anticipating what advantages might accrue to him through his involvement with him, Saul was filled with a sharp sense of disgust for that greed, for that wanton waste when so many were without.

It was his Scots blood, he told himself sardonically. All those generations of strict Presbyterians and their moral outlook on life.

Sir Alex was testing him, he knew that. His boss was sometimes laughably easy to see through, even though Sir Alex believed himself to be a master of subtlety.

Normally he would never have given Saul such a routine task. Normally they employed agents, at a distance of course, on this kind of business, keeping their own identity secret until they were ready to move in for the kill.

His stomach twisted. He was forty years old, fitter than many men fifteen years his junior, no grey as yet touched his dark hair, and yet sometimes he felt immeasurably old; divorced, distanced somehow from reality, completely alone and alienated from the rest of the human race.

At other times he felt a deep sense of resentment, of anger, of somehow having been cheated of something, and yet he could not quantify what.

Why had he warned Dan about the take-over? Why had he felt so much distaste about the thought of destroying the small old-fashioned company that had passed from father to son for five generations? After all, he had done it before without any qualms. Why now … now, when Sir Alex had virtually promised him that he would soon be stepping down and that he, Saul, would be taking over the chairmanship?

He could still recoup the ground he had lost. Sir Alex’s speech today had confirmed that.

So why had he experienced that overwhelming impulse simply to walk away, to turn his back on Sir Alex and his own future?

There was a very deep and very intense anger inside him, he recognised, coupled with a fear of its overwhelming his self-control. Saul prized his self-control. It was his strongest weapon and now it seemed to be deserting him.

Cheshire. What the hell kind of game was Sir Alex playing, sending him out there? He loved manipulating people, pulling their strings and making them dance. Well, Saul had never responded to that kind of treatment. He might work for Sir Alex, but he had always made it clear that he would not be subservient to him. Sir Alex was the kind of man who could only respect someone he could not bully.

What exactly was he planning? Was it just because he wanted to buy out this drugs company at the lowest possible price that he was sending Saul to Cheshire, or was there an additional motive?

Saul wondered sardonically if, like one of his predecessors, he would return to London to find someone else sitting at his desk. And if he did, would he really care? Did he really care about anything any more? He cared about his children, he told himself. He cared that they rejected him, that they seemed to be more concerned with material possessions. Had he been like that? Josey was fifteen, Thomas nearly thirteen. They were very different in character, as different as he and Christie had been.

He and Karen had been divorced for nearly ten years and his children were strangers to him. Ten very busy years for him. Too busy for him to make time for his children?

The thought itched and stung like a burr under the skin. Just recently he had been asking himself questions, too many questions he could not answer, and why? Because he had woken up one morning and suddenly been sickened by himself, by his life. Why should he feel like that? He had always made his own decisions, his own choices.

From the past he heard Christie’s voice, harsh with passion, her young face angry with contempt as she slung at him, ‘You don’t do anything for yourself, do you, Saul? You just do things to please Dad. That’s why you’re his favourite.’

He had laughed at her, dismissing her outburst. He was a boy. It was only natural that he should be closer to his father … his favourite … or so he had thought then.

Christie … passionate, turbulent, aching for freedom, for full control over her own life even then.

And she hadn’t really changed.

Not that they saw much of one another these days. He had visited her a couple of times since she had moved to Cheshire … a disastrous pair of visits when he had reluctantly … very reluctantly been accompanied by his children.

Christie, as a busy GP, hadn’t been able to spare much time to spend with them, and Josey had been openly scornful of her aunt’s disorganised home life, of the fact that meals were invariably eaten in the kitchen, of the fact that Christie hardly ever wore make-up and certainly never bought designer clothes, unlike her own mother.

The only thing Josey had approved of about her aunt was the fact that she was a single parent. Women no longer needed men, Josey had told Saul challengingly, and he had wondered if what she meant was that children no longer needed fathers, especially fathers like him.

Of the two of them, Josey had always been the more antagonistic towards him. He was surprised how much that hurt him. He had far more important things to think about than his relationship with his daughter, an inner voice warned him, but another challenged quietly, what … what could be more important than his own children? And he stood still in the street as the impact of his own thoughts hit him, unaware of the curious looks of passers-by.

Perhaps a week or so away from London, from Sir Alex, was what he needed, he reflected as he started walking again. A breathing-space … a time to reflect.

But what was there to reflect on? he wondered impatiently, frowning at the unease he could feel. He didn’t like this dichotomy between what he knew he should feel and what he did actually feel. It was so out of character.

‘You have to be single-minded to succeed, Saul.’ That was what his father had always told him, his face shadowed by the disappointments of his own life, by the effects of his own inability to achieve the goals he had set himself.

Fate had been unkind to his father.

But it had been kind to him, he himself had seen to that, or so he had thought until recently.

CHAPTER THREE

‘DAVINA, I know you’re busy, but I wonder if you could spare me half an hour before you go home.’

Davina forced herself to smile.

‘Of course I can, Giles. Would five o’clock be all right?’

As soon as he had closed the office door behind him her smile disappeared. There had been many challenges for her to face in the three months since the death of her husband Gregory, and now it seemed that she was going to have to face another one.

She suspected that Giles Redwood was going to tell her that he wanted to leave. She couldn’t blame him. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy and she knew quite well that the only reason Giles was still here was because he was too gentle, too kind-hearted to leave her completely in the lurch.

And because he loved her?

She winced, her mind shying away from the thought, not wanting to admit its existence.

She had always liked Giles, but it was only since Gregory’s death that she had become aware that he might have much stronger feelings for her. It disturbed her to have to acknowledge that she might have inadvertently played on those feelings in asking him to stay and to support her through the initial crisis of Gregory’s death.

She hadn’t meant to do so. Had, in fact, been motivated purely by panic, the panic of discovering that her father’s company wasn’t the thriving concern she had so foolishly believed, but was actually close to insolvency. That had shocked her more than Gregory’s death in many ways.

It had been Giles who had comforted her, who had told her that she must not blame herself for the lack of awareness of the company’s situation. And it was true that Gregory, and her father before him, had always refused to allow her to have anything to do with the company, to play any part in it.

But now she had no choice. Carey Chemicals was the largest local employer. If Carey’s closed, people would be put out of work; families, whole households would suffer. She could not allow that to happen.

Giles had told her gently that she might have no choice. He had been warning Gregory for some time, he had added uncomfortably, that they must make some kind of provision for the time when their most profitable patent ran out.

Gregory had refused to listen to him. Gregory had had his own obsessions and they had nothing to do with the time and care it took to research and develop new drugs.

Gregory had liked playing the money markets. And, in doing so, Gregory had lost the company many millions of pounds.

Davina felt sick every time she thought about it … every time she remembered her own blind, wilful acceptance of all the lies Gregory had told her. She ought to have questioned him more closely, to have insisted on knowing more about the company.

She ought to have done a great many things, she told herself tiredly, including ending her marriage.

What marriage? There had been no marriage for years. Ever since … Her mind skittered back from a dangerous precipice.

She had married at twenty. Now she was thirty-seven. For seventeen years she had stayed in an empty, sterile marriage, and why?

Out of love? Her mouth twisted. Out of duty, then … out of necessity … out of cowardice. Yes, definitely that, or rather out of fear, fear not so much of being alone—that would almost have been a pleasure—but fear of the unknown, a fear that, once on her own, she would prove her father’s and Gregory’s contempt of her to be a true estimation of her character; and so she had stayed, too afraid to leave the security of a marriage that was a sterile mockery of all a marriage should be, hiding from life within its dead, empty embrace.

But now Gregory was dead. Killed in a road accident, his body twisted in the wreckage of what had once been his expensive saloon car. There had been a woman with him.

A woman who was not known to Davina, but who she suspected was very well known to her husband.

He had been consistently unfaithful to her and she had turned a blind eye to it, as she had to so many other things, telling herself that she was better off than most and that if her marriage had not turned out as she had hoped then she was not alone in her disappointment.

And always at the back of her mind had been the knowledge that her father would never have permitted her to divorce Gregory.

And of course Gregory would never divorce her. How could he, when in effect she owned the company? On paper, that was. Her father had made sure that effective day-to-day control of the company’s affairs lay in Gregory’s hands, but then he had tied those hands by ensuring that the shares were in her name and that Gregory could never sell them.

Carey’s had meant a lot to her father. He had set up the company with his father shortly after the end of the war. Davina had never known her grandfather, he had died before she was born, but she had often wished she had.

It had been her mother who had told her the most about him. How he had had a reputation locally for making his own potions and cures, mainly for cattle ailments originally, but later for human ailments as well.

It had been his lifelong interest in such things that had led him to the discovery of the heart drug which had established the company right at the forefront of its competitors, although he himself had died shortly after the company had been established.

Her own father had been at medical school when war broke out. He had left to join up and had never completed his training.

As a girl, Davina had had dreams of following in her grandfather’s footsteps, but her father had very quickly squashed them. Girls did not become chemists, he had told her contemptuously. They married and produced children … sons. Davina could still remember the look he had given her mother as he spoke. Her parents’ marriage had not produced any sons … only one daughter. Davina.

And as for her own marriage … She frowned quickly. Giles would be coming back soon and she had no idea what she was going to say to him. His wife, Lucy, was one of her closest friends, or at least she had been. Recently Lucy had been behaving rather oddly towards her, and Giles had inadvertently let slip that it was partly because of Lucy that he still intended to leave Carey’s.

Not that she could blame him. After all, if the bank manager was right, Carey’s would not exist for much longer anyway. Unless she could find a buyer prepared to take it over and pump in enough money to save it.

It wasn’t for her own sake that she wanted to keep the company going, and it certainly wasn’t for her father’s.

Carey’s employed almost two hundred people, all of them local, and in a relatively sparsely populated country area that was a very large proportion of the working population.

More than half the workforce were women, and Davina had been dismayed to discover how poorly paid they were.

An economic necessity, Giles had told her. He had been unable to meet her eyes when he had added that Gregory had been able to maintain such a poor wage structure simply because they were the only major local employer.

Davina’s stomach clenched as she remembered the anger, the guilt she had felt on hearing this disclosure. No wonder so many of the women watched her with stony-faced dislike when she drove through the village. She suspected that they would not have believed that Gregory had kept her as short of money as he did them, but it was true.

She had been shocked to learn just how much money Gregory had in his private bank accounts, but, large though that sum was, it was nowhere near enough to save Carey’s.

As she had learned since his death, Gregory had run Carey’s as an autocrat whose word was law. No amount of representations to him from the unions had persuaded him to increase his workers’ wages, nor to provide them with anything other than the most basic of facilities.

Davina had been stunned when she had been shown the lavatories and wash-basins, the crude and unhygienic area that was supposed to be the canteen and rest-room.

Giles, who had escorted her around the company after Gregory’s death, had been sympathetic and understanding, but not even his presence had been able to lessen her shock, her sense of despair and guilt.

And there was nothing she could do to put things right. There was barely enough coming in to pay the wages.

He himself was not a financier, Giles had told her. He was in fact the company’s personnel manager, but even he had been able to see the financial danger the company was courting.

Gregory had refused to listen to him, just as he had refused to listen to anyone else who had tried to advise him, as Davina had learned.

Davina had no idea what on earth she was going to do to prevent the company from having to close down. Find a buyer, the bank had told her, or a backer. But how, and where? Her head ached with the constant tension and worry of suddenly finding herself with this kind of responsibility.

Only last week Giles had told her how much he admired her calm, her strength, but inwardly she felt neither calm nor strong. She was adept at hiding her feelings, though. She had had to be. Very early on in her marriage she had realised how much Gregory enjoyed hurting her. By then she had, of course, known how much of a mistake their marriage was. She had blamed herself, or rather her naïveté, for the failure of her marriage.

She had been a shy teenager, sent to a very small all-girls’ boarding-school when she was eleven years old, and then abruptly removed from it at fourteen when her mother died suddenly from a brain tumour.

At first she had been thrilled because her father had wanted her at home. She had always been much closer to her mother than she had to her father. Theirs had never been a physically close household, but in her grief and shock at her mother’s death she had gone up to him, wanting him to hold her.

Instead he had stepped back from her, rejecting her, his displeasure at her actions written on his face. Confused and hurt, knowing that she had angered him, Davina retreated into herself.

The rough and tumble of the local school confused and alarmed her. The other pupils made fun of her accent, the boys tugged painfully on her long plaits and even the girls ganged up against her, taunting and bullying her. She was an outsider, different, alien, and she was acutely aware of it.

She also soon discovered that her father had brought her home not because he wanted her company or because he loved her, but because he wanted someone to take over her mother’s role as housekeeper. And, while other girls spent their teenage years experimenting with make-up and boys, Davina spent hers anxiously ironing her father’s shirts, cooking his meals, cleaning his house, with what time she did have to spare spent on trying to keep up with her homework.

Of course, her schoolwork suffered. She was too proud, too defensive to try to explain to her teachers why she was always so tired, why she was always being accused of not concentrating on her lessons, and of course when her father read their end-of-term reports on her he was even more angry with her.

The dreams she had once had of emulating her grandfather, of exploring the world of natural medicines and remedies, died, stifled by her father’s contempt and her teachers’ irritation at her lack of progress.

‘Of course we all know, Davina, that you won’t have to work,’ one of her teachers had commented acidly one afternoon in front of the whole class, causing her fellow pupils to shuffle in their seats and turn to look at her, while her face had turned puce with shame and embarrassment. ‘Which is just as well, isn’t it? Because you certainly won’t be employable.’

One of the boys made a coarse comment that caused the others to laugh, and even though the teacher must have heard it she made no attempt to chastise him.

There were girls whom she could have been friends with, girls who, like her, seemed rather shy, but because she had come so late to the school they had already made their friends and formed their small protective groups, and Davina certainly did not have the self-confidence to break into them.

Everyone else at school looked different as well. The girls wore jeans or very short skirts, which were officially banned, but which were worn nevertheless. They had long straight hair and the more daring of them wore dark kohl lines around their eyes and pale pink lipstick.

Davina studied them with awed envy. Her father did not approve of make-up. The one time she had dared to spend her money on a soft pink lipstick he had told her to go upstairs and scrub her face clean.

At fifteen years old she knew that she still looked like a little girl, while her peers were already almost young women.

At sixteen she left school. There was no point in her staying on, her father told her grimly as he viewed her poor exam results.

Instead he paid for her to attend a private secretarial school in Chester so that she could learn to type and so do work for him at home when necessary.

And then just before her seventeenth birthday a small miracle occurred. Out of the blue one morning, while she was engaged on her bimonthly chore of polishing the heavy silver in the dining-room, a visitor arrived.

Davina heard the doorbell ring and went to answer it, wiping her hands on her apron as she did so. She was wearing a pleated skirt, which had originally been her mother’s and which was too wide and too long for her, and her own school jumper, which was too small and too tight.

It would never have occurred to her to ask her father for new clothes. He gave her a weekly housekeeping allowance, but she had to provide him with receipts for the meticulously kept accounts he went through with her every Friday evening.

As she opened the door Davina blinked in surprise at the girl she saw standing there. She was tall, and very slim, and a few years Davina’s senior. She was wearing a very, very short skirt; her long straight hair would have been the envy of the girls in Davina’s class at school and in addition to the kohl liner around her eyes she was wearing false eyelashes.

Her mouth was painted a perfect pale frothy pink, and as Davina stared at her she smiled and said cheerfully, ‘Hi, you must be Davina. Your dad sent me round with some stuff for you to type. I’m working for him while Moaning Martha is recuperating from her op. Honest to God, the instructions she gave me before she left …!’

The thick black eyelashes batted. She was, Davina recognised in awe, chewing gum. The thought of this girl working for her father, replacing Martha Hillary, her father’s fifty-odd-year-old secretary, was almost too much for Davina to take in.

‘I’m dying for a Coke. Not got any, I suppose?’

She was already stepping inside the house, while Davina apologised that all she could offer her was tea or coffee.

The thickly pan-sticked pale face contorted briefly, the long hair barely moving as she tossed her head. ‘OK, go on, then. I’ll make do with the coffee.

‘What on earth do you do all day, cooped up in this place?’ she demanded when Davina led her to the kitchen. ‘It would drive me crazy. That’s why I do temping. Just as soon as I can get a bit of money together, I’m off to London. That’s where it’s all happening.’

It was the start of a brief and wholly unexpected friendship.

Davina never knew why Mandy befriended her. Later on in her life she suspected that Mandy, beneath the outrageous clothes and make-up, had a very strong crusading and protective streak, for she could certainly think of no other logical reason why Mandy should have taken her under her wing.

