Now or Never

by Penny Jordan

  She and Hughie had both laughed when Richard had taken to playing the odd game of bowls with the elderly residents of the local care home with which he had become involved in the course of his work. But, Richard being Richard, he had remained stoically unconcerned by their teasing mockery, and had announced that he enjoyed the game and the company of his co-players.

  That had been a couple of years ago, and now he not only played regularly but was also a member of the committee that ran the local bowling green.

  Richard was going out, which meant that there was no need for her to lie to him…which meant that she was free to go out and meet Todd!

  The nearer his train got to his home, the more uncomfortable and ill at ease Stuart felt. He was dreading having to talk to Alice, to explain to her the life they had shared for so long was now over. It was pointless trying to convince himself that she would understand. How could she? He barely understood himself. All he knew was that there could be no going back!

  It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried! He had! He had fought to stop this from happening, but in the end…

  A woman sitting on the opposite side of the aisle gave him a subtle but thorough visual inspection, noting the handsome tanned face and the white evenly spaced teeth, the hair, silvering in a way that made it and him look very distinguished; the expensive dark suit, and the handmade shirt and complementing tie. A sexy man, a rich man. She gave a discreet glance at his left hand and expelled a faint sigh of regret as she saw his ring. A married man. But experience had taught her that they were often the best!

  The train started to slow down. His station was next. Stuart looked bleakly out of the window at the postcard-pretty countryside. The house would have to be sold. The buffet-car sandwich he had eaten earlier lay queasily on his stomach. The temptation to simply stay on the train and not get off, not go back, was so strong that for a moment he almost gave in to it.

  Stuart’s train was pulling into the station. Alice felt her stomach muscles lock.

  In the early years of their marriage she had sometimes frightened herself by wondering what she would do if he ever fell out of love with her and in love with someone else, but during this last decade she had ceased to do so. Sex had gone from being exciting to becoming mundane, and from that to something which, if she was honest, had become almost a chore. She wasn’t highly sexed; for her, sex was only truly enjoyable as an expression of her emotional love. If someone had asked her six months ago how she thought she would feel if Stuart’s sexual appetite were to diminish, her honest reply would have been that she would feel rather relieved. But now that it was happening, now that he was turning away from her in bed, her prime feeling was not one of relief, but of anxiety and vulnerability.

  Her life was a busy one, filled with a hundred and one small activities. Stuart had often been away for days at a time, and she had somehow not felt worried or threatened, but this time…

  Was it because of what Zoë had said to her? Or had it been Stella’s unthinking remark about her role within their quartet as the happily married one that had jarred like something touching an exposed nerve? Alice didn’t know; all she did know was that it had shocked her to discover just how strongly she felt, how powerfully intense the jealousy stirring inside her was, the possessive fury at the thought of another woman usurping her role in Stuart’s emotions.

  The train had stopped disgorging its passengers. It had been a wet day, but now the sky was clearing, lemon-yellow towards the horizon, the final sharp rays of the sun dazzling the eyes, so that it took her several seconds to actually see Stuart.

  He was walking slowly, his head bent, everything about his body language crying out aloud his reluctance to be where he was. And to be with her?

  ‘And this is Laura. I told you about her, Ian. She’s going to help me with the kids.’

  Laura found herself holding her breath as she was subjected to Zoë’s husband’s boldly sexually predatory gaze.

  He had to be the most aggressively and openly sexual man she had ever met. His sexuality surrounded him like a forcefield, and she had to take a step back to prevent herself from breathing in the physical heat he seemed to generate.

  She saw his mouth twist in a taunting, knowing smile as she did so, watched as he gave her a slanting look that raked her insolently from top to toe, lingering pointedly on her breasts and the apex of her thighs.

  Quite undoubtedly he was sexual dynamite, a walking, talking powerhouse of male testosterone and machismo who obviously looked on every woman who crossed his path as potential bed fodder, but, oddly, she herself did not feel in any way attracted to him.

  Zoë was watching him with a betraying mixture of sick, hungry longing and wary anxiety, and Laura could see his nostrils twitch fastidiously as he obviously caught the smell of alcohol on her breath.

