“It was a present. From a friend.”

“A friend….” Hugo’s eyebrows rose. “A friend and not your husband?”

“I don’t have a husband,” Dee gritted furiously.

“No husband!”

Something hot and dangerous flared in his eyes and Dee started to panic, but it was too late. The damage had already been done, the tinder lit.

“No husband,” Hugo repeated thickly. “What did he do, Dee? Refuse to play the game your way…just like I did…?”

Dee gave a gasp and then made a small shocked sound as the pressure of Hugo’s mouth on her own prevented her from saying anything else.

It had been so long since she had been kissed like this. So long since she had been kissed at all. Hungrily her mouth opened under Hugo’s, and equally hungrily her hands reached for him.

Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author

PENNY JORDAN

Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!

Penny Jordan's novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.

This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan's fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.

About the Author

Penny Jordan is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & 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.

The Marriage Resolution
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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CHAPTER ONE

DEE LAWSON paused in mid-step to admire the pink and yellow stripes of the flowers in their massed corporation bed in Rye-on-Averton’s town square.

She had just been to have coffee with her friend Kelly. Beth, Kelly’s friend and business partner in the pretty crystal and china gift shop the two girls ran in the town—a property which they rented from Dee herself—had also been there, along with Anna, Beth’s godmother. Anna’s pregnancy was very well advanced, and she had laughed a little breathlessly as her baby kicked when his or her mother reached for another biscuit.

With Beth’s wedding to Alex only weeks away Dee suspected that it wouldn’t be very long before Beth too was blissfully anticipating the prospect of becoming a mother.

Strange to think that so little time ago motherhood had been the last thing on any of their minds.

Dee’s eyes clouded a little. But, no, that wasn’t quite true, was it. Motherhood, babies, children, a family were subjects which had always been close to her own heart, even if those feelings, that yearning, had in recent years become something of a closet desire for her, a sadness for what might have been had things been different.

She wasn’t too old for motherhood, though, not at thirty-one—Anna was older than her—and plenty of women in their thirties, conscious of the urgent tick of their biological clocks, were making the decision not to waste any more time but to commit themselves to motherhood even without a committed relationship with their baby’s father.

Had she wanted to do so, Dee knew she could have quite easily and clinically arranged to conceive, even to the point of choosing the biological details of the male donor who would be the father of her child. But, strong though her maternal instincts were, Dee’s own experience of losing her mother shortly after she was born meant that, despite the caring love she had received from her father, for her own child she wanted the extra-special sense of security and belonging that came from being a child surrounded by and brought up with the love of both its parents, for it and for each other. And that was something that was just not possible…not for her…not any more…Once, a long time ago, she had believed…dreamed…

But that had been before Julian Cox had wormed his way into her life, corrupting her happiness, destroying her security.

Julian Cox!

Her full lips twisted distastefully.

It was typical of the man that he had cunningly managed to escape the legal retribution which must surely have been his had he remained within the reach of European law. Where was he now? Dee wondered. She had tried through the considerable network of contacts at her disposal to find him. The last time there had been a firm sighting of him had been last year, in Singapore.

Julian Cox.

He had caused so much destruction, so much unhappiness in other people’s lives, those people he had deceived and cheated via his fraudulent investment scams, people like Beth, and Kelly’s husband Brough’s sister Eve, vulnerable women whom he’d tried to convince that he loved purely so that he could benefit financially. Luckily both of them had ultimately seen through him and had found happiness elsewhere. For her things were not so simple. For her…

Dee stopped and glanced towards the elegant three-storey Georgian building from which the builders’ scaffolding had just been removed, revealing it in all its refurbished splendour.

When she had originally bought it, the building had been in danger of having to be demolished, and it had taken every bit of Dee’s considerable skill to persuade not just the planners but the architect and the builders she had hired that it could be saved, and not just saved but returned to its original splendour.

All the time and effort she had put into achieving its restoration had been well worthwhile, just for that wonderful moment when at a special ceremony the county’s Lord Lieutenant had declared it officially ‘open’ and she had seen the name she had had recarved and gilded above the doorway illuminated by the strategically placed lighting she had had installed.

‘Lawson House’.

And on the wall there was an elegant and discreet scrolled plaque, explaining to those who read it that the money to purchase and renovate the house had been provided posthumously by her father in his memory. And it was in his memory that its upper storey was going to be employed as office accommodation for the special charities which Dee maintained and headed, whilst the lower ground floor was to be used as a specially equipped social area for people of all ages with special needs, a meeting place, a café, a reading room—all those things and more.

And above its handsome marble fireplace she had placed a specially commissioned portrait of her father, which the artist had created from Dee’s own photographs.

‘I wish I could have known him. He must have been the most wonderful man,’ Kelly had once commented warmly when Dee had been talking to her about her father.

‘He was,’ Dee had confirmed.

Her father had had the kind of analytical brain that had enabled him to make a fortune out of trading stocks and shares. With that fortune he had philanthropically set about discreetly helping his fellow men. It was from him that Dee had inherited her own desire to help others, and it was in his name that she continued the uniquely personal local charity which he had established.

And it wasn’t just his desire to help his fellow men that Dee had inherited from her father. She had also inherited his shrewd financial acumen. Her father’s wealth had made her financially independent and secure for the rest of her life. Dee did not need to earn a living, and so, instead, she had turned her attention and her skills to the thing that had been closest to her father’s heart after his love for her.

