Читать книгу For Better For Worse - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 7

TENSELY Fern checked her appearance in the bedroom mirror, already anticipating Nick’s criticism. She smoothed the matt black fabric of her evening dress over her hips, anxiously aware of how much weight she had lost since she had last worn it for the round of Christmas parties.

Her mother’s death had been partly responsible for that. It had been a strain taking care of her for those last weeks of her life, especially with Nick being so resentful of her absence.

She had tried to explain to him how she felt: that it was a mixture of love as well as duty and responsibility which made her feel that she had to be the one to nurse her mother; but Nick had demanded to know how he was supposed to manage in her absence. He had a business to run, he reminded her; she was his wife, and since she did not work, did not bring in any money herself, he felt he was not being unreasonable in expecting her to be there at home for him when he needed her.

She had tried to ignore the feelings of panic and misery his attitude caused her, smothering it beneath a thick blanket of anxious self-control, afraid of challenging him because she was afraid of where such a confrontation would lead.

With her mother so close to death, she had not been able to afford to provoke Nick because she had known she simply would not have either the physical or mental energy to cope with his reaction.

Her mother was dying and needed her, she had told Nick quietly.

‘I need you too,’ Nick had retaliated, and in the end she had compromised as best she could, spending the majority of her time with her mother, dashing home when she could, to ensure that Nick had clean shirts, a fridge and freezer full of food, and doing her best to placate him.

In the end her mother’s death had come almost as a relief to her. She still felt guilty about that. About that and about so many other things as well, but most especially about…

She glanced back towards the mirror, grimacing as she studied her reflection. She looked far too tired and drained for a woman of only twenty-seven; the heavy, rippling mass of her hair, tawny brown with rich gold natural highlights in its thick waves, was almost too great a burden for the taut slenderness of her neck. In fact her hair with its rich tumbling mass of curls presented an almost grotesque contrast to her face and body, she acknowledged wearily. She really ought to have it cut short. She was too old now for its careless abundance, a legacy from a childhood governed by the views of much older parents, a mother who believed that all little girls should have long, neatly plaited hair.

She had toyed with the idea of having it cut years ago when she was at university. She remembered mentioning it to Adam.

‘Don’t,’ he had told her in that strong but gently soft voice of his. And as he’d spoken, he had lifted his hand and slowly touched her, brushing the heaviness of her hair back from her face.

Trembling, she looked away from the mirror, her face flushing with guilty heat. What on earth was she doing? She had made a pact with herself years ago that she would never allow herself to give in to that kind of temptation. To do so was surely to break her marriage vows just as much as though she had…

The last thing she felt like doing tonight was going to a dinner party, especially this one.

For a start she barely knew Venice Dunstant. She was one of Nick’s clients, the widow of an extremely wealthy local entrepreneur who had been much older than she was.

There had been a lot of gossip locally about her when she had originally married Bill.

Venice. Was that really her name, or had she simply appropriated it in the same way she had appropriated Bill Dunstant?

They had met on holiday. Bill, a widower of just over sixty, had gone away on his doctor’s advice to recuperate after a heart attack. He had met Venice and married her within weeks of knowing her. They had been married just over two years when he had suffered his second and fatal heart attack, leaving Venice an extremely wealthy widow.

It had only been since his death that Nick had become involved with her. She had consulted him in his capacity as an insurance broker.

Prior to her husband’s death, she had not been seen very much locally, apparently preferring to spend most of her time in London, but she was now becoming much more active in local affairs.

It had been she who had persuaded Nick to join the exclusive and very expensive new leisure complex which had recently opened.

‘You ought to try exercising a bit more yourself,’ he had commented critically to Fern only the other evening, eyeing her too slender body with obvious disapproval. ‘Venice goes to classes almost every day, and she plays tennis as well.’

Fern had refrained from pointing out that, unlike Venice, she was not in a position to afford the kind of fees demanded by the leisure club, and that, even if she had been able to do so, her mother’s illness and Nick’s own insistence that in view of the fact that he supported her financially it was her duty to ensure that she put his wishes first meant that she wasn’t free to enjoy the luxury of so many hours of personal freedom and self-indulgence.

Nick talked a lot about Venice. Too much? She frowned, her stomach muscles tensing. Was she guilty of being overly suspicious… too untrusting, imagining things which didn’t exist… like another woman’s scent on his skin?

Physically Nick was a very attractive man; a man, moreover, who knew how to make himself appealing to women, as she well knew.

The soft thickness of his blond hair, the boyish charm of his smile, the deep blue of his eyes, all added to his air of masculine appeal. Of just slightly above average height rather than tall, his body lean and slim, unlike Adam who was both tall and broad, and who looked what he was—a maturely male man—Nick looked slightly younger than his age. A fact of which he was secretly proud and tended to subtly emphasise.

Her husband could be described as a vain man, Fern acknowledged, who at thirty still cultivated the same aura of boyish appeal he had had when she first met him.

Nick could be very persuasive when he chose, as she well knew.

She had lost count of the number of times she had given way beneath the weight of his coaxing, dreading the sullen accusations which would follow if she did not.

When had she first realised that she didn’t love him any longer; that she had in fact probably never really loved him, but had simply allowed him to persuade her that she did, flattered by his attention, aware of how anxious her parents were to see her happily and safely married, convinced by both Nick and them that marriage to him was the right thing for her?

She had genuinely believed she did love him then, she told herself miserably. Had genuinely believed that he needed and loved her. Why should she not have done? He had told her often enough how much he wanted her in his life…

And if, after their hurried courtship, she had bewilderedly discovered that his interpretation of loving and needing did not match hers, well, she had kept her thoughts to herself, reminding herself of the vows she had made, telling herself that she was expecting too much, hampered by the restrictions imposed on her by her upbringing from confiding in anyone else, much less seeking their help or advice.