Under Mandy’s tutelage and because she was equally afraid of disappointing her as she was of angering her father, she forced herself to do as Mandy urged and to ask—Mandy had told her to demand—her father to give her a personal allowance.

When he agreed Davina could only assume that either she had caught him in a moment of unfamiliar weakness or that he had been so shocked by her request that he had acceded to it without thinking.

When Mandy heard how much she was to get she had pulled another face.

‘Peanuts,’ she had said scoffingly. ‘You should have asked for at least twice as much. God, the typing you do alone would cost him hundreds if he sent it out to an agency.’

Several times a week Mandy would sneak out of Carey’s and come racing over in her bright red battered Mini, entertaining and alarming Davina with her tales of her hectic and tangled love-life.

She consistently tried to persuade Davina to go out with her at night, but Davina always refused. Although often she envied Mandy her confidence and her worldliness when Mandy described in graphic detail the more intimate side of her life, Davina found herself recoiling a little. She was an avid reader, a dreamer, a romantic, who cherished ideals of the kind of man she would eventually love and who would love her, and he bore no resemblance whatsoever to the descriptions Mandy gave her of her boyfriends and their sexual demands.

And then, just over six weeks after they had first met, Mandy announced that she was leaving Cheshire and going to London.

Davina mourned her going and missed her. Mandy had brought colour and warmth to her life. She was the first close friend she had ever had, and without her life seemed dull and flat.

Her father, who had never approved of the friendship, made no bones about the fact that he was glad she had gone, even though he complained that she had left before his actual secretary was well enough to return to work.

It was summer. Working in the garden, keeping the flowerbeds and the lawn in the immaculate state her father demanded, had tanned Davina’s body and firmed her muscles. She wasn’t very tall, her body slim and delicate, and she had shoulder-length mousy fair hair. She hated her hair. It was neither one thing nor the other, neither curly nor straight, but possessed of an unwanted wave, so fine and silky that it was constantly falling in her eyes. It was a hot summer and the sun had bleached it a little, giving it blonde highlights, which emphasised the fragility of her small face with its sombre grey eyes.

Davina had never thought of herself as being pretty. Pretty girls looked like Mandy or like the models in magazines, and she did not look like them, but one Saturday morning, as she was weeding the front garden, dressed in her shorts and the cotton top she had made herself on her mother’s sewing-machine, the paperboy abandoned his bike to stare admiringly at her and to tell her with a grin, ‘Great legs, babe.’

He was seventeen years old and modelled himself on his American TV heroes. Davina blushed deep pink and hurriedly tucked her legs out of sight.

But even though his comment had embarrassed her, it had also in some complex way pleased her.

Sometimes now at night she lay awake in bed, confused by what she was feeling, aching for someone she could talk to … for someone to love.

She had started playing tennis with the local vicar’s daughter, who was home from university for the holidays. They played together a couple of times a week.

Vicky Lane had a boyfriend, a fellow student, and the two of them were planning to spend a year backpacking once they finished university. As she listened to Vicky describing their plans, talking about the life they intended to live, Davina envied her. Compared with others, her life seemed so constricted, so dull and boring, but what could she do? She could not leave her father. How would he manage, and besides, how could she support herself? She had no skills. She could type and do some book-keeping; that was all.

She had tried to suggest to her father that maybe she could work at Carey’s, but he had been furious with her. Who was to take care of the house and of him? he had demanded. She was becoming selfish, spoiled, he had added, and guiltily she had abandoned the subject.

The village they lived in was small, with very few other people of her age. Most of them had left to work elsewhere and those who remained worked either for Carey’s or on their parents’ land.

There was a certain pattern to village life, a certain hierarchy into which Davina and her father did not really fit.

There were the farming families, established over many, many generations, whose positions had been created not just by wealth but also by the length of time their family names had been associated with the area.

Davina and her father were outside that hierarchy. There were older people in the village who remembered her grandfather and who still made disparaging remarks about her father, saying that he had got above himself, reminding themselves and others that his father had been nothing but the local apothecary … one of them, in fact.

Now Davina’s father was the wealthiest man in the area, and it was his wealth as well as her own shyness that isolated Davina.

Their house was outside the village, set in its own grounds, a large early Victorian building bought by her father when he married her mother, after the war, when such houses were cheap. When Davina’s father brought senior members of his staff home with him for dinner he expected them to be impressed by the house’s grandeur, and they were.

He had a keen eye for a bargain: the heavy old furniture, the Edwardian silver had all been sale-room bargains, and since it was Davina and not he who had to polish the carved wood and the intricately moulded silver he had no idea of the work entailed in keeping his home and his possessions as immaculate as he demanded.

He didn’t love her, Davina knew that. He had wanted a son, and she always felt somehow to blame for the fact that she was not that son. She also felt guilty in some way because her mother had died, as though in doing so her mother had proved that her father was right to despise her sex as weak and second-class. Somehow Davina felt as though it was up to her to justify her sex’s right to exist, but these were vague unadmitted thoughts and feelings that subconsciously shaped the way she behaved.

Yes, she had been very lonely in those years—and then she had met Gregory. Tall, good-looking, charming Gregory had been the ideal she had dreamed of secretly for so long.

A brief knock on the office door roused her from her thoughts. She wasn’t using Gregory’s office with its ostentation and luxury; somehow she hadn’t felt able to. The contrast between it and the rest of the building had not only shocked her, it had also almost made her feel physically ill.

In her father’s day Carey’s had been austere enough, but it had been kept scrupulously clean and well painted. Gregory had discouraged her from visiting Carey’s. And so the shock of discovering the conditions in which their employees were expected to work was something for which she had been totally unprepared.

And she was just as guilty as Gregory in that regard, guilty of taking the easy way out, of going along with what Gregory wanted because she didn’t want to argue with him.

She felt responsible; she was responsible, even though Giles had tried to comfort her and reassure her that she was not to blame.

Giles! That would be him outside the office now—a small square room at the rear of their premises without a window, just a chair, a desk and a telephone, but it was all she needed. There was no place, in a company on the verge of bankruptcy, for plush, expensive offices, for fax machines and computers that lay idle through lack of orders. She had asked Giles innocently about the fax machine in Gregory’s office the first time she visited it after his death. He had looked away uncomfortably and when she pressed him he had blurted out that he thought Gregory used it for his money-market dealings.

That had been the first she had known of her husband’s disastrous gambling in the world money markets.

She called out to Giles to come in and smiled warmly at him as he did so. Although he was almost six feet tall, Giles always seemed shorter because he had a slight stoop. His thick dark blond hair flopped endearingly over his forehead and he was always pushing it back. He was a quiet, studious-looking man who at forty still had a boyishness about him. There was something gentle and non-threatening about Giles that Davina found very appealing.

She wasn’t sure when she had first realised that Giles was attracted to her. Last Christmas at their annual Christmas party he had danced with her, and then, when she was in the kitchen stacking used glasses in the dishwasher, he had come to help her. He had kissed her before he and Lucy left. A brief enough embrace, but she had sensed the need in it … even though she had firmly denied to herself later that it had existed.

She liked Giles and of course it was flattering that he was attracted to her, but she was married to Gregory, and Giles was married to Lucy.

Only now Gregory was dead.

‘Giles—come and sit down.’ She patted the spare chair and smiled warmly at him.

He looked tired, and she felt guilty. He was their personnel manager and was not really equipped to take over the running of the company, but there was no one else. Gregory had always refused to allow anyone to share control of the company, and now Davina knew why: he hadn’t wanted anyone else to know how much money he was losing.

The sales director, their accountant, their chemist—all of them had reported directly to Gregory and had had no real power at all; the chemist had already left, telling Davina grimly that there was no point in his staying. The company was living on its past, he had told her, and Gregory had kept his department so starved of the money needed for research that their very existence was little more than a bad joke.

The sales director had said much the same thing, and their accountant was in reality treated as little more than an accounts clerk, dealing with the wages and day-to-day expenses.

The only person Davina had been able to turn to had been Giles, who at least knew something of how the company functioned.

She was learning, though, but what she was learning she did not like. The working conditions of her employees shamed her, as did their poor wages.

‘You look tired, Giles,’ she said sympathetically.

‘Davina, I’m sorry … I hate to let you down, but I’m going to have to hand in my notice.’

He had been rehearsing his speech all day, dreading making it, but last night Lucy had given him an ultimatum. ‘Leave Carey’s or I leave you,’ she had told him. She was given to making tempestuous threats, and at one time the volatility of her nature had entranced and amused him. She was so different from him, so alive and vital, but gradually he had begun to find her unpredictability a burden; to find that he was longing to go home to someone who was calm and relaxed, who wanted to listen to his problems rather than to unload upon him the avalanche of her own. Someone, in fact, like Davina.

Davina, who was always so calm and so kind. Davina, who had never once in anyone’s hearing criticised her husband, even though everyone knew that he had been unfaithful to her; Davina, whom, to his increasing despair and guilt, he was beginning to believe he loved.

‘Giles, there’s no need to apologise. I’m more than grateful to you for all that you’ve done. Without your support, your loyalty …’ Davina made a wry gesture. ‘I know what you think … what everyone thinks—that nothing can save Carey’s now, that we’re bound to go bankrupt.’

‘You could trade on for another six months or so, but that’s all,’ Giles told her.

‘I can’t give up yet, Giles,’ Davina told him. ‘And it isn’t for my sake. If Carey’s closes down so many families will suffer.’

Giles remained silent. What she was saying was true. Carey’s was the largest, virtually the only major local employer.

‘If you could just stay for a little while longer,’ Davina pleaded with him. ‘We could still find a backer … a buyer …’

Davina could see the indecision in his eyes. She hated having to do this, but what alternative did she have? Without Giles the company would have to close. She was doing all that she could, but there was so much she had to learn. If Giles left they would lose what little credibility they still had, and it was all too likely that the bank would insist on her closing down the company.

‘I know I shouldn’t ask,’ Davina continued. ‘You’ve got your own future to think of, yours and Lucy’s, but Carey’s needs you so much, Giles …’ She took a deep breath, and then looked directly at him and said quietly, ‘I need you so much.’

She saw the colour recede from his face and then flood painfully back into it. He moved as though he was about to get up and then settled back in his chair.

‘Davina …’

‘No, please don’t say anything now. Think about it. Talk it over with Lucy,’ Davina begged him. ‘Philip Taylor at the bank has promised to do what he can to help us find a buyer.’

The overhead light highlighted the delicacy of her face. She had lost weight since Gregory’s death, Giles thought and then wondered bitterly what it was about that kind of man that gave him a wife who was so devoted and loyal, so gracious and loving, while he …

He swallowed quickly. He must not think like that about Lucy. He loved her. He had been desperately in love with her when they married, and she had loved him … had wanted him. He flinched a little as he recognised the direction his thoughts were taking, shifting his weight slightly as his body was jolted into a sudden sharp and dangerous awareness of how alone he and Davina were, and how much he desired her. When he had kissed her last Christmas she had felt so light in his arms, so small. He had wanted desperately to go on kissing her … holding her.

‘Please, Giles,’ she repeated huskily now, and he knew that he couldn’t refuse her.

Lucy often said things she didn’t mean; often lost her temper and gave him ultimatums which within hours she had forgotten. In fact, he had been surprised that she actually cared what he did. Sometimes recently when she looked at him he felt almost as though she hated him, there was so much anger and bitterness in her eyes.

‘I’ll … I’ll think about it,’ Giles promised her.

Davina smiled her thanks at him.

Outwardly she might appear calm, but inwardly her stomach was churning; inwardly she felt full of despair and guilt. How could she be doing this to Giles, using him … using what he felt for her? But what alternative did she have? It wasn’t for her own sake. Owning Carey’s meant nothing to her. She felt no possessive pride of ownership in the company.

But what she did feel was a very powerful and strong sense of responsibility towards its employees, an awareness of how guilty she had been over too many years of turning a blind eye to what was going on.

She could have overridden Gregory’s refusal to let her come to Carey’s. She could have insisted on doing so, but she had, as always in her life, taken the easy way out.

Well, there was no easy way out now … not for the people who depended on Carey Chemicals’ survival for their living.

She was all right. She had the money her father had left her, money that had been left untouched since his death—a good deal of money, in her eyes, but Mr Taylor had explained patiently, almost a little condescendingly to her that, as far as Carey’s was concerned, it was little more than a drop in the ocean.

He had told her then the extent of the company’s overdraft, an overdraft secured by Carey Chemicals’ premises and land, and she had blenched at the extent of it.

The money had been lent to Gregory some years ago by his predecessor, he told her grimly. An advance that should never have been made and certainly would not have been made in today’s harsh financial climate.

That advance, together with Carey Chemicals’ profits, Gregory had used to fund his money-market gambling.

Why had he done it? He had always been a man who enjoyed taking risks; who craved their dangerous excitement. That was, after all, why he had died. He had been driving far too fast for the road conditions, the police had told her, and yet there had been no need. He had not been expected anywhere. No, it had been the thrill of driving at such an excessive speed that had excited him, and killed him and the woman with him, just as his greed and reckless addiction to danger was now killing Carey’s and threatening the livelihoods of everyone involved with it.

Davina stood up, and so did Giles.

They both walked to the door. Giles opened it for her. She thanked him, taking care not to stand too close to him, guiltily aware of the way his hand trembled slightly as he opened the door.

‘Give my love to Lucy,’ she told him. ‘I haven’t seen her for ages.’

She felt uncomfortably hypocritical for mentioning Lucy’s name, as though she had no knowledge of Giles’s feelings for her.

They left the building together, walking to their separate cars, Giles waiting while Davina unlocked and got into hers.

Carey’s was within easy walking distance of the village, its two-storeyed buildings surrounded by the lush Cheshire countryside. The site on which her grandfather and father had originally set up the business had once been occupied by a corn chandler’s. The original two-storeyed Cheshire brick mill was still there. It had a preservation order on it now, because of its age.

Face it: Carey’s doesn’t look like a profitable drug-producing company, Davina reflected as she drove off. She surveyed the jumble of buildings that housed the company, contrasting them with photographs she had seen of the premises of the huge multinationals that dominated the drugs market.

Carey’s, she had to admit, was an anomaly. But for her grandfather’s discovery of that heart drug, Carey’s would never have existed. At home she had his notebooks with his meticulous descriptions of the drugs and potions he had made up for his customers, human and animal. When he had been a young man there had been no National Health Service and very few ordinary people had been able to afford the fees of a doctor, so men like her grandfather had doctored them instead.

She thought it was a pity that her own father had been so reluctant to talk about his childhood and his parents. It had been her mother who had told her about her grandfather, and she had only known him for a couple of years, as he had died shortly after she and Davina’s father had married.

There was a portrait of Davina’s father in the room that was used as the boardroom, and Davina had always thought that there should have been one there of her grandfather as well.

There never would be now, of course. If she was lucky enough to find a buyer, the last thing they would want would be portraits of the original founders of the company.

She drove home, worrying about whether or not Giles would stay with the company, and trying to quell her guilt at the way she had manipulated him.

And then, even more guiltily, she found herself wondering what her life would have been like if she had married someone like Giles instead of Gregory.

CHAPTER FOUR

IT HAD been Davina’s father who had been responsible for Davina’s meeting Gregory.

Gregory had come to work for Carey’s as their technical salesman and her father had invited him to one of the dinners he occasionally gave for certain members of his staff.

Davina had been busy in the kitchen when everyone arrived. These dinners were always something of an ordeal for her. Her father was a perfectionist and Davina dreaded his disapproval if everything was not as he wished it to be.

She had spent virtually all week preparing for this dinner, shopping, cleaning, polishing the silver, washing, starching and then ironing the table linen. And picking flowers from the garden and then arranging them. Her father would never countenance wasting money on buying flowers.

He personally selected the menus he wished Davina to serve, and they were always complicated. Her father was a fussy eater, preferring small, delicately cooked dishes, but on these occasions he liked to impress with lavish cordon bleu meals.

Sticky and uncomfortable from the heat of the kitchen, praying frantically that she had correctly judged the timing and that the hot soufflé her father had insisted on for the first course would not deflate before everyone was seated, Davina heard the kitchen door open. Expecting to see her father walk in to tell her that she could serve the soufflé, she was astonished to see instead a very good-looking young man.

He smiled at her, a warm flashing smile that showed the whiteness of his teeth. His skin was tanned; his brown hair shone. He was tall and lean, and there was a warmth in his brown eyes as he smiled at her that made her face burn even more hotly than the heat from the kitchen.

‘Hello, I’m Gregory James,’ he said to her, introducing himself and holding out his hand.

