For Better for Worse

by Penny Jordan

  Against her body she felt him tremble and harden and a wild whirlwind of response raced through her.

  ‘Adam… Adam…’ Without knowing she was doing so she was repeating his name in a soft, anguished litany of love.

  He was saying something to her, telling her how much he had longed for this… for her. His mouth caressed her jaw, her ears, and her body arched instinctively into his embrace, seeking more than just the intimacy of his clothed flesh against hers.

  ‘Why… why didn’t you tell me any of this before?’ he demanded between kisses. ‘You know how I felt about you… how much I loved you.’

  Fern tensed and pulled back from him, looking into his face and seeing there the truth of what he was saying.

  ‘No. No,’ she told him shakily. ‘I didn’t know… I thought you just felt sorry for me. Nick had once told me that you… that you thought I was too sexually naïve to be desirable…’

  ‘And you believed him? For God’s sake, Fern! Didn’t you guess? Didn’t I show you that time…?’

  ‘I thought it was just… just male lust. I thought you felt sorry for me…’

  ‘And I thought you were just turning to me for comfort because of Nick’s betrayal. You let me think that you loved him even then!’

  ‘Because I didn’t want you to feel responsibility… or that you owed me anything. I was going to leave him, but… but he wouldn’t let me… and I was afraid that if I did you’d think…’ She shook her head, too emotionally overwhelmed to continue. ‘I thought you must have known how I felt,’ she said helplessly at last. ‘After the way I…’ Her hands balled into two small anguished fists as she looked away from him, bringing out into the open for the first time the thing which had tormented her for so long. ‘I was the one who insisted… who demanded… who forced you to…’

  ‘Is that what you really believe?’ Adam demanded, so incredulously that she was forced to look at him.

  ‘Fern, Fern… I wanted you so much, loved you so much that… Even if you hadn’t touched me when you did, it wouldn’t have made any difference. I would still have made love to you. Have you any idea how much remembering what happened between us has tortured me? Not just with guilt and remorse, but with need and wanting, too; with love, lust and anger and a thousand other emotions I can’t even begin to describe.’

  ‘Make love to me now, Adam,’ Fern whispered, shivering as she said the words.

  She felt his tension and looked up at him.

  ‘Not here,’ he told her unevenly. ‘Never here. Come home with me.’

  As he held out his hand to her, she put her own into it.

  * * *

  ‘We’re going to go back to the beginning,’ Adam told her softly as he led her upstairs to his bedroom. ‘To the loving we should have shared… would have shared, if Nick hadn’t come between us. He told me that you didn’t want me, you know. He said you were too embarrassed to tell me so yourself… that you found me too old and boring…’

  He paused to push open the bedroom door and then take her in his arms and gently kiss her as he heard the small anguished sound she made.

  ‘Oh, Adam, it was never like that. I loved you even then, but I was too shy, too immature… too unknowing. I thought you were just being kind to me. I never…’

  ‘Shush,’ Adam told her gently. ‘It doesn’t matter now. None of the bad things that happened are important… they don’t even exist any more. I just want you to think of this, Fern, that the time, the hours I spent with you are the most precious hours of my life, and it’s been the memory of them that’s held me back whenever I’ve been tempted to settle for second-best.’

  ‘Oh, Adam.’

  She wept as he kissed her, drawing her with him into the room and towards the bed.

  The room was soft with shadowy light, the furniture large and comfortable, well-polished, sturdy antique oak, the bed deeply mattressed, its linen starkly white, the scent of Adam’s skin still clinging to it, mingling subtly with its crisp freshness.

  As she lay there watching him, savouring the intimacy of their togetherness, the unbelievable delight of it, the still almost uncertain joy of knowing that he loved her, Fern touched him gently, wordlessly, communicating her need to him.

  He understood at once, lifting her hand in his, holding it and then pressing a kiss to its palm before stepping back from her and quickly undressing.

