Читать книгу For Better For Worse - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 7

‘MMM… nice,’ Zoe murmured teasingly against Ben’s mouth as she wrapped herself around him, curling her body into the sleepy morning warmth of his.

It hadn’t been easy getting their precious time off to coincide; Monday was the one morning of the week when neither of them had to get up early for work, the restaurant where Ben was currently working closed on Mondays and Zoe having begged, cajoled and bribed the others at the London airport hotel where she was working so that she could have Mondays off as well.

She loved it when they were together like this, she thought drowsily as she snuggled deeper into Ben’s naked warmth, rubbing her face against his skin and nuzzling him with lazy, appreciative sensuality.

Once, in their early days together, Ben had told her that she was just like a little cat with her soft fluid body and her habit of rubbing herself affectionately against him.

In truth there was something prettily feline about her small triangular face and the soft sinuous grace of her body.

But Zoe had an energy that had nothing catlike about it, an electric buzzing force that made her grey eyes sparkle with enthusiasm, and which seemed to crackle around her like a live force-field.

There was nothing kittenish about her either; she scorned such ploys and affectations. It was, Ben reflected wryly as he slid his fingers into the thick dark mass of curls haloing her face, only now, in these their most intimate moments, that her normal exuberance was calmed and tamed, to reveal her vulnerability and sensuality.

‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ he told her as he felt her hand slide downwards over his body.

Zoe laughed, turning her face into the curve of his throat and kissing him lovingly.

She laughed again as she heard him groan and felt him turn his body in towards her, his actions running directly counter to his words.

It had always been like this between them right from the very start, Ben, cautious, concerned, wanting to hold back; take time and to be sure; she…

She made a voluptuous sound of appreciation against his skin as her fingers closed gently round him.

…She impatient, impulsive, knowing almost from the first moment they had met that she wanted him.

She felt him move against her, his body aroused, hard; she caressed him slowly, enjoying her own body’s response to him, the taut, heavy feeling in her breasts; the sensitivity of her nipples especially when she rubbed herself rhythmically against his chest, the small betraying, knowing pulse that grew insistently urgent as she let herself absorb the hot silky texture of his skin, anticipating the pleasure that lay ahead, the pleasures they had already known.

Ben wrapped his arms around her, kissing the top of her head and then, when she lifted her face to look at him, her mouth.

His skin smelled of warmth and sleep and the faintly acrid scent of his sweat, and that special unmistakable scent that was his alone and which as always she found unbearably erotic. She wondered if her scent affected him in the same way. Ben didn’t like talking about sex. In the northern city in which he had grown up, boys… men grew up with an attitude towards sex which was very different from the ones she had absorbed from her own middle-class parents.

And yet Ben was an unbelievably tender and caring lover, almost as though, if he was unable to talk to her about this most intimate side of their lives together, then at least he could make up for his inhibitions by showing her all he felt.

They knew each other well enough now, had been together long enough to recognise without words each other’s signs of arousal, each other’s sexual needs, and yet each time they made love it was different… special… familiar and yet still, for Zoe, achingly pleasurable.

Now, when Ben kissed her, he did so lingeringly, slowly, taking his time, as though the intimate caresses of their mouths were a total act of physical communication and satisfaction on their own, and not merely a preliminary act to his physical possession of her.

No, if anything she was the one who was the more impatient.

Not that there was any doubt that Ben wanted her, she acknowledged in satisfaction as she stroked her thumb along the underside of the rigid shaft of his penis and felt him shudder against her, his muscles tensing as his teeth tugged on her bottom lip.

She felt his hand touch her breast, cupping it, and she moved against him, enjoying the delicate friction of his palm against her nipple. Soon he would bend his head and kiss her throat, her shoulder and then her breast itself, taking his time, lingering over each caress, while she felt the urgent thud of his heartbeat against her body and savoured the delicious tension of her own growing need to feel his mouth against her nipple, tugging on the small hard peak of flesh.

Languorously she stroked her hands over his stomach and hips, sliding them down over his buttocks, caressing him lazily until she felt the sharp pins and needles of pleasure exploding inside her as his tongue rubbed over her nipple. Her fingers tightened on his skin, his mouth opened over her nipple. She shuddered in pleasure as the hot fierce surge of her own arousal overwhelmed her.

