Penny Jordan (17 page)

'I don't understand her, Maddy. She wanted children so much and yet she hardly has any time for Amelia and Alex and she certainly has no time for me.'

'Caspar, I
know
how much she loves all of you,' Maddy tried to reassure him again.

'Do you? So did I—once! Or at least I thought I did, but it seems that I was wrong. It isn't just that she's off sex,' he added rawly and frankly. 'I might be a man, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the depressive effect having a family and a full-time career can have on a woman's libido.'

'Much the same effect as it can have on a man's libido under the same circumstances,'

Maddy pointed out gently, immediately defending her sex. 'But not feeling like having sex doesn't mean not loving someone.'

'No, but refusing to even discuss attending my brother's wedding does... I'm sorry,' he apologised again. Rubbing the back of his neck wearily, he tried to relieve the tension that had been building up in him ever since he had given Olivia his ultimatum.

He had never dreamed that it would come to this, that Olivia would absolutely and totally refuse not just to discuss the matter, but to speak to him at all. He swore she would have slept at that damned office of hers if she could. He'd certainly been tempted to stay safely out of the way in his university rooms these past couple of days and probably would have done so if it hadn't been for the girls.

'Olivia's changed, Maddy. She doesn't...she isn't the person she was.'

Perhaps not, but Caspar had changed, too, Maddy suspected. She found it worryingly ominous that Caspar was referring to Livvy as 'Olivia'. Almost as though he were deliberately trying to distance himself from her.

Her heart sank a little. She liked both Caspar

and
Olivia and didn't want to side with either one of them against the other.

'Perhaps you should try to talk to her again, Caspar.'

'Talk!' He grimaced. 'Olivia doesn't have the time, and when she does we just go over and over the same old ground—the same old grievances.

I've tried to suggest we take time out together, but Olivia says I'm trying to pressure her and make her feel guilty. Yeah, I guess I am overre-acting a little, but sometimes it feels like I just don't matter to her any more. I know my own family background could have been a role model for a book on dysfunctional families, but they
are

still my folks, and now that we've got the girls, I just kinda feel I want to mend a few family fences—for their sakes.'

'Tell Livvy that,' Maddy suggested gently.

'Sometimes we expect our partners to understand everything we're thinking and feeling without having to be told, but unfortunately, it doesn't always work that way.'

'It isn't just me that Olivia doesn't have much time for any more. It's even happening with the girls,' Caspar went on. 'Your kids are so lucky to have a mother like you, Maddy. You're always there for them.'

Maddy gave him a rather perturbed little smile.

'I
know
how much Livvy loves her children, Caspar,' she told him firmly. 'I know how much she loves all of you.'

'WASN'T THAT CASPAR I
just saw turning out of the drive as I came in,' Max commented to Maddy half an hour later as he walked into the kitchen.

'Mmm...' Maddy acknowledged. 'He's worried about Livvy. He thinks she's spending too much time at work and apparently she's refusing to take time off to go to America to attend his half-brother's wedding.'

'I wouldn't get too involved there if I were you, Maddy. Married couples should sort out their own differences, and besides, if any man's going to be crying on my wife's shoulder, it's going to be me.'

As she looked up from the sauce she was making, Maddy teased, 'You aren't getting jealous, are you...not of Caspar?'

'Not of Caspar,' Max mimicked back. 'No.

Then whom
should
I be getting jealous of?'

'No one,' Maddy protested.

As he watched her, Max wondered what Maddy would say if she knew just how jealous and in-secure he actually sometimes felt. He hadn't forgotten how close he had come to losing her or how determinedly she had held him at an emotional distance even after they had been officially reconciled. Nor had he forgotten, either, how he had deliberately planned for her to conceive their third child, knowing that the emotional claim of the new life she was carrying, as well as those of the two children they already had, would prevent her from leaving him. He had told himself he was buying time and it had worked.

Those months of Maddy's third pregnancy had brought them together in a closeness that Max had vowed to cherish for ever.

