Read the book: «Cruel Legacy»

Cruel Legacy
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

PROLOGUE

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

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

EPILOGUE

Copyright

PROLOGUE

‘HEARD the latest?’ the nurse coming on to the ward asked. Sally Bruton paused in her task of checking the charts at the end of the patient’s bed, frowning a little as she saw that the specialist had increased the man’s dosage of antibiotics.

Joseph O’Malley was sixty-eight and not recovering as well from his operation as he should have been doing. When Sally was on duty in Men’s Surgical she tried to find extra time to sit and talk to him. She had noticed that he didn’t appear to have any family, or any friends. She winced tiredly as she straightened up and turned round to answer the other nurse’s question.

‘What latest?’ she asked her.

‘A suicide,’ the woman told her. ‘Some man in a big, posh car. I heard about it on the way in. Wonder what made him do it … What time are you due off?’ she asked Sally, changing the subject.

‘Half an hour ago,’ Sally told her drily. She had had to stay on because the nurse relieving her was late and there had been so many cutbacks recently that there had been no one to cover for her.

Not that, if she was honest with herself, she really minded working that extra couple of hours. It meant that when she got home Joel would have gone to work.

It had been a long week; they had had three emergency admissions and, although she was flattered by Sister’s praise of her competence and ability to cope under pressure, there was no doubt that the work was very tiring.

She had hinted to her that the hospital would like her to consider working more hours … perhaps even full-time, and she already knew how Joel would react to that! It had been bad enough when she had told him that she was coming back to work part-time.

‘We need the money,’ she had told him, ignoring his set expression.

‘No, we don’t. I’ll put in for extra overtime,’ he had told her stubbornly.

But then Kilcoyne’s had gone on short time and he had been forced to concede that she was right. The loan he had taken out for his new car and the garage they had had built to house it had meant that they couldn’t possibly manage on his basic wage; not that he had been too pleased to hear her say it.

Yes, she was glad when she was asked to work some extra hours.

Normally, when she got back, Joel was still in bed. In bed, but awake … Her mind shied abruptly away from her thoughts. She was too tired, had too many other things to worry about to spend time dwelling on the sexual hostility that had developed between her and Joel.

Already she could feel her body tensing in rejection, the familiar despair and resentment sweeping over her.

Why couldn’t Joel understand that … ?

The sound of a patient’s bell from further down the ward interrupted her thoughts and sent her to find out what was wrong.

The ward doors opened and in the corridor she saw a small posse of men, two in police uniform and with them the hospital’s pathologist … no doubt on their way to the morgue and the suicide Pat had mentioned.

Sally gave a small shiver. She was a nurse, trained to preserve and nurture life. The man who had killed himself—had he had a family … children … a wife, a woman who right now was lying alone in bed, wondering where her husband was … missing the warmth and intimacy of his body next to hers, or was she more like her … did she too … ?

Abruptly, Sally switched off her thoughts as she reached out to straighten her patient’s bed and retrieve the glasses he had dropped.

Deborah Franklin stretched out her arm sleepily, moving luxuriously in the bed, a small smile curling her mouth. Last night had been so good. Her body still ached gently from their lovemaking; when she touched her skin, it felt sensually alive and femininely soft. She and Mark had always been good together in bed. Good together in every way. She was so lucky … she had worked hard to achieve her luck, though.

‘And Ryan said that he was very pleased with what I’d done. He hinted that there could be more in it for me than just an extra bonus, Mark … He didn’t say so outright, but I’m almost sure I’m going to get a promotion out of it.’

‘Good for you,’ Mark had grunted.

She had laughed good-naturedly. Men never really wanted to talk after sex and she couldn’t really blame Mark for being tired.

She’d been on a real high, buoyed up by her boss’s praise and the tantalising hints he’d thrown about the possible consequences of her hard work. She’d never been coy about expressing her sexual needs; why should she be? Mark and she were equals in all respects. Admittedly, he was that little bit ahead of her up the career ladder, but then he had joined the partnership before her. In fact, he had been the one to suggest that she leave her previous firm and apply for her present post.

‘Why don’t you put in for it if it’s so good?’ she had asked him then. He had shaken his head.

‘Receivership and insolvency work isn’t in my field. I prefer creation, not destruction …’

‘A good receiver can keep a company going …’ she had protested.

‘A receiver, yes … a liquidator, no.’

Deborah had smiled. They had met at university, both of them headed for the fast track. Even then she had set her sights ultimately on a partnership within a large firm of accountants while Mark had wanted a life out of London, finance director on the board of some prosperous Midlands company, perhaps.

As he walked back into the bedroom, she smiled invitingly up at him, patting the empty space next to her in bed.

‘Oh, no … not again,’ he protested.

Deborah laughed, but Mark wasn’t laughing with her, she recognised. He was frowning, turning away from the bed and opening a drawer, extracting clean underwear.

‘Mark …’

‘I’m sorry, Deborah, but I promised Peter I’d be in early this morning …’

‘Are you sure I can’t persuade you to change your mind?’ she teased him, flirting her fingertips against his stomach and then withdrawing slightly as she felt his body tense.

‘What is it, what’s wrong?’ she asked him quietly.

‘Nothing … Look, I’m sorry I have to go but …’

‘I know, you promised Peter, but since when has your department been so busy that you need to go in early?’ she asked him wryly. ‘As I understand it, that side of the business has been hit pretty badly by the recession. You said yourself——’

‘Look, Deborah, I know you’re feeling pretty pleased with yourself, and I’m pleased for you, but just give the gloating a break for a little while, will you?’

Open-mouthed, Deborah stared after his retreating back.

What did he mean, gloating? She hadn’t been gloating … she had simply wanted him to share her excitement, her pleasure … her pride in what she had achieved. Gloating … That was the kind of language men used to put women down, but Mark had never been like that. That was one of the reasons she loved him so much. He had always accepted her equality. He had always praised and encouraged her.

He came back into the bedroom, his thick fair hair neatly brushed into shape, and removed a clean shirt from the wardrobe. He then bent to switch on the radio, turning the sound up so that she would have had to raise her voice to speak to him above it.

What was wrong with him this morning?

As she watched him, the newsreader was announcing a suicide, a man found dead in his car. Deborah heard the item without paying it too much attention. It was a depressingly common event these days, and besides, she was much more concerned about Mark’s comment to her than she was about the death of an unknown man.

‘Bad night?’ Elizabeth Humphries asked her husband sympathetically as he let himself into the kitchen. He had been called out on an emergency at two o’clock, a bad accident on the bypass, a young boy on a motorbike with serious injuries.

‘With luck he’ll make it … just, although for a time it was touch and go … His left arm was severed and some ribs were broken, causing internal injuries. Luckily someone had had the forethought to pack the arm in ice. Twenty years ago, ten years ago even, it would have been impossible for us to reattach it. Surgery’s come a hell of a long way since I first started practising. Not that there’s any way I could have done an intricate operation like that.’

‘Micro-surgery is not your speciality,’ she reminded him. ‘But without all the hard work you put in fund-raising, the hospital wouldn’t have a micro-surgery unit.’

‘I know, I know, but sometimes it makes me feel old, watching these youngsters.’

‘You’re not old,’ she protested. He was three months away from his fifty-fifth birthday. She was five years younger.

They had been married for twenty-eight years and she still loved him as much now as she had done then, albeit in a different way.

‘You should be in bed,’ he told her. ‘Isn’t today one of your days at the Citizens Advice Bureau … ?’

‘Yes.’

No matter how busy he was, how overworked, he always seemed to find time to remember what she was doing. He had been the one who’d encouraged her to do voluntary work when their daughter had first left home.

She had been afraid then, convinced that her services wouldn’t be wanted. Now, with the problems caused by the recession, they were busier than they had ever been, so busy, in fact …

She frowned as she heard him saying tiredly, ‘We had another emergency tonight … not one we were able to do anything about, unfortunately. A suicide.’

‘Oh, poor man!’ she exclaimed, putting down the teapot.

‘You spoil me, you know,’ he told her as she poured him a second cup of tea.

She laughed at him. ‘I enjoy doing it. Sara rang. She thinks Katie has chickenpox.’

‘Oh, lord. Well, a few spots won’t hurt her.’

‘No, but Ian is already panicking. You know what doctors are like about their own families.’

‘I should do … after all, I am one.’

They both laughed.

‘Do you remember the time Sara fell off the swing and broke her arm? You were in a worse state than she was. “It’s broken, Daddy,” she said. “You’ll have to set it."’

‘Yes, I remember … I was shaking so much I didn’t dare touch her and you had to splint it in the end. Some surgeon. Some father.’

‘The best,’ she told him lovingly, rubbing her face against his head.

‘I hope that young lad survives,’ he told her more seriously. ‘It’s always such a damn waste when we lose a young life like that. Sometimes I think I’m getting too old for this job, too emotional. A surgeon shouldn’t have emotions.’