‘Now, Ben,’ she told him thickly. ‘Now… now… now. I want you now…’

Half an hour later, when the sharp summons of the telephone broke into the luxurious pleasure of their shared post-coital relaxation, Zoe told Ben lazily, ‘It’s your turn.’

‘Why on earth can’t we get a telephone by the bed?’ Ben grumbled as he pushed back the duvet and reached for and pulled on a clean pair of underpants.

‘Because you said we couldn’t afford one,’ Zoe reminded him, watching him with unashamed pleasure.

He had a wonderful body, lean and powerfully male without being over-muscled. His arms and chest were taut with sinewy strength, his stomach flat and hard. She gave a small convulsive movement of sheer sensuality, remembering the sensation of the soft dark hair that grew on his body against her fingertips; fine and silky over his chest and stomach, it darkened and thickened into a heavier stomach-tensing line of more intense growth along the centre of his body, spreading wider and thicker above the base of his penis.

Idly she wondered if he derived as much pleasure in looking at her body, in thinking about it, in contrasting its femininity with his own masculinity, as she did his.

She was lucky in that, despite the exuberant thickness and wildness of the brunette curls that more than one envious friend had not been able to believe were actually natural and not the result of some expensive and enviable perm, the hair on her body was confined to a neatly demure triangle of soft hair that started just below the pretty mole where her body started to swell into sensual womanhood.

Thanks to her parents, she had no hang-ups about either her body or her sexuality. Unlike Ben.

She remembered how surprised she had been the first time they had made love and he had insisted on undressing in the dark, and even then on leaving on his underpants until they were actually in bed.

It had been many weeks before she had persuaded him to allow her to see him naked and in the daylight, and even more before she had ventured to tease him gently for his shyness.

What he had said in response to her then had for the first time in her life left her unable to make any verbal reply, unable to do anything other than smother back the anguish aching in her throat.

With five children, boys and girls, sharing one bedroom and two beds, such modesty was essential and necessary, especially when you were the eldest, especially when you were a particularly well developed teenage boy, especially when you had a gut-deep protective instinct towards your younger siblings which you had never been able to put into words but which led you to be fiercely protective, not so much of your own privacy, but of their innocence.

She had never teased him about his need for modesty again, just as she had never retaliated on those occasions when she’d grimaced in disgust over the tacky grubbiness of their rented flat with its damp patches on the walls, its bath which no matter how often she cleaned it never really seemed to her as though it was clean, and he turned on her and told her grimly that where he came from and to his family the privacy of the flat they shared would be considered a real luxury.

Most of the time, because there was just the two of them, because Ben had done his early training under one of the best chefs in the world and because that training had encompassed far, far more than the art of buying, preparing and serving good food, she was not conscious of any social differences between them and she was certainly not concerned about them. But Ben was.

She heard him pick up the receiver and say their number, and then, when he didn’t call out to her, she snuggled back under the duvet.

They still had the whole day ahead of them and it would be fun to coax him into coming back to bed. She rolled over on to her stomach, smiling in reminiscent pleasure as she felt the soft pulsing echo of her orgasm.

It was five minutes before Ben came back. When he did and she saw his face, all thoughts of teasing him back into bed vanished. She sat up immediately, the duvet sliding unregarded off her body.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

‘I don’t know. That was Ma on the phone. She wants me to go up there.’

‘To Manchester?’

‘There’s a train every hour.’ He paused and looked at her. Immediately Zoe shook her head and told him quickly,

‘No, it’s all right. You go. I owe Mum and Dad a visit anyway.’ She pulled a face. ‘I haven’t really seen them since Christmas… I haven’t even told them our good news yet. I wonder when we’re going to hear something definite about the hotel.

‘Don’t worry,’ she told him softly, reaching out and taking hold of his hand. ‘It can’t be anything too catastrophic. Your mother would have told you over the phone if it had been.’

She didn’t question his decision to go north. She knew him well enough by now to realise how seriously he took his role as the eldest in the family; substitute father-figure to his younger siblings in many ways since his parents’ divorce. She had observed the way not just they but also his mother depended on him and, although her heart ached protectively for him when she saw how much he worried about them, she couldn’t blame them for their dependence on him.

She had only met his family once. He hadn’t really wanted her to… had argued angrily against her decision to accompany him on one of his visits home; but she had insisted, knowing intuitively that, if she gave in, his family and his openly ambivalent feelings towards them and the life he had left behind would act as a barrier between them.