The fact that she was not very sexually responsive to Nick she knew must be her fault, and she had struggled guiltily to overcome her lack of enthusiasm, miserably conscious of how much she must be disappointing Nick, of how he, as much as she, must dread the silent sexual intimacy they shared, which invariably resulted in her being left feeling tense and on edge, glad that it was over and yet guiltily unhappy at the same time as she lay there sleepless and dry-eyed, staring at the rejecting silence of Nick’s back.

No wonder he turned away from her the moment it was over, no wonder he complained that she didn’t know how to behave like a real woman. No wonder that eighteen months into their marriage he had had an affair with someone else.

What was a wonder was that she had been so shocked, so disbelieving when she had first found out. Nick was her husband… they were married… had exchanged vows! Other people’s marriages might involve a breaking of those vows, but not hers… And on top of her shock, underlining and heightening it, had been her awareness of how upset her parents would be if her marriage broke up… or how she had somehow let them down, broken faith with the standards they had set her.

It was over two years ago now and yet she could remember the events of that day as clearly as though it had only just happened. The arrival of the woman after Nick had gone to work, her own unsuspecting surprise at seeing her… the woman’s tension slowly communicating itself to her as she refused the cup of coffee Fern had offered, wheeling round to confront her, nervously smoking the cigarette she had just lit.

Fern remembered how afterwards she had been surprised at Nick’s choice, knowing how much he loathed people smoking—an odd, disconnected, sharply clear thought which had somehow lodged itself in her brain while other, far more important ones had been held tensely at bay.

She and Nick were lovers, the woman had told her, angrily claiming that she knew that Fern must be aware of the situation; that she, Fern, was deliberately holding on to Nick when she knew he no longer wanted her.

Shock and pride had prevented Fern from telling her the truth: that she had had no idea of what was going on.

Eventually the woman had left. Fern had watched her drive away, her body, her emotions, her mind almost completely numbed. She remembered walking upstairs and opening her wardrobe doors, removing a suitcase and starting to pack her things.

Then the phone had started to ring. She had gone downstairs intending to answer it, but instead she had walked right past it, through the back door which she had left unlocked and open, and out into the street.

She had no recollection of doing any of this… nor of how she had walked right into town… nor of what her purpose might have been in doing so.

It had been Adam who had found her, who had saved her from public humiliation, only to cause her to suffer later the most profound and intense personal humiliation—but that was something she could still not bear to think about, not now… not ever… He had taken her home—his home, not hers. She had started to cry, bewildered and shocked by the trauma which had overwhelmed her. She had started to tell him about Nick’s affair… her shock… things she would never normally have dreamed of confiding to him.

Her days of confiding in Adam had ended with her marriage to his stepbrother, no matter that once it had been Adam who she had thought was her friend. Adam… Adam she had known first, not Nick.

But, as she had discovered when she met Nick, the Adam she had thought she knew must have been a figment of her own imagination.

‘You didn’t really think Adam was interested in you sexually, did you?’ Nick had asked her incredulously. ‘Oh, Fern.’ He had laughed gently as he gave her a little shake. ‘Did you really think…? Adam already has a girlfriend… or rather a woman friend. It’s a very discreet relationship. Adam prefers it that way… it leaves his options open, if you know what I mean. I suppose I shouldn’t criticise. After all, a man in his position, reasonably well off and with the kind of reputation Adam’s built up for himself as a local do-gooder… he has to be seen to toe the moral line, even if what he does in private… He’s something of a secret stud, my stepbrother. But you’re quite safe from him, Fern. He likes his sexual partners to be women, not little girls… Little virgins…’

She could remember now how humiliated she had felt… how humiliated and self-conscious she had been from then on whenever she saw Adam. Had he actually discussed her with Nick… told Nick…? In fact, she had felt so uncomfortable, so betrayed almost, that she had deliberately started to avoid seeing him. And yet he had never given her any indication… done or said anything…

It had hurt her to know, though, as she now did know because of Nick’s revelations, that Adam had probably been quite aware of the silly crush she had had on him. Aware of it and no doubt amused by it, discussing it probably with the unknown woman who shared his bed, the woman who Nick had implied was a world away from her own silly immaturity.

In the trauma of her shock, though, she had not had the strength to erect her normal defences against Adam. She had simply let him take her home with him, sit her down and gently coax from her what had happened.

She had started to cry, she remembered. And that was when it had happened… when she had broken faith with all that her parents had taught her to respect and revere, when she had done something that was far, far worse than Nick’s merely sexual betrayal of her.

Even now she could not bear to think about it, pushing the memory fiercely out of sight, willing herself not to allow even a chink of light into that seething darkness of spirit and emotion into which she had locked the memories away.

She had known afterwards, of course, that there was no going back, that her marriage to Nick was over, but she hadn’t said anything to Adam.

How could she, when she knew that he had simply acted out of pity, had just reacted as any man would have done to what she had said… what she had done?

She had insisted on returning home, even though Adam had tried to dissuade her. ‘At least let me drive you,’ he had said, but she had shaken her head, unable to bear to look at him, backing away from him in her panic in case he reached out and touched her, so shocked and ashamed by her own behaviour, her own wantonness, that all she had wanted to do was to escape from him and from it, taking advantage of the quirk of fate that decreed that his phone should start to ring just as he reached out towards her, distracting him long enough for her to turn and run.