‘If you didn’t care so much you wouldn’t be such a good surgeon,’ she told him fiercely. ‘People trust you, Richard. And with good reason.’

‘I wonder what made him do it?’

‘What? Oh—speeding … the usual thing …’

‘No, not him, the man who killed himself. Such a dreadful thing to do, to end one’s life …’

‘Mmm, it’s ended for him, but for those closest to him … for his family it’s just beginning, poor devils.’

Philippa opened her eyes warily. Andrew’s side of the bed was empty and cold. She shivered slightly, although not because she missed his presence beside her; that side of their marriage had soured into dull habit ages ago, after Daniel was born.

No, it wasn’t his sexual presence in their bed that she missed.

He had been acting so oddly lately. He had never been easy to talk to at the best of times, hating any hint that she might be questioning his decisions … his dictates, as Rory had rebelliously begun to call them. She had hated it when he had insisted on the boys going to boarding-school, but perhaps it had been for the best. When they were at home it was obvious that they were aware of the atmosphere in the house … the tension … Andrew’s irritation.

At half-term he had really lost his temper with Rory. What the hell did he do with his clothes? he had demanded. Didn’t he realise how much things cost? And what about her … ? Why didn’t she see to it that the boys had a more responsible attitude towards their possessions, and why the hell couldn’t she stop them from making so much damned noise? Wasn’t it enough that he provided her and them with every luxury they could want, breaking his back, working damn near twenty-four hours a day? All he wanted when he came home, all he asked in return was a bit of peace and quiet, a home where he could bring his colleagues and clients without feeling ashamed.

Other wives, he had told her bitterly, managed far better than she did. She had stopped herself from pointing out that other wives probably also knew exactly when their husbands were due home … but over the years she had learned the uselessness of trying to argue with him when he lost his temper.

Wasn’t it enough, he had raged, that he worked his bollocks off to provide her with one of the most expensive and impressive houses in the area, a new car every year, and a lifestyle that all their friends envied?

‘He doesn’t provide them for us … he does it for himself,’ Rory had said bitterly when Andrew had slammed out of the house.

Philippa knew it was true, but she had shushed her elder son all the same. Their friends … what friends? she had wondered later. They had no real friends, only people he thought were useful … people he either wanted to impress or who impressed him. Her one and only real local friend he dismissed contemptuously, claiming that she and her husband were simply not their financial equals.

Status was something that was very important to Andrew. It was, for instance, no secret to her that, despite the fact that he never lost an opportunity to criticise her brother Robert and his wife, Lydia, secretly he was eaten up with jealousy of Robert; eaten up with jealousy and bitterly resentful of the fact that Robert’s marriage to Lydia had allowed him to enter a world which remained closed to him.

Robert had married Lydia because of who she was, because of her family connections and their money, he had declared.

Philippa had said nothing. How could she? After all, hadn’t Andrew married her for exactly the same reasons? And hadn’t she, deep down inside herself, known it … known it and refused to listen to the small, desperate inner voice which had begged her to reconsider what she was doing?

She had been too angry to do so … too angry … too proud and too hurt. Since it was obvious that she had no worth, no value as herself, as the person she knew herself to be, since it seemed she was not even to be allowed to define the kind of person she was, then she might as well be the daughter her parents, and most especially her father, wished her to be. That person was the kind of person who would automatically marry someone like Andrew … the other Philippa. Her Philippa … her Philippa no longer existed, had been destroyed a long time ago; she had not been strong enough to fight for survival … not without love to sustain her.

Love. There was certainly no love in the relationship between her and Andrew.

Andrew and Robert had been at school together, Robert the son of the area’s most successful and respected businessman, Andrew the son of elderly parents who had produced him late in life. Both of them, Philippa suspected—Andrew’s elderly, scholarly father whose main interests were his books and his fossil collection, and Andrew’s mother, a timid, quiet woman who had been much in awe of her own mother—had never quite got over the shock of producing a child who was so different in outlook and ambition from themselves.

It was typical of Andrew that when Robert had been appointed chairman of the family company Lydia’s uncle owned Andrew had immediately started lobbying for promotion to the board of his own employers.

When that had proved unsuccessful, the last thing Philippa had expected was that he would suddenly decide to resign from his job and buy his own company, his own chairmanship.

She could still remember her feeling of dismay when he had told her what he was doing. His mouth had started to twist with bitterness and, recognising what was coming, her heart had dropped even further.

‘Of course if that stupid old bag hadn’t gone and left what should have been mine to someone else, I wouldn’t need to work at all.’

Philippa had said nothing. There was no point in reminding him that his great-aunt Maud had had every right to leave her money to whomever she chose, even if that someone had turned out to be a six-foot-odd itinerant, a New Zealander who had knocked on her door one summer asking for casual work and who had stayed on over the winter to nurse her when she fell ill and broke her hip—facts of which they had known nothing until after her death, until Andrew, in his rage and disbelief, had virtually accused Tom Forster, twenty-nine to Maud Knighton’s eighty-odd, of being his great-aunt’s lover and of having seduced his, Andrew’s, inheritance away from him.

‘How could she do this to me … to our sons?’ Andrew had demanded, after he and Philippa had left the solicitor’s office.

‘Perhaps if we had visited her more …’ Philippa had suggested hesitantly.

‘What, go traipsing up to Northumberland? How the hell could we have done? You know how impossible it is for me to take time off work.’

Andrew had, of course, typically, threatened to take the matter to court, to have his aunt declared insane and the New Zealander guilty of forcing or threatening her into dispossessing him, but to Philippa’s surprise and relief Tom Forster had quietly and calmly offered to share his inheritance with Andrew on a fifty-fifty basis.

Andrew hadn’t wanted to accept. He had insisted that the very fact that he had made the offer proved that he knew Andrew would win any court case, but Philippa’s father and Robert had put pressure on Andrew to accept.

Robert’s emerging political ambitions made it imperative that his background, his family and their histories were all squeaky-clean; the last thing he wanted was the full distasteful story of Andrew’s quarrel with Tom Forster splashed all over the less savoury tabloids.

Philippa, sensitive to her father’s reactions, had been aware of the way he had distanced himself from Andrew afterwards, but Andrew, she suspected, had not. He was not that sort of man; other people’s feelings and reactions had always been things outside his understanding.

The last thing Philippa had expected, after all his complaints about how difficult life was going to be for them now that his expectations of what he would inherit had been so drastically diminished, was that he would actually part with some of the money. Not some of it, she reminded herself now, but all of it and more beside: money he had borrowed from the bank, boasting to her about the size of the loan the bank had given him, saying that showed how highly they regarded him and his business ability. She on the other hand had felt sick at the thought of their owing so much money.

‘How on earth will you ever be able to repay it?’ she had asked him.

He had laughed at her, telling her she knew nothing whatsoever about business, reminding her scornfully that she had no aptitude for it. ‘Your father was right; all the brains in the family went to your brothers.’

Philippa had winced. She had borne the burden of knowing she was a disappointment to her parents all her life. Ideally, they would have preferred another boy, not a girl, and then, when they had discovered that their third child could in no way compete intellectually with their elder two, they had turned away from her, concentrating instead on her brothers. She felt that they had been relieved when Andrew had asked her to marry him. She had only been nineteen, inexperienced and confused about what to make of her life.

‘I don’t want my wife working,’ Andrew had told her importantly once they were married, and she had resigned herself to giving up ideas of a career.

All he wanted her to do was to be a good wife and mother, Andrew had told her. He was the breadwinner, the wage earner. He didn’t like these strident modern women who seemed so out of touch with their femininity.

On their first wedding anniversary he had given her a diamond bracelet.

‘For my good, pretty girl,’ he had told her and then he had made love to her with the thing glittering on her arm. He had spent himself quickly and fiercely, leaving her slightly sore inside and unsatisfied. She remembered that when she had opened her eyes he had not been looking at her but at the bracelet.

She had worn it for the birthday meal he had insisted she invite her parents to. She had felt sick and headachy; she had just been pregnant with Rory, although she hadn’t known it at the time.

Andrew had lost his temper with her because the soufflé he had told her to make hadn’t risen, his mouth thinning into an angry, tight line.

He had never been a violent husband, but he had always resented anything that challenged his authority in even the smallest way. Her inability to make a perfect soufflé had been a challenge to that authority. His authority over her. His desire that she at all times reflect his success … his power … his massive ego.

When the children had been born it was just the same. They had to be a credit to him … always.

No, he had never been an easy man to live with, although no one else seemed to be aware of it. She was lucky to be married to him, other people told her. He was a good husband, her family said … adding approvingly that he had done well.

Just lately, though, he had seemed increasingly on edge, his temper flaring over the smallest thing. One moment he would be complaining about the amount she had spent on housekeeping, or protesting furiously about money she had spent on plants for the garden, the next he was announcing that he was buying a new car … that they were going on an expensive holiday.

