Now or Never

by Penny Jordan

  The poison pen letter was on the table in front of her. She looked at it as bleak despair filled her. Had she been wrong after all to insist to Oliver that he allow her the right to deal with the situation herself?

  A little uncertainly Alice dialled the number of Stuart’s mobile. She had played the message he had left for her—a terse announcement that he might be tied up in meetings in London for longer than he had originally anticipated, and that he did not as yet know which day he would be returning home. ‘Don’t ring back,’ he had instructed her. ‘I’m going straight into a meeting now, and I don’t know when I’ll be free. I’ll ring you.’

  That had been over two hours ago, and he still hadn’t rung back. She had tried to ring him, but his mobile was switched off.

  11

  Dan grimaced as he swung the SUV off the road and into the narrow rutted lane that led to Draycotte Manor. He had only picked the vehicle up the previous evening and was still getting used to it. Another thing he was going to have to get used to, he reminded himself grimly, was to drop his acquired Americanisms and revert to his native English. The top-of-the-range Land Rover he had just acquired was a four-wheel drive, and not a Sports Utility Vehicle.

  It was a surprisingly mild day. One of those days that teased you into believing that summer was really only just around the corner, even though common sense and experience should be telling you that it was no such thing!

  He still wasn’t sure just why he had decided to turn his back on the life he had made for himself in America. And as for his decision to view Draycotte Manor! Pure nostalgic self-indulgence.

  Dan gave a small wry shrug. He was fifty-five and he had worked his ass off for the last ten years. In fact he had worked so damned hard that he had gained a reputation in New York and the Hamptons, where so many of his clients owned properties, for being a confirmed workaholic. And for what?

  He hadn’t even been in New York on nine eleven. But what decent-thinking human being could put their hand on their heart and say honestly that they hadn’t been affected by the trauma of the event at some deep and profound level? Surely it was impossible to be human and not to feel the shock waves that had rocked the world?

  He could see the house in front of him now—an ancient tangle of buildings, parts of which dated back as far as the fourteenth century.

  The course of the financial ups and downs of those who had lived in it could be charted from the various additions, both in bricks and mortar and to the land.

  It was far too large for his needs, and it would cost a fortune to turn it into anything like a comfortable modern home. The agents themselves had as good as admitted that! Financially it would make more sense to knock it down and start again, although since it was listed that would be impossible.

  The land was in an even worse state than the house, thanks to the combination of bad management and lack of investment, plus a disastrous venture by a previous owner who had attempted to turn part of it into a pheasant shoot and had had the full force of a very wrathful and powerful local anti-bloodsports group turned against him for his pains. As a result, so Dan had been told, the local area was awash with semi-tame escaped pheasants, plus a band of marauding peacocks, which had apparently been bought in an ill-fated attempt to open the house to the public.

  His architectural training told him that taking on the house would be like pouring money into a bottomless pit, and if a client had come to him saying that he wanted to buy it Dan would have strenuously tried to persuade him not to do so.

  It was just nostalgia that had brought him here, he told himself as he stopped his Land Rover beside the half-collapsing outbuildings. There was no way he could ever be tempted to buy it. Not even if it had come without the listing and wrapped up with a twenty-four-carat planning agreement to knock it down and rebuild it as an investment!

  Although he didn’t lack the money. He had sold the architectural practice and consultancy he had set up in New York for a sum that put him very comfortably into the millionaire class.

  He had the money—and he certainly did need the challenge! And the sense of continuity, of passing a small part of himself into the future, in a way that a man who had fathered children took for granted, Dan told himself grimly as he automatically redirected his thoughts.

  He had sold up and stopped work, he reminded himself firmly. He already owned a property in France and another in Florida. If he really felt he had to have a home in Britain, then he should be looking at a modern, purpose-built, low-maintenance apartment, and not this haphazard collection of other men’s broken dreams and hopes!

  ‘Hi there!’

  ‘Todd!’ The art of flirtation had never been one of Stella’s accomplishments but this was the first time she had found herself so intensely and immediately regretting its lack, she acknowledged as she tried to control her foolish, flustered reaction to the unexpected sight of him.

  ‘I was just on my way to have a coffee.’ He mentioned the name of a well-known chain of American coffee bars that had just opened in the high street. ‘Can I persuade you to join me?’

  He was wearing sunglasses against the bright glare of the unexpected sudden burst of mild weather, and he removed them as he spoke to her so that, heart-stoppingly, she was suddenly looking right into his eyes. The sensation was so intimate that it fused her to the spot.

  ‘Persuade’ was the wrong verb, Stella admitted, shakily aware of just how fiercely electrical the charge thrilling down her spine was, of her whole body’s high-octane physical response. She grappled for a disgracefully short few seconds with her conscience, before quickly accepting his invitation, and experiencing the totally unfamiliar sensation of wishing she were wearing something more exciting than jeans and an old suede jacket over a plain white shirt.

  It didn’t seem to matter that that coffee bar would normally be her last choice of somewhere to have coffee, or that her coffee shop of choice was normally the small café run by two elderly sisters, whose clientele was several decades removed from the young mothers and bleary-eyed teenagers who were the predominant customers of this new concession.

