by Penny Jordan
'help' her.
'Your father desperately wants to be there for you, Livvy—to make amends.... Why don't you give him another chance?'
'I already did...many many times whilst I was growing up,' Olivia had informed him bitterly.
Her mobile started to ring just as she was approaching the school. For a moment she was tempted to ignore it but what if the call was important? What if Caspar was ringing her?
Pulling into the side of the road she reached for the phone frowning when she recognised Jon and Jenny's number.
'Livvy,' she heard Jenny demanding anxiously.
'Yes. Yes, I'm here,' she confirmed. 'I'm just on my way to school, though, to pick up the girls and I mustn't be late....'
'Livvy...the girls are here.'
'What? But that's impossible. I booked them into the after-school creche. How can they be with you?'
There was a small pause and then she heard Jenny saying quietly, 'They are here and... Look, I think it's best if I explain once you get here.'
'Once I get there— Jenny, is something wrong? The girls, are they—'
'They're both fine,' Jenny assured her quickly. 'But there's something... I'll go now and let you get here, Livvy.'
The girls were at Jon and Jenny's.... As she reversed her car and set off in the direction of her aunt and uncle's house, Livvy's thoughts were a seething mass of maternal shock and anxiety.
How could the girls have got there? Jon and Jenny lived nearly three miles away from the school and...
A traffic jam delayed her by several precious minutes so that it was over twenty minutes later that she pulled up on Jenny's drive, abandoning her car to open the door and run towards the house.
Jenny had obviously been waiting for her because she opened the front door immediately.
'I wanted to talk to you before you see the girls,'
Jenny was telling her as she ushered her into her sitting room.
'What's happened? What's wrong? Why—?'
'Nothing's wrong. They're both fine,' Jenny reassured her again firmly.
'But what are they doing here? How did they get here?'
'They walked,' Jenny told her, her eyes and her voice betraying what she was thinking and Livvy could sense the heavy cold sick feeling ricocheting through her own body as she contemplated the long country lane that led twisting and turning across the fields from the school to Jon and Jenny's home.
It was a narrow lane bordered by fields and woodlands, busy with speeding commuter traffic at certain times of the day and emptily quiet at others and it was the kind of lane that represented every type of danger to children that all parents feared—speeding traffic, no pavements, thick screening hedgerows which meant...
Olivia felt as though she wanted to be sick.
'They walked—on their own....' She was horrified by her negligence as a parent, a mother. How could she not have known the danger they were in?
'Apparently they left school once classes had finished somehow managing to evade their teacher,'
Jenny was continuing. 'I have to admit they planned it all very well.'
'But Amelia knows she must never ever leave the school without being with an adult—she knows—'
Olivia protested.
'As I understand it, it wasn't Amelia who was the driving force behind the enterprise,' Jenny told her ruefully.
Olivia stared at her.
'You mean Alex...' she began in disbelief. 'But she's...' She stopped. Of the two of them Alex was the more adventurous, the more stubborn.
'But why...why...?'
Jenny took a deep breath. This was the bit she had been dreading explaining to Olivia ever since the girls had arrived exhausted and bedraggled half an hour earlier.
How on earth they had managed such a long walk without being seen by someone and reported to the authorities, Jenny had no idea. What she did know, however, was that their guardian angel must have been watching over them to protect them.
'I know how much they've been missing you and Uncle Jon,' Olivia was saying shakily, 'But I've tried to explain to them that you've been busy....'
Jenny couldn't meet her eyes.
'It wasn't really me they came to see Olivia.... At least not in the sense that you mean. They wanted to ask me about their grandfather.'
'Their grandfather...?' Olivia couldn't conceal her feelings.
'What did you tell them?' she demanded harshly.
'I said that they should talk to you about him,'
Jenny said gently.
'He came to see me yesterday,' Olivia told Jenny huskily and reluctantly. 'My father...he offered to help me with the children. I told him no. I told him that I didn't want them to have anything to do with him and I don't. Leo had told them that he was their grandfather.'
Olivia continued in an uneven voice.
'The girls saw him...my father.... Alex had fallen over in the garden and he picked her up.... They guessed who he was...they asked me all sorts of questions....' She closed her eyes. 'What did they say to you?'
'They asked if it was true that the man they'd met was their grandfather and that he was Uncle Jon's brother. They wanted to know why they had never seen him before.'
'And what did you tell them?' Olivia asked her faintly.
Jenny touched her arm comfortingly.
'It wasn't my place to explain the situation to them, Livvy...and they're so young. I just said that he'd been living in another country but that now he was back.'
Olivia sighed. She could well understand how impossible it would have been for Jenny to even begin to attempt to explain the truth to girls so young.
'I'd better take them home,' she told Jenny wearily.
'Thank you for looking after them.'
She sounded so forlorn that Jenny took hold of her in silent commiseration.
'MUMMY...'
Amelia saw her first.
Without any preamble Olivia told them that she was taking them home, bidding them thank Jenny for looking after them.
