Читать книгу For Better For Worse - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 9

‘FERN?’

Anxiety prickled down Fern’s spine as she heard Nick’s voice. He walked into the kitchen, frowning when he saw that she was dressed for going out.

‘Where are you going?’ he demanded.

‘I promised I’d help Roberta sort through the stuff she’s collected for her jumble sale.’

‘What time will you be back? I’m leaving for London this afternoon. You’ll have to pack a case for me. I’ll need my dinner suit. Did you remember to take it to the cleaners?’

‘Yes,’ she told him quietly. There had been lipstick on the collar of his dress shirt; bright scarlet lipstick, the colour Venice had been wearing the night of her dinner party.

People, even the most casual of acquaintances, did kiss these days, she reminded herself as she looked away from him.

Why didn’t she just ask Nick if he was involved with Venice?

What was she so afraid of? Not the ending of their marriage, surely?

What was it, then? Having to confront the fact that all the effort she had put into holding their marriage together over these last two years had just been so much wasted time… Having to admit that she should never have married Nick in the first place… having to face up to the fact that her parents had not been omnipotent; that their way of living their lives was not necessarily right for her. Having to admit that she was married to a man who, despite the fact that he claimed to love and need her, increasingly behaved towards her in a way that suggested his feelings towards her held more contempt than love; that his need was more for a housekeeper than a wife.

Was it the realities of her marriage she was so afraid of confronting, or was it herself?

What was it she really wanted to do? Stay true to the way her parents had believed their daughter’s life should be lived, or be true to herself, accepting herself with all her fallibilities; accepting that staying within her relationship with Nick as it was now was slowly destroying her, killing her self-respect, filling her with loathing for the woman she saw she had become.

‘How long will you be away?’ she asked Nick now before she opened the back door.

‘I don’t know!’ His mouth tightened impatiently. ‘Is my grey suit pressed? I’m taking a client out to lunch.’

‘Venice?’ Fern asked him.

She could see the angry colour seeping up under his skin.

‘Yes, as a matter of fact it is.’

‘You seem to be seeing rather a lot of her lately.’

‘What the hell are you trying to say?’ Nick exploded angrily. ‘She’s a client, that’s all. A very rich client, I might add, and with business the way it is right now…

‘My grey suit, Fern,’ he added impatiently. ‘Is it pressed?’

‘Yes,’ she told him.

They couldn’t go on like this, she told herself as she left the house. They had to sit down and talk honestly with one another.

She smiled grimly to herself. Sit down and talk… The last time they had done that had been two years ago after she had found out about Nick’s affair. She had thought then that he was being honest with her, had allowed him to convince her that their marriage could still work, and for a little while she had actually thought that it might; but then he had started to revert to his earlier behaviour, only this time it had been even worse, because this time, every time he was angry with her, he would taunt her with some viciously cruel remark about Adam.

Oh, afterwards he had always apologised, explained how difficult it was for a man… any man to come to terms with the fact that his wife had been unfaithful to him, told her how generous and heroic he was being in trying to forget what she had done… reminded her of how shocked and distressed her parents would be if they ever discovered the truth… pleaded with her to forgive him, promising that it wouldn’t happen again; and because of the burden of her own guilt she had accepted what he had said, feeling in her heart that she deserved to suffer… to be punished for what she had done.

She was trembling so much she could scarcely see what she was doing, struggling with the latch on the front gate as she opened it.

One brief moment out of time, one careless action, one small error of judgement. Who would have thought that she… that Adam… ?

Fiercely she blocked off the thought, denying it life. She must not think of that now. Not allow herself to remember…

That was, after all, part of her penance, part of the punishment she had inflicted on herself for what she had done.

The morning air was clear and sharp, the wind tempered by the promise of warmth in the spring sunshine.

The wind tugged at her hair, reminding her that she had intended to tie it back. Adam had liked her hair… he had once…

She stopped walking, her body freezing into immobility as she tried to reject her thoughts, pushing them fiercely to the back of her mind, trying not to acknowledge how afraid she was of their power.