When she had protested bewilderedly at his attitude, he had told her harshly that it was important to keep up appearances.

Appearances … Appearances were all-important to Andrew. She might not have much intelligence but at least she was pretty, her father had once said disparagingly.

Pretty …

‘Why do I want to marry you? Because I love you, pretty little thing,’ Andrew had told her when he proposed, then, ‘I can’t wait to show you off to everyone,’ he had told her when they got engaged, and, looking back, it seemed to her now that he had enjoyed her company in public far more than he had ever done in private.

Pretty … How she had grown to dislike that word.

She could hear a car coming up the drive. She got up, sliding out of bed and pulling on her housecoat. It was silk … a Christmas present from Andrew, ‘To wear when we stay with the Ronaldsons,’ he had told her with a smile.

‘I feel so sorry for him. That wife of his isn’t just plain, she’s downright ugly.’

‘He loves her,’ she had told him quietly.

‘Don’t be a fool. No man would love a woman who looks like that. He married her for her money; everyone knows that.’

The car had stopped. She frowned as she opened the bedroom door. The engine had sounded different from Andrew’s new Jaguar.

At first when he had started coming home later and later, she had assumed he was having an affair, and she had been surprised at how little she had minded, but then she had discovered that what he had actually been doing was working.

She had begun to worry then, but when she had tried to talk to him he had told her not to pester him.

‘For God’s sake, I’ve got enough on my mind without you nagging me,’ he had told her. ‘Just leave me alone, will you? This damned recession …’

‘If things are that bad, perhaps we should sell the house,’ she had suggested, ‘take the boys out of private school.’

‘Do what … ? You stupid fool, we might as well take out an advertisement in The Times to announce that we’re going bust as do that … have you no sense? The last thing I need right now is to have people losing confidence in us, and that’s exactly what will happen if we sell this place.’

Last weekend they had gone to see her brother and Robert and Andrew had played golf, leaving Philippa and Lydia to a rather disjointed afternoon of talk. When the men had got back there was a strained atmosphere between them and Andrew had announced that they had to leave.

Philippa hadn’t been sorry to go. She and Robert had never been close. She had always been much closer to her other brother, Michael, and Lydia she had never liked at all. Andrew still hadn’t come in. She went downstairs, thinking he must have forgotten his keys. When she opened the door and saw the police car outside, she tensed.

‘Mrs Ryecart?’

The policeman came towards her. There was a policewoman with him. Both of them had grave faces.

‘If we might just come in …’

She knew, of course … had known straight away that Andrew was dead, but she had thought it must be an accident … not this … not a deliberate taking of his own life. They had tried to break it to her gently. Found in his car … the engine running … unfortunately reached the hospital too late.

Suicide.

WPC Lewis would stay with her, the policeman was saying quietly. ‘Is there anyone else you’d like us to inform … your husband’s parents … ?’

Philippa shook her head.

‘I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ the WPC was saying. ‘You’ve had a shock.’

Suicide …

She started to tremble violently.

CHAPTER ONE

‘MUM, Paul’s still in the bathroom and he won’t let me in.’

Sally paused on the landing, grimacing as she stooped down to pick up the sock she had dropped on her last trip downstairs with the dirty washing. Her back still ached from working yesterday.

‘Paul, hurry up,’ she commanded as she rapped on the bathroom door.

‘He knows I’m going to Jane’s and I’m going to be late now,’ Cathy wailed.

‘No, you won’t,’ Sally soothed her daughter. ‘He’ll be out in a minute.’

‘He’s doing it deliberately. I hate him,’ Cathy announced passionately.

Sally had just finished loading the washing machine when Paul came into the kitchen. Was he never going to stop growing? she wondered. Those new jeans she had bought for him last month were already too short.

‘Where’s Dad?’ he demanded.

‘He’s not back yet,’ she told him.

Joel had been irritable and difficult to live with ever since they had heard the news that Andrew Ryecart had committed suicide. Sally knew that he was worried about his job, but there was no need to take it out on them—it wasn’t their fault!

‘He said he was going to come home early,’ Paul grumbled. ‘He was going to take me fishing.’

Sally’s face tightened. This wouldn’t be the first time recently that Joel had done something like this. Only last week they’d had a row about the fact that he’d forgotten that she’d arranged for them to go round to her sister’s and had arranged to play snooker instead.

‘You were the one who arranged to see them,’ he had countered when she had complained.

‘Well, someone had to,’ she had told him. ‘If it was left to you we’d never see anyone from one blue moon to another.’

‘I forgot,’ he’d told her, shrugging the matter aside as though it weren’t important. Unwilling to continue arguing with him in front of the children, Sally had gritted her teeth and said nothing, but inwardly she had been seething.

She had still been angry with him about it later that night when he had come in from his snooker match, walking away from him when he started telling her about it and later turning her back on him in bed, freezing her body into rejecting immobility when he had reached out and touched her breast.

They had argued about that as well. In hushed, angry whispers so as not to wake the children. They were getting older now and Cathy in particular was becoming sharply aware. Only a couple of months ago she had come home from school asking if Sally and Joel still had sex.

‘Well, you shouldn’t have had much problem answering that one,’ Joel had grunted when she’d told him.

She frowned again, remembering the conversation which had followed.

‘I suppose that’s going to be another excuse, is it?’ Joel had demanded aggressively. ‘You don’t want the kids overhearing us. Not that there is very much to overhear these days.’

‘Sex—you’re obsessed with it,’ she had countered. ‘We can’t discuss anything these days without your turning it into an argument about sex.’

‘Perhaps that’s because arguing about it is just about all we do,’ he had told her angrily.

It hadn’t always been like this between them—far from it. When they had first married … when they had first met …

She had been a shy, awkward girl of fourteen, her shyness made worse by the fact that she and her parents had only recently moved into the area. At school she had felt isolated and friendless. Her sister, seven years her senior, was already adult, and it was probably inevitable that the others should have picked up on her loneliness and started bullying her.

It had been Joel who had come to her rescue; two years older than her, a tall, dark-haired, broad-shouldered boy with an air of solid self-confidence about him on which she had instinctively and gratefully leaned.

He was the middle child in a family of five, with two older sisters and a pair of younger, twin brothers. The chaotic and unruly household absent-mindedly presided over by his mother had been in such direct contrast to her own orderly home lifestyle that it had fascinated her. Joel’s father was a loud, boisterous bear of a man who made his living in a variety of different ways, from running a market stall to working in a friend’s pub.

He had something of the gypsy in him, both in his looks and his way of life. Joel’s mother had, so local gossip went, married down when she’d married him. Vague and fragile, and completely unworldly, she treated her children as though she was still not quite convinced that she had actually produced them.

Her elder daughter was more a mother to her siblings than a sister, and Joel at sixteen, already mature beyond his years, had been someone for Sally’s fourteen-year-old self to look up to with shy adoration.

They had grown apart after they left school, Joel to begin his apprenticeship and she to begin nursing, and had only met again later through a mutual friend.

There had been sexual attraction enough between them then and more than enough to spare, although Joel had not rushed her into bed.

She had liked that in him. It showed restraint—and respect.

Initially, her parents hadn’t been too keen on their marrying. Her mother had cherished hopes of her marrying a doctor, and Sally had had to suffer listening to her mother’s praises of her sister Daphne’s marriage to a teacher, a white-collar worker.

Both her parents and Joel’s were dead now, and Joel’s brothers and sisters had moved right away from the Lincolnshire town where they had been born and raised. The only family close by now was Sally’s sister Daphne, and Daphne always managed to make Sally feel inferior, second-rate. She and Joel had never liked one another and she knew that Joel disliked her visiting her sister.

‘What’s wrong with you now?’ Joel had demanded after Daphne had summoned her so that she could show off her new kitchen.

‘Nothing,’ she had retorted, but later that night, looking round her own kitchen, she had suddenly started to contrast it and the rest of her home with Daphne’s much larger house. When Joel had seen the kitchen brochures she had brought home, his mouth had compressed immediately.

‘A new kitchen?’ he had stormed. ‘Are you crazy, Sal—have you seen the price of this stuff?’

The quarrel that had followed had been one of the worst they had ever had.

‘We could take out a loan for it,’ Sally had told Joel stubbornly. ‘That’s what Daphne and Clifford did. I could work extra hours to pay for it and——’

‘No,’ Joel had interrupted her. ‘We can’t afford it and I don’t want——’

‘We couldn’t afford for you to have a new car or a garage to keep it in,’ Sally had pointed out bitterly. ‘But you still got them.’

She had known from the white look round his lips that she had gone too far, but stubbornly she had refused to take the words back. Instead she had continued recklessly, ‘If I’m going to have to work to pay for your car, Joel, I might as well do a bit extra and pay for something I want as well.’