As the financial brain behind all the charities her father had established, as well as their chairperson, Dee had made sure that the charities’ assets were secure and profitable—and, just as important, that their money was invested not just profitably but sensitively so far as not taking advantage of other people was concerned.

All in all, Dee knew that she had a lot to be grateful for. The friendship which had sprung up between her and the two younger women, Beth and Kelly, who rented the shop premises from her, and Anna, too, had added a very welcome and heart-warming extra strand to her life. Dee was part of a large extended family that had its roots in the area’s farming community and which went back for many generations; she had the pleasure of knowing that she had faithfully adhered to all the principles her father had taught her, and that her father himself was remembered and lauded by his fellow citizens.

A lot to be grateful for, yes, but she still couldn’t help thinking about when…But, no, she wasn’t going to dwell on that—not today—not any day, she informed herself firmly. Just because seeing Anna’s pregnant state and Beth and Kelly’s happiness had made her so sharply conscious of the void which existed in her own life that did not mean…

Above her head the sky was a vivid spring blue decorated with fluffy white clouds whipped along by the breeze. The Easter eggs which had filled shop windows in recent weeks had been removed to make way for flowers and posters advertising the town’s special May Day celebration, which had its roots in the ancient May Day Fair which had originally been held in the town in medieval times.

There would be a procession of floats, sponsored in the main these days by corporate bodies, a funfair in the town square, a bonfire and fireworks, and, since she was on the committee planning and co-ordinating the whole affair, Dee knew that she was going to be busy.

Amusingly, she had been shown an old document recently, listing the rules which applied to anyone bringing sheep, cattle or other livestock into the town on May Day. The modern-day equivalent was making rules for the extra volume of traffic the Fair caused.

Babies were still on Dee’s mind when she eventually got home. A second cousin on her mother’s side had recently had twins, and Dee made a mental note to buy them something special. She had heard on the family grapevine that she was going to be asked to be their godmother. It was a wonderful compliment, Dee knew, but, oh, how it made her heart ache. Just the mere act of holding those precious little bundles of love would make her whole body ache so!

In an effort to give her mind a different and more appropriate turn of direction, she decided that she ought to do some work. Strength of will and the ability to follow through on one’s personal plans were, her father had always told her, very positive assets, and to be admired. Perhaps they were, but over the years Dee had become slightly cynically aware that so far as the male sex was concerned a strong-minded woman was often someone to be feared rather than admired, and resented rather than loved.

Dee switched on her computer, telling herself firmly that it was silly to pursue such unprofitable thoughts. But it was true, a rebellious part of her brain insisted on continuing, that men liked women who were illogical, women who were vulnerable, women who were feminine and needed them to help and protect them. She was not like that, at least not outwardly. For a start she was tall—elegantly so, her female friends often told her enviously. Her body was slim and supple, she enjoyed walking and swimming—and dancing—and she was always the first one her younger nieces and nephews wanted to join in their energetic games whenever there was a family get-together.

She wore her thick honey-coloured straight hair long, primarily because she found it easier to manage that way, often coiling it up in the nape of her neck in a style which complemented her classically elegant bone structure. Whilst she had been at university she had been approached in the street by the owner of an up-market model agency who had told her that she had all the potential to become a model, but Dee had simply laughed at her, totally unaware of the dramatic impact of her timeless elegance.

Over the years, if anything that impact had heightened, rather than lessened, and although Dee herself was unaware of it she was now a woman whom others paused to glance at discreetly a second time in the street. The reason so many men appeared to be intimidated by her was not, as she herself imagined, her strength of will, but in actual fact the way she looked. That look combined with the classically stylish clothes she tended to favour meant that in most men’s eyes Dee was a woman they considered to be out of their league.

Dee frowned as she studied the screen in front of her. One of the new small charities she had taken under her wing was not attracting the kind of public support it needed. She would have to see if there was some way they could give it a higher profile. Somewhere for teenagers to meet, listen to their music and dance might not have the appeal of helping to provide for the more obviously needy, but it was still a cause which, in Dee’s opinion, was very deserving.

Perhaps she should speak to Peter Macauley about it. Her father’s old friend and her own retired university tutor shared her father’s philanthropic beliefs and ideals. A bachelor, and wealthy, having inherited family money, he had already asked Dee to be one of the executors of his will because he knew that she would see that his wishes and bequests were carried out just as he would want them to be. He was on the main committee appointed by her father to control the funds he had bequested to finance his charities.

Thinking of Peter Macauley caused Dee to pause in what she was doing. He was not recovering from the operation he had had some months ago as quickly as he should have been, and the last time Dee had driven to Lexminster to see him she had been upset to see how frail he was looking.

He had lived in the university town all his adult life, and Dee knew how strenuously he would resist any attempt on her part to cajole him into moving to Rye-on-Averton, where she could keep a closer eye on him, never mind how he would react to any suggestion that he should move in with her. But the four-storey house he occupied in the shelter of the town’s ancient university was far too large for him to manage, especially with its steep flights of stairs. He had friends in the town, but, like him, they were in the main elderly. Lexminster wasn’t very far away, a couple of hours’ drive, that was all…

It had been Dee’s first choice of university, since it had offered the courses she’d wanted to take, and, more importantly, had meant that she wouldn’t have to move too far away from her father. In those days the new motorway which now linked the university town to Rye had not been built, and the drive had taken closer on four hours than two, which had meant that she had had to live in student digs rather than commute from home.

