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MILLS & BOON
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
EPILOGUE
Copyright
PROLOGUE
‘HEARD the latest?’ the nurse coming on to the ward asked. Sally Bruton paused in her task of checking the charts at the end of the patient’s bed, frowning a little as she saw that the specialist had increased the man’s dosage of antibiotics.
Joseph O’Malley was sixty-eight and not recovering as well from his operation as he should have been doing. When Sally was on duty in Men’s Surgical she tried to find extra time to sit and talk to him. She had noticed that he didn’t appear to have any family, or any friends. She winced tiredly as she straightened up and turned round to answer the other nurse’s question.
‘What latest?’ she asked her.
‘A suicide,’ the woman told her. ‘Some man in a big, posh car. I heard about it on the way in. Wonder what made him do it … What time are you due off?’ she asked Sally, changing the subject.
‘Half an hour ago,’ Sally told her drily. She had had to stay on because the nurse relieving her was late and there had been so many cutbacks recently that there had been no one to cover for her.
Not that, if she was honest with herself, she really minded working that extra couple of hours. It meant that when she got home Joel would have gone to work.
It had been a long week; they had had three emergency admissions and, although she was flattered by Sister’s praise of her competence and ability to cope under pressure, there was no doubt that the work was very tiring.
She had hinted to her that the hospital would like her to consider working more hours … perhaps even full-time, and she already knew how Joel would react to that! It had been bad enough when she had told him that she was coming back to work part-time.
‘We need the money,’ she had told him, ignoring his set expression.
‘No, we don’t. I’ll put in for extra overtime,’ he had told her stubbornly.
But then Kilcoyne’s had gone on short time and he had been forced to concede that she was right. The loan he had taken out for his new car and the garage they had had built to house it had meant that they couldn’t possibly manage on his basic wage; not that he had been too pleased to hear her say it.
Yes, she was glad when she was asked to work some extra hours.
Normally, when she got back, Joel was still in bed. In bed, but awake … Her mind shied abruptly away from her thoughts. She was too tired, had too many other things to worry about to spend time dwelling on the sexual hostility that had developed between her and Joel.
Already she could feel her body tensing in rejection, the familiar despair and resentment sweeping over her.
Why couldn’t Joel understand that … ?
The sound of a patient’s bell from further down the ward interrupted her thoughts and sent her to find out what was wrong.
The ward doors opened and in the corridor she saw a small posse of men, two in police uniform and with them the hospital’s pathologist … no doubt on their way to the morgue and the suicide Pat had mentioned.
Sally gave a small shiver. She was a nurse, trained to preserve and nurture life. The man who had killed himself—had he had a family … children … a wife, a woman who right now was lying alone in bed, wondering where her husband was … missing the warmth and intimacy of his body next to hers, or was she more like her … did she too … ?
Abruptly, Sally switched off her thoughts as she reached out to straighten her patient’s bed and retrieve the glasses he had dropped.
Deborah Franklin stretched out her arm sleepily, moving luxuriously in the bed, a small smile curling her mouth. Last night had been so good. Her body still ached gently from their lovemaking; when she touched her skin, it felt sensually alive and femininely soft. She and Mark had always been good together in bed. Good together in every way. She was so lucky … she had worked hard to achieve her luck, though.
‘And Ryan said that he was very pleased with what I’d done. He hinted that there could be more in it for me than just an extra bonus, Mark … He didn’t say so outright, but I’m almost sure I’m going to get a promotion out of it.’
‘Good for you,’ Mark had grunted.
She had laughed good-naturedly. Men never really wanted to talk after sex and she couldn’t really blame Mark for being tired.
She’d been on a real high, buoyed up by her boss’s praise and the tantalising hints he’d thrown about the possible consequences of her hard work. She’d never been coy about expressing her sexual needs; why should she be? Mark and she were equals in all respects. Admittedly, he was that little bit ahead of her up the career ladder, but then he had joined the partnership before her. In fact, he had been the one to suggest that she leave her previous firm and apply for her present post.
‘Why don’t you put in for it if it’s so good?’ she had asked him then. He had shaken his head.
‘Receivership and insolvency work isn’t in my field. I prefer creation, not destruction …’
‘A good receiver can keep a company going …’ she had protested.
‘A receiver, yes … a liquidator, no.’
Deborah had smiled. They had met at university, both of them headed for the fast track. Even then she had set her sights ultimately on a partnership within a large firm of accountants while Mark had wanted a life out of London, finance director on the board of some prosperous Midlands company, perhaps.