Joel hadn’t made any response, but the look on his face, in his eyes, had made her catch her bottom lip between her teeth.

Joel was a very proud man—too proud, she sometimes thought—but then her guilt had changed to irritation. Why should she be the one to feel bad just because she wanted a new kitchen? Was it really so much to ask? The trouble with Joel was that his precious pride was more important to him than she was, or so she was beginning to think.

In the end, Joel had given way and she had got her kitchen. The units weren’t the same as her sister’s expensive hand-painted ones, of course. Joel had installed theirs himself, working in the evenings and at weekends, and the day he had finished them she had come home from night duty to find that he had worked all through the night to get them finished.

He had grinned at her like a boy as he’d invited her to admire his handiwork, sweeping her up into his arms and kissing her.

He had smelled of wood and paint and sweat, his exuberance reminding her of the boy he had been when they first met.

The kitchen had been perfect … just what she had wanted, and she hadn’t resisted when he had whispered suggestively to her that they play out a certain sexy scene from the film Fatal Attraction to celebrate its completion …

Paul had put on his coat and was opening the back door.

‘Where are you going?’ Sally asked him sharply.

‘Round to Jack’s,’ he told her. ‘Dad still isn’t back and it’s going to be too late now.’

She let him go, feeling her irritation against Joel grow. It wasn’t fair, the way he always put himself first and refused to pull his weight, leaving her to do everything.

It had been all right, expecting her to run the house and take care of all the kids’ needs when she was at home, but now that she was working …

‘So stop working,’ he had told her last week when she had come home to find the house in a mess and him sitting in front of the television.

‘You know I can’t,’ she had protested. ‘We need the money.’

‘I’m ready, Mum …’

She forced herself to smile at Cathy as she came into the kitchen.

‘OK, love, I’ll take you now. Don’t forget, your dad’s picking you up.’

‘Huh … if he remembers. Mum, can we go to Florida next year? Nearly everyone in the class has been except for me.’

‘Florida’s very expensive, Cathy …’

Sally hadn’t told Joel, but she had already decided that she was going to try and put something aside from her wages into a special holiday account. She’d love to take the kids to Disneyland. Another few years or so and they would be too old to really enjoy it. It would be worth making a few sacrifices, and if she and Joel both put the same amount away each month …

‘Don’t forget,’ she reminded Cathy as she dropped her off outside her friend’s home, ‘you’re not to leave until your dad comes to pick you up.’

‘All right, all right. I’m not a baby, you know,’ Cathy told her as she rolled her eyes and tossed her hair.

Physically, Cathy took after Joel’s mother, being small, blonde and far too pretty. She had none of Sally’s thick dark hair and, thankfully, seldom revealed any of the tension that often clouded Sally’s deep’brown eyes.

Temperamentally Cathy was far stronger than Joel’s mother and, if neither of their children had shown any signs of the superior intelligence Daphne claimed for her son, Edward, they were both doing well enough at school for Sally to feel secretly very proud of them.

It was nice to have the house to herself, she acknowledged when she got back; not that she was likely to have any time to appreciate her solitude. Unlike Joel, she could not sit down in front of the television set oblivious to the chaos around her.

Upstairs the bathroom floor was covered in wet towels and someone had left the shower gel open on the shower floor, so that its contents was oozing wastefully away.

‘You should make the children contribute more to the household work,’ Daphne had remonstrated with her when she had called round unexpectedly one day and found her sister up to her eyes in domestic chores.

‘The way you do with Edward?’ Sally had commented wryly.

‘Edward is a very special child. With his level of intelligence he needs a constant input of intellectual stimuli to prevent him getting bored. Besides, he’s naturally a very tidy boy. Your two need the discipline of taking responsibility for certain domestic chores. But then, of course, I suppose it is difficult for you. If Joel were a different kind of man … Clifford is marvellous in the house. He wouldn’t dream of sitting down and expecting me to do everything … but then of course it’s all down to background, isn’t it?’ she had added. ‘And with Joel’s family background …’

Daphne hadn’t meant to be unkind. It was just that, as the older sister, she had always seemed to think it her role to have the freedom to comment on and criticise Sally’s family and way of life.

‘She’s a snob,’ Joel had once commented blatantly, and a part of Sally agreed with him, but naturally, since Daphne was her sister, she had felt duty-bound to defend her. She looked at her watch.

She had another half hour before she needed to leave for work.

She finished cleaning the bathroom, emptied the washing machine and refilled it. Both Cathy’s and Paul’s bedrooms were fearsomely untidy, but she hardened her heart. They both knew that they were supposed to tidy their own rooms.

Where was Joel? Irritably she scribbled him a note, reminding him that he had to pick Cathy up and that he had forgotten his promise to Paul.

It must be nice to be a man, and not have to worry about domestic routine and arrangements, safe in the knowledge that there was someone else there to cope. Well, she reflected, she didn’t have that luxury, and if she didn’t leave in five minutes flat Sister was going to be reminding her that every minute she was late meant that either someone else had to cover for her or the ward went unstaffed … Sister was a stickler for punctuality, and who could blame her? If only she could impose the same awareness of responsibility on Joel that Sister imposed on her ward nurses.

As she finally locked the back door behind her, she breathed a small sigh of relief.

Wearily Joel opened the back door. The kitchen smelled cold and empty, unlike the kitchen of his childhood where his brothers and sisters had always played. But his mother hadn’t always been there, too caught up in doing other things, just like …

He dismissed the thought irritably. No one could ever accuse Sally of not being a good mother—far from it. She doted on Paul and Cathy. Spoiled them, made it obvious that their needs came first in her life—well before his.

He frowned as he caught sight of the note on the kitchen table.

Pick up Cathy. All he wanted to do was to sit down and unwind, to think about what was happening at work.

They had all known that Andrew’s suicide had to be bad news for the company. It had been obvious for months that things weren’t going well. No one seemed to know exactly what was going to happen, but everyone was afraid that it would mean more job losses, more redundancies.

The other men had turned to him, as foreman, for reassurance and explanations, but he hadn’t been able to give them, and on top of his own feelings of anxiety and uncertainty he had felt as though he was somehow failing them, letting them down in not being able to supply the answers to their questions.

He had tried to see the works manager, but the pale, thin girl who was his secretary had simply shaken her head. The last thing he needed was to come home to an empty house and a terse note from Sally complaining because he had forgotten he had promised to take Paul fishing. Didn’t she realise how serious the situation was?

He had tried to ring to explain that he was going to be late, but the phone had been engaged.

He hadn’t eaten anything all day and his stomach felt empty, but the last thing he wanted was food. He looked at the note again and then checked his watch. He might as well go straight round for Cathy.

Jane’s mother gave him an amused look as she opened the door.

‘I’ve come to collect Cathy,’ he told her.

She was a plump, slightly over-made-up blonde, the smile she gave him just a little bit too suggestive as she told him, ‘Lucky Cathy,’ and added, ‘Look, why don’t you come in and have a drink? And I dare say we could find you something to eat,’ she added as they both heard his empty stomach growl protestingly.

‘Thanks but I’d better not. Sally’s got supper on,’ he lied.

‘Oh … I thought she was working tonight.’ The blonde was pouting slightly now, the pale blue eyes narrowing.

He’d never been a man who enjoyed the dangers of flirting, but her obvious availability and sexuality were making him sharply aware of the contrast between her attitude towards him and Sally’s.

His body hungered for the comfort of sexual contact with Sally, but these days she just didn’t want to know. Sometimes he felt the only reason she stayed with him was out of habit and because he provided a home for her and the children plus a steady income to support them all. It certainly wasn’t because she wanted to be with him.

The children were more important to her than he was. Much more important.

Cathy chattered excitedly all the way home.

‘Lindsay Roberts went to Disneyland for her summer holiday,’ she told him. ‘She was telling everyone about it. When can we go, Dad? Everyone else in my class has been.’

‘Stop exaggerating, Cathy,’ he told her sharply. Too sharply, he realised when she suddenly fell silent and he saw the sullen pout of her mouth and the tears shining in her eyes.

‘Why are you so mean?’ she demanded angrily. ‘Mum wants us to go.’

‘I’m not being mean, Cathy … I …’

He stopped. How did you tell a fifteen-year-old that the way things were right now you were lucky to be able to pay the mortgage, never mind pay for expensive American holidays?

‘You’re mean,’ Cathy told him. ‘And you forgot that you promised to take Paul fishing.

‘I wish I lived in a big house like Lindsay’s with a garden all the way round it.’

Joel’s mouth tightened. It wasn’t Cathy’s fault, he told himself. Kids were more materialistic these days; the whole world was more materialistic.

‘Aunt Daphne’s having an extension built on to her house, with a new bathroom. I heard her telling Mum.’