  ‘So Laura, you’re going to take care of the kids, are you?’ he demanded, turning away from Zoë to concentrate exclusively on Laura. ‘Know much about them, kids, do you?’ he challenged, launching the question at her like a guided missile.

  ‘Some,’ Laura returned coolly. ‘After all, I was once one myself, and a pretty obnoxious one at that. Although I have to say that George and William are both absolute honeys.’

  She had used their names deliberately, and she saw that he knew it from the slight change in his expression.

  ‘Really? You surprise me! If it was left up to my darling wife—’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ Zoë interrupted him furiously. ‘I do my best, and, for your information, if you and my mother didn’t undermine me all the time—’

  ‘Undermine you?’ Ian laughed sardonically. ‘You do that to yourself, Zoë. Where are they, anyway, the kids?’ he demanded of Laura.

  ‘Upstairs in bed,’ she responded. ‘Zoë wasn’t sure what time you would get home and, although it’s old-fashioned, I believe that children should have an established bedtime.’

  ‘So that you girls can have all the more time to do your own thing, eh? How many bottles have you got through this time, Zoë, or did you stop counting?’

  Laura could almost taste the savagery and hostility emanating from him as Zoë took a step back.

  ‘I only drink because you leave me here on my own so much,’ she told him, accusingly. ‘You know that. If you took me away on your business trips…’

  ‘You’ve got two kids, remember?’

  Laura had had enough. She might not hold a particularly strong brief for Zoë, but there was no way she was going to stand here and be forced to be a passive onlooker to Ian’s cynical cruelty towards his wife.

  ‘I’d better go up and check on the boys,’ she announced, and without waiting for any response she left the kitchen.

  She could still hear the raised voices coming from downstairs when she opened the door to the bedroom the two boys shared.

  ‘Dad’s back.’ George was sitting upright in bed, his body tense. His younger sibling, William, slept. ‘He’s not going to make Mum cry, is he?’ George was asking her, his dark eyes too old and knowing in his anxious little face.

  Laura ached for him. She knew all too well herself what it meant to be a child lying awake at night dreading hearing the sound of a parent’s grief, only in her case it hadn’t been because her parents were quarrelling that her mother had cried, but because she had known that she was dying.

  Sitting down on the bed, she pushed the floppy dark hair back off his forehead.

  ‘Grown-ups do cry sometimes,’ she told him.

  The look he gave her said that he knew when he was being fobbed off. Anxiety still shadowed his face, and for some reason it reminded her of Joey’s anxiety when she had seen him outside his school.

  Nicki’s reaction had been totally uncalled for, totally over the top! She had had no intention whatsoever of hurting Joey.

  Laura started to frown. One of the things she had always reluctantly admired about Nicki, as well as resented, had been her cool demeanour and her calm control. Nothing had ever seeme
d to faze Nicki. No amount of teenage insults, sulks or arguments, no amount of banged doors, or furious outbursts. Nothing! Until now.

  George had gone back to sleep and she could no longer hear the raised voices from downstairs. Zoë had insisted on delaying supper until Ian returned, and Laura’s stomach was beginning to rumble protestingly. Quietly leaving the bedroom, she went back downstairs. The kitchen door was open but as she stepped inside she froze as she saw the scene in front of her.

  Zoë was on the kitchen table, her head thrown back, the whole of her upper body arched in sexual urgency, her top pulled up to expose her naked breasts, her flesh revealing the imprint of Ian’s fingers, her face suffused with an unmistakable flush of arousal.

  Her skirt was up around her hips, her bare thighs pale against the darkness of Ian’s suit as he stood between them, her knees gripping him as she moaned in frantic sexual hunger.

  Totally unable to move, Laura was distantly aware of the thrusting movement of Ian’s hips, hypnotic and mesmerising. Zoë was moaning a string of commands to him, obscenities punctuated with guttural cries and the harshness of her breathing.

  ‘I want to come…make me come, Ian,’ Laura heard her sobbing frantically.

