by Penny Jordan
Nicki breathed heavily down her nose as she heard someone knocking on her back door. Again! She had just finished cutting out everything she needed from the day’s papers. It was extraordinary—and frightening—to realise just how much there was to be cut out and carefully pasted into the record book she was keeping. Every day children were snatched, stolen, disappeared. She felt a sharp thrill of fear and triumph as she studied the neatly cut pieces of newsprint scattered on the table. All of them proof of just how right she was to be concerned about Joey’s safety.
She frowned as she re-read one piece, about a child snatched on the way home from school. She wasn’t convinced that it was safe for Joey to be going to school. He could, after all, be taught here at home with her, where he would be totally safe.
Another piece caught her eye. A horrific story of a jealous stepsibling murdering a younger child. A cold shudder gripped her.
Would Joey ever be safe? Laura hated him, just as she hated her.
On the other side of the door, Maggie hesitated, and then, reminding herself sternly of all the years when she and Nicki had been the closest of friends, she gripped the handle and pushed.
Nicki was seated at the kitchen table, surrounded by discarded newspapers, but it was not these that caused Maggie to come to a full stop and stare in consternation at her, unable to keep the shock from her eyes.
Still gripping her scissors, Nicki frowned at Maggie.
Maggie felt her stomach muscles tense as she studied her friend. What on earth had happened to her? She looked…she looked…Maggie swallowed and bit her lip, all the more shocked by Nicki’s neglected, untidy, downright unkempt appearance because she knew just how fastidious her friend had always been. Even when she had been suffering unbelievable physical cruelty at the hands of her first husband, Nicki had still presented an immaculate appearance to the world.
‘Nicki?’ Maggie began unsteadily.
‘What do you want?’ Nicki asked her sharply.
‘I…I was passing and I thought I’d call and see you. Talk to you.’
Nicki was frowning. ‘I can’t talk to you. I’m too busy.’
Silently Maggie looked at the mess of newspaper on the floor and all over the table, the pieces cut out.
‘Nicki,’ she began hesitantly and very gently. But before she could continue Nicki stood up, waving the scissors she was holding in the air, and demanding angrily, ‘I want you to go, Maggie. Now…and I don’t want you to come back here ever again. You know that you shouldn’t be having that baby, don’t you?’ she hissed. ‘Something will happen to it, Maggie. Something very, very bad…’
Maggie felt sick and shocked. Tears stung her eyes as she turned blindly towards the still-open kitchen door.
She could hardly recognise the friend who had meant so much to her in the woman she had just seen. Shakily she got back in her car and restarted the engine.
And then as she drove away she felt it—the tiniest of movements, a flutter, nothing more, as though the baby itself wanted to defy and deny Nicki’s horrible words.
Now her tears were caused by relief and joy, Maggie recognised as she shook her head and whispered emotionally, ‘I told you, you’ve got to wait. This will have to be our special secret now…You do realise that, I hope?’ she challenged her bump mock severely.
16
‘Maggie!’
Maggie stopped in mid-step as she heard Alice’s voice.
‘You look wonderful,’ Alice told her fondly. ‘Very glam. I remember when I was pregnant having to wear huge baggy tops and the ugliest pair of maternity dungarees ever made.’
‘And you looked like a madonna in them,’ Maggie told her, adding with a sigh, ‘But then of course you were young.’ A small shadow crossed her face. ‘I just called round to see Nicki. Alice, I’m really worried about her. Not…not because of the way she feels about me…about this,’ she added, patting her stomach gently. ‘She just didn’t seem like the Nicki we know. In fact…’ She stopped. Life was complicated enough already without her adding to those complications by confiding in Alice about the poison pen letters.
‘Maggie, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about,’ Alice was saying, looking so uncomfortable and embarrassed that Maggie immediately guessed.
‘Don’t tell me—the computer is acting up and you want me to—?’