He might have prepared her for their poverty, for the vast gulf that lay between him, with his energy for life, his ambition, his determination, his awareness and control over his life, and their poverty and apathy; but what he had not prepared her for, obviously because it had not occurred to him to do so, had been the shock of discovering that his mother could more easily have passed for his older sister.

He had been nearly twenty then and had looked older. His mother, who had given birth to him days after her sixteenth birthday, was still, amazingly after having five children, small and almost fragilely slender, her anxious eyes turning to her eldest son not just for his support, but for his approval as well, Zoe had recognised on a welling tide of her own emotion.

Ben had only told her the bare facts of his early upbringing, and then half reluctantly. His parents had divorced when he was in his early teens, his father disappearing, leaving the family completely without his emotional and financial support.

Reading between the lines, she had guessed that Ben had taken on to his own shoulders the role abandoned by his father, and then, without knowing her, she had resented Ben’s mother on Ben’s own behalf for her selfishness in allowing such a young child to take such an appalling burden.

Now that resentment had gone, but in its place had been born a determination never to treat Ben as his family did, using him as an emotional and financial support, taking from him instead of giving.

And with that in mind she smiled generously at him now and swallowed her own disappointment at the disruption of their precious shared time.

‘You can have the bathroom first,’ she told him. ‘I’ll go and make the coffee.’

On their days off breakfast together was normally a special leisurely ritual. She made the coffee while Ben went down to the small bakery a couple of streets away to buy fresh croissants still warm and buttery from the ovens.

Zoe acknowledged that she was lucky in never seeming to put on any extra weight no matter what she ate, but then her job was very physically demanding, with long hours and missed mealtimes.

She hadn’t said anything at work yet about their plans. It had been hard enough getting her job as it was. Like everyone else, the large hotel chains were cutting back on expenses and staff. Only the fact that she had among the best exam results in her year had secured her a coveted job as a very junior trainee.

She had been with the company several years now, had completed their training scheme and had been lucky enough to be offered her present job as junior undermanager of their Heathrow hotel.

A plum job with a minute salary and the ferocious expense of travelling by car to work from the flat she and Ben shared. Silly perhaps, when she could have lived in or even at home with her parents, but it was worth all the hassle… all the time, all the travelling… all the hours she spent alone while Ben was still working… worth it for the precious wonderful time they did get to spend together.

Once Ben had gone, she rang her parents’ number. Her mother answered the phone, pleasure quickening her voice when Zoe announced her plans.

‘Darling, I’d love to see you. Will Ben be coming as well?’

‘No. Not this time.’

‘Oh, dear, what a shame. Never mind.’

Zoe grinned to herself as she heard the note of relief underlying her mother’s pretended disappointment. As products of the Sixties, with all that the decade’s culture had embraced, her parents had been determined to bring her up free of the shibboleths, the petty tyrannies and restrictions, the prejudices from whose shackles they and their whole generation had so enthusiastically and gloriously cut themselves free, and she knew how it both astonished and appalled them that they should have suffered such an extraordinary sea-change, such a reversion to the middle-class mores of their own parents, which they had assumed they had successfully thrown off where her own relationship with Ben was concerned.

Valiantly they battled to keep this horribly unegalitarian backsliding into middle-class morality hidden from their daughter, but Zoe was as much a product of her own decade as they were of theirs; she knew them too well, had lived with them too long, had grown to maturity alternately caught between amusement and disbelief at their naïveté and lack of awareness of what the real world, her world comprised to suffer any sense of ill-usage at their reaction to Ben.

As she had laughingly confided to one of her oldest friends, a girl like herself, born to the same kind of free-thinking, liberal if somewhat woolly-minded parents, ‘I think the parents are more shocked at the way they’re reacting to Ben than I am. Mummy said to me after the first time she’d met him, “Poor Ben… He’s been so financially and socially disadvantaged.” She can’t even bring herself to say that he’s working-class, poor darling. She still lives in a world where class differences aren’t supposed to exist. I think she sees my relationship with Ben as some sort of physical desire for some rough manual worker type that will probably pass. She believes I’m oblivious to the class differences between us when of course I’m not. Neither of us is. Poor Mummy, she doesn’t really understand that it’s different now. Ben and I don’t live in some dream-world where we think that love can conquer everything. We know it’s going to be hard… that we’re going to have to work at it. It’s not like it was for our parents, going through life doped up to the eyeballs on pot and sex.’

