Now or Never
Page 38
It had become obvious to Maggie when the police had told her this that the woman must have been responsible for the poison pen letters.
Bella was the image of her father, and Dan adored her—as she did him. Initially Maggie had put up barriers between herself and Dan, but he had persisted patiently in persuading her to allow him to take them down, and the night she had finally accepted his proposal she had had the most wonderful and special dream about Oliver. In it he had been smiling at her as he’d told her how much he wanted her to be happy.
The truth was that she had never really stopped loving Dan, just as she would never, ever allow Oliver to become a forgotten part of Bella’s life, or in any way excluded from it.
For Bella’s first birthday, Dan had surprised her by presenting her with a photograph album for Bella, filled with dozens of photographs of Oliver, most of which she herself had never even seen.
The discovery that he had spent the months since Bella’s birth painstakingly searching for them with just this very occasion in mind had shown Maggie just how much he loved and understood her.
This Christmas was going to be a very, very special one for them. They would be celebrating it at Draycotte Manor, having moved in there immediately after their wedding, and on Christmas Eve, when she and Dan unwrapped their presents to one another and toasted their love, they would be offering up a very special thank-you to Oliver for the gift he had given them both.
‘Well, this is it, then,’ Laura exclaimed as Zoë got into her car. ‘We’ve made it, fully fledged, fully paid-up members of The Grown-Up Women’s Club. Are we sad or what? Feels weird, doesn’t it? Socialising with our mothers?’
‘Weird but good.’ Zoë grinned, adding, ‘Do you think we can still claim junior league status and get them to pay?’
‘What, now that we’ve both been made partners in the business?’ Laura laughed, referring to the generous and totally unexpected Christmas present Nicki had given them both in the shape of partnerships only a few days earlier.
Picking up his precious, cherished stepdaughter, Dan carried her carefully upstairs to her nursery.
Holding her in his arms, he began to turn the pages of the photograph album he had balanced on his knee.
‘And this is your daddy Oliver when he was at school,’ he told her softly. He often looked through the album when Maggie wasn’t there, so that he and Oliver could have a good old men’s chin-wag together about women and life and football, and most of all of course about their wonderful, wonderful daughter. Not that he would ever have admitted as much to Maggie, much less told her how comforting he sometimes found it to open the album and feel that he had someone with whom to share the complex feelings and anxiety that fatherhood was bringing him. And someone, too, who understood and knew Maggie!
‘So, won’t be long until Christmas now, old chap,’ he began, settling Bella firmly against his shoulder. ‘Madam here is getting a sack full of stuff, which she will no doubt ignore in favour of the boxes containing it. I’ve put her name down for that season ticket that we talked about, by the way. I hope she isn’t going to be like Maggie and natter on all the way through the game!
‘And I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve had a word with Stuart—you remember, Alice’s husband—and there’s going to be a special donation to this charity he’s involved in, in your name. Know you don’t like anything showy, but we thought it would be a cause you would like to be connected with. Those kids…’
Ten minutes later, when he quietly closed the door behind him and carried Bella back downstairs, a soft sigh of peacefulness whispered around the room as though somewhere, somehow, an acknowledgement had been made of love given and received.
ISBN: 978-1-4603-6408-6
NOW OR NEVER
Copyright © 2003 by Penny Jordan.
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