Those days…How long ago those words made it seem, and yet, in actual fact, it had only been a mere ten years. Ten years…a different life, a lifetime away in terms of the girl she had been and the woman she was now. Ten years. It was also ten years since her father’s unexpected death.

Her father’s death. Dee knew how surprised those who considered themselves to be her closest friends would be if they knew just how profoundly and deeply she still felt the pain of losing her father. The pain—and the guilt?

Abruptly she switched off her computer and got up.

Seeing Anna had done more than reawaken her own secret longing for a child. It had brought into focus things she would far rather not dwell on. What was the point? What was the point in dwelling on past heartaches, past heartbreaks? There wasn’t one. No, she would be far better employed doing something productive. Absently—betrayingly—she touched the bare flesh of her ring finger, slightly thinner at its base than the others. Other things—such as what?

Such as driving over to Lexminster and visiting Peter, she told herself firmly. It was a couple of weeks since she had last seen him, and she tried to get over at least once a fortnight, making her visits seem spur-of-the-moment and accidental, or prompted by the need for his advice on some aspect of her charity work so as to ensure that his sense of pride wasn’t hurt and that he didn’t guess how anxious she had become about his failing health.

Her sleek car, all discreet elegance, just as discreetly elegant as she was herself, ate up the motorway miles to Lexminster, the journey so familiar to her that Dee was free to allow her thoughts to drift a little.

How excited she had been the first time she had driven into the town as a new student, excited, nervous, and unhappy too, at leaving her father.

She could still vividly remember that day, the warm, mellow late-September sunshine turning the town’s ancient stone buildings a honey-gold. She had parked her little second-hand car—an eighteenth-birthday present from her father—with such care and pride. Her father might have been an extremely wealthy man, but he had taught her that love and loyalty were more important than money, that the truly worthwhile things in life could never be bought.

She had spent her first few weeks at university living in hall and then moved into a small terraced property, which she had co-bought with her father and shared with two other female students. She could still remember how firm her father had been as he’d gone over the figures she had prepared to show him the benefits of him helping her to buy the cottage. He had known all the time, of course, the benefits of doing so, but he had made her sell the idea to him, and she had had to work too, to provide her share of the small mortgage payments. Those had been good years: the best years of her life—and the worst. To have gone from the heights she had known to the depths she had plummeted to so shockingly had had the kind of effect on her that no doubt today would have been classed as highly traumatic. And she had suffered not one but two equally devastating blows, each of which…

The town was busy; it was filled with tourists as well as students. All that now remained of the fortified castle around which the town had been built were certain sections of carefully preserved walls and one solitary tower, an intensely cold and damp place that had made Dee shiver not just with cold but with the weight of its history on the only occasion on which she had visited it.

Economics had been her subject at university, and one which she had originally chosen to equip her to work with her father. But there had always co-existed within her, alongside her acutely financially perceptive brain, a strong streak of idealism—also inherited from her parents—and even before she had finished her first university term she had known that once she had obtained her degree her first choice of career would be one which involved her in using her talents to help those in need. A year’s work in the field, physically assisting on an aid programme in one of the Third World countries, and then progressing to an administrative post where her skills could be best employed, had been Dee’s career plan. Now, the closest she got to helping with Third World aid programmes was via the donations she made to their charities.

Her father’s untimely death had made it impossible for her to carry on with her own plans—for more than one reason. Early on, in the days when she had dutifully taken over the control of his business affairs, there had been a spate of television programmes focusing on the work of some of the large Third World aid organisations. She had watched them with a mixture of anguish and envy, searching the lean, tanned faces hungrily, starving for the sight of a certain familiar face. She had never seen him, which was perhaps just as well. If she had…

Dee bit her bottom lip. What on earth was she doing? Her thoughts already knew that that was a strictly cordoned-off and prohibited area of her past, an area they were simply not allowed to stray into. What was the point? Faced with a choice, a decision, she had made the only one she could make. She could still remember the nightmare journey she had made back to Rye-on-Averton after the policeman had broken the news to her of her father’s death—‘a tragic accident,’ he had called it, awkwardly. He had only been young himself, perhaps a couple of years older than her, his eyes avoiding hers as she’d opened the door to his knock and he’d asked if she was Andrea Lawson.

‘Yes,’ she had answered, puzzled at first, assuming that he was calling about some minor misdemeanour such as a parking fine.

It had only been when he’d mentioned her father’s name that she had started to feel that cold flooding of icy dread rising numbingly through her body.

He had driven her back to Rye. The family doctor had already identified her father’s body, so she had been spared that horrendous task, but of course there had been questions, talk, gossip, and despite the mainly solicitous concern of everyone who’d spoken with her Dee had been angrily conscious of her own shocking secret fear.

Abruptly Dee’s thoughts skidded to a halt. She could feel the anger and tension building up inside her body. Carefully she took a deep breath and started to release it, and then just as carefully slid her car into a convenient parking spot.