Automatically Davina extended hers and only just stopped herself from gasping out loud at the frisson of sensation that struck her as he slowly curled his fingers around hers and shook her hand.

No one had ever affected her like this before. In her naïveté her skin flushed darker, her whole body trembling as she succumbed to his sexual magnetism.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you,’ Gregory told her smoothly as he released her hand.

For a moment Davina felt confused. There was something about the tone in which he delivered the apology that jarred on her, some falseness, some instinctive awareness of a mockery of her, as though he intended the words to have a double meaning, as though he was laughing at her for her reaction to him, but these feelings were so vague and unformed that they had vanished before she could really grasp them, leaving her to stammer a few incoherent words, while Gregory continued, ‘Your father was on his way to tell you that everyone is ready to eat, and I asked if I might deliver the message for him. And to see if there was anything I could do to help.’

To help? Davina gave him an unguarded startled look. Her father believed that it was a woman’s place to be subservient in every way to the males in the household, and the thought of any man offering her any kind of domestic help was a concept with which Davina was completely unfamiliar.

‘Thank you, but there’s really no need,’ she began breathlessly, but he stopped her, looking at her until she could no longer meet the intensity of his gaze as he said slowly,

‘Oh, yes, there is. There is every need. I’ve been wanting to meet you, Davina.’

He … this wonderful, good-looking man, had been wanting to meet her? She shook her head dizzily, wondering if she had fallen asleep and was having a dream, but no, it was real. He was real. She was so flustered that she could barely even breathe, never mind think of moving, and Gregory, watching her, allowed himself a small inner smile of satisfaction. Good. She was obviously as naïve and dumb as he had heard. He had met her. Now the rest should be easy.

Brought up by a widowed mother who had died while he was in his first year at university, Gregory had always bitterly resented the good fortune of others, a good fortune which had been denied to him. His mother was poor. He was clever and good-looking, but he learned early in life that that did not compensate for lack of wealth. Wealth was power, and power was what Gregory wanted. He had learned young to smile and say nothing when others taunted him or drew attention to his second-hand school uniform and the poverty of his possessions. His time would come. He would make sure that it came.

It was while he was at university that he realised how hard it was going to be for him to achieve his ambition. The best jobs, and with them the money and the power he craved, would not be offered to someone like him. They would go to others, youths with far fewer qualifications than he possessed, far less worthwhile degrees, but they had something more important than intelligence: they had family; they had position and power.

It had been a chance conversation he had overheard between two fellow graduates which had told him the path he must take through life. Both of them were unaware of his presence, and were discussing a third, absent friend.

‘You know, his sister’s getting married in June. He was telling me about it last week. She’s in the club. His family are furious. Apparently she’s been going around with some working-class type, who obviously knew which side his bread was buttered on. Now she’s pregnant, the family have no option but to let them marry, and they’ll have to support them, find him some sort of decent job. They’re furious about the whole thing, but, of course, they’re putting a brave face on it.’

‘Nice work if you can get it,’ the other man commented wryly. ‘Marrying a rich girl.’

Marrying a rich girl. Gregory mulled the thought over in his mind, letting it lie fallow for a short time before finally allowing it to take root.

The problem was that he did not know any rich girls. He knew girls … plenty of them. He was a good-looking young man who had grown up in an environment where teenagers had begun experimenting with sex well under the legal age limit, and he had learned early the basic mechanics of sex. To those over the years he had added a variety of refinements which so far had ensured him as much success as he needed or wanted with the opposite sex.

When he wished he could be ingratiatingly charming and well mannered, surface attributes that went no more than skin-deep, as those of his sexual partners who had not immediately taken the hint that he was tired of them had very quickly found out.

Gregory had no real warmth about him, no real kindness; as far as he was concerned, they were weaknesses he could not afford.

A rich wife. He bided his time. The doors to the homes of his fellow graduates, or at least those who could have introduced him to the lifestyle he craved, remained firmly closed to him. He got a job and then another, and finally a third with Carey’s.

He had chosen Carey’s out of three possible employers because he had learned from eavesdropping on a casual conversation while waiting to be interviewed that the man who owned Carey’s had only one child, an unmarried daughter.

Gregory had become very adept over the years at listening to other people’s conversations. He had discovered it was an extremely profitable way of learning things.

He had been at Carey’s now for six months. That was how long it had taken him to discreetly and cautiously bring himself to old man Carey’s eye, without offending or arousing the suspicions of his co-employees.

He had accepted the accolade of the dinner invitation for one purpose only, and that had been to meet this small, naïve girl with the flushed face and untidy hair. He had made enough discreet enquiries into Carey’s now to know just how rich Davina would one day be.

Physically she was not his type. He liked women with endless legs, generously curved bodies and with that look in their eyes which said they knew what life was all about.

Davina Carey was small and slight, her body girlish rather than sensual. Her eyes held naïveté and self-consciousness. And when they looked at him they also held awe and wonder.

As he accepted Davina’s disjointed dismissal and left the kitchen—after all, he had never intended actually to help her; that had simply been an opportune method of meeting her—he was smiling to himself.

Physically, as a woman, she might not appeal to him, but as a wife, a rich wife, she would be ideal.

Davina served the meal in a daze of gauzy unbelievable daydreams in which all manner of impossible things suddenly seemed dramatically possible.

Now, she told herself breathlessly as she cleared the plates from the main course, scraping them into the waste-bin before soaking them in hot water and then hurrying to serve the pudding, she knew why there had never been anyone else in her life: it had been because fate had already chosen Gregory for her. Because fate had known that he was there, that he existed; that he lived and breathed … even if she hadn’t.

Her body completely still, she stared out of the kitchen window, lost in her dreams, and then abruptly and painfully jolted herself back to reality by reminding herself that she was probably reading far too much into what he had said to her, in the way he had looked at her. Achingly she wished she had someone, a friend in whom she could confide, whose advice she could seek, with whom she could discuss the wonder and excitement of what had happened.

Gregory deliberately waited almost a week before getting in touch with her. A week was just long enough for her to have begun to lose hope, but nowhere near long enough for her to have even begun to forget about him.

He telephoned her, using his office telephone.

Davina had just returned from doing some shopping. She picked up the receiver and said the number, her heart shuddering to a frantic standstill of shock and pleasure when she heard Gregory’s voice.

So many times over the last six days she had mentally relived those moments when he had walked into the kitchen, the things he had said, the way he had looked, and, with each day that passed, so her belief in herself, in the message his eyes had silently given her, had diminished.

And now, just when she had been on the verge of giving up hope, of accepting that she had foolishly read far too much into what had happened, he had rung her.

And then as abruptly as her hopes had swung upwards they were dashed again as he said formally, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t rung before. I’ve been away on business. I just wanted to ring to thank you for a marvellous meal last week.’

He was merely ringing to thank her. A polite bread-and-butter telephone call, that was all, Davina acknowledged dully.

On the other end of the line Gregory smiled to himself. He could almost taste her disappointment.

He waited a few seconds and then added casually, ‘There’s a very good musical on at the Palace in Manchester at the moment. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but I’ve been given some complimentary tickets and I was wondering if you’d care to see it with me. The tickets are for tomorrow evening. Rather short notice, I’m afraid.’

He was asking her out! Her. Like a rider on a roller-coaster, her hopes soared again. Both her hand and her voice were trembling as she thanked him and accepted the invitation, ignoring the small warning voice that reminded her that she would have to get her father’s approval and that tomorrow evening was his bridge evening and he would expect her to provide a supper for himself and his cronies, since it was his turn to host it.

Well satisfied with his progress, Gregory made arrangements to pick her up the following evening.

He didn’t live locally, but rented a small flat in Manchester, preferring to keep his work and his private lives apart. He had a company car, and one of the first things he had learned in his first job was how to ensure that his expenses claims covered his own personal motoring costs as well as the travelling he did for his employers.

Not that he overdid things. Gregory knew very well how to temper greed with caution. It was one of the things he was best at.

He was having a good day today. He picked up his paper and turned to the stocks and shares section. If he had one appetite that was not wholly under his own control, it was not, as with so many of his peers, sex; sex was something he enjoyed for the pleasure it gave him and the control over the women who enjoyed the benefits of his skill and experience. No, Gregory’s weakness was the thrill of tension and excitement that he got from gambling.

Not gambling as in betting on horses, or visiting casinos. No, Gregory’s gambling took the form of highly calculated risks in the buying and selling of stocks and shares.

Over the years Gregory had had some spectacular successes with this, his own private, very private game, and he had also suffered some heavy losses.

He frowned as he remembered the last one. It had all but wiped out the special fund he kept for his investments, and for a month or two he had had to live very meagrely indeed, but today he felt lucky. All the omens were good. He picked up the paper, studying it avidly.

For once fate seemed to be on Davina’s side. When her father came home that evening, before she could mention Gregory’s invitation, he said curtly to her, ‘I shall be going out tomorrow night.’

‘But it’s your bridge night,’ Davina interrupted him.

Her father’s mouth thinned with displeasure. ‘I wish you would allow me the courtesy of finishing my conversations, Davina, instead of interrupting me. Yes, it is my bridge night, but there has been a slight alteration in the arrangements. The Hudsons have decided to take a short holiday and visit their son next week, and because of this they have asked if the venue of tomorrow’s meeting can be changed from here to their house, since it would have been their turn to host everyone the week they will be away.’

As she prepared her father’s supper Davina hummed under her breath. She couldn’t believe her good fortune. She closed her eyes, giving in to the temptation to let her imagination recreate for her a mental image of Gregory James. Tall, good-looking, and with a look in his eyes that made her ache with excitement.

She still couldn’t entirely believe that he had actually asked her out.

She told her father about the invitation after he had eaten, picking her time carefully and cautiously, and then holding her breath as he frowned. ‘Gregory James, you say. Hmm. A very bright young man. Well-mannered, as well. Not like some these days.’

Very slowly and carefully Davina released her pent-up breath. Her father, it seemed, approved of Gregory. She could scarcely believe her luck.

It took her virtually all afternoon the next day to decide what to wear for her date. Outfit after outfit was discarded as she went through her wardrobe, wishing she had had the courage to buy something as daring as the outfits Mandy had worn with such panache, and then being forced to admit that her father would never have permitted her to wear such short skirts, nor such striking colours.

In the end she settled for a cream linen skirt teamed with a neat floral blouse. Over it she could wear the cream mohair jacket she had knitted for herself the previous winter.

As an irrational extravagance, the last time she had been to Chester she had bought herself a pair of new shoes. They were all the rage, beige patent, almost flatties, with tiny heels and a large gold-rimmed flat buckle on the front. They matched her outfit exactly and she was lucky enough to have small enough feet to wear such pale-coloured shoes.

She was ready far too soon, of course, her hair combed as straight as she could get it, a defiant touch of blue eyeshadow on her eyelids, pale pink lipstick on her mouth. She ached for the courage to line her eyes with the black kohl that everyone was wearing, but cringed from her father’s reaction should she do so. He didn’t approve of make-up of any kind, but she defiantly refused to give in completely.

Her father was still at home when Gregory arrived. To her surprise and delight, he actually invited Gregory into his study and offered him a glass of sherry.

Davina, of course, wasn’t included in the invitation, but she didn’t mind. She went upstairs and surreptitiously checked her appearance, staring anxiously into the mirror. If only her hair were thicker, straighter. She wondered if it would look any better if she coloured it lighter or if somehow she could cut herself a thicker fringe. She wished too that she were taller. All the girls in the magazines were tall, with endless, endless legs.

She sighed fretfully. There were so many things about herself she’d like to change if only she could. What on earth could a man like Gregory possibly see in her?

Downstairs in Alan Carey’s study, Gregory displayed the charm and good manners which so often had blinded people to his real nature. Alan Carey seemed as easy to deceive as all the rest.

It was a slow, careful courtship. Within weeks Gregory knew quite well that there was virtually nothing that Davina would not do for him, although it was not Davina who was important but her father. Davina was no use to him without her father’s money. And so, in effect, although it was Davina he took out and dated, it was actually her father to whom he was paying court.

For six months they exchanged nothing more than relatively chaste kisses. Only occasionally did Gregory assume a mock passion, for which he always apologised, claiming to Davina that it was his love for her that threatened his self-control.

Davina, with no experience of any kind to illuminate her sexual darkness, accepted what he said, and, if when she left him and was lying awake in bed her body ached rebelliously for an intimacy that had nothing to do with the kind of kisses Gregory gave her, she told herself severely that she was lucky to have someone who treated her with so much respect.

It was a time when, although the media might have given out an image of teenagers eagerly and freely enjoying what was termed ‘the sexual revolution’, in fact in country areas, away from the freedom of cities like London, where young people lived away from home and their parents’ watchful eyes, many of the old shibboleths still existed. And one of these was still that nice girls did not ‘do it’, or at least not until they were engaged, and then only very discreetly, so that it was something they discussed in nervous excited whispers, and only with other girls in the same situation.

So, while her body wantonly ached with a need whose fulfilment was only something Davina vaguely understood, her mind, her upbringing told her that it was right that Gregory should be so restrained with her, that it was out of love, out of respect for her; and she contented herself with rosy, breathlessly exciting daydreams of how different things would be if he actually asked her to marry him. Then there would be no need for restraint between them, then … She moved restlessly in her bed, turning over on to her stomach, her hand pressed against her lower body and then hastily, guiltily removed.

She had started waking up out of her sleep, brought abruptly from its depths by the intensity of the powerful rhythmic contractions of her body, shocked and disturbed by such a physical phenomenon, and yet at the same time delighted and awed by this glimpse of the pleasure it could afford her, naïvely assuming that, if her dreams of him could bring her so much pleasure, when Gregory did become her lover the pleasure would be even greater.

It was her father who announced that he had invited Gregory to spend Christmas Day with them, and, when after church on Christmas morning Gregory presented her with an engagement ring while her father looked on in approval, Davina was too thrilled with happiness and love to question the fact that her father had obviously known that Gregory was going to give her the ring before she had, or that Gregory had not actually asked her if she wished to become engaged to him.

The wedding date was set for the following summer. Davina was pleased that her father approved of Gregory; she was happier than she had ever believed possible.

They were married the following June. It had been agreed that the young couple would move in with Davina’s father rather than buy their own home, an arrangement that had been made between Davina’s father and Gregory without either of them consulting her, but Davina was too blissfully in love with Gregory to care.

They were honeymooning in Italy. She felt dizzy with excitement at the thought of finally being alone with him, alone and married!

On the way from the airport to their hotel all she could think was that tonight she would lie in Gregory’s arms. Tonight she would become his truly and completely.

She looked towards him, wanting to reach out and touch him, but Gregory hated public displays of affection. Suddenly she felt shy, nervous … very unsure of herself.

It was hot in the coach and Gregory didn’t seem to be aware of her discomfort. He was talking animatedly to the courier, a pretty blonde girl who had met them at the airport.

Suddenly Davina felt very alone, very insecure. There was a huge lump in her throat. She ached for Gregory to turn towards her, to hold her hand.

The anticipation she had felt suddenly turned to a cold, leaden feeling of fear and panic. It was a sensation that persisted for the rest of the day, and she couldn’t understand it.

Their room was smaller, much smaller than she had imagined from the brochure. It had twin beds instead of the double she had expected, and the balcony overlooked not the sea, but the rear of the hotel.

When she commented on this to Gregory he told her that the courier had explained to him that there had been a mix-up with the bookings. In actual fact, Gregory had changed the booking so that he could pocket the difference between the room they had booked and this much cheaper one. Davina’s father had paid for their honeymoon as a wedding present, and the difference between the two rooms would provide their spending money while they were here.

The room felt airless and stuffy. Davina felt oddly light-headed, sick almost.

Gregory was saying something about going down to the bar for a drink.

Dusk was just falling, her body ached with tiredness from the strain of the day, and nothing was happening as she had expected. For one thing, she had somehow imagined that they would be more alone, less surrounded by other holidaymakers and the efficient courier who seemed to have attached herself to them. For another, she had expected Gregory to be different. After all, they were married now … Now there was no need for him to treat her with restraint.

Her eyes were over-bright with foolish tears. What had she expected? she asked herself as she heard the door close behind him. That he would pick her up and carry her to the bed, that he would undress her and then slowly and thoroughly make love to her? Things weren’t like that these days. She was a modern young woman, she told herself firmly. Of course Gregory wanted a drink. It had been a hot, tiring journey, and while he was gone she might as well unpack their things. She could have a shower and then be all pretty and cool for him when he came back. It never even occurred to her that Gregory might have asked her if she wanted a cool drink in the company of her new husband! Determinedly she pushed aside her sense of somehow having been abandoned, and unlocked their cases.

