Starting Over

by Penny Jordan

  'I don't want him to live anywhere else, I want him to come home and live with us.'

  Alex's manner was almost aggressive, her mouth pouting as she glared angrily at her mother.

  Olivia closed her eyes and mentally counted slowly to ten.

  AT LEAST she seemed to have reassured the girls that they would be seeing Caspar again as well as explaining why it was not possible for them to have Christmas together, Olivia decided thankfully as she finished reading the chapter of their shared bedtime story and started to get up.

  'Mummy...'

  Olivia tensed.

  'Yes, Alex...' God, but she was so tired and there was still so much she had to do before she, too, could go to bed. Far too much fortunately for her to have any spare energy left to think about that unexpected and unwanted visit from her father. How dare he simply think he could walk into her life...their lives...?

  And as for that pseudo loving offer of his help...

  'That man who came today who looks like Uncle Jon, is it true that he's our grandfather?'

  Olivia froze. How on earth...? Anger seared her in a white-hot sheet of hate. Had her father actually dared...?

  In the other bed Amelia was making a strangled anxious noise. Frowning, Olivia looked at her.

  'Alex, I told you not to say anything about that,'

  Amelia snapped, glaring at her younger sister.

  Olivia sat down heavily on Amelia's bed. She was trembling violently but she tried to suppress it, worried that the girls might see.

  'What makes you ask that, darling?' she asked Alex carefully.

  'Leo said that he was,' Alex replied openly. 'He called him "Uncle David" and when I said that we didn't have an uncle David he said that he was his uncle David but our grandfather.'

  'I see.'

  Frantically she wondered what to do. She had never discussed her father or her childhood with her daughters. They were far too young to understand the complications of her relationship with her own parents for one thing and for another she never saw her mother and had not expected that her father would ever dare to come back to Haslewich.

  'Is it true?' Alex was persisting.

  Olivia paused; her throat had become dry, she ached to deny her father, but how could she without blatantly lying?

  'I...yes, he is,' she agreed huskily.

  She could see the troubled look on Amelia's face and had a sudden unwanted recollection of herself at Amelia's age watching over her mother as she slept off what Olivia recognised now must have been one of her bulimic attacks.

  She closed her eyes momentarily. If only Caspar were here, he would know what to do—what to say.

  Tears clogged her throat. He had been so furious with her when he had discovered that she hadn't told him that her father had come home. Confusing mud-dled thoughts were filling her head. Why was she feeling regretful about their quarrel? Caspar was the one who had been at fault—not her.

  'But how can he be our grandfather?' Alex was saying plaintively.

  'He's our grandfather because he's Uncle Jon's brother, stupid,' Amelia cut in sharply, avoiding looking directly at Olivia as she spoke.

  Alex glared back at her sister.

  'But if he's our grandfather then why don't we see him? Leo sees Uncle Jon and Aunt Jenny all the time.'

  'That's enough. Go to sleep, both of you,' Olivia instructed them shakily.

  Just hearing them talking about her father, comparing their lack of any kind of relationship with him with the warm intimate love that existed between Jon and Jenny and their grandchildren made Olivia feel sick and angry and guilty. She had tried to compensate, to provide her children with the grandparenting she wanted them to have and she had thought she had succeeded, that they were finding surrogate grandparents in Jon and Jenny just as she had found surrogate parents in them; but just recently she had found herself watching her aunt and uncle, afraid that she might see that they preferred their 'real' grandchildren above Amelia and Alex.

  'But I want to know how he can be our grandfather when we've never seen him?' Alex was continuing stubbornly.

  'That's enough,' Olivia shouted, immediately ashamed of her anger when she saw the shocked look in Alex's eyes and the way she clung to her bedclothes.

  'I don't want to hear another word about...about any of this,' she continued in a more gentle voice.

  Kissing them both good-night she walked over to the door. Just as she was closing it she thought she heard Alex whispering fiercely to Amelia, 'Well, I don't care what you say, I liked him.'