He had come after her, calling out her name, but it was too late, she was already outside in the street, knowing that with others to see them, others who knew who both of them were and what their relationship to one another was, Adam could hardly run after her and force her physically back into the house.

And besides, why should he really want to? Despite the concern he seemed to feel for her, secretly he must surely have been only too relieved that she was leaving, saving him the necessity of pointing out to her that she had misunderstood… that he had never intended…

The phone had been ringing as she got home, but she had ignored it, knowing that it would be Adam. Instead she had gone straight upstairs to where her suitcase still lay open on the bed.

Methodically she had started to remove her clothes from the wardrobe and pack them into it, rehearsing what she was going to say to Nick, how she was going to tell him that she knew about his affair, knew he loved someone else; knew that their marriage had to end.

He had arrived home ten minutes later, returning much earlier than usual, and she had seen immediately from his expression that he knew his lover had been to see her.

She had opened her mouth to tell him that she was leaving but he’d forestalled her, bursting into an impassioned speech, reaching out to take hold of her, scarcely seeming to notice the way she tensed and flinched back from his touch.

‘Fern… Fern… I’m so sorry. I never meant you to find out. She never meant anything to me, you must believe that,’ he told her huskily.

He went on to beg her not to leave him, to tell her how much he still loved and needed her, to plead and cajole, making her head ache with the voluble force of his arguments and insistence.

‘Think what this will do to your parents,’ he said as he looked at her half-packed suitcase. ‘You know how much it would hurt and upset them. Do you really want to do that to them, Fern, and all over a silly little fling that never meant anything important?

‘You’re so naïve… you see everything in black and white. How many marriages do you think would survive if every woman who learned that her husband had made a small mistake actually left him? I never intended it to happen, but, well, let’s be honest—sexually…’ He gave a small shrug. ‘She made me feel wanted,’ he told her, giving her his little-boy-lost smile. ‘She made me feel that I was important to her. She wanted me, Fern. Oh, I know it isn’t your fault that you aren’t very responsive sexually, and believe me I do understand, but I am a man with all the normal male urges, and she…’

She felt sick then, sick and too filled with loathing and disgust to say anything, to do anything other than merely stand there and listen to him, knowing that he was right, knowing how upset her parents would be, how shocked, how devastated… how difficult they would find it to understand.

‘I still need you,’ Nick insisted. ‘We can put things right… try again. Please, Fern. You must give me a second chance.’

In the end she gave in. What other option did she have? she asked herself bewilderedly. Nick loved her; he needed her; her parents would neither understand nor approve if she left him, and she herself was bitterly aware of her own guilt, her own betrayal of the vows she had made and had fully intended to keep.

Nick was right, she did owe it to him to give their marriage a second chance. But even as she was giving in, agreeing, aware of the huge weight of reasons why she ought to be pleased that he wanted to stay with her, she still felt an unfamiliar dangerous flare of panic and anger, a sense almost of being trapped and imprisoned.

She suppressed it, of course, quickly smothering it with the tight blanket of her parents’ teachings and her own awareness of what she owed it to them and to Nick to do.

But that night in bed, after he had made love to her and she had lain dry-eyed and tense beside him, she knew she had to tell him about Adam.

The next morning she tried to do so.

‘What do you mean, you can’t stay with me?’ he demanded angrily. ‘Look, Fern, I’ve already told you, it… she meant nothing. It was just sex, that’s all, just sex.’

‘It isn’t that,’ she whispered miserably. ‘It’s me. I…’

Something in her expression must have given her away, because she heard him curse and then demand aggressively, ‘It’s Adam, isn’t it? Well, if you think I’m going to let you leave me for him…’

‘It isn’t like that,’ she protested, horrified by what he was saying. ‘Adam isn’t… doesn’t…’

She wasn’t able to continue, her voice breaking under the strain of what she was feeling, but Nick grabbed hold of her arm, insisting fiercely, ‘Oh, no, you aren’t stopping there. Adam isn’t… doesn’t what, Fern? Adam doesn’t want to fuck you? Don’t lie to me, Fern. I know how much he…’

He stopped then, releasing her so roughly that she half fell against the kitchen table.

‘I’m not letting you go,’ he repeated flatly. ‘You’ve made a commitment to me, to our marriage, and if you think…’

He paused, watching her as she crouched against the table, her body shaking with shock and tension, tears slowly filling her eyes as her self-control started to splinter.

Suddenly his voice softened and became almost cajoling.

‘Think, Fern. Think of how your parents would feel if we broke up… if I had to tell them that you’ve been unfaithful to me with Adam. How long have you been seeing him? How often?’

She stopped him immediately, the words falling over one another as she tried to explain what had happened, how upset she had been, how Adam had found her. How…

‘You mean you did it just to pay me back… because of my affair,’ Nick interrupted her before she could finish what she was saying. For some reason he had started to smile, his voice and body relaxing. ‘Did you tell Adam that?’ he asked her softly. ‘Did he know you were coming back here to me?’

‘I didn’t tell him anything. Just that… just about her coming here…’

He was still smiling at her, almost crooning at her as he reached out to her, apparently unable to sense the tension and resistance in her body as he pulled her into his arms.

‘Fern, Fern, don’t you see? The only reason you went to Adam was because you wanted to get back at me. Of course I’m upset… jealous… hurt—what man wouldn’t be? But I do understand. You love me… and because of that you wanted to hurt me… to pay me back for hurting you. But it’s all over now and we’re still together. And we’re going to stay together. Let’s both put the past behind us and make a fresh start… give our marriage a second chance. I want to. Don’t you?’