  Fern watched him, mesmerised, not just by her own desire but by a dazed feeling that this still might not be real… that it could still be wrenched away from her… he could still be wrenched away from her.

  She had thought she had remembered every aspect of their previous lovemaking, every angle of his body, every muscle and sinew, every shadow and hollow of its maleness, and yet now the reality of him was somehow much more sharply male, much more intensely masculine. She could feel her body tensing in sensual awareness of his sexuality and her response to it.

  Suddenly she longed to be free of her own clothes and her fingers were already reaching eagerly for the buttons on her shirt when Adam leaned over her and gently took them away.

  ‘No,’ he told her softly. ‘We’re going right back to the very beginning… remember?’

  Later, leaning against him, her whole body trembling with unfamiliar pleasure as his mouth gently caressed the curve of her breast, and then opened over her nipple in slowly careful exploration, she rested her head against the thick darkness of his downbent head, stifling her small moan of pleasure as his deliberately gentle kisses gave way to a deeper rhythmic sucking that caused her spine to arch and her body to shake beneath the onslaught of the intense tremor of sensation that spread downwards from his mouth, tightening her body into a sharply spiralling coil of desire.

  Each time he touched her it was as though he sensed her need… knew exactly what she felt… what she craved.

  Lying naked next to him, she was aware of emotions, sensations she had never experienced before. Slowly she recognised what they were…

  For the first time in her life she was aware of how it felt to be loved.

  As Adam leaned over her, slowly kissing his way over her body, his hand rested lightly over her sex. Protecting her modesty? No need for that now perhaps, but if she had still been the girl she was when they first met…

  ‘Oh, Adam.’ She reached out, gently touching his head, overwhelmed by the intensity not just of her arousal but of her emotions as well. She felt him lift his hand, his mouth slowly caressing the inside of her thigh.

  Her body trembled… a woman’s body not a girl’s, with a woman’s strongly powerful sexuality and arousal.

  She could feel tears begin to sting her eyes as, beneath the surge of pleasure that swamped her, she recognised the care, the tenderness, the reverence almost of his touch.

  She could feel his control as well as his need, his care and cherishing of her as well as his masculine desire to take her and hold her, to fill her with his body and fulfil the primitive biological programming of his sex towards the re-creation of himself within her.

  ‘Adam,’ she cried out his name in anguished pleasure as she felt the heat of his mouth on her body and gave in to its demand that she abandon herself to its promise of pleasure.

  ‘Now, Adam. Please, please now,’ she begged him huskily, her fingers tightening in his hair, her voice sharpening with need—need and anticipation.

  ‘N… no… not that,’ she told him fiercely as she felt his mouth begin to move more possessively, more passionately on her sex. ‘You… I want you, Adam. Inside me. Now.’

  She shuddered, torn between impatience and arousal, stiffening her body against the shock of losing the sensuous contact of his mouth as he moved to obey her.

  Later she would show him the same pleasure he had just shown her, caressing his body with her mouth, arousing it with the deliberate and intimate loving touch of her tongue; give to him the same special expression of her love, her desire to know him completely as he had just given her. Later, not now. Now her im
patient, urgent body craved the full possession of him; her senses, her emotions demanded, commanded that she give herself up completely, abandon herself totally to woman’s most deeply held and atavistic need to experience the total possession of her lover.

  Just as strong as the need she could sense within him ran her own complementary need, to feel him so deep within her, to be so totally possessed by him, to feel that he was so absolutely and utterly hers that for those few brief seconds of time they were actually one complete whole, with no barriers, no difference, every thought, every feeling, every breath and every heartbeat completely shared.

  So this, then, was the mystical, elevating, almost divine quality that really loving someone and being loved by them could sometimes bring to mortal physical union, Fern reflected dizzily as she cried out to him and reached out for him, comprehension, reality, all of them arrested and then completely overturned as she felt him move within her and was swamped by the exquisite, unbearable intensity of the feeling exploding inside her.