Paul was in the kitchen when they got back. Tiredly, Joel apologised to him and started to explain, but Paul wasn’t listening.

‘It’s OK … I didn’t want to go fishing anyway,’ he told him curtly.

Joel had never found it easy to get on with his son. He had always felt that Sally over-indulged him, much more so than he had ever been indulged as a boy. He could scarcely even remember his mother spending much time with him. She had not been the maternal type, despite giving birth to five children. Sally, on the other hand, had cosseted and protected Paul to the point where Joel had sometimes felt when he was a baby that he wasn’t even allowed to touch him.

‘You’re too hard on him. He’s a child, that’s all,’ Sally would protest whenever he attempted to discipline him.

‘Mum said to tell you that there’s cottage pie in the fridge for supper,’ Cathy informed him. ‘But I don’t want any.’

‘Neither do I,’ Paul announced.

Joel paused in the act of opening the fridge door and then closed it again. The phone rang and he went to answer it. It was the foreman in charge of one of the other production lines at the factory.

‘Fancy a pint?’ he asked.

Joel sighed under his breath.

‘I can’t,’ he told him flatly. ‘Sally’s at work and I’ve got to stay in with the kids.’

‘When I grow up I’m never going to get married,’ Cathy announced when he had replaced the receiver. ‘And I’m going to have lots and lots of money and go to America as often as I like.’

‘Cathy …’ Joel began, and then stopped. What was the point? How could he explain to her?

Later, when both children had gone to bed, he prowled restlessly round the living-room, too on edge to sit down and watch the television. No one knew yet exactly what was going to happen with the factory, but, whatever it was, he already had a gut feeling that it wasn’t going to be good.

As a boy he had felt the effects of his father’s careless attitude towards a settled existence and regular, reliable work; his mother hadn’t seemed to care that some weeks there wasn’t any food in the house.

‘Make sure you ask for seconds at dinnertime,’ Beth, one of his older sisters, had instructed him when he first started school.

He had promised himself even before he and Sally married that his kids would never know the indignity of that kind of poverty; that they would never suffer the effects of that kind of parental irresponsibility.

Three years ago, when Sally had tentatively suggested trying for another baby, he had shaken his head and tried to explain to her how he felt.

Six months later, he had had a vasectomy. Was he imagining it, or was it after that that she had started to lose interest in him sexually, as though she no longer wanted him now that he could not provide her with a child … now that he could no longer fulfil his biological role in her life?

And if he lost his job and he could no longer fulfil his role as breadwinner either, would she reject him even more?

He went into the kitchen and made himself a cup of tea, absent-mindedly leaving the empty unrinsed milk bottle on the worktop.

One of the other men had said to him this afternoon, ‘What the hell are we going to do if this place does close down? There’s nowhere else for us to go. Not in this town.’

‘No,’ he had agreed. ‘Nor anywhere else locally either. The engineering industry’s been hit badly by the recession.’

What he really wanted was to have Sally here at home listening to him while he told her how worried he was, he admitted as he switched on the television and then switched it off again.

She never seemed to have time to listen to him any more, and then she complained that he never talked to her.

Increasingly recently at Kilcoyne’s he had worked hard in his role as foreman to mediate between the men and the management, and as overtime had stopped and the men had felt the effects in their wage packets he had had them coming to him complaining that they were finding it difficult to manage.

He was in exactly the same boat, but because he was their foreman he had felt unable to point this out to them and tell them that he had his own problems.

He had never really wanted Sally to go out to work, and she wouldn’t have had to either if he hadn’t been fool enough to take out that extra loan to buy a new car, and then she had wanted a new kitchen—like her sister.

None of them had known then just how high interest rates were going to rise, and, even though now the payments were easier, they were still heavily in debt to the bank. At the time it had seemed worth taking the risk, he had told himself it had been worth it, and that night when Sally had walked in just as he was finishing the kitchen … It had been a long time since they had made love like that, since he had felt her body clench with excitement and need when he touched her. He had felt really good that night. Happy … secure … a king in command of his own small personal world. And then six weeks later the company had gone on to short time, and Sally had announced that, since he was making such a fuss about the cost of the kitchen, she’d pay off the loan herself.

It had been too late then to take back the angry words he had uttered in the panic of realising just what the drop in his weekly wage was going to be.

And besides, Sally had been proved right. They couldn’t have managed without the money she was bringing in.

Knowing that hurt him more than he wanted to admit. He had tried to tell Sally that, to explain, but she just didn’t seem to want to listen.

She had changed since she’d started working, even though she herself refused to admit it, grown away from him, made him feel he was no longer important to her.

‘You’re lucky,’ one of the men had said to him today. ‘At least your wife’s in work.’

Lucky. If only they knew.

Sally hummed to herself as she walked down the ward. She always enjoyed her work on Men’s Surgical. She paused by Kenneth Drummond’s bedside, responding to his warm smile. The forty-five-year-old university lecturer had been very badly injured in a serious road accident several months earlier, and she had got to know him quite well during his lengthy stay in hospital.

She had been on night duty during his first critical weeks under special care and a deep rapport invariably developed between such patients and the staff who nursed them. At times she had felt as though she had almost been willing him to live, reluctant to go off duty in case without her there he might give up and let go of his precarious hold on life.

It was a feeling no one outside the nursing profession could really be expected to understand. Joel certainly hadn’t done so.

‘You’ll have heard my news, I expect,’ Kenneth commented as she smiled back at him.

‘Yes, Wednesday, isn’t it? You’ll be glad to get away from here, I expect.’

‘Not really.’ His smile disappeared. ‘To be honest with you, I’m feeling rather apprehensive about it. Not because of any lack of faith in your surgeon’s hard work,’ he told her. ‘He’s assured me that he’s put enough pins and bolts in me to hold up the Eiffel Tower. No, it’s not that.’

‘Still, you are bound to feel a bit anxious,’ Sally comforted him. ‘It’s only natural.’

‘Mmm. But it’s not so much that. To be honest with you, it’s the loneliness I’m dreading.’ He pulled a wry face. ‘I don’t suppose I should admit to that, should I? Very unmacho of me. We men are supposed to be tough guys who don’t admit to any kind of emotional vulnerability … until we’re somewhere like this. I don’t know how you nurses manage to put up with us. You can’t be left with a very high opinion of the male sex after you’ve heard us crying into our pillows.’

‘It isn’t always easy,’ Sally admitted. ‘It hurts seeing that someone’s in pain and that you know you can’t always do anything about it. Mind you, it’s nothing to what you hear down on the labour ward,’ she told him, trying to lighten his mood. ‘Of course it’s the men who get the worst of it down there. Woe betide any male nurse who tries to tell a woman in the middle of her contractions just to remember how to breathe and everything will be all right …’

‘Yes. I’ve always thought that, when it comes to bearing pain, women are far braver than men and far more stoical.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Sally told him with a grin. ‘I cursed Joel, my husband, to hell and back when I was having Cathy. I swore afterwards that nothing would ever make me go through anything like that again.’ She smiled reminiscently.

‘You’ve got two children, haven’t you?’ Kenneth asked her.

‘Yes. I would have liked another, but …’

She stopped, frowning. It wasn’t like her to confide so easily in anyone, especially a patient.

‘Have you any children?’ she asked him directly.

Although he had talked to her a lot during the months he had been in hospital, he had never mentioned any family.

‘Yes and no. My wife and I are divorced. She remarried and lives in Australia now.’ His expression changed. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t either a good husband or a good father. We married very young, straight out of university. Rebecca was pregnant at the time and she blamed me, quite rightly, I suppose, for the fact that her career was over before it had even started. A termination wasn’t an option in those days and neither really was single motherhood. James, our second son, was born following an ill-timed attempt at marital reconciliation. We separated before he was born. They—my sons—are adults now, and anyway they look on their stepfather as their father, and quite rightly, so it’s ridiculous of me to lie here feeling sorry for myself because I’m going home to an empty house when, in truth, it is empty through my own choice.’

‘Have you no one … no family or friend … who could come in and help you out for a few days?’ Sally asked him, concerned. He was making a good recovery from his injuries, much better in fact than anyone had believed when he had first been brought in, but it would still be several months before he was able to move about easily on his repaired leg, despite what the surgeon might have to say about his handiwork.

‘Not really …’ He shrugged his shoulders, powerfully muscled from the exercises the physio had been giving him. ‘My colleagues at the university have done more than enough already. I can hardly expect them to do any more. I suppose I’m lucky that I’m in a profession where this——’ he touched his injured leg ‘—hasn’t meant that I’ve lost my job. Lucky in fact still to have the leg,’ he added, his face suddenly grave.

‘Yes,’ Sally agreed simply.

When he had first been brought in there had been a danger that his left leg might have to be amputated, his injuries had been so severe.