What could she say? How could she refuse to accept the olive branch he was offering her? How many other husbands would be as generous… as forgiving? She owed it to him… to her parents… to the way they had brought her up and the standards they had inculcated in her, to do what he was suggesting.

‘Yes,’ she agreed listlessly. ‘Yes, I do.’ And yet somehow saying the words had hurt her throat, straining the muscles, making them ache with the same weary despair that had also invaded her body…

‘Fern, what the hell are you doing? Aren’t you ready yet?’

Guiltily Fern hurried towards the bedroom door, stepping back from it just in time as Nick thrust it open and walked in.

Formal clothes suited him, she acknowledged, as she studied the effect of his well-cut fair hair, and the healthy tan he had acquired since visiting the leisure centre, against the expensive fabric of his dinner suit and the crisp whiteness of his dress shirt.

Nick liked his dress shirts to be hand-laundered by her, and starched. It was a laborious job and one which she felt the local laundry could have performed far more efficiently, but she also knew that if she tried to point this out to Nick he would demand to know if she thought he was made of money, and what she did with her time. After all, she did not work.

Because Nick would not let her. Because every time she raised the subject of getting herself some sort of part-time paid work he told her furiously that he was not going to be humiliated in their local community by having his wife pretending that he kept her so short of money that she needed to earn the pathetically few pounds she would earn.

‘And besides, what would you do?’ he had taunted her. ‘You’ve never held down a proper job.’

‘I could train,’ she had retorted. ‘Some of the local shops…’

Nick had gone from contempt to fury, accusing her of deliberately trying to undermine him, his position.

Didn’t she at least owe it to him to at least try to behave as a loyal wife? he had demanded bitterly.

A loyal wife… Her eyes bleak with despair, she turned to look at him, watching the irritation and contempt hardening his face as he studied her.

‘Why the hell don’t you find something decent to wear?’ he demanded.

She could have retorted that she could not afford the luxury of anything other than the most basic of chain-store clothes, but to do so would reignite his grievance against her late parents, for using their modest wealth to purchase annuities which had died with them rather than investing their capital elsewhere so that it could have been passed on to her.

They must present a bizarre contrast, she admitted tiredly, Nick in his obviously expensive dinner suit, she in her shabby, well-worn, dull dress.

‘My God, you love playing the martyr, don’t you?’ Nick accused her as he glared at her. ‘Hurry up or we’re going to be late. I don’t know what the hell you’re doing up here anyway.’ He gave her another disparaging glance.

Comparing her with Venice, Fern wondered unhappily, or was she simply imagining things… looking for them, because…?

As she followed him downstairs, she wondered what Nick would say if she told him that she would rather stay at home.

Get even more angry with her than he already was, she imagined.

There had been a time when she had actually enjoyed going to dinner parties, had looked forward to the stimulation of conversation with other people, but that had been before Nick had pointed out to her on their way home one evening that she was boring people with her silly mundane conversation.

He had apologised to her later, but when she had refused to respond he had accused her of sulking and she had tried to tell him that she wasn’t; that she just felt so weighed down by the burden of realising what people had privately been thinking of her that she simply couldn’t raise the energy to respond to him.

‘Don’t he to me, Fern,’ he had told her bitterly. ‘You’re trying to punish me for telling you the truth. Just as you tried to punish me for having an affair by…’

She had run out of the room then, unable to bear to listen to him any more, knowing that she was behaving childishly and yet unable to trust herself to stay and hear him out.

It had been shortly after that that her father had died, and then her mother, who had suffered ill health for several years, had gradually started to grow worse, and she had had no energy left to do anything other than cope with her mother’s decline.

‘Fern, for heaven’s sake come on,’ Nick demanded irritably. Quietly she picked her bag up off the bed and walked towards the bedroom door.

Well, at least there was one thing she could be sure of about this evening’s dinner party, Fern reflected, trying to resurrect her sense of humour, and that was that Venice would not be dressed in an out-of-date, dowdy black dress.

She was wrong, on one point at least. Venice was wearing black, but that was the only thing her own dress had in common with the outfit Venice had on, Fern remarked wryly as Venice opened her front door to them.

At closer to thirty-five than thirty Venice was older than Fern; older than Nick too, a tiny, vivacious, fragile-boned creature with a small oval face and enormous eyes. Where another woman might have self-consciously tried to conceal her lack of height, seeing it as a fault rather than an asset, Venice seemed to take pleasure in deliberately underlining the fact that she couldn’t be much more than five feet tall, and Fern, who had in the past suffered several slighting comments from Nick about her own small frame and the fact that short women invariably lacked the elegant grace of their taller sisters, stifled a small pang of envy at Venice’s abundant self-confidence.

The black dress she was wearing might almost have been painted on to her body. For someone so small-boned she had disconcertingly voluptuous breasts. Fern had overheard a couple of other women discussing Venice and her figure, one of them wondering out loud if her breasts might possibly owe more to man than nature.

Whatever the case, they were certainly catching Nick’s eye, Fern recognised.

Had Venice deliberately chosen that trimming of black feathers for her dress, knowing that they not only provided an eye-catching contrast to her skin, but also that the sheen on the feathers reflected the pearly translucence of her bare skin?

The single pear-shaped diamond that nestled between her breasts was so large that it only just escaped being vulgar. When she moved, it blazed cold fire like the matching diamonds in her ears.

Tonight the almost white-blonde hair, which she normally wore in a perfectly shaped shoulder-length bob, was drawn up and back in a contemporary version of a Bardot-type beehive hairstyle, all careless, artful fronds of ‘escaping’ hair and tousled curls, half as though she had just come from her bed and the arms of her lover, piling her hair up carelessly on top of her head, more concerned with the pleasure of their lovemaking than her public appearance.