Now that the initial agonising sharpness of losing her father had eased Dee wanted to do something beyond renovating Lawson House to commemorate his name and what he had done for his town. As yet she was not quite sure what format this commemoration would take, but what she did know was that it would be something that would highlight her father’s generosity and add an even deeper lustre to his already golden reputation. He had been such a proud man, proud in the very best sense of the word, and it had hurt him unbearably, immeasurably, when…

She was, Dee discovered, starting to grind her teeth. Automatically she took another deep breath and then got out of her car.

In the wake of the arrival of the town’s new motorway bypass there had also arrived new modern industry. Locally, the town was getting a reputation as the county’s equivalent to America’s silicone valley. The terrace of sturdy early Victorian four-storey houses where Peter lived had become a highly covetable and expensive residential area for the young, thrusting executive types who had moved into the area via working in the new electronics industries, and in a row of shiny and immaculately painted front doors Peter’s immediately stuck out as the only shabby and slightly peeling one.

Dee raised the knocker and rapped loudly twice. Peter was slightly deaf, and she knew that it would take him several minutes to reach the door, but to her surprise she had barely released the knocker when the door was pulled open. Automatically she stepped inside and began, ‘Goodness, Peter, that was quick. I didn’t expect—’

‘Peter’s upstairs—in bed—he collapsed earlier.’

Even without its harshly disapproving tone the familiarity of the male voice, so very, very little changed despite the ten-year gap since she had last heard it, would have been more than enough to stop her dead in her tracks.

‘Hugo…what…what are you doing here?’

As she heard the trembling stammer in her own voice Dee cursed herself mentally. Damn! Damn! Did she have to act like an awestruck seventeen-year-old? Did she have to betray…?

She stopped speaking as Hugo started to shake his head warningly at her. He pushed open the old-fashioned front-parlour door and indicated that she was to go in.

Obediently Dee did so. She was still in shock, still grappling to come to terms with his unexpected presence. It was years since she had last seen him.

When they had first met he had been a graduate whilst she had still been a first year student. He had been working towards his Ph.D., a tall, quixotically romantic figure with whom all her fellow female students had seemed to be more than half in love. Even in a crowd as diverse and individual as his peers had been, Hugo had immediately stood out—literally so. At six foot three he had easily been one of the tallest and, it had to be said, one of the best-looking men on the campus, so strikingly and malely attractive that he would have automatically merited a second and a third look from any woman, even without his signature mane of shoulder-length thick dark hair.

Add to the attributes of his height and male physique—tautly muscled from playing several sports—the additional allure of shockingly sensual aquamarine eyes and a mouth with the kind of bottom lip that just automatically made a woman know how good it would be to be kissed by him, and it was no wonder that Hugo had been the openly discussed subject of nearly every female undergraduate’s not-so-secret fantasies.

Dee had quite literally run into him as he was rushing to one of Peter’s meetings one day.

Dee, who had heard about Hugo from the female grapevine, and who had glimpsed him to heart-stopping effect in and around the campus, had been astounded to discover that Hugo was a leading activist in Peter’s small army of idealists and helpers.

‘What do you mean, what am I doing here?’ Hugo was challenging her now curtly. ‘Peter and I go back a long way and—’

‘Yes, yes, I know that,’ Dee acknowledged. ‘I just thought…’

She was in shock; she knew that. Her body felt icy cold, and yet at the same time as sticky and uncomfortable as though she was drenched in perspiration. Her heart was hammering frantically to a disjointed and dangerously discordant rhythm, and she suspected that she was actually in danger of hyperventilating as she tried to force some air into her tense lungs.

‘You just thought what?’ Hugo demanded tauntingly. ‘That I was still carrying a torch for you? That I just couldn’t go on living without you any longer…that my feelings for you, my love for you, was so strong that I just had to come looking for you…?’

Dee blenched beneath the witheringly sardonic tone of his voice. Was it really unbearably cold in this room or was it her…? She could feel herself starting to tremble. Only inwardly and invisibly at first, and then with increasing intensity until…

‘How are your husband and your daughter?’ Hugo asked her with obvious indifference. ‘She must be…how old now…nine…?’

Dee stared at him. Her husband…her daughter…What husband…what daughter…?

Someone was knocking on Peter’s front door.

‘That will be the doctor,’ Hugo announced before she could gather her confused thoughts and correct his misapprehensions.

‘The doctor…?’

‘Yes, Peter is very poorly. Excuse me, I’ll go and let her in.’

Her! Peter’s normal doctor wasn’t a woman!

As she stood to one side a very attractive, cold-eyed brunette walked through the door towards Hugo, saying, ‘Ah, Mr Montpelier. I’m Dr Jane Harper; we spoke on the phone.’

‘We certainly did,’ Hugo agreed, with far more warmth in his voice than there had been when he’d spoken to her, Dee noticed, digesting the unwanted recognition that knowledge brought as uncomfortably as though it had been a particularly unwelcome piece of food.

‘Please, come this way,’ Hugo was inviting the doctor, and she was smiling at him as though…

Angrily Dee swallowed down her own unpalatable thoughts.

CHAPTER TWO

PETER was very poorly. She had known he wasn’t well, of course, and had been getting increasingly concerned about him, but to hear Hugo describing him as ‘very poorly’ had come as an unpleasant shock to her. Anxiously Dee followed Hugo down the narrow hallway. She had seen the female appreciation in the other woman’s eyes as Hugo had let her in, even if it had been quickly masked by her professionalism as she’d asked quickly after her patient.

