Now or Never. PENNY JORDAN

      She had been living in the small cottage she had bought after the breakup of her marriage to Dan. They had sold the family home, and she had used the money she had received from her share of it to finance her expansion of the small business she and Dan had originally started together.

      ‘Oh, Maggie … Maggie …’

      As he wrapped her in his arms and kissed her Maggie could feel the emotion emanating from Oliver. Whilst not perhaps strictly good-looking in the movie-star sense, he possessed a special something that was all his own, a sweetness of nature that shone from his steady-gazed warm brown eyes, an attraction that went way, way beyond mere good looks.

      A woman, any woman could look at Oliver and know immediately that he was a man who liked women, genuinely and wholeheartedly liked them. And in addition to that …!

      He was gorgeous. He was sexy! He was tender and loving and good-humoured. He possessed an almost telepathic ability to guess how she was feeling and the love he gave her flowed from him with a generosity she sometimes had to pinch herself to believe was real.

      There had been a special rapport between them from the moment he had first walked into her office, even though initially Maggie had fought hard to both deny and deride it. She hadn’t been in the market for a relationship. The breakup of her marriage had left her too wary, too self-protective to want one.

      Oliver had told her that he had read about her company and that he hoped to persuade her to commission him to do some conceptual design work for them. Her company planned and designed office interiors, providing a highly personal and tailored environment for those fortunate enough to be able to afford their services.

      The business did not make a vast profit, but it did make a very comfortable one and, more importantly so far as Maggie was concerned, she considered running it to be both challenging and satisfying.

      It had amused and delighted her a great deal earlier in the year to read a newspaper article claiming that to be able to have the forward-thinkingness, the taste and the money to afford a Rockford interior for one’s offices was to truly have arrived!

      Maggie had looked at Oliver as he’d stood there in her office—her own design team’s work, of course with just enough witty touches of feng shui, colour planning and atmospherics to whisper a discreet statement about her to those in the know. Maggie herself was not a designer, but she was an administrator par excellence, a woman with extraordinary ‘people’ skills and she had found herself thinking enviously of the woman who must inevitably share Oliver’s life—and that alone had been enough to shock and frighten her.

      Even so it had taken Oliver a good many months to wear down her resistance and her objections to the point where she’d been prepared to admit how much she cared about him, and even longer for her to agree to going public on their relationship.

      She suspected the turning point had been when she had finally started to open up to him about her marriage to Dan.

      Unlike her, Oliver had had no hesitation in telling her about his life. She had ached for him when he had told her about his childhood, and the years spent worrying about and caring for his mother who had suffered badly from MS. From the day his father had walked out on them shortly after Oliver’s sixteenth birthday, until his mother’s death whilst he was at university, Oliver had virtually become her sole carer.

      ‘What do you think we’re going to have?’ Oliver was whispering to her now as he took her back in his arms. ‘A boy or a girl?’

      ‘I don’t mind,’ she told him. And it was the truth. Right now it was enough just to know she was carrying his child. She felt as though she had successfully negotiated a gruelling obstacle course, and all she wanted to do now was enjoy the respite of having done so.

      ‘I hope it’s going to be a girl, just like you,’ Oliver told her.

      Immediately Maggie stiffened and pulled away from him.

      ‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ she challenged him. ‘This baby isn’t going to have any of my genes, Oliver.’

      To her chagrin Maggie could feel her voice starting to thicken. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t do this; that she wouldn’t allow herself to be tormented by what by rights should now be an old and bearable pain. She didn’t want to remember now the days … the nights when she had endured the ferocious, savage agony of it, tearing at her. She had known grief in her life; many times; the deaths of her parents, the breakup of her marriage, but this grief had been like none other she had experienced. It had been terrifying in its enormity, its inescapability, its finality.

      ‘Not your genes,’ Oliver agreed softly. ‘But our baby will have your love, your mothering, Maggie.’

      Our Baby. Maggie could feel the yearning aching deep inside her.

      ‘I suppose now that it’s actually official you’ll be wanting to tell The Club,’ Oliver teased her, pulling a face.

      ‘Don’t call them that,’ Maggie protested, but she was smiling too. ‘They are my best and closest friends, The four of us have known one another since we were at school.’

      ‘And you share a bond that no mere male can possibly understand,’ Oliver interrupted her. ‘Yes, I do know that.’

      ‘I have never said that,’ Maggie denied.

      ‘You don’t need to,’ Oliver told her wryly.

      ‘They aren’t going to be very pleased with me for keeping it a secret from them,’ Maggie admitted. ‘Especially Nicki. After all, I was the first to know when she was pregnant with Joey. In fact I knew even before Kit! And they still haven’t really forgiven me for not telling them about you sooner.’

      ‘So the phone lines are going to be burning, once we get home?’ Oliver smiled.

      Maggie shook her head vigorously, her curls dancing.

      ‘No. We’re due to go out for a meal together, on Friday. I think I’ll wait until then when we’re all together.’

      It would be a relief to tell them, to bask in their amazement and excitement. She had never let any of them know just how much she had envied them as one after the other they had given birth to their babies, partially because she hadn’t wanted their pity and partially because of Dan, and by the time she had realised that they had come to assume that she simply did not want children it had been too late to correct their misconceptions.

      Even in a friendship as close as theirs there were sometimes secrets, Maggie acknowledged.

      

      ‘What’s wrong?’

      They had had dinner an hour earlier and were just preparing for bed. Maggie was more tired than she wanted to acknowledge—because of her pregnancy or because …

      ‘I just hope that we’re doing the right thing,’ she answered Oliver quietly.

      ‘Of course we are,’ he reassured her robustly. ‘Why shouldn’t we be?’

      Silently Maggie looked at him.

      ‘You know why,’ she told him. ‘I’m fifty-two years old Oliver. A woman who has gone through the menopause, who without the intervention of modern science and the gift of another woman’s eggs could not be carrying your child. You, on the other hand, are a young man in the prime of your life. You’re in your thirties, with a whole lifetime of impregnating younger fertile women ahead of you.’

      ‘Maggie. Stop it! The fact that we are different ages, the fact that you went through an early menopause, they mean nothing in comparison to our love.’

      Maggie looked away from him. They had argued so many, many times before about this. She might not feel her age, she might not even look it—certainly Oliver had flatly refused to believe she could possibly be a day over thirty-five when they had first met, just as she had initially completely believed him when he had told her that he was in his late-thirties—but the cruel facts were that there were