Only of course that particular type of artless sensuality could only be achieved with the aid of a very expensive hairdresser.

But even without the embellishments provided by her late husband’s wealth Venice would have been a very beautiful woman, Fern admitted.

That she was also a very sensual and provocative one as well and that she enjoyed being so Fern also had little doubt.

Venice was obviously very much a man’s woman and made no attempt to hide it, something that was reinforced by the cursory way she welcomed Fern, turning immediately and far more enthusiastically towards Nick, moving between Fern and her husband, her back almost but not quite turned towards Fern, almost deliberately excluding her from her welcome to Nick.

A welcome which was surely far more effusive than was warranted by the business relationship Nick claimed to have with her. Or was she being unfairly suspicious? Fern wondered, as she stood quietly to one side, politely waiting for Venice to finish her conversation with Nick.

‘That’s a beautiful diamond,’ Fern heard Nick saying softly to her.

‘Yes, isn’t it?’ Venice agreed.

As she smiled up at him, her index finger stroked over the hollow between her breasts just above where the diamond lay, almost deliberately drawing Nick’s attention to her body.

Not that she needed to do so, Fern acknowledged. He had hardly taken his eyes off her since she opened the door to them.

The last time Nick had become involved with another woman, he had claimed that she, Fern, had driven him to it with her sexual coldness. If she, his wife, had been more responsive to him, if she had not forced him to find sexual solace in the arms of another woman, he would never have dreamed of being unfaithful to her.

It was her fault that he had had an affair.

And deep down inside herself Fern had believed him. After all, hadn’t her parents brought her up to be aware that it was her female role in life to please and appease, to be gently and femininely aware of the needs of others, and to minister to them before her own?

She had married Nick without giving much thought to whether or not they might be sexually compatible, naïvely assuming that her inability to find much pleasure in their initial lovemaking had been because of her lack of experience.

And besides, she had not been marrying Nick for sex. She had been marrying him because he loved her… because he needed and wanted her.

It hadn’t taken her very long to realise that the understanding with which Nick had appeared to treat her lack of sexuality before their marriage was an indulgence he might have been prepared to allow a fiancée but was most definitely not prepared to allow a wife.

She should never have stayed with him, she recognised now. Not once she realised she no longer loved him; but it had seemed more important then to put her parents’ feelings before her own, and Nick had been so persuasive, so contrite, so sure that this time they would be able to make a go of it, that she simply hadn’t had the heart to tell him that she no longer wanted to.

And then of course there had been the complication of Adam, and so she had given way.

Not just because she had wanted to protect her parents, not even because she was still torn between what she felt or rather did not feel for Nick, and what she firmly still believed—as she had been brought up to believe—that the sanctity of the state of marriage, of the commitment she had made, far, far outweighed the self-indulgence of giving way to her own feelings; but also, shamefully, she had given way because she could not face the thought of Adam knowing she had walked out on her marriage and suspecting why… feeling sorry for her that what had happened between them had in the end been at her instigation, and did not mean… could not mean that she could ever have any future with him…

No, she could not endure the humiliation of listening to Adam explaining in that careful, neutral voice of his that he did not really want her. As though she needed telling…

‘Stay with me,’ Nick had pleaded. ‘We can make it work. I know we can…’

And she had allowed herself to believe him… because she had so desperately needed to believe him.

And now?

She could feel the panic starting to flood through her, the aching, cold, terrifying sensation of somehow having been asleep, only to wake up and find herself trapped in a world, a life that was totally alien to her.

She was still suffering from the effects of her parents’ deaths, she told herself. That was why she was experiencing this sense of panic and loss… this sense of dislocation … of being not just a stranger to herself, but in some sense an outsider to her own life… someone who was dispossessed… alone… alien…

It was a relief when Venice finally turned to her, giving her a coolly appraising look as she commented with a feline smile, ‘Fern… do come into the drawing-room. You look cold… and so thin.’

So plain, so dowdy, so patently undesirable, Fern added mentally to herself as Venice ushered them into the drawing-room, having handed their coats to the uniformed maid who had been standing silently just behind her.

Fern tried to think of anyone other than Venice who would give a small weekday dinner party for less than a dozen people and employ uniformed temporary staff.

Not even Lord Stanton up at the Hall did that. But then Lord Stanton probably couldn’t afford to, and besides, he had the invaluable Phillips to take care of all his domestic arrangements. She had a feeling that Phillips would have been highly disdainful of Venice’s maid, uniformed or not.

Venice’s drawing-room, like the rest of Venice’s house, had been decorated and furnished with one object in mind, and that was to provide the perfect backdrop for Venice herself.

If, in the recessionary environment-conscious Nineties some people might have balked at such an obvious display of wealth and consumerism, such an unabashed love of luxury, Venice was plainly made of sterner stuff.

The drawing-room had, Fern recognised, been redecorated since she had last seen it, and she blinked a little at the effect of so many subtly different shades of peach, layer upon layer of them, so that the room almost seemed to pulsate with the soft colour.

If chiffon curtains were not exactly what one might have expected to find in a drawing-room, they certainly created a very sensual effect, and it certainly took very little imagination to picture Venice lying naked on the thick fleecy peach-hued rug, smiling that slant-eyed provocative smile of hers at her lover.

And her husband? Fern wondered dully.

‘I must show you my bathroom… It’s wonderful,’ she heard Venice saying. ‘I’ve had a mural done of the Grand Canal with the bath framed so that it looks as though I’m looking out through one of the windows of one of those enormous old palazzos. So clever… and so naughty. Sometimes I almost feel as though the gondoliers are real and can actually see me.’