The car wasn't the place to ask them the question she wanted to ask. At the end of the short drive Alex was yawning tiredly and had to be carried from the car to the house, shaking her head and announcing that she didn't want any tea when Livvy asked what she would like to eat.
'Aunt Jenny gave us something to eat whilst we were waiting for you,' Amelia told her quietly.
Olivia had promised herself that she wasn't going to frighten them by getting angry but the fear haunting her of what could so easily have happened to them was driving her. Why, when they were both safe and she was giving thanks for that fact, did she still feel like screaming at them that she was furiously angry with them for leaving school in the way they had when they knew that it was expressly forbidden for them to do so?
But to her despair and shame she could see in Amelia's eyes that her elder daughter was afraid of her doing just that so instead, she dropped down on her heels next to her and gently gathering them both to her in her arms she asked as calmly as she could,
'Haven't both Daddy and I always told you that you must never leave school unless one of us is with you—
or we've told you that someone else will collect you?'
Alex, still a baby really, trembled, her eyes filling with huge tears.
'When is my daddy coming home?' she whispered heartbreakingly. 'I want him to come home.'
'Oh, Alex.' Fresh guilt and a grief she didn't want to acknowledge filled Olivia.
'Daddy doesn't love us any more, does he?' Alex was continuing tearfully.
'Of course he loves you,' Olivia responded immediately and she knew truthfully.
"Then why isn't he here?' Alex demanded quickly.
'Sweetheart, you already know why,' Olivia reminded her gently.
'Daddy and Mummy aren't going to live together any more. You know that,' Amelia informed her younger sister sharply, but when she looked at her Olivia could see that if anything her elder daughter was even more upset than her
younger.
She ought to have expected this and been prepared for it, Olivia knew, but somehow she had hoped...
convinced herself that the girls had accepted the separation.
'Well, if we can't have a daddy then I want to have a grandpa,' Alex announced, adding challengingly,
'Other children at school have grandpas and grandmas and they—'
'Oh, Alex,' Olivia protested realising painfully that Alex's small body was resisting all Olivia's attempts to offer her love and comfort.
'Amelia...' Olivia turned to her elder daughter. She loved both her children so much that it had never oc-curred to her that they might start to reject her...blame her...because they felt they had lost Caspar.
'You're older than Alex.... You know you aren't allowed to leave school and that road...'
'I had to do it, Mummy,' Amelia told her unwillingly. 'Alex said that she would go without me if I didn't....'
The look she gave first her younger sister and then Olivia herself tore at Olivia's emotions. How well she herself could remember that feeling of being responsible for the welfare and safety of a younger sibling, the anxiety, the fear, the anger and resentment against the world that forced on her a responsibility that was too heavy for her combined with a stoical determination to carry that burden somehow.
Oh, Amelia.... What was she doing to her children she asked herself sorrowfully. What was she inflicting on them?
'I wanted to know about my grandpa,' Alex was telling her firmly. 'You wouldn't tell us so I wanted to ask Uncle Jon about him.'
Every word she uttered was adding to Olivia's despair and guilt. How could she possibly continue with her work now? How could she bear to allow them out of her sight for a single second?
Serpent-like the thought slipped into her mind that none of this would have happened if Caspar had been here.
Caspar...
She had dreamed about him last night—again—
waking up, her face wet with tears to find her arms outstretched yearningly to the empty side of their bed.
But it had been the Caspar she had fallen in love with she had dreamed of, she reminded herself fiercely, not the Caspar her husband had become.
'Amelia and Alex, you must both promise me that you will never, ever, do anything like this again,' Olivia told them. 'That road is very dangerous... and you...
'You're both so precious, so vulnerable,' she wanted to tell them, but of course they were far too young to understand.
She was, Olivia knew, facing the dilemma that faced so many single working mothers. She needed to work to support her children financially, to give them the lifestyle enjoyed by their peers within their family group and at school. The house was mortgaged and Caspar would do his bit she knew, but she had always been the main breadwinner. Yes, they could down-scale. She could sell the house and buy something smaller in Haslewich itself, perhaps, and she was fully prepared to do so; but no matter what economies they made she would still have to earn a living...and she could not do that unless she had the kind of back-up and help that meant she need never have a single second's anxiety about the safety and welfare of her daughters.
There had been another message left from the nanny agency to say that they were unable to find anyone to meet her needs. Jenny, who she had hoped would help her, could not do so. All the other women in the family had very full busy lives of their own with their own responsibilities; and besides, there was no way she wanted her precious children to feel they were always on the fringes of other people's lives, always second best, always having to stand aside and watch others receive the love and hugs of loving parents and grandparents whilst they...
Olivia closed her eyes. There was no other course open to her now. For her children's sake she had to put aside her own pride and bitterness.
She had seen the look in her father's eyes as he tended Alex's cut leg. Tears filled her own. For the sake of her daughters there was nothing else she could do.
SARA GLANCED at her watch. It was well gone eight o'clock in the evening and her desk was virtually clear. She could have left hours ago and been curled up comfortably in her fiat watching her favourite TV
programme. So what was she doing sitting here...
waiting...?