  'NICK—are you feeling all right?'

  Nick frowned as he looked across the room at his brother.

  'Yes. I'm fine. Why?'

  'You've been in a world of your own for the last ten minutes. If you overdid it at the gym earlier and—'

  Nick grimaced.

  'Will you please stop fussing. There is nothing wrong with me and if you weren't such a worrier—'

  'So,' Saul said softly. "What is absorbing your attention to the exclusion of everything else just now?'

  Nick refused to be drawn. The truth was that he had been thinking about Sara and her unbelievable acceptance of his preposterous proposition. Because she genuinely wanted to have a 'no strings—no-holds-barred' sex fling with him or because she was playing a very subtle game of brinkmanship?

  Irritably Nick wondered just why he was finding it so hard to take on board the idea that Sara might simply want to have sex with him as opposed to a relationship. Most men would have been overjoyed to take her up on her offer; after all, wasn't sex without emotion or commitment every determined-to-remain-single man's fantasy—and he had to remain unat-tached. There was no way he could continue to do the job he loved if he wasn't. Oh, at first he imagined a woman would accept that there would be times when he would simply have to pack his bags and disappear for an unspecified length of time, but gradually things would change. Inevitably in a committed relationship the subject of children would arise, and once the relationship included children there would be pressure on him to put their needs first, to give up a job that didn't just take him away from them in terms of time but which also was dangerous enough to contain a risk that he may never return.

  One day maybe he would feel ready to exchange his current work for a stay-at-home desk job, but that day was still a long, long way off and Sara had struck him as the kind of woman who would be very specific about what she expected from her man—her mate....

  There he went again, bringing emotion into the equation.

  Perhaps he should try to out-manoeuvre Sara and double bluff her, agree that they should opt for a sex-only relationship and see just how long it took her to change her mind and backtrack.

  Grimly he wondered how many other men in his position would be feeling so ominously heavy-hearted about the thought of going to bed with a woman who made them ache so much just to think about her that their longing for her was a tight, taut physical pain.

  'BUT OVER the years things changed, Livvy changed....'

  'It's something most people do,' Molly told Caspar dryly. 'It's called maturing.'

  'I'm sorry, I'm boring you,' Caspar acknowledged shortly.

  His original one night stop-over in Williamsville had become four and counting. The original meal at the Italian restaurant Molly had recommended had proved so energising and exciting and the ancient se-dan so recalcitrant and stubborn about refusing to be fixed, that Caspar had found himself offering to pick Molly up from her home and drive her to work as a thank you for recommending the restaurant to him and because she had laughingly admitted that he had not been the only one to harbour a teenage fantasy of riding a Harley-Davidson.

  Now, after just a matter of days, Caspar felt as though he had known her all his life and in a way he had. She was very much the type of girl he had dated through college, feisty, self-confident, proud of herself and her opinions although as a woman she presented those assets of her personality in an appealingly softer way than he remembered hi

s collegiate dates doing.

  'No, you're not boring me,' she corrected him firmly, her smile saying that she was refusing to play games and take offence at his remark as he had done at hers.

  'I was simply pointing out that it's a healthy part of the human condition for us to change. To resent such a natural process in those close to us suggests to me—'

  'Now, you're starting to psychoanalyse me,' Caspar groaned.

  'It's my job,' Molly reminded him.

  'And that's how you see me, is it?' Caspar asked her ruefully. 'As a potential patient?'

  It was several seconds before she replied, an uncharacteristic hesitation that exposed a potential hint of vulnerability that aroused all Caspar's male hunting instincts.

  Whilst she played with the froth on the top of her cappuccino Caspar waited. He would be lying to himself if he tried to pretend that he didn't find her attractive; that his body and his mind were both excited and aroused by her. But he would be lying to himself, too, if he tried to ignore the fact that admitting those feelings caused him to feel guilty—even though he had no reason to be. He and Livvy had separated—

  Livvy's idea not his, and so he was now perfectly free to...to what? To enjoy the company of another woman, to flirt with her, desire her...go to bed with her...form a relationship with her?