  It was sheer bliss to have Todd walk on the outside of the pavement as he escorted her protectively towards the coffee bar, opening the door for her, and—had she imagined it?—actually pausing as she went through it to look down into her eyes and give her a smile that reduced the universe to the small circle of intimacy that suddenly seemed to be enclosing them in a very private and very dangerous little bubble.

  ‘This is a real piece of good luck,’ he told her. ‘I was going to get in touch with Paul to ask him to let me have your phone number.’

  ‘You…you were?’

  She was stuttering with a self-consciousness that even a girl as young as Julie would have probably derided with lip-curling contempt, Stella admitted to herself. Hopefully she could blame the sudden colour burning her face on the heat of the coffee bar. The heat burning her body was a different matter!

  Stella’s admiration for Todd grew as he not only managed to find an empty table, but also, miraculously, persuaded the blank-eyed teenager who had turned her back on them when they’d walked in to abandon her conversation with her friends and to remove the used plates from the table and wipe it down for them.

  ‘What will you have?’ Todd asked her. ‘Or do I have to guess? They say that you’re either a tea or a coffee person! I’ve never been a tea drinker—unlike my ex-wife,’ he added disparagingly.

  Mentally consigning her secret longing for a cup of strong, hot tea into oblivion, Stella smiled and lied enthusiastically that coffee was quite definitely her choice of drink, wondering at the same time just what on earth had come over her!

  The smile he gave her was toe-curlingly sexy, she acknowledged as she watched him walk towards the counter. It was a very novel sensation, being treated with all those little man-to-woman courtesies that she had deemed ridiculously unimportant and even laughably out of date and old-fashioned as a young woman, but which now
suddenly were a blissful pleasure that made her feel wonderfully feminine and cherished. A pleasure that the role into which Maggie and the others had thrust her had denied her, she reminded herself.

  Todd was still standing at the counter. As she’d noticed before, he was lean enough to look good in the jeans he was wearing and mature enough to have had the good sense to team them with a good quality soft checked shirt instead of trying to emulate a younger generation.

  Idly she wondered about his private life. Somehow he did not strike her as the sort of man who would spend his evenings falling asleep in front of the television, as Richard did.

  No, there was something openly vigorous about Todd; something vibrant and…exciting. Exciting. A tiny thrill of forbidden speculation was stirring her senses; an awareness that she was very conscious of the breadth of his shoulders, the narrowness of his waist and the muscular definition of his backside, and that the awareness had a sexual undertow to it that she should not be allowing it to have.

  ‘These kids make me feel so old,’ Todd complained with a rueful shake of his head as he came to sit down and handed her her coffee. ‘Mind you, I suppose in their eyes I am! My grandchildren will soon be their age, after all.’

  Stella sipped her coffee. It was aromatic, but slightly bitter, and the huge mug contained far too much for her.

  ‘Have you made any firm plans for them to come over to see you yet?’ she asked him, guessing how much he wanted to talk about them.

  ‘Unfortunately, no. It’s still under negotiation! However, I am hoping that it won’t be too long before I have them here. But before I do, I am going to have to find somewhere else to live. The flat I’m currently renting is fine for me, but it only has one bedroom. I’ve just been to the estate agents’, but, to be honest, I would appreciate a little more help than they were able to give me. I don’t suppose that you…’ He paused and waited, whilst Stella’s heart thudded furiously. He was asking her to help him. He wanted her to…her mind automatically baulked at what she was thinking. She was letting her imagination run away with her, because of her flustered reaction to the unexpected sight of him, she told herself severely. Men did not proposition women like her, not even discreetly, cloaking their intentions in outwardly legitimate requests!

  And if by some remote chance Todd was actually coming on to her, then of course she was going to refuse to…

  ‘I’d be pleased to do whatever I can to help,’ she told him a little breathlessly, ‘but I must warn you that I’m no expert so far as property is concerned!’

  ‘I was thinking more of other things, like whether or not an area might be a good one for kids, what the facilities are, and what the drawbacks could be. That kind of thing. Where local knowledge makes a difference,’ Todd told her smoothly.

  He was looking right into her eyes, focusing on her with the kind of intensity surely more appropriate for lovers. She reached for her drink and discovered that her hand was trembling. Quickly she snatched it away, but Todd stopped her, taking hold of it.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her softly. ‘Frightened of getting burned?’

  This could not be happening…not to her.

  ‘The cup is hot.’ She heard herself half stammering and half whispering, as though she were a mere teenage girl and not a mature woman!

  Todd was smiling at her. And he was still holding onto her hand!

  ‘You really are an incredibly sexy woman,’ he told her outrageously, and surely untruthfully. ‘But I expect you already know that. Your husband is a very lucky man.’

  Stella goggled at him.

  No one—no one—had ever, ever, described her as ‘incredibly sexy’ and just for a second she wished that the others had been here to hear it! To hear her, practical, sensible Stella, being described by a man like Todd as ‘incredibly sexy’! And then reality broke into her little daydream, and she snatched her hand back from Todd, giving him a reproving look.