She was working, that was what she told herself, ignoring the fact that she had been achieving little for the last fifteen minutes. Anyway, what had she expected? That just because she had indicated to Nick that she had changed her mind and that she wanted to go ahead with...with the ultimate cure for the afflic-tion she was suffering from, that he would drop everything and come speeding over to sweep her off to his bed!
No, of course she hadn't.
Liar, she scorned herself with silent derision. That was exactly what she had expected him to do. Was he deliberately trying to torment her, to humiliate her or was he more mundanely perhaps the kind of man who lost interest in his prey once it had stopped running?
Unable to dwell logically or unemotionally on such unpalatable and unwanted thoughts, Sara got off her chair and paced her office agitatedly.
If he didn't want her, well that was fine by her. He, after all, was the one who had come on to her and not the other way around. She had noticed how sexually compelling he was of course, but... She tensed as the telephone on her desk rang. There was no telephone in the flat which was why she had remained down here in the office, finding herself work to do just in case...
She made an angry grab for the telephone receiver grimacing when she discovered that the caller was someone who had dialled the office number in error and who really wanted to make a booking in the restaurant.
Politely she asked him to hold on whilst she went into the restaurant for the reservation book.
Having taken the booking, she was on her way back to the restaurant with it when she saw him. He was just about to push open the outside door. It was a wet night and as she watched him in avid absorbed intensity she saw him shake the raindrops off himself.
He hadn't seen her as yet and so she was able to watch him, virtually rooted to the spot by the urgency and strength of what she was feeling.
NICK HADN'T intended to go to the restaurant—or indeed to make any attempt to contact Sara. He wanted, no, needed, time to come to terms with what she had said to him. But then he had discovered that he needed some cash and the nearest cash dispenser was only a few seconds' walk away from the restaurant and...
As he pushed open the door he saw her. She was standing looking at him. A huge swell of feeling so strong that it shocked him surged through him. He wanted to swoop down and pick her up there and then, take her away somewhere where he could be totally and completely on his own with her...then they would see just how easy she would actually find it to separate sex from emotion.
As he reached her side some dangerous impulse within her drove Sara to say in soft challenge, 'Goodness me, I'd begun to wonder if you'd changed your mind and to think that perhaps you were one of those men who was all talk but no action!'
Aghast she wondered what on earth had prompted her to say something so foolhardy. But it was too late to take back her challenging words now. She could see from the angry glint in Nick's eyes just what he thought of them.
'Changed my mind? No way. And as for the rest of your statement...' His voice had become as smooth as cream but Sara was very sharply aware of the acid sting that lurked beneath his soft words.
'It will be my pleasure to prove otherwise.'
His pleasure! A tiny dart of fear and insecurity stabbed through Sara's body. Unwittingly her glance lifted to his to search his eyes, her own widening and darkening with an unexpected vulnerability that made Nick catch his breath. Just what kind of a game was she playing with him? One moment the sophisticated sexually experienced woman of the world, the next a vulnerable-looking novice who trembled at the mere thought of having sex.
But, after a remark like the one she had just made to him, there was no way she could be that!
Help
lessly Sara wondered how on earth she could have been so idiotic. No man liked having his sexuality challenged—she knew that.
Nick took a deep breath. What was he waiting for?
She had made it plain to him just what she wanted.
'I have to return home for a few days....'
'Home?' Sara questioned numbly. What was he trying to tell her? That he had, after all, changed his mind? That he needed more time to decide? Either way...
'Yes. I live in Pembrokeshire,' he told her tersely.
'I want you to come with me.'
Go with him?
Sara wasn't sure if the weakness that filled her was caused by shock or relief.
'We could be alone there,' Nick told her quietly, forcing her to meet and hold his gaze. 'I don't think either of us want to have our private lives played out under the interested eyes of either Frances and her family or my brother and his...'
'No,' Sara agreed. 'But Pembrokeshire...'
She hadn't got as far as thinking where they would expiate their mutually unwanted desire but had hazily assumed they would go to some hotel. Certainly, she agreed with him that she didn't want anyone else to know what was happening. After all, it wasn't as though they were going to have a proper relationship or become a 'couple,' but to go away alone with him to his home...
'If you can't trust me enough to come to my home then you certainly can't trust me and if you can't trust me enough to enter my home then you certainly can't trust me enough to enter your body,' he told her trenchantly and with such open sexual meaning that Sara flushed.
'I... When... There's Frances and my work... I'd have to take time off,' she began disjointedly.
'The weekend after next,' Nick told her immediately. 'Oh, and you'll need warm clothes. The cottage is fairly remote.'
Warm clothes! Sara gave him a startled look but wished she hadn't as he returned it with amusement, bending his head to whisper wickedly in her ear,
'What's wrong? Granted I want you like hell and I can promise you it's going to give us both very great pleasure when I prove it to you, but we shan't be spending the entire weekend in bed. Pembroke has one of the most famous and beautiful coastline walks in the country. If the weather's good enough we could even sail.