‘No. No, it isn’t that. Actually, I was wondering if you’d found a house as yet,’ Alice told her awkwardly. ‘Only, you see, Stuart wants to put ours up for sale and you did say that you thought a house like ours would be ideal and so…’ As her voice trailed away Maggie stared at her.
‘But you love that house, and so does Stuart. I can remember the day he bought it for you. How excited and thrilled he was, you both were…’
‘I know, but he says that it’s too big for us now. And I suppose he’s right. And besides…’
Stuart had consistently ignored her tentative overtures in bed recently—the mere fact that she had had to make them in the first place was unusual enough to add further fuel to her suspicions, without the bombshell he had dropped about wanting to sell the house, and needing to spend so much time working and living away from home.
She had to face it. Stuart was a prime candidate for a middle-aged extra-marital affair, if magazines and newspapers were anything to go by.
It had shocked her to recognise how primitively possessive and anguished she had felt at the thought of another woman having sex with him. How jealous and desperate not to lose him. He was her husband, her partner…hers! Her own sex drive might never have been particularly high—her nurturing talents lay in other directions. But she had often suspected that Stuart enjoyed the challenge of coaxing and arousing her; that he was that rather old-fashioned kind of man who believed that a woman was of more value to him for being that little bit unobtainable, and instinctively she had refused to change her own personality to meet the sexual fashion requirements of the times. But now, suddenly, she was discovering that she was nowhere near as sanguine as she had always assumed she would be at the thought of Stuart, her husband, her mate, sharing the most intimate essence of himself with another woman.
Normally, the first people she would have turned to with her fears would have been her friends, but suddenly it seemed as though there were barriers between them all, differences. She no longer felt able to reveal her feelings of insecurity and misery, which would have allowed her to expose them to some much-needed fresh air and common sense. Instead, she kept them enclosed inside herself, in a way that was only serving to hothouse and force her fears into a very dangerous and terrifying threat.
Now, having witnessed Maggie’s shock at her disclosure that Stuart wanted to sell their home, she felt even more threatened.
‘Stuart’s got some new responsibilities at work,’ she explained brittly. ‘And he feels that he needs to be closer to the airport, so he thinks we should buy something smaller here and then he can rent somewhere to live during the week.’
She was almost holding her breath as she waited for Maggie to see through the façade of acceptance she had erected and to demand to know more; to give her the opportunity to express her feelings in full. But instead Maggie simply nodded and shrugged her shoulders almost dismissively as she acknowledged, ‘Well, I can see his point.’
Unaware of what Alice was secretly feeling, Maggie was tusselling with her conscience. Although she might teasingly have said to Alice that she wanted a house like hers, she knew that she would never, could never move into the house that had been Alice’s home. She would always feel as though she were a guest there, a voyeur, almost a trespasser. For her, the house would always be Alice’s, and she knew that she would feel as though she were stealing something from her friend if she were to move into it.
Trying not to feel hurt by her friend’s inability to sense her anxiety and guess at what lay behind it, Alice squared her shoulders and determinedly changed the subject.
‘Talking of houses,’ she commente
d brightly, ‘you know of course that Zoë works at Sheridans, the estate agents’?’
Maggie nodded.
Alice gave her a slightly awkward look. Here again was a case in point where she would have welcomed the forum of their group friendship in which to air this particular piece of news! She felt torn between distressing Maggie by revealing it, in case she had not already heard it from someone else, and keeping it from her, with the result that she would ultimately feel betrayed and let down when she did find out because Alice had not passed the news on to her.
This was a situation where Nicki’s calm good sense was called for, and where Alice felt very much in need of the back-up and support of the others, not just for herself but for Maggie as well.
‘Well, I don’t know whether or not you’ve heard yet, Maggie, but apparently Dan is back.’
‘Dan?’ Maggie instinctively placed her hand to her body, her shock registered in her eyes and her voice. ‘No,’ she admitted faintly. ‘No, I hadn’t heard.’
‘Well, I only know because Zoë told me that he’s interested in buying Draycotte Manor.’
