Now or Never

PENNY JORDAN is one of Harlequin Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged 65. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over 100 million books around the world. She wrote a total of 187 novels for Harlequin Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A PERFECT FAMILY, TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY, THE PERFECT SINNER and POWER PLAY, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan: ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’, and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America – two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

More titles by PENNY JORDAN

For the ultimate indulgence be sure to download the stunningly sensational ebooks

TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY

and

POWER GAMES

Pure escapism, pure passion, pure decadence…it’s impossible to resist!

For a full list of Penny Jordan’s titles go to www.millsandboon.com

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Now or Never

Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

1

‘You’re sure? I mean, it couldn’t possibly be a mistake?’

Maggie Rockford’s voice trembled. She could feel Oliver’s warm, protective grip of her hand tightening as she looked away from the doctor to exchange anguished glances with him. There had been so many visits here to see this highly acclaimed specialist over the months—visits prior to which she had swung perilously from hope to fear and then back again. Visits involving what had seemed like an unending raft of tests and medical procedures backed up with counselling sessions, and questions that had sometimes seemed even more invasive than the physical side of what she had been undergoing.

Crossing London this morning in their taxi, Oliver Sanders had held both her hands in his as he had told her emotionally, ‘Whatever happens this morning, whatever we hear, I want you to know that it will make no difference to the way I feel about you. About the way I love you, Maggie.’

But of course it would. How could it not?

Anxiously she refocused on the doctor, who was frowning.

Maggie shivered, her eyes blurring with the tears she had sworn she would not cry.

‘This mascara cost a small fortune and no way am I going to waste it by crying,’ she had insisted to Oliver when he had stood looking at her put it on.

‘Stop watching me,’ she had demanded uncomfortably in the early days of their relationship. Her ex-husband Dan used to lie on the bed watching her dress and put on her make-up, it was true, but things had been different then, she had been different, and in the newness of her relationship with Oliver she had felt acutely self-conscious sharing such intimacy.

‘There’s no need to be defensive with me,’ Oliver had told her gently. ‘All I want to do is love you, Maggie.’

‘There is no mistake.’ The specialist was assuring her soberly, his voice breaking into her thoughts. ‘The blood test is totally conclusive.’

‘No mistake!’

Immediately she turned towards Oliver.

His face had lost its colour, his eyes dark with emotion as he reached for her. Now she could see in his expression what secretly she had already known. Now she could see just how much this did matter to him. Her already knotted stomach tightened.

Patiently the doctor waited for his words to sink in.

After all, delivering news like this was part of his job, and he had learned just how to say the words so that they were properly absorbed and their meaning retained; words that could give hope, or totally destroy it. Words that in effect held the gift of life!

When he judged that he had given them enough time, he continued.

‘The procedure has been successful.’

As she focused on him Maggie could see Oliver wiping his eyes as they brimmed over with tears.

Surely she was the one who should be crying? But somehow she felt unable to do so. The tension inside her was too great, the enormity of what lay ahead of her too big for the easy release of crying.

‘There is no mistake,’ the specialist repeated and this time he smiled at them both. ‘Congratulations, Maggie. You are quite definitely pregnant.’

Pregnant! The innovative, hugely expensive private treatment she had undergone had worked, and she was carrying Oliver’s baby!

She, who until Oliver had come into her life and believed that she had managed to come to terms with the fact that she would never have a child.

Somehow Maggie realised that they had both stood up, and that Oliver was hugging her, his voice thick with emotion as he thanked the specialist.

‘Maggie you’ve done it. You clever, wonderful girl,’ he praised her emotionally.

Just for a second Maggie felt the darkness of the familiar shadow hovering. Determinedly she pushed it away. She wasn’t going to allow it to spoil this special moment.

Even so, her natural honesty forced her to point out to him quietly, ‘I’ve had a lot of help.’

The specialist was opening the door and showing them out, reminding Maggie that she would need to make a series of appointments so that the progress of her pregnancy could be carefully monitored.

Maggie eyed him anxiously.

‘There’s nothing to worry about, is there?’ Oliver asked the doctor, immediately reacting to her body language.

‘No. But of course, in view of the circumstances of this pregnancy, Maggie will need to be careful.’

‘I’ll make sure that she is,’ Oliver was responding fervently.

‘You heard what the doctor just said,’ he reminded Maggie, two minutes later, after they had checked through her appointments and were on their way out of the clinic.

‘Oliver,’ Maggie told him quietly. ‘There is no way I am going to do anything that might jeopardise this pregnancy. Whatever it takes for your baby to be born safely and healthily, I am going to do it.’