  ‘You stupid bitch, you’re too drunk.’

  The flat tone of disinterest and detachment in which the harsh words were delivered shocked Laura out of her paralysis. Hastily backing out of the kitchen, she hurried back upstairs to her own room, her face burning. Not with embarrassment over what she had witnessed, but with anger. Anger against Ian for the way he was treating Zoë. Anger against Zoë herself for letting him do so, and for so patently enjoying the way in which he was demeaning her.

  Just as she would be demeaning herself if she ever gave in to Ryan?

  ‘Stella!’

  Automatically Stella took a step back as Todd came towards her, glancing quickly over her shoulder.

  ‘I’m so glad you could make it,’ he told her. ‘Look, it’s far too cold to stand here. Why don’t we go back to my place?’

  Stella hesitated, her mouth suddenly very dry and her heart racing. She felt as giddy as though she had been caught in an oxygen-laden slipstream of terrific force, and was euphorically high on the resultant adrenalin rush.

  Back to his place! Already she could mentally envisage its shadowed intimacy and privacy. Her thoughts scattered in a dozen different directions, shot through with a dozen different emotions.

  ‘Todd, I don’t think…’ She could hear her own aching disappointment, protesting volubly against her decision, so clearly that she was surprised that Todd could not hear it as well.

  But he was already apologising, explaining. ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking straight. I’m so damned wound up at the moment…What about that place over there?’

  Stella turned her head uncertainly towards the wine bar. There wasn’t really any reason why she shouldn’t have a drink in public with Todd, was there? They were on the same committee, after all, and if she hadn’t actually told Richard yet about Todd’s request that she help him to find a flat, it was only because she simply hadn’t had time, not because she wanted or needed to be secretive about it.

  ‘Yes, all right,’ she accepted.

  The wine bar was busy, but Todd found them a small table tucked discreetly into the shadows.

  ‘I just can’t believe what my ex has done,’ he announced angrily as soon as they had been served their drinks. ‘You know I told you that my daughter-in-law had okayed a visit here by my grandchildren? Well, now it seems she’s having second thoughts, thanks to my ex who has told her that she doesn’t think it’s a good idea. I can’t believe she’s done that! I mean, why? To get at me? Okay, so I wasn’t the best husband in the world, but I’ve paid for that. She saw to it that I did. You wouldn’t believe what those lawyers of hers managed to get out of me!’

  Stella listened to him in silence. He had brought her here because he wanted to talk about his family…his ex-wife!

  Her disappointment felt like a cold, heavy weight pressing down on her body. Chagrined, she continued to listen. And then, just when she had tusselled with her conscience and decided that it was far better, far wiser, far safer for her to think of him merely as a friend, he reached across the table and took hold of her hand, breaking off his diatribe against his ex to tell her huskily, ‘Stella, the way I feel right now, it’s probably just as well you were sensible enough to refuse to go back to my place. I need you so badly! No, don’t look at me like that. We aren’t a couple of immature kids, who need to play games with one another, to tease and test each other. I knew the moment I saw you how I felt, and I know it was the same for you, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. We’re old enough not to have to waste precious time going through the motions of a pointless move and countermove game of hide and seek. I want you in my bed so badly right now. I need you so badly right now. I need you to lose myself in…to…’

  Frantically Stella snatched her hand away.

  ‘Todd, I’m married,’ she protested shakily.

  Taking her hand back, he lifted it to his lips. ‘So?’ he challenged her softly.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ Stella insisted. ‘My…Rich will be home soon. I’ve got to go, Todd.’

  ‘Okay…If you insist. But next time…’

  14

  ‘I can’t believe it’s nearly two months since we last got together and that we’re into April already. Things have been pretty hectic for all of us lately, though, so it’s not surprising.’ Alice sighed as she slipped off her coat and handed it to the hovering waiter before sitting down.

  ‘Aren’t the other two here yet?’ she asked Stella, looking round the restaurant.

  ‘Well, Nicki isn’t coming,’ Stella replied. ‘When I rang her she said she couldn’t make it because she was looking after Joey. Maggie’s coming, though.’