To Alice’s consternation, if anything Maggie looked even more shocked.
‘Oh, Maggie, I’m sorry,’ she apologised awkwardly. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘You haven’t,’ Maggie told her immediately, forcing her lips into a smile as she shook her head and tried to gather her scattered thoughts. ‘I…I just didn’t realise. But then, there’s no reason why I should have done. Dan and I are history, after all—and very much so. I just didn’t imagine that he would ever want to come back here. I thought he was settled in New York…’
‘Look, I was on my way to the library to get some books for my course and then I’ve got to pick the boys up from Laura because she’s got a dental appointment, but why don’t we go and have a cup of coffee?’
‘Alice, I’m fine,’ Maggie insisted.
Dan was back. Her heart was jumping unevenly inside her chest, and she could feel her face starting to burn.
It struck her that her reactions were not exactly dissimilar to those she had experienced when she had first known him.
‘Who is that?’ she had demanded breathlessly of Nicki, the day Nicki had introduced them.
‘Oh, just someone I know…a friend,’ Nicki had responded airily. And she had believed her. Because she had wanted to believe her! Because she had known already that she was going to fall in love with him, and because she couldn’t bear to think that Nicki herself might be closer to him than she was saying.
Dan…Although she had never admitted as much to the others, knowing that they believed her to be wild and adventurous, Dan had been her first lover. Her first love!
And she had loved him with such passion. Such intensity, such completeness.
It had torn her apart when he had been unfaithful to her. It had felt as though someone were ripping her heart out of her body and that she simply could not continue to live. And yet at the same time she had been so close to him emotionally that she had understood the male need that had driven him into someone else’s arms, someone else’s body!
She had pleaded with him not to leave her, to give their love a second chance, and he had told her that he could not. That he could not bear to be with her knowing that it was because of him that they could not have children. That it was tearing him apart, to know that she knew…that she was protecting him…
‘You make me feel so much less of a man, Maggie.’
‘Not in my eyes, you aren’t,’ she had told him stubbornly.
‘Maybe not in yours,’ he had replied. ‘But I am in my own! And I can’t live with the burden of that any more.’
With the burden of her, he had meant, though, and Maggie had known then that she had to allow him to go.
And now he was back.
She placed her hands on her body. On her stomach, where Oliver’s child was growing inside her.
‘Have you seen much of Stella, and her new grandson?’ she asked Alice quietly, and Alice recognised that the subject of Dan was not one Maggie wished to pursue.
Instinctively, Laura touched her new filling with the tip of her tongue. Her jaw felt a little bit tender, and her lip was tingling a little, but thankfully the anaesthetic was wearing off.
She had never been very keen on going to the dentist. Her friends had always laughed at her for making a fuss, and even her father had not really understood her aversion to the drill.
In fact, the only person who had ever seemed to realise how she felt had been Nicki. Laura frowned as she remembered being taken to the dentist’s once by Nicki when her mother had been in hospital having treatment.
‘Do you think that Mum gets frightened?’ she asked Nicki as they waited in the reception area. She didn’t realise then that Nicki wanted her father, and was still treating her as a friend.
‘I think we all get frightened about certain things, Laura,’ Nicki told her. ‘But your mother is a very special person, and a very brave person.’
‘I want to be brave,’ Laura said. ‘But then I hear the drill.’
Nicki looked at her watch, Laura remembered, and then got up and said something to the receptionist. ‘I won’t be very long,’ she told Laura, and then she disappeared. When she came back she was carrying a small package, which she handed to Laura.
‘Open it,’ she had told her.
Uncertainly, Laura did so. Inside was a small personal stereo system complete with a tape of her then favourite group.
‘You can listen to it whilst the dentist is using the drill,’ Nicki said simply.
There were times when Laura desperately wished that she had simply not returned home that day, that she had never been forced to confront the reality of Nicki’s relationship with her father. Perhaps, then, when they had married…
But she could never forget the way in which Nicki had betrayed her mother. Or the way that Nicki had deceived her. She had believed in her! Trusted her! Felt that she had known her, but the woman she had believed she knew would never have behaved in such a way.