‘My baby? This is our baby,’ Oliver told her fiercely.

Their baby. Conceived with Oliver’s sperm and another woman’s—a fertile woman’s—donated egg!

‘Maggie,’ Oliver challenged her insistently when she made no immediate response. ‘This is our baby.’

The look in his eyes made Maggie give herself a small warning mental shake, but before she could give him the response she knew he wanted a door opened and a dark-haired, heavy-set woman burst into the corridor.

‘Don’t lie to me!’ she was screaming at the white-coated man following her. ‘I know what you’ve done. You’ve stolen my babies … You promised me …’

Wildly she turned towards Maggie, who instinctively placed her hand protectively against her still-flat tummy. Just as instinctively the woman’s gaze honed in on Maggie’s betraying gesture, her eyes narrowing, an angry flush of colour staining her pale skin.

‘They’re liars in here. Murderers,’ she hissed, staring at Maggie whilst she demanded,

‘Is it you they’ve given them to? Whoever it is I shall find out.’

Shocked, Maggie stepped back from her.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw that two nurses had quietly entered the foyer and were approaching the woman, taking a careful hold of her. As she was firmly but gently led away, still screaming and sobbing, the man who had been with her, whom Maggie recognised as one of the clinic’s medics, apologised.

‘I’m sorry about that.’

As he turned to follow the nurses the receptionist shook her head and whispered confidingly to Maggie and Oliver.

‘Heavens knows how she got in. The commissioner has got strict instructions not to admit her. She’s a bit of a crank.’

Although Maggie managed a polite smile the incident had upset her. Was this what motherhood was all about? Seeing danger everywhere and feeling fiercely determined to protect one’s child from it? One’s child. Oliver’s child … Her child!

‘Are you all right?’

Maggie could see that Oliver was frowning as he stepped protectively close to her. ‘I’m fine.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘Being pregnant must be making me feel extra sensitive,’ she told him lightly, trying to shrug off the feeling of disquiet the other woman’s behaviour had caused her.

‘I just wish …’ She paused, her expressive eyes shadowing. ‘It’s silly of me, I know, but I wish that hadn’t happened. She looked so … so anguished, Oliver. I know that everyone who comes here for help doesn’t get to be as lucky as we have been. And the only reason we have been so lucky is because of the generosity of the woman who donated her eggs.’

Although naturally it was against the clinic’s protocol for them to have met her, they had been given sufficient information to know that in build and colouring she was very similar to Maggie.

When Oliver had first told her that he wanted them to have a child, she had thought that he was joking.

‘I can’t,’ she had reminded him.

‘You were made to be a mother,’ he had insisted. ‘And there are ways.’

That had been over a year ago but she could still remember the fierce, thrilling jerk of emotional response her heart had given to his words. It had been as though he had uncovered a truth about herself that she had previously kept hidden, a sore place she had refused to acknowledge.

And then she had happened to read an article about the clinic and the controversial pioneering work it was doing, using eggs donated by fertile women to help women who could not possibly conceive naturally to have a child.

Right from their first visit to the clinic she had refused to allow herself to be optimistic, to hope too much.

Oliver had been the one who had been convinced she would conceive, who had carried the hope for both of them.

Watching Oliver as he hailed a taxi to take them back to their hotel, Maggie felt a resurgence of her normal self-confidence. She had booked them into the Langham, one of London’s most prestigious modern designer hotels, mainly for sentimental reasons. The Langham was the hotel where they had spent their first night together. ‘Remember the first time we stayed here?’ she asked Oliver half an hour later as they crossed its foyer.

At six feet one he towered over her. She was only five feet two without the heels she always wore. Dan, her ex, had been even taller at six feet two, his hair so deep, dark brown it was almost black, thick, his olive-tinged skin in direct contrast to her red-gold curls and celtic paleness, where Oliver’s hair was a much softer brown, bleached blond at the ends, a legacy he claimed from his days spent surfing in Australia during the year out he had taken following his degree, to heal himself emotionally from the pain of his mother’s death.

‘Of course.’ He grinned, answering her question. ‘I’d been working for you for more then twelve months, every second of which I’d spent wondering just how I was going to get you into bed, and then we came here and …’

‘And you said to the receptionist behind my back that there’d been a mistake and that we only needed one room. You were lucky I didn’t sack you on the spot when I found out,’ she told him mock severely.