‘No,’ Ann had agreed wryly. ‘My mother seems to think that because Matthew and I live together we spend our entire lives in bed having sex. She actually apologised for disturbing me the other day when she rang me up at eight in the evening. I nearly told her I’d only just come in from work; that I had a file of balance sheets I’d brought home with me to work on; that Matthew had gone to the supermarket to do the shopping and that we’d be lucky if either of us got to bed before midnight, and that once we did the last thing either of us would feel like doing would be making love. But you can’t disillusion the poor darlings, can you?’ Ann had added, wrinkling her nose.

Zoe’s parents had a house in Hampstead, the fashionable part, bought just before the first of the big property booms with the help of a cash wedding present from both sets of parents who had been delighted and fervently relieved to discover that their offspring were finally legalising their union.

They had met at university; had taken the hippy trail to India together, returning with matching flowing locks and caftans. They had got married in them; scarlet ones. Zoe had seen the photographs, which were not among those now displayed in the plain tasteful heavy silver frames which decorated the pretty antique tables in her mother’s sitting-room.

As an investment banker, her father had done well in the Seventies and Eighties. Zoe had gone to St Paul’s, where she had worked hard enough to get a very satisfactory nine O levels. Her parents had confidently expected her to go on to university and had been shocked when she had told them what she wanted to do instead.

‘Hotel management… but why, darling?’ her mother had asked, obviously perplexed.

‘Because I like looking after people,’ Zoe had told her calmly. ‘I enjoy organising them… being bossy and managing.’ She had given them a wide laughing smile. ‘Of course I won’t always be working for someone else,’ she had assured them. ‘One day I shall have a hotel of my own. Perhaps somewhere abroad… Spain… Benidorm,’ she added teasingly.

Of course they had been disappointed, but eventually they had given way, as she had known they would. They knew nothing of discipline or coercion and had no defences against her stubborn insistence that she knew what she wanted to do.

Against all the odds, Ben liked them, although he considered they were no match for her.

She knew that if she had wished it her father would gladly have financed her, giving her an allowance, buying her a better car than the ten-year-old Mini which took her to and from work… even paying the rent on a decent flat; but once she had made up her mind to move in with Ben she had decided that she would live on what she earned. Not that Ben resented her parents’ wealth. To do so, he had once told her, would harm him much more than it could harm them.

Her mother picked her up from the station. At forty-six she still showed traces of the pretty girl she had been, the prettiness now softened and transmuted into a polished elegance.

As she kissed her affectionately, Zoe said, ‘You look good! I like the new hairstyle, it suits you.’

Heather Clinton smiled. ‘I wore it like this in the Sixties, straight and bobbed.’

‘Only then it was the same colour as mine,’ Zoe teased. ‘Not blonde.’

And then she had gone braless, and worn skimpy little shift dresses that showed more of her body than they concealed, and in those days her body had been worth showing, her skin glowing with health and youth, honey-tanned, sleek and firm.

Now, despite her aerobics classes, despite the expensive body preparation she used, she was beginning to be aware of the first beginnings of an unflattering loss of tone, an awareness that, no matter how hard she tried, it was impossible for her to recapture that golden, silky-skinned glow which David had loved so much.

Had he noticed its loss too? Did he, as she did herself, compare her to younger, fresher-skinned women and find her wanting?

She glanced at her daughter, half anxiously, half enviously. Zoe was all the things she had once been; so like her and yet so very different from her.

‘Daddy’s had to fly to Jersey,’ she told Zoe. ‘So I’m afraid it will just be the two of us.’

‘Never mind,’ Zoe told her. ‘We’ll be able to have a good gossip. How about having lunch somewhere together? That Italian place… I’m starving.’

She grinned to herself as she saw the uncertain sideways look her mother was giving her clothes: black leggings, black lace-up boots, a silk turtleneck sweater which she had swooped on with glee in a second-hand shop and, over the top of it, a thick bulky cotton-knit sweater which was really Ben’s.