It was quite a long walk into town, and she quickened her step a little. She had promised Roberta that she would meet her at the surgery at eleven.

The road where she and Nick lived was on the outskirts of the small market town, a pleasant cul-de-sac of Victorian villas built around the time the railway had first come to the area.

Theirs was one of a pair of good-sized semis which could have been turned into a very attractive and comfortable family home had Nick been willing to spend some money on it. It had the benefit of a large garden and an extra upper storey, and its previous owners had converted the small maze of kitchen, larder and scullery at the back of the property into a large kitchen.

Nick however had pointed out to her shortly after their marriage, when she had tentatively suggested that it might be nice to add a conservatory to the house, that since he was the only one of them working she must realise that he simply could not afford that sort of luxury.

She had done her best to update the décor, and had been quite proud of the dragged and stippled paint effects with which she had transformed the old-fashioned décor of the rooms, and of the curtains and loose covers she had painstakingly made from factory remnants of fabric bought as ‘seconds’, until Nick had commented to her how amateurish her skills were.

He had done it quite kindly and gently, but she could still remember how humiliated she had felt when, flushed with success and proud of what she had done, she had suggested they give a small dinner party to show off their home.

‘Darling, it’s impossible,’ Nick had told her. ‘Don’t you see… anyone we invite could be a potential client? One look at what you’ve done to this place and they’re going to wonder if my professional skills are as amateurish as your homemaking ones.’

His criticism, although perhaps justified, had taken from her all the pleasure and sense of achievement she had felt in what she had done, and when three weeks later Nick had suddenly announced that he had booked a firm of decorators to come and repaint the whole house she had quietly kept to herself her disappointment over the effect of the no doubt practical but very plain woodchip paper with which every internal wall had been covered.

It was obviously Nick’s choice and no doubt he was right when he explained that it looked far better than what she had done.

After that it had never seemed to Fern that the house was really her home; only the kitchen was her domain, and she had tried to make it as cheerful and warm as she could, even though she could tell from Nick’s face that he did not approve of the bowls of spring bulbs; the flowers from the garden, the soft yellow paint and the pretty curtains and chair covers she had made for the room.

From the outside the house looked neat and well cared for, just like all the others in the cul-de-sac, but inside it was empty and desolate of all that made a house a proper home, Fern reflected sadly as she turned into the road into town, her footsteps automatically slowing down slightly as she studied the view in front of her.

It didn’t matter how many times she walked down here, or how familiar the view before her was; she always felt a fresh surge of pleasure at what she saw.

The town had originally been an important stopping-off point for stage-coaches and other carriage traffic, a vital link with the main arterial routes of the day, and although now modern roads and motorways had turned the town into a quiet backwater, bypassing it, the signs of its thriving, bustling past were clearly visible in its architecture.

One side of the town square was still dominated by the coaching inn which was said to date back to the fifteenth century, although its present exterior was that of a late Tudor building, herringbone-patterned brick insets between the beams replacing the original wattle and daub. Adjacent to it ran a line of similar buildings, once private homes, now mainly shops and offices. Next to them was the church crafted in local stone, its spire reaching up dizzyingly towards the sky.

There was a local legend that the original bells had been melted down at the time of the Civil War to make weapons and armour, but as far as Fern knew this had never actually been substantiated.

Like looking at the rings of a tree to discover its age, the various stages of the town’s growth could be seen in the different styles of its architecture.

The third side of the square was lined with handsome Georgian town houses, originally the property of the wealthy tradesmen who had made their homes in the town, drawn there by the business generated from the coaching traffic.

Adam’s office was in one of those buildings, beautifully renovated and lovingly restored to all its original elegance.

When it came to his work, no detail was too small to escape Adam’s careful attention. Even the paint for the walls had had to be specially mixed to an old-fashioned recipe.