She herself was quite obviously an unwanted third, Dee recognised as Hugo outlined Peter’s symptoms to the doctor and she listened intently to him, positioning herself so that Dee was blocked out of Hugo’s line of vision. Not that she minded that. She was still trying to come to terms with the shock of his totally unexpected presence.

The last time she had seen him he had been a rangy young man dressed in tee shirt and jeans, his wild mane of hair curling youthfully round his face. Initially his reputation as something of a rebel had caused Dee’s father to be a little bit disapproving of him, but even her father could not have found fault with the appearance he presented now, Dee acknowledged as his absorption with the doctor gave her the opportunity to study him surreptitiously. The tee shirt and jeans had been exchanged for a smartly tailored business suit, and the dark hair was no longer shoulder-length but clipped neatly to his head, but the bone structure was still the same, and so were the aquamarine eyes and that dangerously sexy mouth. Dee’s heart gave a dangerous little flutter—and that was something else which did not appear to have changed either!

Anxious to distract herself, as well as concerned for Peter, she started to walk towards the stairs.

‘Where are you going?’ Hugo demanded, breaking off his quiet conversation with the doctor.

‘I thought I’d go up and see Peter…’ Dee began, but immediately both the doctor and Hugo began to shake their heads in denial.

Feeling thoroughly chastised, Dee tried to conceal her chagrin.

‘I’d better go up and see him,’ the doctor was saying to Hugo.

‘Yes. I’ll come with you,’ he agreed.

Both of them were totally ignoring Dee. To suffer such ignominy was a totally unfamiliar experience for her, and not one she was enjoying, but there was no way she intended to leave—not until she had discovered how Peter was.

It was ten minutes before the doctor and Hugo came back downstairs, and Dee’s anxiety for Peter overcame her outraged pride enough for her to ask quickly as they walked into the room, ‘How is he? What’s wrong with him? Will…?’

‘He’s got a weak heart and he’s been overdoing things,’ the doctor told her matter-of-factly. ‘Trying to move some books, apparently. He really shouldn’t be living on his own, not at his age. He ought to be living in some kind of sheltered accommodation since he doesn’t appear to have any family, and in view of his recent operation.’

‘Oh, no, that would be the last thing he would want…’ Dee began to protest. but the doctor was already turning away from her.

‘He was fortunate that you were here when he collapsed and that you knew what to do,’ she said warmly to Hugo. ‘If he’d continued to try to lift those books…’ She stopped, and Dee told herself sternly that she was being unfair in thinking that what Hugo had done was quite simply what any person with any sense would have done, and scarcely seemed to warrant his elevation to the rank of a super-hero as the doctor seemed to suggest.

‘I’ll make some arrangements with the social services for some home help for him,’ the doctor told Hugo, once again totally excluding Dee from the conversation.

‘Oh,’ she added, suddenly turning to glance dismissively at Dee. ‘He wants to see you…’

‘I told him you were here,’ Hugo informed her briefly as Dee hurried towards the door.

Was she being unkind in suspecting that the doctor wanted to have Hugo to herself? And if she did what business was it of hers? Dee thought as she hurried upstairs.

Peter looked very small and frail lying there in bed, the sunshine pouring through the open windows highlighting the thin boniness of his hands.

‘Peter!’ Dee exclaimed warmly as she sat down beside him and reached for one of his hands, holding it tightly.

‘Dee, Hugo said you were here…Now, you’re not to worry,’ Peter told her before she could say anything. ‘Hugo is just fussing. I just felt a little bit short of breath, that’s all. There was no need for him to call the doctor…

‘Dee…’ Suddenly he looked very fretful and worried. ‘You won’t let them send me…anywhere…will you? I want to stay here. This is my home. I don’t want…’

Dee could see how upset he was getting.

‘Peter, it’s all right. You’re not going anywhere,’ Dee tried to reassure him.

‘The doctor was saying that I ought to be in a home,’ Peter told her anxiously. ‘I know. I heard her…she…’

He was starting to get even more upset, increasing Dee’s concern for him.

‘Peter, don’t worry…’ She started to comfort him, but as she did so the bedroom door opened and Hugo came hurrying in, glowering at her as he strode protectively to Peter’s side.

‘What have you been saying to him?’ he demanded acerbically. ‘You’re upsetting him…’

She was upsetting him? Of all the nerve.

‘Peter, it’s all right,’ she promised her father’s old friend gently, deliberately ignoring Hugo—not an easy feat with a man the size Hugo was, and even less easy when one took into account his overpowering sexual charisma. ‘The only home I would ever allow you to move into would be mine, and that’s a promise…’

Out of the corner of her eye Dee could see the way Hugo’s mouth was tightening.

What was he doing here anyway? She had had no idea that Peter still had any contact with him. He had certainly never mentioned Hugo to her.

‘I don’t want to go anywhere; I want to stay here,’ Peter was complaining fretfully, plucking agitatedly at the bedcover as he did so. Dee’s tender heart ached for him. He looked so vulnerable and afraid, and she knew, in her heart of hearts, that for his own sake he ought not to be left to live on his own. Somehow she would have to find a way to persuade him to come to live with her, but he would, she knew, miss his university friends, the old colleagues he still kept in touch with.

‘And staying here’s exactly what you shall do—at least so long as I have any say in the matter,’ Hugo told him firmly.