  It was Molly who brought a halt to his stampeding thoughts by telling him quietly, 'The way I see you is as a man who is still very much working through the problems in his relationship with another woman—in your case your wife, but marriage doesn't come into this. Olivia is on your mind...in your thoughts virtually ninety-nine percent of the time.'

  'Because I can't understand what the hell was wrong with her,' Caspar exploded.

  'Did you try asking her?' Molly asked him calmly, adding before he could answer, 'or did you simply assume that you knew and then proceed to put her right, tell her how she should behave?

  'You would be amazed at how many of my clients complain to me that they aren't listened to, that their complaints, their attempts to make themselves heard are simply swept aside.'

  'Of course I listened to her,' Caspar defended himself, adding jokingly, 'I'm a lawyer. I'm used to listening.'

  'Is that what lawyers do?' Molly asked him ruefully.

  Caspar had the grace to laugh.

  'Well, occasionally they do other things,' he teased,

  'like riding Harley-Davidsons and enjoying good Italian food and being with stunningly beautiful clever women...'

  'Beautiful and clever. How else do you see me I wonder, Caspar? Perhaps as someone who can fill the empty space in your bed that's beginning to make you ache just a little bit too much for comfort?'

  Caspar hesitated. For this woman nothing other than the truth would suffice. She wouldn't accept it and he knew he would be insulting her if he tried to offer her anything less than her due. And he already knew that she just wasn't someone he wanted to insult or hurt in any way.

  'I see you as someone unique and special,' he told her gravely and honestly. 'Yes, I want to take you to bed. What man wouldn't? But I enjoy being with you for its own sake, Molly. I like listening to your voice, seeing your smile, watching you. I like that fearsomely clever mind of yours and I like the delicious way your sweater fits over the curves of your breasts. I like the championing look in your eyes when you talk about people you want to help and I like the authority in your voice when you want to make a businesslike point. I like the way you drive that wretched beat-up old car instead of something that's a status symbol. I like the way you've made a life for yourself here in this small country town instead of taking those re-markable and highly marketable career skills of yours to somewhere like Washington. What does keep you here, by the way?'

  She looked down at the table, long, long eyelashes lying vulnerably against the purity of her skin.

  When at last she looked at him he could see an emotion in her eyes that tore at his heart.

  'I grew up here,' she told him quietly. 'Whilst I was away at college there was an accident at a local chemical factory. They made stuff for fanners—pesticides, that sort of thing. The explosion caused a gas cloud that passed right over the town.

  'My younger sister was in school that day. She was four years old—a menopause baby for my mother—

  we all adored her. She and a lot of the other kids in school that day breathed in that poisonous stuff.... She started having fits and suffered severe brain damage and so did some of the other kids.

  'They all got compensation of course, but how can you compensate someone, anyone, for the loss of their ability to enjoy life to the full?' There was a wry twist to her mouth as she added, 'Up until then I had been intending to study law—I'd got it all planned. A fast-track career that would take me up to and into the White House, no less, but then I saw the way the lawyers working for the chemical company were handling the case and—'

  She spread her hands '—I guess I just didn't have the stomach to be that kind of lawyer and so—' she took a deep breath '—I couldn't heal my baby sister.

  She lives full-time in a special home now. I go visit every week but she can't recognise me now.' Her eyes were bleak.

  'My folks died some while back—of a broken heart some might say.... In my line of work you get to see all kinds of human misery and despair, but for me there's nothing out there that comes anywhere near to what a parent feels when they see their child destroyed and they just can't protect them.'

  Caspar shook his head. What could he say? Any words would seem inadequate—and worse, an insult.

  Instead, uncharacteristically he reached out and took hold of her hand clasping it warmly between both of his own.