It had been Lord Stanton who had unearthed in his library an estimate and recipe for paint originally supplied for the new wing of the hall which had been built at the same time as the houses and by the same builder who had been responsible for the pretty Nash-type terrace of houses in Avondale.

As she crossed the square, heading for the church, and the surgery, Fern deliberately took the longer way round so that she wouldn’t have to walk past Adam’s office. The sun glinted on the leaded windows of the coaching inn, highlighting the uneven thickness of the old-fashioned glass, and picking out the detail on the pargeting decorating the upper storey of the building next to it.

In the centre of the square stood an open-arched two-storey stone building, a relic of the days when the town had marked one of the stopping-off places for drovers taking their flocks from one part of the country to another.

On a clear day from the top of the church tower it was possible to see out over the Bristol Channel to the west and to the spire of Salisbury cathedral to the southeast.

It had been Adam’s gentle coercion of the local authorities, supported by Lord Stanton, that had been responsible for the removal of the square’s tarmac road surface and the uncovering and restoration of the original cobbles which lay beneath it.

Adam’s family had lived in the town since the late sixteenth century. Wheelwrights originally, they had prospered during the days of coach travel.

Fern had never met either Nick’s mother or Adam’s father, both of whom had been killed in a road accident a couple of years prior to her knowing the stepbrothers. However, while Adam had always spoken warmly of both Nick’s mother as well as his own parents, Nick rarely mentioned his family at all.

Fern knew that Nick’s father had deserted his wife and small son when Nick was barely three years old—Adam had told her that—but when she had once gently tried to sympathise with Nick over his father’s defection he had rounded angrily on her.

Fern also knew from comments other people had made that Adam’s father, like Adam himself, had been very highly thought of locally, and had been a very generous benefactor to local charities.

He had also been very good to Nick, treating him if anything more indulgently than he had his own son.

Fern remembered how surprised she had been when she first met Nick to discover that the expensive car he had been driving—far more expensive than the car Adam drove—had been a present to him from Adam’s father.

The money Nick had used to set himself up in business had also come from Adam’s father, via a legacy left to him in the older man’s will, but despite this Nick seemed to begrudge the fact that Adam had inherited a far larger proportion of his father’s wealth than Nick himself had done.

Fern remembered how shocked she had been the first time she had heard Nick voice this resentment, but then she had reminded herself that, bearing in mind the defection of his own father, it was perhaps understandable that Nick should react so badly, perhaps super-sensitively and totally erroneously seeing in Adam’s father’s willing of the larger part of his fortune to his natural son a rejection of Nick, his stepson.

And yet Fern had also heard Nick saying disarmingly how uncomfortable he had sometimes felt about the fact that Adam’s father had seemed to relate far better to him than he had done to Adam himself.

‘I think he felt more in tune with me than he did with Adam. Adam, worthy though he is, can be a bit lacking in humour at times.’

Fern had been surprised by this comment, since she had thought that Adam had an excellent sense of humour, rather dry and subtle perhaps, but he was an extremely perceptive and aware man, who made generous allowances for the vulnerability and frailties of others.

Was it perhaps because Nick had felt he was closer to Adam’s father than Adam was himself that he had been so resentful of the fact that Adam had been left the larger portion of his wealth?

Nick had, after all, been the sole beneficiary of his mother’s admittedly much more modest estate.

Fern carefully kept as much distance between herself and Adam’s office as she could; was it really necessary for her heart to start thumping so furiously fast just at the mere thought that she might see him? Miserably she deliberately looked in the opposite direction, refusing to give in to the temptation to turn her head and see if that faint shadow she could see at one of the windows really was Adam.

Adam… She shivered convulsively, acknowledging how stupidly weak she was. Just mentally saying his name had such a powerful effect on her senses that she was half afraid she had said it out loud.

It was a relief to walk into the surgery and escape.

‘Ah, good, there you are,’ Roberta announced as she saw her. ‘The stuff’s already across at the church hall. I was just beginning to wonder if you weren’t going to make it.’