Gregory came back just in time to change for dinner, and Davina, who, after her shower, had dithered over whether or not to change into the ultra-feminine and frilly broderie anglaise trousseau shortie robe she had bought for herself, was glad that she had put on a dress instead when Gregory disappeared into the bathroom, firmly locking the door behind him.

When he came out fifteen minutes later his skin gleamed; he smelled of soap, and, even slicked back off his head, his hair still made her want to reach out and stroke her fingers through it.

The sight of him, the smell of him, the reality of him banished her earlier panic, and she ached to throw herself into his arms, to have the confidence, the experience to tease him with kisses and caresses until he growled that what he wanted was not dinner but her, but she knew awkwardly that she just wasn’t that kind of girl, that she did not have that kind of self-confidence, and so instead she sat miserably through the dinner she had not wanted, her throat closing up with a misery she could not explain as the blonde courier hovered over their table, chatting animatedly with Gregory while ignoring her.

It was late, almost midnight, when they finally went up to their room. Gregory had been drinking steadily all evening. He swayed slightly as he unlocked their bedroom door.

The atmosphere inside the bedroom hit them like a muggy hot wall. The room had no air-conditioning, and the windows were screwed down so that they could not be opened.

Davina showered quickly, trying to ignore the headache tensing her scalp.

When she came out of the bathroom wearing her new robe and its matching shortie nightdress, the broderie anglaise threaded with pale blue satin ribbon, Gregory was lying on one of the twin beds.

He looked up at her and pronounced, ‘Very virginal. What are you going to do? Take it home complete with appropriate bloodstain to show Daddy?’

Davina stared at him in disbelief. She started to tremble a little, aware that something was wrong, but not knowing what.

After all her dreams, the reality of Gregory’s lovemaking shocked her into a silence that prevented everything other than one brief, sharp sound of pain leaving her lips as he possessed her.

She didn’t even cry. Not then, not until she was alone in her own single bed and Gregory was safely asleep, snoring in the other bed.

Was this what she had waited for … wanted … ached for … dreamed about? Was this, then, sex? Where was the exquisite build-up of sensation, the aching, consuming urgency of need, the quick, fierce pangs of sensation that exploded into that rhythmic starburst of pleasure she had known in her dreams and in waking from them? If this was sex, then what had they been?

When Davina returned from her honeymoon she felt immeasurably older—and wiser; the scales had not so much fallen from her eyes as been ripped from them.

After the fourth night of enduring Gregory’s increasingly uncomfortable penetration of her now painful body, on the fifth night she turned quietly and sadly away from him.

Gregory made no attempt to coax or persuade her, simply returning to his own bed with a small shrug.

Feeling shocked, distressed, and most of all guilty because she was not able to enjoy his lovemaking, not able to respond to him since at times she almost wished she were here on her own rather than here with him, she was relieved to return home and to escape into the familiar routine of her life there.

She had no close friends to whom she could confide her doubts and feelings of guilt and despair. Her family doctor was old, and a friend of her father’s, and even if she had been able to pluck up the courage to consult anyone about her growing dislike of sex she could never have explained to him the way she felt, the tension she felt whenever Gregory touched her, the dread almost.

It was her fault, of course. It had to be, and she knew that Gregory must be as disappointed as she was herself, even though he made no complaints.

She was glad when she had her period and was relieved of the necessity of having to lie tensely in bed praying that Gregory would not touch her, and yet even in her relief she was conscious of other feelings, of a heavy, leaden sense of somehow having lost something; of having been cheated of something.

She refused to allow herself to remember those tormenting pre-marriage dreams, the feeling she had experienced. She had just imagined them; they hadn’t been real. If they had been, she would have experienced them with Gregory, she told herself firmly.

It was on the night of their first wedding anniversary that Gregory told her that during their honeymoon he had made love to the courier.

The moment he told her she knew that it was the truth. He had come home late, too late for the special dinner she had prepared. Her father was out playing bridge. They had had a row. She had promised herself that tonight she would try, really try to overcome her dislike of sex, but then Gregory had come home late, and she had smelled the perfume on him immediately.

When she asked him whose it was he had told her about the girl he had been seeing. A girl who, unlike her, was good in bed and who knew how to please a man.

Shocked, distraught with despair, Davina had demanded to know why, then, he had married her.

Gregory had told her.

‘For your father’s money,’ he said brutally. ‘What the hell other reason could there be? Why the hell would a man … any man want you? And don’t bother going running to your father over this, Davina. He thinks you’re as useless as I do. Why do you think he was so keen to see us married? A divorce is the last thing he’d want.’

A divorce! The brutality of the ugly words hit her like a blow. Divorce was something that happened to other people. In Davina’s world it was still seen as a stigma, as a sign of failure on the part of a wife, as a wife and as a woman.

The very sound of the word terrified Davina. It would be a public acknowledgement of her failure.

It was only later, curled up into a tight ball of misery on her own side of their bed, that she confronted the true enormity of what Gregory had told her.

He did not love her. He had never loved her. She felt sick inside … not at his lack of love, but at her own folly in believing that he might have loved her. From this point onwards Davina had had to acknowledge that their marriage was a sham.

Outwardly their lives went on as normal. Occasionally Gregory made love to her, and when he did Davina gritted her teeth and prayed that she might get pregnant. They both wanted children, but for very different reasons.

Davina’s father had started dropping hints about grandchildren, but both Davina and Gregory knew that what he wanted was grandsons.

Gregory told Davina that it was her fault. She underwent a whole series of tests before a young and sympathetic female doctor suggested to her that the reason she had not conceived might lie with Gregory and not with her, since they could find no reason why she should not conceive.

Davina contemplated putting the doctor’s theory to Gregory with a certain amount of grim mental despair. She had changed from the girl who had married Gregory in such blissful ignorance, even though barely twenty-four months separated the woman she now was from that girl.

No, she would not tell Gregory what the doctor had said, she acknowledged wearily as she drove home.

Slowly she started to forge a life for herself. A life apart from Gregory’s. She was a married woman now, not a girl.

She ran the house smoothly and efficiently, and, since both her father and Gregory rejected any suggestions she tried to make that she could fill in some of her spare time by working for the company, she looked for another avenue to occupy her.

Davina needed to keep busy. That was the only way she had of keeping at bay her despair over her marriage. If she just kept herself busy enough she did not need to think about her marriage at all. She did not need to think about the fact that Gregory was unfaithful to her. She knew that because he made no attempt to hide it now.

In front of her father he used the pretext of work as an excuse for his absences. To her in private he didn’t bother to conceal what he was really doing.

It shamed Davina more than she could bear to admit that she was actually sometimes glad, grateful that she was not the recipient of his sexual favours. Now she dreaded those times when he did touch her. Just occasionally, when her concentration lapsed, she sometimes remembered how she had felt before she married him, but she fought hard to keep that kind of weakness at bay. She was married to him, and at least he had the discretion to conduct his affairs outside their own small social circle. Davina had seen the way the other wives looked at Gregory, and she dreaded the day he returned any of their interest.

Sometimes she was sickened by her own weakness in staying with him, but she was too afraid, too conventional to break out of their marriage—and to what purpose, anyway? There was none. She was empty of all hope, all pleasure, all desire; a woman unwanted, unloved and undesired by the man to whom she was married.

But she was married and she must make the best of it. Behave like an adult and not a child.

Wryly Davina shook her head, dismissing her thoughts of the past. What was the point in dwelling on the past? She had chosen to marry Gregory, no one had forced her, and it was pointless wondering what her life might have been had she married someone like Giles. Gregory was dead now, and his death had brought her far more important things to worry about than the emotional barrenness of her own life.

It had been cowardice, and a too strongly rooted dread of offending against her father’s idea of convention, that had kept her in her marriage; it was that which had trapped her just as much as Gregory’s manipulation of her. She couldn’t blame everything on him.

Not even the failure of the company?

She closed her eyes tiredly. That was a different matter. What on earth had prompted him to get involved in something as volatile and dangerous as the currency market, and with money that should have been used to secure the future of the company and of its employees?

How much real chance did she have of finding a backer … an investor? Virtually none, the bank manager had told her grimly. These were difficult times for industry; money was tight, especially the kind of risk-money involved in supporting something like Carey’s.

Davina turned into the drive. She was home. Home; she smiled mirthlessly to herself as she stopped the car and got out.

She had lived in this house all her life and she felt very little affinity towards it. It had never truly been hers. During her father’s lifetime it had been his, and after his death … Well, he might have willed it to her, but she had never truly felt it belonged to her.

It had been Gregory, during one of his many affairs, who had produced the interior designer responsible for its present décor; she and Gregory had been having a passionate affair at the time, and even though she knew it was quite ridiculous, since she knew Gregory could never have had sex with her here at home, Davina felt somehow as though the very fabrics the woman had chosen were impregnated with the musky odour of sex.

She loathed the brilliant harsh colours the woman had chosen, the dramatic blacks and reds, the—to her—ugly rawness of so much colour and emotion. They made the rooms seem claustrophobic, reminding Davina of that awful honeymoon hotel with its cramped room and lack of air.

As she unlocked the front door and walked into the hall she wondered with a certain wry amusement if she was always to associate sex with a lack of breathable air. She also wondered even more wryly if, had it not been for Matt, she would ever have felt this faint stirring of curiosity about Giles. If all she had ever known was Gregory’s lovemaking, somehow she doubted it.

It had been a long time now since she had finally recognised that Gregory might not have been the skilled lover he had always claimed. Five years, to be precise.

But now wasn’t the time to think of Matt.

‘Lucy, I’m home.’

Giles tensed as he heard the sound of pans being slammed in the kitchen. Increasingly these days he dreaded coming home, dreaded the inevitable row that followed his arrival.

Ducking his head to avoid the house’s low beams, he walked slowly towards the kitchen. Outside the closed door, he paused, mentally willing away his involuntary mental image of opening the door and finding not Lucy, his wife, waiting there for him, her face sharp with temper, but Davina.

Davina, who always looked so cool and calm; Davina, whom he had never once heard raise her voice; Davina, who was always so relaxed, so easy to be with, her manner directly the opposite of that of his emotional, highly volatile wife.

He must stop thinking like this, he told himself fiercely as he took a deep breath and then pushed open the kitchen door.

Lucy was standing by the sink.

She was tall and slim, her thick, dark red curls a fiery glow of colour round her small pale face. Her eyes, green and almond-shaped, glittered with temper. Giles could almost see it vibrating through her tense body as she glared at him.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ she demanded. ‘You were supposed to be back at half-past five.’

‘I had to talk to Davina.’

‘Oh, you did, did you? And did you tell her that you were leaving? That she wasn’t going to have your broad manly shoulder to cry on for much longer?’

Giles winced at the bitterness, the acidity in her voice.

She had gone too far. She could see it from Giles’s face, and for a moment she was afraid. She had thought she had learned to control these rages, these outbursts of temper fuelled by fear and insecurity.

‘Well, I hope you’ve had something to eat,’ she told Giles, ‘because there certainly isn’t anything here for you. Half-past five, you said. It’s almost seven.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ Giles told her wearily. ‘I’ll make myself a sandwich later.’

‘Why bother?’ Lucy goaded him, driven relentlessly towards self-destruction by her fear and anguish. ‘Why not ring Davina and have dinner with her? She’s a wonderful cook … although rumour has it that she wasn’t much good in bed. Still, that won’t bother you, will it, darling? You haven’t had much interest in that department yourself recently, have you? Or is it just me you don’t want?’

‘Lucy, please,’ Giles begged her wearily. ‘Not now. I——’

‘You what? You don’t want to discuss it. All right, let’s discuss something else, then, shall we? Like your telling Davina that you weren’t going to stay. You did tell her that, didn’t you, Giles?’

Giles sighed. ‘I … I tried. Look,’ he said desperately when he saw Lucy’s face, ‘it won’t be for much longer. Only another few weeks. She needs me, Lucy.’

He knew the moment he said it that he had said the wrong thing, but as he watched the way Lucy’s face closed up, her eyes as hard and flat as dull river pebbles, he also knew it was too late to call back his words.

As Lucy slammed down the pan she had been holding and walked past him he said desperately, ‘Lucy, please try to understand …’

As she opened the door she turned on him, feral as a maimed cat. ‘I do understand,’ she told him. ‘I understand that Davina James is more important to you than I am.’ As she slammed the door the whole house seemed to shake.

It was an old house, parts of it dating back to the fourteenth century, a long low-timbered building. They had bought it eight years ago when they first moved here shortly after their marriage.

They had been so happy then. So much, so passionately in love. When had it all changed? Why?

He had thought himself so blessed when he met Lucy, bemused by the way she had flirted with him, teased him and coaxed him, dazzled by her fire, by the life, the energy that filled and drove her. She had been a passionate lover, overwhelming all his hesitation, overwhelming him.

He had been thrilled, disbelieving almost when she had told him she wanted to marry him, shy, hesitant, unsure of him for the first time in their relationship. He had loved her so much then. And he still loved her now. At least, a part of him did; another part of him …

He tensed as he heard the front door slam and then the sound of her car engine starting up.

It had been unjust of her to accuse him of not wanting her any more. She had been the one to reject him, to turn away when he reached for her, to let him know without words that his body, his touch no longer aroused her.

Helplessly Giles sat down, his head in his hands. Maybe for the sake of his marriage he should have stood firm and told Davina that he could not stay on. Maybe he should have done, but the truth of it was that he hadn’t wanted to. The truth was that he had looked at Davina and had ached to take her in his arms, to hold her, to protect her. Davina was that kind of woman. She did not, as Lucy had always done, challenge his masculinity, she complemented it. Where Lucy was all fire and passion, Davina was all loving, comforting serenity, and something within him ached to have that serenity wrapped around him.

He was so tired. Tired of Lucy’s wild outbursts of temper, her volatility, of all the things about her that had once held him in such thrall. Including her passion? Her love for him?

Sick at heart, he groaned helplessly to himself.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘I’M SORRY, Saul, but I’d forgotten when we arranged for you to have the children this weekend that we were going to stay with the Holmeses. Tom adores it down there. He and Charles Holmes are such good friends——’

‘And Josey?’ Saul interrupted his ex-wife grimly. ‘Does she adore it too?’

It was pointless losing his temper with Karen. He knew that, but he could feel the emotion surging through him, battering down his self-control, demanding an outlet. What was happening to him? He had always been so sure of his self-control, of his ability to hide his real emotions, especially when they were unwanted ones.

‘Saul, please. Don’t be difficult about this. Josey’s got her own friends. Her own life. She’s growing up.’

And the last thing she wanted to do was to spend time with him, Saul recognised as he heard Karen out in acid silence. It was hard to remember now that they had once been married, that they had once shared all the intimacies of a married relationship, and sometimes it was even harder to recall why they had married, to recall the emotions he had once felt.

He was drained of those emotions now, incapable almost of experiencing them, even in retrospect. Increasingly he felt as though he had somehow lost pace with the rest of the human race, as though he was isolated from it, living in a void, a vacuum, where nothing existed other than his own unfamiliar, terrifying doubts.

‘Why don’t we arrange for them to come to you next weekend?’ Karen was saying.

‘I’m afraid next weekend is out,’ Saul told her. ‘I’m leaving for Cheshire next week.’

‘You’re going to see Christie?’

He could hear the astonishment in Karen’s voice and just in time stopped himself from correcting her and telling her that he was going to Cheshire on business.

His body suddenly felt cold with shock at the thought of how easily he might have made such a self-betraying mistake. It showed how much his concentration was slipping … his control. The purpose of his visit to Cheshire was supposed to be confidential—not that Karen was likely to realise its significance if he had told her that he was going there on business, but that wasn’t the point.

He ended his phone call without asking Karen if he could speak with either of his children, not because he hadn’t wanted to, but because he had recognised that neither of them was likely to want to speak to him. His fault and not theirs. As a father he hadn’t been much of a success, had he? He hadn’t been ‘there’ for them.

Not like his own father. He had been there for him. He had always been there for him; through his childhood, through his young adulthood, and even after his death Saul had felt his presence, had been comforted by the knowledge that he was fulfilling his father’s dreams for him, but just recently that closeness he had always felt had somehow slipped away from him. That inner conviction he had always had that in fulfilling his father’s ambitions for him he was also fulfilling his own dreams had somehow become lost to him.

He and his father had always been so close. It was a closeness that Christie had resented and rebelled against.

He smiled wryly as he thought about his sister. She had always been a rebel and in some ways she still was. She was unorthodox, idealistic, tough, gritty, and so determinedly independent that he wasn’t surprised she had never married.