As he walked back into the bedroom, she smiled invitingly up at him, patting the empty space next to her in bed.
‘Oh, no … not again,’ he protested.
Deborah laughed, but Mark wasn’t laughing with her, she recognised. He was frowning, turning away from the bed and opening a drawer, extracting clean underwear.
‘Mark …’
‘I’m sorry, Deborah, but I promised Peter I’d be in early this morning …’
‘Are you sure I can’t persuade you to change your mind?’ she teased him, flirting her fingertips against his stomach and then withdrawing slightly as she felt his body tense.
‘What is it, what’s wrong?’ she asked him quietly.
‘Nothing … Look, I’m sorry I have to go but …’
‘I know, you promised Peter, but since when has your department been so busy that you need to go in early?’ she asked him wryly. ‘As I understand it, that side of the business has been hit pretty badly by the recession. You said yourself——’
‘Look, Deborah, I know you’re feeling pretty pleased with yourself, and I’m pleased for you, but just give the gloating a break for a little while, will you?’
Open-mouthed, Deborah stared after his retreating back.
What did he mean, gloating? She hadn’t been gloating … she had simply wanted him to share her excitement, her pleasure … her pride in what she had achieved. Gloating … That was the kind of language men used to put women down, but Mark had never been like that. That was one of the reasons she loved him so much. He had always accepted her equality. He had always praised and encouraged her.
He came back into the bedroom, his thick fair hair neatly brushed into shape, and removed a clean shirt from the wardrobe. He then bent to switch on the radio, turning the sound up so that she would have had to raise her voice to speak to him above it.
What was wrong with him this morning?
As she watched him, the newsreader was announcing a suicide, a man found dead in his car. Deborah heard the item without paying it too much attention. It was a depressingly common event these days, and besides, she was much more concerned about Mark’s comment to her than she was about the death of an unknown man.
‘Bad night?’ Elizabeth Humphries asked her husband sympathetically as he let himself into the kitchen. He had been called out on an emergency at two o’clock, a bad accident on the bypass, a young boy on a motorbike with serious injuries.
‘With luck he’ll make it … just, although for a time it was touch and go … His left arm was severed and some ribs were broken, causing internal injuries. Luckily someone had had the forethought to pack the arm in ice. Twenty years ago, ten years ago even, it would have been impossible for us to reattach it. Surgery’s come a hell of a long way since I first started practising. Not that there’s any way I could have done an intricate operation like that.’
‘Micro-surgery is not your speciality,’ she reminded him. ‘But without all the hard work you put in fund-raising, the hospital wouldn’t have a micro-surgery unit.’
‘I know, I know, but sometimes it makes me feel old, watching these youngsters.’
‘You’re not old,’ she protested. He was three months away from his fifty-fifth birthday. She was five years younger.
They had been married for twenty-eight years and she still loved him as much now as she had done then, albeit in a different way.
‘You should be in bed,’ he told her. ‘Isn’t today one of your days at the Citizens Advice Bureau … ?’
‘Yes.’
No matter how busy he was, how overworked, he always seemed to find time to remember what she was doing. He had been the one who’d encouraged her to do voluntary work when their daughter had first left home.
She had been afraid then, convinced that her services wouldn’t be wanted. Now, with the problems caused by the recession, they were busier than they had ever been, so busy, in fact …
She frowned as she heard him saying tiredly, ‘We had another emergency tonight … not one we were able to do anything about, unfortunately. A suicide.’
‘Oh, poor man!’ she exclaimed, putting down the teapot.
‘You spoil me, you know,’ he told her as she poured him a second cup of tea.
She laughed at him. ‘I enjoy doing it. Sara rang. She thinks Katie has chickenpox.’
‘Oh, lord. Well, a few spots won’t hurt her.’
‘No, but Ian is already panicking. You know what doctors are like about their own families.’
‘I should do … after all, I am one.’
They both laughed.
‘Do you remember the time Sara fell off the swing and broke her arm? You were in a worse state than she was. “It’s broken, Daddy,” she said. “You’ll have to set it."’
‘Yes, I remember … I was shaking so much I didn’t dare touch her and you had to splint it in the end. Some surgeon. Some father.’
‘The best,’ she told him lovingly, rubbing her face against his head.
‘I hope that young lad survives,’ he told her more seriously. ‘It’s always such a damn waste when we lose a young life like that. Sometimes I think I’m getting too old for this job, too emotional. A surgeon shouldn’t have emotions.’