‘I left a little bit later than I planned,’ Fern apologised as they crossed the narrow cobbled street separating the surgery from the church hall.

‘Just look at all this stuff,’ Roberta groaned after they had let themselves in and were standing surveying the bagged bundles heaped in the middle of the room. ‘Heavens, these don’t even look as though they’ve been worn,’ she commented as she tackled the nearest of the bags, holding up a couple of dresses for Fern’s inspection. ‘These came from Amanda Bryant and they probably cost more than I spend on my wardrobe in a whole year… much more,’ she added ruefully as Fern leaned forward to inspect the labels. ‘I think I remember Amanda wearing this one for last year’s vicarage garden party.’

‘It is very striking,’ Fern acknowledged.

Amanda Bryant and her husband Edward had been their fellow guests at Venice’s dinner party, a very wealthy and flamboyant local couple who had made a good deal of money from a variety of shrewd investments. There were certain staid members of the local community who tended to disapprove of them, but Fern liked them both. Amanda made her laugh with her robust good-natured humour, and her very genuine and down-to-earth enjoyment of their new-found wealth. They were not in the least pretentious and their annual summer barbecue was one of the best attended and most popular local events, probably second only in popularity to Lord Stanton’s New Year’s Eve ball, ranking there with the river race which Adam organised each year to raise money for charity.

‘Venice has given us masses of stuff as well. All of it designer-label by the looks of it and hardly worn. I only wish I were a smaller size,’ Roberta added wistfully. ‘There’s a suit here that would fit you perfectly, Fern,’ she added, eyeing her own plump figure with resignation. ‘It’s just your colouring.’

Fern could feel the tension crawling down her spine; revulsion at the thought of wearing something that Venice herself might have worn when she was with Nick… In her mind’s eye, Fern could see Nick removing it from the other woman’s body… touching her… caressing her…

She felt no sexual or emotional jealousy at the scene she had mentally conjured up, only a deadening sense of futility and despair.

Was it for this that she had spent the last two years of her life desperately trying to piece together her marriage… to convince herself that in staying in it she had made the right, the only decision… that ultimately what she was enduring would prove worthwhile once she and Nick were through the turbulence of these painful years; that ultimately the need he said he had for her would… must conjure up an answering spark within her, that would allow her to cease searching hopelessly for whatever it was that had drawn her to him in the first place and make her believe that she loved him?

Without turning round to see what Roberta was showing her, she said quietly, ‘I’m afraid I’m not really the type for drop-dead glamour outfits. They’re not really my style.’

As she watched her, Roberta repressed a small sigh. Fern might not have Venice’s extrovert vibrant personality, but she had a marvellously slender and supple figure, a femininity which shone through the dullness of her clothes, a serenity and tranquillity which drew others to her in need of the gentle warmth of her personality.

She had a very pretty face as well, and as for her hair!

Roberta’s own husband, a pragmatic and very down-to-earth Scot, had once confessed to Roberta that he was never able to look at Fern’s hair without wondering if it felt as sensually warm and silkily luxurious to touch as it did to look at.

‘It’s the kind of hair that makes a man want to reach out and…’

He had stopped there looking slightly shame-faced and sheepish, while Roberta raised her eyebrows and commanded drily, ‘Go on!’

He had not done so, of course; there had been no need, and neither had Roberta been annoyed or jealous. She knew him far too well, and Fern as well. Now, if it had been Venice they had been discussing… There was a woman who would enjoy nothing more than the challenge of taking another woman’s man. Fern, on the other hand…

‘There are one or two children’s outfits here,’ Fern commented, interrupting her train of thought.

‘We’ll keep them separate from the rest,’ Roberta told her, ‘although I don’t think there will be very many. Most mothers these days seem to operate their own exchange system.’

‘Well, it does make sense,’ Fern pointed out. ‘Children’s things are very expensive and often they’re not in them long enough to wear them out.’

