Starting Over

by Penny Jordan

  'Come and have a coffee with me.'

  His abrupt invitation startled him as much as it did Sara. He could see the shock registering in her eyes along with the rejection. What the hell had possessed him? He knew there was no place in his life for what she represented.

  'I...' Sara paused, the refused she was about to utter somehow impossible to say. A chilly little breeze had sprung up making her shiver.

  'Come on,' Nick announced firmly, slipping his hand beneath her arm. 'It's too cold to stand here and argue. My car's parked round the corner right outside the coffee shop.'

  Somehow Sara found she was walking alongside him. What on earth was she doing? She loathed him, detested him and the last thing she wanted to do was to have coffee with him. But somehow that was exactly what she was doing, breathing in a rich heavenly scent of the freshly ground beans as they walked into the coffee shop, virtually empty apart from a very obvious pair of lovers seated in one corner and holding hands across their table.

  'I don't know why I'm doing this,' Sara protested faintly as they were led to a table by one of the waitresses.

  'Perhaps we're more alike than you think,' Nick suggested wryly as they sat down, enlarging when she looked sharply at him, 'Maybe we both like living dangerously.'

  Living dangerously! Sara's stomach clenched betrayingly. What she was doing was dangerous, she acknowledged. Dangerous and downright reckless.

  Scanning the menu Sara ordered hot chocolate, braving the look the stick-thin waitress gave her curves as she asked disapprovingly, 'With marshmallows or without?'

  'With please,' Sara told her defiantly.

  She could see Nick grinning at her as he gave his own order of espresso.

  'Hot chocolate and marshmallows...somehow I thought you were going to be a cafe latte girl.'

  'Really? Well I'm sorry to disappoint you,' Sara began challengingly, stopping when Nick asked her softly, 'Who said I was disappointed?'

  Sara moved restlessly in her chair. Just in her line of vision the lovers were leaning closer to one another.

  Curiously Nick turned his head towards the lovers and then looked back at her.

  'Poor souls, they're obviously aching for something more intimate and we both know how that feels, don't we?'

  'You're absolutely crazy,' Sara hissed at him furiously as the waitress brought their order.

  'No,' Nick corrected her when the girl left, 'I'm, honest. You want me as much as I do you, Sara. No, don't bother to perjure yourself, there's no point.'

  'Perjure myself. This isn't a court case. I'm not on trial. Oh, this is ridiculous. I...'

  'You know the best thing you and I could do don't you?' Nick interrupted her.

  'Yes, move to opposite ends of the country, or better still the universe....' Sara answered him flippantly.

  'Actually I was thinking of something more radical than that,' Nick told her grimly.

  Sara stared at him. She wished she hadn't ordered the chocolate. It tasted too sweet and sickly, clogging her already tight throat.

  'The best way for us to get this whole thing out of our systems might not be for us to fight it but to go along with it—a quick, short, sharp fling a no-holds-barred sex thing, intense enough to burn itself out...'

  Sara focused on him, her drink forgotten. 'You've got to be joking,' she interrupted him sharply. 'That's the oldest line in the book and if you think for one minute I'm going to fall for it...'

  'Calm down. It wasn't a serious proposition,' Nick reassured her wryly. 'You've got to understand this situation is as unfamiliar to me as it obviously is to you....'

  'You mean women actually still exist who have fallen for it,' Sara derided him.

  'No,' Nick checked her instantly. 'I mean that I have never experienced what I am experiencing right now... I don't like what's happening any more than you do, Sara.'

  'Nothing is happening,' Sara denied immediately.

  'Prove it,' Nick challenged her. 'We can go back to your place now and I can take you in my arms and kiss you and you can show me just how much ' 'nothing" is happening between us....'

  'No,' Sara told him forcefully.