‘If you didn’t care so much you wouldn’t be such a good surgeon,’ she told him fiercely. ‘People trust you, Richard. And with good reason.’
‘I wonder what made him do it?’
‘What? Oh—speeding … the usual thing …’
‘No, not him, the man who killed himself. Such a dreadful thing to do, to end one’s life …’
‘Mmm, it’s ended for him, but for those closest to him … for his family it’s just beginning, poor devils.’
Philippa opened her eyes warily. Andrew’s side of the bed was empty and cold. She shivered slightly, although not because she missed his presence beside her; that side of their marriage had soured into dull habit ages ago, after Daniel was born.
No, it wasn’t his sexual presence in their bed that she missed.
He had been acting so oddly lately. He had never been easy to talk to at the best of times, hating any hint that she might be questioning his decisions … his dictates, as Rory had rebelliously begun to call them. She had hated it when he had insisted on the boys going to boarding-school, but perhaps it had been for the best. When they were at home it was obvious that they were aware of the atmosphere in the house … the tension … Andrew’s irritation.
At half-term he had really lost his temper with Rory. What the hell did he do with his clothes? he had demanded. Didn’t he realise how much things cost? And what about her … ? Why didn’t she see to it that the boys had a more responsible attitude towards their possessions, and why the hell couldn’t she stop them from making so much damned noise? Wasn’t it enough that he provided her and them with every luxury they could want, breaking his back, working damn near twenty-four hours a day? All he wanted when he came home, all he asked in return was a bit of peace and quiet, a home where he could bring his colleagues and clients without feeling ashamed.
Other wives, he had told her bitterly, managed far better than she did. She had stopped herself from pointing out that other wives probably also knew exactly when their husbands were due home … but over the years she had learned the uselessness of trying to argue with him when he lost his temper.
Wasn’t it enough, he had raged, that he worked his bollocks off to provide her with one of the most expensive and impressive houses in the area, a new car every year, and a lifestyle that all their friends envied?
‘He doesn’t provide them for us … he does it for himself,’ Rory had said bitterly when Andrew had slammed out of the house.
Philippa knew it was true, but she had shushed her elder son all the same. Their friends … what friends? she had wondered later. They had no real friends, only people he thought were useful … people he either wanted to impress or who impressed him. Her one and only real local friend he dismissed contemptuously, claiming that she and her husband were simply not their financial equals.
Status was something that was very important to Andrew. It was, for instance, no secret to her that, despite the fact that he never lost an opportunity to criticise her brother Robert and his wife, Lydia, secretly he was eaten up with jealousy of Robert; eaten up with jealousy and bitterly resentful of the fact that Robert’s marriage to Lydia had allowed him to enter a world which remained closed to him.
Robert had married Lydia because of who she was, because of her family connections and their money, he had declared.
Philippa had said nothing. How could she? After all, hadn’t Andrew married her for exactly the same reasons? And hadn’t she, deep down inside herself, known it … known it and refused to listen to the small, desperate inner voice which had begged her to reconsider what she was doing?
She had been too angry to do so … too angry … too proud and too hurt. Since it was obvious that she had no worth, no value as herself, as the person she knew herself to be, since it seemed she was not even to be allowed to define the kind of person she was, then she might as well be the daughter her parents, and most especially her father, wished her to be. That person was the kind of person who would automatically marry someone like Andrew … the other Philippa. Her Philippa … her Philippa no longer existed, had been destroyed a long time ago; she had not been strong enough to fight for survival … not without love to sustain her.
Love. There was certainly no love in the relationship between her and Andrew.
Andrew and Robert had been at school together, Robert the son of the area’s most successful and respected businessman, Andrew the son of elderly parents who had produced him late in life. Both of them, Philippa suspected—Andrew’s elderly, scholarly father whose main interests were his books and his fossil collection, and Andrew’s mother, a timid, quiet woman who had been much in awe of her own mother—had never quite got over the shock of producing a child who was so different in outlook and ambition from themselves.
It was typical of Andrew that when Robert had been appointed chairman of the family company Lydia’s uncle owned Andrew had immediately started lobbying for promotion to the board of his own employers.
When that had proved unsuccessful, the last thing Philippa had expected was that he would suddenly decide to resign from his job and buy his own company, his own chairmanship.
She could still remember her feeling of dismay when he had told her what he was doing. His mouth had started to twist with bitterness and, recognising what was coming, her heart had dropped even further.
‘Of course if that stupid old bag hadn’t gone and left what should have been mine to someone else, I wouldn’t need to work at all.’