  ‘Well, today has definitely been my lucky day. And not just because I’ll be getting the benefit of your advice, but because I’ll be enjoying the pleasure of your company as well! How can I get in touch with you?’

  Dizzily Stella gave him her address and mobile number.

  All she was doing was arranging to help him, she told herself later. After all, helping him to find somewhere to live was hardly indulging in anything clandestine or lover-like, was it?

  Was it?

  Maggie stared unseeingly out of the kitchen window. She had barely slept, waking over and over again during the night from horrifying dreams, her face wet with tears, which Oliver had wiped away as he’d comforted her.

  Oliver had begged her to go to the office with him this morning.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she scolded him, adding gently, ‘Nothing’s going to happen, Oliver. I won’t let it. Not to me and most of all not to our baby. But, please, you have to trust me and let me do what I believe is right. We agreed that you would,’ she reminded him firmly.

  ‘I don’t like leaving you here on your own,’ he protested, but they both knew that he couldn’t cancel his morning’s appointments at such short notice, and, besides, Maggie did not want him to. This was something she had to come to terms with on her own, for all their sakes.

  But the morning had dragged. She felt sapped of her normal energy, nervous and on edge, starting at every sound, uncomfortable with the solitude of her own thoughts, but unable to dismiss them. She ought to go and see Nicki, but she knew that she would not—could not—do so. She felt too fragile, too bruised…too afraid? But neither could she allow Oliver to do what he had wanted to do and hand the letter to the police. She was, she admitted, still desperately trying to cling to a tiny thread of hope that there would be an explanation, that Nicki would get in touch with her, and that somehow things could be put right!

  At lunchtime she had pushed away her meal barely touched, and now…She had folded the letter up and put it to one side, refusing to keep on re-reading it, but its words were burned into her memory.

  How could Nicki have done it? And why? They had always been so close, shared so much!

  The Nicki she knew and loved might disapprove of what she, Maggie, had done, but she would never, ever do something so calculatedly cruel and damaging. Not Nicki, who had suffered so much herself!

  But a tiny niggling worm of doubt refused to go away as she remembered the way Nicki had reacted to her news, her vehemence, her fury, the sheer un-Nickiness of her response.

  It still hurt, too, that Alice had not made any attempt to get in touch with her after her phone call to her yesterday, and that neither she nor Stella had somehow telepathically recognised her need and responded to it, even though she told herself sternly that she was being unreasonable and irrational.

  There was, after all, nothing to stop her telephoning them. No, nothing at all, other than a painful feeling of alienation, and, surely ridiculously, of being an outsider!

  Suddenly she couldn’t stay in the house any longer, with her tormented thoughts going round and round in circles. She had to go out, breathe fresh air…escape!

  Maggie had told herself that she was simply driving around aimlessly, but as soon as she saw the turning for Draycotte Manor she knew that somewhere deep down inside herself she had meant to come here. To this special place where she had come so many times before, seeking solitude and peace; seeking to renew herself and reaffirm all those things in life that were so important to her.

  Once this had been her and Dan’s special place: their wish-fulfilment house, the place they had laughingly told themselves would one day be theirs if by some miracle they became millionaires!

  She had come here to cry over Dan and to grieve for the love she had lost, the emptiness of life without him; to mourn his loss in the places they had made their own.

  And after Dan had gone and she had been left with the empty shell of her life, so cracked and damaged that it had literally taken her years to painfully collect all the pieces and painstakingly
patch them together, she had still come here. To remember and to listen to her own thoughts, to be grateful for all that she had had and all that was still to come.

  The last time she had come here had been the day after she’d finally acknowledged Oliver’s love. She had come to say a final goodbye to the house, a final thank-you for all that it had given her. To tell it that, now she had Oliver, she no longer needed to lean on the emotional security of the dreams and the hopes it had kept, in secret and in safety, for her!

  Engrossed in her own thoughts, parking her own car in front of the main house, Maggie didn’t notice the four-wheel drive vehicle tucked neatly almost out of sight round the side of the ramshackle stable block.

  Oliver frowned as he stared at his office wall. He had hated leaving Maggie this morning, knowing how upset she had been during the night. They might have made up their original quarrel, but he still felt sharply, painfully aware that at some very deep level she didn’t totally trust him to be able to protect her and keep her safe, when she still thought that the full responsibility of looking after herself rested on her own shoulders. When she doubted his judgement!

  Had he been Dan, would she have behaved in the same way, or would she have allowed him to decide what should be done? Would she have felt she could rely on him to protect her and their child?

  Oliver’s frown deepened. He had recognised very early on in their relationship that a part of him was always going to be jealous of Maggie’s ex-husband, just as a part of her was always going to love him, even if Maggie herself insisted that this was not so.

  Sometimes he felt as though he knew her better than she did herself. And the truth was, no matter how much Maggie herself might try to deny it, there was a part of her that she tried to keep hidden that was so intrinsically generous and loving that it was impossible for her not to gift that love to those she cared about.

  Nicki was a case in point. Oliver was sure that Maggie must be as aware as he was himself that that letter could logically only have come from Nicki, and yet Maggie had still stood by her friend and defended her. He must not upset Nicki.