‘You know, lying here these last few weeks has proved something of a double-edged sword. Once the immediate danger is over and you know you’re going to live, you find that you have time on your hands to think about all those things you’ve pushed into the deepest cupboards of your mind, all hidden safely out of sight and then avoided on the grounds that there simply isn’t time to deal with them,’ he told her sombrely. ‘Having a busy life is a wonderful excuse for not dealing with one’s deeper emotional problems, as I’ve discovered.

‘When my wife used to accuse me of being selfish, of living in my own world, I always felt she was being unfair. After all, I had stood by her, hadn’t I? I married her, provided a home for her and the family. It’s only while I’ve been lying here that I’ve come to realise what she meant … I was selfish.’ He paused, watching the effect his words were having on Sally, but her expression reassured him, the sympathy in her eyes encouraging him to go on.

‘I’m a very orderly man,’ he told her. ‘I like neatness and tidiness. It comes, I suspect, of being an only child. She was just the opposite, and when I complained about coming home to the disorder of a household containing a small child she would point out, quite rightly, that she simply didn’t have the time to do everything.

‘I suspect that part of my irritation stemmed from resentment of the fact that she put the baby’s needs before mine. I’ve always believed that she was the one who abandoned our marriage, who broke faith with it by having an affair with another man.’ He paused and gave Sally a painful look. ‘Oh, yes, she managed to find time for that. No doubt the appeal of spending time in bed with her lover was far greater than that of doing the housework …

‘I shouldn’t be criticising her though,’ he added, shaking his head. ‘I realise now that in many ways I had never properly committed myself to our marriage. The family was a duty, a responsibility I shouldered because it was the right thing to do and then, having been seen to do the right thing in the eyes of the world and publicly, I privately turned my back on them by giving to my work, and consequently to myself, my self-esteem, my ego, the time and attention I should have given them.

‘Will you think very badly of me if I tell you that there were many many nights when I deliberately made extra work for myself rather than go home; that I preferred the quiet calm of my work to the noisy, untidy chaos of our home?’

‘No,’ Sally told him honestly, shaking her head. How could she say anything else, when she too knew what it was like to dread returning home, even if it was for different reasons?

‘We should never have married, of course. We weren’t suited; we didn’t even really like one another. I was never the kind of man she wanted, as she proved when she left me. Her lover was all the things I wasn’t and am not …’

Sally made a soft, sympathetic sound that made him stop and smile ruefully at her.

‘Oh, I don’t envy him … in any way. His type of competitive macho sexuality has never been something I’ve wanted to emulate. There, now I really have revealed my inner self to you,’ he told her.

Sally flushed a little as she looked away from him. He was so very different from Joel—in every way. Joel would never talk to her as openly as Kenneth was doing, never discuss his innermost feelings with anyone, never reveal any aspect of himself which might show him in a bad light. Like the man Kenneth’s wife had left him for, Joel too possessed a competitive male sexuality.

Kenneth’s nature was kinder … warmer. A small shadow touched her face, and, seeing it, Kenneth told her gently, ‘You are all the things a woman should be, Sally. All the things any man could possibly want in a woman …’

Sally made a small protesting sound beneath her breath, but he heard it and shook his head.

‘No, it’s true. And so is something else.’ He turned his head and looked at her. ‘I’m going to miss you and our conversations very, very much indeed …’

‘All patients miss their nurses when they first go home,’ Sally told him huskily.

‘Ah … I suppose that’s a tactful way of telling me that all male patients fall a little in love with their nurses,’ he retaliated. ‘Very true. Although in my case I suspect it’s rather more than a little. You must be very glad that you’re happily married, and that you’ve got a wisely protective husband to stand between you and the endless stream of smitten male patients who would probably make your life a misery with their protests of undying love.’

He was smiling at her with his mouth, but his eyes were unsmiling. His eyes … She caught her breath.

It was just as well he was going home, she told herself severely half an hour later when she went for her break.

Sally grimaced disgustedly as she walked into the kitchen and caught sight of the empty, unwashed milk bottle. Joel had left three used teabags in the sink and they had made a dirty brown stain on the surface she had left clean and shining when she went to work. His mug was on the worktop, unwashed. She scooped up the teabags with one hand and turned on the hot tap with the other, her mouth compressing. She could hear Joel coming downstairs, but she didn’t turn round.

‘Do you have to leave the place in such a mess, Joel?’ she demanded as he came into the kitchen.

She could tell from the sound of his feet that he was wearing his slippers, which meant that he wasn’t dressed … which meant … She could feel her stomach muscles tightening protestingly, resentfully, her whole body tensing when he came up behind her and slid his arms round her, trying to nuzzle his face into her neck as he told her, ‘It’s Saturday morning. Leave all that and come to bed. You must be worn out.’

‘Too worn out for what you’ve got in mind,’ she told him shortly, edging away from him, relieved when he abruptly let go of her.

‘For goodness’ sake, aren’t I allowed even to touch you now? What’s the matter with you?’

‘Nothing’s the matter with me,’ she denied, turning round. ‘And as for touching me … all you ever want these days is sex, sex, sex. Why don’t you think about what I might want for a change? Like not coming home to find the place looking like a tip …’

‘It’s an empty milk bottle, Sal, that’s all,’ Joel told her wearily. ‘OK, so I should have rinsed it out, but to be honest with you I had other things on my mind——’

‘Just as you had other things on your mind when you were supposed to come home early and take Paul fishing, I suppose,’ she interrupted him angrily. ‘You’re always accusing me of spending too much time with the kids, Joel, but whose fault is that? If you spent a bit more time with them yourself …’

‘They don’t want me … they …’

He stopped when he saw the stubborn look on her face.

‘I tried to ring, but the phone was engaged. Probably that sister of yours boasting about her new extension …’

Sally stared at him. ‘How do you know about that?’

‘Cathy told me. It seems this house isn’t good enough for her any more. She wants to live somewhere with a garden all the way round it. When you’re complaining to her, perhaps you ought to try explaining to her that if you’d got yourself a husband like your sister’s she might have been in with a chance,’ he added bitterly.

‘Oh for goodness’ sake, Joel, stop feeling so sorry for yourself,’ Sally protested. ‘If you could see some of the patients from the wards …’ She stopped abruptly, tensing inwardly as she recognised what she was doing. It was unfair of her to compare Joel to Kenneth Drummond. Unfair and unwise? ‘Look, it’s been a long night and I’m tired. If you go up and get dressed now you could do the supermarket shopping while it’s still quiet and then——’

‘Yeah … and pushing the trolley will give me something else to think about instead of sex, sex, sex—is that it?’

Sally flinched as she saw the bitterness in his eyes, but she was not going to give way and be bullied into making love with him. If he wanted to sulk like a spoiled child, well, then, let him.

‘Sally …’

Gritting her teeth, she ignored him, keeping her back turned until she heard him leave the kitchen. Upstairs in the bathroom, Joel showered angrily, turning the water to its fullest force, welcoming the savage pounding on his skin as a release of his tension. He hadn’t wanted to have sex with Sally, he had simply wanted to touch her … to hold her, to make her focus her attention on him and listen to him while he tried to explain. To explain what? That he was afraid … Oh, she would love that. The last thing she had time to do these days was to listen to his problems.

She ought not to have been so uptight with Joel, Sally admitted tiredly as she pulled the duvet over herself. She’d make it up to him later … cook him a special supper, bribe the kids to stay out of the way, try to get him to listen while she tried to explain what she wanted from him, needed from him now that she was working.

Yes, they could talk later.

CHAPTER TWO

‘GOODNESS, I’d forgotten how bad London traffic is, hadn’t you?’ Deborah exclaimed. ‘Emma said it was eight for dinner at eight-thirty. Will we make it in time, do you think?’

Without waiting for Mark to reply, she added, ‘I can’t believe it’s over eighteen months since we last saw them. Their moving down to London has made the distance too great between us for frequent visits.’

She gave Mark a quick, amused look as he stamped hard on the brakes and cursed as someone cut in front of him.

‘I told you you should have let me drive the London stretch of the journey,’ she reminded him cheerfully. ‘You know I’m a much better driver than you.’

‘You mean a much more aggressive one,’ he retorted.

‘My driving is not aggressive, it’s simply self-assured,’ Deborah corrected him. ‘I think we have to take a left here, Mark … Oh, no, you missed it. Now we’ll have to go all the way round again. You really should …’ She saw the muscle starting to twitch in his jaw and bit back the comment she had been about to make, saying instead, ‘Ryan told us on Friday that we’re going to be appointed as liquidators for Kilcoyne’s. No official announcement has been made as yet. They’re going to wait until after the funeral for that. Apart from the bank there are quite a lot of trade creditors outstanding. Not that they’re likely to recover very much. The bank seems to have all the security pretty well tied up——’

‘Where did you say we had to turn?’ he interrupted her tersely. Mark had never enjoyed city driving or heavy traffic. Unlike her. She positively revelled in the cut and thrust of it, the tussle of wills with other drivers, the challenge of outwitting them.