She was also a marvellous mother. A much better mother than he was a father. He admired the way she had brought Cathy up herself, just as he admired the way she had doggedly pursued her chosen career and qualified as a GP.

Cathy had been born soon after she’d qualified, and even now, over twelve years later, he still had no idea exactly who his niece’s father was, only that he’d been married and had wanted nothing to do with his child—or its mother.

He dialled her number, smiling as he heard the familiar huskily abrupt sound of her voice.

‘You want to come and stay? Well, yes, of course you can, but why? What’s wrong?’ she demanded with sisterly candour.

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Saul told her. ‘It’s just that I’ve got some business to attend to there and I thought …’

‘You’d save money on hotel bills by staying with me. Since when, Saul?’ she scoffed. ‘More like you’re involved in something underhand and machiavellian for that precious boss of yours. I know you. There’s no way you’d voluntarily give up the luxury and comfort of staying somewhere like the Grosvenor for the chaos of my place unless you had some ulterior motive.’

‘Unless of course I just happened to want to see you and Cathy,’ Saul told her grimly.

Her comment had caught a raw spot, rubbed against an inflamed patch of his conscience, but even as he became aware of it he was aware also of his inability to control or conceal his reaction to it.

‘OK … OK …’ he heard Christie saying wryly. ‘Of course you can stay, Saul. As a matter of fact,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘you could be the answer to my prayers. I’m due to attend a conference at the end of next week. Cathy was going to stay with a schoolfriend, but the whole family’s gone down with mumps and I can’t inflict her on them as well.

‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of your extending your visit until after the conference, is there?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ Saul told her. He had only intended to spend a couple of days in Cheshire, but there was no reason why he shouldn’t stay a little while longer. The thought of putting some distance between himself and Sir Alex was one that appealed to him.

Alex was trying to manipulate him, to threaten him into submission. ‘Get me what I want or else’ had been implicit in his comments, and what the hell did he care about the damage he was about to inflict on the company he wanted to acquire?

Come to think of it, why should he care? Saul asked himself ten minutes later when he had finished speaking to Christie. He hadn’t minded in the past, had he?

At least not until Alex had wanted to take over and dismantle Dan Harper’s family company. Then he had minded.

He moved irritably from his desk to the fireplace. He had bought this apartment after the break-up of his marriage in what had then been an unfashionable part of London. The Georgian house was four storeys high and his apartment occupied the entire second floor. It was too large for a single man, but when he had bought it he had had the children in mind. The apartment had three good-sized bedrooms, each with its own bathroom.

He grimaced to himself. He could probably count quite easily on the fingers of both hands the number of times Josey and Tom had stayed with him for any period longer than one night, especially recently. Recently their visits had become even more spasmodic. Josey in particular seemed to be showing increased antagonism towards him.

Beside his bed he had a photograph of them, next to the one of his father.

His father. Why was it that, when he thought of his father these days, as well as all the love and the positive emotions he had always felt for him he now felt anxiety, a fear almost that somehow he was letting his father’s dreams for him slip away from him?

His father’s dreams for him. Wasn’t that the crux of the problem, of the doubts, the anxiety, the increasing awareness possessing him that his whole life had narrowed down to a tunnel which had become a trap, and that in continuing down that tunnel he was going against his own instincts, his own desires? Wasn’t that partially why there was so much antagonism between him and Alex? Wasn’t it true that somewhere deep inside him an unwanted voice was beginning to question what exactly it was he wanted out of life, whether the ambitions he was pursuing so relentlessly were really what he wanted?

And didn’t his thoughts always come back to this … this ongoing and increasingly stressful battle inside him to force himself to fulfil the tacit promises he had made his father?

For as long as he could remember, Saul had known that as his father’s son it was his duty to succeed and do well in life.

His earliest memories of conversations with his father were of the tight, painful feeling he got inside his stomach when his father told him how much he regretted wasting his own opportunities, how hard it was to bring up a family on his modest income and how, if he was wise, Saul would not do as he had done and ignore the importance of becoming a success.

Saul had hated those conversations. They had left him feeling sore inside and afraid. He loved his father and he was proud of him, and he hated knowing that somehow his father was not proud of himself; that in some way he felt as though he were a failure.

And yet, when Saul looked for an explanation as to why his father should feel this, he could not find it. He was loved by his family, especially Saul himself. His parents had lots of friends; there always seemed to be people dropping in; the large kitchen was always full of warmth and laughter, and, if his mother frowned sometimes and sighed anxiously when he tore his jeans, she still hugged and kissed him and told him he mustn’t worry when he asked her if it was true that they were poor.

Saul had not understood then why his father worried so much about money. It seemed to Saul that there could be no better place to live than here in their small, cosy, well-filled house with its untidy garden; that there could be no better feeling than the one he got when he came home from school to find his mother waiting for him in the kitchen with a smile and a warm hug. In fact, if it had not been for the fact that his father was so often worried and unhappy, Saul would have thought their family was very lucky indeed. But he knew that he must be wrong, because his father was not happy, his father was always urging him not to make the mistakes he had made, and that confused and worried him, because he loved his father and he wanted him to be happy.

It worried Saul a great deal that a man like his father, whom everyone liked and many people loved, a man who was part of a family where there was such warmth and laughter, should be so unhappy, and it made him feel guilty and anxious because he could not always understand what it was that made his father like that.

Saul knew that his father did not talk to Christie the way he did to him. Girls, it seemed to Saul, did not have to worry about things like ‘doing well’. Girls were allowed to be happy and not to have to think about things like that. Saul loved his sister, but he understood as he listened to his father that it was his duty as a male to take care of the females and to protect them, and most of all to make sure that he earned enough money to look after them properly.

Saul’s father had had his chances, Saul knew that, because he had often told Saul so, but he had not made the most of them. Saul must not repeat his mistakes. Saul must work very hard at school. There was no money in the family for him to inherit, no family influence to secure a safe future for him. He would have to succeed by his own endeavours.

The year Saul came third in the class in the end-of-term examinations his mother praised him but cautioned him to remember that there were other things, other gifts, other virtues that were just as important as being clever.

His father, on the other hand, told him that only the very best, the very cleverest children were given the chance to make the most of their lives, and Saul sensed that somehow he had let his father down. That being third was somehow not good enough.

The next year he was first. His father praised him, but still Saul felt empty inside. And not just empty, but lonely as well. He thought about all the football matches he had missed … all the times he had stayed in to work when his friends were out having fun, and he told himself again that he was wrong to feel that doing well and being a success had not made him feel happy in the way that his father had told him they would.

By the time he was ready to sit his GCEs Saul had dismissed those earlier childish feelings of doubt and pain. He was almost a man now, and he had absorbed his father’s teaching so well that he no longer questioned how he felt. Feelings were for girls, anyway. He had more important matters to concern him.

Saul was going to do well. Everyone said so, and Saul could see how proud and pleased that made his father. He was going to be accepted for Oxford if he did as well in his exams as his teachers felt he could. He knew already what subjects he would read, and that he would leave Oxford to go to America to spend some time in Harvard, getting his master’s.

After that the world, the commercial world, at any rate, would be his oyster. He would have the kind of qualifications that would make firms eager to employ him.

Saul saw his way ahead very clearly. A man with no money behind him and no family influence had to work, and work hard, to achieve … to make something of his life, and he intended to do just that … he had to do that … didn’t he? His family, his father, were relying on him to do so.

When he was seventeen Saul fell in love. He was a handsome boy, tall, taller than his father, with strong bones and powerful muscles; looking after the garden had become his job, and all those winters spent digging over vegetable beds and all those summers pushing the old-fashioned non-electric mower had built up his muscles and weather-hardened his flesh.

The combination of his thick dark hair and pale blue eyes with their rimming of thick black lashes had already had a devastating effect on many of his sister’s friends, but Saul had remained impervious to their flirtatious giggles and wide-eyed admiration.

Angelica, though, was different. In addition to looking after his parents’ garden, Saul earned himself some much needed pocket-money by working in other people’s gardens as well.

Angelica’s parents’ was one of these gardens.

Angelica’s parents were a very well-to-do couple. Gordon Howard was away a great deal of the time on business. Amy Howard was a small, fragile-looking blonde woman with a vague manner. To Saul she always looked somehow as though she was about to burst into tears. Whenever he went to work there she appeared in the garden with glasses of fruit juice, tinkling with ice, and more often than not Saul could smell alcohol on her breath. He didn’t like her very much. She was so very different from his own mother and yet in some way he felt sorry for her, and he had the same feeling in the pit of his stomach when she talked to him as he had had all those years ago, when his father had talked to him about his missed chances.

These days, though, Saul didn’t allow himself to dwell on those kinds of feelings. He blocked them off, denying them. They were not male, and they were not going to be a part of his life. He was going to be successful and do well. He was not going to have any doubts … any regrets. When he married, his wife would never have that sad, despairing look in her eyes that he sometimes saw in his mother’s.

The Howards had one child, Angelica. Saul had heard about Angelica from her mother, who, it seemed to him, appeared to adopt a very odd attitude to her daughter, one moment praising her to the skies, referring to her in such terms of glowing perfection that Saul frowned, secretly despising this wonder child, and then at other times complaining petulantly that Angelica did not love her, that she never spent any time with her, choosing to spend her holidays with her friends and their families.

Angelica was a year older than Saul. After leaving boarding-school, she had gone to an exclusive private college in Oxford, where apparently she was perfecting her languages and taking a very advanced secretarial course.

The half-term before Saul was due to sit his A levels Angelica came home.

Amy Howard was away in Miami, visiting friends. Gordon Howard was also away, on one of his business trips. Saul had gone round to the house to do the spring pruning and to dig over the formal beds which Gordon Howard had religiously filled with annuals every late spring, their precise colour patterns somehow reinforcing Saul’s awareness of the rigidity of the Howard home and the remoteness from one another of the people who lived there.

He had been working for a couple of hours before he realised that there was someone in the house, and he wouldn’t have realised it then if he hadn’t happened to turn his head and glance towards its windows just as the curtains at one of them were swished back.

The girl who stood in the window was definitely not Amy Howard. She had long dark hair that tumbled down on to her naked shoulders, and Saul felt his throat go dry with shock, and his muscles tense with something that was very definitely something else, as she stood there, stretching the suppleness of her body, apparently uncaring that he could see her.

Female nudity wasn’t completely unfamiliar to him; he had a sister, after all, and there were magazines freely available to anyone who chose to look at them, depicting the female anatomy in far more explicit detail than anything he could see now as he stood motionless, staring up at the girl moving her body as languorously as a lazy cat, her stretching movement lifting her breasts so that he could see how firm they were, how narrow her ribcage, how softly rounded her hips, how fascinatingly erotic and enticing the small patch of hair between her thighs, how long and supple her legs.

As he stood transfixed, staring at her, he knew he should look away, but he simply could not move. A raw, scorching heat seemed to spread through his body, a sharp, pulsing ache that made his face burn with embarrassment and confused his mind.

He had made forays into exploring the technicalities of sex, of course, and had thought himself well aware of what did and what did not turn him on, but this girl, with her wild, gypsyish mane of hair, her strong, lithe body, her apparent indifference to her nudity and to his observation of it, excited his senses in a way that wasn’t solely sexual.

He wanted to take hold of her, to run his hands over her skin, to close his eyes and absorb its silky texture, to breathe in the scent of her, to stroke her with his tongue, to …

He groaned out loud, aware that he was almost shivering with the intensity of what he was feeling. He closed his eyes, trying to blot out her image, trying to deny his need to reach out to her, to touch her face, to explore its delicacy, to see if the full smoothness of her lips felt as soft and silken as it looked. They reminded him of the petals of a poppy, vulnerable, rich, drawing the eye and enticing the touch, but all too easily bruised if treated too roughly.

He gave another deep shudder, his body racked by the physical torment of his desire, by the emotional impact of his reaction to her. He felt somehow awed, and humbled, his mind a jumble of conflicting sensations and needs. He had an unfamiliar urge to throw himself at her feet, to tell her she was the most perfect, the most beautiful human being he had ever seen. He wanted to hold her, to cherish her, to tell her how much she moved him and in how many ways, and he wanted also to crush her body beneath his own, to enter her and possess her and hear her cry out with the same elemental, savage urge that pulsed through him.

That he should feel this way made him both elated and ashamed.

Saul’s father was a very moral man, and, despite what Saul had observed happening in the world around him, a part of him retained his father’s earliest teachings: that women were to be cherished and revered, protected and treated with tenderness and care. It confused him now that he should experience both that tenderness and at the same time an alien and very sharp physical desire that he could only translate in his own mind as somehow pagan and dangerous.

When he opened his eyes, trying dizzily to clear his mind, she had gone. The curtains were still drawn back, fluttering slightly in the breeze.

She had, he realised, opened the window. Had she seen him … watching her? A dark red tide of guilt and embarrassment burned his skin. He turned to his work, resolutely keeping his back to the house.

Half an hour passed, longer, but he still could not relax, his muscles taut and stressed.

He heard the back door open but he dared not turn round. The grass muffled the sound of her approach, but he still knew that she was there, even before he heard the slow seduction of her voice saying, ‘Hi. You must be Saul. I’m Angelica.’

He had to turn round. He couldn’t ignore her. She was tall, but nowhere near his own height. Her body was now clothed in jeans and a dark grey baggy sweater with a neckline that left her collarbone exposed and with it the graceful, delicate curve of her shoulder and throat.

She was close enough for him to catch her scent. He could feel the heat searing his body, the ache of wanting. She smiled at him, perfectly composed, perfectly at ease.

She had long, slanting hazel eyes … cat’s eyes, and close to her mouth was just as full, just as enticing as it had seemed at a distance. Her skin was matt and smooth, her nails, when she lifted her hand to push the tumble of her hair off her face, free of lacquer and yet somehow glossy and attractive.

He had a shocking second’s vision of them lying against his skin, digging into it, the kind of vision he had never had in his life, and with the heat of embarrassment that poured through his body came a sharp sense of surprise that he who had never experienced such a thing should know so clearly and so unequivocally how it would feel to have the fierce rake of her nails against his flesh, the passionate twisting of her body beneath his own.

‘I’m just having a drink. Want one?’

The casual words focused his attention on reality, although he couldn’t quite bring himself to look directly into her eyes, just in case she was laughing at him. Instead he looked round as though somehow expecting to see the usual glass of juice materialising out of thin air. He was thirsty, he recognised, his throat raw and dry. He nodded, still unable to trust his voice.

‘Come on, then.’ She turned back towards the house, plainly expecting him to follow her.

He dug the spade into the earth and did so.

He had been inside the house before on many occasions, but this time it felt different … almost as though in some way he was trespassing … or walking into danger. He felt the hairs on his arms lift as he paused on the threshold of the kitchen to remove his boots.

His socks were old heavy-duty ones he wore when he was working. There was a hole in one toe and he blushed furiously as he saw it. He couldn’t imagine her ever wearing anything with holes in it … ever looking less than the picture of immaculate perfection she presented now. When his sister wore jeans they looked like jeans. On this girl … And that sweater …

He felt himself go hot as into his mind slipped a mental image of his tugging it down over her shoulder to expose her flesh to the exploration of his mouth. He imagined her winding her arms around his neck, pressing herself up against him, making small excited noises of pleasure in his ear.

‘Coffee do, or would you prefer something stronger? Always supposing you’re old enough to drink it.’

Her words brought him back to reality. He swung round and then flushed as he saw the way she was looking at him. ‘Coffee will do fine,’ he told her thickly.

He watched, fascinated, as she lit herself a cigarette. He had never been able to understand why anyone should want to poison themselves with nicotine, but now, watching as she perched on the edge of the kitchen table, supporting her weight with one slender hand, arching her back so that her breasts were clearly outlined beneath her sweater, he suddenly wished that he too was a smoker; that he could go up to her and lean close to her as he lit his cigarette from hers.

‘Coffee’s over there,’ she told him, gesturing towards the filter machine but not making any attempt to help him. ‘Help yourself.’

He moved awkwardly across the kitchen, conscious of his mud-stained jeans, his holey socks, the sweat drying on his body in the warmth of the room.

‘Not much to say for yourself, have you?’ she commented mockingly. ‘Will you be working here all week?’

He nodded, his body tensing as he saw the way her nipples were pushing against the wool of her sweater.

Feverishly febrile images tormented his senses. Mentally he pictured her naked body as he had seen it earlier. Beneath her sweater she was naked now. He knew it. He ached to go over to her, to reach out and touch her, not in lust but with all the aching emotion, all the weakening need, all the unexpected reverence for the perfection of her body that he could feel tormenting him, sweeping aside all that he had previously thought he believed about sex.