But that didn't alter the fact that Maddy
had

planned to leave him. He knew how many other men envied him his marriage and his wife and he couldn't blame them. The old Max, the Max he had once been, would, no doubt, had he been one of those friends, have set out very resolutely to seduce a woman like Maddy for no other reason than it amused him to do so. Max knew he wasn't the only man to think like that. There were others and Maddy had a dangerously tender heart. He wasn't suggesting that Caspar was like that, no, but right now Caspar was feeling aggrieved and vulnerable, and Maddy...

'No, I'm not jealous,' Max told her with a smile. 'I'd just rip apart any man who tried to take you away from me.'

Although she protested and shook her head at him, Maddy couldn't help but be inwardly flattered. It was rather nice to know that one's husband felt so possessive about one and it was especially nice for her, Maddy admitted, but she hadn't been in the habit of saying so recently to Max. Maddy had learned to be a little more sturdy and a lot more independent than the girl she had been when she first married him. But now she abandoned her feigned indifference and admitted,

'I like it when you get all possessive about me. It makes me feel—'

She wriggled and protested as Max crossed the kitchen and took her in his arms. 'You make
me

feel horny,' he told her trenchantly. 'Forget supper. I want to eat
you
and then—'

'Max,' Maddy said, laughing. 'The children...'

'No, I don't want to eat them,' Max replied mock seriously, relenting as he suggested, 'Give them their supper and let them watch that wretched video they've been going on about and then you and I—'

'Max...' Maddy warned.

'I'll go out and get you your favourite take-away,' he promised. 'It's Saturday night. Married couples always have sex on Saturday night.'

'No, they don't,' Maddy protested. 'Most of them have it on Sunday morning.'

'Mmm...' Max lifted his mouth from the warm curve of her throat where he had buried it. 'Well, we can do that, as well. I don't mind,' he offered obligingly.

PROPPING HIS HEAD UP
, David leaned over to look down into Honor's sleeping face. Even in her sleep she was smiling. What was she dreaming of—him? He grimaced a little at his own vanity and then wondered if she would still be smiling if she knew the truth about him. Inevitably, they had spent what was left of the night together after he had insisted on going downstairs to find some candles. She had protested a little at the waste when he had lit them all after placing them round the bed.

'No?' he had queried softly. 'It will be like making love on an island becalmed in a dark sea.'

And as she had told him huskily later, there had been something almost magical...and mystical...

about making love with one another in the flickering candlelight.

They had had breakfast in bed, giggling together like two children as they argued over who was responsible for the toast crumbs.

He had licked honey off her skin and she had...

David closed his eyes as he remembered the way she had touched and tasted him. In reality, they hardly knew one another, but there had been an honesty, a purity, about their coming together that had elevated it way above anything cheap or carnal.

It was both pointless and unfair to compare what they had shared with what he had had with Tiggy, but that didn't stop him knowing that all the real intimacy, the real sharing, the real loving, had been in Honor's arms...in Honor's body.

'We haven't used any precautions,' he had reminded her earlier this morning when she had touched him lovingly, whispering her desire for him. 'Or...'

'No.' She had shaken her head, laughing a little. 'At my age, I doubt that they're necessary.

I've got two grown-up daughters,' she had reminded him. 'And as for safe sex—since neither of us has had a partner for a long time...'

'I have
never
had a partner,' David had told her honestly. 'A wife, yes, but a partner...no.'

'I used to wonder what I had done wrong, why fate wasn't sending me a man who would really love me,' Honor had told him dreamily. 'But that was before I learned how important it was to love myself.'

'And since then?' David had whispered as he nibbled gently on her ear lobe.

'Since then, I haven't needed anyone else's love,' Honor had replied honestly.

She had talked to him openly about her life, her past, but he had not been able to be similarly honest with her.

There was no real point, he reminded himself.

Their time together could only be brief, their relationship transitory, and once she knew the truth she was bound to reject him. Who could blame her? But as he looked down into her sleeping face, David knew that he would have to tell her even though he couldn't really understand the compul-sion that was driving him to do so. Just as he didn't understand why he had felt that he must come home.