She had been suffering from a bad bout of uncharacteristic vulnerability prior to the fateful first night she had spent here with Oliver; going through a period when she had been questioning her own satisfaction with her life and secretly comparing it with the lives of her friends; envying them their secure relationships with their male partners; the closeness and intimacy they shared; the children they had together, things that she had believed were permanently going to be denied to her.

‘I was lucky, full stop, the day I met you,’ Oliver corrected her softly. ‘You are so special, Maggie,’ he told her emotionally, raising her hand to his mouth and tenderly kissing her fingers. ‘So special, so perfect; so irreplaceable. So very, very much the woman I want to be the mother of my baby.’

Maggie shivered a little. It scared her sometimes when he spoke like this. No one was perfect, least of all her.

She could remember when she had first introduced him to Nicki, her best friend.

‘He worships you,’ Nicki had told her wryly. ‘You’ll have to be careful never to disillusion him, Maggie,’ she had added warningly.

Thinking of Nicki reminded Maggie of the fact that she was going to have a considerable amount of grovelling and apologising to do when she broke the news of her pregnancy to her close circle of lifelong friends. They would want to know why they had not been let into her plans, allowed to share the trauma of what she had been going through with her, no question. Especially since …

‘Come back.’

Ruefully she smiled at Oliver as he ushered her into the lift.

The first time they had stayed here together, they had barely left the suite, making full use of its luxurious, opulent fittings, including the private Jacuzzi. Oliver had poured champagne over her naked body, licking it ardently from her skin, touching her until they had both been high on the pleasure of the intensity of their desire for one another.

But tonight there would be no marathon sex session, and nor would there be any champagne or long soak in the Jacuzzi. But then sex wasn’t high on her list of priorities right now, Maggie acknowledged as they walked into their suite.

‘You do realise that we’re going to have to buy a proper house now, don’t you?’ she challenged Oliver. ‘A house with room for a nursery, and with a garden and …’

‘I know,’ Oliver agreed. ‘The apartment will definitely have to go.’

Maggie watched him indulgently. Oliver had fallen in love with the apartment the first time they had viewed it. On the top floor of the building, it was a modern conversion designed to imitate the loft apartments so popular in New York. Privately Maggie would have preferred something a little bit more traditional, and rather more comfortable, but Oliver, with his designer’s eye, had laughed at her and so she had kept to herself her no doubt old-fashioned fears about the practicality of keeping the immaculate stainless steel kitchen in its gleaming clutter-free state, and her concerns about just how the contents of her extensive designer wardrobe were going to fit into and remain crease-free in four artistically stacked woven storage trunks. In the end the conversation of the apartment’s third bedroom into a dressing room with fitted wardrobes had solved the clothes storage problem, but the kitchen was not and never would be her own ideal of what a kitchen should be.

She had been living in the small cottage she had bought after the breakup of her marriage to Dan. They had sold the family home, and she had used the money she had received from her share of it to finance her expansion of the small business she and Dan had originally started together.

‘Oh, Maggie … Maggie …’

As he wrapped her in his arms and kissed her Maggie could feel the emotion emanating from Oliver. Whilst not perhaps strictly good-looking in the movie-star sense, he possessed a special something that was all his own, a sweetness of nature that shone from his steady-gazed warm brown eyes, an attraction that went way, way beyond mere good looks.

A woman, any woman could look at Oliver and know immediately that he was a man who liked women, genuinely and wholeheartedly liked them. And in addition to that …!

He was gorgeous. He was sexy! He was tender and loving and good-humoured. He possessed an almost telepathic ability to guess how she was feeling and the love he gave her flowed from him with a generosity she sometimes had to pinch herself to believe was real.

There had been a special rapport between them from the moment he had first walked into her office, even though initially Maggie had fought hard to both deny and deride it. She hadn’t been in the market for a relationship. The breakup of her marriage had left her too wary, too self-protective to want one.

Oliver had told her that he had read about her company and that he hoped to persuade her to commission him to do some conceptual design work for them. Her company planned and designed office interiors, providing a highly personal and tailored environment for those fortunate enough to be able to afford their services.

The business did not make a vast profit, but it did make a very comfortable one and, more importantly so far as Maggie was concerned, she considered running it to be both challenging and satisfying.

It had amused and delighted her a great deal earlier in the year to read a newspaper article claiming that to be able to have the forward-thinkingness, the taste and the money to afford a Rockford interior for one’s offices was to truly have arrived!