Within three days they were lovers. Angelica was the one who initiated their intimacy, laughing at his hesitancy, his shyness and his inexperience, and then suddenly heart-stoppingly ceasing to laugh at him when she touched his naked body, stroking it with her fingertips, and then with her soft open mouth, doing to him unimaginable, unbearable things that made him forget his inexperience and his hesitancy as he took hold of her and possessed her, making her cry out with sharp pleasure.

By the end of the week it was as though he had known her all his life, as though she had always been a part of him. Each time, he tried to find some new way to please her, to show her how much he loved her.

She had no inhibitions, knew no boundaries, and if at first he was semi-shocked by her lack of hesitation or shyness, that shock quickly disappeared under the expert ministrations of her hands and her mouth.

One afternoon when it was unexpectedly mild she insisted on making love outside, in the wild, overgrown section of the garden out of sight of the house.

Afterwards she smiled languorously, showing her teeth like a stalking cat as she whispered to him, ‘Mm … very D.H. Lawrence, but I think I prefer doing it inside, and there are still some things we haven’t tried.’

As he held her close, wanting to prolong the intimacy they were sharing, she leaned towards him, telling him explicitly what she would like to do.

It still had the power to shock him, this almost aggressive sexuality she possessed, but he was too besotted with her to question why he should want to recoil from any evidence that this was not her first experience of sexual pleasure. He knew that she was twelve months older than he was, but he was tall and well built and could easily have passed for a youth of nineteen or twenty rather than one of seventeen.

He had been disconcerted to discover that her favourite place for making love was her father’s study. At first he had felt uncomfortable, inhibited, being there, but his desire for her and the way she touched and aroused him quickly subdued those feelings.

She had a game she liked to enact with him, a fantasy, which she played out in the study. She was, she told him, his secretary, and he was to summon her into the room and then order her to make love to him. For this fantasy she would dress up in a neatly formal little suit, but under it she would be completely naked, or sometimes she would simply wear stockings. On other occasions she was the one who was the aggressor, sitting on the desk in front of him, peeling off her clothes, stroking her hands over her own skin but forbidding him to touch her until she said that he might.

Often by the time she finally allowed him to touch her he was so aroused that he could do little other than give in to his need to possess her, so quickly that afterwards he felt cheated almost, aching for an opportunity to show her how much he loved her, to touch her with tenderness and love, to spend as long as he could savouring every aspect of her and his love for her before that final act of possession.

Sometimes when he left her he experienced the same feeling he had as a child when his father had told him about the importance of success; an empty, hollow feeling as though something wasn’t quite right … as though there was something absent … missing.

He had ten days with her before she told him she was going back to college.

‘I’ll write to you,’ she promised, and foolishly he believed her. Even more foolishly he spent so much time aching for her, yearning for her, that he failed two out of his four A levels and had to resit them.

His father’s disappointment was the hardest to bear, the feeling of having let him down, of having allowed himself to forget his main goal, and because of that he set up barriers to protect himself from making the same mistake a second time. Emotions, he warned himself, must never be allowed to take priority over ambition. He had seen what could happen when they did. He had almost ruined his entire future, and for what? A girl who had not even written him one letter, a girl who, he saw with retrospect, had simply been using him … who had never been emotionally involved with him in the way he had been with her.

To punish himself for his weakness he concentrated exclusively on his work, studying so far into the night that his mother protested. His father shook his head and said that sometimes in order to succeed sacrifices had to be made; that he was young and could afford to miss out on a few hours’ sleep … that he wished he had Saul’s chances … that, given his life again …

Saul escaped to his own room, unable to bear the look of pain and sadness he knew would be in his mother’s eyes.

This time he passed his A levels with exceptionally high grades. He had learned an extremely valuable lesson, and all the time he was at Oxford he took care to avoid getting himself into any kind of situation that would make him emotionally vulnerable.

He dated girls, even slept with one or two of them, but he always made it clear that, while physically he found them desirable, that was all he wanted, and all he had to offer.

He got the reputation of being remote and unemotional. ‘Clever as hell,’ was the way one girl described him, ‘cold as Siberia and so sexy that just looking at him makes you ache inside.’

When Saul heard this description he smiled grimly to himself. He was a lot wiser now than he had been at seventeen, and a lot less naïve. He knew a come-on when he heard one, but he wasn’t going to respond. His finals lay ahead of him, and after that, hopefully, a year at Harvard. And this time he wasn’t going to forget all the important things he had learned from his father; this time he wasn’t going to make the mistake of allowing his emotions to get in the way of his ambitions.

The phone rang. Saul frowned as he picked up the receiver.

‘Ah, Saul. Glad I was able to catch you in.’

His frown intensified as he recognised Sir Alex’s voice. It was like the man that he should feel no need to introduce himself; that he should assume autocratically that he needed no introduction.

‘I was half expecting you’d be on your way to Cheshire by now.’

Subtlety, at least when it came to people rather than business, had never been Sir Alex’s strong point, Saul reflected. His tools of persuasion veered more towards the verbal bludgeoning and threatening school than the delicate hint.

‘You haven’t forgotten our discussion, have you?’ Sir Alex queried sharply when Saul made no response. ‘Or are you suffering another crisis of conscience?’

‘I shall be leaving for Cheshire once I’ve tied up some loose ends here,’ Saul told him coolly.

There weren’t really any loose ends for him to tie up. He knew already as much as he was going to know about Carey’s without being on the spot to do some far more in-depth research, but he could feel himself bristling inwardly at Alex’s bullying tone. The older man’s manner was beginning to jar on him. There were many things about him that Saul genuinely liked and admired, but he had never been more conscious of how little he wanted to be like him.

And yet for years he had worked patiently towards that one goal: to take over from Sir Alex when he retired. To take over from him, but not to be him.

On Sir Alex’s desk was a photograph of his daughter, taken when she graduated from Cambridge. Sir Alex had not been there for her graduation. He had been away on business. He and his wife had divorced over twenty years ago, and as far as Saul knew Sir Alex’s contact with his daughter was now limited to the exchange of cards at Christmas. Was that what he wanted? Was that the kind of relationship he wanted with his children?

For the first time behind the slightly hectoring tone of his employer’s voice Saul was suddenly aware of, if not exactly a loneliness, then certainly an aloneness. Two men, both of them, in the eyes of the world, successful and to be envied, but take away their work and what was there really in their lives?

For quite a long time after his conversation with Sir Alex was over he sat motionlessly where he was.

Beside him on his desk was the small file containing the basic facts about Carey Chemicals. He picked it up, flipping it open as he started to read.

He read quickly, pausing only a handful of times, once when he read how the company had originally come into being, a second time when he read of Gregory James’s heavy losses on the money markets, and a third time when he read that the company was now in the hands of his widow, the founder’s granddaughter, Davina James.

She would want to sell. She would have to. There was no other option open to her. The business was on the verge of bankruptcy. Saul suspected he knew the kind of woman she would be. The investigating agents Sir Alex had employed had been thorough. There were no details of Gregory James’s many affairs, just a couple of paragraphs stating that his unfaithfulness was a constant and ongoing situation and that it would seem that his wife must have been aware of it.

Saul thought he knew the type. He had met enough of them over the years; elegant, brittle, too thin, too tense and too expensively dressed, they reminded him of fragile china ornaments. You always had the feeling that if they were asked to participate in anything real they would crack and fall apart.

Some of them turned to sex as a means of solace for the uninterest of their husbands, some of them turned to drink, some to good works, but none of them, it seemed to Saul, seemed prepared to take the simple step of freeing themselves from the humiliation and destruction of their marriages by divorcing their husbands. Wealth, position, appearances, it seemed, were always more important than pride, self-respect or self-worth.

He had once made the mistake of saying as much to Christie and she had turned on him immediately, challenging him to put himself in their shoes, to be what life and circumstances had forced them to be.

He winced a little as he remembered her anger, her vehemence about the fact that so many members of her sex were taught almost from birth to accept second best, to put others first, to give instead of to take. Many of them were held in those marriages by their children, she had told him fiercely.

But Davina James did not have any children. He frowned as he lifted the last sheet of paper from the file and saw the photographs pinned neatly behind it.

There were several of Carey Chemicals, showing the run-down state of the buildings and how totally ill equipped it was to compete with even the poorest of its competitors. Without that all-important heart-drug patent which had been revised over the years to create a second patent it would have disappeared decades ago.

There was another photograph. He stiffened as he saw the name written on the back: ‘Davina James’.

He turned it over.

She was nothing like what he had imagined. The file quoted her date of birth, so he knew that she was thirty-seven years old, but in this photograph she looked younger and vulnerable in a way that made his body tense with rejection.

There was none of the glossy sophistication that he had expected about her. She was dressed in jeans and what looked like a man’s shirt, one hand lifted to push a strand of soft fair hair out of her eyes. She was wearing gardening gloves and there was a smear of dirt along one cheekbone, a fork in the ground at her feet. Her skin, free of make-up, looked clear and soft, and without even realising what he was doing Saul suddenly discovered that his thumb was touching her face.

But it wasn’t the living warmth of a woman’s flesh he could feel, just the hard glossy texture of the print.

He withdrew his hand as though the print had scorched him.

CHAPTER SIX

GUILTILY aware of how long it had been since she had last seen Lucy, and of the discomfited look on Giles’s face whenever she mentioned his wife to him, on Saturday afternoon, knowing that Giles would be playing golf and that Lucy would be on her own, Davina decided to call round and see her.

She had done nothing wrong, she assured herself as she drove through the village. It was her duty to do all she could to protect the livelihoods of those who worked for Carey’s, and without Giles’s help she could not do that.

But Giles was Lucy’s husband, and one of the reasons she had been able to persuade Giles to stay on had been his feelings for her. Feelings which neither of them had discussed … admitted, but which both of them knew were there. Did Lucy know as well?

Davina’s heart sank. The last thing she wanted to do was to hurt anyone, and she genuinely liked Lucy. Oh, she knew that there were those in their small, tight-knit local circle who disapproved of her; Lucy wasn’t like them. She was flamboyant, outspoken, turbulent and passionate. She was also extremely attractive, Davina reflected as she drove through the soft Cheshire countryside.

And extremely unhappy?

Davina pushed the thought away. Lucy’s obvious disenchantment with her life and with her husband had nothing to do with her. Lucy was not a woman’s woman. She had no interest in cosy, gossipy chats over cups of coffee, comfortable womanly discussions on the failings of men in general and husbands in particular, rueful, sometimes too dangerously honest admissions that there came a point in a relationship when sex was no longer its prime motivating force, when, as one long-married wife had once put it in Davina’s hearing, she ‘got more excitement out of watching Neighbours than making love with her husband’.

Lucy was openly, too openly sometimes, scornful of that kind of female intimacy. Lucy was different, and, because she was different, other women found her dangerous.

Davina didn’t find her dangerous. Davina liked her, and when Giles had first come to work for Carey’s Davina had envied her. Things had been different then. She had not yet met Matt, and Lucy and Giles had been so obviously, so passionately, so blindingly in love with one another that it had made Davina’s empty heart ache just to see them.

She remembered calling round early one afternoon just after they had moved in. Giles had come to answer the door, his face flushed, his hair untidy, apologising for keeping her waiting, and then behind him on the landing Davina had seen Lucy, and she had known immediately that she had interrupted them making love.

She had felt so envious then, so alone.

And now she felt guilty, even though she told herself she had nothing to feel guilty about.

Davina parked her car on the Cheshire brick herringbone-patterned drive and walked up to the front door.

She remembered the first time she had visited the house and how stunned she had been by the way Lucy had decorated and furnished it. The whole house had seemed to sing with harmonious colour and warmth, soft peaches and terracottas which complemented Lucy’s dark red hair, cool blues and greens and creams, the colour of her eyes and skin; the house was Lucy, Davina had thought, right down to the femininity of the soft cushions and the voluptuous way in which she had used her fabrics. It was a house in which even on the greyest of days the sun always seemed to be shining.

Today the sun was shining, but when Lucy opened the door Davina was shocked to see how pale she looked, how withdrawn her manner was in stark contrast to her normal ebullience.

‘Lucy, it’s been ages since I saw you,’ Davina told her nervously. ‘It’s the company. It seems to eat into my time.’ As she followed Lucy into the kitchen Davina was aware that she was speaking too fast, gabbling almost.

‘Funny, that’s always Giles’s excuse,’ Lucy told her harshly. ‘The company. Odd that you never seemed very interested in it while Gregory was alive, isn’t it?’

There was outright hostility in her voice now and Davina’s heart sank. This was what she had been dreading; that Lucy would resent her for persuading Giles to stay on.

‘Lucy, I know how you must feel,’ she began awkwardly. ‘But——’

‘Do you? I don’t think so,’ Lucy interrupted her bitterly. ‘You aren’t the one who has to sit here alone all day waiting for your husband to come home, are you? Why are you so anxious to hold on to Carey’s, Davina? You never cared about it while Gregory was alive.’

‘I didn’t realise then the problems they were having,’ Davina told her. On that subject at least she could be totally honest with Lucy. She owed it to her to be totally honest with her. ‘I have to try to keep Carey’s going, Lucy. I can’t let the company close down.’

‘Why not? You’re financially secure, aren’t you?’

Davina winced at the accusation in her voice. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘It isn’t the money, Lucy. It isn’t for me …’

‘Then who is it for?’ Lucy asked sarcastically. ‘Giles?’

Davina winced again.

‘If Carey’s closes, over two hundred people will lose their jobs, and there are no other jobs for them to go to.’

‘Giles can get another job,’ Lucy told her stubbornly. ‘Giles isn’t free to throw his career chances away for Carey’s, Davina. Giles is my husband.’

‘I know that.’ Davina couldn’t look at her. She could see how angry Lucy was, how upset, but there was more than anger in her eyes; there was pain, as well as vulnerability. Davina wasn’t used to seeing Lucy vulnerable, and doing so now made her ache a little inside.

She had always envied Lucy slightly, envied her insouciance, her self-confidence, her brilliant, glowing sensuality, her way of living life to its fullest, and most of all, if she was honest, she had envied Lucy the love that existed between her and Giles. Not because she had wanted Giles for herself, never that … No, what she had envied Lucy was the state of being loved, of being wanted, needed, of being the centre of someone’s world.

Once she had known a little of what that was like, once and very, very briefly, but what she had known had merely been a shadow of the brilliance of the love that Lucy and Giles had seemed to share.

What had happened to them? What had happened to that love? She could understand why Lucy was resentful and angry that Giles was staying on at Carey’s, but surely she must know that it was Giles’s very nature to stick loyally to those to whom he believed he owed that loyalty?

‘I was wondering if you fancied a day in Chester, shopping?’ Davina asked her, trying to change the subject to something less painful.

‘Shopping? While Carey’s goes bankrupt and people lose their jobs?’ Lucy demanded gibingly.

Davina flushed, with irritation, not guilt. Lucy was being deliberately difficult … childish almost. For the first time Davina realised that there was still a lot of the child about Lucy, and that it was this combination of a child’s faroucheness and a woman’s sexuality that made her so powerfully appealing.

She tried again.

‘Lucy, I’m sorry if you’re angry because Giles has decided to stay on a little longer at Carey’s.’

‘So it was Giles’s decision, was it?’ Lucy demanded tauntingly.

Davina heard the bitterness in her voice and her own heart suddenly felt unbearably heavy. It had been wrong of her to persuade Giles to stay, but what alternative had she had? If he left, the company would collapse. There was literally no one else who could take over. She tried to explain as much to Lucy, but Lucy did not want to listen.

‘Giles isn’t doing this for Carey’s, Davina,’ Lucy interrupted her angrily at one point. ‘He’s doing it for you. You know it and I know it. Even Gregory knew it.’

Davina couldn’t hide her shock. It was reflected in her eyes, in the way her body tensed, her colour fluctuating as she demanded huskily, ‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, come on, Davina. Giles must have told you about the arguments he and Gregory had about the way Gregory was running the company. Giles didn’t approve of the way Gregory was playing with the firm’s money. He was concerned for your future … your security. He even threatened Gregory that he would tell you what was going on. If Gregory had lived he would have sacked Giles, and Giles knew it. Do you honestly think Giles did any of that because of Carey’s? It isn’t Carey’s Giles cares about, Davina. It’s you.’

‘No … no, that isn’t true,’ Davina denied, but she felt like Judas, not only denying Giles, but also denying Lucy the right to express her bitterness and pain.