She laughed, batting her eyelashes at Nick, and ignoring her, Fern recognised.

Some of their fellow dinner guests had arrived ahead of them: the local doctor and his wife, both of whom Fern knew reasonably well. She had no really close friends in the town.

She had looked forward to making new friends when they had first moved into their house after their marriage, but Nick had proved to be unexpectedly jealous and possessive; so much so, in fact, that she had found it easier simply to give in to the emotional pressure he put on her rather than endure the unpleasant confrontations her attempts to establish an independent life for herself provoked.

Although she knew a lot of people, some through Nick’s business and others through the work she did for a variety of local charities—Nick approved of this unpaid help she gave to others, not because it helped the charities she worked for, but because it increased his esteem within the area—she had no really close confidantes… no one to whom she could talk about the crisis she felt she was facing.

Was it her parents’ deaths—a final severing of the physical links with her childhood—which had prompted this agonising and soul-searching, this belief that her life had become an empty wasteland with nothing to look forward to; these traumatic feelings of panic which threatened to engulf her whenever she was forced to confront the reality of her marriage? Or was it because she was afraid of facing up to that reality; afraid of stripping back the fiction and the deceit and seeing her marriage for what it really was? Afraid of admitting that she did not love her husband?

And if he was having an affair with Venice… She could feel her heart starting to beat faster, her throat starting to close up.

Don’t think about it, she warned herself. Don’t think about it.

Why not? Because she was terrified that, if she did, she would have to do something about it… that, without the necessity of protecting her parents to hide behind, she would be forced to confront the truth and ask herself, not just why, but also how she could bear to stay in a marriage that was so plainly a mockery of everything that such a commitment could be.

A commitment… That was the crux of all her agonising. When she’d married Nick she had made a commitment… a commitment she had truly believed to be given for life; she had made promises, vows, which were meant to last for life, not to be pushed to one side the moment things went wrong. And surely, just so long as Nick continued to claim that he needed and wanted her, she had no right to walk away from that commitment?

‘Fern… how are you?’

Dizzily she broke free of her painful thoughts, smiling automatically, her tension tightening her face into an almost masklike rigidity as she turned towards the doctor’s wife.

‘I’m fine, Roberta… and you?’

‘Relieved that the winter flu season is almost over,’ Roberta Parkinson told her ruefully. ‘It’s been particularly bad this year, as well. John lost several of his older patients as an indirect result of it. Are you sure you’re feeling all right?’ she added with motherly concern. ‘You’re looking a bit pale.’

‘It’s just the heat in here,’ Fern fibbed. In actual fact she was enjoying the warmth of the room. It was such a contrast to the cold chilliness of their own sitting-room at home.

Because he himself was often working in the evenings, Nick refused to allow her to have the central heating or the gas fires on, claiming that she was extravagantly wasteful with heat.

If it weren’t for the Aga in the kitchen—not one of the brightly coloured modern ones, but the original old-fashioned dull cream type which had been in the house when they first moved in, and which Nick had claimed he was unable to afford to replace—Fern reflected that most evenings she would have been forced to go to bed at a ridiculously early hour just to keep warm.

Roberta excused herself, moving away to talk to the two other couples who had also arrived; Fern knew them both and smiled an acknowledgement of their greeting but remained where she was. One of the couples was a local entrepreneur and his wife, who had moved into the area in the last few years, and the other was their local MP and her husband.

Fern liked all four of them, but tonight she was feeling so on edge and tense that she wanted a few seconds to herself before going over to join them. Because she was afraid of what her expression might betray?

She could feel the panic welling up inside her again, and with it her increasing dread that she was losing all control, not just of her life, but of herself as well. Only yesterday, when Nick had ignored her request that they sit down and talk about their relationship, she had felt almost hysterically close to screaming her frustration out loud. Something… anything to make him listen to her instead of swamping her with his anger, his irritation, his indifference to what she was feeling.

‘Only one more couple to arrive now,’ she heard Venice saying from behind her. As she turned around, she noticed distantly that Nick was with her.

‘Oh, Fern, you don’t have a drink,’ Venice commented, all mock hostessly concern.

‘Fern’s driving,’ Nick announced before Fern herself could say anything. ‘And besides, she has no head for alcohol.’

Fern was uncomfortably aware of the briefly appraising look Jennifer Bowers was giving them from the other side of the room; a look which said quite plainly what the MP thought of Nick’s attitude towards her.

Hurt and humiliated, Fern could feel her colour rising as the anger and pain built up inside her, coupled with the knowledge that there was no way she could express what she was feeling; that even when they were back at home and on their own she would not be able to explain to Nick how his behaviour hurt her.

And that was surely her fault and not his, the result of her early upbringing and the loving but old-fashioned parents who had taught her with gentle insistence that little girls, especially nice, well-behaved little girls, did not behave aggressively, did not argue with others, did not express views which contradicted those of others, and always went out of their way to make life easier for others. Being polite and helpful, her parents had called it.

And since Nick insisted that he loved her, she must surely be the one at fault in feeling this frightening dislocation from life; this subversive awareness that she did not love him in return even though she knew she ought to.

In the distance she heard the doorbell ring, shifting her focus back from her introspective thoughts of the past and into the present.

‘Ah, here are our final couple. They haven’t been together for very long. I expect that’s why they’re late. They probably stopped on the way for…’ Venice gave a small expressive shrug as she went to welcome them.

Fern turned away, smiling at Roberta as she came over to her and announced, ‘I almost forgot… I wanted to have a word with you about the charity auction we’re organising. You’re still on to help sort out the jumble stuff, by the way?’