  A short, sharp fling...a swift sexual liaison based on lust. It was alien to everything she believed in, everything she had felt she could ever want and yet, the images Nick's words had conjured up were tormenting; alluring and enticing; a hot body-drenching fantasy of sex and desire that teased her with dangerously illicit images of the two of them together and which had a devastating physical effect on her. Tom between shame and longing she tried to control her unruly thoughts. If Nick should even begin to guess what they were!

  'I have to go,' she told him, feverishly getting up and almost bolting for the door knowing that Nick wouldn't be able to follow her until he had paid the bill.

  Ruefully Nick watched as Sara made her escape.

  That comment he had made to her about them having a sexual fling had been said more as a challenge to his own feelings than as an option he had intended to promote seriously, but the expression on Sara's face, the brief betrayal he had seen in her eyes had been like adding petrol to the fire he himself had already started.

  The resulting conflagration was still making itself felt within his body. Feelings so intense had surely to burn themselves out. Oblivious to the waitress's pouting disappointment at his total lack of interest in her, Nick made his way back to his car. If it wasn't for this wretched ridiculous ban that his doctor had placed on him returning to work he could have found some relief from what he was experiencing first by putting a safe distance between Sara and himself by returning home, and second by immersing himself in the most complex and demanding case he could find. But with big brother Saul watching his every move, he knew he wasn't going to be allowed to leave until the medics had given him the all clear.

  OLIVIA STARED frowningly at the half-eaten sandwich on her desk. She couldn't remember buying it, never mind starting to eat it. What was she going to do about Jenny? She ached to have someone to confide in, but who was there now?

  Her mobile rang. Frantically she dived in her bag to answer it, the colour leaving her face as she heard the headmistress of the girls' school telling her crisply,

  'Mrs Johnson, it's Briony Howard here. You were due to pick your daughters up at six. That's when our after-school creche closes. It's now six-fifteen....'

  Stammering an apology Olivia assured her that she would pick the girls up within fifteen minutes.

  How could she have let that happen? What kind of mother was she, she asked herself guiltily as she stuffed the mobile back into her bag and grabbed the papers she had been working on.

  It was just gone six-thirty when she pulled up outside the school. Amelia's and Alex's pale anxious faces told their own story. Olivia apologised to the grim-faced headmistress.

  'Places at the creche are limited,' she told Olivia warningly, 'and I'm afraid that when we have parents who abuse our time limits we have to ask them to make alternative arrangements. On this occasion I'm prepared to make allowances, but in future...'

  Scarlet-cheeked, Olivia bowed her head as she accepted the other woman's justified rebuke.

  As she hurried them towards the car she could see that both girls were close to tears as indeed she was herself. A memory of her own childhood came back to her. She had been meant to be going to Brownies but her mother had been out shopping all day returning too late to take her and her father had flatly refused when Tania had complained that she was too tired, saying that he had an appointment.

  They had started to argue and Olivia could remember how upset and close to tears she had felt, but when her father slammed out of the house Tania herself had started to cry and somehow Olivia had found that she was the one comforting her mother instead of the other way around. Later her father had come back grimly bowling her into the car without a word and then driving to the church hall far too fast but miraculously on time for the Brownie meeting.

  He had even given her one of his
terse hugs before driving off again. If she closed her eyes she could still capture the warm, secure feeling that had given her—

  the sense of belonging and of being loved; but such instances had been very rare and she was convinced her father had never really loved her.

  There was no way she ever wanted one of her own daughters to think that!

  'I'm sorry,' she apologised to them both as she unlocked the car door.

  'It's all right, Mummy,' Amelia told her quietly.

  'We told Mrs Howard that you would be busy working....'

  Busy working! Too busy to remember that her daughters were waiting for her. What kind of person was she? What kind of mother was she?

  Who knew, once she and Caspar were actually di-vorced perhaps he would remarry and provide them with a far better mother, one that the girls deserved.

  Angrily she shook herself and her thoughts returned to her father. Why had he come back into their lives?

  She hated him for being here...hated him, hated him, hated him....