In contrast her mother was wearing a casual but very obviously expensive cream linen skirt and jacket, teamed with the plainest of plain ivory silk shirts, her nails elegantly buffed and free of polish, just as her hair was free of lacquer and her face of heavy clogging make-up. Her only jewellery was her wedding and engagement rings, and the pretty trio of gold Cartier bracelets Zoe’s father had bought her for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

Over lunch it was Zoe who skilfully controlled the conversation and who then, as a penance for not confiding in her mother about her own and Ben’s hopes for the new restaurant-cum-hotel, allowed Heather to take her into her favourite dress shop and buy her a new outfit.

Her mother had pulled a slight face over her choice of brilliantly patterned Lycra cycling shorts and a top which she claimed clashed appallingly with it, but Zoe had smiled indulgently, refraining from pointing out that her generation had its own fashions and its own tastes and kissing her mother affectionately as they waited for her purchases to be wrapped up.

When her mother announced uncertainly that it was her evening for her bridge lesson, Zoe heroically concealed her amusement and gravely assured her that no, she did not mind at all.

‘Ben will probably be home by the time I get back,’ she assured her mother, hugging her warmly.

Only when she got back, Ben had not returned, and after the warmth of her parents’ home, with its unpretentious and unfussy but oh, so discreetly expensive décor, the flat seemed even more unwelcoming than ever.

Here on the tatty basic furniture there were no carefully treasured silver-framed photographs, no pretty pieces of Chelseaware… no cleverly chosen objets d’art… no paintings. No, there were none of those things, but there was love, Zoe reminded herself, and then she stood still, frowning, the forefinger halting that she had been dragging lazily through the permanent film of dust on the black ash table which Ben had assembled and which had joints which were nothing like true.

There was love in her parents’ home as well, wasn’t there? Of course there was, she reassured herself. All through her childhood and then her teenage years she had been aware of that love, and had taken it for granted. Too much for granted? After all, among their generation her parents were unusual in remaining together.

On her way up the stairs she had collected the post. Two bills, a bank statement and a thick white typed envelope which she was dying to open.

It was addressed to both of them, and she was nearly sure it was something from their backer. What did it contain? News about the property he intended to purchase? She could feel the excitement starting to uncoil and fizz up inside her.

Hurry up, Ben, she pleaded silently. Hurry up. She could have opened the letter, of course, it was after all addressed to both of them, but like a little girl she wanted to share the surprise with him… to share the pleasure… or the disappointment.

It wasn’t going to be a disappointment, she assured herself firmly. Ben was the one who was the pessimist, not she…

It was almost midnight before he came back, and she knew immediately when she saw his face that whatever his mother had wanted to tell him could not have been good news.

‘Ben!’ she cried out in sympathetic alarm. ‘What’s wrong? Is someone ill? Is…?’

There were dark shadows under his eyes, and his skin looked drained and sallow, his blue eyes which could glow warmly with love and tenderness bleak and empty.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked him gently.

He sat down heavily on the old sofa they had inherited with the flat. Zoe’s mother had wanted to have it re-covered for them, grimacing at the unknown identity of its many stains, but Zoe had firmly refused, flinging over it instead a richly patterned rug she had picked up from one of the street markets.

Now she sat down next to him, not touching him… waiting…

‘It’s Sharon,’ he told her emptily. ‘She’s pregnant.’ He turned his head and looked at her, but he wasn’t seeing her, Zoe recognised, not really; his expression was too controlled, too hard and full of starkly bitter bleak despair.

Uncertainly Zoe waited, instinct telling her not to speak… not to touch… not to do anything; and then abruptly he seemed to focus properly on her, the blood surging into his face, burning it with a heat that left stains like bruises against his cheekbones.

‘She’s sixteen years old, for God’s sake, and she’s pregnant.

‘Mum thought she was on the Pill, but apparently she forgot to take it and Sharon, of course, like the little fool that she is, didn’t say a word to Mum about anything until she was just about bursting out of her school uniform.

‘My God… hasn’t she learned anything? Hasn’t she seen from Mum? Doesn’t she realise?’

Zoe swallowed painfully, knowing that his anguish was something private, something beyond the bonds that the two of them shared, caused by his knowledge and experience of a way of life that was totally alien to her.

Even so, she tried to reach out to him, asking hesitantly, ‘And the father… the boy?’

‘The boy…’ The face he turned towards her was white now… not with exhaustion but with a bitter savage fury, the expression in his eyes one that made her shiver; one which she thought would always haunt her.