Fern was just about to answer when the drawing-room doors opened and Venice swept in, ushering the last arrivals inside.

Fern looked towards the doors automatically and then froze, paralysed with shock, her whole body going numb as she stared at the couple who had just walked in; or, rather, at the man who had just walked in.

Adam. She could feel the sound of his name pounding inside her skull, a silent, anguished protest of torment and pain that affected every single nerve-ending of her body; the sensation of her fear that it would be stronger than her self-control making her feel as physically sick as though she had actually let that silent private sound of torment become a physical nerve-jarring reality, revealing to everyone around her exactly what she was feeling… what she had been feeling for so long that suppressing those feelings had drained her energies to the point where there was simply nothing left over for anything else.

In those seconds of agonised confusion and fear it was as humiliating and terrifying as though she had been standing naked in front of them all… worse, in fact; but then she felt Nick’s hand on the small of her back, heard the surprised chagrin and envy in his voice as he commented disbelievingly to her, ‘Where the hell did Adam find her?’

And hard on the heels of the grateful realisation that somehow fate had been kind to her and that she had not betrayed her feelings came the sickening awareness, not just of the youth and prettiness of the girl who was with Adam, but also the way she stood uncertainly close to his side, and the way he moved closer, protectively towards her, smiling encouragingly down at her.

Fern could literally feel the knife-twist of jealousy and pain spearing inside her, the hot agony of longing and guilt that rose up so that she felt almost as though she was drowning in her own anguish.

‘Fern…’

She heard Adam say her name… saw him coming towards her.

‘Adam.’

Was that really her voice? It sounded so cool, so contained, so totally the opposite of all that she was feeling.

No one would ever guess, watching the wary way they greeted one another, that Adam was her brother-in-law, she recognised bleakly, or rather her stepbrother-in-law. There was after all no blood relationship between Nick and Adam; Nick’s mother had married Adam’s father when Nick had been in his early teens and Adam almost a young adult, and physically of course they could not have been more dissimilar.

Where Nick was all dapper blond elegance, Adam was…

She found she was having to swallow hard past the obstruction which had somehow lodged in her throat as her mind, her thoughts, her emotions, obviously resentful of the constrictions she had placed upon them, rebelled and relayed to her not the actual reality of Adam as he now stood before her, tall, distinguished in the formal evening clothes which subtly emphasised the essential maleness of him, his dark, normally slightly unruly thick hair firmly brushed—and newly cut—his eyes a calm, sober grey; but Adam as she had once seen him, his skin damp with sweat, tiny beads of it lodging in the hollow at the base of his throat, the scent of it, of him, filling her nostrils with a musky and body-trembling awareness of his masculinity, his eyes, so calm and steady now, burning with a molten silver heat, making her tremble, unleashing within her needs, desires, feelings she had never known she could possess.

For all his workouts at the gym, for all the obvious pride and self-satisfaction Nick took in his body and his sexuality, he had never, could never… She swallowed hard, forcing herself to ignore the taunting images filling her memory and to concentrate instead on the girl standing so shyly at Adam’s side.

She couldn’t have been a day over nineteen, Fern reflected, unable to stop herself from responding to the shy, hesitant smile she was giving her.

Enviably tall, with pretty dark hair, she had eyes which still held the doe-like innocence of extreme youth, her mouth its vulnerability and uncertainty.

The last time she had seen her, Fern remembered wryly, she had had a brace across those now perfect little white teeth and she had been wearing her school uniform.

‘Fern, you remember Lily James, don’t you?’ Adam queried, gently bringing the younger girl forward.

‘Yes… yes, of course I do. How are you, Lily? How are your parents?’

She sounded as though she was old enough to be Lily’s grandmother, Fern recognised ruefully, but there was not even a decade between them.

It was totally contrary to Fern’s own nature to be unkind to anyone, much less an obviously shy young girl like this, even if… when…

Even when what? Fern asked herself bitterly as she smiled warmly at the younger girl, gently trying to put her at her ease.

Even if Adam loved her…

Her heart seemed to jolt right up into her throat, its already nervous beating becoming a frantic distressed hammering.

The palms of her hands were damp with sweat, her nails curling painfully into their softness as she fought to suppress the cry of agony she could feel building in her throat.

What was wrong with her? She had always known that one day Adam would fall in love… that someone would eventually cause him to abandon the bachelor state which Nick had always claimed he would never voluntarily give up.

‘If you really want my stepbrother,’ he had told Fern once before they were married, ‘then the only way you’re likely to get him is by tricking him into getting you pregnant. Very keen on being seen to do the right thing, is our Adam. Do you want him, Fern?’ he had added slyly.

‘Adam is just a friend,’ she had responded tautly. After all, no nice, decent girl ever admitted even to herself that she could possibly want a man who did not want her… or at least that was the message she had picked up from her mother’s carefully protective teachings.

And she had believed it. And still believed it?

She could feel the pain stirring inside her again, tearing, wrenching, streaked with guilt and shame.

Adam was standing so close to her that she was actually conscious of the scent of him, not the faint cool hint of cologne he was wearing, but the basic personal male smell…

Despairingly she moved back from him, giving Lily a small apologetic smile as she started to excuse herself.

‘Fern.’

She could hear the tension in Adam’s voice and the anger, and her own stomach muscles clenched in response.

She couldn’t look at him. She dared not…

‘I think Venice wants us to go through into the dining-room,’ she told him distantly as she turned away and looked for Nick.

The meal they were served was superbly presented, an exotic combination of all that was luxurious and first rate, which must have cost Venice as much as she probably spent on food in a year, Fern reflected tiredly, unable to face the richness of her food, nor the smell that rose up from her plate.