Starkly Laura stared into a shop window without really seeing its display.
‘So there you are, my darling girl. Tell me now, and the truth if you please, have you not missed me at all?’
‘Ryan!’ Her eyes widening, Laura swung round and watched dizzily as the familiar lazy, triumphant smile curled his mouth.
‘The very same,’ he acknowledged in that rough, soft, deliciously accented English that tugged so dangerously at her heartstrings.
‘I was in the area, and I thought…Ah, no,’ he told her, shaking his head. ‘I can tell that you have me for a liar…The truth is that I was missing you so much that I persuaded the dragon in Human Resources to give me your address and…Have you any idea just what you’re doing to me right now? Isn’t it a mercy that we’re standing here in the street in full view of the townspeople? Otherwise, I might just—’
‘Stop it, Ryan!’ Laura told him sharply.
‘Stop what?’ he demanded mock innocently. ‘Stop wanting you? Stop aching for you so bad that I can’t think for the longing for you? Oh, no, my darling girl, I can’t do that. I wish I could, but you are just too—’
‘Ryan…’ Laura warned.
‘Come back to me,’ Ryan pleaded with her. ‘Come back with me now, Laura. Let me show you how much I’ve missed you. How good it can be between us…’
His voice was a seductive whisper that tugged dangerously on her senses.
‘You know you want me,’ Ryan was murmuring. ‘And I sure as hell want you.’
Laura closed her eyes. He was married. He had children, and although it wasn’t love they were talking about sharing but sex, if she gave in to him, to herself she would be exactly the same as Nicki.
‘Ryan, it’s no good,’ she began.
‘Laura, please. All I want is just to talk to you. Just to talk, I promise. Have lunch with me. Please…’
Lunch! Laura looked away from him.
<
br /> The boys were with Alice for the rest of the day, and it was her night off.
‘Yes, all right,’ she agreed reluctantly. Despite her trip to the dentist, she was feeling hungry. Perhaps over a shared meal she would be able to make it clear to him that what he wanted—her—was quite definitely not on the menu!
‘Good girl!’ Ryan told her in delight, taking hold of her as he added, ‘My car’s this way.’
His car! Laura frowned, but Ryan was already tugging her arm firmly into his own and hurrying her down the street.
‘Nicki, what’s going on?’ Kit demanded in exasperation as he walked into the kitchen. He had arrived home to discover two men measuring up the gateway, and when he had asked what they were doing they had explained that they were measuring up for special electronic security gates.
‘What do you mean?’ Nicki asked him.
‘I mean, what are those men doing measuring for security gates?’ Kit told her sharply.
Nicki looked away from him.
‘I need to make sure that Joey is safe.’
Kit frowned as he looked at her. The kitchen floor was covered in pieces of newspaper, and Nicki was wearing the same clothes she had been wearing the previous day and the day before that.
‘Joey is safe, Nicki,’ he told her. ‘In fact he’s so damn safe that the poor kid is in danger of being suffocated. He’s a boy, Nicki, and he needs to be allowed some freedom. Can’t you see what you’re doing to him?’
‘I’m protecting him,’ Nicki shouted at him. ‘I have to protect him.’
‘Protect him? From what?’ Kit demanded irritably. ‘For God’s sake, Nicki…’
‘From Laura,’ she told him fiercely. ‘Laura wants to hurt him.’
Kit stared at her.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Laura wants to do no such thing. Look, I know you’ve got this thing about her, Nicki, but to accuse her of wanting to hurt Joey! That’s crazy!’
Nicki felt her stomach starting to churn. It was just as she had begun to suspect. Joey was in as much danger from his father as he was from his half-sister. Kit thought that he could overrule her, deceive her, that she was too stupid to realise how he felt, but she wasn’t. She would never let either of them hurt Joey. Never…