‘Mmm… it’s all very different from when mine were young,’ Roberta agreed. ‘These days it’s all designer trainers and the right kind of jeans virtually from the moment they can speak.’

Even with only a very short break for a sandwich and a cup of coffee, it took them until well into the afternoon to work their way through all the clothes which had been donated.

Fern’s knees ached from the draught coming in under the church hall’s ill-fitting doors when she eventually got to her feet. Outside the sun was still shining although it was chilly now inside the hall.

Nick had said that he wanted to leave at five, which meant that he would arrive at his London hotel in good time for dinner.

He hadn’t told her where he would be staying, though. Fern frowned as she remembered how tense and on edge he had been earlier… how irritable with her.

After she had left Roberta and started to walk home, she wondered tiredly why it was that she and Nick just could not seem to grow closer to one another. It was after all what they both wanted.

Was it? a small bitter voice demanded. If it was, why was Nick paying so much attention to Venice?

She was one of his clients, Fern reminded herself firmly, and Nick was after all human and a man. It was only natural that he should be aware of Venice as a woman. What man would not be?

But Adam had not looked at Venice with the same barely concealed sexual interest that she had seen in Nick’s eyes…

She tensed briefly, fighting off the wave of emotion she could feel threatening her.

As she had done on her arrival, she carefully skirted Adam’s office, keeping her head averted as she hurried past it on the opposite side of the square, increasing her walking pace as she left the town behind her.

If she didn’t linger too long, she just about had enough time to take in one of her favourite detours, to enjoy a special piece of self-indulgence. After all, if Nick was right, she wasn’t going to be able to do so for much longer, she reflected.

Broughton House lay on the outskirts of the town, close enough to her own house for her to be able to turn off into the quiet lane which led to it.

The railway which had led to the erection of their own small cul-de-sac had also heralded the end of the town’s busy prosperity, preserving it as it had been in the middle of the nineteenth century virtually so that it remained compact and neat, without the urban sprawl which had overtaken so many other towns.

Although it was less than a mile from the town, Broughton House was still surrounded by fields, with an outlook over open countryside, the builder having cleverly sited it so that the side overlooking the town had the least number of windows.

It had originally been built by a wealthy merchant, a ‘nabob’ returning from India, who, disdaining the existing properties, had commissioned himself a new one in the countryside surrounding the place which had been his original birthplace.

The grounds, which covered an area of almost four acres, had become overgrown during the last eighteen months or so of Mrs Broughton’s life, but Fern liked the soft wildness of the over-long grass with its sprinkling of spring bulbs; the moss which coated the paths and the general air of what to others might be neglect but to her gave the place more a sense of somehow sleeping mysteriously, waiting for the magical touch of an owner who would love it to restore it to its original splendour, but these were thoughts she kept to herself, knowing how derisive Nick would be were she to voice them to him.

As she walked through the formal rose garden, bare now at this time of year, she paused to watch the young heron standing on the mossy edge of the round goldfish pond.

Somewhere within its depths lurked a dozen or more fat lazy goldfish, but Fern suspected they were far too wise and knowing to risk surfacing in such cool weather, and that the young marauder for all his bravura would have a disappointing wait for his dinner.

Through the rhododendron bushes now gone wild and desperately in need of some attention Fern could see the house itself, but today the house wasn’t her destination.

Instead she turned away from it, finding her way through what had once been an attractively planted shrubbery.

Alongside the neglected path there flowered remnants of what must once have been a two- to three-foot-deep ribbon of spring bulbs naturalised in grass.

Today these survived only in broken patches and clumps.

It took Fern almost ten minutes to force her way through the tangled undergrowth obscuring the pathway to the small bowl-shaped enclosure at the centre of the shrubbery.

The stone seat set back from its rim was encrusted with lichen, the lion masks of the seat pedestals and arms badly weathered.