Maggie had looked at Oliver as he’d stood there in her office—her own design team’s work, of course with just enough witty touches of feng shui, colour planning and atmospherics to whisper a discreet statement about her to those in the know. Maggie herself was not a designer, but she was an administrator par excellence, a woman with extraordinary ‘people’ skills and she had found herself thinking enviously of the woman who must inevitably share Oliver’s life—and that alone had been enough to shock and frighten her.

Even so it had taken Oliver a good many months to wear down her resistance and her objections to the point where she’d been prepared to admit how much she cared about him, and even longer for her to agree to going public on their relationship.

She suspected the turning point had been when she had finally started to open up to him about her marriage to Dan.

Unlike her, Oliver had had no hesitation in telling her about his life. She had ached for him when he had told her about his childhood, and the years spent worrying about and caring for his mother who had suffered badly from MS. From the day his father had walked out on them shortly after Oliver’s sixteenth birthday, until his mother’s death whilst he was at university, Oliver had virtually become her sole carer.

‘What do you think we’re going to have?’ Oliver was whispering to her now as he took her back in his arms. ‘A boy or a girl?’

‘I don’t mind,’ she told him. And it was the truth. Right now it was enough just to know she was carrying his child. She felt as though she had successfully negotiated a gruelling obstacle course, and all she wanted to do now was enjoy the respite of having done so.

‘I hope it’s going to be a girl, just like you,’ Oliver told her.

Immediately Maggie stiffened and pulled away from him.

‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ she challenged him. ‘This baby isn’t going to have any of my genes, Oliver.’

To her chagrin Maggie could feel her voice starting to thicken. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t do this; that she wouldn’t allow herself to be tormented by what by rights should now be an old and bearable pain. She didn’t want to remember now the days … the nights when she had endured the ferocious, savage agony of it, tearing at her. She had known grief in her life; many times; the deaths of her parents, the breakup of her marriage, but this grief had been like none other she had experienced. It had been terrifying in its enormity, its inescapability, its finality.

‘Not your genes,’ Oliver agreed softly. ‘But our baby will have your love, your mothering, Maggie.’

Our Baby. Maggie could feel the yearning aching deep inside her.

‘I suppose now that it’s actually official you’ll be wanting to tell The Club,’ Oliver teased her, pulling a face.

‘Don’t call them that,’ Maggie protested, but she was smiling too. ‘They are my best and closest friends, The four of us have known one another since we were at school.’

‘And you share a bond that no mere male can possibly understand,’ Oliver interrupted her. ‘Yes, I do know that.’

‘I have never said that,’ Maggie denied.

‘You don’t need to,’ Oliver told her wryly.

‘They aren’t going to be very pleased with me for keeping it a secret from them,’ Maggie admitted. ‘Especially Nicki. After all, I was the first to know when she was pregnant with Joey. In fact I knew even before Kit! And they still haven’t really forgiven me for not telling them about you sooner.’

‘So the phone lines are going to be burning, once we get home?’ Oliver smiled.

Maggie shook her head vigorously, her curls dancing.

‘No. We’re due to go out for a meal together, on Friday. I think I’ll wait until then when we’re all together.’

It would be a relief to tell them, to bask in their amazement and excitement. She had never let any of them know just how much she had envied them as one after the other they had given birth to their babies, partially because she hadn’t wanted their pity and partially because of Dan, and by the time she had realised that they had come to assume that she simply did not want children it had been too late to correct their misconceptions.

Even in a friendship as close as theirs there were sometimes secrets, Maggie acknowledged.

‘What’s wrong?’

They had had dinner an hour earlier and were just preparing for bed. Maggie was more tired than she wanted to acknowledge—because of her pregnancy or because …

‘I just hope that we’re doing the right thing,’ she answered Oliver quietly.

‘Of course we are,’ he reassured her robustly. ‘Why shouldn’t we be?’

Silently Maggie looked at him.

‘You know why,’ she told him. ‘I’m fifty-two years old Oliver. A woman who has gone through the menopause, who without the intervention of modern science and the gift of another woman’s eggs could not be carrying your child. You, on the other hand, are a young man in the prime of your life. You’re in your thirties, with a whole lifetime of impregnating younger fertile women ahead of you.’

‘Maggie. Stop it! The fact that we are different ages, the fact that you went through an early menopause, they mean nothing in comparison to our love.’

Maggie looked away from him. They had argued so many, many times before about this. She might not feel her age, she might not even look it—certainly Oliver had flatly refused to believe she could possibly be a day over thirty-five when they had first met, just as she had initially completely believed him when he had told her that he was in his late-thirties—but the cruel facts were that there were an inarguable, an inescapable sixteen years between them.