Philippa had said nothing. There was no point in reminding him that his great-aunt Maud had had every right to leave her money to whomever she chose, even if that someone had turned out to be a six-foot-odd itinerant, a New Zealander who had knocked on her door one summer asking for casual work and who had stayed on over the winter to nurse her when she fell ill and broke her hip—facts of which they had known nothing until after her death, until Andrew, in his rage and disbelief, had virtually accused Tom Forster, twenty-nine to Maud Knighton’s eighty-odd, of being his great-aunt’s lover and of having seduced his, Andrew’s, inheritance away from him.
‘How could she do this to me … to our sons?’ Andrew had demanded, after he and Philippa had left the solicitor’s office.
‘Perhaps if we had visited her more …’ Philippa had suggested hesitantly.
‘What, go traipsing up to Northumberland? How the hell could we have done? You know how impossible it is for me to take time off work.’
Andrew had, of course, typically, threatened to take the matter to court, to have his aunt declared insane and the New Zealander guilty of forcing or threatening her into dispossessing him, but to Philippa’s surprise and relief Tom Forster had quietly and calmly offered to share his inheritance with Andrew on a fifty-fifty basis.
Andrew hadn’t wanted to accept. He had insisted that the very fact that he had made the offer proved that he knew Andrew would win any court case, but Philippa’s father and Robert had put pressure on Andrew to accept.
Robert’s emerging political ambitions made it imperative that his background, his family and their histories were all squeaky-clean; the last thing he wanted was the full distasteful story of Andrew’s quarrel with Tom Forster splashed all over the less savoury tabloids.
Philippa, sensitive to her father’s reactions, had been aware of the way he had distanced himself from Andrew afterwards, but Andrew, she suspected, had not. He was not that sort of man; other people’s feelings and reactions had always been things outside his understanding.
The last thing Philippa had expected, after all his complaints about how difficult life was going to be for them now that his expectations of what he would inherit had been so drastically diminished, was that he would actually part with some of the money. Not some of it, she reminded herself now, but all of it and more beside: money he had borrowed from the bank, boasting to her about the size of the loan the bank had given him, saying that showed how highly they regarded him and his business ability. She on the other hand had felt sick at the thought of their owing so much money.
‘How on earth will you ever be able to repay it?’ she had asked him.
He had laughed at her, telling her she knew nothing whatsoever about business, reminding her scornfully that she had no aptitude for it. ‘Your father was right; all the brains in the family went to your brothers.’
Philippa had winced. She had borne the burden of knowing she was a disappointment to her parents all her life. Ideally, they would have preferred another boy, not a girl, and then, when they had discovered that their third child could in no way compete intellectually with their elder two, they had turned away from her, concentrating instead on her brothers. She felt that they had been relieved when Andrew had asked her to marry him. She had only been nineteen, inexperienced and confused about what to make of her life.
‘I don’t want my wife working,’ Andrew had told her importantly once they were married, and she had resigned herself to giving up ideas of a career.
All he wanted her to do was to be a good wife and mother, Andrew had told her. He was the breadwinner, the wage earner. He didn’t like these strident modern women who seemed so out of touch with their femininity.
On their first wedding anniversary he had given her a diamond bracelet.
‘For my good, pretty girl,’ he had told her and then he had made love to her with the thing glittering on her arm. He had spent himself quickly and fiercely, leaving her slightly sore inside and unsatisfied. She remembered that when she had opened her eyes he had not been looking at her but at the bracelet.
She had worn it for the birthday meal he had insisted she invite her parents to. She had felt sick and headachy; she had just been pregnant with Rory, although she hadn’t known it at the time.
Andrew had lost his temper with her because the soufflé he had told her to make hadn’t risen, his mouth thinning into an angry, tight line.
He had never been a violent husband, but he had always resented anything that challenged his authority in even the smallest way. Her inability to make a perfect soufflé had been a challenge to that authority. His authority over her. His desire that she at all times reflect his success … his power … his massive ego.
When the children had been born it was just the same. They had to be a credit to him … always.
No, he had never been an easy man to live with, although no one else seemed to be aware of it. She was lucky to be married to him, other people told her. He was a good husband, her family said … adding approvingly that he had done well.
Just lately, though, he had seemed increasingly on edge, his temper flaring over the smallest thing. One moment he would be complaining about the amount she had spent on housekeeping, or protesting furiously about money she had spent on plants for the garden, the next he was announcing that he was buying a new car … that they were going on an expensive holiday.