What was he going to do now that he
was

here—spend the rest of his life skulking in the shrubbery at Queensmead?

'Honor...'

Reluctantly, she opened her eyes.

'There's something I have to tell you,' David began.

'CASPAR. WHERE ON EARTH
have you been?'

Caspar's mouth twisted as he sent Amelia and Alex upstairs to get changed before turning to confront Olivia.

'Do you really care?' he challenged her angrily.

'It's five o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, for heaven's sake, Olivia. You left this house before eight this morning and—'

'I was back at half past one,' Olivia defended herself. 'But you weren't here. Where were you?'

'I took Amelia to dancing practice. She goes every Saturday—remember?'

'That only lasts an hour,' Olivia pointed out.

'I went to see Maddy,' Caspar told her quietly.

'To see
Maddy...'
Olivia stared at him in confusion and then started to frown as he refused to meet her eyes. 'Oh, I see,' she guessed. 'You went to see Maddy to cry on her shoulder. To complain about me.'

'She's concerned about you, Olivia. We all are,' Caspar stated grimly. 'Everyone can see what you're doing to yourself and this family.'

'Can they? Are you sure about that, Caspar, or can they only see it because you've described it to them? What are you trying to do to me?'

'I'm not trying to do
anything
to you. It's what you're doing to yourself that concerns me. This paranoia you've developed about your work—'

'Paranoia?' Immediately, Olivia stiffened.

'What are you trying to say? That I'm mad...

deranged...?'

'Don't be ridiculous,' Caspar protested.

'But that's what paranoia is, isn't it?' Olivia pressed. 'A form of madness. I work because I have to, Caspar.'

'You
have
to? Why?' he demanded sharply.

'Well, one very good reason is that we need the money,' Olivia defended herself. 'You know that.

We couldn't have bought this house on what you earn as a lecturer. We run two cars. We live well, and you're the one who's insisted on the girls'

having so many out-of-school activities. They all have to be paid for.'

'So it's
my
fault that you have to work. Is that it? It's
my
fault because I'm not a good provider... because I don't earn enough—'

'I said no such thing,' Olivia interrupted sharply. 'Look, Caspar,
you
were the one who started this argument. You're just behaving like a spoiled, petulant child because I won't go to your brother's wedding. What I still can't understand is why you're so keen on going. You've admitted you're not close. According to you, you can't even remember all their names and—'

'God, Olivia, that was years ago. Yes, I
did
still feel sore about my childhood when I first came over here, but since then we've had the girls and now...' He made a brief, helpless gesture with his hands. 'This isn't a dress rehearsal. This is life...real life. It's time for me to make my peace with my family, my father—'

'Your father!' Olivia's mouth twisted. 'What is it about you men that makes you stick together...forgive one another anything? Ben would welcome my father back with open arms given the chance, and even Jon... I thought that Jon felt like I did...that he would never, could never, forgive my father, but the way he talks about him sometimes now it's almost as though—'

'As though what? As though he misses him?

Olivia, they
are
twins.'

'Yes, and he's
my
father,' she returned fiercely.

'But that doesn't stop me hating him.'

Caspar started to frown. 'Look, why are we talking about your father? It's my family we were discussing. You know, Olivia, sometimes I think you're obsessed by David. Yes, he did something very wrong and yes, I can understand how bad that must make you feel, but to keep dwelling on it the way you're doing—to keep digging it up, exhuming it—'

'I'm doing no such thing. It doesn't need exhuming. It's there, Caspar, there in front of me every day. How do you think I feel, knowing that other members of the family, that Uncle Jon and Max and the others
all
know what my father did, that they're probably watching me just to make sure—'

'Now I know you're beating yourself up over nothing,' Caspar broke in sharply. 'What the hell is this, Olivia? If you think that dragging up the whole trauma of your father's fraud is going to sidetrack me from wanting to go to the wedding, if you're trying to play for the sympathy vote—'