When she left it was with the feeling that all she had done was to make things worse. The last thing she would do would be to have an affair with another woman’s husband, especially when that woman was a friend; surely Lucy knew that? She liked Giles, of course she did. And yes, she was flattered … comforted even by his obvious concern for her, but that was as far as it went.

Except that she had used Giles’s concern for her to persuade him to stay on at Carey’s. Except that, in being concerned for her, Giles was very obviously hurting Lucy. And hurting other people was the very last thing Davina wanted to be responsible for.

From an upstairs window Lucy watched Davina drive away. She ought to hate Davina, but she couldn’t. She felt too afraid. What would she do if Giles did leave her? She loved him, she had always loved him and she always would, but so much had changed between them, and she knew that she herself was sometimes guilty of almost deliberately trying to drive him away, but she hurt so much inside. The pain was unbearable, eating into her, driving her into a frenzy of despair so that she had to lash out at someone, and that someone was inevitably Giles.

No, she couldn’t blame him if he left her for Davina. Davina was older than her but she was still young enough to give him children … sons.

The scene beyond the window blurred as her eyes filled with tears. Sons. Men needed them … craved them. They were always more important to them than daughters. Lucy had learned that when she was six years old. The day her mother told her that her father had left them to go and live with someone else.

Lucy hadn’t understood at first when her mother had told her that she wasn’t her father’s only child. That she had half-brothers, two of them, five years younger than Lucy. Twins … two boys … two sons. How could one daughter ever be important enough to a man to hold him against competition like that?

‘When is Daddy coming home?’ she had asked her mother over and over again until at last she had turned on her and screamed,

‘Never! Do you understand? Never. He doesn’t want us any more. He doesn’t want you. He has other children now … two sons, and they’re more important to him than you and I could ever be.’

Lucy had been afraid then; afraid because she knew that somehow being a girl meant that she would never, ever be loved as much as if she had been a boy.

She was a rebellious child, difficult, her mother said. Her teachers complained about her wilfulness and blamed it on her red hair. Lucy didn’t care. When she was naughty people couldn’t ignore her. When she was naughty she was almost as important as if she had been a boy.

Tall for her age, thin and gawky, she was almost fifteen when suddenly, overnight almost, she was transformed from an ugly duckling of an overgrown schoolgirl into a stunningly sensual young woman.

Suddenly she had a figure, breasts, a waist, hips. Suddenly her legs, so thin and coltish, were enviably long and slender. Suddenly her eyes seemed to develop a mysterious slant, her mouth a soft pout. Suddenly Lucy discovered the power of her sexuality, and equally suddenly boys discovered her.

Now things were different. Now Lucy discovered that one look from her bewitching eyes, one toss of her red curls, one tantalising pout was enough to have every boy in the neighbourhood at her feet.

Suddenly she had something that others wanted, and because of it she was valued … loved … or so it seemed to the emotionally starved child who still lived inside the quickly developing body of the new Lucy.

For a while Lucy was happy. People … boys … wanted her and said they loved her, and then three months before her seventeenth birthday her mother announced that she was remarrying. The man she was marrying did not, it seemed, want a seventeen-year-old stepdaughter, and it had been decided that Lucy would go to live with an aunt of her mother’s in London.

Lucy told everyone at school that London was ‘quite definitely the place to be’, and she even pretended that she had actually persuaded her mother to let her go and live with her great-aunt.

Lucy had become very good at pretending, like when the boys who said they loved her fumbled clumsily with her clothing, their hands hot and sweaty on her body. She pretended to herself that she enjoyed what they were doing; that she liked the way they touched her … wanted her, when in fact what she really felt inside was very afraid and very alone. She would never admit that to anyone, though. Not to anyone.

At eighteen Lucy left school and then drifted casually from job to job. Jobs were plentiful in London and Lucy was too busy enjoying herself to think about things as dull and boring as the future.

She was no longer living with her great-aunt. Now she shared a flat with three other girls; and not always the same three other girls. Life was casual, careless; Lucy was popular and sought-after. By the time she was twenty-one she had been engaged three times and had turned down several other proposals.

But deep down inside, despite her popularity, Lucy was afraid … afraid that somehow she was not worthy of being loved, afraid that when men said they loved her they did not mean it. Her father had said he loved her but it had not been true. He had left her. And so had her mother.

Lucy was determined that if there was any more leaving to be done she would be the one to do it, and she did.

She had turned from a pretty girl into a stunningly beautiful and sensual young woman. Men were fascinated by her. She was more cautious now, though, more wary; less inclined to give anything of herself. She had learned that men valued best that which was the hardest to obtain. Lucy took care to make sure that she was very hard to obtain. Impossibly hard, in most cases.

And then she met Giles.

She was working for an upmarket London PR firm. Giles worked for a recruitment agency which was headhunting for a new advertising director for the company.

He came in one afternoon to see Lucy’s boss. And then he returned, the next day and the next, for the rest of the week in fact, until he finally plucked up the courage to ask her out.

He wasn’t Lucy’s type at all, too shy, too quiet, but he continued to besiege her until finally, out of a mixture of exasperation and amusement, she went out with him.

It was only after her fifth date with him that Lucy admitted to herself that, while he might not be her type, she was enjoying the way he treated her, the way he spoiled and pampered her. Not in the financial sense—Lucy wasn’t particularly impressed by money as money, although she had a love of rich things that made her sensually materialistic. No, it was the way Giles bathed her in his obvious love for her, the way he surrounded her with it, wrapped her in it; the way when they were out together he so patently never even thought of looking at anyone else.

Lucy was a beautiful young woman but her upbringing, her insecurities and the type of men she had dated before had taught her that, while she might be valued and wanted for her physical appearance, her escorts were constantly and sometimes not even very tactfully checking to make sure that she, their date, was the most attractive woman in the room; that the other men were aware who she was with, that they were envying them because she was with them.

With Giles there was none of that, and yet it was plain that he was totally bemused, totally head over heels in love with her. Lucy, starved all her life of such unquestioning love, responded to it.

The sharply clever manner she adopted with other men softened when she was with Giles. When they were together she started to shed the outer of her many layers of protective cynicism. When he kissed her and she felt his body tremble, instead of inwardly mocking him for his weakness she found that she wanted to cling to him and hold him.

She had assumed from his manner towards her that Giles would be a tentative, hesitant lover, but when he stumblingly invited her to spend a long weekend with him she discovered otherwise.

He did not, as others had, take her to an expensive, prestigious hotel where he could show her off during the day to the other envious male guests, and where at night he could make love to her in the anonymous surroundings of their hotel bedroom.

Instead Lucy discovered that he had rented what he hesitantly described as ‘a cottage’, though not some rough, ill-equipped and damp affair as she had dreaded. No, he had displayed far greater sensitivity than that, and what intrigued and tantalised her even more was that he had also displayed how keenly aware he was of what pleased her. Because the cottage was, in fact, a small country house, not very far from Bath, since, as he told her hesitantly when they arrived, he had thought she might like to visit Bath while they were staying in the area.

‘I believe there are some very good shops,’ he told her, clearing his throat a little uncertainly and looking hesitantly at her in the half-light of the evening.

Shops! Lucy smiled to herself. Giles was far more perceptive than she had realised. There was nothing she enjoyed more than shopping. She remembered for the first time with a faint touch of self-dislike the occasions in the past when she had subtly manoeuvred a previous unwilling escort into taking her shopping, and when she had normally also managed to inveigle him into buying her something.

Her machinations had never bothered her in the past, so why did she feel this unexpected dislike at the thought of cynically coaxing Giles into buying her something? She dismissed the thought, wondering if the ‘cottage’ would be as presentable inside as it was out.

It was set in its own large gardens, and, from what she could see of them in the dusk, they were softly pretty with flowers, climbing roses and clematis, a perfect complement for the softly washed pink-tinged front of the house.

She wasn’t disappointed.

Inside, the house smelled of polish and fresh flowers, which were everywhere, and in her favourite colours as well, she observed as she walked silently through the downstairs rooms and the hall, with its polished floor and rugs, its circular polished table with the huge display of delphiniums, and larkspurs in their lavender-blues and lilacs spiked with white.

The sitting-room was large and elegantly furnished, off-white settees with mounds of cushions, sofa tables with displays of flowers, this time in creams and soft pinks, huge overblown roses that looked as though they had come straight from some country garden.

She touched the petals of one of them. It was still slightly damp, as though it had actually just been picked.

A log fire, a real one, burned in the hearth, the faint smell of seasoned logs mingling with the scent of the roses.

Behind her she heard Giles saying roughly, ‘They reminded me of you, of the colour and texture of your skin, of the way you smell,’ and then he was holding her, burying his mouth in the nape of her neck and then the side of her throat, and she realised that he had actually chosen the flowers himself.

Something inside her, some hard, tight part of her which had never been breached, swelled and ached with the emotion she had locked away inside it. Astoundingly she felt her eyes prick with tears and her heart … her heart, not just her body, ache with feeling.

Giles was pressed up hard against her back. She could feel him trembling, knew how much he wanted her, and yet he still released her, apologising rawly, ‘I’m sorry. That was crass of me.’

Lucy looked at him. One of her flatmates had commented on how attractive he was, how solid and male-looking. She herself hadn’t really been aware of it before, but now suddenly she was.

Angry with herself and for some reason a little afraid, she reacted instinctively, adopting her normal manner of protective cynicism, shrugging as she flicked the petals of one of the roses with her polished fingertips and commenting, ‘Well, there certainly isn’t any need to rush, is there? I mean, we’ve got the whole long weekend. Four whole days.’

The look in Giles’s eyes stunned her.

‘A lifetime wouldn’t be enough for me, Lucy,’ he told her hoarsely.

After that, to be allowed to go upstairs on her own while he unpacked the car threw her a little.

The house had five bedrooms, two with their own bathrooms. She chose the smaller of these, oddly drawn by its softly pretty country décor. The ceiling sloped down to a pair of dormer windows, and it had been papered with a pretty cottagey paper. The bed was high and old-fashioned, with proper bedding instead of a duvet. The floor was carpeted in such a pale peach carpet that it made the whole room seem full of warmth and light.

The bathroom off the bedroom was simple and functional. The sanitary-ware was white and old-fashioned, the bath huge with enormous brass taps. As a concession to modern-day living, a wall of neat cupboards had been installed with, Lucy was pleased to see, mirrors set above them and decent lighting. The floor was polished and sealed, a proper door on the shower instead of the plastic curtain they had in the flat.

She heard Giles coming upstairs and opened the bedroom door.

‘I haven’t booked dinner anywhere for us this evening,’ he told her awkwardly. ‘I wasn’t sure what you’d feel like doing.’

It was obvious what he felt like doing, Lucy reflected to herself. She was torn between irritation and a sudden and sharply unexpected frisson of tension, of nervousness almost. Her, nervous … and of Giles? Impossible.

‘Well, what I feel like doing right now is having a shower,’ she told him coolly. ‘And what I shan’t feel like doing afterwards is …’ She hesitated deliberately, watching him, waiting for him to become either angry or hectoring, but instead he simply looked steadily back at her. ‘I’m hungry,’ she told him pettishly, suddenly unsure of herself, and afraid because of it. ‘And I certainly don’t intend to play the little woman and start cooking.’

She reached out, took her case from him, and then retreated, closing the bedroom door on him. She waited for several minutes, wondering what he would do, and then she heard him going back downstairs.

As she stripped off her clothes and showered she wasn’t sure whether she was pleased or disappointed that he had taken her dismissal so calmly. Most of the men she knew would have been demanding their pound of flesh by now and no mistake.

She eyed herself in the mirrors as she stepped out of the shower. She had a good body; her breasts were perhaps a little fuller than fashion dictated, but her waist was enviably narrow, her legs long and slender, her bone-structure that of an expensive, fragile racehorse. Her skin gleamed with health and with the scented moisturiser she was fanatical about using. She had the beginnings of a soft peachy tan.

There was a hectic flush along her cheekbones and her eyes looked huge, as though she had been on drugs, she recognised tensely. She dried her hair and then took her time dressing and reapplying her make-up.

There was no sign of Giles. The house was so quiet that she even wondered if he had perhaps gone and left her, but when she went to the window and looked out she could just about make out the outline of the car in the darkness.

She opened the bedroom door and walked out. She had been through this often enough before to know what it was all about, she reminded herself as she walked downstairs.

So why was she feeling so nervous … so on edge?

She had almost reached the bottom step when the kitchen door opened and Giles appeared. He had changed too, and his hair was damp as though he had showered. He must, she realised on a small spurt of shock, have used one of the other rooms.

‘Supper’s ready,’ he told her.

Supper was ready. Lucy stared at him. What had he done? Certainly he could not have sent out for a takeaway, not here.

‘I thought we’d eat in the sitting-room,’ he added a little uncertainly.

Lucy nodded, for once lost for words.

An hour later, greedily eating the last of her chocolate mousse, she admitted to herself that she was impressed.

The food, which, Giles had told her shyly, he had brought with him in a hamper from London, had been wildly delicious and, she suspected, wildly expensive. There had been champagne, pink champagne, which she knew others looked down on, but which she loved.

They had started the meal with tiny wild strawberries, and then there had been delicious cold salmon served with delicately flavoured salads, a sorbet laced with something alcoholic, and then proper, darkly bitter chocolate mousse, and she had greedily eaten both hers and Giles’s.

It had been food chosen not for a man but for a woman, and again she was confused by Giles’s sensitivity in so accurately gauging her tastes.

Now, curled up on the settee while Giles removed the remains of their meal, she felt relaxed and replete. She felt, she recognised on a sudden startled stab of awareness, happy.

The scented candles Giles had lit while they ate still burned, filled the room with their fragrance, warm and musky. She breathed it in sensuously.

She was wearing a simple shift dress, simple in design, that was. It had been perilously expensive, so soft and fragile that all she was able to wear underneath it was a tiny pair of briefs.

Now as she moved into a more comfortable position on the settee she was aware of the sudden sharp peaking of her nipples, and the slow unfolding ache of desire inside her.

When Giles came back she smiled languorously at him, her eyes narrowed and mysterious. He came across to her, leaning over her. His hand cupped her face. It felt good against her skin, cool and firm. His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth, tentatively, hesitantly almost. She let her lips part, rubbing the tip of his thumb with her tongue, her eyes closing sensuously, but there was nothing calculated or deliberate about the gesture, she was genuinely aroused, and as she arched up towards Giles she heard him mutter thickly. ‘Oh, God, Lucy …’

He had never kissed her so fiercely before, so hungrily. She heard him telling her unsteadily that she tasted of chocolate, but then she teased him with her tongue and he stopped saying anything.

She had never, she realised breathlessly later, wanted to make love so much with any man. Suddenly she couldn’t wait to be rid of her clothes and for Giles to be rid of his. She could feel how aroused he was and that knowledge excited her.

She tugged impatiently at the buttons on his shirt, spreading her hands flat against his chest, licking and nuzzling his bare throat and then his chest, laughing softly as she heard him groan and felt the sweat springing up on his skin.

He fumbled with the zip on her dress the first time he tried to unfasten it, but instead of irritating her his hesitancy only seemed to sharpen the excitement coiling inside her. When he finally unfastened it and the dress slid to a silky heap at her feet, leaving her body virtually naked, gilded by the light of the candles, its sheen enhanced by the soft cream backdrop of the settee, the dark arousal of her nipples as perfect as the deepest of the velvet-petalled roses, Giles didn’t touch her. He simply looked at her.

Men had looked at Lucy before, but none of them had ever looked at her like this, as though they were beholding a miracle, a vision; none of them had ever looked at her with heaven in his eyes.

And then he started to touch her, to kiss her, not hesitantly or half clumsily, as she had expected, but with a true lover’s sensitive awareness of every minute response she made, so that when she quivered as his mouth touched the sensitive cord in her neck he kissed it again slowly and lingeringly. And when her nipple swelled tautly in the moist heat of his mouth he knew that she wanted him to caress her there, without her having to say or do anything to tell him so.

His knowledge of how to please her was something that shocked her almost as much as her own quick, almost avid sexual response to him. She found that she was piqued, jealous almost of where he might have gained that knowledge, of the woman or women with whom he had learned such unexpected skills.

But, as Giles told her later, his sexual experience was far less than hers, and what had guided him, motivated him had been his need to please her, to love her.

The climax that shook her body long before he entered her caught them both off guard, Lucy doubly so because it was an alien sensation to her to have her body so completely out of her own control.

Giles was not a selfish lover, nor a demanding one, and nor, she discovered to her astonishment, would he allow her to even the score with the quick, deft manipulation of her hand.

When she drew back from him, startled to have her hand gently but very definitely removed from his body, he told her quietly, ‘When it happens I want it to be when I’m inside you.’