  'I'm hungry,' Alex complained as they drew up outside the house.

  Olivia glanced at the car clock. It was just gone seven. Normally Caspar gave the girls their tea at around five.

  Caspar...

  Olivia closed her eyes. She didn't want to think about her husband right now—so why was she doing so? Why was she sitting here in the car, reluctant to open the door and go into a house which she knew was going to feel cold and empty?

  Cold.. .with the kind of central heating bills she was paying? And as for being empty... As she hustled her daughters towards the house, Olivia reminded herself that she had been the one to make the decision to separate from Caspar and it was a decision she was very glad she had made.

  Once she had sorted out her child-care arrangements she would feel better. Right now she felt so guilty about the anxious expressions she had seen on her daughters' faces when she had arrived to pick them up.

  'I'm sorry I was late coming for you,' she apologised huskily to them again.

  'It's all right, Mummy,' was Amelia's same immediate response.

  Olivia closed her eyes as guilt smote her. Amelia was a child still, a little girl, yet the tone of her voice, the look in her eyes, were those almost of an adult.

  Fiercely Olivia refused to let herself cry in front of them.

  'I wish Daddy was here,' Alex piped up, 'then he could have picked us up from school....'

  She gave a small indignant gasp as Amelia nudged her and sent her a warning look.

  'You hurt me,' she protested indignantly and then stopped, her face going bright-red, tears filling her eyes.

  Olivia could feel her head starting to pulse with sickening tension.

  'Girls, please don't fight,' she begged them. 'I'll make us something special for supper, shall I? What would you like?'

  'A hamburger,' Alex clamoured with relish, her tears forgotten as she danced up and down.

  A hamburger? Olivia's tension increased. That meant driving back into town and Caspar, who had virtually grown up on fast food courtesy of the complicated and haphazard child-care arrangements of his spectacularly involved mish-mash of stepparents, had always been very firm about making sure the girls ate what he termed 'proper food,' allowing them only one fast-food chain meal per month.

  However, before she could say anything Amelia was telling her younger sister sharply, 'You know Daddy never let us have hamburgers during the week.'

  'No...that's right,' Olivia agreed quickly, bustling both girls inside whilst she tried to ignore both Amelia's victorious told-you-so smirk at her younger sibling and Alex's sullenly angry complaints.

  In most households Olivia knew it was the mother who dealt with these particular areas of negotiation and discipline, but because Caspar's work as a lecturer had enabled him to spend more time at home than she could herself, he had taken on that role in their family.

  But she was the girls' mother she reminded herself stubbornly.

  'BYE, GRAMPS.' Sara smiled fondly into her mobile telephone. Her grandfather had rung her, having learned from her parents where she was.

  'Haslewich,' he had commented, asking doubtfully,

  'Are you sure that's a good idea. Oh, I know your father thinks I'm a silly overprotective old fool,' he had continued whilst Sara had remained silent.

  Although on the surface her father and grandfather got on well, Sara knew from what her mother had told her that Gramps had been something of an overprotective parent to her and that there had been arguments and discord when she had first met Richard Lanyon.

  'That's why someone like Tania is the ideal person for him,' Sara's mother had confided. 'Dad needs someone he can cosset and cherish, someone who won't feel overwhelmed and constrained by that kind of love as I'm afraid I did. I once accused him of always wanting to keep me as his little girl, which was both unfair and untrue, but my mother, your grandmother, was very similar to Tania.'

  After that conversation Sara had been even more grateful to her own father for his robust parenting which had involved encouraging her to both act and, even more importantly, think independently.

  Even so she still had a soft spot for her grandfather who had been the donor of many very enjoyable childhood treats and a shoulder to cry on when she had felt the need.

  Perhaps she had inherited from him a watered-down version of his own desire to protect because she, too, felt very sympathetic to and protective of her stepgrandmamma.

  'Have you told Tania where I've ended up?' she had asked her grandfather.