Dee glowered at him. It was all very well for Hugo to make promises that were impossible to keep. And as for him having any say in the matter…!

But before she could say anything, to her astonishment she heard Peter demanding in a shaky voice, ‘You are going to stay here, then, are you, Hugo? I know we talked about it, but…’

‘I’m staying,’ Hugo agreed, but although he said the words gently the look in his eyes as he looked across the bed at her made Dee feel more as though he was making a threat against her than a promise to Peter. What on earth was going on? What was Hugo doing here? There were so many questions she wanted—needed—to ask Peter, but it was obvious that he was simply not well enough to answer her—and that knowledge raised other concerns for Dee.

Peter shared with her the legal responsibility for administering the charities her father had established, and, whilst technically and practically speaking the work involved was done by Dee, via her offices in Rye-on-Averton, so far as legally rubber-stamping any decisions was concerned Peter was her co-signatory, and his authority was a legal requirement that had to be adhered to. He, of course, had the right to nominate another person to take over that responsibility for him, and Dee had always assumed that, when the time came, they would discuss who would take on that duty. Now it seemed it could well be a discussion she was going to have to have with him rather earlier than she had expected.

Peter was a gentleman of the old school, with the old-fashioned belief that women—‘ladies’—needed a strong male presence in their lives to lean on, and Dee knew that he secretly deplored the fact that she had never married and had no husband to ‘protect’ her. She suspected too that he had never totally approved of the licence and authority her father had left to her so far as his financial interests went, and she often wondered a little ruefully what Peter would have thought had he known that her father had appointed him as a co-trustee for Peter’s benefit and protection rather than for hers.

‘His ideas, his ideals are more than praiseworthy,’ her father had once told her, adding with a sad shake of his head, ‘But…’

Dee had known what her father meant, and very tactfully and caringly over the years she had ensured that Peter’s pride was never hurt by the realisation that her father had considered him to be not quite as financially astute as he himself believed he was.

In less than a week’s time Dee was due to chair the AGM of their main committee. There were certain changes she wished to make in the focus and operation of her father’s local charity, and she had been subtly lobbying Peter and the other members of the committee to this end.

Her main aim was to focus the benefit of the revenue the charity earned, from public donation and the endowments her father had made to it, not on its present recipients but instead on the growing number of local young people Dee felt were desperately in need of their help. Her fellow committee members, people of her father’s generation in the main, would, she knew, take some convincing. Conservative, and in many ways old-fashioned, they were not going to be easy to convince that the young people they saw as brash and even sometimes dangerous were desperately insecure and equally desperately in need of their help and support. But Dee was determined to do it, and as a first step towards this she needed to enlist Peter’s support and co-operation as her co-signatory.

She had already made overtures to him, suggesting that it was time for them to consider changing things, but it would be a slow process to thoroughly convince him, as she well knew, and she had sensed that he was already a little bit alarmed by her desire to make changes.

Peter had fallen asleep. Quietly Dee stood up and started to move towards the bedroom door, but Hugo got there first, not just holding it open for her but following her through and down the stairs.

‘There’s really no need for you to stay here with Peter,’ Dee began firmly once they were both downstairs. ‘I could—’

‘You could what? Move him into your own home? What about your own family, Dee…your husband and child? Or is it children now? No, Peter will be much more comfortable where he is. After all, if you’d genuinely wanted him there you’d have taken steps to encourage him to live with you before now, instead of waiting until he’s practically at death’s door…’

Death’s door! Dee’s heart gave a frightened bound.

‘I did try to persuade him,’ she defended herself, ignoring Hugo’s comment about her non-existent husband and family in the urgency of her desire to protect herself from his criticisms. ‘You don’t understand…

Peter’s very proud. His friends, his whole life is here in Lexminster…’

‘You heard what the doctor said,’ Hugo continued inexorably. ‘He’s too old and frail to be living in a house like this. All those stairs alone, never mind—’

‘It’s his home,’ Dee repeated, and reminded him quickly, ‘And you heard what he said about wanting to stay here…’

‘I heard a frightened old man worrying that he was going to be bundled out of the way to live amongst strangers,’ Hugo agreed. ‘At least that’s one problem we don’t have to deal with in Third World countries. Their people venerate and honour their old. We can certainly learn from them in that respect.’

Third World countries. It had always been Hugo’s dream to work with and for the people in such countries, but a quick discreet look at his hands—lean, strong, but not particularly tanned, his nails immaculate—did not suggest that he had spent the last ten years digging wells and latrines, as they had both planned to do once they left university.

How idealistic they had both been then, and how furiously angry Hugo had been with her when she had told him that she had changed her mind, and that it was her duty to take over her father’s responsibilities.

‘You mean that money matters more to you than people?’ he had demanded.

Fighting to hide her tears, Dee had shaken her head. ‘No!’

‘Then prove it…come with me…’

‘I can’t. Hugo, please try to understand.’

She had pleaded with him, but he had refused to listen to her.

‘Look, if I’m going to stay here with Peter there are one or two things I need to do, including collecting my stuff from my hotel. Can you stay here?’

The sound of Hugo’s curt voice brought Dee abruptly back to the present.

‘Can you stay here with him until I get back?’

Tempted though she was to refuse—after all, why should she do anything to help Hugo Montpelier?—her concern for Peter was too strong to allow her to give in to the temptation.