  Later, calmer, saner, she flushed a little with self-conscious awareness of her abandonment, not just of her physical self-control but of her mind and emotions as well.

  Had she really cried out to Adam that she would die for the feeling of him inside her? That the touch, the heat, the feel… the scent of him aroused her to the point where she wanted to scream his name to the skies?

  Had she really not been able to control the building urgency to respond to his thrust within her by scoring the smooth flesh of his back with her nails? As she glanced down at his body she saw that his buttocks still bore the crescent-shaped marks she had inflicted there when…

  Beside her she saw Adam reaching for her, smoothing the damp hair back off her face as he kissed her with lingering tenderness and then searched her face anxiously.

  ‘Are you all right? Did I hurt you? You…’

  She shook her head, reaching out to touch his mouth with her fingertip, tracing the shape of it, pushing aside the last of her self-consciousness, sloughing it off like the unwanted skin it now was as she told him frankly, ‘No. I wanted it to be like that… needed it to be like that; it was so cleansing somehow, so… so necessary.’

  Adam’s passion and her own, Adam’s possession and her abandonment of herself to it had swept away the sad poverty of her memories of Nick’s touch… what had passed for Nick’s lovemaking. It no longer existed, no longer had any place in her memory… no power to hurt or damage her.

  ‘I love you, Fern,’ Adam told her emotionally. ‘And just as soon as we can legally do so, I’d like us to marry.

  ‘I want to be your husband, Fern… your lover… your friend… the father of your children. I want to share with you all the things we should have shared years ago if I hadn’t been a fool and let Nick—’

  ‘Shush.’ Fern shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter now. I was just as much to blame… it took Cressy to show me the truth. She’s getting married soon… I was with them the other day. I felt so envious… I told myself I should be content with my freedom and my plans for the future, that wanting you, loving you… Oh, Adam, I still feel as though I daren’t let myself believe that this has happened…’

  ‘Believe it,’ Adam told her, adding huskily, ‘And believe this as well, Fern. Now that I’ve finally got you, I’m never going to let you go. There’s no way I’m going to risk losing you again.’

  ‘Nick won’t like it,’ Fern told him with a small shiver. Not for herself, but for him. Had he any idea of what Nick really was… of how much he resented him… of how dangerous he could be? As she looked up at him she saw that there was no need for her to put her thoughts into words.

  ‘Why?’ she asked unsteadily instead. ‘Why is he like that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I used to think the answer might lie buried somewhere in his early childhood. The loss of his father, perhaps… but then, some people are just born that way.’

  ‘He wants to destroy you, Adam. All this business about him being concerned about the environment and Broughton House…’

  ‘Broughton House isn’t in any danger from me,’ Adam told her. ‘The supposed consortium I’m part of to flatten it and turn the ground into a supermarket exists more in Nick’s imagination than in reality.’

  ‘I wish someone would buy it and turn it into a proper family home… the kind it must have been originally…’

  ‘It’s too large for most modern families,’ Adam told her with a smile. ‘Although…’

  ‘Although what?’ Fern asked him, half sitting up to look down into his eyes as she heard the speculation in his voice.

  ‘You’ve just given me an idea,’ he told her.

  And then he looked down at her naked body, her breasts still slightly damp with sweat, the soft swell of her belly silky, gleaming, the tangle of her pubic curls damp and inviting.

  ‘Mmm… Come to think of it, you’re giving me far more than just ideas,’ he told her sexily.

  Fern laughed. She felt as comfortable with him as though this intimacy was something they had shared for years, and yet at the same time she was as quickly and erotically aroused as though she were a girl, still newly and passionately in love.

  ‘Tell me about Broughton House first,’ she demanded.

  In between kisses, he did…

  ‘You mean get the council to buy it and turn it into a kind of reform school for young offenders?’

  ‘Not exactly… what I had in mind was more of a halfway house, somewhere they could be given the time and encouragement to take another look at the options open to them.’