  'No, and I don't intend to,' had been his prompt response. 'It would only upset her, arouse unhappy memories for her.'

  'Tania has a son and daughter living in Haslewich,'

  her father had reminded Sara during their own telephone conversation. 'If you were to meet them you could find yourself in a potentially difficult position.

  No child enjoys being deserted by its parent.'

  'Tania didn't desert them,' Sara had defended fiercely. 'You know that, Dad. She wanted to see them but her ex's family made it too difficult for her and she felt, especially with her son, that he was at an age when it wasn't fair to him to disrupt him and cause him any conflict of loyalties...'

  'Mmm...' had been her father's brief but telling response.

  The Crightons. She had sworn before she met them that it would be impossible for her to like them—and now...

  And now what...? She liked Nick Crighton. Sara made a taunting face at her reflection as she walked past a mirror. Like was hardly the word to describe the maelstrom of emotions Nick aroused within her.

  No, maybe not, but a lot of them began with L

  didn't they? Longing... lusting... loving...

  Loving! No. No way did she feel that. Admitting to the lusting bit was bad enough!

  A short, sharp, sexual fling. A hot, sweet, mad, self-indulgence. A wild, wanton abandonment of her old teenage fantasies and beliefs that loving someone and wanting them could only go hand in hand. No it was unthinkable, impossible and yet, she only had to close her eyes to see Nick in her mind's eye: strongly muscled arms, broad shoulders, a very male torso—and he would look even better undressed than he did dressed, she suspected.

  A soft little groan that was almost akin to an aroused-female growl escaped her lips. Guiltily she looked over her shoulder and then derided herself. She was alone in the flat, wasn't she, and Nick Crighton, whatever other skills of legerdemains he might possess did not have the power to simply materialise in front of her.

  Not in person, perhaps, but he was quite definitely exerting a very strong pull on her senses and he certainly had the ability to 'materialise' to devastating physical effect in her imagination.

  A short sexual fling! She must be mad to even contemplate such a thing. But she wasn't contemplating it. No. Not for one minute, even though she strongly believed that women were as entitled to acknowledge the sexual side of their natures as any man, even if she herself had never previously in
dulged in such a freedom.

  She knew girls who had, though. Girls who quite openly and unashamedly stated that they had slept with a man simply because they had desired him physically, and so far as Sara had been able to judge, they had emerged from the experience not just totally emotionally unscathed but shockingly and almost enviably glowing with pleasure and self-satisfaction.

  No, it was often the girls who swore that for them sex could only go hand in hand with love who were the ones who seemed to suffer the most traumas, investing so many hopes and dreams in their relationships that the discovery that their partner did not share them was a humiliating and devastating experience.

  At least a sex-only fling could be ended cleanly and tidily with a 'Thank you, I've had enough now and goodbye.'

  And she would be glad to say goodbye to Nick Crighton, glad to say that she had totally burned out any desire for him. But, of course, it wasn't going to happen. She wasn't going to get any more involved with Nick Crighton than she already was—was she?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  'YOU'RE VERY preoccupied,' David commented lovingly to Honor as he brought her the cup of herbal tea he had just made for them both. 'Is something wrong?'

  'Not wrong exactly,' Honor said slowly.

  Frowning David put down his own tea untouched.

  Honor had not been her normal self for several days and now his concern showed in his voice and face as he insisted, 'But something is bothering you? What is it, Hon? Are you having second thoughts about Father Ignatius being with us?'

  'No, no...' Honor smiled immediately. 'I love having him here. He was telling me a fascinating story the other day about some of the remedies people use in Jamaica—and as for him being here... He's spending more time up at Fitzburgh Place than here. He and Freddy have really hit it off together.' She gave an amused smile. 'It's obvious they've got an awful lot in common.'

  'An agnostic and a Jesuit. Yes. I suppose they must have,' David agreed wryly before adding, 'Stop trying to change the subject. What's wrong?'

  Honor gave him a rueful look before warning him,