‘Yes, I can stay,’ she agreed.

‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ Hugo told her, glancing frowningly at his watch. A plain, sturdy-looking one, Dee noticed, but she also noticed that it was a rather exclusive make as well. His clothes looked expensive too, even if very discreetly so. But then there had always seemed to be money in Hugo’s background, much of it tied up in land, even if he had preferred to make his own way in his university days. His grandmother had come from a prosperous business family, and she had married into the lower levels of the aristocracy.

In Hugo’s family, as in her own, there had been a tradition of helping others, but Hugo had dismissed his grandfather’s ‘good works’ as patronage of the worst kind.

‘People should be helped to be independent, not dependent, encouraged and educated to stand free and proud…’

He had spoken so stirringly of his beliefs…his plans.

Dee longed to reiterate that he had no need to concern himself with Peter, that she would take full responsibility for his welfare, but she sensed that he would enjoy dismissing her offer of help. She had seen the dislike and the contempt darkening his eyes as he’d looked at her, and she had seen too the way his mouth had curled as he had openly studied her as she crossed Peter’s bedroom floor.

What had he seen in her to arouse that contempt? Did he perhaps think the length of her honey-blonde hair was too youthful for a woman in her thirties? Did he find her caramel-coloured trousers with their matching long coat dull and plain, perhaps, compared with the clothes of the no doubt very youthful and very attractive women he probably spent his time with? Did it amuse him to see the way the soft cream cashmere of her sweater discreetly concealed the soft swell of her breasts when he had good reason to know just how full and firm they actually were?

What did it matter what Hugo thought? Dee derided herself as he turned away from her and strode towards the door. After all, he had made it plain enough just how little he cared about her thoughts or her feelings. She shivered a little, as though the room had suddenly gone very cold.

Ten minutes after Hugo had left Dee heard Peter coughing upstairs. Anxiously she hurried up to his room, but to her relief as she opened his bedroom door she saw that he was sitting up in bed, smiling reassuringly at her, his colour much warmer and healthier than it had been when she had seen him earlier.

‘Where’s Hugo?’ he asked Dee as she returned his smile.

‘He’s gone to collect his things,’ she answered him. It hurt a little to recognise how eager he was to have the other man’s company—and, it seemed, in preference to her own.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked him. ‘Would you like a drink…or something to eat?’

‘I’m feeling fine, and, yes, a cup of tea would be very welcome, Dee.’ He thanked her.

It didn’t take her very long to make it, and she carried the tray upstairs to Peter. In addition to his tea she had made him some delicately cut little sandwiches, as well as buttering two of the home-made scones she had brought with her for him. She knew he had a weakness for them, and couldn’t help smiling at the enthusiasm he exhibited when he saw them.

‘I didn’t realise that you and Hugo had kept in touch,’ she commented carefully when she was pouring his tea. He had insisted that he didn’t either need or want to go back to sleep.

‘Mmm…Well, to be honest, we hadn’t…didn’t. But then I happened to run into him a few months ago quite by chance. He was here in Lexminster on business and we were both guests at the same drinks do. I wasn’t sure it was him at first…but then he came over and introduced himself.’

‘Mmm…he has changed,’ Dee agreed, bending her head over the teapot as she poured her own tea and hoping that her voice wasn’t giving her away. She would have recognised Hugo anywhere—there were some things that were just too personal ever to be changed. The aura that surrounded a person’s body, which one knew instinctively once one had been permitted within their most intimate personal space, their scent, as highly individual as their fingerprints, and even the way they breathed. These were things that could not be changed.

‘What’s he actually doing these days?’ she enquired as carelessly as she could.

‘Hasn’t he told you? He’s the chief executive in charge of a very special United Nations aid programme. As I understand it, from what he’s told me, their plan is to educate and help the people they’re dealing with to become self-sufficient and to combat the ravages of the years of drought their land has suffered. He’s very enthusiastic about a new crop they’re still working on, which, if it’s successful, will help to provide nearly forty per cent of the people’s protein requirements.’

‘That is ambitious,’ Dee acknowledged.

‘Ambitious and expensive,’ Peter agreed. ‘The crop is still very much in the early experimental stages. The whole scheme involves huge amounts of international funding and support, and one of Hugo’s responsibilities is to lobby politicians for those funds. He was saying that he’d much prefer to be working in the field, but as I reminded him he always did have a first-class brain. At one time I even thought he might continue with his studies and make a career in academics himself, but he was always such a firebrand…’

A firebrand. Dee had thought of him more as a knight in shining armour, rescuing not distressed damsels but others less fortunate than himself and with far more important needs. Being romantic and idealistic herself, it had seemed to her that Hugo had met every one of her impossibly high ideals and criteria, morally…emotionally…and sexually…Oh, yes, quite definitely sexually! Her virginal reluctance to commit herself physically to a man had been totally and completely swept away by the passion that Hugo had aroused in her. Utterly, totally and completely. She hadn’t so much as timidly crossed her virginal Rubicon as flung herself headlong and eagerly into its tumultuous erotic flood!

‘You should talk with him, Dee,’ Peter was continuing enthusiastically. ‘He’s got some very good ideas.’

‘Mmm…I hardly think learning to grow our own protein is a particularly urgent consideration for the residents of Rye,’ Dee couldn’t resist pointing out a little dryly.