Today, at this time of the year, all that could be seen in the bowl were the emergent shoots of the lilies which when in flower filled the bowl with band after band of massed drifts of flowers in rings of colour from palest cream to deepest gold and from lightest blue to almost purple.

It was Mrs Broughton herself who had first brought her to this spot and told her its history, explaining to her how her husband’s grandmother had had the bowl made and planted, having fallen in love with the same design but on a much grander scale on a visit to America.

The lilies had been in flower then and Fern remembered how the sight of them had made her catch her breath in wonder, tears stinging her eyes, her senses totally overwhelmed by their beauty.

If Nick was right and Adam was part of a consortium planning to buy the house and use the land, this would be the last year she would be able to witness the small miracle of the lilies blossoming.

As she sat down on the stone seat, tears blurred her eyes.

Tears for the destruction of this small oasis of beauty or tears for herself? she wondered cynically as she blinked them away.

‘Fern!’

She tensed, automatically controlling and absorbing her shock, and, even more importantly, concealing it, knowing without having to turn her head to whom the quiet male voice belonged.

Why pretend to be shocked? an inner voice taunted her. You must have known that he might be here. That’s really why you came, isn’t it? Not to mourn the passing of the garden but because…

She got up quickly, her face tight with tension as she turned to face him.

‘Adam!’

Her voice betrayed nothing of what she was feeling; of the unending destructive war within her that was so much a part of her life that the wounds it inflicted on her had long ago ceased consciously to hurt and were something she simply accepted as part of the price she had to pay for her own culpability.

Automatically she retreated into the shadows of the shrubbery, carefully distancing herself from him, protectively concealing her expression, her eyes from him just in case…

‘So Venice was right,’ she said lightly. ‘You are planning to buy this place. What will you build here, Adam? Is it going to be a supermarket as she suggested?’

She could hear the brittle tension in her voice, feel the way her body was starting to tremble as she faced him across the distance which separated them.

It had been almost two years now and yet her senses, her emotions, her flesh could remember with devastating accuracy how it had felt to be held by him, to touch him, not with the knowingness which had come later and for which she must eternally pay the price of her own guilt and searing, suffocating loathing, but with the innocence of loving someone for that first precious and very special time; the wonder of experiencing that love, the joy, the tremulous seesawing between awed delight and disbelief.

He had been so tender with her, so caring… so protective… so careful not to hurry or rush her.

Had he really cared about her at all, or had she simply imagined that he had, out of her own need? Was it merely pity which had motivated him? Whatever he might have felt for her then in that moment of intimacy, she knew what he must feel for her now… how much he must despise her. After all, what man could feel anything other than contempt for a woman who…

Who what? Who went to him and begged him, pleaded with him to make love to her, even after he had already tried to put her to one side, to end what had accidentally and inadvertently begun. Only she hadn’t let him… She had…

She shuddered tensely, desperately trying to block off her self-destructive thoughts, to channel the threatening power of what she was feeling in less lethal directions, to remind herself that she was Nick’s wife.

And the only way she had of reinforcing the view the outside world had to hold of her relationship with Adam, of reinforcing to Adam that he need never ever fear that she would seek to humiliate herself in such a way again, by repeating that idiotic, crazy behaviour of the past, was to treat him with the coldness and distance behind which she had learned to hide her true feelings.

Even when they did not have an audience. After all, it was even more important that Adam did not guess the truth than it was that no one else did.

What was left of her pride, a poor thin-skinned affair, she had somehow managed to patch together, but it could never be wholly mended or trusted, and would certainly never be strong enough to sustain any real blows against it.

‘Is that really what you think I would do, Fern?’

The harshness in his voice hurt her almost physically. She wanted to flinch back from it, to cry out in protest, but stoically she refused to let herself.

Physically Adam might not have that charmed, almost boyish look of youth which made Nick so attractive, but there was something about him in his maturity which appealed even more strongly to her feminine senses now than it had done when they had been younger.

