Read the book: «Now or Never»

About the Author

PENNY JORDAN is one of Harlequin Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged 65. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over 100 million books around the world. She wrote a total of 187 novels for Harlequin Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A PERFECT FAMILY, TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY, THE PERFECT SINNER and POWER PLAY, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan: ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’, and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

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

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

More titles by PENNY JORDAN

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TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY

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POWER GAMES

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

Now or Never
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

1

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

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

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

But of course it would. How could it not?

Anxiously she refocused on the doctor, who was frowning.

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

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

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

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

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

‘No mistake!’

Immediately she turned towards Oliver.

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

Patiently the doctor waited for his words to sink in.

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

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

‘The procedure has been successful.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maggie eyed him anxiously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shocked, Maggie stepped back from her.

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

‘I’m sorry about that.’

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

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

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

‘Are you all right?’

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

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

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

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

‘I can’t,’ she had reminded him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Come back.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Oh, Maggie … Maggie …’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immediately Maggie stiffened and pulled away from him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I have never said that,’ Maggie denied.

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

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

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

Maggie shook her head vigorously, her curls dancing.

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

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

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

‘What’s wrong?’

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

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

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

Silently Maggie looked at him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

‘If you would.’

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

‘Yes. Yes, I have.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Grandma, biscuit … biscuit!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Oh, yes, that’s right, pick on Ian.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicki sighed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The look on his face was its own answer.

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

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

But, of course, Laura was not her child.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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