  'Thanks.' The look she gave him as she removed her hand from his grip spoke volumes.

  'I guess over the years I've become a little cynical.

  Telling that story...' She gave a small shrug. 'I tend to rate how much time I aim to give the person listening to it, how much access to my life by the way they react to what I've said.'

  'So how did I score?' Caspar asked her levelly.

  'You're off the board,' Molly told him, but she hadn't, Caspar noticed, said in which direction he was outside her scorecard.

  'To tell you right now how much I miss my daughters seems kind of thoughtless and selfish,' he said quietly after several seconds of silence. 'But I do miss them...more and more every day.'

  'Are you in contact with them?' Molly asked him.

  'No. Not at this stage. We, or rather Olivia, decided that until things were legally settled it was best that we didn't make contact. They know that I'm driving around the States, but with Christmas coming up....

  One of my half-siblings has a place out at Aspen. I'd have loved to have the girls out for at least a part of the holiday but I'm not sure the disruption would be good for them right now.'

  Molly listened in silence noticing the very British

  'the girls' instead of a more American and familiar

  'the kids.'

  He intrigued her, delighted her and drew her to him in a way that was already making warning bells ring for her.

  She was in her thirties, no fool where men were concerned. There had been a youthful and very brief marriage after which she had decided that the only commitment she wanted to make was to herself, which was really just as well because Caspar, despite all his protests to the contrary, was very much still committed to his Olivia and their daughters.

  'We'd better go,' she told Caspar, glancing at her watch. 'The garage promised me that they've got the right part for the car this time.'

  The mishaps surrounding the repair of her ancient car had become almost a private special-couple-thing kind of a joke between them, only they were not a special couple and the loss of her ancient car was anything but a joke. She could always replace it, of course, but it had belonged to her parents and was the last remaining tangible bridge between the woman she was now and her childhood and for that reason she tended to treat it and value it much as one might a much loved elderly pet.

  'If I were you I'd definitely ditch it and get a Harley,' Caspar teased her as they both stepped out into the cold, late-afternoon air.

  'No way! Harleys are for teens and sad middle-aged lawyers,' Molly mock-taunted him back. The speed with which they had established an intimate verbal connection worried her a little when she allowed herself to question it.

  But why worry about a problem that was soon going to disappear? Caspar had no long-term plans to stay in town and she was certainly not going to encourage him to do so. And just to reinforce that fact, as they walked towards the motorbike she asked him casually,

  'What time do you plan to leave in the morning?'

  'Straight after breakfast,' Caspar responded. He had been wondering about extending his journey and possibly even spending Christmas in Mexico. He'd de-cline the various family offers to stay because doing so would arouse far too many painful thoughts about home and Amelia and Alex.

  At this time of the day—late afternoon—he would normally have collected them from school and taken them home. Just as soon as he had decided what he was going to do with the rest of his life and he had a settled place to live he was going to have them over to stay with him.

  He could still visualise the way they had looked the last time he had seen them.

  They had virtually reached the parked bike now but Molly had stopped to answer her ringing mobile.

  'What...? Yes. Yes, I'll be right there,' Caspar heard her saying, her face was white with shock. Her voice broke up over the words as she told him shakily,

  'That was the home. My sister... She...isn't well.... I need to be there.... I'm sorry, I can't delay.... It's been good meeting you, but I have to go.... Goodbye, Caspar...'

  ANXIOUSLY Olivia unlocked the door of her car. Provided there were no traffic hold-ups she would just about be able to make it to the school in time to avoid another telling off.

  Her nerves felt as raw as the screeching of the car tyres she could hear as another driver exhibited the frantic impatience she could feel boiling up inside herself. She had barely arrived at the office this morning when Jon had collared her. Unsuspectingly she had followed him into his office, assuming he wanted to talk to her about work only to discover that he actually wanted to try to persuade her to allow her father to

  -->