  ‘It’s a wonderful idea,’ she told him enthusiastically later, lying contentedly in his arms.

  She suspected that he had been surprised, almost hesitant at first when she had turned to caress him as he had earlier caressed her, but, once he had realised that her desire to do so was genuine and not merely caused by any feeling that she had to repay the pleasure he had given her, he had abandoned himself totally to her loving, eager touch; and in doing so, she acknowledged mentally now, he had brought her fully and completely into fulfilled awareness of the strength of her own womanhood… her own sexuality, precious gifts indeed… as precious in their way as his love. Gifts she intended to cherish and treasure for ever.

  ‘It won’t be easy,’ she warned him. ‘Nick wants to get you off the council and…’

  ‘The council doesn’t matter,’ Adam told her fiercely. ‘I’ve got all I want from life right here in my arms. All I’ve ever wanted and all I ever will want. You, Fern. You are all that matters to me. You, your happiness and our life together!’

  EPILOGUE

  ‘SO WE can close the file on the Broughton House property now, can we?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. We’ve had confirmation from the Revenue that the sale is going through. It should have fetched more, of course, but with the property market the way it is…’

  ‘And the problems with planning permission for change of use…’

  ‘Mmm… Well, the purchaser seems confident that he’ll get that, although I’m surprised he isn’t getting more opposition from the local residents. I don’t think I’d be too keen on living in close proximity to a—–’

  ‘Sorry to interrupt you, Max, but Michael King is on the phone for you…’

  ‘Right. I’ll be right there. Yes, I think you can go ahead and close the file now.’

  * * *

  ‘So where’s my granddaughter, then?’

  Zoe laughed at the disappointed expression on her mother’s face as she looked round the small sunny sitting-room.

  ‘She’s out with Ben. He’s taken her to the park. It’s the new chef’s first solo attempt at lunches today, and I suspect he was glad to get Ben out of the way.’

  ‘Yes. I saw how busy the restaurant was as I came past.’

  ‘We’ve been lucky,’ Zoe told her. ‘Ben’s found just the right niche in the market. It’s the restaurants which are catering for the expensive business account lunchers whic
h are really suffering. Out here, out of the city centre where most of our customers are local, we’re still managing to keep pretty busy.

  ‘We’ve had to prune our costs, of course, and take into account the fact that people are much more concerned about value for money these days. Clive’s backing has been a tremendous help. Without him we’d never have been able to afford to buy either this house or the restaurant; not having to pay any rent saves a fortune on overheads. I just feel a bit guilty that I’m not contributing more to things…’

  ‘You designed the décor and did all the costings…’

  ‘Mmm… and I’m managing to go back to work at least part-time, even if it is only to work on the reception desk and do the cashiering. I didn’t want Ben to feel that now we’d had Katie he wasn’t important to me any more.’ Zoe laughed ruefully. ‘Now if anyone has had their nose put out of joint I suppose it’s me.’

  ‘I warned you what would happen,’ her mother told her, smiling at her. ‘Men are notorious for becoming doting, adoring, possessive daddies when they have daughters. I’ve never gone along with this thing they’re supposed to have about wanting sons. Some do, of course, but if they’re honest most men will admit that there’s something very special about having a daughter. I can still remember how thrilled your father was when you were born.’

  Zoe was bending down to retrieve a soft felt rabbit half sticking out beneath the sofa.

  * * *

  ‘A flat over the restaurant?’ she had suggested cautiously when they had first talked about moving.

  He had shaken his head.

  ‘You can’t bring a baby up properly in a flat,’ he had told her. ‘No, I’ve got a better idea. There’s a small house up for sale a few houses down from here. It’s got a good-sized back garden, and we’re just across the road from the park.’

  ‘Can we afford it?’ she had protested. Deep down inside she still felt guilty about the baby; worried that, although on the surface Ben had adapted surprisingly well to her pregnancy, inwardly his feelings were very different.