  ‘I saw Nicki in town the other day,’ Alice broke in. ‘She was on the other side of the street, but by the time I had managed to cross she’d disappeared. I think she’s a bit miffed with me at the moment because of Laura working for Zoe.’

  ‘Oh, heavens, Alice, don’t you start looking for problems where they don’t exist. Things are bad enough with Maggie still on her high horse.’

  ‘She and Nicki haven’t made things up yet, then?’ Alice asked, firmly refusing to allow herself to take umbrage at Stella’s outspokenness.

  ‘Well, I told you what Maggie said to me when I bumped into her at the surgery, and…Oh, Maggie’s here.’

  ‘Hello, you two.’ Maggie greeted them both warmly before exchanging hugs.

  Maggie had always been the most tactile of all of them, Alice reflected, returning her hug. She had recently begun to realise just how sterile life could be without the loving intimacy of physical contact with another human being. She and Stuart might be sharing the same bed, but it was beginning to feel as though there were an unscalable wall between them!

  Stella would probably laugh at her if she told her how miserable and insecure Stuart’s unfamiliar lack of desire for her was making her. Maggie would probably laugh too, but for a very different reason. Stella had never made any secret of the fact that she considered herself fortunate in having a relationship with Richard that was based more on friendship than sex, and as for Maggie…well, deep in the throes of love and passion as she was at the moment, the very thought of not having sex would no doubt fill her with amused pity! Anyway, she didn’t really want to even think about the change in Stuart, never mind talk about it.

  ‘Maggie, you look blooming.’ Alice smiled instead. ‘How many weeks are you now? It must be twelve…’

  ‘Nearly,’ Maggie agreed, smiling at the waiter who was holding out her chair for her. She had made herself a promise before coming out that she was not going to accidentally dominate the evening’s conversation with baby talk. ‘How are you progressing with the OU course?’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t begin officially until September, of course, and at the moment I’m still
struggling to get to grips with my computer. I decided that it made sense to learn how to use one, but so far…’

  ‘Heavens, Alice, you should have said. I would gladly come and sit with you to help you. Oliver’s taken over the bulk of the work in the business so I’ll be free to concentrate on the baby, so I’ve got plenty of time on my hands. Which reminds me, we’re going to have to look round for a proper assistant for Oliver. You don’t think that Zoë would be interested, do you? I mean, I know she’s got that job at the estate agents’, but with her degree…’

  Alice hesitated. What Maggie was suggesting would be an ideal job for Zoë, challenging, with plenty of incentives and room to develop a strong career role for herself that would still allow her to spend quality time with her children, but what about Zoë’s drinking? How would she, Alice, feel if in a few months’ time Maggie were to turn round and announce that Zoë was going to be asked to leave?

  ‘I’m not sure, Maggie…You know what Zoë can be like,’ she added lamely.

  ‘It was only a thought,’ Maggie told her briskly.

  ‘Perhaps Nicki might know of someone?’ Stella suggested.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Maggie agreed, her gaze suddenly intent on the cutlery. ‘It was just that I couldn’t help thinking, Alice, that if Zoë has inherited your organisational qualities she’d be ideal. Come to think of it, you would be ideal.’ She laughed. ‘But of course I know you wouldn’t be interested, and I doubt that Stuart would want you to work anyway, would he? I know you’re doing your OU course, but he’s always been the kind of husband who wants you close at hand, we all know that.’

  She was, Alice suddenly discovered, reducing her bread roll to uneatable crumbs!

  ‘And so Julie’s baby is due in a matter of weeks?’ Maggie asked Stella.

  They had finished their main course and were waiting for their coffees to be served.

  ‘We’re not exactly sure when,’ Stella said. ‘Julie is a bit vague as to when she actually conceived.’ She looked surreptitiously at her mobile as she bent down towards her handbag on the pretext of looking for a tissue. Todd was texting her most days—often several times a day—and she looked forward to his messages with the avid, intense hunger of an addict awaiting her fix, which in reality was what she probably was, she acknowledged as the screen proved disappointingly blank.