There was a sensuality, a sexuality about Adam which, although covert and subtle rather than something which he himself was aware of and deliberately flaunted, had an effect on her that made her so aware of herself as a woman—aware of herself and aware of her need for him—that just standing here, what should have been a perfectly ludicrously safe distance away from him, was enough to raise the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck and send a frisson of aching desire twisting painfully through her body.

Adam had a masculinity, a maleness which no woman could possibly ignore, she acknowledged tautly. Even now, with her brain and her body screaming warnings of danger to her, she was intensely aware of it and of him.

Aware of it and achingly, desperately envious of the woman, the girl on whom it was bestowed.

Once she had thought she had been that girl, but Nick had questioned her, laughing at her as he asked her almost incredulously if she had really believed that Adam was attracted to her.

‘Has he ever made love to you?’ he had asked her, and she had shaken her head, wincing as Nick had shrugged and announced bluntly, ‘Well, there you are, then. If he had wanted you… really wanted you, he would have done so. I want you, Fern,’ he had added huskily. ‘I want you very, very much.’

She shivered slightly, forcing herself back to the present and to Adam’s question.

‘You’re a businessman,’ she responded tiredly.

‘I’m an architect,’ he contradicted her flatly.

‘But you are here,’ Fern pointed out, flushing slightly as she heard the anger edging up under his voice. ‘Something must have brought you.’

‘You’re here too,’ Adam retaliated coolly. ‘What brought you?’

Somehow Fern managed to swallow down the hard, hurting ball of tears which had locked in her throat. It was always like this when they met, their voices full of painful anger, her body stiff and tense with the effort of rejecting and controlling what she was really feeling, the indifference, the distance she forced herself to display taking so much out of her that she already knew that the moment he had gone she would be reduced to a trembling, shivering wreck, totally unable to do so much as put one foot properly in front of the other; that she would spend hours and not minutes trying to stop herself from reliving the past, from wishing… wanting…

‘You’re here,’ he had said. Tension crawled along her spine and into her nerve-endings. Did he think she had known he would be here… that she had followed him here… that she might… ?

‘I wanted to see the garden, before you destroy it…’

Try as she might, she could not keep the pain out of her voice. She turned to face him, her chin tilting, the sunlight catching her hair so that for a moment she seemed so ethereally a part of her surroundings that Adam found himself holding his breath, afraid almost to breathe as he watched her, mentally reclothing her in soft greens and yellows, the colours, the fabrics flowing and harmonious, enhancing the feminine suppleness of her body, highlighting the almost fawnlike quality of her features, so delicate that they were cruelly swamped by the dullness of the clothes she was actually wearing. Only her hair… Her hair…

Abruptly he looked away from her. She was Nick’s wife and she loved him, although how she…

As she watched him, Fern wondered what he would say if she told him that she had seen the brochure he had been carrying.

Pain flooded through her. It seemed unfairly cruel of fate that it should be Adam of all people who threatened the existence of somewhere that had come to mean so much to her… a solace… a refuge… a sanctuary…

From what? From life? From herself? From her marriage? Tiredly she knew that she wouldn’t challenge him… just as she couldn’t challenge Nick about Venice?

‘I… I must go. Nick… Nick is… will be expecting me. He… he’s leaving for London and…’

Without finishing her sentence she ducked her head to one side and hurriedly started to skirt a wide circle around him, heading back towards the path, sensing that he was watching her but knowing that she dared not look back at him.

Adam! She could feel the heavy, dreary feeling of despair starting to settle over her as she half ran and half stumbled back down the path. Her body was trembling and she felt icy cold even though at the same time her face felt as though it was burningly hot, and her heart was beating so fast that she was finding it difficult to breathe properly.

Too late now to wish she had gone straight home… to wish she had not given in to the temptation to go to Broughton House and in doing so inadvertently and so very, very dangerously and painfully she now risked opening the Pandora’s box into which she had tried to lock away all her memories and thoughts of Adam.