‘The boys, not the boy,’ he corrected her thickly. ‘Sharon told me that she isn’t sure just who is the father. And of course the stupid bitch has left it far, far too late to have an abortion. Mum can look after it, she told me. Either that or the council can rehouse her.’

Not knowing what to say, Zoe reached out and touched his arm gently.

‘It might all work out for the best,’ she began unsteadily, only to recoil in shock as Ben threw her hand off his arm so violently that she fell back against the settee. His eyes blazed fury and, even worse, contempt.

‘What the hell do you know about it?’ he demanded savagely. ‘It might all work out for the best.’ She winced at the hatred in his voice as he mimicked her voice, her accent. ‘How? Like it did for my mother, with three kids under five by the time she was twenty, an unfaithful husband… no income, no home, and no hope of ever doing anything but watching your life slide away from you, with no hope of ever getting out of the mess you’re in; with no hope of anything, just the sickening reality of snotty-nosed kids dressed in other kids’ cast-offs, and perhaps the odd few days of sex from some man you might happen to meet in the pub, who if you’re lucky won’t leave you with another unwanted and unsupported brat on your hands when he walks out on you. Is that what you call things working out for the best?’

‘She… she could have the baby adopted,’ Zoe suggested shakily, trying not to let him see how much his reaction had hurt her, how much it had excluded her… how much the starkness of the picture he had drawn for her contrasted with the home she had just left, the life and world her parents inhabited.

‘She could, but she won’t… girls like “our Sharon” don’t. They haven’t got that much sense… they love them, you see, the poor bitches, or at least they believe they do, and they can’t even see that by loving them they’re destroying them, submitting them to empty, wasted, dragged-out lifetimes of sterility and apathy. If they really loved them, they’d have them aborted.’

The ugliness of his comment took Zoe’s breath away.

‘And if they really loved themselves they wouldn’t get pregnant in the first place. And who’s to blame for that, do you think, Zoe…? The stupid little tarts for whom sex is about the only pleasure, the only excitement they’ll ever have in their lives, if in fact it does give them any pleasure, or the middle-class liberals like your parents whose liberality took away the only things that used to protect them.

‘Before your parents and their destruction of “the rules”, girls like Sharon got married when they fell pregnant, or at least most of them did.’

‘And was that any better for them?’ Zoe asked him in a low voice. ‘To be married at sixteen to someone they probably didn’t love and to have to stay in that marriage for the rest of their lives? Were they really any happier?’

‘Happier?’ He looked at her in disgust. ‘People like us, like me… like Sharon… like my mother… all my family… happiness doesn’t come into our lives, Zoe. It isn’t an option or a choice. No, Sharon might not have been “happier”, but she’d have been a darn sight better off. She’d have a husband to support her, her child would have had a father… her children would all have had the same father. She wouldn’t have been living alone in some grotty tower block isolated from her friends and family, driven to drink or depression, to drugs and sex… driven perhaps to abusing her children as much as she would be abusing herself.’

‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ Zoe cried out, horrified.

‘No, it doesn’t have to be,’ Ben agreed. ‘Maybe some fairy prince will ride up on a white charger and sweep her off to happy-ever-after land. Is that what you think?’ he asked her in disgust.

There was nothing Zoe could say, no comfort she could offer.

‘Do you know that when she was eleven Sharon was the top of her class… a clever girl, her teachers said, capable of going far, doing things; and then came puberty and suddenly Sharon wasn’t clever any longer. Clever girls don’t get pregnant and ruin their lives and the lives of everyone around them with unwanted babies. Only stupid, selfish girls do that.’

‘And boys,’ Zoe pointed out huskily to him without looking at him. ‘It does take two, you know.’

He gave her a thin, bitter smile. ‘She was supposed to be on the Pill, remember…’ He got up abruptly, turning his back on her. ‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed.’

As he walked into the bathroom, Zoe realised that she hadn’t shown him the letter. She picked it up and stared at it and then slowly put it down again.

Perhaps tomorrow, when he felt a bit better. Tomorrow, when she had had time to forget how suddenly and frighteningly he had become a stranger to her, a stranger who it seemed almost hated and despised her.

But Ben didn’t hate her and he didn’t despise her. He loved her. She knew that.

Right now he was upset and shocked. She looked at the letter again and sighed quietly, blinking back the tears threatening to fill her eyes.