It irked her a little to be told she should crouch eagerly at Hugo’s feet, as though he were some sort of master and she his pupil. In fact, it irked her rather more than just a little, she admitted. She might not have completed her degree course—her father’s death had put an end to that—and she had certainly not been able to go on to obtain her doctorate, but what she had learned both from her father and through her own ‘hands-on’ experience had more than equipped her to deal proficiently and, she believed, even creatively with the complexities and demands of her own work. So far as she was concerned she certainly did not need Hugo’s advice or instruction on how to manage her business.

‘You’ve got a definite flair for finance,’ her father had told her approvingly, and Dee knew without being immodest that he had been quite right.

She also knew she had a reputation locally for being not just astute but also extremely shrewd. Her father, on the other hand, had been almost too ready to trust in other people’s honesty, to believe that they were as genuine and philanthropic as he himself had been, which was why…

‘Dee, you aren’t listening to me,’ Peter was complaining tetchily.

‘Oh, Peter, I’m sorry,’ Dee apologised soothingly.

‘I was just saying about Hugo, and about how you would be well-advised to seek his advice. I know your father was very proud of you, Dee, and that he meant it for the best when he left you in charge of his business affairs, but personally I’ve always felt that it’s a very heavy burden for you to carry. If you’d married it might have been different. A woman needs a man to lean on,’ Peter opined.

Dee forced herself not to protest. Peter meant well, she reminded herself. It was just that he was so out of step with modern times. It didn’t help, of course, that he had never married, and so had never had a wife or daughter of his own.

‘By the way, did you ever find out what had happened to that Julian Cox character?’ Peter asked her.

Immediately Dee froze.

‘Julian Cox? No…why do you ask?’ Warily she waited for his response.

‘No reason; it was just that Hugo and I were talking over old times and I remembered how badly your father was taken in by Cox. That was before we knew the truth about him, of course. Your father confessed to me—’

‘My father barely knew Julian,’ Dee denied fiercely. ‘And he certainly had no need to confess anything to anyone!’

‘Maybe not, but they were on a couple of charity committees together. I remember your father being very impressed by some of Julian’s ideas for raising money,’ Peter insisted stubbornly. ‘It was such a tragedy, your father dying when he did. To lose his life like that, and in such a senseless accident…’

Dee’s mouth had gone dry. She always hated talking about her father’s death. As Peter was saying, it had been a tragic, senseless way to die.

‘Hugo said as much himself…’

Dee felt as though her heart might stop beating.

‘You were discussing my father’s death with Hugo?’

The sharp, shocked tone of her voice caused Peter to look uncertainly at her.

‘Hugo brought it up. We were talking about your father’s charity work.’

Dee tried to force herself to relax. Her heart was thudding heavily as anxiety-induced adrenalin was released into her bloodstream.

‘I’m a little bit concerned about this bee you’ve got in your bonnet about these young people, Dee,’ Peter was saying now, a little bit reprovingly. ‘I’m not sure that your father would have approved of what you’re trying to do. Being philanthropic is all very well, but these youngsters…’ He paused and cocked his head. ‘I applaud your concern for them, but, my dear, I really don’t think I can agree that we should fund the kind of thing you’ve got in mind.’

Dee’s heart started to sink. She had always known it would be difficult to convince Peter to support what she wanted to do, and the last thing she wanted to do now was to upset him by arguing with him. She had no idea how serious his condition might be, and she suspected that any attempt on her part to find out would be met with strong opposition from Dr Jane Harper. If it were Hugo, now, who wanted to know…! She was being unfair, Dee warned herself mentally—unfair and immature. But that didn’t mean that she wasn’t right!

‘What exactly is Hugo doing in Lexminster?’ she asked Peter, trying to give his thoughts a new direction.

‘It’s business,’ Peter told her vaguely.

‘Business?’ Dee raised her eyebrows. ‘I thought you said his work involved lobbying politicians for international support for his aid programme.’

‘Yes. It does,’ Peter agreed. ‘But Lexminster University has access to certain foundation funds which have been donated over the years to be used as the university sees fit.’

‘For charitable causes,’ Dee agreed. She knew all about such foundations.

‘Hugo hopes to get the university to agree to donate all or part of them to his aid programme.’

‘But I thought they were supposed to be used to benefit university scholars’ projects.’

‘Hugo was a university scholar,’ Peter reminded her simply. Yes, he had been, and Peter was on the committee that dealt with the disbursement of those funds, as Dee already knew. She started to frown. Was Hugo’s desire to move in with Peter and take care of him as altruistic as it had initially seemed? The Hugo she had known would certainly never have stooped to such tactics. But then the Hugo she had known would never have worn a Savile Row suit, nor a subtly expensive and discreet cologne that smelled of fresh mountain air just warmed by a hint of citrus.

Dee was becoming increasingly alarmed at the thought of leaving Peter on his own with Hugo, but she sensed that it wouldn’t be wise to express her doubts. From what Peter had already said to her it was obvious that for him Hugo could do no wrong.

Dee was frowning over this unpalatable knowledge when she heard someone knocking on the front door.

‘That will be Hugo!’ Peter exclaimed with evident pleasure. ‘You’d better go and let him in.’

Yes, and no doubt lie prone in the hallway so that he could wipe his boots on her, Dee decided acidly as she got up off the bed.

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