‘Wow … do you think we’ve got the right place?’ Deborah asked when they finally reached the address Emma had given her. It was a quiet, elegant square, and, while it might not compare in size or grandeur with some of London’s more famous squares, it was nevertheless very obviously an exclusive and expensive address.

‘Toby must be doing well if they can afford somewhere like this,’ she added as they left the car. ‘Emma said he’d recently bought into an accountancy practice. Quite an upmarket one too, apparently.’

‘Well, that should please her,’ Mark commented sourly. ‘She always was a bit of a social climber.’

Deborah eyed him in surprise. ‘She’s ambitious, that’s all—she wants Toby to succeed.’

‘Of course she does, she wants him to succeed so that she can boast about how well he’s done to her friends. What happened to her career, by the way? As I remember it, she’d got it all planned that she was going to make a big name for herself in the media.’

‘Well, she was doing very well until the TV station she was with lost its franchise. It was a case of last in first out. Since then she’s been doing some part-time PR work for a friend.’

‘Part-time PR work—well, they certainly haven’t bought this place with what she’s earning from that,’ Mark announced as he eyed the elegant façade of the building in front of them.

Deborah watched him thoughtfully as she pressed the intercom buzzer. He had been so scratchy and grouchy lately, so unlike his normal placid, calm self.

Emma came down herself to let them in. Small and vivacious, her tiny frame and delicate features hid a personality that was extremely strong-willed and tenacious. She was not a woman’s woman, and unlike Deborah she had made few friends at university. Deborah had found her competitiveness more amusing than threatening and had often teased her about the streak of conventionality which had made her insist almost as soon as they had left university that she and Toby marry instead of opting to live together as Deborah and Mark had chosen to do.

She and Mark had been invited to the wedding. A lavish affair held at a small, carefully chosen village where Emma just happened to have an ancient relative living. It had been a fairy-tale occasion, and a tribute to Emma’s talents as a master tactician and planner.

‘Mmm … this is really something,’ Deborah enthused generously as Emma ushered them into the apartment. ‘You could virtually fit the whole of our place into your living-room and have space to spare, couldn’t you, Mark?’ she commented as she admired the expensive silk curtains and the specially woven off-white carpet that covered the floor. ‘You must be doing very well, Toby,’ she added when Emma’s husband brought her her drink.

‘Oh, it’s nothing to do with me,’ he told her without smiling. ‘Emma bought this place herself—with her own money.’

Deborah felt her scalp prickle slightly as she picked up on the highly charged atmosphere which had suddenly developed. She looked helplessly at Mark, who was standing looking out of one of the long Georgian sash windows.

‘Don’t pay any attention to Toby,’ Emma advised brittly as she flashed her husband a quelling look. ‘I’ve already told him, if he wants to make a fool of himself by behaving like a spoilt child then that’s his choice.’

Despite the elegant comfort of the antique-furnished traditional dining-room and the excellence of the meal Emma served, Deborah was relieved when it was finally over. Emma and Toby had barely talked to one another all evening other than to make sniping remarks at one another. Toby made constant references to Emma’s money, in between sneeringly putting her down and being irritatingly sorry for himself.

After dinner, while Toby took Mark off to his study to show him his new state-of-the-art computerised set-up, Deborah helped Emma to clear the table and wash the expensive antique dinner service she had used for the meal.

‘This is lovely,’ she commented appreciatively as she carefully dried one of the plates.

‘It’s Sèvres,’ Emma told her. ‘I only bought it a month ago and Toby’s already broken one of the plates—deliberately, of course. I never imagined he would ever behave like this, Deborah—he’s so childish, so resentful; but, after all, why shouldn’t I enjoy the money and spend it on what I want? My grandmother left it to me, not to me and Toby. He seems to think that just because we’re a couple … just because he’s the man, he should be the one to make the financial decisions within our relationship and to have the financial power. That’s what it’s all about, of course. He was quite happy when he was the one earning more than me, making me feel I should be grateful to him when he insisted on buying me something, paying when we went out—not that that happened very often,’ she added darkly. ‘That’s another thing I’ve discovered about him recently: he can be unbearably mean. Take this dinner service, for instance … he wouldn’t speak to me for three days after I’d bought it and I don’t know what he’s complaining about really; after all, I did give him the money to buy into the partnership, and, all right, so I haven’t had this place put in joint names, but after all that’s only common sense, isn’t it, with the divorce rate as high as it is?

‘He seems to think I’m deliberately trying to humiliate him by letting people know that I’m the one with the money. You wouldn’t believe how unpleasant he’s being … mind you, you could see for yourself the way he is tonight, couldn’t you, embarrassing us all with his childishness? I’ve told him he must either accept things the way they are and live with them or——’ She gave a small shrug.

‘You mean you’d leave him, end your marriage?’ Deborah asked her, shocked.

‘Why shouldn’t I? No woman needs to stay in a relationship that isn’t working for her any more, does she, especially not one with the financial assets that I’ve got? I’ve warned him, if he doesn’t like what’s on offer there are plenty more men who would.’

‘You’re not wearing your engagement ring,’ Deborah commented as she dried the last plate.

‘No …’ Emma gave a small shrug. ‘I was never very keen on it in the first place. My grandmother left me a lovely antique ring which I’m having cleaned and re-sized. I’ll probably wear that instead.’

Deborah frowned, remembering the excitement and triumph with which Emma had flaunted the small diamond Toby had given her the day they got engaged, but she had to agree with her that Toby did seem to be behaving unreasonably and unfairly. He had made it more than plain over dinner how much he resented Emma’s inheritance.

‘Take it from me, Deborah,’ Emma warned her as she dried her hands and smoothed on hand cream, ‘when a man tells you that he sees you as an equal, don’t believe him. What he means is that he’s perfectly prepared to pretend that he does, just so long as he remains more equal than you.’

Some men might be like that, Deborah reflected as she rejoined Toby and Mark, but Mark certainly wasn’t one of them. One of the reasons she had been drawn to him in the first place was his quiet air of calmness, his lack of the kind of keen competitive edge that sometimes drove her; she was wise enough to recognise that, no matter how challenging a relationship with a kindred spirit might be, in the end its sheer intensity and ferocity would burn itself out.

She loved Mark and she admired him for all the qualities he possessed which she did not. She applauded his intelligence and diligence, and the very lack of the ruthless drive to gather and hold power, which the others had teased him for at university, was among the qualities she admired most in him. Mark, with his steadfast, quiet strength, counterbalanced her own impetuosity and impatience. She valued his judgement and, although she would never have admitted it to anyone, least of all him, for fear of ridicule, a small, secret part of her was still semi-inclined to set him apart from the other men she knew, to place him, if not on a pedestal, then certainly far above men such as Ryan Bridges, her immediate boss, whose Machiavellian nature and love of intrigue and power had taken him in ten years with the practice from a newly qualified lackey to a partnership and control over the receivership and liquidation section of the business—via, it had to be admitted, an astute marriage to the daughter of one of the most senior partners who had died only a couple of years after his retirement.

It was a well-known fact within the company that Ryan was not above breaking his marriage vows when it suited him, but his affairs were invariably brief and always ended should the recipient of his attentions begin to interpret them as anything other than the brief satisfaction of his sexual needs and ego.

Even while a part of her unwillingly admired him for his sheer drive and determination, Deborah knew that she could never be happy with a man like that. He might pay lip-service to the ideas of female equality, but lip service was all it was, even if his department did have a far larger proportion of qualified female staff than any of the others. There was a reason for that, and it had nothing to do with the superiority of the girls’ accountancy qualifications.

No one spending any length of time in the department could miss the fact that Ryan had a taste for tall, long-legged young women, nor that he enjoyed overwhelming their intelligence and common sense with his sexuality.

He had tried it on with her when she’d first joined the firm, but she had made it more than plain that she just wasn’t interested. Since then he had treated her with amusement and knowingness. He was a very sexually overpowering man, in every sense of the word. At six feet two, he had the physique and the handsomely battered face of an ex-rugby player, and at thirty-five he possessed such strong sexuality that sometimes Deborah felt as though you could almost smell it on the air after he had left the room.

She was constantly torn between admiration and loathing of him. As an accountant, a fellow professional, she admired him and all that he had achieved; as a woman … She gave a small shiver, redirecting her thoughts to the couple they had just left as Mark unlocked the car.

‘What a dreadful evening,’ she commented as he started the engine. ‘Poor Emma, I felt so sorry for her. I never imagined that Toby could ever behave so badly …’

Mark was frowning.