She made a brief, automatic inviting movement, but he shook his head.

‘No,’ he told her huskily. ‘I want you to want it as well.’

Later she did, laughing a little at him when it was over so quickly, recovering the control she felt she had lost when her body had responded to him so completely earlier.

She fell asleep in his arms, something so alien to her that to wake up and discover that she was in bed with him, and to know that he must have carried her upstairs while she slept, sent a frisson of apprehension along her spine.

To quell it she woke him up and made love to him passionately, almost angrily, her anger dissolving into tears of release when her body was overwhelmed by the intensity of her orgasm.

When she woke up in the morning she was alone. She turned her head, glancing at where Giles had slept, the pillow smelling faintly of him. She moved, turning her face into it, her emotions torn between a helpless awareness of how different he was from anyone else she had known and an instinctive fear of that difference and what it was doing to her.

He came back while she was lying there. He had, she realised when she saw the tray he was carrying, brought her her breakfast … her breakfast, she noticed, and not his: orange juice, which looked as though it had been freshly squeezed, warm croissants, honey and tea—proper tea, not the insipid tea-bag variety they normally had in the flat, and all served on a tray with a cloth and proper china, and, instead of the too perfectly tightly furled hot-house-grown rosebud which always seemed de rigueur in the hotels in which she had stayed with previous lovers, Giles had picked from the garden a jugful of fully open, softly petalled roses.

She buried her face in them, breathing in their scent, not wanting him to see the stupid tears burning her eyes.

‘Where’s your breakfast?’ she asked him when she judged that her voice was steady enough for her to do so.

The smile he gave her was rueful, boyish almost. ‘I had bacon and eggs,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t think you’d appreciate the smell. I thought I’d walk down to the village and get some papers—let you eat in peace.’

It shocked her that he should know her so well already, that he should know that after the intimacy they had shared she now needed some time to herself, to distance herself a little from the intensity of that intimacy, to recover the emotional isolation that was so necessary to her.

She was a sensual woman, but she was also one who had absorbed too many of the sexual insecurities suffered by her mother when she was abandoned by Lucy’s father.

Although when making love she had no inhibitions at all about her body, she preferred to perform the ritual of cleansing her skin, of preparing herself for the world, on her own.

While she could enjoy the love-play that went with sharing a shower or a bath with her lover, she did not like to share what was to her the greater intimacy of preparing herself to face the outside world. No man had ever realised that so immediately and instinctively as Giles had known it.

After he had gone she pictured him making her breakfast, squeezing the oranges, picking the roses. So much care … so much planning must have gone into every fine detail of this weekend with her. She liked that. She liked knowing that he had gone to so much trouble. Where another woman might have disliked his lack of spontaneity, Lucy did not. To her spontaneity equalled fecklessness, the same restlessness which had driven her father to leave her mother. Giles wasn’t like that. Giles was careful, thoughtful. He made plans.

It was a magical weekend, extended by an extra two days because neither of them could bear to break the spell.

Once Giles could add knowledge to his love for her, his lovemaking took on a special quality that took it worlds beyond anything Lucy had known before.

And it wasn’t just in bed that he surprised and delighted her. He took her out, sightseeing, shopping, entrancing her with his determination to spoil and indulge her.

It was only when they were driving back to London that he confessed to her that he hadn’t hired the house at all, but that it belonged to his godmother.

Lucy already knew that both his parents were dead. He had been born to them late in their lives, an only child maybe, but one who had still had the love of both his parents.

When he said he loved her he meant it, Lucy recognised, and she was beginning to suspect that she loved him as well.

Strangely, that did not terrify her as it might once have done, and when three months later he proposed, she accepted.

They were idyllically happy. Secure for the first time in her memory, gradually Lucy let her defences down.

Children, he must want children. She had tested him before they were married, but he had shaken his head and told her roughly that she was all that he wanted.

‘Maybe one day, if you want them,’ he had told her. ‘But girls, Lucy, not boys, otherwise I shall be jealous of them.’

She had laughed then. His words seemed to set the final seal on her happiness.

And they had been happy, Lucy remembered achingly. Too happy perhaps. Perhaps the very quality and intensity of her happiness ought to have warned her.

She had never intended to become pregnant. It had been an accident; a brief bout of food poisoning which had nullified the effect of the contraceptive pill she was taking. By the time she realised she was pregnant it was too late for her to opt for an early termination.

She had been frantic at first, angry and resentful, with Giles as well as with the child she was carrying. She was thirty-three years old and the last thing she wanted was a baby.

Although she tried to suppress them, all the fears she had had before she fell in love with Giles resurfaced. She was alternately anxious and emotional, angry and depressed, but stubbornly she refused to explain to Giles what was wrong. He thought it was because she was pregnant without wanting to be and that she blamed him for it, when in fact she was suddenly terrified of turning into her mother; of producing a child which Giles would reject along with her.

She couldn’t analyse her fears and she certainly could not discuss them with anyone. Her doctor was old-fashioned and disapproved of mothers-to-be being anything other than docilely pleased with their condition.

The more her pregnancy developed, the more afraid Lucy became, the more trapped and angry she felt. And as the weeks went by she could almost feel Giles withdrawing from her. Where once he had always slept as close to her as he could, now he turned away from her in bed.

Her body was changing. She was carrying a lot of water with the baby, which made her seem huge. It was no wonder Giles didn’t want her any more. He denied it, though, and claimed that it was for her sake, because he could see how tired she was, how great her discomfort.

She couldn’t sleep at night, twisting and turning. She woke up one night and Giles wasn’t there. She found him sleeping peacefully in the spare room. She woke him up, furious with him, blaming him for everything, telling him how much she hated him … how much she hated the baby.

She felt more afraid and alone than she had ever felt in her life. She was so used to having Giles to lean on, having Giles to love her, and now suddenly it seemed as though he didn’t any more.

She couldn’t bear people asking her about the baby, and when they did her whole body would tense with rejection, but some instinct she hadn’t known she possessed drove her.

She found she was instinctively adjusting her diet; exercising her body less vigorously, sleeping for longer; it was as though some part of her outside her control was ensuring that, despite her conscious resentment and misery, her baby was being well looked after.

The first time she felt the baby kick she was in the garden picking flowers for a dinner party. She dropped them in shock and stood there, her eyes suddenly brilliant with tears, but when Giles came home she didn’t say anything to him.

A gulf seemed to have opened between them. He couldn’t even seem to look at her these days without wincing, and when he kissed her it was a chaste, dry peck on the cheek.

The people they were entertaining that evening were a local solicitor and his wife. Giles was well established at Carey’s now, even though he detested Gregory James. He was not the kind of man who enjoyed pushing his way up the corporate ladder, and as long as he was happy Lucy had been happy as well. He was a good husband financially, generous, giving her her own allowance. His godmother had died just after their marriage and the money he had inherited from her he had invested to bring them in an extra income so that they lived very comfortably.

The solicitor’s wife was a couple of years younger than Lucy but looked older. She had three young children, around whom her entire life revolved.

‘Has the baby kicked yet?’ she asked Lucy over dinner. ‘I remember the first time John did … I couldn’t wait to tell Alistair. We spent all evening with me with my turn exposed and Alistair’s hand on it just so that he wouldn’t miss it if it happened again. And it was the middle of winter.’

Lucy’s hand shook as she tried to eat her food. Giles couldn’t bear to look at her now, never mind touch her, or at least that was how it seemed.

When Lucy was just over six months pregnant she went into premature labour. Giles was away on business for Carey’s and so there was no one to accompany her when the ambulance screamed to a halt outside the house, summoned by the alert doctor’s receptionist’s response to her frightened telephone call.

The baby, a boy, was born before Giles arrived. She wasn’t allowed to hold him. He was taken away to be placed in an incubator. He was very frail, the hospital told them when Giles arrived two hours later, white and strained, having received a message relayed from the hospital via his secretary.

Lucy was too shocked and drugged to take in much of what was being said. It had all been so unexpected. There had been no warning signs, nothing she had felt or done.

It happened like that sometimes, the nurses soothed her, but Lucy couldn’t let it rest. She felt guilty that somehow she was the one responsible for the baby’s too early birth. She wanted desperately to see him, but had lost a lot of blood and they didn’t want her to move.

In the morning she could see her son, they told her, and Giles, who had been terrified when he walked into the ward and saw how pitifully small and frail she looked, tried awkwardly to describe their child to her.

His halting, terse description seemed to reinforce to Lucy that she had failed, and that he was angry with her because it was her fault that the baby had been born too soon, when in reality what Giles was trying to do was to blot out his mental image of the appalling fragility of the little figure he had seen through the screen that separated him from the premature-baby unit, and the wires and tubes that had been attached to his son’s minute body.

He hadn’t realised until he saw him just how much the sight of his own child would affect him. He had known that Lucy did not want children, and he loved her so much that he had been happy with that. He had seen how angry she was when she found out she was pregnant, and he had known that she blamed him.

All through her pregnancy his guilt had increased. He had seen the discomfort she was in. He had tried his best not to exacerbate things for her. He had even started sleeping in another room in case his need for her overwhelmed him. He ached so much to touch her, to explore and know the rounding contours of her body. He was amazed at how very sensual and arousing he found the visible signs of her pregnancy, at how much he wanted to make love to her, a reaffirmation of all that he felt for her and for the child they had made between them, and then he had been ashamed of his need, reminding himself that Lucy did not share the joy he was beginning to feel in the coming baby.

Now, in the hospital, trying to describe their son to her, he ached with the love the sight of him had stirred up inside him, and with the fear. He was so small … so fragile. He could feel the tears clogging his throat, burning his eyes, and he knew he mustn’t cry in front of Lucy. He turned away from her, unaware of the hand she had stretched out towards him as she tried to find the words to plead with him to tell her more about their child.

She ached inside with the loss of him. A feeling she had never known she could experience overwhelmed her. She wanted her child here with her, in her arms, at her breast, and that need was a physical pain that wrenched apart her whole body.

In the end, hours after Giles had gone home, they let her see him, afraid that if they didn’t she would work herself up into a fever anyway.

The nurse who wheeled her down to the prem unit warned her what to expect.

‘He’s very small,’ she told her quietly. ‘And very frail, I’m afraid.’

Lucy didn’t hear her. ‘My child … my son.’ Her body tensed, aching with love and fear.

The small room seemed so full of equipment that the five incubators were almost lost among the paraphernalia of monitors and tubes.

The nurse on duty stood up, frowning a little as Lucy was wheeled in, but Lucy was oblivious to her presence. All her attention was concentrated on the tiny baby in its incubator; the sole occupant of the small ward, her baby … her son. Without realising what she was doing she stood up, her body trembling as she left the wheelchair, ignoring the protests of the attendant nurse, the weakness of her own body forgotten as she stumbled across to the incubator.

The baby was lying on his back, his head turned towards her, his eyes open. She shuddered as she saw the mass of tubes attached to him and the way his tiny, fragile body fought to take in oxygen. His entire body from head to toe was only a little longer than a grown man’s hand, his limbs so delicate and fragile that his vulnerability made Lucy tremble with anguish and love.

Her impulse to reach into the incubator and pick him up was so strong that she could barely resist it. Her body ached with tenderness and despair. The intensity of the emotion that gripped her was like nothing she had ever experienced or imagined experiencing. Every other aspect of her life faded into oblivion as she looked at her baby and saw him look back at her. The pain of wanting to reach out and touch him, to hold him, and of knowing that for his sake she could not do so, that to even attempt to do so would be to endanger his life, filled her whole body.

As she watched him she prayed for his survival and knew that she would sacrifice anything, even her own life, for him, and the fact that she had once not wanted him or any other child was forgotten in the wave of love that swamped her. She stood motionlessly watching him, pleading silently.

Please God, let him live. Let him live. The sin, the guilt is mine. Please don’t punish him because I thought I didn’t want him.

But her prayers went unanswered. He was a strong baby, they told her compassionately later, but just not strong enough. He had been born too soon and his body was just not developed enough to sustain him outside the womb.

Lucy knew before they came to tell her that he had gone. She had spent every moment they allowed her in the unit, watching over him, afraid even to look away from him, silently, fiercely supporting him with her strength and her love, willing him to go on living, but finally the staff overruled her protests that she must stay with him, and she was wheeled back to her bed. She had lost a good deal of blood, they reminded her, and she was still far from fully recovered herself.

When Giles arrived she wept and begged him to make them let her stay with Nicholas, and when Giles told her that he agreed with the staff that she must recoup some of her own strength she turned away from him and refused to speak to him.

The rift that had developed between them while she was pregnant seemed to have deepened with Nicholas’s premature birth.

Although she did not know it, Giles blamed himself for not being there with her when she went into labour. At the back of his mind lay the feeling that somehow, if he had been, things might have been different.

It had shocked him when he arrived at the hospital to see how ill Lucy looked. He had been so desperately afraid then that he might lose her that for a moment he had actually forgotten their child.

Their child. His heart ached with the weight of his love for Nicholas. A love he couldn’t find the words to express, especially not to Lucy.

Nicholas’s birth had changed her completely. The girl who had so fiercely resented her pregnancy had become a sad-eyed, haunted woman who seemed barely aware that anyone other than her child existed. She seemed to have distanced herself from him completely. When he touched her she winced away from him. He could see in her eyes now her anger and bitterness.

‘Giles, please. I must be with him … I must.’

Her voice had started to rise, panic flooding her as the need inside her fought against her physical weakness, her inability to get up and go to her child.

Tears filled her eyes. She didn’t want to cry, she wanted to scream, to rage, to vent her anger and her fear, to somehow make them understand that she must be with her child, but already a nurse was hurrying towards her bed, holding her wrist, telling her firmly that she must not upset herself.

She tried to fight off the drug they gave her, forcing her weighted eyelids not to drop, focusing bitterly on Giles’s blurring face as she lost her battle.

She woke up abruptly hours later, her heart pounding, her mouth dry. It was just gone two o’clock, and she knew immediately why she was awake.

She heard the door to the ward open quietly and saw the nurse coming in, heading for the small curtained area at the end of the ward. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t; the pain was too great for that.

Giles. Where was Giles? Why wasn’t he here with her? Didn’t he care?

Outside the premature-baby unit, Giles leaned back in his chair, blinking his eyes rapidly. He couldn’t believe it was over. They had told him to go home after they had given Lucy the sleeping drug but he hadn’t been able to do so. He could still see the way she had pleaded with them to let her be with Nicholas.

Had she known? He shuddered, weighed down by his sense of guilt and failure, and the ache of loss. Their child, their son … his son. Born and now dead.

He stayed until a doctor gently insisted that he must leave; that he must go home and rest because Lucy would need him when she woke up and was told the news.

Giles wanted to tell her how much he wanted to hold his child … how much he wanted to lift him from his cradle of plastic and metal—after all, they could not save him now—and hold him against his body, flesh to flesh, father to child. That he wanted to pour out to him all the love he felt for him, but he just could not find the words, and so instead he nodded and stumbled out of the hospital into the cold of the pre-dawn summer morning.

They would not wake Lucy until nine, they told him kindly. That would give him time to have a brief rest and get back to be with her.

It was not his fault, nor the hospital’s, that Lucy did not need to be wakened.

She waited until the nurses changed shift. There was a new nurse, a trainee, the ward was busy, and it was easy for Lucy to convince the girl that she could manage to get to the bathroom unaided.

It took her a long time to make her way to the prem unit. She was still very weak. They hadn’t told her just how much blood she had lost or just how much danger she had actually been in, and Lucy assumed that it was the drug they had given her that made her feel so unsteady.

The nurse in charge of the unit didn’t see her until it was too late. The tubes had been removed from the incubator and Nicholas had been dressed in a set of minute doll’s clothes, a white knitted romper suit embroidered with teddy bears in pale blue and yellow.

The mother of another premature baby had given the clothes to the hospital, and the nurse, who knew that she should have the strength to detach herself from her emotions, had cried a little as she dressed him in them.

She saw Lucy and knew immediately that there was no need to tell her anything, and she marvelled, not for the first time, at the power of maternal love. Silently she settled Lucy with Nicholas in her arms and then went to her office to ring Lucy’s ward.

His body felt soft and warm so that it was almost possible for Lucy to believe that he was simply asleep. She touched his face. His skin felt so soft. He looked like Giles. She was sure of it. It was only when she kissed him that her control broke, her body racked by the shudders of pain that ached through her.

By the time Giles arrived they had sedated her, and, what with his concern over her and the arrangements for the funeral she insisted on holding, it never occurred to Giles to tell her how he had watched over Nicholas for her, or that he had been with him when he died.

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