They had almost finished their pudding when without warning Venice turned to John Parkinson and asked, ‘What do you think of this plan to bulldoze Broughton House and build shops and offices on the land?’

‘What plan?’ Roberta’s husband asked with some concern.

‘Oh, haven’t you heard?’ Venice queried. ‘It’s all over the town that someone local is planning to put in a bid for the place, ostensibly as a private home, but in reality because he… they have very different plans for it.

‘Of course it would have to be someone with the right kind of local contacts and influence so that they could get planning permission pushed through, wouldn’t you say so, Adam?’

Although she was smiling sweetly at Adam, no one could have been in any doubt that it was Adam to whom Venice was referring when she spoke of ‘someone local’ acquiring Broughton House. But surely Adam would never lend himself to that kind of scheme?

It was true that Adam, as an architect, was bound to be interested in anything which might lead to new commissions, and it was certainly no secret that he was part of a highly successful local conglomerate which had designed, built and now ran several small local shopping parades and housing schemes, but all of them had been completely above board and free from any taint of the kind of underhand usage of power and position which Venice was now none too subtly implying.

‘Perhaps we ought to organise a committee to oppose it,’ Venice continued without giving Adam any chance to reply. ‘I have actually heard that what’s being proposed isn’t just a small parade of shops, but a huge hypermarket. Of course you have to admire whoever it is for his chutzpah. If he can pull it off, it will make him very, very wealthy, and I suppose to be fair there will be those who will say that the town does need that kind of facility. What do you think, Adam?’

‘Broughton House is in an area of “outstanding natural beauty”,’ Adam told her quietly. ‘I should imagine it would be impossible to get planning permission for that kind of venture.’

‘Oh, but surely not if one had the right connections… knew whom to approach and how,’ Venice persisted, smiling sweetly at him.

There was a small, uneasy silence which Nick broke by turning to Adam and saying silkily, ‘You don’t seem particularly surprised, Adam, but then perhaps you know more about what’s going on than the rest of us. After all, as a member of the town council…’

‘Like Venice, I have heard the rumours,’ Adam countered, ‘but that seems to be all they are… rumours.’

‘But the house is up for sale and unliveable-in in its present state,’ Venice persisted. ‘And surely you, Adam, both as an architect and a councillor, must know something…’

‘Mrs Broughton lived in it…’

Fern froze as she heard the unsteady huskiness in her own voice, her words cutting right across Venice’s deliberate probing, deflecting attention away from Adam and towards herself, drawing not just an irritated little frown from Venice at her intervention, but an angry glare from Nick as well.

‘Fern has always had a ridiculously sentimental attachment to the place,’ Nick announced tersely, giving her a cold look.

‘Well, I for one would be very surprised to hear that anyone would be foolish enough to imagine they could get planning permission for that kind of venture,’ Jennifer Bowers announced briskly. ‘And if anyone tried, I should certainly oppose it. After all, we haven’t spent all these years protecting the character and history of the town only to go and have hypermarkets built on its unspoilt land.’

‘Adam’s the expert on the town’s history and preservation,’ Venice persisted. ‘And I still have a sneaking suspicion that he knows more about what’s going on than he wants to tell us.’

Because Adam himself was involved in some scheme or other to destroy the house? That was what Venice was implying, and Adam himself had done and said nothing that really contradicted her subtle accusations. Because he couldn’t?

As she glanced round the table, Fern suspected that she wasn’t the only one wishing that Adam would make a more definite and unequivocal rebuttal of Venice’s hints.

‘Have you heard anything about this supermarket business?’ Roberta asked her later as they waited for Venice’s maid to bring down their coats.

Fern shook her head.

Was what Venice had been suggesting true? Was Adam involved in some plan to secretly circumvent the planning controls operating locally? And what about Nick’s earlier thoughts that Adam wanted the house to raise a family?

The maid came back downstairs, apparently unable to find Fern’s jacket. Quietly she went upstairs to look for it herself.

The coats were all placed on a bed in one of the spare rooms. She had to move several before she could find her own thin jacket, and as she lifted one of them, a heavy, plain wool man’s coat, she knew immediately that it was Adam’s. Her fingers tightened into the fabric. She could feel the hot salt burn of the tears clogging her throat and for a moment the impulse, the need to bury her face in the soft black fabric and breathe in the scent of Adam from it was so strong that she had the coat halfway to her face, the fabric gripped tightly in her fingers, before she fully realised what she was doing.

Appalled, she dropped it, turning round quickly, her face flushed with guilt as she mechanically reached for her own jacket.

As she pulled it on, she realised that in dropping Adam’s coat she had dislodged a heavy folded brochure from an inside pocket. She bent to pick it up and replace it and then stiffened as she realised what it was.

Through the tears which blurred her vision she could see the photograph of Broughton House on the front cover of the sale brochure.

She was twenty-seven years old, still a relatively young woman, but suddenly she wished with almost savage intensity that she were older, her life closer to its end, and with it the end of all the pain, the misery, the guilt which daily became an even greater burden to her.

She was Nick’s wife, she reminded herself; she had no right to…

To what? To love another man?

‘Stay with me, Fern,’ Nick had begged her. And then later when she had told him about Adam he had said it again.

He must genuinely want and need her to overlook what she had done, mustn’t he? And surely in view of that she owed it to him to stay.

And besides, what was the point in her leaving? she had recognised numbly. Where else was there for her to go—now that she had been all the way to hell and back again? And to heaven as well?

Shakily she turned away, almost running towards the door and down the stairs.