‘What exactly do you mean, Toby is behaving badly? Quite frankly I thought he showed remarkable restraint. If I’d been him I think I’d have throttled her well before we reached the main course, and smashed every bit of her damned dinner service into the bargain. God, I don’t know how he stands it. It must be like selling your soul to the devil. She’s certainly got the whiphand in that relationship, and you can see that she intends to use it.’

‘What do you mean?’ Deborah asked him, frowning. ‘It is her money; it’s only natural that she should feel she has a right to decide how it’s spent …’

‘Oh, yeah, it’s her money all right; she made sure we all knew that, didn’t she? I’ve never seen a man so humiliated and emasculated. Poor sod, he told me that when they go to bed now he feels like a stud being paid for sex. He says it’s totally changed her, and that——’

‘A stud—Toby?’ Deborah started to laugh.

‘What’s so funny?’ Mark asked her curtly.

‘Well, it’s just that Toby … and you … well, you’re just not the stud type, are you … not like … ?’

She winced as Mark crashed through the gears, realising too late that she had offended him. ‘Mark, I didn’t mean that as a complaint … I like you the way you are,’ she told him gently, reaching out and touching his knee lightly. ‘As far as I’m concerned, over-sexed, pushy men are a complete turn-off. All they can think about is their own satisfaction. They never see past their own egos or even think about what a woman might want.’

‘Whereas poor unsexy sods like me have to make sure we know all about how to make our partners happy if we’re ever going to be lucky enough to get a decent lay … is that what you’re saying?’

Deborah gave him a surprised look. What on earth had got into him? He was reacting as though she had been criticising him personally and not merely passing comment on the evening and the relationship between Emma and Toby.

‘Well, at least having too much money is never likely to be a problem we’ll have to face,’ she told him with a grin. ‘I don’t have any rich old grandmother wanting to leave me her all …’

‘It isn’t the money, it’s the way Emma’s using it as a weapon to bludgeon the life out of Toby that’s the problem,’ Mark told her. ‘And the way she’s enjoying doing it. That’s what really sickens me …’

‘Mark, that isn’t true!’

‘Isn’t it?’ he asked her grimly. ‘Would you admit it, even if you thought it was, or would you just close ranks in female solidarity?’

‘That’s unfair,’ Deborah protested. ‘I’d never support another woman simply because she was a woman. You know me better than that, surely.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry,’ he agreed. ‘It’s just that I’m feeling a bit edgy at the moment. Peter said there were comments made at last week’s partnership meeting about the fact that the income from our section is down—again—and guess who got a real kick out of pointing it out?’

‘Ryan?’ Deborah hazarded. ‘Well, you can’t blame him for feeling pleased that we’re doing so well. Splitting the receivership and liquidation side of things off into a separate department was his idea. I know he can be a bit over the top at times.’

‘He’s a clever bastard, I’ll give him that.’

‘Yes, you have to admire him for what he’s achieved,’ Deborah agreed.

‘But not for the way he’s achieved it.’ Mark pointed out.

‘No,’ she agreed, stifling a yawn. ‘I still can’t believe how much Emma and Toby have changed. She always seemed to lean on him so much …’

‘A real clinging vine, and now that she’s outgrown his support she’s threatening to strangle him. She’s one of the most manipulative women I’ve ever met. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d staged the whole thing tonight, just to give her grounds to divorce him.’

‘Oh, Mark, that’s not fair.’

‘Isn’t it? You know you can be very naïve when it comes to human motivations.’

‘Mmm … perhaps, but not naïve enough not to know how lucky I am to have you,’ she told him lovingly as he stopped for some traffic lights and she leaned across to kiss him lightly. ‘Seeing Toby with Emma tonight made me realise all over again how lucky I am to have you. He was so obviously jealous of her, Mark, it was horrible, so demeaning for both of them. I could never imagine you behaving like that. You’ve always encouraged me to stretch myself and grow … you were the one who talked me into applying for this job and persuaded me I could do it … You’ve always been so generous both personally and professionally.’

‘Ah, perhaps that’s because I enjoy the superior role of mentor,’ he told her teasingly.

‘Superior … we’ll see about that,’ Deborah challenged back, laughing at him as he bent his head to kiss her and then cursed as the lights changed to green and the car behind made a noisy protest at his slowness.

‘Mmm … that was lovely,’ Deborah commented drowsily as she smoothed her fingertip lovingly down Mark’s back. It was still slightly damp with perspiration from their lovemaking and she bent her head to breathe in the scent of him and kiss the indentation of his spine.

‘Hey, I thought you said you wanted to leave early in the morning …’

‘Mmm … so I did, but it isn’t morning yet, is it?’ she teased him as she stroked her hand over his hipbone and the vulnerable flesh of his stomach.

Mark had a lovely body, wholesomely, perfectly male in a way that never failed to delight her senses. Unlike Ryan, who was so obviously and overpoweringly sexual that the fastidious side of her nature automatically retreated from such potency.

Mark’s sexuality was far more subtle than that, and, to her, far, far more erotic. He was a generous lover, experienced enough to know how to please her but not so arrogant as to resent her showing him how he could increase that pleasure.

She herself was an uninhibited lover, her sexuality both voluptuous and yet at the same time unexpectedly refined, so that she always carried with her an air of somehow being slightly set apart from the rest of her sex.

Some men … men like Ryan … seemed to find that a challenge that irked and irritated them. Mark was not like that, though. He accepted that, no matter how sensually voluptuous she might be in bed, when they were not in bed the other side of her nature was repulsed by the kind of man who had to make constant sexual comments and innuendo.

She laughed herself at the odd marriage within her of sensualist and prude, but no one else other than Mark was allowed to laugh about it with her. While she was quite happy not to be married, she believed totally in a monogamous relationship and in fidelity within that relationship. She would never dream of being unfaithful to Mark, and if she ever did it would mean that their relationship was over. And if he was unfaithful to her? Her fingers ceased their erotic journey as she stared into the darkness.

Mark would never do that to her; he knew how much he meant to her. He knew how much she needed and depended on him, even if others did not. It wasn’t just love and desire that kept them together, it was trust as well, trust and respect; shared goals and ambitions and a shared belief in one another; a shared support for one another.

As a child she had been teased for being too much of an idealist, and so she had learned to conceal that vulnerability within her, but Mark knew it was there.

‘How do I look?’ she asked him a short while later when they had torn themselves out of bed.

‘Fine,’ Mark replied absently without turning round.

‘Oh, Mark,’ she protested.

‘What is it?’ He put down his razor and turned round.

‘You can’t have forgotten,’ Deborah protested.

‘Forgotten what?’

‘That Ryan’s taking me out to lunch.’

Mark grunted. ‘Oh, that—probably wants to proposition you—again.’

‘No, it isn’t that … he’s been dropping hints all week about how pleased he’s been with my work and how much the department is expanding. I think this is it, Mark … I think he’s actually going to put me in charge of my own section … give me something to really get my teeth into …’

‘Some poor bankrupt to savage, you mean … wow, won’t that be great?’

Deborah gave him a startled look. There was a thread of acid bitterness in his voice that she had never heard before. ‘Look, I know you don’t like that side of things …’

‘Save it until tonight, will you, Deborah? I’ve got a hell of a lot on my mind right now. Somehow I don’t think your department’s the only one in for a reshuffle, only we’re on the down side of the seesaw.’

Deborah frowned. ‘What do you mean, Mark—what’s … ?’

‘Forget it,’ he told her. ‘I’m just a bit on edge, that’s all. Good luck at lunchtime, and a fiver on it that he will proposition you.’

Deborah laughed. ‘The way you did the first time we went to bed. Remember?’

‘As I remember it, you were the one who did the propositioning on that occasion.’

‘I was drunk … It was Dutch courage …’

‘Not the next day when you rang up to ask me if it was still on for dinner, it wasn’t,’ he reminded her with a grin.

‘All right, so I finally got tired of waiting for you to do the asking, but I don’t recall ever hearing you say no.’

They were both laughing as he leaned over to kiss her. Last night had been good between them, Deborah reflected happily as she finished getting dressed. Very good! She loved it that their sexual relationship was so harmonious; it made her feel complete, wholly, fully alive and fully a woman. She would hate to have the kind of lover who bullied or domineered her … the kind of lover that a man like Ryan would be, or the kind Emma complained that Toby had become.

‘So … you’re looking very pleased with yourself today … good night last night?’

Deborah smiled vaguely, tucking a strand of her sleekly bobbed chestnut hair behind her ear. ‘Yes, as a matter of fact it was; we had dinner with some old friends.’

She knew what Ryan was trying to do, but she wasn’t going to be tricked into playing that game.

He had brought her to one of the area’s most exclusive and expensive restaurants for lunch and it hadn’t escaped her notice that the majority of the other lunchers there were very obviously couples.

‘Nice place, this, isn’t it?’ he asked her. ‘You should see the bedrooms, all four-poster beds and the fabrics all silk and velvet … very sensual … very tactile … very romantic.’